The Old Knox

ALMOST the first automobile in the New Hampshire town where I was born belonged to my family. I can barely remember standing with my chin just above the nursery window sill and watching it being pushed into the driveway beside the house on the day my brothers ‘had the accident.’

Family tradition says that it was in fact the second car which the town could boast. The first, according to the same authority, belonged to Mary Baker Eddy, and was only used to accustom her horses to the sight of it and its like on the road. My knowledge of ‘the old Knox,’ as the family has called it for a generation now, is derived mostly from my elders, whose recollections, I am sure, have lost nothing with the passage of years. But anyone who possessed such memories as these of the first family automobile, the second to be familiarly seen in the state capital, would be a fool if he did not make the most of them. And if I am ever tempted to think that the saga of our first car is only a myth, a work of imagination, I have my own dim but actual memories to remind me of its core of truth, and also the evidence of the family picture albums. In these old volumes, full of unreal photographs that look as though the washwoman had laundered them with too much bluing in the water, we still see ourselves go bowling along, sitting oddly upright in the old car. One parent, in an enormous wide hat with a heavy veil tapering to the chin, looks rather like the funnel of an early steam locomotive; the other wears a becoming version of the moustaches of the period, and a derby with a very round crown. Boys of assorted ages appear in blouses with sailor collars and straw hats with stiff flat brims. And there we are, ensconced in that vehicle which we might otherwise be tempted to think we had imagined. We see ourselves as a part of the historical record.

As my brother eloquently said, there were people who got their first automobile ride in that car. ‘Stop it!’ they screamed, and asked to be let out at once. The fright of some of them was not as unreasonable as it now seems, for the car had a curious feature, fit to terrify anyone exposed to it. This was a seat, a sort of advance rumble seat, opening out in front of the steering lever, in front of the engine, so that the occupant felt himself projected along directly over the road. When the latter began to fly underneath him at the prodigious rate of twenty miles an hour, when he saw the highway vanishing under his feet without any intervening barrier except a fragile dashboard, he could be forgiven if he felt that he was going to be pitched forward and his brains dashed out against the New Hampshire stones.

When the automobile was ready for delivery, my father took the train to Boston with a friend and drove it back. They were all day at the job, and did not get home until well into the evening. The same drive takes about two hours now; but the old Knox had to be stopped and filled with water every fifteen miles, and roads, tires, and velocities were not what they have since become. Tires were always popping, especially on hot summer days, when the dirt roads, presenting one long series of ’thank-you-marms,’ were baked dry and brown, and brought one blowout after another. My elders would come home three, four, and five hours late from a holiday fishing trip, dirty and covered with sweat, after patching punctured or exploded tires half a dozen times in fifty miles.

And the hills! The hills of that primitive time were august, towering, perpendicular. Steep as the side of a barn, we called them; and they looked it. They beetled over the audacious contraption that tried to chug up them, they menaced and laughed at it. The car strained and jerked, halted altogether, stalled and beaten. But there was a system for getting the better of the hills. The driver, when he felt the feeble power beginning to expire, — and he felt it by the jerking of his head back and forth like a lily on the end of a stem no less than by the complaints of the motor, — would do his best to manœuvre the car over the next thankyou-marm. With that behind the rear wheels as both a brace against sliding downhill and a footing for the next effort, he would give in to the inevitable and let the car stop. Everyone, except the driver, would climb out and mass behind the paralyzed machine. The driver would race the engine, give a warning shout, and throw in the clutch. The car would lunge forward, the massed human power would heave from behind, and with two or three frog-leaps, bouncing on the hard road as if it would pound itself to pieces, it might make the next thank-you-marm. By a series of such joint convulsive efforts, man and machine together might make the top of the hill.

Where are now the topless crags that the old Knox used to climb so proudly? When we bowl up through New Hampshire to-day, we look with anxious interest for the big hill outside Bristol, scene of so many comic struggles and epic achievements. We can’t find it any more. It has ceased to exist. The new car goes over all deviations of altitude in the road at forty-five or fifty miles an hour, and never makes a squeak of protest.

Another peril to automobiles in those days was fire. Gasoline was highly inflammable; cooling systems were primitive; pipe lines broke and spilled hot oil on hot metal. My father (as I have heard) noticed that dirt collected profusely about the engine of the old Knox. He devised a sort of crankcase to keep it out, got a local blacksmith to execute his design, and had it fitted to the car. Unfortunately it not only kept out dirt but air too, interfering seriously with the free circulation of the latter which was supposed to help keep the engine cool. All innocently my brothers, with some chosen friends, took the car one morning to drive out to one of their favorite fishing streams. No shadow of trouble fell across the day until, bowling prosperously over a little rise and beginning to descend the other side, they saw in front of them a man on a bicycle. They honked him, probably not without some thought of giving him a start. But the results were out of proportion to anything they could have expected. The man gave one look over his shoulder, fell off his bicycle, picked himself up, scrambled over a stone wall, and ran off through an adjacent graveyard.

It was still easily possible to meet on the roads people who had never seen a horseless carriage, and who were startled and alarmed if one crept up on them from behind a little hill, especially if it said ‘Honk’ without warning. My brothers decided that here was just such a specimen, some unworldly farmer or country storekeeper quite unprepared for a sudden visitation by the latest and most revolutionary of man’s inventive marvels. They laughed, and chugged ahead. But when a man’s behavior has startled another person beyond all accounting for, and he cannot find any cause in his own consciousness for the freakish effect he sees, he usually looks around to find out whether any other cause can be operating in the neighborhood, a cause which may perhaps concern him too. This is just what the fishing party did, and one glance behind them was enough to explain everything and more. Streaming out in the rear of the car, like the tail of a comet, was a long column of flames, blown backward by the wind of their speed. They were riding in a devil-wagon for fair, and likely to be burned up in it. The driver put on the brakes, but already the heat had destroyed the brake bands. The car did not stop. He shut off the engine, and it gradually slowed. But as it lost speed the flames rose toward the perpendicular. The fishing party decided that it was high time to jump. They hit the road, picked themselves up, and ran after the still-rolling car until it came to rest just outside a farmhouse, from which a small boy, hysterical with excitement, came running out with a glass of water.

But nothing could save the old Knox from burning down to the wheels. That is how, standing with my chin on the sill of the nursery window, I watched with awe the unhappy, charred wreck pushed into the side yard, past the elm tree, to wait there until my father came home from the office to take stock of the disaster with his own eyes. My brothers sat down disconsolately on the front steps to wait for him.

The Knox was rebuilt, and actually had a later career. But for me, in retrospect, in the dim justice which memory insists on rendering to this faithful servant, its record ends in that fiery consumption which left it a mere awkward spread of wheels, with the steering post rising from it like the broken mast of a sunken vessel, showing where it went down.

Waiting there on the front steps, with the burned frame standing appallingly evident in the driveway, my brothers grew more and more apprehensive. The more they looked at it, the more plainly unbecoming and out of place that black wreckage appeared, exposed to full view in the yard, presenting the full scope of the catastrophe at first glance, with no time for gradual approaches and softening explanations. They could not stand it. They decided that the place for the hulk was down in the back yard, by the garage. The yard sloped downward; it would be easy to coast to a better position.

So one of them got aboard to steer, and the other gave a push. But unfortunately they had forgotten the burned-out brake bands. There was no stopping, once the car got well started. It rolled down the little slope of lawn, accelerating as it went; rolled hideously toward Father’s garden, toward the sweet peas trained on birch brush and flowering beautifully, toward the rows of tomatoes and beans and radishes. It burst through the sweet peas, it mowed down the corn and potatoes, it came finally to rest in the soft soil where the ground leveled out, and stood surrounded by its havoc and its devastation, like Lee at Chancellorsville. There is a sort of military grandeur and terror about the spectacle — a good place to take leave of the old Knox.