Maggie | Page 7

it turned its glare upon all things. He
became so sharp that he believed in nothing. To him the police were
always actuated by malignant impulses and the rest of the world was
composed, for the most part, of despicable creatures who were all
trying to take advantage of him and with whom, in defense, he was
obliged to quarrel on all possible occasions. He himself occupied a
down-trodden position that had a private but distinct element of
grandeur in its isolation.
The most complete cases of aggravated idiocy were, to his mind,
rampant upon the front platforms of all the street cars. At first his
tongue strove with these beings, but he eventually was superior. He
became immured like an African cow. In him grew a majestic contempt
for those strings of street cars that followed him like intent bugs.
He fell into the habit, when starting on a long journey, of fixing his eye
on a high and distant object, commanding his horses to begin, and then
going into a sort of a trance of observation. Multitudes of drivers might
howl in his rear, and passengers might load him with opprobrium, he
would not awaken until some blue policeman turned red and began to
frenziedly tear bridles and beat the soft noses of the responsible horses.
When he paused to contemplate the attitude of the police toward
himself and his fellows, he believed that they were the only men in the

city who had no rights. When driving about, he felt that he was held
liable by the police for anything that might occur in the streets, and was
the common prey of all energetic officials. In revenge, he resolved
never to move out of the way of anything, until formidable
circumstances, or a much larger man than himself forced him to it.
Foot-passengers were mere pestering flies with an insane disregard for
their legs and his convenience. He could not conceive their maniacal
desires to cross the streets. Their madness smote him with eternal
amazement. He was continually storming at them from his throne. He
sat aloft and denounced their frantic leaps, plunges, dives and straddles.
When they would thrust at, or parry, the noses of his champing horses,
making them swing their heads and move their feet, disturbing a solid
dreamy repose, he swore at the men as fools, for he himself could
perceive that Providence had caused it clearly to be written, that he and
his team had the unalienable right to stand in the proper path of the sun
chariot, and if they so minded, obstruct its mission or take a wheel off.
And, perhaps, if the god-driver had an ungovernable desire to step
down, put up his flame-colored fists and manfully dispute the right of
way, he would have probably been immediately opposed by a scowling
mortal with two sets of very hard knuckles.
It is possible, perhaps, that this young man would have derided, in an
axle-wide alley, the approach of a flying ferry boat. Yet he achieved a
respect for a fire engine. As one charged toward his truck, he would
drive fearfully upon a sidewalk, threatening untold people with
annihilation. When an engine would strike a mass of blocked trucks,
splitting it into fragments, as a blow annihilates a cake of ice, Jimmie's
team could usually be observed high and safe, with whole wheels, on
the sidewalk. The fearful coming of the engine could break up the most
intricate muddle of heavy vehicles at which the police had been
swearing for the half of an hour.
A fire engine was enshrined in his heart as an appalling thing that he
loved with a distant dog-like devotion. They had been known to
overturn street-cars. Those leaping horses, striking sparks from the

cobbles in their forward lunge, were creatures to be ineffably admired.
The clang of the gong pierced his breast like a noise of remembered
war.
When Jimmie was a little boy, he began to be arrested. Before he
reached a great age, he had a fair record.
He developed too great a tendency to climb down from his truck and
fight with other drivers. He had been in quite a number of
miscellaneous fights, and in some general barroom rows that had
become known to the police. Once he had been arrested for assaulting a
Chinaman. Two women in different parts of the city, and entirely
unknown to each other, caused him considerable annoyance by
breaking forth, simultaneously, at fateful intervals, into wailings about
marriage and support and infants.
Nevertheless, he had, on a certain star-lit evening, said wonderingly
and quite reverently: "Deh moon looks like hell, don't it?"
Chapter V
The girl, Maggie, blossomed in a mud puddle. She grew to be a most
rare and wonderful production of a tenement