Courtesy en Route

MY instinctive courtesy, which never fails me when I am on foot, is often frustrated when I am at the wheel of my car. This is most annoying to me. I am not willing to concede that the machine age is of necessity an age of discourtesy, or that I am, of necessity, a less gracious person at fifty miles per hour than I am when standing still, or when sauntering afoot.

On the contrary, I contend that the automobile should be included among those ‘new occasions’ which not only ‘teach new duties,’ as Lowell affirmed, but also should teach new courtesies. It is not the disappearance of the old forms of courtesy that troubles me, but our failure to create new forms to grace this ‘new occasion.’

I realize that motorists in fast-moving, glass-enclosed cars cannot exchange the gracious greetings or the gallant gestures of the horse-and-buggy era. Only another Don Quixote would attempt to revive these departed amenities.

And such he was. I had only a moment’s sight of him, but I shall never forget his kindly, gentle face, or his courtly manner, or his unconcern about the traffic jam which he caused and through which he moved with stately nonchalance.

I was first in line, waiting for a green light on Beacon Street, eager to get out of the city. When the light came, I stepped on the gas and sped through the gears and — jammed on my brake! There was a screaming of other brakes, the slither of dragging tires, and the sudden smell of hot rubber. An ancient, highroofed, and eminently respectable Franklin sedan was making a left turn on the red light. My car, and a coupé approaching from the opposite direction, had narrowly escaped crashing into it.

I glanced indignantly at the driver and saw that he was an elderly man and evidently a man of breeding. Although his car was in motion, and although there was every reason why he should move on as quickly as possible, the benevolent old gentleman did not allow these exigencies to prevent the courteous acknowledgment of his obligations. Amidst the din of tooting horns, he lifted his hat to the woman in the coupé crowded against his left running board and, in what seemed to be the same instant, made a gracious gesture to me with his right hand while by some miracle of juggling he twirled his wheel, cleared my front fender by a hair’s breadth, and moved off out of the jam.

As he swung into the line ahead of me, I looked for his number plate, and was not surprised to see that the car was from Virginia. I followed closely behind him all the way to Harvard Square in the hope that some need of information regarding his route might cause him to stop and give me the privilege of a brief conversation with him. But I lost him at the Square when I stopped for a red light, through which he drove upon his sightseeing way.

I heard the shrill whistle of the traffic officer and opened my window to hear what harsh words the officer might bawl at my courtly friend. The natural red of the officer’s Irish complexion was further reddened by the cold November wind. He looked formidable, but when I had my window open I saw that he was grinning. With one hand he was holding back the traffic, with the other he was beckoning my friend to come on.

‘Come on, Virginia!’ he shouted encouragingly. ‘Carry me back to old Virginny. Stay back, you-all! Give the Old Dominion the right of way.’

My heart warmed to the Irish officer. Stationed in his little sentry box, in the midst of the rushing, crisscrossing streams of cars, he refused to allow the exigencies of a machine age to frustrate his native humor, or his native courtesy.

It is not, however, for such spectacular courtesies as these that I am pleading, but for some way to express commonplace courtesies on the road without being spectacular and without stalling traffic. The very simple way which I am proposing is to use the horn for this purpose. There have always been sporadic attempts on the part of motorists to do this very thing, but thus far these attempts remain sporadic and ineffective. An occasional driver will acknowledge a courtesy by sounding two toots on his horn. The twin toots presumably mean ‘Thank you,’ but they cannot be distinguished from the two staccato toots that mean ‘ Look out! ‘ or even ‘Get out!’

My proposal is that we should adopt a uniform signal. One longish toot followed by a short one is suggestive of ’T-h-a-n-k you.’ The driver thus thanked would acknowledge the thanks by the same signal: one longisk and one short toot, meaning ‘ W-e-l-come.’ This signal would very soon be generally recognized as the Thank-youand-welcome signal.

Other signals would undoubtedly come into common use. The drivers of several fleets of motor trucks in New York City are rapidly establishing a signal by which one driver warns another if someone is stealing a ride on the other truck. The day may come when a prudish spinster, driving behind a youthful romantic couple, will be able to express her outraged sensibilities in a series of sharp toots which the youngsters will hear and recognize as meaning ‘Tut-tut-tuttut!’

I confess that when a driver takes the middle of the road ahead of me, or even drives well over on the left of the road, I press my horn in a way that produces a series of low, grunting sounds. I always hope that the inconsiderate driver will catch the resemblance between the sound of my horn and the grunts of a road hog. I should get more satisfaction out of this procedure if the rumbling toot were an established signal which these inconsiderate drivers understood.

Yes, I should like to have that signal widely adopted, even though I should hear it sounding behind me on one of those too frequent days when I suddenly realize that my car has taken to the other side of the road while I have been absorbed in looking at some charming landscape, or in thinking absentmindedly of the waning courtesies of this machine age.