Jonathan and His Continent Part 33

You take the cars after dinner to go a two or three hundred mile journey. You pa.s.s an hour or two in the smoking-room; you go to your berth, sleep the night through, and by the time you awake you are at your journey's end.

In point of comfort, the American trains are to the French and English trains what these latter are to the stage-coach of bygone days.

Nothing can surpa.s.s the comfort and luxury of the Pullman cars, unless it be the perfected Pullman that is called the Vestibule Train. Six or seven carriages, connecting one with another, allow of your moving about freely over a length of some hundred yards. Dining-room, sleeping car, drawing-room car, smoking-room, library, bath-room, lavatory, the whole fitted up in the most luxurious style. What can one desire more? It is a hotel on wheels. It is your _appartement_, in which you whirl from New York to Chicago in twenty-four hours. Cook, barber, valets de chambre--you have all at hand. Yes, a barber! There is a barber's shop at the end of the train. Perhaps, by-and-by, they will introduce a billiard-room. The platforms at the ends of the carriages are closed in by a concertina-pleated arrangement having doors opening outwards. You pa.s.s from one carriage to the other without having to expose yourself to cold or rain; children may play about and run from carriage to carriage with perfect safety. Everything has been thought out, everything has been carried out that could conduce to the comfort of travellers; and unless the Americans invent a style of dwelling that can be moved about from one place to another (and they will come to this, no doubt, in time), I do not see that one could desire, or even imagine, more agreeable, more elegant, or safer railway carriages.

Let anything unforeseen occur--a snowstorm, for instance,--delaying the train for hours, and you at once recognise the superiority of American trains over European ones. Instead of being cooped up in a narrow box-like compartment, shivering with cold and hunger until the rails have been cleared, you can move about from one end of the thoroughly warmed train to the other, and obtain food and drink when you require it. Under such circ.u.mstances it is not difficult to resign yourself to the delay.

Rugs are a useless enc.u.mbrance. The trains are warmed from October to April. As soon as you enter the carriages, you feel the need of taking off your wraps, for the temperature is generally hovering about the eighties.

The fireman is a pitiless ebon tyrant, who will take no heed to your appeals for mercy: let the temperature be high or low, he evidently considers his whole duty to be the piling on of as much coal as the stove will burn.

There are windows and ventilators: but if you open your widow, you will see your fellow-travellers turn up their coat-collars and get down their shawls and furs; and you will hear energetic grumblings, which will give you to understand that you are turning yourself into a public calamity.

The Americans are shivery people, stewing themselves in a _bain-marie_.

As to the ventilators, they are under the management of the car conductor; and if that gentleman is not too warm, you may gasp and faint before getting any relief from him. The comfort of the travellers is not his affair; and if you succeed in coaxing him to open one or two ventilators, he soon comes along again to close them.[18]

[18] Even in the morning, after twenty or thirty people have pa.s.sed the night in the car, it is quite difficult to get the ventilators opened to change the air.

Here, as well as in the hotels, and in all conditions of American life, you are at the mercy of servants. There is no remedy at hand, no appeal against it.

The car conductors are generally impolite, even rude. Do not ask them questions--above all, those questions which travellers are wont to ask: "Shall we soon be at----?" "Is the train late?" "What is the next station?" etc. In America you are supposed to know everything, and no one will help you unless you should happen to address yourself to well-bred people.

If you ask a pa.s.ser-by in the street the nearest way to the station, he makes as though he understood you not. The word _station_ is English; but you must talk American here, and say _depot_, p.r.o.nounced _deepo_.

When a railway servant has succeeded in insulting you, he is quite proud, and plumes himself on his smartness; he looks at his mates and seems to say, "Did you hear how I spoke up to him?" He would be afraid of lowering himself by being polite. In his eyes, politeness is a form of servility; and he imagines that, by being rude to well-bred people, he puts himself on a footing with them, and carries out the greatest principle of democracy--equality. Just so agreeable, obliging, and considerate as is the cultivated American; just so rude, rough, and inconsiderate is the lower-cla.s.s one.

You go to a railway ticket-office to book for a certain place. Perhaps there are several lines of railway running to your destination. The clerk says, without looking at you, and at the rate of a thousand words a minutes:

"What line? B. and O., or S.F. and W, R.R., or C.I.L. and C.?"

"I want a ticket for Chicago."

"I ask you whether you wish to go by the----"

Here he once more repeats various parts of the alphabet, casting a look of pity at you the while. Do not believe he will translate his A B C D's into English--it is your place to understand them.

Do not lose your temper, however; that never pays in America. The natives would only enjoy it. Take the matter laughingly. This is the advice the Americans gave me; and I recommend it to you, if ever you are similarly placed.

I was having a siesta one day in one of the comfortable arm-chairs of a drawing-room car, when the conductor came along and, giving me a formidable thump, cried out in the most savage tone:

"Your ticket!"

I made haste to oblige him, and to offer apologies.

"I trust I have not kept you waiting," said I.

He went away quite crestfallen.

You see, in America, you must be polite to everyone, or you would constantly be running the risk of treating with disrespect a future President.

Another day I was in a New York local train. These trains have not drawing-room cars with smoking-rooms attached. Neither first, second, nor third cla.s.s: all the carriages are alike. I addressed the conductor, asking him where I should find the smoking-compartment. In reply, he murmured a few unintelligible words between his teeth. In my humblest, sweetest accents, I said:

"Excuse me, I did not hear."

He shouted at me at the top of his voice:

"Be--hind--the--lo--co--mo--tive; do you hear this time?"

My first impulse was to knock him down. But I bethought myself of the advice that had been given me, and answered, with a smile:

"Yes, I heard. I beg a thousand pardons. You are really too polite."

A popular American actress was dining one evening in the dining-room car of a New York train. Being alone, she ate slowly, and deliberately dawdled over the meal, to kill time. The waiter, displeased at the audacity of such conduct, stood about within hearing, and began making the rudest remarks on her proceedings.

When she had quite finished her dinner, and he came to remove the dishes, the actress wrote a few words upon one of her cards and, handing it to him with a sweet smile, she said:

"Here is my card; if you hand it in at the Opera House to-morrow evening, you will be provided with a stall. I regret exceedingly that it is not in my power to offer you a box--it is such a treat to meet with a polite railway servant!"

I have met, occasionally, with a polite conductor, but they are in the proportion of one to ten.

The names of the stations are hidden. Do not hope that the conductor will clear up the mystery.

The train had just stopped a few leagues from Richmond.

"What station is this?" asked a traveller, addressing the conductor.

This individual simply shrugged his shoulders and turned his back.

I happened to be close to him.

"What inquisitive people there are, to be sure!" I said to him.

To an irritable person, the rudeness of the railway and hotel servants would be enough to spoil all the pleasure of a visit to America. But the Americans themselves are good-tempered, and pay no attention to these things. I know some who even get a certain amount of amus.e.m.e.nt therefrom.

The negro who makes your bed is more polite; but his politeness is not disinterested. A few moments before the arrival of the train at your destination, he brushes you down, and receives the invariable quarter (25 cents) for his trouble. These negroes, independently of the salary paid them by the company they work for, make from forty to fifty shillings a day in this way: say, from five to six hundred pounds a year.

How many a white would turn black for less!

There is another annoyance on the railway, a veritable bugbear that it is hard to bear philosophically.

On board the train is an indefatigable general dealer, whose store is in the last car.

Scarcely is the train in motion when he commences operations. He begins by taking a bundle of newspapers, with which he goes his first round, banging the doors after him. This done, he returns to his store, puts by the papers he has not sold, takes a basket, fills it with apples, oranges, and bananas, and starts again. Second banging of the doors at either end of your car. He shouts "Apples, oranges, bananas!" as he goes. You shake your head to let him know that you do not wish any of his fruit, and he pa.s.ses. Then he returns to his shop. You think you would like a nap, and will proceed to have one. You are reckoning without your host. He presently reappears with jujubes and cough lozenges; then with travelling-caps; then with cigars and cigarettes.