THE IRON TRAIL
Our luck, which had up to that point been as good as luck could be,
failed us miserably when we started for Chicago. The very day before we
left New York there was a blizzard and a snowstorm. Not in New York
itself. There was only a very strong wind there. Nor in Chicago, but all
over the district which lay between. One train was held up for eighteen
hours in a snowdrift. The last fragments of food in the restaurant car
were consumed, and the passengers arrived chilled and desperately hungry
at their destination. We might have been in that train. It was not,
indeed, possible for us to leave New York a day sooner than we did; but
I cannot see why the blizzard could not have waited a little.
Twenty-four hours' delay would have made no difference to it. It might
even have gathered force. To us it would have made all the difference in
the world. We missed a great experience. That is why I say that our luck
failed us at this point.
It would not, at the moment, have been a pleasant experience, and I do
not pretend that we should have enjoyed either the cold or the hunger;
and we are not the sort of people who, under such circumstances, secure
the last sardine. We should, owing to our feebleness in self-assertion,
have been among the first to go foodless. But afterwards we could have
thought about it and all our lives told steadily improving stories about
the adventure. The recollection of it would have added zest to every
remaining hour of comfort in our lives. What is a short spell of
suffering compared to such enduring joys? But in these matters we have
been singularly unlucky through life. We have never been in a shipwreck
or a railway accident or been forced to escape from a burning house.
Only once did a horse run away with us, and it fell almost immediately
after making its dash for liberty. No burglar has roused us to do battle
with him in the middle of the night. It seems hard, when we have been
denied all the great adventures of life, to miss by the narrow margin of
a single day the minor excitement of being snowed up in a train.
However, it is useless to complain. The thing was not to be and it was
not. Our journey was commonplace and unadventurous. We hired what is
called a drawing-room car on our train. This is an extravagant thing to
do. For people of our humble means it is almost criminally reckless.
Some day when we cannot afford to have our boots re-soled, when we are
looking at the loaves in the windows of bakers' shops with vain desire,
when we have neither money nor credit left to us, we shall think with
poignant regret of the huge sums we spent on that drawing-room car. We
shall be sorry, at least one of us will be sorry that we were not more
careful when he or she, the survivor, cannot afford a simple tombstone
to mark the grave of the other. But at the moment the money, in spite of
Atlantic City, being actually in our pockets, we felt that the
drawing-room car was an absolute necessity. I should take it again if I
were going to Chicago. But then we are not yet reduced to penury.
The alternative to a drawing-room car, on most trains, is a section in a
Pullman sleeping-car. Against this we rose in revolt. I cannot imagine
how the Americans, who are in many ways much more highly civilized than
Europeans, tolerate the existence of Pullman sleeping-cars. I am not
physically—though I am in every other way—an exceptionally modest man.
I have, for instance, no objection to mixed bathing, and it does not
make me blush to meet one of the housemaids in a hotel when, dressed
only in my pajamas, I am searching for the bathroom. But I do object to
undressing in the corridor of a Pullman sleeping-car, and I cannot, not
being a professional acrobat, undress in my berth. For a lady the thing
is, of course, much worse. Besides the undressing and the still more
difficult dressing again, there is the business of washing in the
morning, washing and, for most men, shaving. You go into a sort of
dressing-room to do that. There are not nearly basins enough. There is
not room enough. Somebody is sure to walk on your sponge, will walk on
your toothbrush, too, unless you happen to be a clerk, and therefore
practiced in the art of holding things behind your ear.
I think Americans are beginning to recognize that these sleeping-cars
are barbarous. I met one lady who told me that she would always gladly
sacrifice a new dress in order to spend the money on a drawing-room car.
I entirely sympathize with her; but, even if you are prepared for these
heroic extravagances, you cannot always get a drawing-room car. There
was one occasion on which we failed, though we telegraphed three days
before to engage one. On some of the best trains of the best lines there
are also what are called "compartments." These are comparable in comfort
to the cabins of the International Company of Wagon Lits on the
Continental trains de luxe, though inferior to the London and North
Western Railway Company's sleeper. No one has any right to grumble who
secures a compartment. Unfortunately, it is not every railway company
which has them, and it is by no means every train on which they are run.
The drawing-room car, when you get it, is in itself a comfortable thing
to travel in. There is a good deal of room in it. There is satisfactory
lavatory accommodation. The attendants are civil and competent. Any one
who can sleep in a train at all could sleep in a drawing-room car if
only he were not waked up every time the train stops or starts. Trains
must stop occasionally, of course. But there is no real need for
emphasizing the stops as American trains do. It is possible—I know
this, because both the French and English trains do it—to stop without
giving inexperienced passengers the impression that there has been a
collision. Stopping is not a thing a train ought to be proud of. There
is no reason why the attention of passengers should be drawn to it
forcibly. For starting with a bang there is, of course, more excuse. To
start at all is a triumph. It is a victory of mind over inert matter,
and any one who accomplishes it wants, naturally and properly, to be
admired. I can understand the annoyance of the train, conscious of being
able to start, at feeling that its passengers, who ought to be praising
it, are perhaps sound asleep. Yet I cannot help thinking that all the
admiration any train ought to want might be secured without excessive
violence. Suppose a notice were hung up in every coach: "This train will
stop twice during the night and after each stop will start again.
Passengers are requested to realize that this is not an easy thing to
do. They will therefore admire the train." No passenger with a spark of
decent feeling in him would refuse an appreciative pat to the engine in
the morning. We do as much for horses who cannot drag us nearly so far
or half so fast. We do it for dogs who do not drag us at all, only fetch
things for us. We should certainly treat engines with the same kindness
if they were a little tenderer to us. But I refuse to pat, stroke or in
any way fondle an engine which, out of mere vanity, wakes me up by
starting boisterously.
We ran during the night through the tail of the snowstorm which had
stopped the train the day before. We had left New York in pleasant
autumn weather, on one of those days which, without being cold, has an
exhilarating nip about it. We arrived in Chicago in what seemed to us
midsummer weather, though I believe it was not really hot for Chicago.
We passed on our way through a snow-covered district and had the
greatest difficulty in keeping warm during the night. This is one of the
advantages of traveling in America. The distances are so immense that in
the course of a single journey you have the chance of trying several
kinds of climate. In England you get the same result by staying in one
place. But the American plan is much better. There, having discovered a
climate which suits you, you can settle down in it with a fair amount of
confidence that it will remain what it is for a week or two at a time.
In England, whether you travel about or stay still, you have got to
accustom yourself to continual variety.
After breakfast, when the train had passed the snow-covered region and
the air became a little warmer, we sat on the platform at the end of the
observation car and looked out at the country through which we were
going. Nothing could conceivably be more monotonous. The land was quite
flat, the railway line was absolutely straight. The train sped on at a
uniform pace of about forty miles an hour. As far back as the eye could
see were the rails of the track, narrowing and narrowing until they
looked like a single sharp line, ruled with remorseless precision from
some point at an infinite distance in the east. On each side of us were
broad spaces of flat land, reaching, still flat, to the horizons north
and south of us. Every half-hour or so we passed a village, a collection
of meanly conceived, two-storied houses with a hideous little church
standing just apart from them. Hour after hour we rushed on with no
other change of scenery, no mountain, no lake, no river, just flat land,
with a straight line ruled on it. It was incredibly monotonous. I
suppose that the life of the people who inhabit that region is as
interesting, in reality, as any other life. The seasons change there, I
hope. Harvests ripen, cows calve, men die; but on us, strangers from a
very different land, the unvarying flatness of it all lay like an
intolerable weight.
Yet that journey gave me, more than anything else I saw, a sense of the
greatness of the American people. There is, I suppose, some one thing in
the history of every nation which impresses the man who realizes, even
dimly, the meaning of it, more than anything else does. Elizabethan
England's buccaneering adventures to the Spanish main seem to me to make
intelligible the peculiar greatness of England more than anything else
her people have ever done. Revolutionary France in arms against Europe
is France at her most glorious, with her special splendor at its
brightest. So my imagination fixes on America's settlement of her vast
central plain as the greatest thing in her story. Her fight for
independence was fine, of course; but many other nations have fought
such wars and won, or, just as finely, lost. Her civil war stirs
thoughts of greatness in any one who reads it. But this tremendous
journey of the American people from the east to the Mississippi shores,
halfway across a continent, was something greater than any war.
First, no doubt, hunters went out from the narrow strip of settled
seaboard land. They pushed their adventurous way across the Alleghanies,
finding passes, camping in strange fastnesses. They came upon the
westward-flowing waters of the great network of rivers which drain into
the Mississippi. They made their long, dim trails. They fought, with
equal cunning, bands of Indian braves. They returned, in love with
wildness, weaned from the ways of civilization, to tell their tales of
strange places by the firesides of sober men. Or they did not return.
They were great men, and their achievements very great, but not the
greatest.
More wonderful was the accomplishment of those long streams of settlers
who crossed Virginia and Pennsylvania to find the upper reaches of the
waterways which should lead and bear them mile by mile to the
Mississippi shore. It is barely a century since these men, home lovers,
not wanderers with the call of the wild in their ears, home builders,
not hunters, went floating in rude arks down the Ohio, the Cumberland,
the Tennessee. With unimaginable courage and faith they took with them
women, children, cattle, and household plenishing. Somewhere each ark
grounded and the work of settlement began. I saw the woods which stretch
for miles over rolling hills and round lakes beyond that curious colony
of very wealthy people at Tuxedo. My imagination pictured for me, as I
gazed at these woods, the outpost settlements of one hundred years ago.
The "half-faced camp," rudest of the dwellings of civilized man, was
built. Trees were "girdled" or cut down with patient toil. A small
clearing was made amid the interminable miles of forest land. I imagined
the men, lean and grim, the anxious women, ever on the alert because of
the perpetual menace of the Indians who might lurk a stone's throw off
among the shadows of the trees.
We can guess at the satisfaction of each triumph won; the day when the
lean-to shed with its open side gave place to the log hut, still rude
enough; the day when some great tree, sapless from its "girdling," was
hewn down at last; the adding of acre after acre of cleared land; the
incredibly swift growth of villages and towns; the pushing out of
settlements, south and north, into yet stranger wildernesses, away from
the friendly banks of the waterways. The courage and endurance of these
settlers must have been far beyond that required of soldiers, explorers
or adventurers. Step by step, almost literally step by step, they made
this wonderful journey, conquering every acre as they passed it. Yet we
know very little about them. Homer made a list of the ships which sailed
for Troy. Who has chronicled the arks and rafts of these still braver
men? Camoens wrote his Luciad to glorify the voyage of Vasco da Gama
round the African coast. All England's Elizabethan literature is,
rightly understood, an interpretation of the spirit of Drake and
Raleigh. No one has written an epic of these American pioneer settlers.
Yet surely if ever men deserved such commemoration they did.
Our train ran on and on at forty miles an hour, and my spirit was cowed
by the vast monotony. What sort of spirit had the men who faced it
first, to whom the conquest of a mile was a great achievement, to whom
it must have seemed that there was no end to it at all? I wonder whether
there was in them some great kind of faith, of which we have lost the
secret now, a belief that God Himself had bidden them go forward? Or
perhaps there was strong in them that instinct for the conquest of
nature which, whether he knew it or not, has always been in man, which
has made him greater than the beasts, only a little lower than the
angels. Or perhaps it was hunger for life itself, not for a fuller or a
richer life, but for the bare material existence, which sent them on,
threatened by want in civilized places, to look for ground where things
would grow, where the fruit of their toil would not be taken from them.
To find a parallel for the achievement of these men the mind must go
back to dim ages before history began, when our ancestors—why and how
we cannot guess—learned to light fires, chip flints, snare beasts, make
laws; groped through a palpable obscurity toward justice and right,
fought those impossible battles of theirs which have won for us the
kingship of the world. Theirs was an achievement greater indeed than
that of America's pioneer settlers, but of the same kind.
I went to church in New York on Thanksgiving Day, and I, though a
stranger, was given the privilege of reading aloud that wonderful
chapter in the Book of Deuteronomy which tells how God led His people
through a great and terrible wilderness. I forgot, as I read it, all
about Israel and Sinai. I remembered how the people among whom I was had
journeyed across their vast continent. They are not my people. Their
glory is none of mine. Their Thanksgiving Day had nothing to do with me,
but emotion thrilled me strangely as I read. I wondered, thanked, and
bent my head with fear, so great was the past which is remembered, so
terrible the warning which follows the recital. "Beware lest thou at all
forget the Lord thy God."
The observation car, with its sheltered platform at the back of it, is a
pleasant feature of the long-distance American train, one which might,
with advantage, be copied in Europe. But the best thing, the most wholly
satisfactory, about American railway traveling is that certain trains
are fined for being late. This happens in England, I think, certainly in
Ireland, in the case of mail trains. It does them a lot of good, but
gives small gratification to the suffering passengers, because the
Post-Office authorities take the money. In America the passengers get
the fine. Our train was an hour and a quarter late in getting to
Chicago, and we were handed a dollar each as compensation for our
annoyance. I felt sorrier than ever that we had not traveled the day
before in the train that was delayed by the blizzard. Then we should
have got eighteen dollars each and been able to buy several splendid
dinners to make up for our starvation.
It is not every train in America which pays for unpunctuality in this
way. I am not sure that the rule applies even to express trains all over
the continent, nor do I know whether the railway companies deal thus
justly with their passengers of their own free will. It seems very
unlikely that they do. I am inclined to think that there must be a law
on the subject, either a law made by the State of Illinois or, as I
hope, one made by Congress itself. However this may be, I have no doubt
at all that the law, if it is a law, ought to be made and strictly
enforced in every civilized country. I traveled once by a London & North
Western Railway express train, which was three hours late; and I
suffered a loss, was actually obliged to disperse no less a sum than
£2-18-0 in consequence. I tried in vain to make the company see that it
ought to pay me back that £2-18-0. I never got a penny. Yet the offense
of the American company was a trifling one in comparison. It was one
hour and a quarter late in a journey supposed to occupy twenty-three
hours. The London & North Western Railway took nine hours over a journey
which it professed to do in six. I cannot help feeling that the English
company would have got its train to London on that occasion much more
rapidly if it had known beforehand that it might have to pay each
passenger fifteen shillings at Euston. We hear a great deal on this side
of the Atlantic about the scandalous way in which American railway
magnates control American legislation. It appears that occasionally, at
all events, the legislators exercise a very salutary control over the
railways.
Charges of corrupting senates are certainly made against American
railway directors. They may conceivably be true. If they are it seems
desirable, in the interests of the passengers, that some of the British
railways would take in hand the task of corrupting the House of Commons
in the American way. The morals of that assembly could in no case be
much worse than they are, so there would be little loss in that way,
while the gain to the public would be immense if trains, even a few of
the best trains, were forced under heavy penalties to keep time.