In the days of my cynicism I used to laugh in my sleeve, and
occasionally in print, at the ways of the politicians and statesmen en
route, who have their pictures taken hobnobbing with locomotive
engineers, trainmen, and Pullman porters. Since I have myself become a
professional wanderer and have come into closer, somewhat enforced,
fellowship with these individuals I laugh at the politicians and
statesmen no more. On the contrary I commend them, and I think with
appreciation and gratitude of a poem by George Sterling, one of our real
voices to-day calling down blessings on the heads of these "workers of
the night" to whose watchful care we who travel intrust our lives.
One who makes only occasional journeys by rail is not likely to think
very much about the man at the throttle; but when one has practically
lived on the rail for two or three months running, not only the man at
the throttle, but the man at the switch, the flagman, the fireman, the
conductor, and the Pullman porter as well, come to be in a very real
sense members of his family.
Mr. Carnegie's hero medals are often bestowed, and worthily, upon men
who on sudden impulse have performed some deed of heroism and
self-sacrifice for the benefit of others; but I have yet to hear of one
of these desirable possessions being bestowed upon the flagman who, in
the face of a raging blizzard, at midnight, the thermometer at zero,
leaves the comparative comfort of the rear car, and walks, whistling for
company, back some four or five hundred yards along the icy track, and
stands there with his red lantern in hand to warn a possibly advancing
train behind of danger ahead.
When the ice-incased wires are down, and the signal and switch towers
are out of commission because of the rampageous elements, how many of us
who lie comfortably asleep in the warm berths of our stalled trains give
so much as a thought to the man outside in the freezing cold of the
night, keeping the switches clear that we may proceed, or to the
flagman at the rear, shelterless before the storm, who stands between us
and disaster? Most of us, I fancy, do not think of them at all, and I
fear that many of us so occupy ourselves with self-sympathy on these
occasions that we find no words of commendation in our hearts for
anybody connected with the whole railway system; but rather words of
condemnation for that system and everybody connected with it, from the
innocent stockholder looking for dividends, all the way down to those
poor devils who have forgotten under the stress of demoralizing
conditions to fill the water tanks that we may drink and get our fair
share of the nation's supply of typhoid germs.
For myself, I can truthfully say that the remark of a railway official
made to me many years ago in response to one of my complaints has of
late years gathered considerable force and significance. This gentleman
was a neighbor of mine, and one Christmas he presented me with an annual
pass on the Hudson River Railroad. It was a delightful gift, and I used
it with enthusiasm. One morning, however, as he and I sat together on a
local train that had in some mysterious way managed to lose four hours
on a thirty-minute run, I turned to him and said:
"Charlie, sometimes I wish I had never accepted that confounded old pass
of yours. I've bartered my freedom of speech for a beggarly account of
empty minutes. If it wasn't for that blankety-blank pass, I could tell
you what I think of your blinkety-blink old road. Here we are four hours
late on a thirty-minute run!"
"Why, my dear boy," he replied with an amiable smile, "you are
dingety-dinged lucky to get in at all!"
Individually I have experienced so much kindliness and courtesy at the
hands of the personnel of our railroads in all parts of the United
States that I sometimes get real satisfaction out of sharing with them
the discomforts of travel. I have discovered without half trying that
there are profound depths of friendliness in them which need to be given
only half a chance to manifest themselves. Rarely indeed have I met with
discourtesy at their hands, and many a weary hour has been cheered by
their native wit. For the most part, naturally, my contact has been with
the station agent and the conductor--and the Pullman porter.
While I deplore the abuses of tipping in this and other countries, I
have rarely grudged the Pullman porter his well earned extra quarter.
Perhaps the general run of us have not had the time, nor the
inclination, to acquaint ourselves with the difficulties of the Pullman
porter's job. We don't realize that with a car full of people ten
passengers will want the car cooled off, ten others will want a little
more heat, five will complain that there is too much air, five others
will complain that there is too little; and poor Rastus, ground between
the two millstones of complaint, has to make a show of pleasing
everybody. He above all others would be justified in announcing as his
favorite poem those fine old lines:
As a rule a man's a fool:
When it's hot he wants it cool;
When it's cool he wants it hot--
Always wanting what is not.
I recall one fine old darky once on a train running into Cleveland, who
was very unhappy over a complaint of mine that, with a car crowded to
the limit with women and children, some cigarette fiend had vitiated
what little air there was in the car by smoking in his berth. I was
awakened at three o'clock in the morning by the oppressive odor of
burning paper and near-perique. There is no mistaking the origin of that
aromatic nuisance, and my gorge rose at the boorish lack of
consideration that the smoker showed for the comfort and convenience of
his fellow travelers. I pressed the button alongside my berth, and a
moment later the porter was peering in at me through the curtains.
"Look here, John," said I in a stage whisper, "this is a little too
much! Somebody in this car is smoking cigarettes, and I think it's a
condemned outrage. With all these ladies on board it seems to me that
you ought to insist that the man who can't restrain his passion for
cigarettes should get off at the next stop and take the first cattle car
he finds running to where he thinks he is going."
"Yas, suh," returned the porter sadly. "It's too bad, suh, an' I've
tried my bes' to stop 'em twice, suh."
"Well, by George!" said I, sitting up. "If they won't stop for you,
maybe they will for me. If any man aboard this car thinks he can get
away with a nuisance like this--"
"Yas, suh," said the porter; "but that's jest whar de trouble comes in,
suh. I been after 'em, suh; but it ain't no use. In bofe cases, suh, it
was de ladies deirsefs dat was a-doin' all de smokin', suh."
And he grinned so broadly as I threw myself back on my pillow that when
I finally got to sleep again I dreamed of the opening to the Mammoth
Cave, through a natural association of ideas.
[Illustration: "I have been after 'em, suh; but it ain't no use."]
Occasionally one finds some trouble in keeping ahead of the Pullman
porter in the matter of repartee. There used to be on the night run to
Boston a venerable chap, black as the ace of spades, but patriarchal in
his dignity, of whom I was very fond. He was as wide awake at all hours
of the day and night as though sleep had not been invented. Like most of
his class, he was inclined to bestow titles on his charges.
"Yo' got enough pillows, Cap'n?" he asked on one occasion, after he had
fixed my berth.
"Yes, Major," I replied, putting him up a peg higher. "But it's a cold
night, and I think another blanket might come in handy."
"All right, Cunnel," said he, adding to my honors. "I'll git hit right
away."
"Thank you, General," said I, as he returned with the desired article.
"Glad to serve yo', Admiral," said he with deep gravity.
"And now, Bishop," said I, resolved to keep at it until I scored a
victory, "suppose--"
"Hol' on, mistuh!" he retorted instantly. "Hol' on! Dey ain't mo'n one
puhson in de Universe whut's higher 'n a bishop, an' I knows mighty well
yo' ain't Him!"
Our dusky brothers not infrequently fill me with a sense of consolation
in difficult moments. Two such cases occur to me at this writing; one in
my own experience, and the other in a story I heard in the South last
winter, the mere thought of which has many times since served to soften
my woes in troublesome moments.
The first occurred several years ago, when the steel passenger cars
first came into commission. Being myself of a somewhat inflammable
nature, I make it a rule to travel on these in preference to the
old-fashioned tinder boxes of ten years ago whenever I can. On this
particular occasion, however, on a hurried midwinter night run, I found
myself in a highly ornate, lumbering Pullman of the vintage of '68. It
was an essentially mid-Victorian affair, and in the matter of decoration
was a flamboyant specimen of the early A. T. Stewart period of American
interior embellishment.
Those whose memories hark back that far will remember that the Pullman
Company's money at that time was largely expended on lavish
ornamentation of a peculiarly assertive rococo style, consisting for the
main part of an eruption of gew-gaws which ran riot over the exposed
surfaces of the car like a rash on the back of a baby. The external
slant of the upper berth in these cars was ever a favorite surface for
this particular kind of gew-gawsity, and no occupant of a lower berth
known to me ever succeeded in getting safely into bed, or out of it,
without having one or more of these lovely patterns imprinted on the top
of his head with more force than delicacy. In collisions the occupant of
one of these varnish-soaked orgies of fretwork had about as much chance
of escaping unscathed as what a dear clerical friend of mine in a lay
sermon once characterized as "a celluloid dog chasing an asbestos cat
through the depths of purgatory." Whenever I find myself on one of these
cars I think instinctively of just three things, and in this order--my
past life, my possible permanent future, and my accident insurance
policy--and try to comfort myself by playing both ends against the
middle.
In my haste on this occasion I had not particularly noticed the
characteristics of the car until I attempted to remove my shoes to
retire. As I sat up after untying the laces I was brought to a painful
realization of the old-time nature of the vehicle by having impressed
most forcibly upon the top of my head the convolutions of an empire
wreath, carved out of pine splints, and embossed with gold leaf, which
served to give Napoleonic dignity to the upper berth when not in use.
The jar, plus the ensuing association of ideas, brought to my mind an
uneasy realization of the probable truth that the car was of antique
pattern, about as solid as any other box of potential toothpicks, and as
fireproof as a ball of excelsior soaked with paraffin. At the moment the
porter happened to be passing with the carpet-stepped ladder to assist a
two-hundred-and-fifty-pound traveling man into the berth overhead, and I
addressed him.
"See here, porter!" said I. "What kind of car do you call this, anyhow?
Isn't this the car Shem, Ham, and Japhet took when they moved back to
town from Ararat?"
"Yas, suh," he answered. "She suttinly am an ol' timah, suh."
"Well, I don't feel exactly safe, George," said I. "Aren't there any
steel cars on this train?"
"Oh, we's all safe enough, suh," said George, with the assurance of one
who is so well intrenched that no foe on earth could possibly get at
him. "De cyar behind an' de cyar in front, dey's bofe steel, suh."
I had never expected to enjoy in this life the sensations that I suspect
are those of a mosquito when he finds himself caught between the
avenging palms of a horny-fisted son of toil, who has at last got a
pestiferous nuisance where he wants him; but I must confess that such
were my sensations that night; and every time the train came to a sudden
stop in its plunging through the dark I had a not too comfortable sense
that when the steel front of the car behind finally came to meet the
iron end of the car ahead, through the unresisting mass of splinters and
Empire wreaths between, I would personally, in all likelihood, more
closely resemble a cubist painting of a sunset on the Barbary Coast than
a human being. I imagine that what really carried me uninjured through
the nervous ordeal of that night was the amused view I took of good old
George's notions as to what constituted absolute safety.
The other incident, as narrated to me by a fellow traveler, has given me
much comfort in exasperating moments. In sections of the South and West
the engineers have not as yet mastered the art of stopping or starting
their trains gently. When they stop they stop grindingly, with jolts and
jars sudden and violent enough to send a snoring traveler full of stored
up impetus head first through a stone wall; or, if it be in the
daytime, with a jerk of such a nature as would snap his head off
completely if the latter were not so firmly fastened to his neck. It is
a method that may do very well for freight, but for passengers and
dynamite it has its disadvantages.
It was on a line renowned for its jarring methods that the incident of
which my friend told me is alleged to have occurred. A train made up of
day coaches and Pullman sleepers broke through a wooden trestle and
landed in a frightful mass of twisted wreckage on the bottom of a ravine
some eighty feet below. The wrecking crew worked nobly, and after
several hours of heroic effort came to a crushed and splintered sleeper
at the base of the ruin. There amid the debris, sleeping peacefully,
with a beam across his chest, lay the porter, wholly unhurt, and
dreaming. He was even snoring. The foreman of the wrecking crew, with
suitable language expressing his amazement at the miracle, finally
succeeded in getting Sambo half awake.
"Wh-whut's de mattah?" stammered Sambo, sitting up, and gazing dazedly
at the ruin on every side.
"Matter?" echoed the foreman. "Why, Jumping Jehoshaphat, man! Don't you
know that this whole dod-gasted train has fallen through the trestle?
It's a wonder you weren't killed. Didn't you feel anything?"
"Why, yas, boss," said Sambo. "I did feel sumpin' kind o' jolty; but I
t'ought dey was jes' a-puttin' on de dinah at Jackson."
So it is that nowadays when these jolting, jarring notes come along to
vex my soul I no longer lose my temper as I used to do, but think rather
of that old darky and "de dinah at Jackson," and wax mellow, feeling
that that story alone, true or not, is a full justification of all the
sufferings I or others have had to endure at the ungentle hands of the
freight engineer at the passenger throttle.
These men on the engines are great characters, and whenever I can get
into touch with them I do so. In some of my zigzagging trips hither and
yon in the Middle and Northwest I often find myself back to-day on some
train or other that has carried me along on some previous trip, and it
is frequently much like a family reunion when I meet the crew for a
third or fourth time. "Glad to see you back," is a familiar greeting
from conductors, engineers, flagmen, and porters alike. There is one
diner on a Western run that I have visited so frequently that I receive
all the kindly special attention one used to look for at an inn to which
he was a constant visitor; and I think it all grew out of the fact that
the first time I traveled on that particular car I summoned the man in
charge to complain of the pie.
"I don't like to complain," said I; "but this pie--"
"What's the matter with the pie?" he asked, bristling a little.
"Why," said I, "it's so confoundedly good that even a whole one couldn't
satisfy me!"
[Illustration: "These men on the engines are great characters."]
Ever since the registry of that complaint I have really had more than
the law allows on that particular car. Preferential treatment that would
fill the Interstate Commerce Commission with anguish is always mine.
Neither the rack nor all the fires of the Inquisition could extract from
me its precise identity, lest its kindly crew be fined for overcourtesy
to a specific individual.
But to return to the engineers: I have always cherished the memory of a
stolid old graybeard in command of a special train circumstances once
compelled me to hire in order to meet an Arizona date for which there
was no possible regular connection by rail. My special started from
Phoenix shortly after midnight of a stormy day, to carry me down to
Maricopa, there to connect with an early morning express into Tucson.
The train consisted of an engine and a single day coach. Inasmuch as it
was mine for the time being, and at considerable cost, I decided to
exercise my proprietary rights and ride on the engine. A heavy rain
which had been falling all day had changed the dry, sandy beds of the
Salt and Gila rivers to torrential streams, to the great disadvantage of
the roadbeds. We literally seemed to be feeling our way along in the
dark, until suddenly the clouds broke away and a glorious moon shed its
radiance over everything. Just at this point the engineer with a
startled exclamation seized the throttle and brought us to a
disquietingly abrupt stop. He whispered a word or two to the fireman,
who immediately descended from the cab and ran on ahead along the track
until he was completely lost to sight.
"What's the trouble?" said I somewhat apprehensively, as the engineer
began examining his machinery.
"Oh, nothing," said he. "I've just sent Bill ahead to see if the bridge
is still there."
"Bridge? Still there?" I queried. "There's nothing wrong with the
bridges, I hope."
"Well--I dunno," said he. "Look over there," he added with a wave of his
hand off to the left of us. I peered across the stream in the direction
he had indicated, and there in the bright light of the moon I could see
that two huge iron spans of the Santa Fe bridge had been completely
undermined by the fierce flow of the waters, and now lay flat on their
sides in midstream.
"Ooo-hoo! All right!" came the voice of the fireman from the dark ahead.
I sat transfixed and speechless as the engineer started slowly ahead and
moved at a snail's pace along the soggy road. We came to the bridge,
which was still standing, in a few moments; but oh how it swayed as we
inched our way across! I should have felt safer if that train and I
were lying together in a hammock. We fairly lurched across it, and I
should not have been at all surprised if at any moment the whole
structure had collapsed under our weight. Finally we got across in
safety, and my heart condescended to emerge from my boots.
"By George, Mr. Engineer!" said I. "If there's any more like that, I
guess I'll get off and walk the rest of the way."
"All right, mister," said the engineer cheerfully. "If you prefer the
company of rattlesnakes and Gila monsters to mine, go ahead--and may the
Lord have mercy on your soul!"