ONE OF THE FOGGED IMPRESSIONS
Somewhere we read a sign “Cedar Rapids suits me. It will suit you.”
Of course after those last six hours of mud-wallowing agony C-e-d-a-r
R-a-p-i-d-s simply spelled Heaven. But after we were dry and warm and
fed—such is the ingratitude of human nature and tourists—we would very
gladly have gone away again.
I do not like thee, Doctor Fell,
The reason why I can not tell——
explains our feelings rather perfectly. We were tired; at least E. M.
was exhausted, and Celia and I were tired probably in sympathy. Also it
is always disappointing to start out for a place and not be able to get
there, and little things sometimes sum up a feeling of depression quite
out of proportion to their importance.
We went over bad pavement, and came to some more that was torn up, so
that the city had an upheaved effect. It was all drenched in rain, and
the little we saw of it looked ugly and brown, and finally our rooms were
completely sapping to joyfulness of spirit. Perhaps if we had come from
a hotel less attractive than the Black Hawk in Davenport, we should not
have so keenly felt the contrast, but the rooms we were in depressed us
to the verge of melancholia. Dingy bottle-green paper, a stained carpet,
a bathroom in which the plumbing wouldn’t work, a depressing view of a
torn-up street! I wandered around the cow-path surrounding my big bed
in my narrow room, looked out at the weeping sky, and wondered whether
we were going to have this sort of thing all the way—these dust-filled
hideous rooms, cleaned only with a carpet sweeper; these sooty, ugly,
busy, noisy towns. And the meals—those anemic chilled potatoes, beans
full of strings, everything slapped on plates any which way, and
everything tasting as though it had come out of the same dishwater!
Whenever I am far away from home and uncomfortable, I think of the story
Eleanor Hoyt Brainard once told me. After a long chapter of misadventures
on one of those dreadful journeys where she missed the good boat and
rocked about on a little one, failed to get accommodations at the places
that she counted on, and as a last straw took a wrong continental train,
and finally too exhausted to sleep was settling herself for the night in
the corner of a third-class day coach, she began to cry. To her husband’s
amazed and concerned questioning, “Oh, dear!” she sobbed, “it’s just come
over me we have a perfectly good home! And I wonder _why_ we don’t stay
in it more!”
When my article appeared in _Collier’s_, a Cedar Rapids newspaper arose
in wrath and said we must have put up at a third-rate hotel. I agree with
its rating, but was told it was the best in town. I do realize, however,
it is a very distorted judgment that appraises a town by a few rooms in
an hotel. Unless you can stay in a city long enough to know some of its
people, to learn something about its atmosphere and personality, your
opinion of it is as valueless as your opinion of a play would be, after
seeing only the posters on the outside of the theater. Yet if you are a
transient tourist, it is the room you are shown into that necessarily
colors your impression of that city. If your room is fresh and clean
and comfortable, you give the attributes of newness, cleanness and
up-to-dateness to the city itself. An ugly, down-at-heels, uncomfortable
hotel makes you think the same of the city. You can’t help it, can you?
Besides which we had come to see the country and not stop, rained in, for
indefinite periods in towns that differed in no way from dozens of others
in the East. It was the West, the real great, free, open West we had come
to see. Ranches, cowboys, Indians, not little cities like sample New
Yorks.
At the hotel there was a large Bakers’ Convention. A suggestively
domestic affair in more ways than one, since many had brought their
wives. As though in advertisement of the nourishing quality of a wheat
diet, men and women were nearly all pleasingly plump. We noticed
also, that every man without exception had a solitaire diamond ring
on his wedding-ring finger. Sometimes the wife had only a wide gold
wedding-ring, but her husband was in diamonds. I don’t know whether bread
is a specialty of Cedar Rapids, or whether an effort was made to do
particular honor to the bakers, but bread was the one thing on the menu
that proved to be really good.
There were two bakers and their wives, elderly couples, who sat at the
next table to us. One of the wives had a wretched cough and the other was
rather deaf; and to the combination we owe an anecdote that I hope they
did not mind our overhearing, or my repeating.
It seems the husband of the wife who had the cough, sent for a doctor who
had been out night after night on serious cases until the poor man was
completely exhausted. In order to listen to the patient’s breathing he
put his head on her chest and told her to “count four.” The husband came
into the room and heard his wife counting, “One hundred and forty-six—one
hundred and forty-seven——” and the doctor sound asleep!
It was in Cedar Rapids, too, that our waitress told us about an
automobile she had just bought, to drive out in the evenings! As a
newspaper afterwards printed in criticism of my above remark, “Tips in
the West may be larger than the earnings of dyspeptic authoresses in the
East!”