A FEW WAYS OF THE WEST
Just as the good roads turned into mud slides in a few minutes, a few
hours of sun and wind transformed them into good ones again. After only
two days’ delay we went back over the scene of all our misery and the
distance out of our way that had taken us nearly six hours, we skimmed
over in less than one, returning to our Des Moines road with a little
delay and no misadventure. (Our non-interruptible chauffeur paying no
attention to the suggestion of stopping to taste the famous springs at
Colfax.)
When we arrived in Des Moines, as E. M. wanted to take the car to a
garage to have some things fixed, Celia and I went out by ourselves on
foot. The first vehicle we saw had a sign on it “Jitney, 5 cents.” Never
having been in one, and not caring a bit where it took us, we promptly
got in.
“Now, what are we going to see?” asked Celia, not addressing anybody in
particular.
“Strangers?” questioned the driver affably, turning around.
“Yes,” said Celia, “what can we see from your car?”
“Well, there’s the Capitol—I go right by that, and the finest buffaloes
in the States are less’n a block further out. You could go see the
buffaloes and then walk back to the Capitol.”
“Excellent!” we agreed.
The buffaloes were stuffed in a case at the museum, but they must
certainly have been among the finest in the world when they were alive.
We also saw some stuffed prairie dogs. But out here you need not go in
a museum to see them! After the museum we walked through the Capitol, a
fine building splendidly situated on a height overlooking the city and
its dome newly gleaming with gold. When we were descending the many steps
of the Capitol’s terrace, we saw the same jitney driver who had brought
us there, and his car being empty, he drew up expectantly at the curb.
Not wanting, however, to return to the spot we had started from, we
suggested that he take off his sign and drive us about by the hour.
He grinned broadly. Sure he would! Also he augmented his price with
equal alacrity. Then rolling up his “5-cent” sign, and surveying his
unplacarded machine in evident satisfaction, he said jauntily:
“I tell you! The cops’ll think I’m the showfer of a _mill_ionaire! When
you’re nothing but a jitney you stay behind here, and you don’t go there!
But you bet they’ll let me through _now_ all right!”
As a jitney he had been trundling along briskly, but now assuming all the
characteristics of those who are hired by time instead of by distance,
he never let the speedometer go above eight miles an hour; tried his best
to keep it at six and stalled the engine about every hundred yards, until
at the end of a very little while of halting and creeping we found his
tin-kettle tramp machine acute punishment. We told him that if he would
only go quickly, we would willingly pay for a second hour’s drive at the
end of twenty minutes. But nothing we could say had any effect upon him.
He kept on at the same dot-and-go-one creep. Finally, in desperation,
Celia shrieked:
“If you don’t get us home at once, it will be too late! You will have to
take us to the asylum!”
He looked around at Celia like a scared rabbit, and in her frenzied
countenance found evidently no reassurance, for he took us home at a
speed that broke the traffic regulations—even for the “showfers of
millionaires!”
In a few of our impressions, Des Moines had an eccentric topsy-turviness
as though we had stumbled into the pages of “Alice in Wonderland.” At the
Chamberlain, an old-fashioned General Grant style of hotel, the elevator
boys sit on chairs _in the center_ of the elevator and the guests stand.
When I asked to have a cup of coffee and toast sent up to my room the
next morning at half-past seven, the head waitress raised her eyebrows
and explained:
“If you will tell the clerk at the desk, he will have your room called at
whatever hour you say.”
“I don’t want my room called,” I protested, “I want you to send my coffee
up to me at seven-thirty.”
She looked vaguely puzzled. Then in a moment she said, with obvious
intention to be kind: “Don’t you think you better just leave a rising
call? Because maybe you will feel all right in the morning and’ll want to
come down for your breakfast.”
We also found another original idea in hotel service. At the Chamberlain
we were told our rooms would be two dollars and a half apiece, but our
bill was two-fifty for one and five-fifty for the other two. When I asked
why, the clerk said: “Didn’t you have the door open between?”
“Certainly we did.”
“Well, you see,” he explained, “that makes the room _en suite_, so it is
fifty cents extra.”
The interest people take in population is very amazing to us. Ask any
New Yorker the city’s population and two out of five will shrug their
shoulders. Ask anyone out here—man, woman or child—you will get on the
spot the figures of the last census—plus the imagined increase since!
At random I asked two young girls looking in a milliner’s window. In the
midst of their exclamations about the “swellness” of a black and white
hat they answered in unison, “Eighty-six thousand, three hundred and
sixty-eight.”
“A Mrs. Simson had twins this morning—that makes eighty-six thousand,
three hundred and seventy, doesn’t it?”
“Why, yes—that’s so,” beamed one of them.
“But six deaths would make it six less!”
For a moment they looked disconcerted, then the other answered brightly:
“Oh, the deaths’ll come off the next census taking, and there’ll be
_ever_ so many births before that!”
Des Moines newspapers were full of the glory of their city. “Enterprise,
confidence, civic pride are what make the citizenship of our city!” “Des
Moines is ever going forward!” are sentences we read. “Nothing the matter
with Des Moines!” was the title of a leader in one of them. What was the
matter with Des Moines, we wondered. The article did not tell us. It only
said: “With our new thirteen-story building and the new gilded dome of
the Capitol, Des Moines towers above the other cities of the State like a
lone cottonwood on the prairie.”
However, levity aside, when Des Moines has completed the parkway in front
of the Capitol, and built up all of the embankment like the stretch that
is already finished, the city with its civic center will be one of the
most beautiful and perfect in the world. Already a community of beautiful
buildings and houses, some day Des Moines will probably put up a last
word in hotels. Maybe Des Moines, being a city of homes, doesn’t care
about hotels!
Don’t think from this that the Chamberlain is poor! It is a perfectly
comfortable and well-run hotel, but not truly representative of this fine
city.
In a little hotel the other day a waitress rushed out of the dining-room
and shouted to the clerk behind the desk at which I was standing:
“Say, have you seen Charlie?”
“Who wants him?”
“Miss Higgins.”
“Excuse me a minute,” said the clerk, as he went to look for Charlie, the
proprietor, for Miss Higgins, the waitress!
Most of the hotels so far have been comfortable and nearly all clean. One
of the exceptions has a story, and because of the story I cannot bear to
tell its name. “A new house,” the clerk we left in the morning told us,
“doing a big business. Yes, you had better telegraph ahead for rooms.”
Escorted by negro bellboys we entered a terra cotta and green lobby, the
walls and ceilings of which protuberated with green and orange and brown
and iron and gold and plaster, and all smudged with many wipings in of
soot.
The clerk, or proprietor, was a ray of welcoming attentiveness. Yes,
indeed, he had saved rooms with baths for each of us. He was the pink of
personal neatness and we hoped the bellboys’ color had perhaps not been
chosen with a purpose. Our rooms, however, were brown and sooty, and in
my bathroom I wrote the word “dirt” on the washstand with my finger and
it showed like a rut in the road. We went down to dinner not expecting
much. And, had surprisingly good food in a spotlessly clean dining-room!
When I went to bed the electric lights would not turn on, and as no one
answered the bell I gave up ringing and went to bed in the dark. The
thermometer was about ninety-five; everything felt gritty, and in front
of my eyes blinked mockingly an intermittent electric sign which in
letters six feet high flashed all through the night about a snow-white
laundry!
I was awakened by a waiter with my breakfast, which couldn’t have been
better; clean silver, unchipped china, and the best coffee and toast we
had had anywhere! Evidently the man who ran the restaurant was good,
and whoever ran the chambermaid was bad, and whoever decorated the
place in terra cotta, green, bronze and crimson was criminal! The nice
man at the desk was evidently the proprietor; we wondered whether to
tell him about the electric light and the bells that did not work, and
the good-for-nothing chambermaid, but decided that either he knew it
and could not help it or that he did not know it and did not want to!
When I went to the office to pay our bill he was so really attentively
interested in our welfare that I found myself saying politely: “We have
been very comfortable.”
The man’s look of wistfulness changed to one of pitying perplexity: “You
have been comfortable! Here?” He smiled as one would smile at a child
who was trying to say it did not mind the splinter in its finger.
“I had a delicious breakfast,” I found myself saying enthusiastically.
“Really I did. The best toast I have had since I left my home.”
“Did you?” He seemed pleased and interested. “You were lucky.”
His expressionless, dry tone and impersonal smile would have made Hodge
in “The Man From Home” even more famous.
“Don’t you mind my feelings,” he said, “you needn’t try to pretend my
house is first-class or even second! I’ve seen good hotels, and I know!”
He leaned over the desk away from one of the “shoe men.” “It’s about
fourth-class; that’s _just_ about what it is.”
“There is just one thing the matter——” I hesitated.
“_One_, which one?”
“A dirty chambermaid.”
“Oh, they’re Polacks! Housekeeper can’t break them in! They are something
like cats; they don’t take to water! No, ma’am, there is a big difference
between this house and the ones in New York City, I know that; but all
the same,” and the first look of pride crept into his face, “this hotel’s
the best in the city. The others’d tumble to pieces if you stepped in
’em.”
* * * * *
A great deal of Iowa is uncultivated, picturesque, with grazing lands,
many trees,—chiefly beautiful cottonwood,—and streams, and much prettier
than Illinois, although Illinois was to me more interesting because of
the immense flat farms of grain, and the houses in groups, like being
placed at the hub of a wheel, the farms spreading out like the spokes.
The houses were like those in New England, white with green shutters and
well built. All of this great Western country is rich on its face value,
and it is little surprise to be told of the wealth reputed to these
landowners.
Every town through the Middle West seems to have a little grill of
brick-paved streets; a splendid post-office building of stone or brick or
marble; a court-house, but of an older period generally; and one or two
moving picture houses; two or three important-looking dry-goods stores,
and some sort of hotel, and in it a lot of drummers in tilted-back chairs
exhibiting the soles of their shoes to the street.