CHAPTER VII
Traveling North by Way of the South
Off for Chicago—Trying a Southern Railway—The Sleeping-car Mattress, One of the Luxuries of the World—Courting Sleep—Astonishing Discovery of Daylight—Spurious Insomnia—Missing a Cold Bath—A Strange Stranger—Mobile—The Battle House Restaurant—Patriotic Coffee—Delicacy Versus Flavor—Five-cent Café-au-lait—Milk Versus Cream—Central American Bitter Coffee—Cereal Coffee—The Best Substitute—The Stranger and the Conductor—Compelled to Keep a Saloon in His Own House—Hugging a Young Lady—Tears and the Bottle—The Capital of Alabama—Mismanaging a Cigar—Putting His Boots to Bed—More Ice-water—Cakes and Lemons—Breakfast on the Train—An Unaccountable Disappointment—Drowning Sorrow in Drink—The Great American Treating Habit.
After our oyster supper my comrades started for Chicago via the Illinois Central Railway, and as I was committed to the Louisville and Nashville route, we parted company. My train was scheduled to start at 8 P. M., but a train which was to connect with us was indefinitely late, and as we could not safely go backward in the dark in search of it, we had to wait. Finally the expected happened, the loiterer arrived, and we started off at a soothing pace that put me to sleep. At home where I had a comfortable bed, a quiet room and everything my own way, I couldn’t go to sleep like that. In Chicago the pace is too fast. Fortunately I had taken the precaution to ask the porter to call me at six o’clock, that I might breakfast at a genuine U. S. hotel in Montgomery, where the train was to rest from seven to nine.
I awoke and turned over a few times in the course of the night, as one does on sleeping-car mattresses. I did it, however, just to feel how soft and comfortable the mattress was, and to congratulate myself. Any one who does not appreciate a sleeping-car mattress can learn to by taking passage in the S. S. Brighton. Let him ask the purser, steward or any of the officers of one of the small fruit boats about the Pullman mattress. Let him serve on one of them for two or three years and then try the Pullman bed. If I were a Carnegie, a Peter Cooper, or any other conscientious multi-millionaire, living or dead, I would create a fund with some of the money I couldn’t enjoy in Heaven or on earth, for the purpose of enabling all employees of fruit boats to live on land. Why do not the fruit-boatmen strike for better beds? Workmen on land strike for everything they want, and get it; and everybody tolerates the general inconvenience of it. We are all willing to help.
I noticed after two or three waking spells that the train was always stationary, but inferred that it was the stopping that disturbed and wakened me, for I was not accustomed to sleeping without noise and motion. After a time I became convinced that I could not go to sleep without their assistance, and waited impatiently for the train to begin its rumbling and bumping motion. As it did not start I concluded that it had stopped to take a long rest at Mobile, where it was due at 11:40 P. M., and that the time of day was therefore the middle of the night. I felt like blaming the Southern railroads for the way they allowed their express trains to lie around on side-tracks all along the line, waiting to miss connections, instead of hustling to make time and accommodate nervous people. I criticised them for their schedule habit of leaving New Orleans at 8 P. M. in order to loaf about Mobile and visit for two hours at Montgomery. My train could just as well have left at midnight and have given me an opportunity to go to the French opera with Doctor and Mrs. Palmer and have an oyster supper with them afterward, as to pretend to leave at eight, lie waiting for late trains until after nine, then shuffle off like a tramp-train and constantly wake me by standing still. A sleeping car should not try to imitate a bedroom in a country hotel.
I strove to become accustomed to the quiet and to will myself to sleep. I kept turning myself over like a pancake that must sooner or later get done. I turned on my side and tried to snore myself off. But snoring loves an audience, and I didn’t have any. It occurred to me that I was kept awake by the enjoyment of the to me unusual comfort of the bed, so I turned on my side and put my under arm behind me to keep myself from being too comfortable. When I couldn’t endure that position any longer I uncovered my head to be able to hear what was going on, and thus listen myself to sleep, but there were no noises. I threw down the cover and tried to keep cool, but the car was warm. I tried all of the stunts known to insomniacs, from complicated and inverted methods of counting to the solution of problems and the composition of scientific lectures, but they only made me hungry. Apparently I had not eaten oysters enough in New Orleans to last through the attack, so I ate two apples which I happened to have in my overcoat pocket. But eating never did agree with me, and I became more wide awake than ever. In bed I was no better off than an ordinary millionaire. His money could not buy Nature’s gift to the poor, and my science could not produce it. I knew that we were not lying at Montgomery or it would have been daylight and the porter would have called me. Hence I concluded that my arrival in the United States had brought back my old insomnia and that there was no remedy for it but expatriation or a sailor’s life.
Finally I became utterly discouraged at having lost almost an entire night’s rest, for I was too much of a veteran to expect any more sleep that night. So I sat up and pulled aside the window curtain to see if there were any signs of dawn. To my astonishment I let in bright sunlight. The window curtain had fitted so tightly in the window frame that the usual morning ray of light had not penetrated. I had mistaken the shimmer of light about the edges of the curtains for the night lights of the station. I rang for the porter and asked him why it was daylight.
“Dunno, sah,” he answered, “’cept it’s eight o’clock, and we’s waitin’ heah at Mobile foh a broken bridge to git mended.”
All of my insomnia had evidently been since about 6 A. M., and after eight hours of sleep, or two hours more than my average when I am sleeping well. I now knew that I had acquired the insomnia habit, and was destined to be a victim of insomnia no matter how well I slept. A bridge over which we were to pass was disabled, and by waiting until it was repaired, instead of going right along regardless, like a Northern express train, we missed a cold morning bath—being given no chance to choose between the bath and the extra nap. The train ahead of us had taken our bath. But like all dyspeptics who fret before arising, I felt consoled and cheerful after getting up and letting in the sunlight and realizing that the world was still getting on all right.
As the bridge could not be sufficiently repaired for traffic until noon, I concluded to make the best of the situation and hunt up a good cup of coffee. Mobile was the capital of the French possessions in America 200 years ago, long before old New Orleans was born. In the antebellum days Mobile was the hothouse of the Southern aristocracy and is now one of the richest towns in the old South in proportion to its population. I would find a good cup of café-au-lait in Mobile.
While I was making my toilet, a man of about seventy years, with scant white hair and delicate features, entered the dressing-room with a pint bottle of whiskey in his hand, and addressed me cordially.
“Have a drop, stranger?”
“Is it French coffee?” I asked.
“No, it’s Kentucky corn juice. Try some?”
“No, I thank you. I always begin the day with a drink of pure water.”
“And end it with a drink of pure whiskey, eh? I commence with water too, but I can’t take it pure before breakfast.”
After taking a stomachful of equal parts of whiskey and water, he warmed up and became talkative. He told me he had boarded the train at midnight and had awaked in the morning at the same place from which he had started. He said the train had held its own and hadn’t drifted any, and that he had known it wouldn’t; but he had engaged his berth to sleep in and was going to fulfill his part of the contract like a law-abiding citizen.
I told him that this delay was only one of many mishaps that had befallen me, that I had experienced nothing but delays since I had left home six weeks before, and would arrive there nearly a week behind time. I had been singularly unfortunate.
“Young man!” he exclaimed in a startling, sepulchral voice that quivered slightly, like that of an orator giving a cue to the emotion he is about to evoke. “Young man, you don’t know what you are talking about.”
“You’re right,” I answered; “I have had insomnia since six o’clock this morning, and my bearings are a little bit off. I never complain of real troubles, for they are blessings in disguise. They are good for us. Fancied troubles are the blighting ones.”
“Suppose that you had been kept away from your home on account of your health for three months, and were now called home to a dying wife, and couldn’t make any better progress than I have since I started last night? You don’t know what real troubles are, young man.”
Here he took another drink of his poison and I expressed as much sympathy as I could, considering the novelty of the exhibition, and started out in search of my poison, viz., café-au-lait.
I confess that I was considerably surprised at the old-fashioned provincial aspect of the town, and concluded that it was a better place than it appeared to be. Like New Orleans, it had a good harbor, had wealth, was the seaport of a prosperous Southern state, and imported bananas; yet it looked to me very much like a large country town of one business street. It belonged to the older generation of cities, already in a senile stage of existence. But the old aristocrats, who had been too proud to engage in commercial pursuits or to encourage their sons to do so, were nearly all dead, and the town, under the influence of new ideas, was beginning a new life and taking on new growth and development. So I resolved to test her with café-au-lait, and hurried out in search of the Battle House of antebellum fame. I finally found a shabby old building that had seen better days, with an unexpectedly aristocratic-looking restaurant under it full of well-dressed negro waiters, who bowed and scraped and ran on tiptoe as they always do where the tipping system is in vogue. It was the waiters’ way of announcing the fact to their victims. But the poor fellows (the waiters) served them (their victims) with a sort of feverish anxiety, and served them well and swell, and thus almost justified the system. My waiter was not, however, as good a Frenchman in scholarship as in manners, for although he understood my order for an omelette, he did not understand “café-au-lait,” or “coffee with hot milk.” Hot milk was too plebeian—cream was served in his restaurant.
After a long wait my breakfast came. The omelette was good, but the rolls were American biscuit rolls, damp, soft, lukewarm and flavorless. And the hot milk was in a tiny lunch-counter pitcher that held less than two tablespoonfuls. The coffee was clear and unadulterated, and therefore genuine United States made coffee. When U. S. makes coffee that is clear, U. S. thinks she has made coffee. She uses good or bad Mocha and Java in moderate quantity, but in order to make it clear she puts an egg in it which hardens about the grounds before the full flavor has been extracted, and thus much of the flavor remains at the bottom of the pot to be boiled out and developed for the servants and the waste-pail. Then the drinker covers up the taste with rich cream, thinking that the flavor, being covered up, cannot get away. Such coffee is comparatively harmless to the commonwealth, and on that account deserves its popularity. It is one of the few popular things that are harmless.
One of the advantages of café-au-lait is that the proportion of the two ingredients can be varied to suit the taste or idiosyncrasy of the drinker. Those who can not drink strong coffee can diminish the proportion of coffee with milk until but little coffee is used, and those who can not drink full strength milk can reduce the quantity of milk until but little milk is used. The palate will soon become accustomed to what is habitually drunk and may finally be taught to prefer either dilution.
I ate my breakfast and my hunger was appeased; but as I had started out to get a hot drink rather than something to eat, I was not satisfied, and the enjoyment of the meal was incomplete. I do not wish to say anything derogatory to the Battle House restaurant, for the hotel has died since (was burned up) and therefore deserves to be eulogized. In fact, I wish to praise the restaurant on patriotic grounds. It made American coffee and deserves praise for being American instead of French, which in itself is the highest praise I can give. But it did not occur to me to feel patriotic at the time. The temperature, following the “norther,” was 36 degrees F., the most chilling and unpatriotic temperature of the whole Fahrenheit system, and as I went out into the street my thoughts were still upon a good, hot, comforting cup of coffee. I therefore resolved to try again, and finally found a low-down restaurant on the corner of Royal Street near the station and got a cup of their cheap coffee, probably ordinary South American or Central American, which might have been thickened and blackened by a little chicory. It was not as clear and delicate as that of the Battle House, but it had more flavor. I asked for hot milk and when I had diluted the coffee nearly one half, the mixture still had flavor. I could have drunk three or four cupfuls. The charge for it was five cents. The price was the only bad thing about it, and I almost felt un-American at having enjoyed five cents so hugely. I felt humiliated, but I felt good.
The Central American coffee is quite bitter when well made. I was told that in order to develop the bitter flavor the Central Americans burn the coffee beans when they roast them, and thus render it more bitter than natural. This scorching takes away some of its delicacy of flavor and renders it unpalatable to many North Americans, but by using plenty of sugar when it is taken black, or by diluting it with an equal quantity of hot unskimmed milk and using but a small quantity of sugar, its bitterness is modified and it has a richness of flavor that makes it preferable to the so-called Mocha and Java as ordinarily made. It differs from ordinary U. S. restaurant coffee as champagne from cider. But, of course, many prefer cider.
Cereal coffee is possibly a good substitute for young people whose nerves are more easily injured than their stomachs. But for middle-aged and old people it is too heavy, for the amount of starch in it which must be swallowed without mastication tends to produce acid fermentation in the alimentary canal and hasten the advent of gout, which is the goal of all good eaters and drinkers. Cereal coffee has just one excuse for existing, but I’ve forgotten what it is. Old-fashioned chicory has more flavor and is less fermentable, and therefore is preferable for both the young and old. Pure coffee contains no starch and not enough tannin to injure a canary bird, and the stimulation of moderate coffee drinking is not very injurious to people past middle age. The only real contraindication is youth—but youth is always contradictory. Next to the sugar put into the coffee, the most injurious feature is the manner of drinking it, viz., sipping it while eating, and thus washing down food that should be chewed until dissolved and washed down by the saliva.
But the best solution of the whole coffee problem is to sip a glass of hot, slightly salted milk at the beginning and another at the end of the meal, and to eat the meal dry between them. If persisted in to the exclusion of coffee this hot milk habit will after a time take away all desire for coffee drinking, which is a habit of civilization and a very ancient and barbarous one. But many of us who consider ourselves civilized have barbarous tastes and habits, and do not wish to relinquish them. We bequeath the refining of our barbarous tastes to posterity—to our heirs. Let them fight over them, as they do over the other things.
After the train had finally pulled out I heard the sleeping-car stranger telling the sleeping-car conductor of his misfortune and the reason why he had been obliged to stay away from his home, which was in Hyde Park, Chicago. He said he couldn’t stand the cold there, and that it was impossible to get a hot drink within walking distance of his house.
“Just imagine,” he said, “living in Chicago and not being able to get a hot drink; to have to keep a saloon in your own house. There is something wrong about a community that makes every man keep a private saloon.”
“You’re right, sir. There must be something wrong about a city that can not provide saloons enough for its citizens. They must be tea-totalers,” replied the conductor sympathetically.
“Yes, and every one of ’em is tanning his stomach with tea and coffee. Serves ’em right. Let ’em tan it, damn it! By the way, conductor, did you see the fun a few minutes ago?”
“No, what was it?”
“I hugged a young lady, and she didn’t object. Yes, sir, I did it. As I was passing her in the aisle she stumbled against me and I had to hug her to keep from being knocked down. She begged my pardon and I excused her, thinking that honors were even, ha, ha!”
“We’ll be looking for an elopement, next,” suggested the conductor.
“No,” he said, “my tongue is the only thing that would run away with me now.”
After thus dwelling a while in a facetious manner on the details of the romantic adventure, and repeating himself many times, he suddenly remembered what he was there for and began to talk tearfully about his wife, and pulled out his bottle and went into the smoking-room for water. The old man was as young in his feelings as the day he was born—he had a saving sense of humor. Those who are not gifted with a sense of humor are born old; those with it die young. Notwithstanding his troubles, the old man was dying young.
We arrived at Montgomery at 5 P. M. and had to change cars in order to catch the train that had left New Orleans in the morning, twelve hours after we had. By this time the old gentleman was dull and heavy and did not wish to get off. He had paid for his berth expecting the car to go on to Chicago, and insisted on keeping it. He said that he had fulfilled his part of the contract. They put him off, however, and I left the poor old fellow in the station while I went out for a stroll through the main thoroughfare of the picturesque little capital of Alabama in the heart of the South. It is a busy-looking place of about 30,000 inhabitants, with crowded streets and attractive-looking stores that seemed to be doing plenty of business. Following the main thoroughfare, I soon came within sight of the state-house, which showed off to great advantage on the hill at the head of the street. Beside it I found the Confederate Soldiers’ Monument, which was a credit to the state from a confederate point of view. It even created strong feelings of admiration and sympathy in me, a lifelong republican and sinner.
When I returned to the train at half past six the old Hyde Parker, who was forced to keep a private saloon in his own house, came aboard with a full stock of wet goods in his system and a fresh stock in his pocket. He sat in the smoking-room trying in vain to crack jokes and smoke a cigar. His ideas were muddled and he had lost the knack of managing a lighted cigar. He did not put the wrong end in his mouth nor miss his mouth, but he repeatedly dropped it, let it go out twice, chewed the end off, burned his fingers and finally threw it at the cuspidor, missing his aim and scattering the ashes on our feet.
Two young men, who seemed to be commercial travelers, took a kind-hearted interest in him and offered to help him to bed. But the septuagenarian did not know the number of his berth and could not find his ticket. He had left it in his overcoat and did not know where his overcoat was. One of the young men went to the porter, found the overcoat and number, and had the berth made up. He himself had undoubtedly helped and been helped to bed on sundry occasions in the past and was willing and qualified for the deed of sympathy. When he returned the old man was offering to fight three of us. I knew that it was one of the Hyde Parker’s tipsy jokes, but the others, not knowing him as well as I did, took him seriously and insisted upon putting him to bed. They were preparing to use kindly force if necessary. He then started to unlace his shoes in the smoking-room and, upon being told by the astonished young men not to take them off there, he said that he wanted to put his shoes to bed first, and asked how they could get to bed unless he put them there. Realizing that they took him in earnest, he went on in that way for a while before he allowed them to lead him off. He was not too far gone to have a little sport with them.
The next morning when I entered the dressing-room his empty whiskey bottle lay on the washstand under the ice-water faucet, indicating that he had been to the water already, and he sat near the window eating sponge cakes out of a paper bag. He was sober and thoughtful and did not seem to be enjoying his breakfast. I had a few limes left from the stock laid in at Bocas del Toro and was sucking one.
“If you would suck one of these limes,” I said, “it would give a fine lemon flavor to your cake.”
“Lemons don’t taste good, and they don’t agree with me,” he replied with a sort of grimace.
“But I have studied foods and digestions for a quarter of a century, and know what tastes good and digests well. That cake is too sweet. Just try a lime with it.”
“Stranger,” he said, “I have tasted and digested food for nearly three quarters of a century and knew what tastes good before you were thought of.”
“Surely you must have been mistaken all of this time,” I said, “or you would agree with me, for I am a physician and have learned all about taste and digestion. Hereafter, before deciding how a thing tastes, ask me.”
“Well, Doctor, I’d like to know how whiskey tastes.”
“Like poison,” I answered.
“Well, I feel just like taking poison, and the poisoner the better,” he said as he arose and started for the water tank.
I allowed him to poison himself while I went out to the dining-car for breakfast. When I returned I found him smoking a black cigar and looking quite pleasant. The poison had reached its cerebral destination and had overcome the melancholy tension.
He asked me how the breakfast had tasted.
“Why, you have been eating breakfast for three quarters of a century and ought to know,” I answered.
“I’ve lived just long enough, Doctor, to learn that eating breakfast before working for it is a bad habit that follows civilization.”
“I agree with you there. It is a mere matter of taste after all. As a doctor I eat breakfast before I work, not because it is a bad habit, but because I am a doctor, and must know how it acts in order to be able to treat others who do it. I eat to learn.”
“And I suppose they charged you a dollar for the lesson, for learning how it tasted?”
“No,” I said, “this isn’t a dollar car. Meals are served à la carte. You can get all you want for less than a dollar, unless you have an officious waiter who puts on so much style for you that you feel ashamed to take back what is left of your dollar. If you are a grapefruit faddist your breakfast costs a quarter more. Or if you are rich and don’t know any better you can take sweetened grapefruit, breakfast food smothered with sugar, an omelette with jelly, melted butter on toast, coffee sweetened into syrup, griddle cakes served with honey and milk, and Apollinaris to wash it all down, and can spend a couple of dollars and lay up disease for the future, as the lady and gentleman across from me were doing. I had a fine large piece of broiled white fish, with Saratoga potatoes, cornbread, two cups of coffee and a pitcher of hot milk, all for eighty cents, less than double the price of a common restaurant breakfast.”
“You have to pay something to keep the wheels going around,” he remarked.
“Yes, and for the comfort and convenience,” I answered. “It’s worth it. You can get chops for fifty cents, a tenderloin steak for sixty-five cents, or eggs for twenty cents.”
The old man’s eyes opened wider and he began to swallow saliva as I continued:
“They have a fine list of specials on the bill of fare this morning: Spanish omelette, hashed chicken with poached eggs, shad’s roe with bacon, and a lot of dainty dishes at popular prices.”
He put down his cigar and said, “I say, stranger, I’m getting hungry for something good to eat, even if I don’t know what tastes good. I believe I’ll go in and try it.”
When he came back I asked him if he had had a good breakfast.
“Yes, I had breakfast,” he said, and maintained a gloomy silence.
Whether my glowing description had led him to expect too much, or whether the prices were unsatisfactory, or whether he had been taken with one of his facetious attacks and had gotten himself into trouble with the decorous and decorative dining-car conductor, or whether his domestic troubles had gained the ascendency and spoiled his breakfast, or whether a good meal did not agree with him as well as a good drink, or whether it was getting too far past the time for another “smile,” or what not, I could not ascertain. So I left him alone with his full stomach and empty bottle and went to my seat in the sleeper.
When I returned a little later he was saying to two men who were smoking with him:
“Gentlemen, I can’t help speaking of it. I have been buried in the pine woods for three months and am now going home to bury my wife. Oh, it’s hard! Where’s the porter? I must have another drink.”
We tried to dissuade him and refused to join him, but he got his drink in spite of our efforts.
“It’s hard, gentlemen. I remember how when my mother died, my father called my brother and me to him and said, ‘Boys, your mother is dying. She’ll never sit at the table with us again, never again.’ And to think that now I am going home to tell my boys the same thing. Oh, it’s hard! I must have another drink. I can’t stand it.”
His voice was broken with emotion and his eyes full of tears as he tried to persuade us to take a drink with him, but he had to take one alone. We had no excuse for getting drunk. We could not say, Joliet like, “Drinking is such sweet sorrow, that I shall keep on drinking till it be morrow.”
By noon he had taken five drinks that I knew of, besides having finished his own bottle before breakfast, and was again telling jokes. He had a specific remedy for grief.
The old man was a true American in his feelings and actions. He had hesitated about paying a dollar for a breakfast on wheels with its flying luxuries, and was not ashamed to be frugal in his diet, yet had spent more than a dollar since breakfast for drinks, and had offered to “treat” like a prince. And the fact that he was on his way home to the bedside of a dying wife was not sufficient even temporarily to break up his drinking habit. Surely we Americans are creatures of habit, especially of the treating habit, which leads to the drinking habit. We are the most hospitable people in the world. In other countries people treat and entertain for a purpose; we do so without a purpose.