When you take a train with a harem in it—I use the word in its originally clean sense—and you have no personal interest in the harem, you are apt to fare badly. The train is meant where the women are sorted out for one car, and what is left is just turned into another. It is a vicious fashion, and fosters the art of lying. There goes a young man at the heels of a lady whom he never saw before, or spoke to in his life, and he is carrying a spick-and-span new bandbox. My word for it, it is as empty as a church contribution-box on Saturday afternoon. He bought that box for precisely that emergency. The lady ascends the platform. So does the bandbox. The brakeman opens the door, and the young man slips in unquestioned, and secures a comfortable seat. He means to study for the ministry, and he has been lying by bandbox!
There is another man. He appears to be a good man. You are sure he is, and he stands where the brakeman can see him, and touches his hat to a window of the harem where nobody is sitting, and then, with a little smiling affectionate haste, he skips up the steps and says, "Please let me in a minute!" and in he goes. That unfortunate man never beheld a face in that car in all his life. The more you think of it the more vicious the fashion seems. It does not benefit the ribbons, and is a positive damage to the whiskers. Pen men up together, and if they do not act like cattle it will be in spite of the pen! Women sprinkled through the cars keep the train upon its honor, if not upon the track, and elevate the lumbering thing from a common carrier to an educator.
Flying bedrooms are among the crowning achievements of railway travel. They are gorgeous. They remind you—the most of them—of the Hall of Representatives at Washington, which in its turn suggests a Chinese pagoda. They are luxuries. If you don't mind plunging endwards through your dreams at forty miles an hour; and if you don't care whom you sleep with; and if you never catch cold; and if you have no "reasonable doubt" as to getting out, provided the bed-room is mistaken for a dice-box, some night, and you are sure you will not come within an ace of throwing the deuce, there is nothing like them. Snores in many languages are let loose upon you, and feet from many boots. The porter has an appetite for boots. He sits up at night to get yours, no matter where you put them, and there he is in the morning, the boots in one hand and nothing in the other. It is pleasant, also, to have the drapery of your couch whisked one side every few minutes, just as you have dropped off into a doze, and a strange hand passed over your face, by somebody blundering about in quest of his berth.
Flying drawing-rooms deserve what winged bed-rooms need—unmitigated praise. The clank of wheels is shut out. You exult to the angles of your elbows, because there is room for them. You can go about in your revolving chair like a shingle chanticleer upon a barn-ridge. You read quietly, write comfortably, converse easily. It is home adrift.
CHAPTER XXIII.
A FLANK MOVEMENT.
In war and peace all people are afraid of a flank movement. General Sherman, though he never quite found out what newspapers are for, did discover that the Federal strength was in the enemy's flanks. In other words, if the Confederate army had been finished off prematurely like a pictorial cherub, he would have had nothing to punish. It is said to be a dreadful strain upon a man's muscles to kick at nothing! In a railway car a man is apt to be flanked by somebody—a small army of observation in the rear.
Take a man who has a fine sense of feeling all over, and put two women behind him—one woman thus located is comparatively harmless, but two are a terror, for they can talk about you!—and he begins to wonder if his collar is clean behind, and how he looks just back of his ears, and whether a stray string, or something, may not be sticking up above his coat, though he cannot remember that he ever had anything there to be tied. Then he tries to remember whether he brushed his hair neatly behind, in his haste this morning, lest he should be behind himself. Just at that minute there is a coincidence; a little laugh from the ladies on the next seat, and footsteps on the rim of his ear! It is mid-winter, and it cannot be a fly. If he were only sure it was a tarantula, he would be happy. They laugh again, and again that small promenader. He knows his head harbors nothing but ideas, and yet a trespasser may have come from foreign pastures, for all that. He wishes he knew—that he could see himself as "ithers see" him at that particular minute.
Can it possibly be of the race that Burns discovered upon the woman's Sunday bonnet? He dares not put his hand up, lest they should observe it. He feels his ears grow red and warm. He wishes they would get hot enough to scorch that creature's feet. Still those small footsteps. He has heard, in his time, the tramp of armed men. It was sublimer, but not half so terrible. Again that little laugh behind him, and rising in his desperation he goes to the rear of the car, claps his hand to the burning ear, and secures a single hair like a bit of a watch-spring, that had coiled on the rim of the human sea-shell, and counterfeited feet that his fancy built upon, as Agassiz built two-story monsters out of a rafter or a rib that somebody exhumed and sent to him. And those ladies had never seen him at all!
If a man could always have the world in his front, courage would not be much of a virtue, if it ever is. There are a great many worthless things passed about as genuine. Now, that little Spartan scamp who stole the fox, hid it under his robe, and let the creature relieve him of his liver rather than be found out and lose the plunder, is handed about with a label to him, as a sort of pocket-model of fortitude. I dug it out of Greek when I was a boy, and was taught it was worth finding. Why, he was nothing but a miserable little thief, that couldn't speak a word of English! So, if courage is a virtue, the brave little wren carries more virtue to the ounce than anything going. The writer knows a public speaker who trembles as did the king who saw something written on the wall, if he is compelled to pass through the body of the house to reach the platform, and yet always faces the audience with perfect self-possession. He has been known to flounder through an unbroken snow-drift, and climb in by a window, simply to avoid the flank movement that took all his courage out of him. When you see a man turn a cold shoulder to a chilling wind instead of squarely facing it, you may count him among the victims of rheumatism, and not among the philosophers.