The walk to the station, over the crisply frozen snow, was delicious. Marathon is famous for its avenue of great elms, which were casting deep blue shadows in the strange light—waning moon and waxing day. The air was very chill—only just above zero—and the smoking car seemed very cold and dismal. I huddled my overcoat about me and tried to smoke and read the paper. But in that stale, fetid odour of last night's tobacco and this morning's wet arctics the smoker was but a dismal place. The exaltation of the dawn dropped suddenly into a kind of shivering nausea.
I changed to another car and threw away the war news. Just then the sun came gloriously over the edge of the fields and set the snow afire. As we rounded the long curve beyond Woodside I could see the morning light shining upon the Metropolitan Tower, and when we glided into the basement of the Pennsylvania Station my heart was already attuned to the thrill of that glorious place. Perhaps it can never have the fascination for me that the old dingy London terminals have—King's Cross, Paddington, or Saint Pancras, with their delicious English bookstalls and those porters in corduroy—but the Pennsylvania is a wonderful place after all, a marble palace of romance and a gallant place to roam about. It seems like a stable without horses, though, for where are the trains? No chance to ramble about the platforms (as in London) to watch the Duke of Abercorn or the Lord Claude Hamilton, or other of those green or blue English locomotives with lordly names, being groomed for the run.
In the early morning the Pennsylvania Station catches in its high-vaulted roof the first flush of sunlight; and before the flood of commuters begins to pour in, the famous station cat is generally sitting by the baggage room shining his morning face. Up at the marble lunch counters the coloured gentlemen are serving hot cakes and coffee to stray travellers, and the shops along the Arcade are being swept and garnished. As I passed through on my way to the Philadelphia train I was amused by a wicker basket full of Scotch terrier puppies—five or six of them tumbling over one another in their play and yelping so that the station rang. "Every little bit yelps" as someone has said. I was reminded of the last words I ever read in Virgil (the end of the sixth book of the Aeneid)—stant litore puppes, which I always yearned to translate "a litter of puppies."
My train purred smoothly under the Hudson and under Jersey City as I lit my cigar and settled comfortably into the green plush. When we emerged from the tunnel on the other side of the long ridge (which is a degenerate spur from the Palisades farther north) a crescent of sun was just fringing the crest with fire. Another moment and we flashed onto the Hackensack marshes and into the fully minted gold of superb morning. The day was begun.
THE AMERICAN HOUSE OF LORDS
I am not a travelling salesman (except in so far as all men are) so I do not often travel in the Club Car. But when I do, irresistibly the thought comes that I have strayed into the American House of Lords. Unworthily I sit among our sovereign legislators, a trifle ill at ease mayhap. In the day coach I am at home with my peers—those who smoke cheap tobacco; who nurse fretful babies; who strew the hot plush with sandwich crumbs and lean throbbing foreheads against the window pane.
But the Club Car which swings so smoothly at the end of a limited train is a different place, pardee. It is not a hereditary chamber, but it is none the less the camera stellata of our prosperous carnivora. Patently these men are Lords. In two facing rows, averted from the landscape, condemned to an uneasy scrutiny of their mutual prosperity, they sit in leather chairs. They curve roundly from neck to groin. They are shaven to the raw, soberly clad, derby hatted, glossily booted. Always they smoke cigars, those strange, blunt cigars that are fatter at one end than at the other. Some (these I think are the very prosperous) wear shoes with fawn-coloured tops.
Is it strange then that I, an ill-clad and pipe-smoking traveller, am faintly uneasy in this House of Lords? I forget myself while reading poetry and drop my tobacco cinders on the rug, missing the little silver gourd that rests by my left foot. Straight the white-jacketed mulatto sucks them up with a vacuum cleaner and a deprecating air. I pass to the brass veranda at the end of the car for a bracing change of atmosphere. And returning, the attendant has removed my little pile of books which I left under my chair, and hidden them in his serving grotto. It costs me at least a whiskey and soda to get them out.