We reached Niagara Falls the next afternoon, and, as I had feared, neither of my guests showed any surprise nor felt any thrill. I could understand the Herr Director’s coolness towards our natural wonder, for he had seen it thirty years before; but his wife’s attitude was inexplicable, until she told me what I had all along anticipated. Her capacity for receiving impressions had been exhausted by the city of New York, and after seeing the “high-scraps” nothing astonished her.
As we stood at the bottom of the American Falls, watching the Maid of the Mist making her journeys into their very spray and returning, only to begin her journey again, I suggested that it was like the American Spirit in its daring; but the Herr Director, with truer insight, said that it was “like the Russian Soul, mystical, elusive, on the verge of destruction always, but of little practical service.”
That same day we were in a power-house, which looked more like a temple than the utilitarian thing it is, and peered into the depths of a shaft which creates power enough to move the street railways of half a dozen cities, and change the night of a million people into day. As we listened to the engineer’s account of almost miraculous achievement, I said triumphantly, “This is the American Spirit!” and the Herr Director replied deliberately, and without sarcasm, “This is the one time when you are right.”
IX
Chicago
WHAT the foreigner thinks of the American Pullman, if he has to spend a night in it, may be found in any volume of the extremely voluminous and interesting literature upon the United States, written by visitors to this country; but more interesting still would be what they have not written about it, and that I have had frequent chances of hearing. The most picturesque and exhaustive comments I ever heard were those made by the Herr Director the evening we left Buffalo, and as he finally determined not to retire at all, we spent the greater part of the night in the smoking-room, much to the dismay of the porter who had no prejudice against sleeping on a Pullman, and whom we cheated out of his irregular but necessary naps.
One of the chief diversions of travellers the world over is to complain against the particular transportation company over whose road they have the ill luck to be going; so it happened that the Herr Director had plenty of company during part of his vigil, and an opportunity to come in touch with one phase of the American Spirit, where it was closely related to his own; for “one ‘kicker’ makes the whole world ‘kick.’”
The small room was so crowded that some of the men were sitting on the wash-stands, and the rest were so close to each other as to make conversation easy and general. This was an extra fare train supposed to be unusually comfortable and speedy; although thus far it had been losing time. It was natural under those conditions that the railroad should come in for its share of blessings, couched in language such as is often heard in smoking compartments of Pullman cars. Had all the pious wishes expressed that night been fulfilled, that railroad and our particular train would have travelled much more swiftly, but to a destination not indicated in the time-tables.
The question under discussion was, which is the worst railroad in the United States, and as some of the men were stock-brokers they knew our roads from their most vulnerable side. The tales they told of the manipulation of stocks and the fleecing of the public, with their consequent effect upon the service, were as startling as they were humiliating; because, in the last analysis, the railroads reflect the general business ethics of the country.
I kept out of the discussion, for not only have I but a hazy notion of economics; my mind was busy classifying the passengers’ racial origin, a very diverting exercise and one which always brings me in touch with people on their really human side.
It happened that two of the men were Polish Jews from Cleveland, who had risen from poverty to where they could travel in Pullman cars, and who confessed that they knew as little of railroad stocks as I, although they were engaged in as risky a business as stocks, that of manufacturing women’s cloaks. They were not far removed from the Ghetto either in speech or ideals, and so were of little interest to me.