For instance, you enter a tranquilly ordered dining-room. The head waitress attentively seats you, your own waitress quickly fetches your first course, and starts towards the pantry for the second, when suddenly a clerk appears and says, “Twenty-six!” With the uniformity of a trained chorus every face turns towards the clock, and the whole scene becomes a flurry of white-starched dresses running back and forth. Back with empty trays and forth with buttered rolls, radishes, cups of soup, like a ballet of abundance. You wonder if no one is going to bring your second course, but you might as well try to attract the attention of a hive of bees when they are swarming. Having nothing else to do you discover the mystic words twenty-six to be twenty-six places to set. Finally you descry your own waitress dealing slices of toast to imaginary diners at a far table. Then you hear the rumble of the train, the door leading to the platform opens and in come the passengers. And you, having no prospect of anything further to eat, watch the way the train supper is managed. Slices of toast and soup in cups are already at their places, then in files the white-aproned chorus carrying enormous platters of freshly grilled beefsteak, and such savory broiled chicken that you, who are so hungry, can scarcely wait a moment patiently for your own waitress to appear. You notice also the gigantic pots of aromatically steaming coffee, tea and chocolate being poured into everyone’s cup but your own, and ravenously you watch the pantry door for that long tarrying one who went once upon a time to get some of these delectable viands for you.
“Will you have broiled chicken?” asks the faithless She you have been watching for, bending solicitously over a group of strange tourists at the next table. At last when the train people are quite supplied, your speeding Hebe returns to you and apologizes sweetly, “I am sorry but I had to help get train Number Seven’s supper. They’ve eaten all the broiled chicken that was cooked, but I’ll order you some more if you don’t mind waiting twenty minutes.”
By and by the train people leave, your chicken arrives and you finish your supper in commonplace tranquillity. But let us look on at another comedy, for which the scene shifts to the railroad station at Albuquerque where the long stone platform is colorless and deserted. You have always on picture postcards seen it filled with Indians. There is not one in sight. Wait though until ten minutes before the California limited is due. Out of the nowhere appear dozens of vividly costumed Navajos and Hopis; their blankets and long braids woven with red cloth, their headbands and beads and silver ornaments fill the platform with color like a flower display. Old squaws and a few young squat themselves in two rows, forming an aisle between the train and the station salesroom. Although you walk up and down between their forming lines watching them arrange their display of baskets and pottery, they are silent until the first passenger alights, and then unendingly they chorus two words:
“Tain cent!” “Tain cent!” The words sometimes sound like a question, sometimes a statement, but generally a monotonous drone. There is a nice old squaw—although I believe the Hopis don’t call their women squaws—sitting at the end. I tripped and almost fell into her lap. She looked up, smiled, and by her inflection, conveyed, “Oh, my dear, did you hurt yourself?” but what she said was, “Tain cent!”
The third Harvey scene is frankly a vaudeville performance of Indian dancing and singing. The stage the adobe floor of the Indian exhibit room, the walls of which are hung to the ceiling with blankets, beadwork, baskets, clay gods, leather costumes—everything conceivable in the way of Indian crafts. Immediately after supper the tourists take their places on benches ranged against three sides of the apartment. Generally there is a big open fire on the fourth side, adding its flickering light as the last note to a setting worthy of Belasco.
The Indians dance most often in pairs but occasionally there are as many as eight or nine in a row or a circle, with an additional background of others beating time. The typical step is a sort of a shuffling hop; a little like the first step or two of a clog dancer before he gets going, or else just a bent kneed limp and stamp accompanied either by a droning chant or merely a series of sounds not unlike grunts. To our Anglo-Saxon ears and eyes it seemed very monotonous even after a little sample. Yet we are told they keep it up for eight or ten or twelve hours at a stretch, when they are dancing seriously and at home. Dancing to them is a religious ceremony, not merely an informal expression of gayety.
The women we saw wore heavy black American shoes and calico mother hubbards with a ruffle at the bottom, and generally a shawl or blanket around their shoulders. Only one wore the blanket costume as it is supposed to be worn: around her body and fastened on one shoulder leaving the other arm and shoulder bare and also bare feet.
The men were much more picturesque, in dark-colored velvet shirts, silver belts, necklaces of bright beads and white cross-bars that looked like teeth, huge turquoise square-cut earrings and red head-bands. The “Castle cut” head-dress that has been the rage in New York for the last year or two is simply that of the Navajo Indians. Their head-band is a little wider and invariably of red, and the black straight hair ends as stiffly as a tassel.
In some places as at the Grand Canyon, there are Navajo huts and a Hopi communal house where the tourist can see something of the way the Indians live; the way they weave blankets or baskets, beat silver or make and paint pottery.
But to go back to Albuquerque, where although we saw less of the Indians than later in other places, we were lucky enough to hear a great deal about them. After dinner—there was no dancing—we were in the Indian Exhibit room—probably the most wonderful collection of their crafts that there is. As we were admiring an exceptionally beautiful blanket of red, black and white and closely woven as a fine Panama hat, a man—we thought him the proprietor at first—said: