The hotels in Atlantic City are, most of them, as fantastic in appearance as the place itself. I imagine that the architects who planned them must, before they began their work, have been kept for weeks on the sea-front and forced to go to all the entertainments which offered themselves by day and night. They were probably fed on crab dressed in various ways and given gin rickeys to drink. Then, when allowed to drop to sleep in the early morning, they would naturally dream. At the end of a fortnight or so of this treatment their dreams would be imprinted on their memories and they would draw plans of hotels suitable for Atlantic City. Only in this way, I think, can some of the newer hotels have been conceived. They are not ugly, far from it. Crab, dressed as American cooks dress it, does not induce nightmares, nor is a gin rickey nearly so terrific a drink as it sounds. The architect merely dreams, as Coleridge did when his Kubla Khan decreed a stately pleasure dome in Xamadu. But Coleridge dreamed on opium and his visions were of stately things. The Atlantic City hotel is less stately than fantastic. It is a building which any one would declare to be impossible if he did not see it in actual existence.
It will always be a source of regret to me that I did not stay in one of these hotels which captivated me utterly. It was just what, as a boy, I used to imagine that the palace of the Sleeping Beauty must be. A look at it brought back dear memories of the transformation scenes of pantomimes, in the days before transformation scenes went out of fashion. It was colored pale green all over, and, looked at with half-closed eyes, made me think of mermaids. I am sure that it was perfectly delightful inside; but we did not stay there. A friend had recommended to us another hotel, of great excellence and comfort, but built before Atlantic City understood the proper way to treat architects. In any case we could not have stayed in the pale green hotel. It was closed. We were in Atlantic City out of season.
CHAPTER V
THE IRON TRAIL
Our luck, which had up to that point been as good as luck could be, failed us miserably when we started for Chicago. The very day before we left New York there was a blizzard and a snowstorm. Not in New York itself. There was only a very strong wind there. Nor in Chicago, but all over the district which lay between. One train was held up for eighteen hours in a snowdrift. The last fragments of food in the restaurant car were consumed, and the passengers arrived chilled and desperately hungry at their destination. We might have been in that train. It was not, indeed, possible for us to leave New York a day sooner than we did; but I cannot see why the blizzard could not have waited a little. Twenty-four hours' delay would have made no difference to it. It might even have gathered force. To us it would have made all the difference in the world. We missed a great experience. That is why I say that our luck failed us at this point.
It would not, at the moment, have been a pleasant experience, and I do not pretend that we should have enjoyed either the cold or the hunger; and we are not the sort of people who, under such circumstances, secure the last sardine. We should, owing to our feebleness in self-assertion, have been among the first to go foodless. But afterwards we could have thought about it and all our lives told steadily improving stories about the adventure. The recollection of it would have added zest to every remaining hour of comfort in our lives. What is a short spell of suffering compared to such enduring joys? But in these matters we have been singularly unlucky through life. We have never been in a shipwreck or a railway accident or been forced to escape from a burning house. Only once did a horse run away with us, and it fell almost immediately after making its dash for liberty. No burglar has roused us to do battle with him in the middle of the night. It seems hard, when we have been denied all the great adventures of life, to miss by the narrow margin of a single day the minor excitement of being snowed up in a train.
However, it is useless to complain. The thing was not to be and it was not. Our journey was commonplace and unadventurous. We hired what is called a drawing-room car on our train. This is an extravagant thing to do. For people of our humble means it is almost criminally reckless. Some day when we cannot afford to have our boots re-soled, when we are looking at the loaves in the windows of bakers' shops with vain desire, when we have neither money nor credit left to us, we shall think with poignant regret of the huge sums we spent on that drawing-room car. We shall be sorry, at least one of us will be sorry that we were not more careful when he or she, the survivor, cannot afford a simple tombstone to mark the grave of the other. But at the moment the money, in spite of Atlantic City, being actually in our pockets, we felt that the drawing-room car was an absolute necessity. I should take it again if I were going to Chicago. But then we are not yet reduced to penury.
The alternative to a drawing-room car, on most trains, is a section in a Pullman sleeping-car. Against this we rose in revolt. I cannot imagine how the Americans, who are in many ways much more highly civilized than Europeans, tolerate the existence of Pullman sleeping-cars. I am not physically—though I am in every other way—an exceptionally modest man. I have, for instance, no objection to mixed bathing, and it does not make me blush to meet one of the housemaids in a hotel when, dressed only in my pajamas, I am searching for the bathroom. But I do object to undressing in the corridor of a Pullman sleeping-car, and I cannot, not being a professional acrobat, undress in my berth. For a lady the thing is, of course, much worse. Besides the undressing and the still more difficult dressing again, there is the business of washing in the morning, washing and, for most men, shaving. You go into a sort of dressing-room to do that. There are not nearly basins enough. There is not room enough. Somebody is sure to walk on your sponge, will walk on your toothbrush, too, unless you happen to be a clerk, and therefore practiced in the art of holding things behind your ear.
I think Americans are beginning to recognize that these sleeping-cars are barbarous. I met one lady who told me that she would always gladly sacrifice a new dress in order to spend the money on a drawing-room car. I entirely sympathize with her; but, even if you are prepared for these heroic extravagances, you cannot always get a drawing-room car. There was one occasion on which we failed, though we telegraphed three days before to engage one. On some of the best trains of the best lines there are also what are called "compartments." These are comparable in comfort to the cabins of the International Company of Wagon Lits on the Continental trains de luxe, though inferior to the London and North Western Railway Company's sleeper. No one has any right to grumble who secures a compartment. Unfortunately, it is not every railway company which has them, and it is by no means every train on which they are run.
The drawing-room car, when you get it, is in itself a comfortable thing to travel in. There is a good deal of room in it. There is satisfactory lavatory accommodation. The attendants are civil and competent. Any one who can sleep in a train at all could sleep in a drawing-room car if only he were not waked up every time the train stops or starts. Trains must stop occasionally, of course. But there is no real need for emphasizing the stops as American trains do. It is possible—I know this, because both the French and English trains do it—to stop without giving inexperienced passengers the impression that there has been a collision. Stopping is not a thing a train ought to be proud of. There is no reason why the attention of passengers should be drawn to it forcibly. For starting with a bang there is, of course, more excuse. To start at all is a triumph. It is a victory of mind over inert matter, and any one who accomplishes it wants, naturally and properly, to be admired. I can understand the annoyance of the train, conscious of being able to start, at feeling that its passengers, who ought to be praising it, are perhaps sound asleep. Yet I cannot help thinking that all the admiration any train ought to want might be secured without excessive violence. Suppose a notice were hung up in every coach: "This train will stop twice during the night and after each stop will start again. Passengers are requested to realize that this is not an easy thing to do. They will therefore admire the train." No passenger with a spark of decent feeling in him would refuse an appreciative pat to the engine in the morning. We do as much for horses who cannot drag us nearly so far or half so fast. We do it for dogs who do not drag us at all, only fetch things for us. We should certainly treat engines with the same kindness if they were a little tenderer to us. But I refuse to pat, stroke or in any way fondle an engine which, out of mere vanity, wakes me up by starting boisterously.
We ran during the night through the tail of the snowstorm which had stopped the train the day before. We had left New York in pleasant autumn weather, on one of those days which, without being cold, has an exhilarating nip about it. We arrived in Chicago in what seemed to us midsummer weather, though I believe it was not really hot for Chicago. We passed on our way through a snow-covered district and had the greatest difficulty in keeping warm during the night. This is one of the advantages of traveling in America. The distances are so immense that in the course of a single journey you have the chance of trying several kinds of climate. In England you get the same result by staying in one place. But the American plan is much better. There, having discovered a climate which suits you, you can settle down in it with a fair amount of confidence that it will remain what it is for a week or two at a time. In England, whether you travel about or stay still, you have got to accustom yourself to continual variety.