IX
CHANCE ACQUAINTANCES
The delightful author of that most appealing story, "The Friendly Road," had only to scratch the surface of things a little to find many a golden nugget of friendliness and courtesy in the mines of the human spirit. As I look back on my many thousands of miles of travel in this country I find myself able to say with equal confidence that on the Roads of Steel, and the lanes tributary thereto, where few of us would think to look for such things, I too have found my golden nuggets without more than half-trying to find them. I have already spoken of my friends among the trainmen, to whose fidelity and watchful care I have owed my safe transit and my comfort in many a long and weary stretch. They have been an abundant source of happiness to me; but there have been others still, in whose wit and fraternal companionship, and illuminating discourse, I have found both pleasure and profit. Many of these have been the chance acquaintances of the smoker and the observation car en route.
It does not happen often here in the East that we make friends "by rail." Possibly it is because the distances traversed are comparatively short. Perhaps too it is due to the Eastern Reserve, which is a State of Mind, just as the Western Reserve has become several States of Being. I know that the democratic Westerner traveling in the East finds us apparently cold and unresponsive; though I doubt we are really so. We are merely hurried, and possibly worried; too preoccupied to notice the many little opportunities for friendly intercourse that a railway journey presents.
It is my own impression that the distance to be traveled has largely to do with this difference of manner between the Eastern man and his brother from the West. The average Easterner who has never penetrated the West farther than Sandy Hook has no real conception of the magnificence of those distances about and beyond the Mississippi Valley. At times when for reasons of business or pleasure I have gone from my home in Maine to my encampment in New York, between the hours of six P.M. on a Tuesday, say, and six A.M. of the following Wednesday, I have passed through six separate American commonwealths: but in those Far Western stretches I have time and again spent my full twenty-four hours upon the road without in any wise finding myself subject to the rules and regulations of the Interstate Commerce Commission.
Out of this rises, naturally enough, a difference in attitude toward one's fellow travelers. There comes to be a greater sense of a settled community interest on the longer journey, which brings with it greater inclination for social intercourse with one's neighbors of the sleeper.
One of the conspicuous results of my contact with humanity on the road has been that I have come to hold a very high respect for the traveling man; so high indeed that where ten years ago I should probably have spoken of him in the terms of our American vernacular as a drummer, I have now definitely ejected that word from my vocabulary, save in its narrower meaning as applied to that overnoisy person who beats that most unmusical musical instrument, the drum, in our modern bands. These commercial travelers average high in character and in intellect, and the man who keeps his ears open while in their company can hardly fail to learn much from their discourse. The best of them know their own special lines from the ground up, and if my observation of them is correct the very least of them are authorities on human nature.
I do not wish to boast, but I think that if some emergency should arise requiring me to prepare offhand an article on suspenders, straw hats, automobiles, or canned tomatoes, I could qualify as an apparent authority, anyhow, from things I have heard directly from the good fellows pursuing those particular lines, or have overheard in their chats with others, in the smoking cars. More than once I have left a symposium conducted by a group of these gentlemen almost obsessed with the notion that our universities might be better qualified to do their real work in life if the average college professor were able to "get his stuff over" as humanly, as clearly, as entertainingly, and as effectively as do the bulk of these advance agents of the American industrial world. They are, according to their several capacities, full of their subject, saturated with it, enthusiastic over it, and wholly unreluctant when they get even half a chance to reveal their knowledge to a ready listener.
I have met men on the road who were as eloquent on the subject of men's underwear as I should like to be on the necessity of a cheerier spirit in meeting the trials of life, and one effervescent soul on a Pacific Coast trip once held me and mine spell-bound by his remarkable disquisition on the spiritual influence of comfortable shoes, talking for a longer time than I have ever yet listened willingly to a sermon on some seemingly less homely topic. And as authorities on the state of the nation, political, commercial, and spiritual—well, any kind of administration, Republican, Democratic, Progressive, would not do badly were it to summon a congress of these individuals to meet annually at Washington, to confer with it, to inform it, and to lay before it anything having directly or remotely to do with "things as is."
They are by nature diplomats, by instinct orators, and of necessity they are profound students of human nature. They have to be adaptable to circumstance, ready of resource, and full of tolerance. I take off my hat to them, and heartily congratulate the business interests of the United States to-day upon the high character and quality of manhood of this splendid army in the field of commerce.