After ascending for some time, we began to coast down again, still through unprepossessing thoroughfares, until at last we slid up in the mud to the door of the Hotel Baltimore—one of the busiest hotels in the whole United States.
On sight of the hotel I took a little heart. Breakfast was near and the hostelry looked promising. It was, indeed, the first building that I saw in Kansas City, that seemed to justify "City."
The coffee at the Baltimore proved good. We saw that we were in a large and capably conducted caravansary—a metropolitan hotel with a dining room like some interior in the capitol of Minnesota, and a Pompeian room, the very look of which bespoke a cabaret performance at a later hour. From the window where we sat at breakfast we saw wagons with brakes set, descending the hill, and streams of people hurrying on their way to work: sturdy-looking men and healthy-looking girls, the latter stamped with that cheap yet indisputable style so characteristic of the young American working woman—a sort of down-at-the-heels showiness in dress, which, combined with an elaborate coiffure and a fine, if slightly affected carriage, makes her at once a pretty and pathetic object.
In Kansas City one is well within the borders of the land of silver dollars. Dollar bills are scarce. Pay for a cigar with a $5 bill, and your change is more than likely to include four of those silver cartwheels which, though merely annoying in ordinary times, must be a real source of danger when the floods come, as one understands they sometimes do in Kansas City. Not only are small bills scarce but, I fancy, the humble copper cent is viewed in Kansas City with less respect than in the East. I base this conclusion upon the fact that a dignified old negro, wearing a bronze medal suspended from a ribbon tied about his neck, charged me five cents at the door of the dining room for a one-cent paper—a rate of extortion surpassing that of New York hotel news stands. However, as that paper was the Kansas City "Star," I raised no objection; for the "Star" is a great newspaper. But of that presently.
Later I found fastened to the wall of my bathroom something which, as I learned afterward, is quite common among hotels in the West, but which I have never seen in an eastern hotel—a slot machine which, for a quarter, supplies any of the following articles: tooth paste, listerine, cold cream, bromo lithia, talcum powder, a toothbrush, a shaving stick, or a safety razor.
Counterbalancing this convenience, however, I found in my room but one telephone instrument, although Kansas City is served by two separate companies. This proved annoying; calls coming by the Missouri & Kansas Telephone Company's lines reached me in my room, but those coming over the wires of the Home Telephone Company had to be answered downstairs, whither I was summoned twice that morning—once from my bath and once while shaving. I had not been in Kansas City half a day before discovering that monopoly—at least in the case of the telephone—has its very definite advantages. A double system of telephones is a nuisance. Even where, as for instance in Portland, Oregon, there are two instruments in each room, one never knows which bell is ringing. Duplication is unnecessary, and where there are two companies, lack of duplication is annoying. Every home or office in Kansas City provided with but one instrument is cut off from communication with many other homes and offices having the other service, while those having both instruments have to pay the price of two.
It always amuses me to hear criticisms by foreigners of the telephone as perfected in this country. And our sleeping cars and telephones are the things they invariably do criticize. As to the sleeping car there may be some justice in complaints, although it seems to me that, under the conditions for which it is designed, the Pullman car would be hard to improve upon. It is the necessity of going to bed while traveling by rail that is at the bottom of the trouble. But when a foreigner criticizes the American telephone the very thing he criticizes is its perfection. If we had bad telephone service, and didn't use the telephone much, it would be all right, according to the European point of view. But as it is, they say we are the instrument's "slaves."
That was the complaint of Dr. George Brandes, the Danish literary critic. "The telephone is the worst instrument of torture that ever existed," he declared. "The medieval rack and thumb-screws were playthings compared with it."
Arnold Bennett, in his "Your United States," tells of having permanently removed the receiver from the telephone in his bedroom in a Chicago hotel. His action, he declares, caused agitation, not merely in the hotel, but throughout the city.
"In response to the prayer of a deputation from the management," he writes, "I restored the receiver. On the horrified face of the deputation I could read the unspoken query: 'Is it conceivable that you have been in this country a month without understanding that the United States is primarily nothing but a vast congeries of telephone cabins?'"