New York—Everyone is in a hurry. Everyone is dodging everyone else. Everyone is trying to keep his knees from being knocked by swift-passing suitcases
Even the food in the dining-car seems to be standardized. The dishes look differently, and vary mildly in flavor, but there is one taste running through everything, as though the whole meal were made from some basic substance, colored and flavored in different ways, to create a variety of courses. The great primary taste of eastern dining-car food is, as nearly as I can hit on it, that of wet paper. The oysters seem to be made of slippery wet paper with oyster-flavor added. The soup is a sort of creamy essence of manilla. The chicken is damp paper, ground up, soaked with chicken-extract, and pressed into the form of a deceased bird. And, above all, the salad is green tissue-paper, soaked in vinegar and water.
As with the officials, so with the passengers. They become frigid, too. If, forgetting momentarily that you are no longer in the West, you speak to the gentleman who has the seat beside you in the buffet smoker, after dinner, he takes a long appraising look at you before replying. Then, after answering you briefly, and in such a way as to give you as little information as possible, and to impress upon you the idea that you have been guilty of gross familiarity in speaking to a social superior without having first been spoken to by him—then the gentleman will rise from his chair and move to another seat, feeling, the while, to make sure that you have not got his watch.
That, gentle reader, is the sweet spirit of the civilized East. Easterners regard men with whom they are not personally acquainted as potential pickpockets; and men with whom they are acquainted as established thieves.
On you rush towards the metropolis. The train is crowded. The farms, flying past, are small, and are divided into little fields which look cramped after the great open areas of the West. Towns and cities flash by, one after another, in quick succession, as the floors flash by an express elevator, shooting down, its shaft in a skyscraper; and where there are no towns there are barns painted with advertisements, and great advertising signboards disfiguring the landscape. There are four tracks now. A passenger train roars by, savagely, on one side, and is gone, while on the other, a half-mile freight train tugs and squeaks and clatters.
When the porter calls you in the morning, and you raise your window shade, you see no plains or mountains, but the backs of squalid suburban tenements, with vari-colored garments fluttering on their clothes lines, like the flags of some ship decked for a gala day.
Gathering yourself and your dusty habiliments together, you sneak shamefully to the washroom. Already it is full of men: men in trousers and undershirt, men with tousled hair and stubble chins, men with bags and dressing-cases spread out on the seats, splattering men, who immerse their faces in the swinging suds of the nickel-plated washbowl, and snort like seals in the aquarium.
Ah, the East! The throbbing, thriving, thickly-populated East!
Presently you get your turn at a sloppy washbowl, after which you slip into the stale clothing of the day before, and return to the body of the car, feeling half washed, half dressed and half dead.
Outside are factories, and railroad yards, and everywhere tall black chimneys, vomiting their heavy, muddy smoke. But always the train glides on like some swift, smooth river. Now the track is elevated, now depressed. You run over bridges or under them, crossing streets and other railroads. At last you dive into a tunnel and presently emerging, coast slowly along beside an endless concrete platform raised to the level of the car floor.