The luxury of modern travel is a thing one often hears spoken about nowadays. Personally, we have had to listen to it for so long, and we are so heartily convinced that it is a piece of arrant humbug, that we are finally moved to protest. "The luxury of modern travel"—pish tush, and again pish! There ain't no such thing.
Travel may not have been luxurious, but it was at least interesting in the good old days of the mail-coaches. We like to think of them rolling with a tremendous clatter of hoofs and a flourish on the guard's horn through grey villages dozing among their elms, right up to the doors of glorious old inns where the hostlers tumbled out with fresh horses and journeying gentlemen tumbled in for a glass of mulled port.
That was travelling, bless you! There was some sport to that, some exhilaration. A man might well be moved to song on the top of one of those old coaches of a fine spring morning with the hedge-rows all in tender green. Even we ourself, who have a voice that causes people to turn around and scowl when we join in a chorus, even we might be led to troll a rollicking catch under such circumstances as that.
But who ever heard of anyone singing in a Pullman car—unless it should be a traveller in the smoking-room who had travelled not wisely but too well? And even those days are past now. Singing isn't done, that's all. There is no excuse for it, except inebriety or a brainstorm—and we have ruled out inebriety, more or less. Besides, the man who manages to get an extra Scotch or so nowadays doesn't make a fuss about it. He keeps the fact a dark and happy secret. So, instead of singing in a Pullman car, one simply sits and grouches until that blessed moment of release when the porter has brushed all the dust off one's coat into one's eye, and one can seize one's grip and totter out into the open air once more.
The misery of modern travel starts from the moment the traveller, laden with disheveled impediments of all sorts, plunges madly out of the house watch in hand—this is difficult but it can be done—to the taxicab which has come just twenty minutes late. The driver says it is because the people at the garage gave him the wrong address, the intimation being that he had finally arrived at the right one by some process of complicated and inspired ratiocination. The real truth is that he stopped to talk to a "ladifren."
Personally, we plunge out and catch a streetcar. We are a democratic cuss. Also they don't make one wait so long. Moreover, it is so exciting to stand on the back platform and pull out one's watch—it is ten minutes fast, though one doesn't suspect it—and break into a cold sweat every time anyone stops the car either to get on or off.
The car-line we usually take crosses railroad-tracks in two or three places. This may seem to the reader an irrelevant detail, but it wouldn't seem so if the reader had to take it. Invariably when one is in a bigger hurry than usual, a shunting-engine and a crew of leisurely fiends in dingy overalls are engaged in chivvying a bunch of freight-cars backwards and forwards over the crossing, while one notes the second-hand of one's watch slipping merrily around and one mentally calls on all the lurid reserves of language.
Rushing into the depot—dear reader, did you ever rush into the Toronto Union Depot? Did you ever sprint madly, with your bag banging against your knees, down that interminable corridor—it seems a mile and a half long at the very least—from the main entrance to the door where a cool ruffian in a uniform insists on stopping you and seeing your ticket, though you have just four seconds to catch your train and you know on what track it is just as well as he does? And when you have finally got by him, did you ever slide down one of those flights of iron steps into that damp and dismal tunnel where the trains stand? If you have ever done any of these things, you can sympathize with us when we repeat with an intonation of melancholy contempt, "The luxury of modern travel!"
But somehow or other in a fashion which strengthens our belief in a kindly Providence, we catch the train. We always do. Just as the porter picks up his little stool and climbs aboard, we hurl ourself and our bag into the vestibule after him. Then, when the conductor and brakeman have lifted us off our ebony brother in livery, we are shown to our berth. Removing our overcoat and picking out of our bag a book and such cigars as have not been reduced to fine-cut, we adjourn to the smoking-room.
There is a general notion, principally among ladies, that the smoking-room of a sleeping-car is a place of extraordinary hilarity and indecorous enjoyment. They have visions of men sitting around in their shirt-sleeves playing poker, drinking out of pocket-flasks, and exchanging amid clouds of smoke stories that would make even the porter blush. But, alas, it is not thus.