When the would-be porter is through in this schoolroom his education goes forward out on the line. Under the direction of one of the grizzled autocrats he first comes in contact with actual patrons—comes to know their personalities and their peculiarities. Also, he comes to know the full meaning of that overused and abused word—service. After all, here is the full measure of the job. He is a servant. He must realize that. And as a servant he must perfect himself. He must rise to the countless opportunities that will come to him each night he is on the run. He must do better—he must anticipate them.
Take such a man as Eugene Roundtree, who has been running a smoking car on one of the limited trains between New York and Boston for two decades—save for that brief transcendent hour when Charles S. Mellen saw himself destined to become transportation overlord of New England and appropriated Roundtree for a personal servant and porter of his private car. Roundtree is a negro of the very finest type. He is a man who commands respect and dignity—and receives it. And Roundtree, as porter of the Pullman smoker on the Merchants' Limited, has learned to anticipate.
He knows at least five hundred of the big bankers and business men of both New York and Boston—though he knows the Boston crowd best. He knows the men who belong to the Somerset and the Algonquin Clubs—the men who are Boston enough to pronounce Peabody "Pebbuddy." And they know him. Some of them have a habit of dropping in at the New Haven ticket offices and demanding: "Is Eugene running up on the Merchants' to-night?"
"It isn't just knowing them and being able to call them by their names," he will tell you if you can catch him in one of his rarely idle moments. "I've got to remember what they smoke and what they drink. When Mr. Blank tells me he wants a cigar it's my job to remember what he smokes and to put it before him. I don't ask him what he wants. I anticipate."
And by anticipating Roundtree approaches a sort of nth degree of service and receives one of the "fattest" of all the Pullman runs.
George Sylvester is another man of the Roundtree type—only his run trends to the west from New York instead of to the east, which means that he has a somewhat different type of patron with which to deal.
Sylvester is a porter on the Twentieth Century Limited; and, like Roundtree, he is a colored man of far more than ordinary force and character. He had opportunity to show both on a winter night, when his train was stopped and a drunken man—a man who was making life hideous for other passengers on Sylvester's car—was taken from the train. The fact that the man was a powerful politician, a man who raved the direst threats when arrested, made the porter's job the more difficult.
The Pullman Company, in this instance alone, had good cause to remember Sylvester's force and courage—and consummate tact—just as it has good cause in many such episodes to be thankful for the cool-headedness of its black man in a blue uniform who stands in immediate control of its property.
Sylvester prefers to forget that episode. He likes to think of the nice part of the Century's runs—the passengers who are quiet, and kind, and thoughtful, and remembering. They are a sort whom it is a pleasure for a porter to serve. They are the people who make an excess-fare train a "fat run." There are other fat runs, of course: the Overland, the Olympian, the Congressional—and of General Henry Forrest, of the Congressional, more in a moment—fat trains that follow the route of the Century.
It was on one of these, coming east from Cleveland on a snowy night in February last, that a resourceful porter had full use for his store of tact; for there is, in the community that has begun to stamp Sixth City on its shirts and its shoe tabs, a bank president who—to put the matter lightly—is a particular traveler. More than one black man, rising high in porter service, has had his vanity come to grief when this crotchety personage has come on his car.