Chapter 5. Transit And Hotels

________________________________________________
_ CHAPTER V. TRANSIT AND HOTELS

The choice of such a trite topic as the means of travel may seem to denote that my observations in the United States must have been superficial. They were. I never hoped that they would be otherwise. In seven weeks (less one day) I could not expect to penetrate very far below the engaging surface of things. Nor did I unnaturally attempt to do so; for the evidence of the superficies is valuable, and it can only be properly gathered by the stranger at first sight. Among the scenes and phenomena that passed before me I of course remember best those which interested me most. Railroads and trains have always appealed to me; I have often tried to express my sense of their romantic savor. And I was eager to see and appreciate these particular manifestations of national character in America.

It happily occurred that my first important journey from New York was on the Pennsylvania Road.

"I'll meet you at the station," I said to my particular friend.

"Oh no!" he answered, positively. "I'll pick you up on my way."

The fact was that not for ten thousand dollars would he have missed the spectacle of my sensations as I beheld for the first time the most majestic terminus in the world! He alone would usher me into the gates of that marvel! I think he was not disappointed. I frankly surrendered myself to the domination of this extraordinary building. I did not compare. I knew there could be no comparison. Whenever afterward I heard, as I often did, enlightened, Europe-loving citizens of the United States complain that the United States was all very well, but there was no art in the United States, the image of this tremendous masterpiece would rise before me, and I was inclined to say: "Have you ever crossed Seventh Avenue, or are you merely another of those who have been to Europe and learned nothing?" The Pennsylvania station is full of the noble qualities that fine and heroic imagination alone can give. That there existed a railroad man poetic and audacious enough to want it, architects with genius powerful enough to create it, and a public with heart enough to love it--these things are for me a surer proof that the American is a great race than the existence of any quantity of wealthy universities, museums of classic art, associations for prison reform, or deep-delved safe-deposit vaults crammed with bonds. Such a monument does not spring up by chance; it is part of the slow flowering of a nation's secret spirit!

[Illustration: IN THE PARLOR-CAR]

The terminus emerged brilliantly from an examination of the complicated detail, both esthetic and practical, that is embedded in the apparent simplicity of its vast physiognomy. I discovered everything in it proper to a station, except trains. Not a sign of a train. My impulse was to ask, "Is this the tomb of Alexander J. Cassatt, or is it a cathedral, or is it, after all, a railroad station?" Then I was led with due ceremony across the boundless plains of granite to a secret staircase, guarded by lions in uniform, and at the foot of this staircase, hidden like a shame or a crime, I found a resplendent train, the Congressional Limited. It was not the Limited of my dreams; but it was my first American Limited, and I boarded it in a condition of excitement. I criticized, of course, for every experienced traveler has decided views concerning _trains de luxe_. The cars impressed rather than charmed me. I preferred, and still prefer, the European variety of Pullman. (Yes, I admit we owe it entirely to America!) And then there is a harsh, inhospitable quality about those all-steel cars. They do not yield. You think you are touching wood, and your knuckles are abraded. The imitation of wood is a triumph of mimicry, but by no means a triumph of artistic propriety. Why should steel be made to look like wood?... Fireproof, you say. But is anything fireproof in the United States, except perhaps Tammany Hall? Has not the blazing of fireproof constructions again and again singed off the eyebrows of dauntless firemen? My impression is that "fireproof," in the American tongue, is one of those agreeable but quite meaningless phrases which adorn the languages of all nations. Another such phrase, in the American tongue, is "right away!" ...

I sat down in my appointed place in the all-steel car, and, turning over the pages of a weekly paper, saw photographs of actual collisions, showing that in an altercation between trains the steel-and-wood car could knock the all-steel car into a cocked hat!... The decoration of the all-steel car does not atone for its probable combustibility and its proved fragility. In particular, the smoking-cars of all the Limiteds I intrusted myself to were defiantly and wilfully ugly. Still, a fine, proud train, handsome in some ways! And the trainmen were like admirals, captains, and first officers pacing bridges; clearly they owned the train, and had kindly lent it to the Pennsylvania R.R. Their demeanor expressed a rare sense of ownership and also of responsibility. While very polite, they condescended. A strong contrast to the miserable European "guard"--for all his silver buttons! I adventured into the observation-car, of which institution I had so often heard Americans speak with pride, and speculated why, here as in all other cars, the tops of the windows were so low that it was impossible to see the upper part of the thing observed (roofs, telegraph-wires, tree-foliage, hill-summits, sky) without bending the head and cricking the neck. I do not deny that I was setting a high standard of perfection, but then I had heard so much all my life about American Limiteds!

The Limited started with exactitude, and from the observation-car I watched the unrolling of the wondrous Hudson tunnel--one of the major sights of New York, and a thing of curious beauty.... The journey passed pleasantly, with no other episode than that of dinner, which cost a dollar and was worth just about a dollar, despite the mutton. And with exactitude we arrived at Washington--another splendid station. I generalized thus: "It is certain that this country understands railroad stations." I was, however, fresh in the country, and had not then seen New Haven station, which, as soon as it is quite done with, ought to be put in a museum.

We returned from Washington by a night train; we might have taken a day train, but it was pointed out to me that I ought to get into "form" for certain projected long journeys into the West. At midnight I was brusquely introduced to the American sleeping-car. I confess that I had not imagined anything so appalling as the confined, stifling, malodorous promiscuity of the American sleeping-car, where men and women are herded together on shelves under the drastic control of an official aided by negroes. I care not to dwell on the subject.... I have seen European prisons, but in none that I have seen would such a system be tolerated, even by hardened warders and governors; and assuredly, if it were, public opinion would rise in anger and destroy it. I have not been in Siberian prisons, but I remember reading George Kennan's description of their mild horrors, and I am surprised that he should have put himself to the trouble of such a tedious journey when he might have discovered far more exciting material on any good road around New York. However, nobody seemed to mind, such is the force of custom--and I did not mind very much, because my particular friend, intelligently foreseeing my absurd European prejudices, had engaged for us a state-room.

This state-room, or suite--for it comprised two apartments--was a beautiful and aristocratic domain. The bedchamber had a fan that would work at three speeds like an automobile, and was an enchanting toy. In short, I could find no fault with the accommodation. It was perfect, and would have remained perfect had the train remained in the station. Unfortunately, the engine-driver had the unhappy idea of removing the train from the station. He seemed to be an angry engine-driver, and his gesture was that of a man setting his teeth and hissing: "Now, then, come out of that, you sluggards!" and giving a ferocious tug. There was a fearful jerk, and in an instant I understood why sleeping-berths in America are always arranged lengthwise with the train. If they were not, the passengers would spend most of the night in getting up off the floor and climbing into bed again. A few hundred yards out of the station the engine-driver decided to stop, and there was the same fearful jerk and concussion. Throughout the night he stopped and he started at frequent intervals, and always with the fearful jerk. Sometimes he would slow down gently and woo me into a false tranquillity, but only to finish with the same jerk rendered more shocking by contrast.

The bedchamber was delightful, the lavatory amounted to a boudoir, the reading-lamp left nothing to desire, the ventilation was a continuous vaudeville entertainment, the watch-pocket was adorable, the mattress was good. Even the road-bed was quite respectable--not equal to the best I knew, probably, but it had the great advantage of well-tied rails, so that as the train passed from one rail-length to the next you felt no jar, a bliss utterly unknown in Europe. The secret of a satisfactory "sleeper," however, does not lie in the state-room, nor in the glittering lavatory, nor in the lamp, nor in the fan, nor in the watch-pocket, nor in the bed, nor even in the road-bed. It lies in the mannerisms of that brave fellow out there in front of you on the engine, in the wind and the rain. But no one in all America seemed to appreciate this deep truth. For myself, I was inclined to go out to the engine-driver and say to him: "Brother, are you aware--you cannot be--that the best European trains start with the imperceptible stealthiness of a bad habit, so that it is impossible to distinguish motion from immobility, and come to rest with the softness of doves settling on the shoulders of a young girl?" ... If the fault is not the engine-driver's, then are the brakes to blame? Inconceivable!... All American engine-drivers are alike; and I never slept a full hour in any American "sleeper," what with stops, starts, hootings, tollings, whizzings round sharp corners, listening to the passage of freight-trains, and listening to haughty conductor-admirals who quarreled at length with newly arrived voyagers at 2 or 3 A.M.! I do not criticize; I state. I also blame myself. There are those who could sleep. But not everybody could sleep. Well and heartily do I remember the moment when another friend of mine, in the midst of an interminable scolding that was being given by a nasal-voiced conductor to a passenger just before the dawn, exposed his head and remarked: "Has it occurred to you that this is a sleeping-car?" In the swift silence the whirring of my private fan could be heard.

I arrived in New York from Washington, as I arrived at all my destinations after a night journey, in a state of enfeebled submissiveness, and I retired to bed in a hotel. And for several hours the hotel itself would stop and start with a jerk and whiz round corners.

* * * * *

For many years I had dreamed of traveling by the great, the unique, the world-renowned New York-Chicago train; indeed, it would not be a gross exaggeration to say that I came to America in order to take that train; and at length time brought my dream true. I boarded the thing in New York, this especial product of the twentieth century, and yet another thrilling moment in my life came and went! I boarded it with pride; everybody boarded it with pride; and in every eye was the gleam: "This is the train of trains, and I have my state-room on it." Perhaps I was ever so slightly disappointed with the dimensions and appointments of the state-room--I may have been expecting a whole car to myself--but the general self-conscious smartness of the train reassured me. I wandered into the observation-car, and saw my particular friend proudly employ the train-telephone to inform his office that he had caught the train. I saw also the free supply of newspapers, the library of books, the typewriting-machine, and the stenographer by its side--all as promised. And I knew that at the other end of the train was a dining-car, a smoking-car, and a barber-shop. I picked up the advertising literature scattered about by a thoughtful Company, and learned therefrom that this train was not a mere experiment; it was the finished fruit of many experiments, and that while offering the conveniences of a hotel or a club, it did with regularity what it undertook to do in the way of speed and promptness. The pamphlet made good reading!...

I noted that it pleased the Company to run two other very important trains out of the terminus simultaneously with the unique train. Bravado, possibly; but bravado which invited the respect of all those who admire enterprise! I anticipated with pleasure the noble spectacle of these three trains sailing forth together on three parallel tracks; which pleasure was denied me. We for Chicago started last; we started indeed, according to my poor European watch, from fifteen to thirty seconds late!... No matter! I would not stickle for seconds: particularly as at Chicago, by the terms of a contract which no company in Europe would have had the grace to sign, I was to receive, for any unthinkable lateness, compensation at the rate of one cent for every thirty-six seconds!

Within a quarter of an hour it became evident that that train had at least one great quality--it moved. As, in the deepening dusk, we swung along the banks of the glorious Hudson, veiled now in the vaporous mysteries following a red sunset, I was obliged to admit with increasing enthusiasm that that train did move. Even the persecutors of Galileo would never have had the audacity to deny that that train moved. And one felt, comfortably, that the whole Company, with all the Company's resources, was watching over its flying pet, giving it the supreme right of way and urging it forward by hearty good-will. One felt also that the moment had come for testing the amenities of the hotel and the club.

"Tea, please," I said, jauntily, confidently, as we entered the spotless and appetizing restaurant-car.

The extremely polite and kind captain of the car was obviously taken aback. But he instinctively grasped that the reputation of the train hung in the balance, and he regained his self-possession.

"Tea?" His questioning inflection delicately hinted: "Try not to be too eccentric."

"Tea."

"Here?"

"Here."

"I can serve it here, of course," said the captain, persuasively. "But if you don't mind I should prefer to serve it in your state-room."

We reluctantly consented. The tea was well made and well served.

[Illustration: BREAKFAST EN ROUTE]

In an instant, as it seemed, we were crossing a dark river, on which reposed several immense, many-storied river-steamers, brilliantly lit. I had often seen illustrations of these craft, but never before the reality. A fine sight-and it made me think of Mark Twain's incomparable masterpiece, _Life on the Mississippi_, for which I would sacrifice the entire works of Thackeray and George Eliot. We ran into a big town, full of electric signs, and stopped. Albany! One minute late! I descended to watch the romantic business of changing engines. I felt sure that changing the horses of a fashionable mail-coach would be as nothing to this. The first engine had already disappeared. The new one rolled tremendous and overpowering toward me; its wheels rose above my head, and the driver glanced down at me as from a bedroom window. I was sensible of all the mystery and force of the somber monster; I felt the mystery of the unknown railway station, and of the strange illuminated city beyond. And I had a corner in my mind for the thought: "Somewhere near me Broadway actually ends." Then, while dark men under the ray of a lantern fumbled with the gigantic couplings, I said to myself that if I did not get back to my car I should probably be left behind. I regained my state-room and waited, watch in hand, for the jerk of restarting. I waited half an hour. Some mishap with the couplings! We left Albany thirty-three minutes late. Habitues of the train affected nonchalance. One of them offered to bet me that "she would make it up." The admirals and captains avoided our gaze.

We dined, _a la carte_; the first time I had ever dined _a la carte_ on any train. An excellent dinner, well and sympathetically served. The mutton was impeccable. And in another instant, as it seemed, we were running, with no visible flags, through an important and showy street of a large town, and surface-cars were crossing one another behind us. I had never before seen an express train let loose in the middle of an unprotected town, and I was _naif_ enough to be startled. But a huge electric sign--"Syracuse bids you welcome"--tranquilized me. We briefly halted, and drew away from the allurement of those bright streets into the deep, perilous shade of the open country.

I went to bed. The night differed little from other nights spent in American sleeping-cars, and I therefore will not describe it in detail. To do so might amount to a solecism. Enough to say that the jerkings were possibly less violent and certainly less frequent than usual, while, on the other hand, the halts were strangely long; one, indeed, seemed to last for hours; I had to admit to myself that I had been to sleep and dreamed this stoppage.

From a final cat-nap I at last drew up my blind to greet the oncoming day, and was rewarded by one of the finest and most poetical views I have ever seen: a misty, brown river flanked by a jungle of dark reddish and yellowish chimneys and furnaces that covered it with shifting canopies of white steam and of smoke, varying from the delicatest grays to intense black; a beautiful dim gray sky lightening, and on the ground and low, flat roofs a thin crust of snow: Toledo! A wonderful and inspiring panorama, just as romantic in its own way as any Spanish Toledo. Yet I regretted its name, and I regretted the grotesque names of other towns on the route--Canaan, Syracuse, Utica, Geneva, Ceylon, Waterloo, and odd combinations ending in "burg." The names of most of the States are superb. What could be more beautiful than Ohio, Idaho, Kentucky, Iowa, Missouri, Wyoming, Illinois--above all, Illinois? Certain cities, too, have grand names. In its vocal quality "Chicago" is a perfect prince among names. But the majority of town names in America suffer, no doubt inevitably, from a lack of imagination and of reflection. They have the air of being bought in haste at a big advertising "ready-for-service" establishment.

Remembering in my extreme prostration that I was in a hotel and club, and not in an experiment, I rang the bell, and a smiling negro presented himself. It was only a quarter to seven in Toledo, but I was sustained in my demeanor by the fact that it was a quarter to eight in New York.

"Will you bring me some tea, please?"

He was sympathetic, but he said flatly I couldn't have tea, nor anything, and that nobody could have anything at all for an hour and a half, as there would be no restaurant-car till Elkhart, and Elkhart was quite ninety miles off. He added that an engine had broken down at Cleveland.

I lay in collapse for over an hour, and then, summoning my manhood, arose. On the previous evening the hot-water tap of my toilette had yielded only cold water. Not wishing to appear hypercritical, I had said nothing, but I had thought. I now casually turned on the cold-water tap and was scalded by nearly boiling water. The hot-water tap still yielded cold water. Lest I should be accused of inventing this caprice of plumbing in a hotel and club, I give the name of the car. It was appropriately styled "Watertown" (compartment E).

In the corridor an admiral, audaciously interrogated, admitted that the train was at that moment two hours and ten minutes late. As for Elkhart, it seemed to be still about ninety miles away. I went into the observation-saloon to cheer myself up by observing, and was struck by a chill, and by the chilly, pinched demeanor of sundry other passengers, and by the apologetic faces of certain captains. Already in my state-room my senses had suspected a chill; but I had refused to believe my senses. I knew and had known all my life that American trains were too hot, and I had put down the supposed chill to a psychological delusion. It was, however, no delusion. As we swept through a snowy landscape the apologetic captains announced sadly that the engine was not sparing enough steam to heat the whole of the train. We put on overcoats and stamped our feet.

The train was now full of ravening passengers. And as Elkhart with infinite shyness approached, the ravening passengers formed in files in the corridors, and their dignity was jerked about by the speed of the icy train, and they waited and waited, like mendicants at the kitchen entrance of a big restaurant. And at long last, when we had ceased to credit that any such place as Elkhart existed, Elkhart arrived. Two restaurant-cars were coupled on, and, as it were, instantly put to the sack by an infuriated soldiery. The food was excellent, and newspapers were distributed with much generosity, but some passengers, including ladies, had to stand for another twenty minutes famished at the door of the first car, because the breakfasting accommodation of this particular hotel and club was not designed on the same scale as its bedroom accommodation. We reached Chicago one hundred and ten minutes late. And to compensate me for the lateness, and for the refrigeration, and for the starvation, and for being forced to eat my breakfast hurriedly under the appealing, reproachful gaze of famishing men and women, an official at the Lasalle station was good enough to offer me a couple of dollars. I accepted them....

[Illustration: IN THE SUBWAY ONE ENCOUNTERS AN INSISTENT, HURRYING STREAM]

An unfortunate accident, you say. It would be more proper to say a series of accidents. I think "the greatest train in the world" is entitled to one accident, but not to several. And when, in addition to being a train, it happens to be a hotel and club, and not an experiment, I think that a system under which a serious breakdown anywhere between Syracuse and Elkhart (about three-quarters of the entire journey) is necessarily followed by starvation--I think that such a system ought to be altered--by Americans. In Europe it would be allowed to continue indefinitely.

Beyond question my experience of American trains led me to the general conclusion that the best of them were excellent. Nevertheless, I saw nothing in the organization of either comfort, luxury, or safety to justify the strange belief of Americans that railroad traveling in the United States is superior to railroad traveling in Europe. Merely from habit, I prefer European trains on the whole. It is perhaps also merely from habit that Americans prefer American trains.

* * * * *

As regards methods of transit other than ordinary railroad trains, I have to admit a certain general disappointment in the United States. The Elevated systems in the large cities are the terrible result of an original notion which can only be called unfortunate. They must either depopulate the streets through which they run or utterly destroy the sensibility of the inhabitants; and they enormously increase and complicate the dangers of the traffic beneath them. Indeed, in the view of the unaccustomed stranger, every Elevated is an affliction so appallingly hideous that no degree of convenience could atone for its horror. The New York Subway is a masterpiece of celerity, and in other ways less evil than an Elevated, but in the minimum decencies of travel it appeared to me to be inferior to several similar systems in Europe.

The surface-cars in all the large cities that I saw were less smart and less effective than those in sundry European capitals. In Boston particularly I cannot forget the excessive discomfort of a journey to Cambridge, made in the company of a host who had a most beautiful house, and who gave dinners of the last refinement, but who seemed unaccountably to look on the car journey as a sort of pleasant robustious outing. Nor can I forget--also in Boston--the spectacle of the citizens of Brookline--reputed to be the wealthiest suburb in the world--strap-hanging and buffeted and flung about on the way home from church, in surface-cars which really did carry inadequacy and brutality to excess.

The horse-cabs of Chicago had apparently been imported second-hand immediately after the great fire from minor towns in Italy.

[Illustration: THE STRAP-HANGERS]

There remains the supreme mystery of the vices of the American taxicab. I sought an explanation of this from various persons, and never got one that was convincing. The most frequent explanation, at any rate in New York, was that the great hotels were responsible for the vices of the American taxicab, by reason of their alleged outrageous charges to the companies for the privilege of waiting for hire at their august porticos. I listened with respect, but with incredulity. If the taxicabs were merely very dear, I could understand; if they were merely very bad, I could understand; if they were merely numerically insufficient for the number of people willing to pay for taxicabs, I could understand. But that they should be at once very dear, very bad, and most inconveniently scarce, baffled and still baffles me. The sum of real annoyance daily inflicted on a rich and busy but craven-hearted city like New York by the eccentricity of its taxicab organization must be colossal.

As to the condition of the roadways, the vocabulary of blame had been exhausted long before I arrived. Two things, however, struck me in New York which I had not heard of by report: the greasiness of the streets, transforming every automobile into a skidding death-trap at the least sign of moisture, and the leisureliness of the road-works. The busiest part of Thirty-fourth Street, for example--no mean artery, either--was torn up when I came into New York, and it was still torn up when I left. And, lastly, why are there no island refuges on Fifth Avenue? Even at the intersection of Fifth and Broadway there is no oasis for the pursued wayfarer. Every European city has long ago decided that the provision of island refuges in main thoroughfares is an act of elementary justice to the wayfarer in his unequal and exhausting struggle with wheeled traffic.

All these criticisms, which are severe but honest, would lose much of their point if the general efficiency of the United States and its delightful genius for organization were not so obvious and so impressive to the European. In fact, it is precisely the brilliant practical qualities of the country which place its idiosyncrasies in the matter of transit in so startling a light.... I would not care to close this section without a grateful reference to the very natty electric coupes, usually driven by ladies, which are so refreshing a feature of the streets of Chicago, and to the virtues of American private automobiles in general.

* * * * *

It is remarkable that a citizen who cheerfully and negligently submits to so many various inconveniences outside his home should insist on having the most comfortable home in the world, as the American citizen unquestionably has! Once, when in response to an interviewer I had become rather lyrical in praise of I forget what phenomenon in the United States, a Philadelphia evening newspaper published an editorial article in criticism of my views. This article was entitled "Offensive Flattery." Were I to say freely all that I thought of the American private house, large or small, I might expose myself again to the same accusation.

[Illustration: THE PASSENGERS ON THE ELEVATED AT NIGHT ARE ODDLY ASSORTED.]

When I began to make the acquaintance of the American private house, I felt like one who, son of an exiled mother, had been born abroad and had at length entered his real country. That is to say, I felt at home. I felt that all this practical comfort and myself had been specially destined for each other since the beginning of time, and that fate was at last being fulfilled. Freely I admit that until I reached America I had not understood what real domestic comfort, generously conceived, could be. Certainly I had always in this particular quarreled with my own country, whose average notion of comfort still is to leave the drawing-room (temperature 70 deg.--near the fire) at midnight, pass by a windswept hall and staircase (temperature 55 deg.) to a bedroom full of fine fresh air (temperature 50 deg. to 40 deg.), and in that chamber, having removed piece by piece every bit of warm clothing, to slip, imperfectly protected, between icy sheets and wait for sleep. Certainly I had always contested the joyfulness of that particular process; but my imagination had fallen short of the delicious innumerable realities of comfort in an American home.

Now, having regained the "barbaric seats" whence I came, I read with a peculiar expression the advertisements of fashionable country and town residences to rent or for sale in England. Such as: "Choice residence. Five reception-rooms. Sixteen bedrooms. Bathroom--" Or: "Thoroughly up-to-date mansion. Six reception-rooms. Splendid hall. Billiard-room. Twenty-four bedrooms. Two bath-rooms--" I read this literature (to be discovered textually every week in the best illustrated weeklies), and I smile. Also I wonder, faintly blushing, what Americans truly _do_ think of the residential aspects of European house-property when they first see it. And I wonder, without blushing, to what miraculous degree of perfected comfort Americans would raise all their urban traffic if only they cared enough to keep the professional politician out of their streets as strictly as they keep him out of their houses.

* * * * *

The great American hotel, too, is a wondrous haven for the European who in Europe has only tasted comfort in his dreams. The calm orderliness of the bedroom floors, the adequacy of wardrobes and lamps, the reckless profusion of clean linen, that charming notice which one finds under one's door in the morning, "You were called at seven-thirty, and answered," the fundamental principle that a bedroom without a bath-room is not a bedroom, the magic laundry which returns your effects duly starched in eight hours, the bells which are answered immediately, the thickness of the walls, the radiator in the elevator-shaft, the celestial invention of the floor-clerk--I could catalogue the civilizing features of the American hotel for pages. But the great American hotel is a classic, and to praise it may seem inept. My one excuse for doing so is that I have ever been a devotee of hotels, and once indeed wrote a whole book about one. When I told the best interviewer in the United States that my secret ambition had always been to be the manager of a grand hotel, I was quite sincere. And whenever I saw the manager of a great American hotel traversing with preoccupied and yet aquiline glance his corridors and public rooms, I envied him acutely.

[Illustration: THE RESTAURANT OF A GREAT HOTEL IS BUT ONE FEATURE OF ITS SPLENDOR]

The hospitality of those corridors and public rooms is so wide and comprehensive that the ground floor and mezzanine of a really big hotel in the United States offer a spectacle of humanity such as cannot be seen in Europe; they offer also a remarkable contrast to the tranquillity of their own upper stories, where any eccentricity is vigorously discouraged. I think that it must be the vast tumult and promiscuity of the ground floor which is responsible for the relative inferiority of the restaurant in a great American hotel. A restaurant should be a paramount unit, but as a fact in these hotels it is no more than an item in a series of resorts, several of which equal if they do not surpass it in popular interest. The Americans, I found, would show more interest in the barber-shop than in the restaurant. (And to see the American man of business, theoretically in a hurry, having his head bumped about by a hair-cutter, his right hand tended by one manicurist, his left hand tended by another manicurist, his boots polished by a lightning shiner, and his wits polished by the two manicurists together--the whole simultaneously--this spectacle in itself was possibly a reflection on the American's sense of proportion.) Further, a restaurant should be a sacred retreat, screened away from the world; which ideal is foreign to the very spirit of the great American hotel.

I do not complain that the representative celebrated restaurants fail to achieve an absolutely first-class cuisine. No large restaurant, either in the United States or out of it, can hope to achieve an absolutely first-class cuisine. The peerless restaurant is and must be a little one. Nor would I specially complain of the noise and thronging of the great restaurants, the deafening stridency of their music, the artistic violence of their decorations; these features of fashionable restaurants are now universal throughout the world, and the philosopher adapts himself to them. (Indeed, in favor of New York I must say that in one of the largest of its restaurants I heard a Chopin ballade well played on a good piano--and it was listened to in appreciative silence; event quite unique in my experience. Also, the large restaurant whose cuisine nearest approaches the absolutely first-class is in New York, and not in Europe.) Nor would I complain that the waiter in the great restaurant neither understands English nor speaks a tongue which resembles English, for this characteristic, too, is very marked across the Atlantic. (One night, in a Boston hotel, after lingual difficulties with a head-waiter, I asked him in French if he was not French. He cuttingly replied in waiter's American: "I _was_ French, but now I am an American." In another few years that man will be referring to Great Britain as "the old country.") ...

No; what disconcerts the European in the great American restaurant is the excessive, the occasionally maddening slowness of the service, and the lack of interest in the service. Touching the latter defect, the waiter is not impolite; he is not neglectful. But he is, too often, passively hostile, or, at best, neutral. He, or his chief, has apparently not grasped the fact that buying a meal is not like buying a ton of coal. If the purchaser is to get value for his money, he must enjoy his meal; and if he is to enjoy the meal, it must not merely be efficiently served, but it must be efficiently served in a sympathetic atmosphere. The supreme business of a good waiter is to create this atmosphere.... True, that even in the country which has carried cookery and restaurants to loftier heights than any other--I mean, of course, Belgium, the little country of little restaurants--the subtle ether which the truly civilized diner demands is rare enough. But in the great restaurants of the great cities of America it is, I fancy, rarer than anywhere else. _

Read next: Chapter 6. Sport And The Theater

Read previous: Chapter 4. Some Organizations

Table of content of Your United States: Impressions of a first visit


GO TO TOP OF SCREEN

Post your review
Your review will be placed after the table of content of this book