On a night well toward its noon, many years ago, a friend of the Easy Chair (so close as to be at the same time its worst enemy) was walking wearily up and down in the station at Portland, Maine, and wondering if the time for his train to start would ever come, and, if the time did come, whether his train would really take advantage of that opportunity to leave Portland. It was, of course, a night train, and of course he had engaged a lower berth1 in the sleeping-car; there are certain things that come by nature with the comfortable classes to which the friend of the Easy Chair belonged. He would no more have thought of travelling in one of the empty day coaches side-tracked in the station than he would have thought of going by stage, as he could remember doing in his boyhood. He stopped beside the cars and considered their potential passengers with amaze and compassion2; he laughed at the notion of his being himself one of them; and, when he turned his back on them, he was arrested by the sight of an elderly pair looking from the vantage of the platform into the interior of a lighted Pullman parlor-car which, for reasons of its own, was waiting in luminous3 detachment apart from the day coaches. There was something engaging in the gentle humility4 of the elderly pair who peered into the long, brilliant saloon with an effect not so much of ignorance as of inexperience. They were apparently5 not so rustic6 as they were what another friend of the Easy Chair calls villaginous; and they seemed not of the commonest uninformed villaginosity, but of general intelligence such as comes of reading and thinking of many modern things which one has never seen. As the eavesdropper7 presently made out from a colloquy8 unrestrained by consciousness of him, they had never seen a parlor-car before, except perhaps as it flashed by their meek9 little home depot10 with the rest of some express train that never stopped there.
"It is splendid, John," the woman said, holding by the man's arm while she leaned forward to the window which she tiptoed to reach with her eager eyes.
"I guess it's all of that," the man consented, sadly.
"I presume we sha'n't ever go in one," she suggested.
"Not likely," he owned, in the same discouraged tone.
They were both silent for a time. Then the woman said, with a deep, hopeless aspiration11, "Dear! I wish I could see inside one, once!"
The man said nothing, and if he shared her bold ambition he made no sign.
The eavesdropper faltered12 near their kind backs, wishing for something more from them which should give their souls away, but they remained silently standing13 there, and he did not somehow feel authorized14 to make them reflect that, if the car was lighted up, it must be open, and that the friendly porter somewhere within would not mind letting them look through it under his eye. Perhaps they did reflect, and the woman was trying to embolden15 the man to the hardy16 venture. In the end they did not attempt it, but they turned away with another sigh from the woman which found its echo in the eavesdropper's heart. Doubtless if they had penetrated17 that splendid interior without having paid for seats, it would, in some fine, mystical sort, have pauperized them; it would have corrupted19 them; they would have wished after that always to travel in such cars, when clearly they could not afford it; very possibly it might have led to their moral if not financial ruin. So he tried to still his bosom's ache, but he could never quite forget that gentle pair with their unrequited longing20, and the other day they came almost the first thing into his mind when he read that a great German steamship21 company had some thoughts of putting on a train of Pullman cars from the port of arrival to the mercantile metropolis22 which was the real end of their ships' voyages. He thought, whimsically, perversely23, how little difference it would make to that pair, how little to those measureless most whose journeys shall end in heaven, where Pullman passengers, or even passengers by the ordinary European first-class cars, may be only too glad to meet them. He gave a looser rein24 to his thoughts and considered how very little the ordinary necessities of life, such as Pullman cars and taxicabs and electric radiators25 and non-storage chickens and unsalted butter concern the great mass of the saints, who would find them the rarest luxuries, and could hardly be imagined coveting26 them; and then from this wild revery he fell to asking himself whether a Pullman train would be such a great advance or advantage over the old-fashioned European first-class carriages in which he had been so long content to travel with the native nobility. Self-brought to book on this point, he had to own that he had once had moments of thinking in a German second-class car that he would not change to an American Pullman if he could for even less than a third more money. He recalled a pleasant run from Crewe to Edinburgh in a third-class English car, when he never once thought of a Pullman car except to think it was no better. To be sure, this was after two-thirds of his third-class fellow-passengers had got out, and he was left to the sole enjoyment27 of two-thirds of the seats. It is the luxury of space which your more money buys you in England, where no one much lower than a duke or a prime minister now goes first class for a long haul. For short hauls it is different, and on the Continent it is altogether different. There you are often uncomfortably crowded in the first-class carriages, and doubtless would be in a Pullman if there were any, so that if you are wise, or only well informed, you will give the guard a shilling to telegraph before leaving London and get you a number on the Rapide from Calais to Paris.
It is astonishing how quickly knowledge of any such advisable precaution spreads among even such arrogantly28 stupid people as first-class passengers ordinarily are. By the time a certain train had started for Dover with that friend of the Easy Chair's already mentioned, every soul in his first-class compartment29 had telegraphed ahead, and when they arrived in Calais the earliest Englishman who got past the customs ran ahead and filled the racks of the carriage with his hand-baggage, so that the latest Frenchman was obliged to jump up and down and scream, and perhaps swear in his strange tongue, before he could find room for his valise, and then calm down and show himself the sweetest and civilest of men, and especially the obedient humble30 servant of the Englishman who had now made a merit of making way for his bag.
At this point the fable31 teaches that money will not buy everything in European travel, though some Americans imagine it will. It will not, for instance, buy comfort or decency32, though it will secure privacy in a French sleeper33 between Paris and Marseilles either way. For an augmentation of forty-five francs, or nine dollars, on the price of a first-class ticket, it will buy you a berth in a small pen which you must share with another animal, and be tossed hither and yon, night long, as in the berth of a Bermuda steamer. Second-class passengers in France or Italy cannot buy a berth in a sleeper for any money, and they may go hang or stand, for all the International Sleeping-Car Company cares; and this suggests the question whether in our own free and equal land the passengers in the ordinary day coaches are ever invited, by the first call or the last, to share the hospitalities of our dining-cars; or are these restricted to the proud stomachs of the Pullman passengers?
No, no; the privacy of a French sleeping-car is all very well, but for decency give our friend a good, old-fashioned Pullman sleeper at a third the money, with its curtains swaying with the motion of the car and muting the long-drawn, loud-drawn breathing of the serried34 sleepers35 behind them. To be sure, in the morning, when stooping backs begin to round the curtains out, and half-shod feet to thrust into the narrow gangway between them, the effect is of a familiarity, an intimacy36; but so much trust, so much brotherly kindness goes with it all that you could not call it indecency, though certainly you could not claim it privacy. It only proves, as that friend of ours was saying, that money cannot buy everything, and that, if you expect the Pullman parlor-cars to be an improvement on the German first-class cars, you will be disappointed, probably. First-class cars vary much all over Europe; even second-class cars do. In Austria they are not nearly so good as in Germany, and in Italy—poor, dear Italy!—they are worse still. That is because, the enemies of socialism say, the roads are state roads, or because, the friends of socialism say, the expropriated companies have dumped their worn-out rolling-stock on the commonwealth37, which must bear the shame of it with the stranger. Between these clashing claims we will not put our blade. All we say is that Italian railroad travel is as bad as heart could wish—the heart that loves Italy and holds dear the memory of the days when there were few railroads, if any, there, and one still went by diligence or vettura. The only absolutely good railroad travel is in England, where the corridor car imagined from the Pullman has realized the most exacting38 ideal of the traveller of any class. In the matter of dining-cars we have stood still (having attained39 perfection at a bound), while the English diner has shot ahead in simplicity40 and quality of refection. With us a dollar buys more dinner than you wish or like; with them three shillings pay for an elegant sufficiency, and a tip of sixpence purchases an explicit41 gratitude42 from the waiter which a quarter is often helpless to win from his dark antitype with us. The lunch served on the steamer train from London to Liverpool leaves the swollen43, mistimed dinner on the Boston express—
"But what about that 5 P.M. breakfast which you got, no longer ago than last September, on the express between Salisbury and Exeter?" our friend exults44 to ask; and we condescend45 to answer with forced candor46:
Yes, that was rather droll47. No Englishman would dream of ordering afternoon tea consisting of chops, boiled potatoes, and a pot of souchong, and, if we chose to do so, we took a serious chance. But starvation will drive one to anything; we had had nothing to eat since leaving Salisbury three hours before, and in the English air this is truly famine. Besides, the amiable48 agent who came to our compartment for our order pledged his word that those potatoes should be ready in twenty minutes; and so they were, and so were the chops, and so, of course, was the tea. What he had failed to specify49 was that the dining-car had been left, by divers50 defections at the junctions51 passed, the last car in our train, and that it was now straining at its leash52 in wild leaps and bounds. One reached it by passing through more corridor cars than there are Pullmans and day coaches in a west-bound Lake Shore train, and when one arrived one reeled and flounced into one's seat by such athletics53 as one uses in a Bermuda steamer (or did use in the old fifteen-hundred-ton kind) crossing the Gulf54 Stream. When once comparatively secure in one's chair, the combat with the lunch began. Mrs. Siddons would have been at home there, for there was nothing for it but to stab the potatoes, and all one's cunning of fence was needed to hold one's own with the chops. But how delicious they were! How the first mealed and the last melted in the mouth; and the tea, when once poured from the dizzy height at which the pot had to be held, and the wild whirl in which the cup had to be caught to the lips, how it cheered without inebriating55, and how the spirit rose to meet it! The waiter, dancing and swaying like any ship's steward56, served the stray Americans with as much respectful gravity as if they had been county-family English and he had been for generations in their service. He did not deprecate the capers57 of the car, but only casually58 owned that, when it happened to be the last in the train, it did pitch about a bit, sir.
No, England is the only country where you can get the whole worth of your money in railroad travel, and the well-to-do sinner can enjoy the comfort which must be his advance recompense in this world for the happiness he cannot warrantably count upon in the next. That steamer train of Pullmans in Germany will never contest the palm with the English corridor train; nor will our palatial59, porterless depots60 vie with the simplest of these English wayside stations, where the soft endearments61 of the railway servants penetrate18 to the very interior of the arriving stranger's compartment and relieve him of all anxiety for his hand-baggage. Then the cloak-room, that refuge of temporary sojourn62, where his baggage remains63 in the porter's charge till it is put back into the train, who will contend that our parcels' windows, with their high counters fencing the depositor from the grim youths standing like receiving and paying tellers64 within, compare with the English cloak-room? Its very name descends65 from the balls and assemblies of the past, and graces the public enjoyment of its convenience with something of the courtesy and dignity of the exclusive pleasures of the upper classes; it brings to one sense a vision of white shoulders bent66 over trim maids slippering slim feet, and to another the faint, proud odors of flowers that withered67 a hundred years ago.
But what vain concession68 is this to the outworn ideals of a state and a condition justly superseded69! How far we have got from that gentle pair with whom we began peering into the parlor-car in Portland, Maine! To such as they it will matter little whether Pullman cars are or are not put on that steamer train in North Germany. A great danger is that the vast horde70 of Americans who travel will forget the immeasurable majority who remain at home, and will lose in their sophistication the heaven-glimpsing American point of view. It is very precious, that point of view, and the foreigner who wins it is a happier man than the native who purse-proudly puts it away. When we part with the daily habit of trolleys71 and begin to think in cabs and taxicabs; when we pass the line of honest day coaches and buy a seat in the parlor-car; when we turn from pie, or baked beans, and coffee at the refreshment-counter and keep our hunger for the table d'h?te of the dining-car; when we buy a room in the steamboat in disdain72 of the berth that comes with our ticket; when we refuse to be one of four or even two in the cabin of the simpler steamers and will not go abroad on any vessel73 of less than twenty or thirty thousand tons, with small, separate tables and tuxedos74 in the saloon; when we forsake75 the clothing-store with its democratic misfit for all figures and order our suits in London, then we begin to barter76 away our birthright of republican simplicity, and there is soon nothing for us but a coronet by marriage in the family or a quarter-section of public land in northwestern Canada.
There has been altogether too much talk (some of it, we contritely77 own, has been ours) of the comparative comforts and discomforts78 of life for the better-to-do in Europe and America. In the demand for Pullman trains between our port of arrival and the end of our journey when we go to the Continent for a much-needed rest, we are apt to forget the fellow-citizens whom we saw across the impassable barrier dividing our first class from them on the steamer, and who will find the second-class German cars quite good enough for them, and better than our day coaches at home. If we cannot remember these, then let us remember those for whom Pullmans are not good enough and who spurn79 the dust of our summer ways in their automobiles80, and leave the parlor-cars to our lower-class vulgarity. Such people take their automobiles to Europe with them, and would not use that possible Pullman train if they found it waiting for them at the port of arrival in Germany. What is the use? It will soon not be an affair of automobiles, but of aeroplanes, at the ports of European arrival, and a Pullman train will look sadly strange and old to the debarking passengers. No one will want to take it, as no one would now want to take a bicycle, or even a "bicycle built for two." These things are all comparative; there is nothing positive, nothing ultimate in the luxuries, the splendors81 of life. Soon the last word in them takes on a vulgarity of accent; and Distinction turns from them "with sick and scornful looks averse," and listens for the
"airy tongues that syllable82 men's names
On sands and shores and desert wildernesses83."
Simplicity, at the furthest possible remove from all complexity84, will be the next word—the word that follows the last, the woman's word.
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1
berth
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| n.卧铺，停泊地，锚位；v.使停泊 | |
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compassion
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| n.同情，怜悯 | |
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luminous
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| adj.发光的，发亮的；光明的；明白易懂的；有启发的 | |
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4
humility
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| n.谦逊，谦恭 | |
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apparently
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| adv.显然地；表面上，似乎 | |
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rustic
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| adj.乡村的，有乡村特色的；n.乡下人，乡巴佬 | |
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7
eavesdropper
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| 偷听者 | |
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8
colloquy
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| n.谈话，自由讨论 | |
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9
meek
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| adj.温顺的，逆来顺受的 | |
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depot
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| n.仓库，储藏处；公共汽车站；火车站 | |
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aspiration
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| n.志向，志趣抱负；渴望；(语)送气音；吸出 | |
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12
faltered
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| （嗓音）颤抖( falter的过去式和过去分词 )； 支吾其词； 蹒跚； 摇晃 | |
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13
standing
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| n.持续，地位；adj.永久的，不动的，直立的，不流动的 | |
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authorized
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| a.委任的，许可的 | |
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embolden
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| v.给…壮胆，鼓励 | |
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16
hardy
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| adj.勇敢的，果断的，吃苦的；耐寒的 | |
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17
penetrated
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| adj. 击穿的，鞭辟入里的 动词penetrate的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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18
penetrate
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| v.透(渗)入；刺入，刺穿；洞察，了解 | |
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corrupted
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| （使）败坏( corrupt的过去式和过去分词 )； （使）腐化； 引起（计算机文件等的）错误； 破坏 | |
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longing
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| n.（for）渴望 | |
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21
steamship
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| n.汽船，轮船 | |
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metropolis
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| n.首府；大城市 | |
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perversely
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| adv. 倔强地 | |
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24
rein
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| n.疆绳，统治，支配；vt.以僵绳控制，统治 | |
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radiators
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| n.（暖气设备的）散热器( radiator的名词复数 )；汽车引擎的冷却器，散热器 | |
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26
coveting
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| v.贪求，觊觎( covet的现在分词 ) | |
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enjoyment
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| n.乐趣；享有；享用 | |
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28
arrogantly
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| adv.傲慢地 | |
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compartment
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| n.卧车包房，隔间；分隔的空间 | |
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30
humble
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| adj.谦卑的，恭顺的；地位低下的；v.降低，贬低 | |
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fable
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| n.寓言；童话；神话 | |
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decency
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| n.体面，得体，合宜，正派，庄重 | |
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sleeper
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| n.睡眠者，卧车，卧铺 | |
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serried
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| adj.拥挤的；密集的 | |
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sleepers
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| n.卧铺（通常以复数形式出现）；卧车( sleeper的名词复数 )；轨枕；睡觉（呈某种状态）的人；小耳环 | |
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intimacy
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| n.熟悉，亲密，密切关系，亲昵的言行 | |
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commonwealth
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| n.共和国，联邦，共同体 | |
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exacting
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| adj.苛求的，要求严格的 | |
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39
attained
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| （通常经过努力）实现( attain的过去式和过去分词 )； 达到； 获得； 达到（某年龄、水平、状况） | |
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40
simplicity
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| n.简单，简易；朴素；直率，单纯 | |
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41
explicit
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| adj.详述的，明确的；坦率的；显然的 | |
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42
gratitude
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| adj.感激，感谢 | |
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43
swollen
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| adj.肿大的，水涨的；v.使变大，肿胀 | |
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44
exults
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| 狂喜，欢跃( exult的第三人称单数 ) | |
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45
condescend
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| v.俯就，屈尊；堕落，丢丑 | |
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46
candor
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| n.坦白，率真 | |
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47
droll
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| adj.古怪的，好笑的 | |
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48
amiable
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| adj.和蔼可亲的，友善的，亲切的 | |
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49
specify
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| vt.指定，详细说明 | |
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50
divers
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| adj.不同的；种种的 | |
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51
junctions
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| 联结点( junction的名词复数 )； 会合点； （公路或铁路的）交叉路口； （电缆等的）主结点 | |
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52
leash
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| n.牵狗的皮带，束缚；v.用皮带系住 | |
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53
athletics
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| n.运动，体育，田径运动 | |
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54
gulf
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| n.海湾；深渊，鸿沟；分歧，隔阂 | |
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55
inebriating
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| vt.使酒醉，灌醉（inebriate的现在分词形式） | |
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56
steward
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| n.乘务员，服务员；看管人；膳食管理员 | |
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57
capers
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| n.开玩笑( caper的名词复数 )；刺山柑v.跳跃，雀跃( caper的第三人称单数 ) | |
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casually
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| adv.漠不关心地，无动于衷地，不负责任地 | |
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palatial
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| adj.宫殿般的，宏伟的 | |
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depots
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| 仓库( depot的名词复数 )； 火车站； 车库； 军需库 | |
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endearments
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| n.表示爱慕的话语，亲热的表示( endearment的名词复数 ) | |
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sojourn
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| v./n.旅居，寄居；逗留 | |
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63
remains
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| n.剩余物，残留物；遗体，遗迹 | |
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tellers
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| n.（银行）出纳员( teller的名词复数 )；（投票时的）计票员；讲故事等的人；讲述者 | |
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65
descends
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| v.下来( descend的第三人称单数 )；下去；下降；下斜 | |
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bent
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| n.爱好，癖好；adj.弯的；决心的，一心的 | |
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67
withered
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| adj. 枯萎的，干瘪的，（人身体的部分器官）因病萎缩的或未发育良好的 动词wither的过去式和过去分词形式 | |
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concession
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| n.让步，妥协；特许(权) | |
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69
superseded
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| [医]被代替的，废弃的 | |
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horde
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| n.群众，一大群 | |
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71
trolleys
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| n.（两轮或四轮的）手推车( trolley的名词复数 )；装有脚轮的小台车；电车 | |
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72
disdain
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| n.鄙视，轻视；v.轻视，鄙视，不屑 | |
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vessel
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| n.船舶；容器，器皿；管，导管，血管 | |
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tuxedos
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| n.餐服，无尾晚礼服( tuxedo的名词复数 ) | |
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forsake
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| vt.遗弃，抛弃；舍弃，放弃 | |
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barter
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| n.物物交换，以货易货，实物交易 | |
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contritely
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discomforts
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| n.不舒适( discomfort的名词复数 )；不愉快，苦恼 | |
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79
spurn
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| v.拒绝，摈弃；n.轻视的拒绝；踢开 | |
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automobiles
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| n.汽车( automobile的名词复数 ) | |
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81
splendors
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| n.华丽( splendor的名词复数 )；壮丽；光辉；显赫 | |
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syllable
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| n.音节；vt.分音节 | |
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83
wildernesses
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| 荒野( wilderness的名词复数 )； 沙漠； （政治家）在野； 不再当政（或掌权） | |
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complexity
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| n.复杂(性)，复杂的事物 | |
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