Abroad at Home: American Ramblings, Observations, and Adventures of Julian StreetStreet, Julian
General
Abroad at Home: American Ramblings, Observations, and Adventures of Julian Street
Street, Julian
United States -- Description and travel; United States -- Social life and customs -- 1865-1918
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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