Part 6 (1/2)
I. PHILADELPHIA
AN EARLY TRAIN
[Ill.u.s.tration]
The course of events has compelled me for several months to catch an early train at Broad Street three times a week. I call it an ”early”
train, but, of course, these matters are merely relative; 7:45 are the figures illuminated over the gateway--not so very precocious, perhaps; but quite rathe enough for one of Haroun-al-Raschid temper, who seldom seeks the ”oblivion of repose” (Boswell's phrase) before 1 A. M.
Nothing is more pathetic in human nature than its faculty of self-deception. Winding up the alarm clock (the night before) I meditate as to the exact time to elect for its disturbing buzz. If I set it at 6:30 that will give me plenty of time to shave and reach the station with leisure for a pleasurable cup of coffee. But (so frail is the human will) when I wake at 6:30 I will think to myself, ”There is plenty of time,” and probably turn over for ”another five minutes.” This will mean a hideous spasm of awakening conscience about 7:10--an unbathed and unshaven tumult of preparation, malisons on the shoe manufacturers who invented boots with eyelets all the way up, a frantic sprint to Sixteenth Street and one of those horrid intervals that shake the very citadel of human reason when I ponder whether it is safer to wait for a possible car or must start hotfoot for the station at once. All this is generally decided by setting the clock for 6:50. Then, if I am spry, I can be under way by 7:20 and have a little time to be philosophical at the corner of Sixteenth and Pine. Of the vile seizures of pa.s.sion that shake the bosom when a car comes along, seems about to halt, and then pa.s.ses without stopping--of the spiritual scars these crises leave on the soul of the victim, I cannot trust myself to speak. It does not always happen, thank goodness. One does not always have to throb madly up Sixteenth, with head retorted over one's shoulder to see if a car may still be coming, while the legs make what speed they may on sliddery paving. Sometimes the car does actually appear and one buffets aboard and is buried in a brawny human ma.s.s. There is a stop, and one wonders fiercely whether a horse is down ahead, and one had better get out at once and run for it. Tightly wedged in the heart of the car, nothing can be seen. It is all very nerve-racking, and I study, for quietness of mind, the familiar advertising card of the white-bearded old man announcing ”It is really very remarkable that a cigar of this quality can be had for seven cents.”
Suppose, however, that fortune is with me. I descend at Market Street, and the City Hall dial, s.h.i.+ning softly in the fast paling blue of morning, marks 7:30. Now I begin to enjoy myself. I reflect on the curious way in which time seems to stand still during the last minutes before the departure of a train. The half-hour between 7 and 7:30 has vanished in a gruesome flash. Now follow fifteen minutes of exquisite dalliance. Every few moments I look suddenly and savagely at the clock to see if it can be playing some saturnine trick. No, even now it is only 7:32. In the lively alertness of the morning mind a whole wealth of thought and accurate observation can be crammed into a few seconds. I halt for a moment at the window of that little lunchroom on Market Street (between Sixteenth and Fifteenth) where the food comes swiftly speeding from the kitchen on a moving belt. I wonder whether to have breakfast there. It is such fun to see a platter of pale yellow scrambled eggs sliding demurely beside the porcelain counter and whipped dextrously off in front of you by the presiding waiter. But the superlative coffee of the Broad Street Station lunch counter generally lures me on.
What mundane joy can surpa.s.s the pleasure of approaching the station lunch counter, with full ten minutes to satisfy a morning appet.i.te!
”Morning, colonel,” says the waiter, recognizing a steady customer.
”Wheatcakes and coffee,” you cry. With one deft gesture, it seems, he has handed you a gla.s.s br.i.m.m.i.n.g with ice water and spread out a snowy napkin. In another moment here is the coffee, with the generous jug of cream. You splash in a large lump of ice to make it cool enough to drink. Perhaps the seat next you is empty, and you put your books and papers on it, thus not having to balance them gingerly on your knees.
All round you is a l.u.s.ty savour of satisfaction, the tinkle of cash registers, napkins fluttering and flas.h.i.+ng across the counters, coloured waiters darting to and fro, great clouds of steam rising where the big dish covers are raised on the cooking tables. You see the dark-brown coffee gently quivering in the gla.s.s gauge of the nickel boiler. Then here come the wheatcakes. Nowhere else on earth, I firmly believe, are they cooked to just that correct delicacy of golden brown colour; nowhere else are they so soft and light of texture, so hot, so beautifully overlaid with a smooth, almost intangible suggestion of crispness. Two golden b.u.t.ter pats salute the eye, and a jug of syrup.
It is now 7:38.
As everyone knows, the correct thing is to start immediately on the first cake, using only syrup. The method of dealing with the other two is cla.s.sic. One lifts the upper one and places a whole pat of b.u.t.ter on the lower cake. Then one replaces the upper cake upon the lower, leaving the b.u.t.ter to its fate. In that hot and enviable embrace the b.u.t.ter liquefies and spreads itself, gently anointing the field of coming action. Upon the upper s.h.i.+eld one smilingly distributes the second b.u.t.ter pat, knifed off into small slices for greater speed of melting.
By the time the first cake has been eaten, with the syrup, the other two will be ready for manifest destiny. The b.u.t.ter will be docile and submissive. Now, after again making sure of the time (7:40) the syrup is brought into play and the palate has the congenial task of determining whether the added delight of melting b.u.t.ter outweighs the greater hotness and primal thrill of the first cake which was glossed with the syrup only. You drain your coffee to the dregs; gaze pityingly on those rus.h.i.+ng in to snap up a breakfast before the 8 o'clock leaves for New York, pay your check, and saunter out to the train. It is 7:43.
This, to be sure, is only the curtain-raiser to the pleasures to follow.
This has been a physical and carnal pleasure. Now follow delights of the mind. In the great gloomy shed wafts and twists of thick steam are jetting upward, heavily coiled in the cold air. In the train you smoke two pipes and read the morning paper. Then you are set down at Haverford. It is like a fairyland of unbelief. Trees and shrubbery are crusted and sheathed in crystal, lucid like chandeliers in the flat, thin light. Along the fence, as you go up the hill, you marvel at the scarlet berries in the hedge, gleaming through the gla.s.sy ribs of the bushes. The old willow tree by the Conklin gate is etched against the sky like a j.a.panese drawing--it has a curious greenish colour beneath that gray sky. There is some mystery in all this. It seems more beautiful than a merely mortal earth vexed by sinful men has any right to be. There is some ice palace in Hans Andersen which is something like it. In a little grove, the boughs, bent down with their s.h.i.+ning glaziery, creak softly as they sway in the moving air. The evergreens are clotted with lumps and bags of transparent icing, their fronds sag to the ground. A pale twinkling blueness sifts over distant vistas. The sky whitens in the south and points of light leap up to the eye as the wind turns a loaded branch.
A certain seriousness of demeanour is noticeable on the generally unfurrowed brows of student friends. Midyears are on and one sees them walking, freighted with precious and perishable erudition, toward the halls of trial. They seem a little oppressed with care, too preoccupied to relish the entrancing pallor of this crystallized Eden. One carries, gravely, a cus.h.i.+on and an alarm clock. Not such a bad theory of life, perhaps--to carry in the crises of existence a cus.h.i.+on of philosophy and an alarum of resolution.
RIDGE AVENUE
One of the odd things about human beings is, that wherever they happen to live they accept it as a matter of course. In various foreign cities I have often been amused (as every traveller has) to see people going about their affairs just as though it were natural and unquestionable for them to be there. It is just the same at home. Everyone I see on the streets seems to be not at all amazed at living here instead of (let us say) Indianapolis or Nashville. I envy my small Urchin his sense of the extreme improbability of everything. When he gets on a trolley car he draws a long breath and looks around in ecstasy at the human scenery. I am teaching him to say in a loud, clear tone, as he gets on the car, ”Look at all the human beings!” in the same accent of amazement that he uses when he goes to the Zoo. Perhaps in this way he will preserve the happy faculty of being surprised.
It is an agreeable thing to keep the same sense of surprise in one's home town that one would have in a strange city. You will find much to startle you if you keep your eyes open. Yesterday, for instance, I was lucky enough to meet a gentleman who had stood only a few feet away from Lincoln when he made the Gettysburg Speech. Then I found that in a certain cafeteria which I frequent the price you pay for your lunch is always just one cent less than that punched on the check. The cas.h.i.+er explained that this always gives a pleasant surprise to the customers, and has proved such a good advertising dodge that the proprietor made it a habit. And I saw, in a clothing dealer's window on Ninth Street, some fuzzy caps for men, mottled purple and ochre, that proved that the adventurous spirit has not died in the breast of the male s.e.x.
There is much to exercise the eye in a voyage along Ridge Avenue.
Approaching by way of Ninth Street, one sees in the window of a barber shop the new contract that the employing barbers have drawn up with their journeymen. This agreement shows a sound sense of human equities, proclaiming as it does that ”the owner must not do no act to injure the barber personal earnings.” It suddenly occurred to me, what I had not thought of before, how the barbers of Great Britain must have grieved when a London newspaper got up (some years ago) an agitation in favour of every man in England raising a beard in memory of King Edward. The plan was that the money thus saved was to be devoted to building--I had almost said ”growing”--a battles.h.i.+p, to be named after the Merry Monarch. Of course, one should not speak of raising a beard, but of lowering it. However----
Ridge Avenue begins at Ninth and Vine, in a mood of depression. Perhaps the fact that it runs out toward the city's greatest collection of cemeteries has made it morbidly conscious of human perishability. At any rate, it starts among p.a.w.nshops, old clothing and furniture, and bottles of Old Virginia Bitters, the Great Man Restorer. The famous National Theatre at Callowhill Street has become a garage; it is queer to see the old proscenium arch and gilded ceiling dustily vaulted over a fleet of motortrucks. After a wilderness of railway yards one comes to a curious bit in the 1100 block; a little brick tunnel that bends around into a huddle of backyards and small houses, where a large green parrot was stooping and nodding on a pile of old boxes. This little scene is overlooked by the tall brown spires of the Church of the a.s.sumption on Spring Garden Street.
There is matter for tarrying at the Spring Garden Street crossing. Here is an ambitious fountain built by the bequest of Mary Rebecca Darby Smith, with the carving by J. J. Boyle picturing another Rebecca (she of Genesis xxiv, 14) giving a drink to Abraham's servant and his camels. It is carved in the bronze that the donor gave the fountain ”To refresh the weary and thirsty, both man and beast,” so it is disconcerting to find it dry, as dry as the inns along the way. The horse trough is boarded over and thirsting equines go up to Broad Street for a draught. The seat by the fountain was occupied by a man reading the New York _Journal_, always a depressing sight.
Across from the fountain is one of the best magazine and stationery shops in the city. Here I overheard a conversation which I reproduce textually. ”What you doing, reading?” said one to another. ”Yes, reading about the biggest four-flusher in the Yew-nited States,” said he, looking over an afternoon paper which had just come in. ”Who do you mean?” ”Penrose. Say if it was a Republican in the White House, theyda pa.s.sed the treaty long ago.” The proprietor of this shop is a humorist.