Our own experience of Pullman smoking-rooms is that they are the dullest holes on earth. The smoke is there all right, dense clouds of it. And such smoke!—any old thing that will burn, native shag, Turkish cigarettes, five-cent cigars, pipes of every age and degree of disrepute, all mixed up together. But of conversation there is none, except when a couple of commercial travellers start a competition in mendacity as to the number of orders they have taken in the towns along the line. As for stories—we haven't heard a new one yet.
So far as cards are concerned, we once saw a man play solitaire. And on two or three occasions in the more convivial past, crude but friendly souls have drawn from hip-pockets pint-flasks which they have timidly proffered by way of brightening the general gloom. We always hated to refuse—exhibitions of hospitality were so rare there. If an African chief came in and wanted to rub noses—we believe that is the usual expression of friendly interest in Ashantee—we would hardly have had the heart to decline.
About midnight, when one has no decent excuse for putting it off any longer—especially as the porter, who sleeps in the smoking-room, comes in and scowls every few minutes until one gives it up to him—we drag ourself to our berth. That is, we stow ourself away in a dark cubby-hole, too short for us by three inches actual measurement, and just high enough to bruise the top of our head every time we sit up. There we proceed to divest ourself of our garments and lay them away in places where they will fall down on our face at intervals during the night—the intervals being whenever we start to doze.
We would like to go into the details of our divestiture, with a view to comparing notes with other tall gentlemen who have been compelled to remove their habiliments—mentionable and otherwise—within the confines of a berth. In view, however, of the somewhat intimate nature of the case, we are obliged to let it go with the general statement that the performance is a highly acrobatic one. We get our things off somehow or other—probably we give anyone coming along the aisle the impression that a sea-lion or a dromedary has got into our compartment. And then, our final frantic struggle having made us free, we address ourself to sleep.
Sleeping-cars are so named because you try to and can't. Some people can, of course. When they can, they always snore—fiendishly. Invariably there is a man across the aisle with one of those going-down-for-the-third-time snores, the kind that suggest a muffled shriek of agony. All night long you keep hoping against hope that he is really strangling. But he never is. Next morning he always bobs up smiling and rubicund, and informs everyone in the wash-room that he slept like a top—meaning, of course, a racing automobile with the muffler cut out.
Somehow the night goes by. It is one of the melancholy compensations of life that everything passes. Just about dawn you drop off into the first decent nap you have been able to get; and twenty minutes later the porter reaches in and punches you in the ribs or pounds on the roof of the berth to let you know it is time you were up. As a matter of fact, you have a full hour or more before you arrive. But he believes in getting people up early. It gives him a chance to roll up the berths and stow them out of sight in the mysterious recesses the Lord and Mr. Pullman have provided for that purpose. Besides, it is a display of authority, and this is always dear to the porteresque heart—most people's hearts, in fact.
So you sit up suddenly and bang your head. Being thus thoroughly awakened, you glance out of the window and study the fence-posts or the clay banks past which you are speeding. Then you poke a frowsy head into the aisle through the curtains, and promptly drag it back as a large lady in a flowered kimona bears down upon you with an angry glare. It is obvious that she thinks you have been sitting there for half an hour peeping into the aisle till you could get that chance to look at her in her dishabille. Naturally you can't explain. What is there to say? Least of all can you tell her the simple truth, which is that if you had known anything like that was prowling around the car you wouldn't have peeped out for a flock of limousines—or should it be "covey?"
Will someone kindly tell us, will someone please explain, why it is ladies assume that frigidly severe attitude when anyone happens to look at them during their matutinal parades up and down the aisle? If we ourself catch anyone glancing at us while we meander towards the wash-room with our toothbrush and our other collar—anyone, that is, of the opposite sex, and it is surprising how very opposite some of them are—we merely blush in simple-hearted confusion. We may wonder why the lady should look at us. But it would never occur to us to be indignant over the matter, not even if we were wearing a flowered kimona and carried our toilet tools in a cute little silk bag.
In the wash-room you stand for half an hour behind a row of gentlemen with their heads in basins. Every now and then one comes up to breathe, and then he goes down again for another five minutes during which he throws soap-suds all over you. When finally you manage to get a basin yourself, the car gives a sudden lurch and it empties itself gracefully into your lap.
When you have contrived at last to wiggle into your clothes—they always look as if you had spent the night tying knots in them—you go back and sit on the end of your suit-case in the aisle, or somebody else's suit-case, while the porter brushes everybody in sight and takes a quarter away from each of them. We don't mind the quarter. We'd gladly give much more than that if he would only leave us alone. But he won't. He fixes us with his shiny eye; he beckons to us; and we walk away down the aisle to meet him. There he turns our coat-collar back, sifts an ounce or two of coal-dust down our neck, deftly blows the rest of it into our ear, knocks our hat all out of shape, seizes the coin which we feverishly proffer him as the price of our deliverance, and then drops us for the next victim.