Suddenly the Pullman Company awoke to the absurdity of it all. More than ten years ago it came to the decision that architecture was all right in its way, but that it was not a fundamental part of car building. It separated the two. It began to throw out the grilles and the other knickknacks, even before it had committed itself definitely to the use of the steel car.
Recently it has done much more. It has banished all but the very simplest of the moldings, and all the hangings save those that are absolutely necessary to the operation of the car. It has studied and it has experimented until it has produced in the sleeping car of to-day what is probably the most efficient railroad vehicle in the world. Our foreign cousins scoff at it and call it immodest; but we may reserve our own opinion as to the relative modesty of some of their inst.i.tutions.
This, however, is not the story of the Pullman car. It is the story of that ebony autocrat who presides so genially and yet so firmly over it.
It is the story of George the porter--the six thousand Georges standing to-night to greet you and the other traveling folk at the doors of the waiting cars. And George is worthy of a pa.s.sing thought. He was born in the day when the negro servant was the pride of America--when the black man stood at your elbow in the dining rooms of the greatest of our hotels; when a colored butler was the joy of the finest of the homes along Fifth Avenue or round Rittenhouse Square. Transplanted, he quickly became an American inst.i.tution. And there is many a man who avers that never elsewhere has there been such a servant as a good negro servant.
Fashions change, and in the transplanting of other social ideas the black man has been shoved aside. It is only in the Pullman service that he retains his old-time pride and prestige. That company to-day might almost be fairly called his salvation, despite the vexing questions of the wages and tips of the sleeping-car porters that have recently come to the fore. Yet it is almost equally true that the black man has been the salvation of the sleeping-car service. Experiments have been made in using others. One or two of the Canadian roads, which operate their own sleeping cars, have placed white men as porters; down in the Southwest the inevitable Mexicano has been placed in the familiar blue uniform.
None of them has been satisfactory; and, indeed, it is not every negro who is capable of taking charge of a sleeping car.
The Pullman Company pa.s.ses by the West Indians--the type so familiar to every man who has ridden many times in the elevators of the apartment houses of upper New York. It prefers to recruit its porters from certain of the states of the Old South--Georgia and the Carolinas. It almost limits its choice to certain counties within those states. It shows a decided preference for the sons of its employees; in fact, it might almost be said that to-day there are black boys growing up down there in the cotton country who have come into the world with the hope and expectation of being made Pullman car porters. The company that operates those cars prefers to discriminate--and it does discriminate.
That is its first step toward service--the careful selection of the human factor. The next step lies in the proper training of that factor; and as soon as a young man enters the service of the Pullmans he goes to school--in some one of the large railroad centers that act as hubs for that system. Sometimes the school is held in one of the division offices, but more often it goes forward in the familiar aisle of a sleeping car, sidetracked for the purpose.
Its curriculum is unusual but it is valuable. One moment it considers the best methods to "swat the fly"--to drive him from the vehicle in which he is an unwelcome pa.s.senger; the next moment the cla.s.s is being shown the proper handling of the linen closet, the proper methods of folding and putting away clean linen and blankets, the correct way of stacking in the laundry bags the dirty and discarded bedding. The porter is taught that a sheet once unfolded cannot be used again. Though it may be really spotless, yet technically it is dirty; and it must make a round trip to the laundry before it can reenter the service.
All these things are taught the soph.o.m.ore porters by a wrinkled veteran of the service; and they are minutely prescribed in the voluminous rule book issued by the Pullman Company, which believes that the first foundation of service is discipline. So the school and the rule book do not hesitate at details. They teach the immature porter not merely the routine of making up and taking down beds, and the proper maintenance of the car, but they go into such finer things as the calling of a pa.s.senger, for instance. Noise is tabooed, and so even a soft knocking on the top of the berth is forbidden. The porter must gently shake the curtains or the bedding from without.
When the would-be porter is through in this schoolroom his education goes forward out on the line. Under the direction of one of the grizzled autocrats he first comes in contact with actual patrons--comes to know their personalities and their peculiarities. Also, he comes to know the full meaning of that overused and abused word--service. After all, here is the full measure of the job. He is a servant. He must realize that.
And as a servant he must perfect himself. He must rise to the countless opportunities that will come to him each night he is on the run. He must do better--he must antic.i.p.ate them.
Take such a man as Eugene Roundtree, who has been running a smoking car on one of the limited trains between New York and Boston for two decades--save for that brief transcendent hour when Charles S. Mellen saw himself destined to become transportation overlord of New England and appropriated Roundtree for a personal servant and porter of his private car. Roundtree is a negro of the very finest type. He is a man who commands respect and dignity--and receives it. And Roundtree, as porter of the Pullman smoker on the Merchants" Limited, has learned to antic.i.p.ate.
He knows at least five hundred of the big bankers and business men of both New York and Boston--though he knows the Boston crowd best. He knows the men who belong to the Somerset and the Algonquin Clubs--the men who are Boston enough to p.r.o.nounce Peabody "Pebbuddy." And they know him. Some of them have a habit of dropping in at the New Haven ticket offices and demanding: "Is Eugene running up on the Merchants"
to-night?"
"It isn"t just knowing them and being able to call them by their names,"
he will tell you if you can catch him in one of his rarely idle moments.
"I"ve got to remember what they smoke and what they drink. When Mr.
Blank tells me he wants a cigar it"s my job to remember what he smokes and to put it before him. I don"t ask him what he wants. I antic.i.p.ate."
And by antic.i.p.ating Roundtree approaches a sort of _n_th degree of service and receives one of the "fattest" of all the Pullman runs.
George Sylvester is another man of the Roundtree type--only his run trends to the west from New York instead of to the east, which means that he has a somewhat different type of patron with which to deal.
Sylvester is a porter on the Twentieth Century Limited; and, like Roundtree, he is a colored man of far more than ordinary force and character. He had opportunity to show both on a winter night, when his train was stopped and a drunken man--a man who was making life hideous for other pa.s.sengers on Sylvester"s car--was taken from the train. The fact that the man was a powerful politician, a man who raved the direst threats when arrested, made the porter"s job the more difficult.
The Pullman Company, in this instance alone, had good cause to remember Sylvester"s force and courage--and consummate tact--just as it has good cause in many such episodes to be thankful for the cool-headedness of its black man in a blue uniform who stands in immediate control of its property.
Sylvester prefers to forget that episode. He likes to think of the nice part of the Century"s runs--the pa.s.sengers who are quiet, and kind, and thoughtful, and remembering. They are a sort whom it is a pleasure for a porter to serve. They are the people who make an excess-fare train a "fat run." There are other fat runs, of course: the Overland, the Olympian, the Congressional--and of General Henry Forrest, of the Congressional, more in a moment--fat trains that follow the route of the Century.
It was on one of these, coming east from Cleveland on a snowy night in February last, that a resourceful porter had full use for his store of tact; for there is, in the community that has begun to stamp Sixth City on its shirts and its shoe tabs, a bank president who--to put the matter lightly--is a particular traveler. More than one black man, rising high in porter service, has had his vanity come to grief when this crotchety personage has come on his car.
And the man himself was one of those who are marked up and down the Pullman trails. An unwritten code was being transmitted between the black brethren of the sleeping cars as to his whims and peculiarities.
It was well that every brother in service in the Cleveland district should know the code. When Mr. X entered his drawing-room--he never rides elsewhere in the car--shades were to be drawn, a pillow beaten and ready by the window, and matches on the window sill. X would never ask for these things; but G.o.d help the poor porter who forgot them!
So you yourself can imagine the emotions of Whittlesey Warren, porter of the car Thanatopsis, bound east on Number Six on the snowy February night when X came through the portals of that scarabic antique, the Union Depot at Cleveland, a redcap with his grips in the wake. Warren recognized his man. The code took good care as to that. He followed the banker down the aisle, tucked away the bags, pulled down the shades, fixed the pillow and placed the matches on the window sill.
The banker merely grunted approval, lighted a big black cigar and went into the smoker, while Warren gave some pa.s.sing attention to the other patrons of his car. It was pa.s.sing attention at the best; for after a time the little bell annunciator began to sing merrily and persistently at him--and invariably its commanding needle pointed to D.R. And on the drawing-room Whittlesey Warren danced a constant attention.
"Here, you n.i.g.g.e.r!" X shouted at the first response. "How many times have I got to tell all of you to put the head of my bed toward the engine?"
Whittlesey Warren looked at the bed. He knew the make-up of the train.
The code had been met. The banker"s pillows were toward the locomotive.
But his job was not to argue and dispute. He merely said:
"Yas-suh. Scuse me!" And he remade the bed while X lit a stogy and went back to the smoker.
That was at Erie--Erie, and the snow was falling more briskly than at Cleveland. Slowing into Dunkirk, the banker returned and glanced through the car window. He could see by the snow against the street lamps that the train was apparently running in the opposite direction. His chubby finger went against the push b.u.t.ton. Whittlesey Warren appeared at the door. The language that followed cannot be reproduced in THE SAt.u.r.dAY EVENING POST. Suffice it to say that the porter remembered who he was and what he was, and merely remade the bed.
The banker bit off the end of another cigar and retired once again to the club car. When he returned, the train was backing into the Buffalo station. At that unfortunate moment he raised his car shade--and Porter Whittlesey Warren again reversed the bed, to the accompaniment of the most violent abuse that had ever been heaped on his defenseless head.
Yet not once did he complain--he remembered that a servant a servant always is. And in the morning X must have remembered; for a folded bill went into Warren"s palm--a bill of a denomination large enough to buy that fancy vest which hung in a haberdasher"s shop over on San Juan Hill.
If you have been asking yourself all this while just what a fat run is, here is your answer: Tips; a fine train filled with fine ladies and fine gentlemen, not all of them so cranky as X, of Cleveland--thank heaven for that!--though a good many of them have their peculiarities and are willing to pay generously for the privilege of indulging those peculiarities.
Despite the rigid discipline of the Pullman Company the porter"s leeway is a very considerable one. His instructions are never to say "Against the rules!" but rather "I do not know what can be done about it"--and then to make a quick reference to the Pullman conductor, who is his arbiter and his court of last resort. His own initiative, however, is not small.
Two newspaper men in New York know that. They had gone over to Boston for a week-end, had separated momentarily at its end, to meet at the last of the afternoon trains for Gotham. A had the joint finances and tickets for the trip; but B, hurrying through the traffic tangle of South Station, just ninety seconds before the moment of departure, knew that he would find him already in the big Pullman observation car. He was not asked to show his ticket at the train gate. Boston, with the fine spirit of the Tea Party still flowing in its blue veins, has always resented that as a sort of railroad impertinence.
B did not find A. He did not really search for him until Back Bay was pa.s.sed and the train was on the first leg of its journey, with the next stop at Providence. Then it was that A was not to be found. Then B realized that his side partner had missed the train. He dropped into a corner and searched his own pockets. A battered quarter and three pennies came to view--and the fare from Boston to Providence is ninety cents!
Then it was that the initiative of a well-trained Pullman porter came into play. He had stood over the distressed B while he was making an inventory of his resources.
"Done los" something, boss?" said the autocrat of the car.
B told the black man his story in a quick, straightforward manner; and the black man looked into his eyes. B returned the glance. Perhaps he saw in that honest ebony face something of the expression of the faithful servants of wartime who refused to leave their masters even after utter ruin had come upon them. The porter drew forth a fat roll of bills.
"Ah guess dat, ef you-all"ll give meh yo" business cyard, Ah"ll be able to fee-nance yo" trip dis time."
To initiative the black man was adding intuition. He had studied his man. He was forever using his countless opportunities to study men. It was not so much of a gamble as one might suppose.
A pretty well-known editor was saved from a mighty embarra.s.sing time; and some other people have been saved from similarly embarra.s.sing situations through the intuition and the resources of the Pullman porter. The conductor--both of the train and of the sleeping-car service--is not permitted to exercise such initiative or intuition; but the porter can do and frequently does things of this very sort. His recompense for them, however, is hardly to be cla.s.sed as a tip.
The tip is the nub of the whole situation. Almost since the very day when the Pioneer began to blaze the trail of luxury over the railroads of the land, and the autocrat of the Pullman car created his servile but entirely honorable calling, it has been a mooted point. Recently a great Federal commission has blazed the strong light of publicity on it.
Robert T. Lincoln, son of the Emanc.i.p.ator, and, as we have already said, the head and front of the Pullman Company, sat in a witness chair at Washington and answered some pretty pointed questions as to the division of the porter"s income between the company and the pa.s.senger who employed him. Wages, it appeared, are twenty-seven dollars and a half a month for the first fifteen years of the porter"s service, increasing thereafter to thirty dollars a month, slightly augmented by bonuses for good records.
The porter also receives his uniforms free after ten years of service, and in some cases of long service his pay may reach forty-two dollars a month. The rest of his income is in the form of tips. And Mr. Lincoln testified that during the past year the total of these tips, to the best knowledge and belief of his company, had exceeded two million three hundred thousand dollars.
The Pullman Company is not an eleemosynary inst.i.tution. Though it has made distinct advances in the establishment of pension funds and death benefits, it is hardly to be cla.s.sed as a philanthropy. It is a large organization; and it generally is what it chooses to consider itself.
Sometimes it avers that it is a transportation company, at other times it prefers to regard itself as a hotel organization; but at all times it is a business proposition. It is not in business for its health. Its dividend record is proof of that. All of which is a preface to the statement that the Pullman Company, like any other large user of labor, regulates its wage scale by supply and demand. If it can find enough of the colored brethren competent and willing and anxious to man its cars at twenty-seven dollars and a half a month--with the fair gamble of two or three or four times that amount to come in the form of tips--it is hardly apt to pay more.
No wonder, then, the tip forms the nub of the situation. To-day all America tips. You tip the chauffeur in the taxi, the redcap in the station, the barber, the bootblack, the manicure, the boy or girl who holds your coat for you in the barber"s shop or hotel. In the modern hotel tipping becomes a vast and complex thing--waiters, doormen, hat boys, chambermaids, bell boys, porters--the list seems almost unending.
The system may be abominable, but it has certainly fastened itself on us--sternly and securely. And it may be said for the Pullman car that there, at least, the tip comes to a single servitor--the black autocrat who smiles genially no matter how suspiciously he may, at heart, view the quarter you have placed within his palm.
A quarter seems to be the standard Pullman tip--for one person, each night he may be on the car. Some men give more; some men--alas for poor George!--less. A quarter is not only average but fairly standard. It is given a certain official status by the auditing officers of many large railroads and industrial corporations, who recognize it as a chargeable item in the expense accounts of their men on the road.