A clock struck three as my weary head struck the pillow. I closed my eyes. Then when, as it seemed to me, I was barely dozing off there came a knocking at my bedroom door.
"What is it?"
"Six o'clock," replied the voice of our trusty Hannah.
As I arose I knew the feelings of a man condemned to death who hears the warden's voice in the chilly dawn: "Come! It is the fatal hour!"
When, fifteen minutes later, doubting Hannah (who knows my habits in these early morning matters) knocked again, I was moving about my room, my hands full of hairbrushes and toothbrushes and clothes brushes and shaving brushes; my head full of railroad trains, and hills, and plains and valleys, and snow-capped mountain peaks, and smoking cities and smoking-cars, and people I had never seen.
The breakfast table, shining with electric light, had a night-time aspect which made eggs and coffee seem bizarre. I do not like to breakfast by electric light, and I had done so seldom until then; but since that time I have done it often—sometimes to catch the early morning train, sometimes to catch the early morning man.
Beside my plate I found a telegram. I ripped the envelope and read this final punctuation-markless message from a literary friend:
you are going to discover the united states dont be afraid to say so
That is an awful thing to tell a man in the very early morning before breakfast. In my mind I answered with the cry: "But I am afraid to say so!"
And now, months later, I am still afraid to say so, because, despite a certain truth the statement may contain, it seems to me to sound ridiculous, and ponderous, and solemn with an asinine solemnity.
It spoiled my last meal at home—that well-meant telegram.
I had not swallowed my second cup of coffee when, from her switchboard, a dozen floors below, the operator telephoned to say my taxi had arrived; whereupon I left the table, said good-by to those I should miss most of all, took up my suit case and departed.
Beside the curb there stood an unhappy-looking taxicab, shivering as with malaria, but the driver showed a face of brazen cheerfulness which, considering the hour and the circumstances, seemed almost indecent. I could not bear his smile. Hastily I blotted him from view beneath a pile of baggage.
With a jerk we started. Few other vehicles disputed our right to the whole width of Seventy-second Street as we skimmed eastward. Farewell, O Central Park! Farewell, O Plaza! And you, Fifth Avenue, empty, gray, deserted now; so soon to flash with fascinating traffic. Farewell! Farewell!
Presently, in that cavern in which vehicles stop beneath the overhanging cliffs of the Grand Central Station, we drew up. A dusky redcap took my baggage. I alighted and, passing through glass doors, gazed down on the vast concourse. Far up in the lofty spaces of the room there seemed to hang a haze, through which—from that amazing and audacious ceiling, painted like the heavens—there twinkled, feebly, morning stars of gold. Through three arched windows, towering to the height of six-story buildings, the eastern light streamed softly in, combining with the spaciousness around me, and the blue above, to fill me with a curious sense of paradox: a feeling that I was indoors yet out of doors.
The glass dials of the four-faced clock, crowning the information bureau at the center of the concourse, glowed with electric light, yellow and sickly by contrast with the day which poured in through those windows. Such stupendous windows! Gargantuan spider webs whose threads were massive bars of steel. And suddenly I saw the spider! He emerged from one side, passed nimbly through the center of the web, disappeared, emerged again, crossed the second web and the third in the same way, and was gone—a two-legged spider, walking importantly and carrying papers in his hand. Then another spider came, and still another, each black against the light, each on a different level. For those windows are, in reality, more than windows. They are double walls of glass, supporting floors of glass—layer upon layer of crystal corridor, suspended in the air as by genii out of the Arabian Nights. And through these corridors pass clerks who never dream that they are princes in the modern kind of fairy tale.
As yet the torrent of commuters had not begun to pour through the vast place. The floor lay bare and tawny like the bed of some dry river waiting for the melting of the mountain snows. Across the river bed there came a herd of cattle—Italian immigrants, dark-eyed, dumb, patient, uncomprehending. Two weeks ago they had left Naples, with plumed Vesuvius looming to the left; yesterday they had come to Ellis Island; last night they had slept on station benches; to-day they were departing; to-morrow or the next day they would reach their destination in the West. Suddenly there came to me from nowhere, but with a poignance that seemed to make it new, the platitudinous thought that life is at once the commonest and strangest of experiences. What scenes these black, pathetic people had passed through—were passing through! Why did they not look up in wonderment? Why were their bovine eyes gazing blankly ahead of them at nothing? What had dazed them so—the bigness of the world? Yet, after all, why should they understand? What American can understand Italian railway stations? They have always seemed to me to express a sort of mild insanity. But the Grand Central terminal I fancy I do understand. It seems to me to be much more than a successful station. In its stupefying size, its brilliant utilitarianism, and, most of all, in its mildly vulgar grandeur, it seems to me to express, exactly, the city to which it is a gate. That is something every terminal should do unless, as in the case of the Pennsylvania terminal in New York, it expresses something finer. The Grand Central Station is New York, but that classic marvel over there on Seventh Avenue is more: it is something for New York to live up to.
When I had bought my ticket and moved along to count my change there came up to the ticket window a big man in a big ulster who asked in a big voice for a ticket to Grand Rapids. As he stood there I was conscious of a most un-New-York-like wish to say to him: "After a while I'm going to Grand Rapids, too!" And I think that, had I said it, he would have told me that Grand Rapids was "some town" and asked me to come in and see him, when I got there—"at the plant," I think he would have said.
As I crossed the marble floor to take the train I caught sight of my traveling companion leaning rigidly against the wall beside the gate. He did not see me. Reaching his side, I greeted him.
He showed no signs of life. I felt as though I had addressed a waxwork figure.
"Good morning," I repeated, calling him by name.
"I've just finished packing," he said. "I never got to bed at all."
At that moment a most attractive person put in an appearance. She was followed by a redcap carrying a lovely little Russia leather bag. A few years before I should have called a bag like that a dressing case, but watching that young woman as she tripped along with steps restricted by the slimness of her narrow satin skirt, it occurred to me that modes in baggage may have changed like those in woman's dress and that her little leather case might be a modern kind of wardrobe trunk.
My companion took no notice of this agitating presence.
"Look!" I whispered. "She is going, too."
Stiffly he turned his head.
"The pretty girl," he remarked, with sad philosophy, "is always in the other car. That's life."
"No," I demurred. "It's only early morning stuff."
And I was right, for presently, in the parlor car, we found our seats across the aisle from hers.
Before the train moved out a boy came through with books and magazines, proclaiming loudly the "last call for reading matter."
I think the radiant being believed him, for she bought a magazine—a magazine of pretty girls and piffle: just the sort we knew she'd buy. As for my companion and me, we made no purchases, not crediting the statement that it was really the "last call." But I am impelled to add that having, later, visited certain book stores of Buffalo, Cleveland, and Detroit, I now see truth in what the boy said.
For a time my companion and I sat and tried to make believe we didn't know that some one was across the aisle. And she sat there and played with pages and made believe she didn't know