Just as the good roads turned into mud slides in a few minutes, a few hours of sun and wind transformed them into good ones again. After only two days’ delay we went back over the scene of all our misery and the distance out of our way that had taken us nearly six hours, we skimmed over in less than one, returning to our Des Moines road with a little delay and no misadventure. (Our non-interruptible chauffeur paying no attention to the suggestion of stopping to taste the famous springs at Colfax.)
When we arrived in Des Moines, as E. M. wanted to take the car to a garage to have some things fixed, Celia and I went out by ourselves on foot. The first vehicle we saw had a sign on it “Jitney, 5 cents.” Never having been in one, and not caring a bit where it took us, we promptly got in.
“Now, what are we going to see?” asked Celia, not addressing anybody in particular.
“Strangers?” questioned the driver affably, turning around.
“Yes,” said Celia, “what can we see from your car?”
“Well, there’s the Capitol—I go right by that, and the finest buffaloes in the States are less’n a block further out. You could go see the buffaloes and then walk back to the Capitol.”
“Excellent!” we agreed.
The buffaloes were stuffed in a case at the museum, but they must certainly have been among the finest in the world when they were alive. We also saw some stuffed prairie dogs. But out here you need not go in a museum to see them! After the museum we walked through the Capitol, a fine building splendidly situated on a height overlooking the city and its dome newly gleaming with gold. When we were descending the many steps of the Capitol’s terrace, we saw the same jitney driver who had brought us there, and his car being empty, he drew up expectantly at the curb. Not wanting, however, to return to the spot we had started from, we suggested that he take off his sign and drive us about by the hour.
He grinned broadly. Sure he would! Also he augmented his price with equal alacrity. Then rolling up his “5-cent” sign, and surveying his unplacarded machine in evident satisfaction, he said jauntily:
“I tell you! The cops’ll think I’m the showfer of a millionaire! When you’re nothing but a jitney you stay behind here, and you don’t go there! But you bet they’ll let me through now all right!”
As a jitney he had been trundling along briskly, but now assuming all the characteristics of those who are hired by time instead of by distance, he never let the speedometer go above eight miles an hour; tried his best to keep it at six and stalled the engine about every hundred yards, until at the end of a very little while of halting and creeping we found his tin-kettle tramp machine acute punishment. We told him that if he would only go quickly, we would willingly pay for a second hour’s drive at the end of twenty minutes. But nothing we could say had any effect upon him. He kept on at the same dot-and-go-one creep. Finally, in desperation, Celia shrieked:
“If you don’t get us home at once, it will be too late! You will have to take us to the asylum!”
He looked around at Celia like a scared rabbit, and in her frenzied countenance found evidently no reassurance, for he took us home at a speed that broke the traffic regulations—even for the “showfers of millionaires!”
In a few of our impressions, Des Moines had an eccentric topsy-turviness as though we had stumbled into the pages of “Alice in Wonderland.” At the Chamberlain, an old-fashioned General Grant style of hotel, the elevator boys sit on chairs in the center of the elevator and the guests stand. When I asked to have a cup of coffee and toast sent up to my room the next morning at half-past seven, the head waitress raised her eyebrows and explained:
“If you will tell the clerk at the desk, he will have your room called at whatever hour you say.”
“I don’t want my room called,” I protested, “I want you to send my coffee up to me at seven-thirty.”
She looked vaguely puzzled. Then in a moment she said, with obvious intention to be kind: “Don’t you think you better just leave a rising call? Because maybe you will feel all right in the morning and’ll want to come down for your breakfast.”
We also found another original idea in hotel service. At the Chamberlain we were told our rooms would be two dollars and a half apiece, but our bill was two-fifty for one and five-fifty for the other two. When I asked why, the clerk said: “Didn’t you have the door open between?”
“Certainly we did.”
“Well, you see,” he explained, “that makes the room en suite, so it is fifty cents extra.”
The interest people take in population is very amazing to us. Ask any New Yorker the city’s population and two out of five will shrug their shoulders. Ask anyone out here—man, woman or child—you will get on the spot the figures of the last census—plus the imagined increase since!
At random I asked two young girls looking in a milliner’s window. In the midst of their exclamations about the “swellness” of a black and white hat they answered in unison, “Eighty-six thousand, three hundred and sixty-eight.”
“A Mrs. Simson had twins this morning—that makes eighty-six thousand, three hundred and seventy, doesn’t it?”
“Why, yes—that’s so,” beamed one of them.
“But six deaths would make it six less!”
For a moment they looked disconcerted, then the other answered brightly: “Oh, the deaths’ll come off the next census taking, and there’ll be ever so many births before that!”
Des Moines newspapers were full of the glory of their city. “Enterprise, confidence, civic pride are what make the citizenship of our city!” “Des Moines is ever going forward!” are sentences we read. “Nothing the matter with Des Moines!” was the title of a leader in one of them. What was the matter with Des Moines, we wondered. The article did not tell us. It only said: “With our new thirteen-story building and the new gilded dome of the Capitol, Des Moines towers above the other cities of the State like a lone cottonwood on the prairie.”
However, levity aside, when Des Moines has completed the parkway in front of the Capitol, and built up all of the embankment like the stretch that is already finished, the city with its civic center will be one of the most beautiful and perfect in the world. Already a community of beautiful buildings and houses, some day Des Moines will probably put up a last word in hotels. Maybe Des Moines, being a city of homes, doesn’t care about hotels!
Don’t think from this that the Chamberlain is poor! It is a perfectly comfortable and well-run hotel, but not truly representative of this fine city.
In a little hotel the other day a waitress rushed out of the dining-room and shouted to the clerk behind the desk at which I was standing:
“Say, have you seen Charlie?”
“Who wants him?”
“Miss Higgins.”
“Excuse me a minute,” said the clerk, as he went to look for Charlie, the proprietor, for Miss Higgins, the waitress!
Most of the hotels so far have been comfortable and nearly all clean. One of the exceptions has a story, and because of the story I cannot bear to tell its name. “A new house,” the clerk we left in the morning told us, “doing a big business. Yes, you had better telegraph ahead for rooms.”
Escorted by negro bellboys we entered a terra cotta and green lobby, the walls and ceilings of which protuberated with green and orange and brown and iron and gold and plaster, and all smudged with many wipings in of soot.
The clerk, or proprietor, was a ray of welcoming attentiveness. Yes, indeed, he had saved rooms with baths for each of us. He was the pink of personal neatness and we hoped the bellboys’ color had perhaps not been chosen with a purpose. Our rooms, however, were brown and sooty, and in my bathroom I wrote the word “dirt” on the washstand with my finger and it showed like a rut in the road. We went down to dinner not expecting much. And, had surprisingly good food in a spotlessly clean dining-room!
When I went to bed the electric lights would not turn on, and as no one answered the bell I gave up ringing and went to bed in the dark. The thermometer was about ninety-five; everything felt gritty, and in front of my eyes blinked mockingly an intermittent electric sign which in letters six feet high flashed all through the night about a snow-white laundry!
I was awakened by a waiter with my breakfast, which couldn’t have been better; clean silver, unchipped china, and the best coffee and toast we had had anywhere! Evidently the man who ran the restaurant was good, and whoever ran the chambermaid was bad, and whoever decorated the place in terra cotta, green, bronze and crimson was criminal! The nice man at the desk was evidently the proprietor; we wondered whether to tell him about the electric light and the bells that did not work, and the good-for-nothing chambermaid, but decided that either he knew it and could not help it or that he did not know it and did not want to! When I went to the office to pay our bill he was so really attentively interested in our welfare that I found myself saying politely: “We have been very comfortable.”
The man’s look of wistfulness changed to one of pitying perplexity: “You have been comfortable! Here?” He smiled as one would smile at a child who was trying to say it did not mind the splinter in its finger.
“I had a delicious breakfast,” I found myself saying enthusiastically. “Really I did. The best toast I have had since I left my home.”
“Did you?” He seemed pleased and interested. “You were lucky.”
His expressionless, dry tone and impersonal smile would have made Hodge in “The Man From Home” even more famous.
“Don’t you mind my feelings,” he said, “you needn’t try to pretend my house is first-class or even second! I’ve seen good hotels, and I know!” He leaned over the desk away from one of the “shoe men.” “It’s about fourth-class; that’s just about what it is.”
“There is just one thing the matter——” I hesitated.
“One, which one?”
“A dirty chambermaid.”
“Oh, they’re Polacks! Housekeeper can’t break them in! They are something like cats; they don’t take to water! No, ma’am, there is a big difference between this house and the ones in New York City, I know that; but all the same,” and the first look of pride crept into his face, “this hotel’s the best in the city. The others’d tumble to pieces if you stepped in ’em.”
A great deal of Iowa is uncultivated, picturesque, with grazing lands, many trees,—chiefly beautiful cottonwood,—and streams, and much prettier than Illinois, although Illinois was to me more interesting because of the immense flat farms of grain, and the houses in groups, like being placed at the hub of a wheel, the farms spreading out like the spokes. The houses were like those in New England, white with green shutters and well built. All of this great Western country is rich on its face value, and it is little surprise to be told of the wealth reputed to these landowners.
Every town through the Middle West seems to have a little grill of brick-paved streets; a splendid post-office building of stone or brick or marble; a court-house, but of an older period generally; and one or two moving picture houses; two or three important-looking dry-goods stores, and some sort of hotel, and in it a lot of drummers in tilted-back chairs exhibiting the soles of their shoes to the street.