The railways and the
hotels between them have so churned up the people that an untraveled
man or woman is a rare animal.
We are apt to suppose that travelers
make roads, and that guests create hotels; but the cause and effect
run exactly in the other way. I am almost disposed to think that we
should become cannibals if gentlemen's legs and ladies arms were
hung up for sale in purveyors' shops.
After this fashion and with these intentions hotels are built. Size
and an imposing exterior are the first requisitions. Everything
about them must be on a large scale. A commanding exterior, and a
certain interior dignity of demeanor, is more essential than comfort
or civility. Whatever a hotel may be it must not be "mean." In the
American vernacular the word mean is very significant. A mean white
in the South is a man who owns no slaves. Men are often mean, but
actions are seldom so called. A man feels mean when the bluster is
taken out of him. A mean hotel, conducted in a quiet unostentatious
manner, in which the only endeavor made had reference to the comfort
of a few guests, would find no favor in the States. These hotels
are not called by the name of any sign, as with us in our provinces.
There are no "Presidents' Heads" or "General Scotts." Nor by the
name of the landlord, or of some former landlord, as with us in
London, and in many cities of the Continent. Nor are they called
from some country or city which may have been presumed at some time
to have had special patronage for the establishment. In the
nomenclature of American hotels the specialty of American hero
worship is shown, as in the nomenclature of their children. Every
inn is a house, and these houses are generally named after some
hero, little known probably in the world at large, but highly
estimated in that locality at the moment of the christening.
They are always built on a plan which to a European seems to be most
unnecessarily extravagant in space. It is not unfrequently the case
that the greater portion of the ground floor is occupied by rooms
and halls which make no return to the house whatever. The visitor
enters a great hall by the front door, and almost invariably finds
it full of men who are idling about, sitting round on stationary
seats, talking in a listless manner, and getting through their time
as though the place were a public lounging-room. And so it is. The
chances are that not half the crowd are guests at the hotel. I will
now follow the visitor as he makes his way up to the office. Every
hotel has an office. To call this place the bar, as I have done too
frequently, is a lamentable error. The bar is held in a separate
room appropriated solely to drinking. To the office, which is in
fact a long open bar, the guest walks up, and there inscribes his
name in a book. This inscription was to me a moment of misery which
I could never go through with equanimity. As the name is written,
and as the request for accommodation is made, half a dozen loungers
look over your name and listen to what you say. They listen
attentively, and spell your name carefully, but the great man behind
the bar does not seem to listen or to heed you; your destiny is
never imparted to you on the instant. If your wife or any other
woman be with you - the word "lady" is made so absolutely distasteful
in American hotels that I cannot bring myself to use it in writing
of them - she has been carried off to a lady's waiting room, and
there remains in august wretchedness till the great man at the bar
shall have decided on her fate. I have never been quite able to
fathom the mystery of these delays. I think they must have
originated in the necessity of waiting to see what might be the
influx of travelers at the moment, and then have become exaggerated
and brought to their present normal state by the gratified feeling
of almost divine power with which for the time it invests that
despotic arbiter. I have found it always the same, though arriving
with no crowd, by a conveyance of my own, when no other expectant
guests were following me. The great man has listened to my request
in silence, with an imperturbable face, and has usually continued
his conversation with some loafing friend, who at the time is
probably scrutinizing my name in the book. I have often suffered in
patience, but patience is not specially the badge of my tribe, and I
have sometimes spoken out rather freely. If I may presume to give
advice to my traveling countrymen how to act under such
circumstances, I should recommend to them freedom of speech rather
than patience. The great man, when freely addressed, generally
opens his eyes, and selects the key of your room without further
delay. I am inclined to think that the selection will not be made
in any way to your detriment by reason of that freedom of speech.
The lady in the ballad who spoke out her own mind to Lord Bateman,
was sent to her home honorably in a coach and three. Had she held
her tongue, we are justified in presuming that she would have been
returned on a pillion behind a servant.
I have been greatly annoyed by that want of speech. I have
repeatedly asked for room, and received no syllable in return. I
have persisted in my request, and the clerk has nodded his head at
me. Until a traveler is known, these gentlemen are singularly
sparing of speech, especially in the West. The same economy of
words runs down from the great man at the office all through the
servants of the establishment.
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