CHAPTER XIX

A HOT BATH IN BANFF

Everybody stops at Banff. The popular places of the world are not necessarily the most beautiful; and even if they start beautiful, they are not rendered more so by the accretion in their midst of a large number of even first-class hotels. Perhaps first-class hotels increase the feeling for beauty. Indeed the sole defence of luxury worth consideration is that it has this effect. Without luxury, would there exist such an appreciator of beauty as d'Annunzio, to name but one? Pardon, I am getting away from Banff.

It is a very beautiful watering-place at the foot of mountains. It is not spoilt yet, and it will be difficult to spoil it. The air is superb. I learnt that just as I was getting into it on my way from the station. I seemed to be the only person walking into it that morning--except for a local Canadian who was going in to his work. It was still very {179} early in the morning, and distinctly cold, and I said to this Canadian workman:

'It's pretty cold at Banff.'

'It's the finest air in Canada,' he replied, with that characteristic touch of resentment of anything that might be taken as a criticism of his native heath, which every Canadian invariably shows. 'Yes, sir, it's the finest air in Canada, and they're putting down concrete sidewalks.'

He was, as a matter of fact, engaged in that work himself, and after I had expressed a proper admiration of it, he became friendly enough and directed me to the hotel I wanted to stay in.

I wish it had not rained at Banff while I was there. It was an unusually cold and early rain, and it prevented me from seeing many of the sights of the place. The motor boat, which as a rule runs several times a day up the Bow River, did not run at all while I was there, and so I did not see this lovely valley. Nor did I take much stock of the buffaloes of the National Park, which are one of the greatest features of Banff, one that tourists with cameras always make for first. Rain was the reason of my abstention. On the other hand, the rain was the immediate {180} cause of my spending a most delightful afternoon in a hot sulphur swimming-bath. There are three such baths in Banff, and I chose the upper one, walking two miles up a winding road, whose woods were beginning to show all the reds of autumn, to get to it. I found that it was an open-air bath, fed by a sulphur stream that trickles steaming down the face of a mountain, and since no one had been tempted there on so gloomy a day, I had it all to myself, and swam up and down in water that varied from 110° to 95° for an hour or more, looking at the hilltops opposite, and the mists that rose and sank about them. The rain and the cold mattered nothing so long as I swam there, wondering if luxury could go further in this world of ours. For there I was lapped about with all the warmth and peace that come to the beach-comber or the lotus-eater, and yet drinking in the brisk mountain air and feeling the challenge of the hills. It was to combine the emotions of a man climbing the Alps with the emotions of a man squatting in a Turkish bath; and only when the latter threatened to become rather the stronger of the two, did I get out, feeling weak but fresh. I had the pleasure while dressing of reading in a printed advertisement {181} of the baths that I had been curing myself of rheumatism, sciatica, asthma, anæmia, insomnia and, I fancy, any other disease I might happen to have latent. Certainly I felt well and uncommonly drowsy when I got back to the hotel. Indeed those who intend to explore Banff with energy would be well advised to postpone the baths till their last day. There is plenty to explore. The National Park alone is 5400 square miles in extent, and encloses half a dozen subsidiary ranges of the Rocky Mountains; and if Banff is to be regarded as the centre for mountain climbing, fishing, and big game hunting, there is of course no end to it. Guide-books mention in a vague way that it is such a centre--which only means that if you want to do any of these things from a highly civilised and comfortable hotel, you had better make Banff your stopping place. Good climbing is to be had quite near, but whether the same is to be said for shooting or fishing depends upon whether anything short of the best in these matters is good. You cannot expect fish and big game to remain centralised. Particularly is this the case with big game. They avoid the centre of things, and prefer to keep on the circumference. In these sort of matters {182} guide-books are very little use. Nowhere do conditions change more rapidly than in Canada, and the man who wants big-horn or big trout will have to make for the circumference too. But there he will neither expect nor find first-class hotels.

Speaking of first-class hotels, I took part--quite an unwilling part--in an incident that goes to show some of the difficulties attendant upon trying to run them in Canada. Frankly, except for those run by the Canadian Pacific Railway, there are practically none. It is not to be wondered at. Cookery is an art, like literature or music, not greatly encouraged in a new country. Take waiters again. Though the wages they make are good and the standard of waiting expected from them is rarely the highest, I believe they are a perennial difficulty to hotel proprietors. On the trains and in the big towns in the East one usually finds that the waiters are Englishmen not long out; and they are so not because they have acquired the science of waiting in the old country (as one might suppose, since it is usually well learnt there), but because they have not as yet acquired that Canadian spirit which makes anything savouring of domestic service--or even of undue courtesy as from man to {183} man--distasteful to the Canadian born, who, in any case, dislikes working for uncertainly long hours. Englishmen, it has to be admitted, are not particularly zealous for long and uncertain hours of work either in these days; and therefore it generally happens that as soon as the newcomer is the least acclimatised, he, too, drops waiting if he has taken it up. In the East a freshly arrived immigrant takes his place; but in the West there is no such constant supply of spare white men. The result is that Western hotels are more or less driven to employ as waiters either women or Japanese and Chinese boys.

The hotel I stayed in at Banff had a staff of the former. Heaven knows we have women waiters enough in England, but in Canada I do not think heaven can know.... As soon as I came in to breakfast in the morning I became aware of a sharp-featured maiden with eyeglasses and tight lips and stiff white cuffs--very much the type of the Girton girl in the older times--who was clearly in charge of the room, and meant to let every one know it. I shrank down at the nearest table, and in a hushed voice requested and received my breakfast from one of the waitresses who were theoretically in attendance. She was very kindly, {184} only she brought me tea instead of coffee. I wanted coffee. I felt it was taking a risk, but as a man at his breakfast usually prefers his own fancy to other people's, I looked about delicately to see if I could catch my waitress's eye and induce her to change the pot. By bad fortune I merely caught the eye of the sharp young lady who, coming up and learning from my unwilling lips that I had been given the wrong drink, said imperiously:

'Kindly tell me which of the girls gave you this!'

Now I had not particularly noticed the girl who had been good enough to help me--an inexcusable carelessness--which the sharp young woman evidently interpreted as a desire to fence with her, for while I hesitated she went on:

'I'll tell you why I want to know. There's some game on this morning----'

'Oh,' I said, 'yes.'

'And I'm not going to stand it,' said the sharp young woman fiercely. 'I fired two of the girls yesterday, and I don't mind if I fire the lot, so if you'll tell me which of them brought you this I'll see to her straight away.'

'I'm afraid I should not know her again,' I said hastily. A scene of strife around my {185} unlucky person, while breakfast got cold and all the other guests at the other tables looked on, was terrible to my fancy. The sharp one seemed most disappointed.

'I wish you could,' she said. 'I'd fix her right now.'

'Quite impossible,' I murmured, hoping that I was speaking the truth. Not so far off there was a young woman, standing chatting genially with two men at another table, who might have brought me that tea.

'Oh, well, of course if you can't,' said the sharp one, and presently brought me coffee with her own fair white-cuffed hands. I thanked her warmly, and she went away; after which I was rewarded for my supposed chivalry by the young woman who had been entertaining those other two men coming up to me and saying in a sweet voice:

'I say, I'm awfully sorry that I brought you that tea instead of coffee. The fact is we're awfully rushed this morning.'

'Not at all,' I said, 'don't think of it,' and hoped inwardly that she would go away before the sharp one spotted her and bore down upon us. She did not seem so rushed as she had said.

'Sure you won't have anything else now?' she persisted in the kindliest way.

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'No, thank you,' I said, and seeing, I suppose, that I was not an entertaining person, she flitted gracefully away to a third table where another male sat, to whom I heard her whisper in passing--on the way to further chat with the other two men:

'Now, mind you don't forget to meet me outside the hotel at six sharp!'

My sympathies almost went out to the sharp-visaged spinster, for really there were quite a number of guests looking about them for food while the rushed staff chatted freely and pleasantly with such male visitors as seemed by their bearing to be worthy of being fascinated. This at breakfast-time--breakfast-time when an Englishman at all events wants food and would not be put off by the conversation of Cleopatra or Helen of Troy. Canadians may be a more gallant race at this hour of the day, but I am not sure of this. The preponderance of Japanese waiters as one gets further West seems to point to the fact that even they prefer food--at meal-times--to sentiment. The Japanese may demand high wages, and leave their places suddenly if they feel like it, but at least they do not threaten one with an emotional scene over one's morning coffee. Nor do I imagine that they require to be treated by their {187} employers with quite that reverential respect of which I remember seeing an example in a small hotel in the Columbia Valley. I was stopping at the hotel over Sunday with a friend, and as we wanted to go out for the day, we asked the manager if we could be supplied with some sandwiches for lunch. He was a mild and obliging young man, but his face fell.

'I'll--I'll see what can be done,' he said, and I heard him go to the young lady who vouchsafed to wait at table occasionally in a superior way. 'My God!' I heard him say in an extremely humble voice to her, 'I'm most awfully sorry to ask such a thing of you, but these chaps want to go out and take some sandwiches. I say, do you suppose it could be managed?'

We got two sandwiches each as a result of his intercession, and in that mountain air we could have done with six times the number. But we realised from the manager's face when he brought them to us that the goddess who had provided them might, instead of doing so, have stalked straight out of the hotel for good.

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