Chapter 20

In criticising American hotels, it must not be forgotten that the rapid process of change that is so characteristic of America operates in this sphere with especial force. This is at work a distinct tendency to substitute the subdued for the gaudy, the refined for the meretricious, the quiet for the loud; and even now the cultured American who knows his _monde_ may spend a great part of his time in hotels without conspicuously lowering the tone of his environment.

The prevalent idea that the American hotel clerk is a mannerless despot is, _me judice_, rather too severe. He is certainly apt to be rather curt in his replies and ungenial in his manner; but this is not to be wondered at when one reflects under what a fire of questions he stands all day long and from week to week; and, besides, he does generally give the information that is wanted. That he should wear diamond studs and dress gorgeously is not unnatural when one considers the social stratum from which he is drawn. Do not our very cooks the same as far as they can? That he should somewhat magnify the importance of his office is likewise explicable; and, after all, how many human beings have greater power over the actual personal comforts of the fraction of the world they come into contact with? I can, however, truthfully boast that I met hotel clerks who, in moments of relief from pressure, treated me almost as an equal, and one or two who seemed actually disposed to look on me as a friend. I certainly never encountered any actual rudeness from the American hotel clerk such as I have experienced from the pert young ladies who sometimes fill his place in England; and in the less frequented resorts he sometimes took a good deal of trouble to put the stranger in the way to do his business speedily and comfortably. His omniscience is great, but not so phenomenal as I expected; I posed him more than once with questions about his abode which, it seemed to me, every intelligent citizen should have been able to answer easily. In his most characteristic development the American hotel clerk is an urbane living encyclopædia, as passionless as the gods, as unbiassed as the multiplication table, and as tireless as a Corliss engine.

Traveller's tales as to the system of "tipping" in American hotels differ widely. The truth is probably as far from the indignant Briton's assertion, based probably upon one flagrant instance in New York, that "it is ten times worse than in England and tantamount to robbery with violence," as from the patriotic American's assurance that "The thing, sir, is absolutely unknown in our free and enlightened country; no American citizen would demean himself to accept a gratuity." To judge from my own experience, I should say that the practice was quite as common in such cities as Boston, New York, and Philadelphia as in Europe, and more onerous because the amounts expected are larger. A dollar goes no farther than a shilling. Moreover, the gratuity is usually given in the form of "refreshers" from day to day, so that the vengeance of the disappointed is less easily evaded. Miss Bates, a very friendly writer on America, reports various unpleasantnesses that she received from untipped waiters, and tells of an American who found that his gratuities for two months at a Long Branch hotel (for three persons and their horses) amounted to £40. In certain other walks of life the habit of tipping is carried to more extremes in New York than in any European city I know of. Thus the charge for a shave (already sufficiently high) is 7-1/2_d._, but the operator expects 2-1/2_d._ more for himself. One barber with whom I talked on the subject openly avowed that he considered himself wronged if he did not get his fee, and recounted the various devices he and his fellows practised to extract gratuities from the unwilling. As one goes West or South the system of tipping seems to fall more and more into abeyance, though it will always be found a useful smoother of the way. In California, so far as I could judge, it was almost entirely unknown, and the Californian hotels are among the best in the Union.

Among the lessons which English and other European hotels might learn from American hotels may be named the following:

1. The combination of the present _à la carte_ system with the inclusive or American system, by which those who don't want the trouble of ordering their repasts may be sure of finding meals, with a reasonable latitude of choice in time and fare, ready when desired. It is a sensible comfort to know beforehand exactly, or almost exactly, what one's hotel expenses will amount to.

2. The abolition of the charge for attendance.

3. A greater variety of dishes than is usually offered in any except our very largest hotels. This is especially to be desired at breakfast. Without going to the American extreme of fifty or a hundred dishes to choose from, some intermediate point short of the Scylla of sole and the Charybdis of ham and eggs might surely be found. There is probably more pig-headed conservatism than justified fear of expense in the reluctance to follow this most excellent "American lead." The British tourist in the United States takes so kindly to the preliminary fruit and cereal dishes of America that he would probably show no objection to them on his native heath.

4. An extension of the system of ringing once for the boots, twice for the chambermaid, and so on. The ordinary American table of calls goes up to nine.

5. The provision of writing materials free for the guests of the hotels. The charge for stationery is one of the pettiest and most exasperating cheese-parings of the English Boniface's system of account-keeping. If, however, he imitates the liberality of his American brother, it is to be hoped that he will "go him one better" in the matter of blotting-paper. Nothing in the youthful country across the seas has a more venerable appearance than the strips of blotting-paper supplied in the writing-rooms of its hotels.

Nothing in its way could be more inviting or seem more appropriate than the cool and airy architecture of the summer hotels in such districts as the White Mountains, with their wide and shady verandas, their overhanging eaves, their balconies, their spacious corridors and vestibules, their simple yet tasteful wood-panelling, their creepers outside and their growing plants within. Mr. Howells has somewhere reversed the threadbare comparison of an Atlantic liner to a floating hotel, by likening a hostelry of this kind to a saloon steamer; and indeed the comparison is an apt one, so light and buoyant does the construction seem, with its gaily painted wooden sides, its glass-covered veranda decks, and its streaming flags. Perhaps the nearest analogue that we have to the life of an American summer hotel is seen in our large hydropathic establishments, such as those at Peebles or Crieff, where the therapeutic appliances play but a subdued obbligato to the daily round of amusements. The same spirit of camaraderie generally rules at both; both have the same regular meal-hours, at which almost as little drinking is seen at the one as the other; both have their evening entertainments got up (_gotten_ up, our American cousins say, with a delightfully old fashioned flavour) by the enterprise of the most active guests. The hydropathists have to go to bed a little sooner, and must walk to the neighbouring village if they wish a bar-room; but on the whole their scheme of life is much the same. Whether it is due to the American temperament or the American weather, the palm for brightness, vivacity, variety, and picturesqueness must be adjudged to the hotel. For those who are young enough to "stand the racket," no form of social gaiety can he found more amusing than a short sojourn at a popular summer hotel among the mountains or by the sea, with its constant round of drives, rides, tennis and golf matches, picnics, "germans," bathing, boating, and loafing, all permeated by flirtation of the most audacious and innocent description. The focus of the whole carnival is found in the "piazza" or veranda, and no prettier sight in its way can be imagined than the groups and rows of "rockers" and wicker chairs, each occupied by a lithe young girl in a summer frock, or her athletic admirer in his tennis flannels.

The enormous extent of the summer exodus to the mountains and the seas in America is overwhelming; and a population of sixty-five millions does not seem a bit too much to account for it. I used to think that about all the Americans who could afford to travel came to Europe. But the American tourists in Europe are, after all, but a drop in the bucket compared with the oceans of summer and winter visitors to the Adirondacks and Florida, Manitoba Springs and the coast of Maine, the Catskills and Long Branch, Newport and Lenox, Bar Harbor and California, White Sulphur Springs and the Minnesota Lakes, Saratoga and Richfield, The Thousand Isles and Martha's Vineyard, Niagara and Trenton Falls, Old Point Comfort and Asheville, the Yellowstone and the Yosemite, Alaska and the Hot Springs of Arkansas. And everywhere that the season's visitor is expected he will find hotels awaiting him that range all the way from reasonable comfort to outrageous magnificence; while a simpler taste will find a plain boarding-house by almost every mountain pool or practicable beach in the whole wide expanse of the United States. The Briton may not have yet abdicated his post as the champion traveller or explorer of unknown lands, but the American is certainly the most restless mover from one resort of civilisation to another.

Perhaps the most beautiful hotel in the world is the Ponce de Leon at St. Augustine, Florida, named after the Spanish voyager who discovered the flowery[32] State in 1512, and explored its streams on his romantic search for the fountain of eternal youth. And when I say beautiful I use the word in no auctioneering sense of mere size, and height, and evidence of expenditure, but as meaning a truly artistic creation, fine in itself and appropriate to its environment. The hotel is built of "coquina," or shell concrete, in a Spanish renaissance style with Moorish features, which harmonises admirably with the sunny sky of Florida and the historic associations of St. Augustine. Its colour scheme, with the creamy white of the concrete, the overhanging roofs of red tile, and the brick and terra-cotta details, is very effective, and contrasts well with the deep-blue overhead and the luxuriant verdancy of the orange-trees, magnolias, palmettos, oleanders, bananas, and date-palms that surround it. The building encloses a large open court, and is lined by columned verandas, while the minaret-like towers dominate the expanse of dark-red roof. The interior is richly adorned with wall and ceiling paintings of historical or allegorical import, skilfully avoiding crudity or garishness; and the marble and oak decorations of the four-galleried rotunda are worthy of the rest of the structure. The general effect is one of luxurious and artistic ease, with suggestions of an Oriental _dolce far niente_ in excellent keeping with the idea of the winter idler's home. The Ponce de Leon and the adjoining and more or less similar structures of the Alcazar, the Cordova, and the Villa Zorayda form indeed an architectural group which, taken along with the semi-tropical vegetation and atmosphere, alone repays a long journey to see. But let the strictly economical traveller take up his quarters in one of the more modest hostelries of the little town, unless he is willing to pay dearly (and yet not perhaps too dearly) for the privilege of living in the most artistic hotel in the world.

It is a long cry from Florida to California, where stands another hotel which suggests mention for its almost unique perfections. The little town of Monterey, with its balmy air, its beautiful sandy beach, its adobe buildings, and its charming surroundings, is, like St. Augustine, full of interesting Spanish associations, dating back to 1602. The Hotel del Monte, or "Hotel of the Forest," one of the most comfortable, best-kept, and moderate-priced hotels of America, lies amid bluegrass lawns and exquisite grounds, in some ways recalling the parks of England's gentry, though including among its noble trees such un-English specimens as the sprawling and moss-draped live-oaks and the curious Monterey pines and cypresses. Its gardens offer a continual feast of colour, with their solid acres of roses, violets, calla lilies, heliotrope, narcissus, tulips, and crocuses; and one part of them, known as "Arizona," contains a wonderful collection of cacti. The hotel itself has no pretension to rival the Ponce de Leon in its architecture or appointments, and is, I think, built of wood. It is, however, very large, encloses a spacious garden-court, and makes a pleasant enough impression, with its turrets, balconies, and verandas, its many sharp gables, dormers, and window-hoods. The economy of the interior reminded me more strongly of the amenities and decencies of the house of a refined, well-to-do, and yet not extravagantly wealthy family than of the usual hotel atmosphere. There were none of the blue satin hangings, ormolu vases, and other entirely superfluous luxuries for which we have to pay in the bills of certain hotels at Paris and elsewhere; but on the other hand nothing was lacking that a fastidious but reasonable taste could demand. The rooms and corridors are spacious and airy; everything was as clean and fresh as white paint and floor polish could make them; the beds were comfortable and fragrant; the linen was spotless; there was lots of "hanging room;" each pair of bedrooms shared a bathroom; the _cuisine_ was good and sufficiently varied; the waiters were attentive; flowers were abundant without and within. The price of all this real luxury was $3 to $3.50 (12_s._ to 14_s._) a day. Possibly the absolute perfection of the bright and soft Californian spring when I visited Monterey, and the exquisite beauty of its environment, may have lulled my critical faculties into a state of unusual somnolence; but when I quitted the Del Monte Hotel I felt that I was leaving one of the most charming homes I had ever had the good fortune to live in.

The only hotel that to my mind contests with the Del Monte the position of the best hotel in the North American continent is the Canadian Pacific Hotel at Banff, in the National Rocky Mountains Park of Canada. Here also magnificent scenery, splendid weather, and moderate charges combined to bias my judgment; but the residuum, after all due allowance made for these factors, still, after five years, assures me of most unusual excellence. Two things in particular I remember in connection with this hotel. The one is the almost absolute perfection of the waiting, carried on by gentlemanly youths of about eighteen or twenty, who must, I think, have formed the _corps d'élite_ of the thousands of waiters in the service of the Canadian Pacific Railway. The marvellous speed and dexterity with which they ministered to my wants, the absolutely neat and even dainty manner in which everything was done by them, and their modest readiness to make suggestions and help one's choice (always to the point!) make one of the pleasantest pictures of hotel life lurking in my memory. The other dominant recollection of the Banff Hotel is the wonderfully beautiful view from the summer-house at its northeast corner. Just below the bold bluff on which this hotel stands the piercingly blue Bow River throws itself down in a string of foaming white cataracts to mate with the amber and rapid-rushing Spray. The level valley through which the united and now placid stream flows is carpeted with the vivid-red painter's brush, white and yellow marguerites, asters, fireweed, golden-rod, and blue-bells; to the left rise the perpendicular cliffs of Tunnel Mountain, while to the right Mt. Rundle lifts its weirdly sloping, snow-flecked peaks into the azure.

In the dense green woods of the Adirondacks, five miles from the nearest high road on the one side and on the other lapped by an ocean of virgin forest which to the novice seems almost as pathless as the realms of Neptune, stands the Adirondack Lodge, probably one of the most quaint, picturesque little hotels in the world. It is tastefully built in the style of a rustic log-hut, its timber being merely rough-hewn by the axe and not reduced to monotonous symmetry by the saw-mill. It is roofed with bark, and its wide-eaved verandas are borne by tree-trunks with the bark still on. The same idea is carried out in the internal equipment, and the bark is left intact on much of the furniture. The wood retains its natural colours, and there are no carpets or paint. This charming little hotel is due to the taste or whim of a New York electrical engineer (the inventor, I believe, of the well-known "ticker"), who acts the landlord in such a way as to make the sixty or seventy inmates feel like the guests of a private host. The clerk is a medical student, the very bell-boy ("Eddy") a candidate for Harvard, and both mix on equal terms with the genial circle that collects round the bonfire lighted in front of the house every summer's evening. As one lazily lay there, watching the wavering play of the ruddy blaze on the dark-green pines, listening to the educated chatter of the boy who cleaned the boots, realising that a deer, a bear, or perchance even a catamount might possibly be lurking in the dark woods around, and knowing that all the material comforts of civilised life awaited one inside the house, one felt very keenly the genuine Americanism of this Arcadia, and thought how hard it would be to reproduce the effect even in the imagination of the European.

It was in this same Adirondack Wilderness that I stayed in the only hotel that, so far as I know, caught on to the fact that I was a "chiel amang them takin' notes" for a guidebook. With true American enterprise I was informed, when I called for my bill, that that was all right; and I still recall with amusement the incredulous and obstinate resistance of the clerk to my insistence on paying my way. I hope that the genial proprietors do not attribute the asterisk that I gave the hotel to their well-meant efforts to give me _quid pro quo_, but credit me with a totally unbiassed admiration for their good management and comfortable quarters.

Mention has already been made (p. 30) of a hotel at a frequented watering-place, at which the lowest purchasable quantity of sleep cost one pound sterling. It is, perhaps, superfluous to say that the rest procured at this cost was certainly not four or five times better than that easily procurable for four or five shillings; and that the luxury of this hotel appealed, not in its taste perhaps, but certainly in its effect, to the shoddy rather than to the refined demands of the traveller. Shenstone certainly never associated the ease of his inn with any such hyperbolical sumptuousness as this; and it probably could not arise in any community that did not include a large class of individuals with literally more money than they knew what to do with, and desirous of any means of indicating their powers of expenditure. It has been said of another hotel at Bar Harbor that "Anyone can stay there who is worth two millions of dollars, or can produce a certificate from the Recorder of New York that he is a direct descendant of Hendrik Hudson or Diedrich Knickerbocker."

Many other American hotels suggest themselves to me as sufficiently individual in character to discriminate them from the ruck. Such are the Hygieia at Old Point Comfort, with its Southern guests in summer and its Northern guests in winter; looking out from its carefully enclosed and glazed piazzas over the waste of Hampton Roads, where the "Merrimac" wrought devastation to the vessels of the Union until itself vanquished by the turret-ship "Monitor;" the enormous caravansaries of Saratoga, one of which alone accommodates two thousand visitors, or the population of a small town, while the three largest have together room for five thousand people; the hotel at the White Sulphur Springs of Virginia, for nearly a century the typical resort of the wealth and aristocracy of the South, and still furnishing the eligible stranger with a most attractive picture of Southern beauty, grace, warm-heartedness, and manners; the Stockbridge Inn in the Berkshire Hills, long a striking exception to the statement that no country inns of the best English type can be found in the United States, but unfortunately burned down a year or two ago; the Catskill Mountain House, situated on an escarpment rising so abruptly from the plain of the Hudson that the view from it has almost the same effect as if we were leaning out of the car of a balloon or over the battlements of a castle two thousand feet high; the colossal Auditorium of Chicago, with its banquet hall and kitchen on the tenth floor; and the Palace Hotel of San Francisco, with its twelve hundred beds and its covered and resonant central court. Enough has, however, been said to show that all American hotels are not the immense and featureless barracks that many Europeans believe, but that they also run through a full gamut of variety and character.

The restaurant is by no means such an institution in the United States as in the continental part of Europe; in this matter the American habit is more on all fours with English usage. The café of Europe is, perhaps, best represented by the piazza. Of course there are numerous restaurants in all the larger cities; but elsewhere the traveller will do well to stick to the meals at his hotel. The best restaurants are often in the hands of Germans, Italians, or Frenchmen. This is conspicuously so at New York. Delmonico's has a worldwide reputation, and is undoubtedly a good restaurant; but it may well be questioned whether the New York estimate of its merits is not somewhat excessive. If price be the criterion, it has certainly few superiors. The _à la carte_ restaurants are, indeed, all apt to be expensive for the single traveller, who will find that he can easily spend eight to twelve shillings on a by no means sumptuous meal. The French system of supplying one portion for two persons or two portions for three is, however, in vogue, and this diminishes the cost materially. The _table d'hôte_ restaurants, on the other hand, often give excellent value for their charges. The Italians have especially devoted themselves to this form of the art, and in New York and Boston furnish one with a very fair dinner indeed, including a flask of drinkable Chianti, for four or five shillings. At some of the simple German restaurants one gets excellent German fare and beer, but these are seldom available for ladies. The fair sex, however, takes care to be provided with more elegant establishments for its own use, to which it sometimes admits its husbands and brothers. The sign of a large restaurant in New York reads: "Women's Coöperative Restaurant; tables reserved for gentlemen," in which I knew not whether more to admire the uncompromising antithesis between the plain word "women" and the complimentary term "gentlemen" or the considerateness that supplies separate accommodation for the shrinking creatures denoted by the latter. Perhaps this is as good a place as any to note that it is usually as unwise to patronise a restaurant which professedly caters for "gents" as to buy one's leg-coverings of a tailor who knows them only as "pants." Probably the "adult gents' bible-class," which Professor Freeman encountered, was equally unsatisfactory.