IMPRESSIONS OF AMERICAN HOTELS.
_Boston, January 6._
Arrived here this afternoon, and resumed acquaintance with American
hotels.
American hotels are all alike.
Some are worse.
Describe one and you have described them all.
On the ground floor, a large entrance hall strewed with cuspidores for
the men, and a side entrance provided with a triumphal arch for the
ladies. On this floor the sexes are separated as at the public baths.
[Illustration: THE SAD-EYED CLERK.]
In the large hall, a counter behind which solemn clerks, whose business
faces relax not a muscle, are ready with their book to enter your name
and assign you a number. A small army of colored porters ready to take
you in charge. Not a salute, not a word, not a smile of welcome. The
negro takes your bag and makes a sign that your case is settled. You
follow him. For the time being you lose your personality and become No.
375, as you would in jail. Don't ask questions; theirs not to answer;
don't ring the bell to ask for a favor, if you set any value on your
time. All the rules of the establishment are printed and posted in your
bedroom; you have to submit to them. No question to ask--you know
everything. Henceforth you will have to be hungry from 7 to 9 A.M.;
from 1 to 3 P.M.; from 6 to 8 P.M. The slightest infringement of the
routine would stop the wheel, so don't ask if you could have a meal at
four o'clock; you would be taken for a lunatic, or a crank (as they call
it in America).
Between meals you will be supplied with ice-water _ad libitum_.
No privacy. No coffee-room, no smoking-room. No place where you can go
and quietly sip a cup of coffee or drink a glass of beer with a cigar.
You can have a drink at the bar, and then go and sit down in the hall
among the crowd.
Life in an American hotel is an alternation of the cellular system
during the night and of the gregarious system during the day, an
alternation of the penitentiary systems carried out at Philadelphia and
at Auburn.
It is not in the bedroom, either, that you must seek anything to cheer
you. The bed is good, but only for the night. The room is perfectly
nude. Not even "Napoleon's Farewell to his Soldiers at Fontainebleau" as
in France, or "Strafford walking to the Scaffold" as in England. Not
that these pictures are particularly cheerful, still they break the
monotony of the wall paper. Here the only oases in the brown or gray
desert are cautions.
First of all, a notice that, in a cupboard near the window, you will
find some twenty yards of coiled rope which, in case of fire, you are to
fix to a hook outside the window. The rest is guessed. You fix the rope,
and--you let yourself go. From a sixth, seventh, or eighth story, the
prospect is lively. Another caution informs you of all that you must not
do, such as your own washing in the bedroom. Another warns you that if,
on retiring, you put your boots outside the door, you do so at your own
risk and peril. Another is posted near the door, close to an electric
bell. With a little care and practice, you will be able to carry out the
instructions printed thereon. The only thing wonderful about the
contrivance is that the servants never make mistakes.
[Illustration: THE HOTEL FIRE ESCAPE.]
Press once for ice-water.
" twice " hall boy.
" three times " fireman.
" four " " chambermaid.
" five " " hot water.
" six " " ink and writing materials.
" seven " " baggage.
" eight " " messenger.
In some hotels I have seen the list carried to number twelve.
Another notice tells you what the proprietor's responsibilities are, and
at what time the meals take place. Now this last notice is the most
important of all. Woe to you if you forget it! For if you should present
yourself one minute after the dining-room door is closed, no human
consideration would get it open for you. Supplications, arguments would
be of no avail. Not even money.
"What do you mean?" some old-fashioned European will exclaim. "When the
_table d'hote_ is over, of course you cannot expect the _menu_ to be
served to you; but surely you can order a steak or a chop."
No, you cannot, not even an omelette or a piece of cold meat. If you
arrive at one minute past three (in small towns, at one minute past two)
you find the dining-room closed, and you must wait till six o'clock to
see its hospitable doors open again.
* * * * *
When you enter the dining-room, you must not believe that you can go
and sit where you like. The chief waiter assigns you a seat, and you
must take it. With a superb wave of the hand, he signs to you to follow
him. He does not even turn round to see if you are behind him, following
him in all the meanders he describes, amid the sixty, eighty, sometimes
hundred tables that are in the room. He takes it for granted you are an
obedient, submissive traveler who knows his duty. Altogether I traveled
in the United States for about ten months, and I never came across an
American so daring, so independent, as to actually take any other seat
than the one assigned to him by that tremendous potentate, the head
waiter. Occasionally, just to try him, I would sit down in a chair I
took a fancy to. But he would come and fetch me, and tell me that I
could not stay there. In Europe, the waiter asks you where you would
like to sit. In America, you ask him where you may sit. He is a paid
servant, therefore a master in America. He is in command, not of the
other waiters, but of the guests. Several times, recognizing friends in
the dining-room, I asked the man to take me to their tables (I should
not have dared go by myself), and the permission was granted with a
patronizing sign of the head. I have constantly seen Americans stop on
the threshold of the dining-room door, and wait until the chief waiter
had returned from placing a guest to come and fetch them in their turn.
I never saw them venture alone, and take an empty seat, without the
sanction of the waiter.
[Illustration: THE HEAD MAN.]
The guests feel struck with awe in that dining-room, and solemnly bolt
their food as quickly as they can. You hear less noise in an American
hotel dining-room containing five hundred people, than you do at a
French _table d'hote_ accommodating fifty people, at a German one
containing a dozen guests, or at a table where two Italians are dining
_tete-a-tete_.
[Illustration: "LOOK LIKE DUSKY PRINCES."]
The head waiter, at large Northern and Western hotels, is a white man.
In the Southern ones, he is a mulatto or a black; but white or black, he
is always a magnificent specimen of his race. There is not a ghost of a
savor of the serving man about him; no whiskers and shaven upper lips
reminding you of the waiters of the Old World; but always a fine
mustache, the twirling of which helps to give an air of _nonchalant_
superiority to its wearer. The mulatto head-waiters in the South really
look like dusky princes. Many of them are so handsome and carry
themselves so superbly that you find them very impressive at first and
would fain apologize to them. You feel as if you wanted to thank them
for kindly condescending to concern themselves about anything so
commonplace as your seat at table.
[Illustration: "SHE IS CROWNED WITH A GIGANTIC MASS OF FRIZZLED HAIR."]
In smaller hotels, the waiters are all waitresses. The "waiting" is done
by damsels entirely--or rather by the guests of the hotel.
If the Southern head waiter looks like a prince, what shall we say of
the head-waitress in the East, the North, and the West? No term short of
queenly will describe her stately bearing as she moves about among her
bevy of reduced duchesses. She is evidently chosen for her appearance.
She is "divinely tall," as well as "most divinely fair," and, as if to
add to her importance, she is crowned with a gigantic mass of frizzled
hair. All the waitresses have this coiffure. It is a livery, as caps are
in the Old World; but instead of being a badge of servitude it looks,
and is, alarmingly emancipated--so much so that, before making close
acquaintance with my dishes, I always examine them with great care. A
beautiful mass of hair looks lovely on the head of a woman, but _one_ in
your soup, even if it had strayed from the tresses of your beloved one,
would make the corners of your mouth go down, and the tip of your nose
go up.
A regally handsome woman always "goes well in the landscape," as the
French say, and I have seen specimens of these waitresses so handsome
and so commanding-looking that, if they cared to come over to Europe and
play the queens in London pantomimes, I feel sure they would command
quite exceptional prices, and draw big salaries and crowded houses.
* * * * *
The thing which strikes me most disagreeably, in the American hotel
dining-room, is the sight of the tremendous waste of food that goes on
at every meal. No European, I suppose, can fail to be struck with this;
but to a Frenchman it would naturally be most remarkable. In France,
where, I venture to say, people live as well as anywhere else, if not
better, there is a horror of anything like waste of good food. It is to
me, therefore, a repulsive thing to see the wanton manner in which some
Americans will waste at one meal enough to feed several hungry
fellow-creatures.
In the large hotels, conducted on the American plan, there are rarely
fewer than fifty different dishes on the _menu_ at dinner-time. Every
day, and at every meal, you may see people order three times as much of
this food as they could under any circumstances eat, and, after picking
it and spoiling one dish after another, send the bulk away uneaten. I am
bound to say that this practice is not only to be observed in hotels
where the charge is so much per day, but in those conducted on the
European plan, that is, where you pay for every item you order. There I
notice that people proceed in much the same wasteful fashion. It is
evidently not a desire to have more than is paid for, but simply a bad
and ugly habit. I hold that about five hundred hungry people could be
fed out of the waste that is going on at such large hotels as the Palmer
House or the Grand Pacific Hotel of Chicago--and I have no doubt that
such five hundred hungry people could easily be found in Chicago every
day.
* * * * *
I think that many Europeans are prevented from going to America by an
idea that the expense of traveling and living there is very great. This
is quite a delusion. For my part I find that hotels are as cheap in
America as in England at any rate, and railway traveling in Pullman cars
is certainly cheaper than in European first-class carriages, and
incomparably more comfortable. Put aside in America such hotels as
Delmonico's, the Brunswick in New York; the Richelieu in Chicago; and in
England such hotels as the Metropole, the Victoria, the Savoy; and take
the good hotels of the country, such as the Grand Pacific at Chicago;
the West House at Minneapolis, the Windsor at Montreal, the Cadillac at
Detroit. I only mention those I remember as the very best. In these
hotels, you are comfortably lodged and magnificently fed for from three
to five dollars a day. In no good hotel of England, France, Germany,
Italy, Switzerland, would you get the same amount of comfort, or even
luxury, at the same price, and those who require a sitting-room get it
for a little less than they would have to pay in a European hotel.
The only very dear hotels I have come across in the United States are
those of Virginia. There I have been charged as much as two dollars a
day, but never in my life did I pay so dear for what I had, never in my
life did I see so many dirty rooms or so many messes that were unfit for
human food.
But I will just say this much for the American refinement of feeling to
be met with, even in the hotels of Virginia, even in the "lunch" rooms
in small stations, you are supplied, at the end of each meal, with a
bowl of water--to rinse your mouth.
[Illustration]