A GROWL ABOUT AMERICAN COUNTRY HOTELS
Though Colin and I had been walking but a very few days, after the first
day or two it seemed as though we had been out on the road for weeks; as
though, indeed, we had spent our lives in the open air; and it needed no
more than our brief experience for us to realize what one so often reads
of those who do actually live their lives out-of-doors, gypsies, sailors,
cowboys and the like--how intolerable to them is a roof, and how
literally they gasp for air and space in the confined walls of cities.
Bed in the bush with stars to see,
Bread I dip in the river--
There's the life for a man like me,
There's the life forever.
The only time of the day when our spirits began to fail was toward its
close, when the shadows of supper and bed in some inclement inn began to
fall over us, and we confessed to each other a positive sense of fear in
our evening approach to the abodes of men. After a long, safe, care-free
day, in the company of liberating prospects and sweet-breathed winds,
there seemed a curious lurking menace in the most harmless village, as
well as an unspeakable irksomeness in its inharmonious interruption of
our mood. To emerge, saturated, body and soul, with the sweet scents and
sounds and sights of a day's tramp, out of the meditative leafiness and
spiritual temper of natural things, into the garishly lit street of some
little provincial town, animated with the clumsy mirth of silly young
country folks, aping so drearily the ribaldry, say, of Elmira, is a
painful anticlimax to the spirit. Had it only been real Summer, instead
of Indian Summer, we should, of course, have been real gypsies, and made
our beds under the stars, but, as it was, we had no choice. Or, had we
been walking in Europe ... yes, I am afraid the truth must out, and that
our real dread at evening was--the American country hotel. With the best
wish in the world, it is impossible to be enthusiastic over the American
country hotel. How ironically the kindly old words used to come floating
to me out of Shakespeare each evening as the shadows fell, and the lights
came out in the windows--"to take mine ease at mine inn;" and assuredly
it was on another planet that Shenstone wrote:
_Whoe'er hath travelled life's dull round,
Whate'er his fortunes may have been,
Must sigh to think he still has found
His warmest welcome at an inn_.
Had Shenstone been writing in an American country hotel, his tune would
probably have been more after this fashion: "A wonderful day has come to
a dreary end in the most sepulchral of hotels, a mouldy, barn-like place,
ill-lit, mildewed and unspeakably dismal. A comfortless room with two
beds and two low-power electric lights, two stiff chairs, an
uncompanionable sofa, and some ghastly pictures of simpering naked women.
We have bought some candles, and made a candlestick out of a soap-dish.
Colin is making the best of it with 'The Beloved Vagabond,' and I have
drawn up one of the chairs to a table with a mottled marble top, and am
writing this amid a gloom which you could cut with a knife, and which is
so perfect of its kind as to be almost laughable. But for the mail, which
we found with unutterable thankfulness at the post-office, I hardly dare
think what would have happened to us, to what desperate extremities we
might not have been driven, though even the possibilities of despair seem
limited in this second-hand tomb of a town...."
Here Colin looks up with a wry smile and ironically quotes from the
wisdom of Paragot: "What does it matter where the body finds itself, so
long as the soul has its serene habitations?" This wail is too typical
of most of our hotel experiences. As a rule we found the humble, cheaper
hotels best, and, whenever we had a choice of two, chose the less
pretentious.
Sometimes as, on entering a town or village, we asked some passer-by
about the hotels, we would be looked over and somewhat doubtfully asked:
"Do you want a two-dollar house?" And we soon learned to pocket our
pride, and ask if there was not a cheaper house. Strange that people
whose business is hospitality should be so inhospitable, and strange that
the American travelling salesman, a companionable creature, not averse
from comfort, should not have created a better condition of things. For
the inn should be the natural harmonious close to the day, as much a part
of the day's music as the setting sun. It should be the gratefully sought
shelter from the homeless night, the sympathetic friend of hungry
stomachs and dusty feet, the cozy jingle of social pipes and dreamy
after-dinner talk, the abode of snowy beds for luxuriously aching limbs,
lavendered sheets and pleasant dreams.
But, as people without any humour usually say, "A sense of humour helps
under all circumstances"; and we managed to extract a great deal of fun
out of the rigours of the American country hotel.
In one particularly inhospitable home of hospitality, for example, we
found no little consolation from the directions printed over the very
simple and familiar device for calling up the hotel desk. The device was
nothing more remarkable than the button of an ordinary electric bell,
which you were, in the usual way, to push once for bell-boy, twice for
ice-water, three times for chambermaid, and so on. However, the hotel
evidently regarded it as one of the marvels of advanced science and
referred to it, in solemnly printed "rules" for its use, as no less than
"The Emergency Drop Annunciator!" Angels of the Annunciation! what a
heavenly phrase!
But this is an ill-tempered chapter--let us begin another.