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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