§ 3
Una’s interest in the Year-Round Inn at Crosshampton Harbor, the results obtained by reasonably good meals and a little chintz, and her memory of the family hotel, had led her attention to the commercial possibilities of innkeeping.
She was convinced that, despite the ingenuity and care displayed by the managers of the great urban hotels and the clever resorts, no calling included more unimaginative slackers than did innkeeping. She had heard traveling-men at Pemberton’s and at Truax & Fein’s complain of sour coffee and lumpy beds in the hotels of the smaller towns; of knives and forks that had to be wiped on the napkins before using; of shirt-sleeved proprietors who loafed within reach of the cuspidors while their wives tried to get the work done.
She began to read the Hotel News and the Hotel Bulletin, and she called on the manager of a supply-house for hotels.
She read in the Bulletin of Bob Sidney, an ex-traveling-man, who, in partnership with a small capitalist, had started a syndicate of inns. He advertised: “The White Line Hotels. Fellow-drummers, when you see the White Line sign hung out, you know you’re in for good beds and good coffee.”
The idea seemed good to her. She fancied that traveling-men would go from one White Line Hotel to another. The hotels had been established in a dozen towns along the Pennsylvania Railroad, in Norristown, Reading, Williamsport, and others, and now Bob Sidney was promising to invade Ohio and Indiana. The blazed White Line across the continent caught Una’s growing commercial imagination. And she liked several of Mr. Sidney’s ideas: The hotels would wire ahead to others of the Line for accommodations for the traveler; and a man known to the Line could get credit at any of its houses, by being registered on identifying cards.
She decided to capture Mr. Sidney. She made plans.
In the spring she took a mysterious two weeks’ leave of absence and journeyed through New York State, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana. The woman who had quite recently regarded it as an adventure to go to Brooklyn was so absorbed in her Big Idea that she didn’t feel self-conscious even when she talked to men on the train. If they smacked their lips and obviously said to themselves, “Gee! this is easy—not a bad little dame,” she steered them into discussing hotels; what they wanted at hotels and didn’t get; what was their favorite hotel in towns in from fifteen hundred to forty thousand inhabitants, and precisely what details made it the favorite.
She stayed at two or three places a day for at least one meal—hotels in tiny towns she had never heard of, and in larger towns that were fumbling for metropolitanism. She sought out all the summer resorts that were open so early. She talked to travelers, men and women; to hack-drivers and to grocers supplying hotels; to proprietors and their wives; to clerks and waitresses and bell-boys, and unconsidered, observant porters. She read circulars and the catalogues of furniture establishments.
Finally, she visited each of Mr. Bob Sidney’s White Line Hotels. Aside from their arrangements for “accommodations” and credit, their superior cleanliness, good mattresses, and coffee with a real taste, she did not find them preferable to others. In their rows of cuspidors and shouldering desks, and barren offices hung with insurance calendars, and dining-rooms ornamented with portraits of decomposed ducks, they were typical of all the hotels she had seen.
On the train back to New York she formulated her suggestions for hotels, among which, in her own words, were the following:
“(1) Make the offices decent rooms—rem. living-room at Gray Wolf Lodge. Take out desks—guests to register and pay bills in small office off living-room—keep letters there, too. Not much room needed and can’t make pleasant room with miserable old ‘desk’ sticking out into it.
“(2) Cut out the cuspidors. Have special room where drummers can play cards and tell stories and spit. Allow smoking in ‘office,’ but make it pleasant. Rem. chintz and wicker chairs at $3 each. Small round tables with reading-lamps. Maybe fireplace.
“(3) Better pastry and soup and keep coffee up to standard. One surprise in each meal—for example, novel form of eggs, good salad, or canned lobster cocktail. Rem. the same old pork, beans, cornbeef, steak, deadly cold boiled potato everywhere I went.
“(4) More attractive dining-rooms. Esp. small tables for 2 and 4. Cater more to local customers with à la carte menus—not long but good.
“(5) Women housekeepers and pay’em good.
“(6) Hygienic kitchens and advertise’em.
“(7) Train employees, as rem. trav. man told me United Cigar Stores do.
“(8) Better accom. for women. Rem. several traveling men’s wives told me they would go on many trips w. husbands if they could get decent hotels in all these towns.
“(9) Not ape N. Y. hotels. Nix on gilt and palms and marble. But clean and tasty food, and don’t have things like desks just because most hotels do.”