The stables had stalls for about fifty horses, and over them were lofts for hay, straw, and corn. Harness-rooms, waiting-room for the postboys, and an “ostry,” i.e., office and store-room for the ostler, were attached, together with chaise and coach-houses. The establishment of the “White Hart”—and it was typical of many others in the old days—covered from five to six acres.
The staff of such a house was, of course, large. Besides the innkeeper and his wife, both of them working hard in the conduct of the business, there were housekeeper, barmaid, man-cook, waiter and under-waiter, kitchenmaid, scullerymaid, chambermaid, laundress, housemaid, nurse, boots, ostler, tap-boy, first-turn postboy, and generally an extra woman: sixteen persons, whom the innkeeper had to lodge and feed daily, in addition to his guests.
The “White Hart” was re-fronted in a very plain, not to say ugly, manner in 1813, and finally demolished in 1863. Not even that most lovely and most famous feature of it, the celebrated “Rochester room,” was spared. This was a noble apartment, built as an addition to the back of the house in 1663 by the Earl of Rochester, as a return for a signal service rendered by the landlord in that time—perilous to such Cavaliers as he—the Commonwealth. It seems, according to Clarendon, that the Earl and Sir Nicholas Armour came riding horseback into the town one night and put up at the “White Hart,” then kept by a landlord named Gilvy, who was affected strongly in favour of Cromwell and all his doings. The local magistrate, hearing of the visit of the Earl, sent secretly to the innkeeper requesting him to detain the travellers’ horses the next morning, so that neither of them should be able to leave, pending an inquiry upon their business; but the thing was not done secretly enough. Probably one of the servants of the inn told those two guests of something ominous being afoot; at any rate, the Earl had Gilvy up and questioned him, and, telling him how probably the lives of himself and friend were in his hand, gave him forty Jacobuses and suggested that they should, without a word, depart that night. Clarendon expresses himself as unable to decide whether the gold or the landlord’s conscience prompted his next action. At any rate, Gilvy conducted the two fugitives from the inn at midnight “into the London way.” They reached London and then fled over sea, while the landlord was left to invent some plausible story to satisfy the Justice of the Peace, who in his turn was suspected by Cromwell of being a party to the escape.
At the Restoration, the landlord received a brimming measure of reward. He was thanked by the King, and the Earl built for him that noble room, forty-two feet long, by twenty-three wide, that was the pride and glory of the “White Hart” for just two hundred years. It was panelled from floor to ceiling in richly carved oak, set off with gilding, and embellished with the figures of Peace and Concord and the initials C R, while the ceiling was painted with nymphs and cherubim by Antonio Verrio.
Nothing has more changed from its former condition than the old inn which has become the modern hotel. The “George,” the “Crown and Anchor,” the “Wellington,” or the “King’s Head,” had an individuality which was never lost. There was a personal kind of welcome from the landlord and the landlady that simulated the hospitality of a friendly host and hostess, mingled with the attention of a superior sort of body-servant. You were not handed over to a number and a chambermaid, like a document in a pigeon-hole tabulated by a clerk; but the hostess herself showed you your rooms, and begged you to put a name to anything you might fancy. There was no general coffee-room then, save for commercial travellers and such social gentlemen as preferred even inferior company to solitude. There was no table d’hôte dinner other than the ordinary, between twelve and two, which was chiefly made for the convenience of travellers by the stage-coach, who halted here for change and refreshment. Even the ladies who might be on the road were served and kept apart from the, perhaps, doubtful gents below; and mine host himself brought in the first dish and set it on the table of the private room, which was as much de rigueur then for ladies as the copper warming-pan and the claret with the yellow seal, or the thick, deep red luscious port of old, ordered by the knowing for the good of the house.
In the country the pretty little inn, with its honeysuckled porch and scrambling profusion of climbing roses up to the bedroom windows, had an even more home-like character in its methods of dealing with its guests. Here the servants stayed on for years, till they grew to be as much part of the establishment as the four-poster hung with red moreen and the plated sconces for candles. And here everything was of perfect cleanliness, and as fresh as fragrant. The eggs and milk and butter were all sweet and new. Generous jugs of cream softened the tartness of the black-currant pudding or the green-gooseberry tart. The spring chickens and young ducklings had been well fed; the mutton was home-grown and not under five years; the beef was home-grown too, and knew nothing of antiseptic preparations or frozen chambers; and the vegetables came direct from the garden, and had been neither tinned nor carted for miles in huge waggon loads, well rammed down and tightly compressed. And all the meat was roasted before an open fire, diligently basted in the process, till the gravy lightly frothed on the browned skin, and the appetising scent it gave out had no affinity with the smell of fat on heated iron, which for the most part accompanies the modern roast in the modern oven. The linen invariably smelt of lavender or dried rose-leaves, of which big bags were kept among the sheets; but the washing apparatus was poor, and the illumination was scanty. Wax candles in silver or plated branched candlesticks, that vaguely suggested churches and sacraments, shed a veritably “dim religious” glimmer in the sitting-room, and appeared expensively under the form of “lights” in the bill—mistily suggestive of food for hungry cats.
Yet the old country inn had, and still has—for it is not wholly extinct—its charms that weigh against any little defect.
Of all this quasi-home life which belonged to the old inn of the past, the hotel of the present has not a trace. For certain forms of luxury the modern hotel is hard to beat. Thick carpets deaden the footsteps of stragglers through the corridors, and your boots, invariably kicked into infinities by midnight guests, do not—as they do in the older houses—fly noisily along the bare boards. The rooms are lighted with electric light, but usually set so high as to be useless for all purposes of reading or working. In the drawing-room are luxurious chairs of all shapes and sizes; in the reading-room papers of all colours, to suit here the red-hot Radical and there the cooler Conservative. The billiard-room attracts the men after dinner as—if in the country—the tennis-ground or the golf-links had attracted them through the day. The telephone does everything you want. Carriages, theatres, quotations, races, a doctor if you are ill, a motor-car if you are well—nothing within the range of human wants that can be ordered and not chosen comes amiss to the telephone and its manipulators. All the rough edges of life are smoothed down to satin softness. All the friction is taken away. A modern hotel is as the isle of Calypso or the Garden of Armida, where all you have to do is to make known your wants and pay the bill.
But it has not one single strain of Home in it. Home is the place where the out-of-date lingers, and where modern conveniences that add to the complexity and the worry of life have no corner. At the modern hotel you are a document in a pigeon-hole—a number, not a person—an accident, not substantive. The chambermaid does not wait on you, but on the room. You get up, breakfast, dine, according to the times fixed by the management. You cannot have your bath before a certain hour, and the bacon is not frizzled until nine o’clock. Luncheon is probably elastic because it is cold, and potatoes can be kept hot without difficulty. Dinner is, of course, fixed, and you take it in masses together: or so took it, for in late years, especially in the first hotels of London, a revulsion of feeling has led to the long tables being abolished, and small ones installed, where, almost privately amid the throng, you and your little party may dine. As a rule the waiters are Swiss and the meat is foreign, the cook is a Frenchman and called a chef; and the materials are inferior. The vegetables are tinned, and oysters, lobsters, salmon, and hare in May follow suit. The sauces are all exactly the same in one hotel as in another, and much margarine enters into their composition. Electric bells emphasise the monotonous ordering of the whole concern, where as little character is expressed in the ring as in the number it indicates; and speaking-tubes sound in the corridors, like domestic fog-horns or railway whistles, calling the chambermaids or waiters of such-and-such a floor to listen to their orders from below. Wherever you go you find exactly the same things—the same order, the same management, the same appliances and methods. You arrive without a welcome, you leave without a farewell. Your character is determined according to the tips you give on parting, and an hour after you have gone your personality is forgotten. But, above all things, Heaven save us from falling ill in the modern hotel. No one cares for you, and no one even has the decency to make a pretence of doing so.
Sometimes, however, if you go somewhat out of the season, and before the rush of visitors begins, you get to a certain degree behind the scenes, and learn a little of the heart and humanity of the management. The chambermaid has time to have a little chat with you in the morning, and the head waiter gives you bits of local information both interesting and new. The manageress is not too busy for a few minutes’ gossip across the counter which separates her from the hall, and screens her off in a sanctuary of her own. And you may find her cheerful, chatty, kindly, and willing to please for the mere pleasure of pleasing.