The feelings of people are expressed with the same kind of defiant individualism as are their tastes. There are the married people who make love to each other in public, and the married people who make anything but love; the women who sit and adore their husbands like worshippers before a shrine, and who like the world to be conscious of their devotion; the men who call their wives pet names for the benefit of the whole table, and even indulge in playful little familiarities which make the girls toss their heads and the young men laugh; and the happy pair who quarrel without restraint, and say snappish and disagreeable things to each other in audible voices, to the embarrassment of all who hear them. There is the rakish Lothario who neglects his own better half and devotes himself to some other man's, with a lofty disregard of appearances; and there is the coquettish little wife who treats her husband very much like a dog and very little like her lord, and who carries on her flirtations in the most audacious manner under his eyes, and apparently with his sanction. And, having his sanction, she defies the world about her to take umbrage at her proceedings.
As for flirtations indeed, these are always going on in hotel life. Sometimes it is flirtation between a single man and a single woman, against which no one has a word to say on the score of propriety, though some think it will never come to anything and some think it will, and all scan curiously the signs of progressive heating, or the process of cooling off. Sometimes it is a more questionable matter; the indiscreet behaviour of a young wife, unprotected by her husband, who takes up furiously with some stranger met at the table d'hôte by chance, and of whose character or antecedents she is utterly ignorant. This is the kind of things that sets the whole hotel by the ears. Prim women ask severely, 'How long has Mrs. So-and-So known Major Fourstars?' and their faces, when told, are a sufficient commentary on the text. Others, in seeming innocence, call them by the same name, and express intense surprise when informed they are not man and wife, but acquaintances of only a week's standing. Others again say it is shameful to see them, and wonder why some one does not write home to the poor husband, and speak of doing that kind office themselves; and others watch them with a cynical half-amused attention, interpreting their actions by the broadest glossary, and carefully guarding their wives or daughters from any association with either of the offenders. Whatever else fails, this kind of vulgar hotel intrigue is always on hand at sea-side places and the like; sometimes ending disastrously, sometimes dying out in favour of a new flame, but always causing discomfort while it lasts, and annoying every one connected therewith save the sinners themselves.
The women who dress to excess are balanced by the women who do not dress at all. The first are the walking advertisements of fashion, the last might be mistaken for the canvassers of old clothes' shops. The one class oppress by their magnificence, the other disgust by their dowdiness; and each ridicules the other to the indifferent third party, who, holding the scales of justice evenly, condemns both alike. Then there are the ugly women who manifestly think themselves attractive, and the pretty women who are too conscious of their charms. To be sure there are also ugly women who are content to know themselves unpersonable, as there are pretty women who are content to know that they are pretty, just as they know that they are alive, but who think no more about it, and never trouble themselves nor their neighbours by their affectations. There are the dear motherly women beyond middle age, scant of breath and incapable of exertion, who sit in the drawing-room, placid and asthmatic, and to whom every one pays an affectionate reverence; and there are the elderly women who chirrup about like young things, and skip up and down steep places with commendable agility, and who are by no means disposed to let old age have the victory for many a year to come. There are the mothers who make their lumpish children sick with a multiplicity of good things, and the mothers who never give a moment's thought to the comfort nor the well-being of theirs; the mothers who fidget their little ones and every one else by their over-anxiety, their over caution, their incessant preoccupation and fear, and the mothers who let theirs wander, and who take it quite comfortably if they do not come in even at night-fall; the mothers who prank their children out like Mayday Jacks and Jills, and the mothers who let theirs go free in rags and dirt, till you are puzzled to believe them better born than the gutter. And with all this there is the plague of the children themselves—the babies who cry all night; the two-year-olds who scream all day; the rampaging boys who haunt the stairs and passages and who will slide down the banisters on a wet afternoon; the clattering little troop playing at horses before your bedroom door, while you are lying down with a sick headache; and the irruption into the drawing-room of the young barbarians who have no nursery of their own.
Quite recent widows with fluffy heads and no sign of their bereaved state, come to the hotel flanked by those of a couple of years' standing, still dressed in the deepest weeds, with the significant cap cherished as a sacred symbol. Brisk young widows appeal to men's admiration by their brightness, and languid young widows excite sympathy by their despair. Pretty young widows of small endowment, whose chances you would back at long odds, are handicapped against plain-featured widows, whose desolation you know no one would ever ask to relieve were it not for those Three per cents. with which they are credited. And the widows of hotel life are always a feature worth studying. There are many who do so study them;—chiefly the old bachelor of well-preserved appearance and active habits, who has constituted himself the squire of dames to the establishment, and who takes up first with one and then another of the unprotected females as they appear, and escorts them about the neighbourhood. He never makes friends with men, but he is hand-in-glove with all the pretty women; and his critical judgment on them on their first appearance is considered final. As a rule he does not care to attach himself so exclusively to one, be she maid, wife, or widow, as to get himself talked about; but sometimes he falls into the clutches of a woman of more tenacity than he has bargained for, and, man of irreproachable respectability as he is, drifts into a flirtation which the hotel takes to mean an offer or an intrigue, according to the state of the lady concerned. As the hotel-life bachelor is generally a man of profound selfishness, the discomfort that ensues does no great harm; and it sometimes happens that it is diamond cut diamond, which is a not unrighteous retribution.
For the most part the people haunting hotels and living at tables d'hôte are not specially charming, but among them may sometimes be met men and women of broad views and liberal minds, cultivated and thoughtful, whose association time ripens into friendship. They stand out in bold relief among the vulgar people who talk loud, stare hard, ask impertinent questions, and discuss the dinners and the company in a broad provincial accent; among the silent people who sit gloomily at table as if oppressed with debt or assisting at a funeral; among the betting-men who flood the house at race-time, making it echo with the jargon of the Turf and the stable; among the quarrelsome people who snap and snarl at every subject started, like dogs growling over a bone; among the religious people who will testify in season and out of season, and the political people who will argue; the stupid people who have not two ideas, and the ignorant people who do not understand anything beyond the educational range of a child or a peasant; the conventional people who oppress one with their strained proprieties, and the doubtful people of whom no one knows anything and every one suspects all. Among the oi polloi of hotel life the really nice people shine conspicuous: and more than one pleasant friendship which has lasted for life has been begun over the soup and fish of a table d'hôte.
OUR MASKS.
We should do badly, as things are ordered, if we went about the world with our natural moral faces. Even stopping short of the extravagance of betraying our most important secrets, as in a Palace of Truth, and frankly telling men and women that we think them fools or bores, it is difficult for the most honest person in society to do without something of a mask in regard to minor matters. The old quarrel between nature and art, and where the limits of each should extend, has not yet got itself arranged; and it is doubtful whether it will during the present dispensation. It may be put to rights in some future state of human development, when the spiritualists will have it all their own way and tell us exactly what we ought to do; but pending this forecast of the millennium, we are obliged to have recourse to art for the better concealment of our natural selves, and especially, for the maintenance of that queer bundle of compromises and conventions which we call society.
The oddest consequence of the artificial state in which we find ourselves obliged to live is that nature looks like affectation, and that the highest art is the most like nature of anything we know. It is in drawing-rooms as on the stage. A thoroughly inartificial actor would be a mere dummy, just as in the Greek theatre a man with his natural face would have seemed mean and insignificant to the spectators accustomed to fixed types of heroic size and set intention. But he whose acting brings the house down because of its truth to nature is he whose art has been the most profoundly studied, and with whom the concealment of art has therefore been the most perfectly attained. So in society. A man of thoroughly natural manners passes as either morose or pert according to his mood—either stupid because disinclined to exert himself, or obtrusive because in the humour to talk. He means no offence, honest body! but he makes himself disagreeable all the same. Such a man is the pest of his club, and the nuisance of every drawing-room he enters. It matters little whether he is constitutionally boorish or good-natured; he is natural; and his naturalness comes like an ugly patch of frieze on the cloth of gold with which the goddess of conventionality is draped.