“Well, all I can say is, that if I had known I certainly would not have engaged you. I don’t care twopence for the lecture; it was the yarn afterwards that I was looking forward to, and I am extremely disappointed.”

Now there was a nice state of affairs! I did the only thing I felt possible—bade him good night, and got into my cab, feeling very angry at what I thought was the perversity of the situation, and leaving my would-be host doubtless very angry at what he considered to be my perversity. It is perhaps unnecessary to add that I never got another engagement at that particular school.

Speaking of cabs being retained for the homeward journey reminds me of a wretched experience I had once in Surrey. I was engaged to lecture at a preparatory school, the headmaster of which was a most kindly, courteous gentleman. He warned me some time before I came that the school was six miles from the nearest station, that I must engage a cab to wait and bring me back, the lecture being arranged so that I should have ample time to dine and return to catch a train somewhere about 10.50. But when I was all ready to depart the cabman could not be found—and by the time he did turn up, it was obvious that things were being cut rather fine. And so I told him, but he only replied nonchalantly that there was “plenty of time,” and did not hasten one bit. Two or three times on the way I tried to liven him up, but he took no notice, and we arrived at the station to find the train gone. A belated porter came up and gave me the information that the next train was about midnight, due at Waterloo about 1 a.m., and then my cabman said, “How long’s she ben gone?”

I am glad to say that I do not remember what I said then. I know it was copious and bitter, but it was utterly lost on the cabman, who simply turned and drove off, leaving me to wait about on a bitter January night in a fireless waiting-room or on a windswept platform until the coming of the last train. I arrived at my hotel in London chilled to the marrow at 1.30 a.m., and owe it to my extraordinary immunity from chills and colds that I did not have a bad bout of illness.

But to return to this matter of hospitality. Taking it all round, I am convinced that there is none so perfectly acceptable to a lecturer at any rate as that in England and Scotland. Irish hospitality is warm, effusive and well meant, but it is too casual, there are too many discrepancies. These can be made fun of, and indeed enjoyed by the young and vigorous, but to the middle-aged, who are none too strong, they are apt to be trying. Such as, for instance, a peat fire in your bedroom on a bitter winter night, which only smoulders and smokes, and gives not the slightest heat. And then to find your pyjamas in the bed wrapped round a leaking hot-water bottle, which has made it necessary to perch precariously upon one edge of the bed, in order to keep dry, but, of course, entailing the destruction of sleep.

But I am in honour bound to say that although I have enjoyed the hospitality of several hundreds of families in this United (as yet) Kingdom of ours, I could count my experiences that were unpleasant on the fingers of one hand, so well is the virtue understood and carried out. In the United States, where I once had a lecture tour, I was never offered hospitality, beyond a meal, but once. And if that once was a fair sample of the custom of the country in that direction, I am very glad. For both my host and hostess regarded me as their property, bound to go through certain performances as a sort of return for my entertainment; and when I jibbed they were immensely surprised. They seemed to think that addressing Boards of Trade, attending Clam Bakes, and speaking pieces from my books to a drawing-room packed with guests invited for the purpose, ought to please me beyond measure, and that all arrangements of the kind might be made without any reference to me or my personal affairs. I am quite willing to believe, however, that such hospitality may be exceptional. Anyhow, I do not want, as Martin Ross has it, to be “entertained within an inch of my life.”

Only once in Australia and New Zealand was I given hospitality—I beg pardon, twice; but as both cases were exceptional, and the pleasure they gave me of the deepest and most lasting kind, I will say no more about them here. As far as I am concerned, hospitality in Australasia and America has been non-existent for me, for the exceptions which I have quoted only go to prove this rule. And now I must close this chapter, not, indeed, that my matter on the subject is exhausted, but because—well, because I want to get on to the burning topic of hotels. And this is a discursive yarn at best, its only virtue, as far as I can see, being its absolute truthfulness. So we will get on, if you please, to a subject that is of the deepest interest to all travellers, but especially to those who travel to earn a living, and to whom hotel charges are a most serious item.

CHAPTER X
HOTELS

My first experience of hotels goes back to 1879, when I arrived in Belfast as a seaman before the mast, and was invited by my good friend, George Hunter, a gentleman who for motives of economy had worked his way home with us before the mast, to dine with him at the Eglinton and Winton Hotel. I was staying at the Sailors’ Home at the time, the best, by the way, that I ever did stay in, but as we had not yet been paid off, my wardrobe was not strictly according to shore ideas. I had a good coat and waistcoat, but I had to wear a pair of moleskin trousers. They were milk-white with energetic washing, but they must have looked funny, for I remember a hilarious commercial after dinner asking me if I was one of the Welsh miner-heroes (there had been a terrific colliery accident in North Wales not long before, attended by the usual heroic endeavours to save life).

I also remember that the food seemed to me the finest of which I had ever dreamed, but then I was fresh from five months of forecastle grub. That, however, was no excuse for my lifting the last cauliflower out of the dish proffered me, even if it was no bigger than a duck egg. To a seaman fresh from five months’ utter privation of vegetables, it was but a mouthful, but something of the enormity of my offence was borne in upon me when the waiter (he was an Irishman) proffered the empty dish to my neighbour.