“Get me some cauliflower,” said that gentleman promptly, not without a stern glance at my plate.
“There’s no more,” replied the waiter, and the silence that ensued was thick enough to cut. For four persons had not been served with cauliflower. Yet, British fashion, no man complained, and the dinner proceeded in grim silence. And I felt bewildered, for my senses told me that I had not been greedy, and yet I could not help feeling also that I had annexed the cauliflower of four diners.
Two years afterwards I arrived at Dundee, and remembering my former experiences, went to a hotel for the one night I was to stay there. And when I sat down to the laden table and the waitress placed a 20-lb. joint of cold roast beef before me to help myself, the hungry months behind me faded away, and I fed blissfully. They only charged me 2s. for my meal, but I am sure they were heavy losers, for I must have eaten over a pound of meat, to say nothing of bread, butter, jam and cake. But I feel that they could have few such appetites as mine then was to cater for.
It was many years before I was a guest at a hotel again, and then, alas! my appetite had gone. Gone so completely that I did not want any breakfast at any time, and for my principal meal in the middle of the day the smallest quantity of the plainest food. And if that food were tough or badly cooked or unpleasant, I wanted nothing but a piece of bread. This made me fiercely critical of hotel charges. I could not remember that to keep up a great establishment it was necessary to charge a fairly high price, and to cater for people with appetites, not abnormalities like myself, satisfied with a cup of coffee and a slice of bread and butter for breakfast, and fiercely resentful at having to pay 2s. for it.
Nevertheless, it is possible to recognise facts that you cannot alter, and I speedily became passive under the infliction of comfortless splendour and high charges for meals that I couldn’t eat. I need hardly say that I never by any chance took a table d’hôte dinner so cheap at 5s., or ditto luncheon at 3s. 6d., fulfilling the requirements of the hotel, which threatened a fine of 2s. if I did not take meals in the house, by paying 2s. for a cup of coffee and a slice of bread and butter at breakfast-time. But in Scotland I found attached to every large hotel a restaurant where the food was really excellent; quality, quantity, variety and price being all that one could desire. There I could dine or lunch for about 1s. 6d. as well as I desired, one plate always serving me, always being sufficient. I know that some people on reading this will esteem me mean, but I am really not so, only I do hate having to pay for a succession of dishes whereof I can only eat one.
I always found, too, that the better the hotel the more moderate were the charges as compared with second- and third-rate places, with the vile old system of charging for attendance, which benefits nobody but the proprietor, and means that you have to pay twice or the attendants get no tips. It is not a bit too emphatic to call the system vile, for these places hire their servants for a few shillings a month, on the distinct understanding that they, the servants, make up for their scanty wages by tips, which the customer has already paid in the bill. Nothing could well be more paltry, dishonest and irritating than such a system, for even the seaside lodging-house keepers’ extras are not nearly so annoying. Fortunately the better class of hotels have abolished the system altogether. You know what you have to pay, and even if you feel that the old extras are added in, that is not half so irritating as the old system.
One of the strangest things that I have noted in my hotel experience is the inferiority of the Temperance Hotel. There must be some exceptions, of course, or how can the popularity of the huge Cranston Hotels be explained; but, speaking generally, so far as my experience goes, in a temperance hotel, food, attendance, accommodation, and civility are all far below what is obtainable in licensed hotels. I do not pretend to explain it, but I have known many men who were total abstainers who shuddered at the thought even of going to a temperance hotel. Is it, I wonder, anything to do with the fact that all temperance drinks are vile, thirst-provokers and stomach-destroyers. Except perhaps water, and even water in satisfying quantity is not good for the middle-aged. It is a puzzle which I leave to wiser heads than mine.
Then there is the Commercial Hotel. If you are a commercial, nothing can well be better. The food is of the best, the charges are reasonable, and the tips exceedingly modest. But if you are not one of the knights of the road, you are in parlous case. The worst room in the house, the almost undisguised scorn of the attendants, the quite undisguised dislike of the guests are yours without asking. The very last hotel I stayed in was a Temperance Commercial Hotel, which outside looked like a large and charming family villa—but my room was positively filthy, with black rotten paper hanging off the walls, a bed apparently made of dumplings, no fire-place, and for light a feeble gas-jet in a remote corner, where it only served to show what a den the room was. I asked for a fire to be made in my room, for the night was bitterly cold, and the two public rooms downstairs were full of tobacco smoke, which I cannot breathe for coughing, but I was told that it was impossible, as there was no fire-place—I had not then seen the room. Why did I go there? Well, the room was taken for me by the secretary of the society I was to lecture for—I attach no blame to him—and when I found out it was too late, in my weak condition, to go anywhere else. But this was in a town of 200,000 inhabitants in the North of England.
Let it be understood once for all that I dislike hotels as necessary evils, but that my sense of justice compels me to admit that one may be made comfortable in a gigantic caravanserai where it would seem impossible for the personal element to have any chance to express itself, and, conversely, that one may be made abjectly miserable in a very small hotel where it might naturally be thought that the proprietor would make it his sole business to see that his guests were comfortable. Management is the keynote of it all, but even that is powerless against other advantages such as position, want of competition, etc. Most gratefully do I bear tribute to one splendid characteristic of all the great hotels owned by the Midland Railway Company—the quality and get-up of their bed-linen. It must be an education in comfort to some people, wealthy folks, too, who stay in them; for I can honestly say that in no private house, however costly in its appointments, have I ever enjoyed contact with such sheets and pillow-slips as in any Midland hotel that I have ever stayed in, and I think I have sampled them all.
For sheer magnificence, which does not always mean comfort by any means, the Great Scottish Railway Hotels are easily first of all the hotels I know, which, of course, does not mean anything of the “Carlton” or “Ritz” type. Why is it, I wonder, that Edinburgh and Glasgow can and do so easily excel our great metropolis in railway stations and hotels? The finest terminus in London is a mere undistinguished siding compared with Waverley, Princes Street or Central Stations; nor, although St. Pancras Hotel is architecturally very fine, does it compare with the castellated splendour of the North British Hotel at Waverley.