Mary Jane Married: Tales of a Village Inn

by George R. Sims

Mr. Stuart—that was the artist’s name who stayed with us—said that he hated these huge hotels, because you were only a number; that you ceased to be a human being, and became No. 367 or No. 56 or No. 111, as the case might be, and if you were ill, or if you died, it was all the same to the management. He said he always had visions of lying ill in one of these places, and hearing somebody call down the speaking-tube outside in the corridor, “Doctor wanted, No. 360,” and perhaps after that, “Coffin wanted, No. 360.” And if ever he felt the least bit ill he always got out of a big hotel as quickly as possible, and went to a small one, so as to leave off being a number, and become a human being again.

He said it was bad enough in the big hotels in our country, but abroad it was something awful to be ill in them. He had a friend of his taken very ill in Italy, in a Grand Hotel, and he used to go and sit with him and try to cheer him up, and he said directly he began to be ill and it was thought he was going to die, the hotel tariff went up about two hundred per cent. for everything. The poor gentleman died in the hotel, and the friends had to be telegraphed for to come and settle up, and a nice settle up it was. Not only was the bill something terrible—such a thing as a cup of beef-tea being about five shillings, and double and treble charged for every little thing in the way of refreshment for the invalid, brought up into the room—but, after the poor gentleman was dead, the manager of the hotel sent the friends in a bill, charging them for the bed, the bed-linen, the curtains, the carpets, and the furniture, and even the wall-paper.

When Mr. Stuart told me that, I said, “Good gracious! whatever for?” And then he explained to me that it is the custom in some of the countries in the South of Europe to be awfully afraid of death—especially in Naples, where the poor gentleman died—and everybody shrinks away from death; the friends leaving the poor invalid to die alone, with only a priest in the room, even though the dying person has all his senses about him; and after there has been death in a room no one will touch anything that has been in it, and so everything is given away or sold cheap to the poor, and everything is had in new, even the walls being stripped and all new paper put on them.

You may be sure in a Grand Hotel in these places the refurnishing is made as expensive as possible, because it is all put down in the corpse’s friends’ bill.

Mr. Stuart—or, as we got to call him, after he’d stayed at the ‘Stretford Arms’ Hotel several times, “The Traveller”—when he found that Harry and I were interested in these things about hotels abroad, and the ways of the people, told us a lot of things, and I put them down in my book, thinking perhaps they would be useful to me some day.

What brought it up about people dying in hotels, was our having a young lady very, very ill indeed, in our house at the time, and we were really afraid that she was going to die, for the doctor shook his head over her; and it was talking about the case, and the worry it was to us having it in the hotel, that led Mr. Stuart to tell us what he did.

Fancy everybody going away and leaving their own relations directly the doctor says that their last moments are coming! It must be awful to the dying people to look round and find all the faces that they love gone from the bedside. Mr. Stuart told us that this custom is so well known among the Naples people, that one day a little girl, who was dying of consumption and had come to her last hour, opened her eyes and saw her father, who was her only relation, stealing out of the room. She looked at him a moment, and then, in a feeble voice and with tears in her eyes, she whispered, “Ah, papa, I see it is all over with me now, for you are going away.”

That made her father feel so sorry that he came back, and sat down, and held his little girl’s hand till she died. But everybody in Naples, when they heard of it, said, “How awful! and how could he do such a thing?” and for a long time afterwards people seemed to shrink from him.

I shouldn’t like to live in a country like that, especially as you are put under ground in twenty-four hours, and the men who put you in your coffin, and go to your funeral, are covered with a long white sack from head to foot, with two holes cut in it for their eyes. So Mr. Stuart said, and he showed us some photographs of them, and made me feel ill for a week.

I said to Harry, when Mr. Stuart had gone to his room and left us thinking over what he had told us, that I hoped the young lady wasn’t going to die in our hotel. To have anybody die in the place—especially a small place like ours—is most unfortunate, and makes everybody uncomfortable, besides interfering with business.