Mary Jane Married: Tales of a Village Inn

by George R. Sims

Oh dear me! I know more about hotel customers now than I did then, and I don’t expect any of them to go into raptures about anything. It’s generally the other way; they always find something to grumble at. We had one gentleman who, all the time he was with us, did nothing but grumble at the pattern of the wall-paper in his bedroom (a very pretty paper it was, being storks with frogs in their mouths, and some other animal sitting on its hind legs that I’ve never met anybody who could tell me its name), and he declared that he had the nightmare every night through looking at it; and another gentleman wanted all the furniture shifted in his room because it was green, and he hated green; and another said the pattern of the carpet made him bilious; and we had a lady who used to go on all day long to me about the bedroom furniture, and say it was so vulgar that if she lived with it long she believed that she would begin to use vulgar language. Then she went into a long rigmarole about the influence of your surroundings, or whatever you call it, till I quite lost my patience, and said we couldn’t refurnish the house for everybody who came.

It was the same with the beds. One person wouldn’t sleep in a wooden bedstead, because—— Well, you know the usual objection to wooden beds, but such a thing, I am sure, need never have been mentioned in my house, for one has never been known; and if they do get into bedsteads it’s the fault of the mistress of the house and the servants in nine cases out of ten.

Another gentleman, who was put in a room with a brass bedstead—the only room we had to spare—shook his head, and said he was sorry he had to sleep on brass, as it destroyed the rural character of the place. Give him a good old four-poster and he felt he was sleeping in the country, but with a brass bedstead you might just as well be in London.

And if the customers didn’t grumble about the bedsteads, they did about the beds. It was really quite heart-breaking at first, when we were very anxious to please, and so, of course, listened to everything people had to say, so as to alter what was wrong, if possible. But it was no use. We had nearly all feather beds at first, and then the customers all hated feather beds and said they weren’t healthy, and we bought mattresses, and then half the people that came said they preferred feather beds, and couldn’t sleep on mattresses.

And as to the bolsters and the pillows, the grumbling about them used to be terrible. I think we must have had an extra fanciful lot of people, for one swore the pillows were too hard, and another that they were too soft. There was one old gentleman who stayed with us three weeks, and all that time we never managed to make his bed right. I made it myself, the housemaid made it, and I even got cook to come and make it, to see if by accident she could make it right. But it was no use; every morning he swore he hadn’t slept a wink because the bed wasn’t made his way, and he kept on about it till he had his breakfast, and then he began to grumble about the tea, and say nobody in the house knew how to make a decent cup of tea. Then it was the same with the bacon, and with the eggs: they were never right. I believe that old gentleman was what you call a born grumbler; nothing was ever right while he was with us. He grumbled so much that I said to Harry we must be careful with his bill, for I felt sure he would fight every item, as some of them do; but when I took it to him he just looked at the total and threw down a couple of banknotes, and never said a word or examined a single item.

I’ve found that often with people who grumble at everything—they don’t grumble at the bill; and people you think have been pleased with everything, you have to argue with them for half an hour to make them believe they’ve had a meal in the house.

But these people aren’t so much bother as the customers who make it a rule to grumble at the wines and the spirits and the beer. Harry used to get quite wild at first when they used to send for him over a bottle of wine, before a lot of people, and say, “Landlord, just taste this wine.” Harry used to have to take a glass, of course, and put on a pleasing expression, and taste it and say, “There’s nothing the matter with it, sir!”

But, they would have it that it wasn’t sound, or it was new, or it was corked, or it was something or the other; and the same with the spirits. There are a lot of people who go about and pretend to be great judges of sixpenny-worths of whiskey and brandy, and sniff at it, and taste it, and palate it as if you were selling it ten shillings a bottle and warranting it a hundred years old. And they’re not at all particular about saying out loud that it isn’t good. I heard one gentleman say one day, when our coffee-room was quite full of customers, “Very nice people who keep this house; pity they sell such awful stuff.”

It made me go crimson; I felt so indignant, because it wasn’t true. Harry is most particular, and if anything were wrong he would speak to the distillers at once; but there is nothing wrong, for he is an excellent judge of whiskey and brandy himself, and we always pay the best price to have the best article, because that is what we believe in. Some people, especially young beginners, do doctor their stuff, I know, to make a larger profit; but it is a great mistake, for it soon gets known, and the house gets a bad name.

I’ve heard a gentleman myself, when asked to go into a certain house with a friend, say, “No, thank you; if I have anything to drink there, I’m always ill for a week afterwards.” The tricks of the trade are all very well, but trade that’s done by trick doesn’t last long, and in inn-keeping, as in any other business, honesty is the best policy in the long run.