These complaints worried us very much, and made Harry almost swear—a thing which, being a sailor, he can’t help sometimes, but doesn’t do often, and then only something very mild, quite different to real sea-swearing, which I’ve heard is very strong indeed.
He was telling another gentleman in our business who came to see us one day about it, and the gentleman said, “My boy, we all have to put up with that sort of thing. But I’ll tell you what to do. If you give a man a good bottle of wine, and he grumbles at it, and pretends there’s something wrong with it, the next bottle he orders give him the worst you’ve got in your cellar, and it’s ten to one he’ll smack his lips and say, ‘Ah, that’s something very different now.’ Then you say, ‘Yes, sir; it was a mistake yesterday—a mistake of the cellarman’s.’ ‘Ah,’ he will say, ‘I am a connoisseur, and my opinion of a wine is taken by the best judges.’ You humour him and flatter him a bit, and if he stays long enough he’ll drink up all the common wine that you’ve got, pay the top price, and recommend your house everywhere for its ‘capital cellar.’”
Of course Harry wouldn’t play such a trick, but it would have served some of the customers right if he had. There are people who think it shows what a lot they know to grumble at the quality of everything—especially at hotels, where some gentlemen never forget to let everybody know that they are capital judges of wines and spirits. With the cigars, too, there is trouble sometimes, though, of course, not so much, as hotel customers who smoke good cigars generally carry their own Havannahs, and for the ordinary cigars, except in the bar and the smoking-room, there is not much call.
But sometimes a gentleman who is sitting in our parlour talking to us, will ask for a Havannah cigar, and Harry will offer him one of the best—and they are really good, for Harry is a judge, and has been with his ship to Havannah, and smoked them green. And I’ve known a gentleman—after smoking the Havannah a little while—say, it was a British cigar in a Havannah box; he could tell by the flavour. And the same gentleman, one evening that we were out, asked for a cigar, and our barmaid gave him one of the threepenny ones by mistake, and he liked it, and said that was something like a cigar. He said Harry had been swindled in the others.
Of course I don’t say all gentlemen are like this. Plenty of them who come to our place do know good wine and good cigars, and when they get them, appreciate them, and don’t mind paying for them.
It is always the people who grumble so much about the quality that are the worst judges, and they do it to be thought good judges. I only mention these things to show what innkeepers have to put up with, and how difficult it is for them always to please their customers, though they try as hard as they can.
Soon after our hotel was quite ready and repainted and repapered, we determined to advertise. We put an advertisement in a London paper, and the next morning we had twenty or thirty letters. “Oh, Harry,” I said, “that advertisement has brought us a lot of customers already.” I expected all the letters were ordering apartments. So when I opened them I was very disappointed. They were all from different newspapers, and guide-books, and railway time-tables, and things of that sort, enclosing our advertisement cut out, and saying, “The cost for inserting this advertisement in so-and-so will be so much;” and soon after that, we began to be pestered with men coming in with big books in a black bag which were just coming out, and they talked for an hour to try and convince us that we ought to put our advertisement in their books.
Some of these books were going all over the world, and everybody was sure to read them; they would be put in every hotel in Europe and Asia and Africa and America, and I don’t know where else besides.
Harry listened for a long time, till the advertisement man began to point out that we should be advertised all over the world for thirty shillings, and then Harry said, “Thank you—but we can’t go into your book till we’ve enlarged our premises. If we are to have customers from Europe and Asia and Africa and America, we shall want a barracks instead of a village hotel.”
But our first advertisement did bring us some customers, and from London, too. It was very nicely worded, because we had copied one that was in the Daily News, and altered it to suit our hotel. We said: “Pretty and quiet little country hotel. Charming apartments. Picturesque scenery. Moderate terms. Very suitable for ladies and gentlemen desiring home comforts, perfect privacy, and salubrious air.”