It was plain he felt that he was properly dressed for the time, the place and the occasion; and to him that was ample compensation for his suffering. I heard afterward that he lost three sets of tennis and had a congestive chill—all in the course of the same afternoon.
The unconquerable determination of the Eastern tourist to have Southern California conform to his back-home standards is responsible for the fact that many of the tourist hotels out there are not so typical of the West as they might be—and as in my humble judgment they should be—but are as Eastern as it is possible to make them—Eastern in cuisine, in charges and in their operating schedules. Here, again, there are some notable exceptions.
In the supposedly wilder sections of the West, lying between the Rockies and the Sierras, the situation is different. It is notably different in Arizona and New Mexico in the South, and in Utah, Montana and Wyoming in the North. There the person who serves you for hire is neither your menial nor your superior; whereas in the East he or she is nearly always one or the other, and sometimes both at once. This particular type of Westerner doesn't patronize you; neither does he cringe to you in expectation of a tip. He gives you the best he has in stock, meanwhile retaining his own self-respect and expecting you to do the same. He ennobles and dignifies personal service.
Out on the Coast, however—or at least at several of the big hotels out on the Coast—the system, thanks to Eastern influence, has been changed. The whole scheme is patterned after the accepted New York model. The charges for small services are as exorbitant as in New York, and the iniquities of the tipping system are worked out as amply and as wickedly as in the city where they originated.
Somebody with a taste for statistics figured it out once that if a man owned a three-dollar hat and wore it for two months, lunching every day at a New York café, and if he dined four nights a week at a New York restaurant and attended the theater twice a week, his hat at the end of those two months would cost him in tips eighteen dollars and seventy cents! No, on second thought, I guess it was a pair of earmuffs that would have cost him eighteen-seventy.
A hat would have been more.
It would be more in Southern California—I'm sure of that. There the tipping habit is made more expensive by reason of the prevalent spirit of Western generosity. The born Westerner never has got used to dimes and nickels. To him quarters are still chicken-feed and a half dollar is small change. So the tips are just as numerous as in New York and for the same service they are frequently larger.
A lot has been said and written about the marvelous palms of Lower California and a lot more might be said—for they are outstretched everywhere; and if you don't cross them with silver at frequent intervals you would do well to try camping out for a change. Likewise a cursory glance at the prices on some of the menus is calculated to make a New Yorker homesick—they're so familiarly and unreasonably steep. And frequently the dishes you get aren't typical of the country; they are—thanks again be to the Easterner—mostly transplanted imitations of the concoctions of the Broadway and the Fifth Avenue chefs.
There are compensations, though. There are some hotels that are operated on admirably different lines, and there are abundant opportunities for escaping altogether from hotel life and seeing this Land of the Living Backdrop where it is untainted and unspoiled; where the hills are clothed in green and yellow; where little Spanishy looking towns nestle below the Missions, and the mocking-birds sing, and the real-estate boomer leaps from crag to crag, sounding his flute-like note. And don't forget the climate! But that is unnecessary advice. You won't have a chance to forget it—not for a minute you won't!