INNS AND HOTELS
"Anchovies and Sack after Supper" was honest Falstaff's notion of an apt sequence. But Anchovies, even in their modern extension of "Hors d'Œuvres," will not make a chapter; and Sack, in the form of Sherry, has been exhaustively discussed. I must therefore betake myself from Falstaff to Touchstone, whose enumeration of "Dinners and Suppers and Sleeping-hours" may serve my present need.
Where to dine? Where to sup? Where to sleep? Momentous questions these; and at this instant they are in the thoughts and on the lips of thousands of my fellow-creatures as they journey through or towards London. October in London is a season with marked and special characteristics. Restaurants are crowded; Bond Street is blocked by shopping ladies; seats at the theatre must be booked ten days in advance.
This October "Season" is the product of many forces. The genuine Londoners, who have been away, for health or sport or travel, in August and September now come back with a rush, and hasten to make up for their long exile by feverish activity in the pursuit of pleasure. But the Londoners by no means have the town to themselves. The Country Cousins are present in great force. They live laborious but delightful days in examining the winter fashions; they get all their meals at Prince's or the Carlton; and they go to the play every night. To these must be added the Americans, who, having shot our grouse and stalked our deer and drunk of our medicated springs, are now passing through London on their way to Liverpool. As a rule, they buy their clothes in Paris, and leave the products of Bond Street and Grafton Street to the British consumer. But their propensity to Theatre-parties and Suppers endears them to managers and restaurant-keepers; and on Sunday they can be detected at St. Paul's or the Abbey, rendering the hymns with that peculiar intonation for which Chaucer's "Prioresse" was so justly admired. Even a few belated French and German tourists are still wandering disconsolately among "the sheddings of the pining umbrage" in the parks, or gazing with awe at the grim front of Buckingham Palace. Where do all these pilgrims stay? We know where they dine and sup; but where do they spend what Touchstone called their "sleeping-hours"? I only know that they do not spend them in Inns, for Inns as I understand the word have ceased to exist. They went out with "The Road."
It has been remarked by not unfriendly critics that the author of these quiet meditations seems to live a good deal in the past, and people in whom the chronological sense is missing are apt to think me a great deal older than I am. Thus when I have recalled among my earliest recollections the fire which destroyed Covent Garden Theatre (in 1856), I have been thought to be babbling of Drury Lane, which was burnt down in 1812; and so, when I say that in early life I travelled a great deal upon the Road, I shall probably be accused of having been born before railways were invented. What is true enough is that a prejudice against railways lingered long after they were in general use; some people thought them dangerous, some undignified, and I believe that there were some who even thought them wicked because they are not mentioned in the Bible. "I suppose you have heard of Lady Vanilla's trip from Birmingham?" says Lady Marney in "Sybil." "Have you not, indeed? She came up with Lady Laura, and two of the most gentlemanlike men sitting opposite her; never met, she says, two more intelligent men. She begged one of them at Wolverhampton to change seats with her, and he was most politely willing to comply with her wishes, only it was necessary that his companion should move at the same time, for they were chained together—two gentlemen sent to town for picking pockets at Shrewsbury races." "A Countess and a felon!" said Lord Mowbray. "So much for public conveyances." To these social perils were added terrors of tunnels, terrors of viaducts, terrors of fires which would burn you to an ash in your locked carriage, terrors of robbers who were supposed to travel first-class for the express purpose of chloroforming well-dressed passengers and then stealing their watches. Haunted by these and similar fears, some old-fashioned people travelled by road till well into the 'sixties. From my home in the South Midlands we took a whole day in getting to London, forty miles off; two to Leamington, three to Winchester; and those who still travelled in this leisurely mode were the last patrons of the Inn.
It was generally a broad-browed, solid, comfortable-looking house in the most central part of a country town. Not seldom the sign was taken from the armorial bearings of the local magnate. There were a Landlord and a Landlady, who came out bowing when the carriage drove up, and conducted the travellers to their rooms, while the "Imperials" were taken down from the roof of the carriage. (Could one buy an "Imperial" nowadays if one wanted it? The most recent reference to it which I can recall occurs in the first chapter of "Tom Brown's School Days.") Very often the rooms of the Inn were distinguished not by numbers, but by names or tokens derived from the situation, or the furniture, or from some famous traveller who had slept in them—the Bow Room, the Peacock Room, or the Wellington Room. The Landlord had generally been a butler, but sometimes a coachman. Anyhow, he and his wife had "lived in the best families" and "knew how things ought to be done." The furniture was solid, dark, and handsome—mahogany predominating, here and there relieved with rosewood. There was old silver on the table, and the walls were covered with sporting or coaching prints, views of neighbouring castles, and portraits of the Nobility whom the Landlord had served. The bedrooms were dark and stuffy beyond belief, with bedsteads like classic temples and deep feather-beds into which you sank as into a quicksand. The food was like the furniture, heavy and handsome. There was "gunpowder tea"—green if you asked for it,—luscious cream, and really new-laid eggs. The best bottle of claret which I ever encountered emerged, quite accidentally, from the cellar of a village Inn close to the confluence of the Greta and the Tees, in a district hallowed by the associations of Rokeby and Mr. Squeers. When, next morning, you had paid your bill—not, as a rule, a light one—the Landlord and Lady escorted you to the door, and politely expressed a hope that you would honour them on your return journey. Then "Hey, for the lilt of the London road!" and the Montfort Arms, or the Roebuck, or the Marquis of Granby, is only a pleasant memory of an unreturning day.
What in the country was called an Inn was called in London a "Family Hotel." It was commonly found in Dover Street, or Albemarle Street, or Bolton Street, or some such byway of Piccadilly; and in its aspect, character, and general arrangement it was exactly like the country Inn, only of necessity darker, dingier, and more airless. Respectability, mahogany, and horse-hair held it in their iron grip. Here county families, coming up from the Drawing Room, or the Academy, or the Exhibition, or the Derby, spent cheerful weeks in summer. Here in the autumn they halted on their return from Doncaster or Aix. Here the boys slept on their way back to Eton or Cambridge; hither the subaltern returned, like a homing pigeon, from India or the Cape.
But the Family Hotel, like the Country Inn, has seen its day. When the Times was inciting the inhabitants of Rome to modernize their city, Matthew Arnold, writing in Miss Story's album, made airy fun of the suggestion. He represented "the Times, that bright Apollo," proclaiming salvation to the "armless Cupid" imprisoned in the Vatican:—
"'And what,' cries Cupid, 'will save us?'
Says Apollo: 'Modernize Rome!
What inns! Your streets too, how narrow!
Too much of palace and dome!'
"'O learn of London, whose paupers
Are not pushed out by the swells!
Wide streets, with fine double trottoirs;
And then—the London hotels!'"
Between the "Inns" of my youth and these "Hotels" of to-day the difference is so great that they can scarcely be recognized as belonging to the same family. Under the old dispensation all was solid comfort, ponderous respectability, and the staid courtesy of the antique world; under the new it is all glare and glitter, show and sham; the morals of the Tuileries and the manners of Greenwich Fair. The building is something between a palace and a barrack, with a hall of marble, a staircase of alabaster, a winter garden full of birds and fountains, and a band which deafens you while you eat your refined but exiguous dinner. Among these sumptuosities the visitor is no longer a person but a number. As a number he is received by the gigantic "Suisse" who, resplendent in green and gold, watches the approach to the palace; as a number he is registered by a dictatorial "Secretary," enshrined in a Bureau; as a number he is shot up, like a parcel, to his airy lodgings on the seventh floor; as a number he orders his meals; as a number he pays his bill. The whole business is a microcosm of State Socialism: Bureaucracy is supreme, and the Individual is lost in the Machine. But, though the courtesies and the humanities and even the decencies of the old order have vanished so completely, the exactions remain much the same as they were. There is, indeed, no courtly landlord to bow, like a plumper Sir Charles Grandison, over the silver salver on which you have laid your gold; but there are gilt-edged porters, and moustached lift-men, and a regiment of buttony boys who float round the departing guest with well-timed assiduity; and the Suisse at the door, as he eyes our modest luggage with contemptuous glare, looks quite prepared, if need be, to extort his guerdon by physical force.
The British Inn, whatever were its shortcomings in practice, has been glorified in some of the best verse and best prose in the English language. It will, methinks, be a long time before even the most impressionable genius of the "Bodley Head" pens a panegyric of the London Hotel.
