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_ In the late high winds I was blown to a great many places--and
indeed, wind or no wind, I generally have extensive transactions on
hand in the article of Air--but I have not been blown to any
English place lately, and I very seldom have blown to any English
place in my life, where I could get anything good to eat and drink
in five minutes, or where, if I sought it, I was received with a
welcome.
This is a curious thing to consider. But before (stimulated by my
own experiences and the representations of many fellow-travellers
of every uncommercial and commercial degree) I consider it further,
I must utter a passing word of wonder concerning high winds.
I wonder why metropolitan gales always blow so hard at Walworth. I
cannot imagine what Walworth has done, to bring such windy
punishment upon itself, as I never fail to find recorded in the
newspapers when the wind has blown at all hard. Brixton seems to
have something on its conscience; Peckham suffers more than a
virtuous Peckham might be supposed to deserve; the howling
neighbourhood of Deptford figures largely in the accounts of the
ingenious gentlemen who are out in every wind that blows, and to
whom it is an ill high wind that blows no good; but, there can
hardly be any Walworth left by this time. It must surely be blown
away. I have read of more chimney-stacks and house-copings coming
down with terrific smashes at Walworth, and of more sacred edifices
being nearly (not quite) blown out to sea from the same accursed
locality, than I have read of practised thieves with the appearance
and manners of gentlemen--a popular phenomenon which never existed
on earth out of fiction and a police report. Again: I wonder why
people are always blown into the Surrey Canal, and into no other
piece of water! Why do people get up early and go out in groups,
to be blown into the Surrey Canal? Do they say to one another,
'Welcome death, so that we get into the newspapers'? Even that
would be an insufficient explanation, because even then they might
sometimes put themselves in the way of being blown into the
Regent's Canal, instead of always saddling Surrey for the field.
Some nameless policeman, too, is constantly, on the slightest
provocation, getting himself blown into this same Surrey Canal.
Will SIR RICHARD MAYNE see to it, and restrain that weak-minded and
feeble-bodied constable?
To resume the consideration of the curious question of Refreshment.
I am a Briton, and, as such, I am aware that I never will be a
slave--and yet I have latent suspicion that there must be some
slavery of wrong custom in this matter.
I travel by railroad. I start from home at seven or eight in the
morning, after breakfasting hurriedly. What with skimming over the
open landscape, what with mining in the damp bowels of the earth,
what with banging, booming and shrieking the scores of miles away,
I am hungry when I arrive at the 'Refreshment' station where I am
expected. Please to observe, expected. I have said, I am hungry;
perhaps I might say, with greater point and force, that I am to
some extent exhausted, and that I need--in the expressive French
sense of the word--to be restored. What is provided for my
restoration? The apartment that is to restore me is a wind-trap,
cunningly set to inveigle all the draughts in that country-side,
and to communicate a special intensity and velocity to them as they
rotate in two hurricanes: one, about my wretched head: one, about
my wretched legs. The training of the young ladies behind the
counter who are to restore me, has been from their infancy directed
to the assumption of a defiant dramatic show that I am NOT
expected. It is in vain for me to represent to them by my humble
and conciliatory manners, that I wish to be liberal. It is in vain
for me to represent to myself, for the encouragement of my sinking
soul, that the young ladies have a pecuniary interest in my
arrival. Neither my reason nor my feelings can make head against
the cold glazed glare of eye with which I am assured that I am not
expected, and not wanted. The solitary man among the bottles would
sometimes take pity on me, if he dared, but he is powerless against
the rights and mights of Woman. (Of the page I make no account,
for, he is a boy, and therefore the natural enemy of Creation.)
Chilling fast, in the deadly tornadoes to which my upper and lower
extremities are exposed, and subdued by the moral disadvantage at
which I stand, I turn my disconsolate eyes on the refreshments that
are to restore me. I find that I must either scald my throat by
insanely ladling into it, against time and for no wager, brown hot
water stiffened with flour; or I must make myself flaky and sick
with Banbury cake; or, I must stuff into my delicate organisation,
a currant pincushion which I know will swell into immeasurable
dimensions when it has got there; or, I must extort from an iron-
bound quarry, with a fork, as if I were farming an inhospitable
soil, some glutinous lumps of gristle and grease, called pork-pie.
While thus forlornly occupied, I find that the depressing banquet
on the table is, in every phase of its profoundly unsatisfactory
character, so like the banquet at the meanest and shabbiest of
evening parties, that I begin to think I must have 'brought down'
to supper, the old lady unknown, blue with cold, who is setting her
teeth on edge with a cool orange at my elbow--that the pastrycook
who has compounded for the company on the lowest terms per head, is
a fraudulent bankrupt, redeeming his contract with the stale stock
from his window--that, for some unexplained reason, the family
giving the party have become my mortal foes, and have given it on
purpose to affront me. Or, I fancy that I am 'breaking up' again,
at the evening conversazione at school, charged two-and-sixpence in
the half-year's bill; or breaking down again at that celebrated
evening party given at Mrs. Bogles's boarding-house when I was a
boarder there, on which occasion Mrs. Bogles was taken in execution
by a branch of the legal profession who got in as the harp, and was
removed (with the keys and subscribed capital) to a place of
durance, half an hour prior to the commencement of the festivities.
Take another case.
Mr. Grazinglands, of the Midland Counties, came to London by
railroad one morning last week, accompanied by the amiable and
fascinating Mrs. Grazinglands. Mr. G. is a gentleman of a
comfortable property, and had a little business to transact at the
Bank of England, which required the concurrence and signature of
Mrs. G. Their business disposed of, Mr. and Mrs. Grazinglands
viewed the Royal Exchange, and the exterior of St. Paul's
Cathedral. The spirits of Mrs. Grazinglands then gradually
beginning to flag, Mr. Grazinglands (who is the tenderest of
husbands) remarked with sympathy, 'Arabella', my dear, 'fear you
are faint.' Mrs. Grazing-lands replied, 'Alexander, I am rather
faint; but don't mind me, I shall be better presently.' Touched by
the feminine meekness of this answer, Mr. Grazinglands looked in at
a pastrycook's window, hesitating as to the expediency of lunching
at that establishment. He beheld nothing to eat, but butter in
various forms, slightly charged with jam, and languidly frizzling
over tepid water. Two ancient turtle-shells, on which was
inscribed the legend, 'SOUPS,' decorated a glass partition within,
enclosing a stuffy alcove, from which a ghastly mockery of a
marriage-breakfast spread on a rickety table, warned the terrified
traveller. An oblong box of stale and broken pastry at reduced
prices, mounted on a stool, ornamented the doorway; and two high
chairs that looked as if they were performing on stilts,
embellished the counter. Over the whole, a young lady presided,
whose gloomy haughtiness as she surveyed the street, announced a
deep-seated grievance against society, and an implacable
determination to be avenged. From a beetle-haunted kitchen below
this institution, fumes arose, suggestive of a class of soup which
Mr. Grazinglands knew, from painful experience, enfeebles the mind,
distends the stomach, forces itself into the complexion, and tries
to ooze out at the eyes. As he decided against entering, and
turned away, Mrs. Grazinglands becoming perceptibly weaker,
repeated, 'I am rather faint, Alexander, but don't mind me.' Urged
to new efforts by these words of resignation, Mr. Grazinglands
looked in at a cold and floury baker's shop, where utilitarian buns
unrelieved by a currant, consorted with hard biscuits, a stone
filter of cold water, a hard pale clock, and a hard little old
woman with flaxen hair, of an undeveloped-farinaceous aspect, as if
she had been fed upon seeds. He might have entered even here, but
for the timely remembrance coming upon him that Jairing's was but
round the corner.
Now, Jairing's being an hotel for families and gentlemen, in high
repute among the midland counties, Mr. Grazinglands plucked up a
great spirit when he told Mrs. Grazinglands she should have a chop
there. That lady, likewise felt that she was going to see Life.
Arriving on that gay and festive scene, they found the second
waiter, in a flabby undress, cleaning the windows of the empty
coffee-room; and the first waiter, denuded of his white tie, making
up his cruets behind the Post-Office Directory. The latter (who
took them in hand) was greatly put out by their patronage, and
showed his mind to be troubled by a sense of the pressing necessity
of instantly smuggling Mrs. Grazinglands into the obscurest corner
of the building. This slighted lady (who is the pride of her
division of the county) was immediately conveyed, by several dark
passages, and up and down several steps, into a penitential
apartment at the back of the house, where five invalided old plate-
warmers leaned up against one another under a discarded old
melancholy sideboard, and where the wintry leaves of all the
dining-tables in the house lay thick. Also, a sofa, of
incomprehensible form regarded from any sofane point of view,
murmured 'Bed;' while an air of mingled fluffiness and heeltaps,
added, 'Second Waiter's.' Secreted in this dismal hold, objects of
a mysterious distrust and suspicion, Mr. Grazinglands and his
charming partner waited twenty minutes for the smoke (for it never
came to a fire), twenty-five minutes for the sherry, half an hour
for the tablecloth, forty minutes for the knives and forks, three-
quarters of an hour for the chops, and an hour for the potatoes.
On settling the little bill--which was not much more than the day's
pay of a Lieutenant in the navy--Mr. Grazinglands took heart to
remonstrate against the general quality and cost of his reception.
To whom the waiter replied, substantially, that Jairing's made it a
merit to have accepted him on any terms: 'for,' added the waiter
(unmistakably coughing at Mrs. Grazinglands, the pride of her
division of the county), 'when indiwiduals is not staying in the
'Ouse, their favours is not as a rule looked upon as making it
worth Mr. Jairing's while; nor is it, indeed, a style of business
Mr. Jairing wishes.' Finally, Mr. and Mrs. Grazinglands passed out
of Jairing's hotel for Families and Gentlemen, in a state of the
greatest depression, scorned by the bar; and did not recover their
self-respect for several days.
Or take another case. Take your own case.
You are going off by railway, from any Terminus. You have twenty
minutes for dinner, before you go. You want your dinner, and like
Dr. Johnson, Sir, you like to dine. You present to your mind, a
picture of the refreshment-table at that terminus. The
conventional shabby evening-party supper--accepted as the model for
all termini and all refreshment stations, because it is the last
repast known to this state of existence of which any human creature
would partake, but in the direst extremity--sickens your
contemplation, and your words are these: 'I cannot dine on stale
sponge-cakes that turn to sand in the mouth. I cannot dine on
shining brown patties, composed of unknown animals within, and
offering to my view the device of an indigestible star-fish in
leaden pie-crust without. I cannot dine on a sandwich that has
long been pining under an exhausted receiver. I cannot dine on
barley-sugar. I cannot dine on Toffee.' You repair to the nearest
hotel, and arrive, agitated, in the coffee-room.
It is a most astonishing fact that the waiter is very cold to you.
Account for it how you may, smooth it over how you will, you cannot
deny that he is cold to you. He is not glad to see you, he does
not want you, he would much rather you hadn't come. He opposes to
your flushed condition, an immovable composure. As if this were
not enough, another waiter, born, as it would seem, expressly to
look at you in this passage of your life, stands at a little
distance, with his napkin under his arm and his hands folded,
looking at you with all his might. You impress on your waiter that
you have ten minutes for dinner, and he proposes that you shall
begin with a bit of fish which will be ready in twenty. That
proposal declined, he suggests--as a neat originality--'a weal or
mutton cutlet.' You close with either cutlet, any cutlet,
anything. He goes, leisurely, behind a door and calls down some
unseen shaft. A ventriloquial dialogue ensues, tending finally to
the effect that weal only, is available on the spur of the moment.
You anxiously call out, 'Veal, then!' Your waiter having settled
that point, returns to array your tablecloth, with a table napkin
folded cocked-hat-wise (slowly, for something out of window engages
his eye), a white wine-glass, a green wine-glass, a blue finger-
glass, a tumbler, and a powerful field battery of fourteen casters
with nothing in them; or at all events--which is enough for your
purpose--with nothing in them that will come out. All this time,
the other waiter looks at you--with an air of mental comparison and
curiosity, now, as if it had occurred to him that you are rather
like his brother. Half your time gone, and nothing come but the
jug of ale and the bread, you implore your waiter to 'see after
that cutlet, waiter; pray do!' He cannot go at once, for he is
carrying in seventeen pounds of American cheese for you to finish
with, and a small Landed Estate of celery and water-cresses. The
other waiter changes his leg, and takes a new view of you,
doubtfully, now, as if he had rejected the resemblance to his
brother, and had begun to think you more like his aunt or his
grandmother. Again you beseech your waiter with pathetic
indignation, to 'see after that cutlet!' He steps out to see after
it, and by-and-by, when you are going away without it, comes back
with it. Even then, he will not take the sham silver cover off,
without a pause for a flourish, and a look at the musty cutlet as
if he were surprised to see it--which cannot possibly be the case,
he must have seen it so often before. A sort of fur has been
produced upon its surface by the cook's art, and in a sham silver
vessel staggering on two feet instead of three, is a cutaneous kind
of sauce of brown pimples and pickled cucumber. You order the
bill, but your waiter cannot bring your bill yet, because he is
bringing, instead, three flinty-hearted potatoes and two grim head
of broccoli, like the occasional ornaments on area railings, badly
boiled. You know that you will never come to this pass, any more
than to the cheese and celery, and you imperatively demand your
bill; but, it takes time to get, even when gone for, because your
waiter has to communicate with a lady who lives behind a sash-
window in a corner, and who appears to have to refer to several
Ledgers before she can make it out--as if you had been staying
there a year. You become distracted to get away, and the other
waiter, once more changing his leg, still looks at you--but
suspiciously, now, as if you had begun to remind him of the party
who took the great-coats last winter. Your bill at last brought
and paid, at the rate of sixpence a mouthful, your waiter
reproachfully reminds you that 'attendance is not charged for a
single meal,' and you have to search in all your pockets for
sixpence more. He has a worse opinion of you than ever, when you
have given it to him, and lets you out into the street with the air
of one saying to himself, as you cannot again doubt he is, 'I hope
we shall never see YOU here again!'
Or, take any other of the numerous travelling instances in which,
with more time at your disposal, you are, have been, or may be,
equally ill served. Take the old-established Bull's Head with its
old-established knife-boxes on its old-established sideboards, its
old-established flue under its old-established four-post bedsteads
in its old-established airless rooms, its old-established
frouziness up-stairs and down-stairs, its old-established cookery,
and its old-established principles of plunder. Count up your
injuries, in its side-dishes of ailing sweetbreads in white
poultices, of apothecaries' powders in rice for curry, of pale
stewed bits of calf ineffectually relying for an adventitious
interest on forcemeat balls. You have had experience of the old-
established Bull's Head stringy fowls, with lower extremities like
wooden legs, sticking up out of the dish; of its cannibalic boiled
mutton, gushing horribly among its capers, when carved; of its
little dishes of pastry--roofs of spermaceti ointment, erected over
half an apple or four gooseberries. Well for you if you have yet
forgotten the old-established Bull's Head fruity port: whose
reputation was gained solely by the old-established price the
Bull's Head put upon it, and by the old-established air with which
the Bull's Head set the glasses and D'Oyleys on, and held that
Liquid Gout to the three-and-sixpenny wax-candle, as if its old-
established colour hadn't come from the dyer's.
Or lastly, take to finish with, two cases that we all know, every
day.
We all know the new hotel near the station, where it is always
gusty, going up the lane which is always muddy, where we are sure
to arrive at night, and where we make the gas start awfully when we
open the front door. We all know the flooring of the passages and
staircases that is too new, and the walls that are too new, and the
house that is haunted by the ghost of mortar. We all know the
doors that have cracked, and the cracked shutters through which we
get a glimpse of the disconsolate moon. We all know the new
people, who have come to keep the new hotel, and who wish they had
never come, and who (inevitable result) wish WE had never come. We
all know how much too scant and smooth and bright the new furniture
is, and how it has never settled down, and cannot fit itself into
right places, and will get into wrong places. We all know how the
gas, being lighted, shows maps of Damp upon the walls. We all know
how the ghost of mortar passes into our sandwich, stirs our negus,
goes up to bed with us, ascends the pale bedroom chimney, and
prevents the smoke from following. We all know how a leg of our
chair comes off at breakfast in the morning, and how the dejected
waiter attributes the accident to a general greenness pervading the
establishment, and informs us, in reply to a local inquiry, that he
is thankful to say he is an entire stranger in that part of the
country and is going back to his own connexion on Saturday.
We all know, on the other hand, the great station hotel belonging
to the company of proprietors, which has suddenly sprung up in the
back outskirts of any place we like to name, and where we look out
of our palatial windows at little back yards and gardens, old
summer-houses, fowl-houses, pigeon-traps, and pigsties. We all
know this hotel in which we can get anything we want, after its
kind, for money; but where nobody is glad to see us, or sorry to
see us, or minds (our bill paid) whether we come or go, or how, or
when, or why, or cares about us. We all know this hotel, where we
have no individuality, but put ourselves into the general post, as
it were, and are sorted and disposed of according to our division.
We all know that we can get on very well indeed at such a place,
but still not perfectly well; and this may be, because the place is
largely wholesale, and there is a lingering personal retail
interest within us that asks to be satisfied.
To sum up. My uncommercial travelling has not yet brought me to
the conclusion that we are close to perfection in these matters.
And just as I do not believe that the end of the world will ever be
near at hand, so long as any of the very tiresome and arrogant
people who constantly predict that catastrophe are left in it, so,
I shall have small faith in the Hotel Millennium, while any of the
uncomfortable superstitions I have glanced at remain in existence. _
Read next: CHAPTER VII - TRAVELLING ABROAD
Read previous: CHAPTER V - POOR MERCANTILE JACK
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