_ CHAPTER XIX. A GROWL ABOUT AMERICAN COUNTRY HOTELS
Though Colin and I had been walking but a very few days, after the first day or two it seemed as though we had been out on the road for weeks; as though, indeed, we had spent our lives in the open air; and it needed no more than our brief experience for us to realize what one so often reads of those who do actually live their lives out-of-doors, gypsies, sailors, cowboys and the like--how intolerable to them is a roof, and how literally they gasp for air and space in the confined walls of cities.
Bed in the bush with stars to see,
Bread I dip in the river--
There's the life for a man like me,
There's the life forever.
The only time of the day when our spirits began to fail was toward its close, when the shadows of supper and bed in some inclement inn began to fall over us, and we confessed to each other a positive sense of fear in our evening approach to the abodes of men. After a long, safe, care-free day, in the company of liberating prospects and sweet-breathed winds, there seemed a curious lurking menace in the most harmless village, as well as an unspeakable irksomeness in its inharmonious interruption of our mood. To emerge, saturated, body and soul, with the sweet scents and sounds and sights of a day's tramp, out of the meditative leafiness and spiritual temper of natural things, into the garishly lit street of some little provincial town, animated with the clumsy mirth of silly young country folks, aping so drearily the ribaldry, say, of Elmira, is a painful anticlimax to the spirit. Had it only been real Summer, instead of Indian Summer, we should, of course, have been real gypsies, and made our beds under the stars, but, as it was, we had no choice. Or, had we been walking in Europe ... yes, I am afraid the truth must out, and that our real dread at evening was--the American country hotel. With the best wish in the world, it is impossible to be enthusiastic over the American country hotel. How ironically the kindly old words used to come floating to me out of Shakespeare each evening as the shadows fell, and the lights came out in the windows--"to take mine ease at mine inn;" and assuredly it was on another planet that Shenstone wrote:
Whoe'er hath travelled life's dull round,
Whate'er his fortunes may have been,
Must sigh to think he still has found
His warmest welcome at an inn.
Had Shenstone been writing in an American country hotel, his tune would probably have been more after this fashion: "A wonderful day has come to a dreary end in the most sepulchral of hotels, a mouldy, barn-like place, ill-lit, mildewed and unspeakably dismal. A comfortless room with two beds and two low-power electric lights, two stiff chairs, an uncompanionable sofa, and some ghastly pictures of simpering naked women. We have bought some candles, and made a candlestick out of a soap-dish. Colin is making the best of it with 'The Beloved Vagabond,' and I have drawn up one of the chairs to a table with a mottled marble top, and am writing this amid a gloom which you could cut with a knife, and which is so perfect of its kind as to be almost laughable. But for the mail, which we found with unutterable thankfulness at the post-office, I hardly dare think what would have happened to us, to what desperate extremities we might not have been driven, though even the possibilities of despair seem limited in this second-hand tomb of a town...."
Here Colin looks up with a wry smile and ironically quotes from the wisdom of Paragot: "What does it matter where the body finds itself, so long as the soul has its serene habitations?" This wail is too typical of most of our hotel experiences. As a rule we found the humble, cheaper hotels best, and, whenever we had a choice of two, chose the less pretentious.
Sometimes as, on entering a town or village, we asked some passer-by about the hotels, we would be looked over and somewhat doubtfully asked: "Do you want a two-dollar house?" And we soon learned to pocket our pride, and ask if there was not a cheaper house. Strange that people whose business is hospitality should be so inhospitable, and strange that the American travelling salesman, a companionable creature, not averse from comfort, should not have created a better condition of things. For the inn should be the natural harmonious close to the day, as much a part of the day's music as the setting sun. It should be the gratefully sought shelter from the homeless night, the sympathetic friend of hungry stomachs and dusty feet, the cozy jingle of social pipes and dreamy after-dinner talk, the abode of snowy beds for luxuriously aching limbs, lavendered sheets and pleasant dreams.
But, as people without any humour usually say, "A sense of humour helps under all circumstances"; and we managed to extract a great deal of fun out of the rigours of the American country hotel.
In one particularly inhospitable home of hospitality, for example, we found no little consolation from the directions printed over the very simple and familiar device for calling up the hotel desk. The device was nothing more remarkable than the button of an ordinary electric bell, which you were, in the usual way, to push once for bell-boy, twice for ice-water, three times for chambermaid, and so on. However, the hotel evidently regarded it as one of the marvels of advanced science and referred to it, in solemnly printed "rules" for its use, as no less than "The Emergency Drop Annunciator!" Angels of the Annunciation! what a heavenly phrase!
But this is an ill-tempered chapter--let us begin another. _