Jonathan and His Continent Part 36

"That is all you ordered," she said to me; "you do not suppose I can make twenty journeys to the kitchen for you."

I rose and sought the hotel-keeper. I made the humblest apologies; pleaded that I was a foreigner who had only been in America a fortnight, and was not yet accustomed to the habits of the Americans. I promised solemnly never to transgress again in this way. Mine host went to the young person who was at the head of the battalion of harpies in the dining-room, and interceded for me with her. I had the happiness of being forgiven, and was allowed to appease my hunger.

From that day forward, as soon as one of these witching damsels began her incantation, I cried out:

"Hold! Enough! Bring it all in."

Then I would eat the least distasteful of the messes, and leave the rest. I can a.s.sure you the hotel did not make much profit out of me.

This is how the dinner is served:

The "d.u.c.h.ess" begins by flinging a spoon and knife and fork down on the table in front of you. It is for you to set them straight, and I would advise you to do so without any murmuring. When you have taken your soup, the said "d.u.c.h.ess" brings you a plate, around which she places a dozen little oval dishes in a symmetrical fas.h.i.+on that one can but admire.

The first little dish contains fish, and a teaspoonful of sauce of some kind. It is needless to inquire the name of this sauce. All the fish sauces are the same; only the name varies. The second apparently contains a little lump of raw beef; the third, a slice of roast turkey; the fourth, mashed potatoes; the fifth, a stewed tomato; the sixth, cranberry sauce; the seventh, chicken salad; the eighth, some rice-pudding; and the last contains (_horrible dictu!_) a slice of apple-tart, with a large helping of cheese in the middle of it. These two things are eaten together, and are consequently served on the same dish.

You begin at the left. The fish presents no obstacle but its bones, and is soon disposed of. You turn your attention to the next dish on the right, and attack the beef. It is impregnable; you can make no impression upon it. You pa.s.s. The turkey is not obdurate, and you fall to on that, making little raids on the potatoes, tomatoes, and cranberry sauce between each mouthful. Thanks to the many climates of America (the thermometer varies in winter from 75 above zero in the south to 45 below in the north), you have turkey and cranberry sauce all the winter, strawberries six months of the year, and tomatoes almost all the year round.

Oh, the turkey and cranberry sauce! I ate enough of that dish to satisfy me for the rest of my days. No more turkey with cranberry sauce for me, though I should live to be a hundred!

Of course, all the meats placed around your plate soon begin to cool, and you have no choice but to bolt your food, diving with knife and fork into the little dishes right and left as dexterously as you can.

Finally you come to the apple-tart, on the extreme right. You carefully lift the cheese, and, placing it aside, prepare to eat your sweets without the strange seasoning. Unhappily, the pastry has become impregnated with an odour of roquefort, and again you pa.s.s. A vanilla ice terminates your repast.

Having disposed of this, you ask yourself why, in a free country, you may not have your various courses served one after the other; why you must bolt your food, and bring on indigestion; and, above all, why the manager of the hotel, in his own interest as a man of business, does not, before all else, study the comfort of his customers. The answer is not difficult to find. It is the well-being of the "d.u.c.h.esses," and not that of the traveller, that he devotes his attention to studying. The traveller is obliged to come to his house, and he can treat him anyhow.

His "helps" will only consent to stay with him on condition he gives them heavy wages and light duties. He has no choice but to submit to his servants, or to close his hotel. The Americans, free though they may be politically, are at the mercy of their servants, whether in public or private life. This kind of tyranny is hateful. To throw off the yoke of the superior cla.s.ses is very well; but I am not aware that the yoke of the common people is at all preferable. John Bull commands all his paid servants; Jonathan obeys his.

Thus in the hotels of America, outside of the large towns, with the rarest exceptions, the dinner is served from one o'clock to three, the tea-supper from six to eight. You happen to arrive at half-past three, tired out and famis.h.i.+ng. You hope to be able to have a good meal without delay. Illusion! You must wait until the dining-room door is opened, and pa.s.s two hours and a half in wretchedness. How often have I entreated, implored, "Could you not get a chop cooked for me, or an omelette, or something? If that is impossible, for mercy's sake give me a slice of cold meat." Prayers and supplications were unavailing. Occasionally a landlord would express his regrets, and make excuses for his inability to oblige me; but far oftener, I got no kind of response at all. Once or twice I tried making a tempest, without any more success. Another time I tried politeness. "Excuse me," I said, "if I am intruding. I hope that by putting up at your house I shall not be too much in your way. I have not the honour to be a citizen of the greatest Republic in the world, but am only a poor European who does not know your ways. In future I will take careful precautions. But this time, and just for once, I would be so much obliged for something to eat. I should be distressed to occasion any derangement in your household; but just for once--only once." Sheer waste of breath. The hotel is as it is; you may use it or stay away.

The Americans are quite right to study the comfort of their servants; but the well-being of one cla.s.s should not exist at the cost of the well-being of another, and the people who travel are as interesting as those who serve at table.

Tyranny from above is a sore; tyranny from below is a pestilence.

CHAPTER x.x.xIX.

_How the Americans take their Holidays.--The Hotel is their Mecca.--Mammoth Hotels.--Jacksonville and St. Augustine.--The Ponce de Leon Hotel.--Rocking-chairs.--Having a "Good Time!"--The American is never Bored.--The Food is not very Salt, but the Bill is very Stiff.--The Negroes of the South.--Prodigious Memories.--More "d.u.c.h.esses."--The Negresses.--I Insult a Woman._

Hotels are one of the strongest attractions in America to the Americans, especially the ladies.

When we Europeans travel, we alight at a hotel because it is impossible that we should have a pitching place of our own in each town we visit, or friends able to receive us; in other words, we go to the hotel because we cannot help it. When we leave our good bed and table, and set out to see the world a little, we say to ourselves: "The worst part of it is, that we shall have to live in hotels perhaps for a month or two; but, after all, it cannot be helped; we must put up with hotels, since we have made up our minds to see Switzerland, or Scotland, or Italy."

Our object in travelling is to see new countries, make pleasant excursions, climb mountains, &c.; and to attain that object, we must use the hotels as a convenience, as a sad necessity.

In Europe, the hotel is a means to an end.

In America, it is the end.

People travel hundreds, nay, thousands of miles for the pleasure of putting up at certain hotels. Listen to their conversation, and you will find it mainly turns, not upon the fine views they have discovered, or the excursions and walks they have enjoyed, but upon the respective merits of the various hotels they have put up at. Hotels are for them what cathedrals, monuments, ruins, and the beauties of Nature are for us.

In February, 1888, I went to see the Americans taking their pleasure in Florida. During the months of January, February, and March, flocks of society people from the great towns in the north go to Florida, where the sun is warm, and the orange trees are in full beauty of fruit and flower. Jacksonville and St. Augustine are in winter what Saratoga, Newport, and Long Branch are in summer: the rendezvous of all who have any pretension to a place in the fas.h.i.+onable world.

But what do they do at Jacksonville and St. Augustine, all these Americans in search of a "good time"? You think perhaps that in the morning they set out in great numbers to make long excursions into the country or on the water; that picnics, riding parties, and such out-of-door pastimes are organised.

Not so. They get up, breakfast, and make for the balconies or terraces of the hotels, there to rock themselves two or three hours in rocking-chairs until lunch time; after this they return to their rocking-chairs again and wait for dinner. Dinner over, they go to the drawing-rooms, where there are more rocking-chairs, and listen to an orchestra until bedtime. And yet, what pretty environs the little town of Jacksonville has, for instance! For miles around stretches a villa-dotted orange grove!

And the _table d'hote_!

Oh! that _table d'hote_!

In France, we look well at the bill of fare and study it; we discuss the dishes, arranging them discreetly and artistically in the mind before making their acquaintance more fully on the palate. We are _gourmets_.

In America, the question seems to be not, "Which of these dishes will go well together?" but, "How many of them can I manage?" It is so much a day; the moderate eaters pay for the gluttons.

You see women come down at eight to breakfast in silk attire, and decked with diamonds. And what a breakfast! First an orange and a banana to freshen the mouth and whet the appet.i.te; then fish, bacon and eggs, or omelette, beefsteak and fried potatoes, hominy cakes, and preserves.

"How little you eat, you Frenchpeople!" said an American to me one day, as I was ordering my breakfast of _cafe au lait_ and bread and b.u.t.ter.

"You are mistaken," said I; "only we do not care for our dinner at eight o'clock in the morning."

The larger the hotel is, the better the Americans like it. A little, quiet, well-kept hotel where, the cookery being done for twenty or thirty persons instead of a thousand, the beef has not the same taste as mutton; a hotel where you are known and called by your name, where you are not simply No. 578, like a convict;--this kind of pitching place does not attract the American, He must have something large, enormous, immense. He is inclined to judge everything by its size.

Jacksonville and St. Augustine boast a score of hotels, each capable of accommodating from six hundred to a thousand guests. These hotels are all full from the beginning of January to the end of March.

I have almost always accepted with reserve the American superlatives followed by the traditional _in the world_; but it may safely be said that the Ponce de Leon Hotel, at St. Augustine, is not only the largest and handsomest hotel in America, but in the whole world. Standing in the prettiest part of the picturesque little town, this Moorish palace, with its walls of onyx, its vast, artistically-furnished saloons, its orange-walks, fountains, cloisters, and towers, is a revelation, a scene from the _Arabian Nights_.

Here the Americans congregate in search of a "good time," as they call it. The charges range from ten to twenty-five dollars a day for each person, exclusive of wines and extras. The American who goes to the Ponce de Leon with his wife and daughters, therefore spends twelve, fifteen, or twenty pounds a day. For this sum, he and his family are fed, played to by a very ordinary band, and supplied with an immense choice of rocking-chairs. On his return to New York, he declares to his friends that he has had a "lovely time." The American never admits that he has been bored, in America especially. The smallest incidents of the trip are events and adventures, and he never fails to have his "good time." He is as easily pleased as a child, and everything American calls out his admiration, or at least his interest. Remark to him, for instance, that to go by train to Florida from the north, one has to travel through more than six hundred miles of pine-forest--which makes the journey very uninteresting--and he will throw you a pitying glance which seems to say "Immense, sir, immense, like everything that is American."

The temperature of Florida in winter is rarely lower than 64 degrees, and ranges from that to 75; but the climate is moist and enervating, the country a vast marsh, and so flat that, by standing on a chair, one could see to the extremities of it with the aid of a good field gla.s.s.

Some enterprising American should throw up a hill down there: he would make his fortune. Everyone would go to see it.

It is not everybody who can afford the luxury of the Ponce de Leon Hotel, but it is everybody who likes to be seen there in the season.

You must be able to say, when you return to the north, that you have been at the Ponce de Leon. This is how it can be managed. You go to some other hotel near the Ponce. In the evening, dressed in all your diamonds, you glide into the courtyard of the great caravansery. Another step takes you to the immense rotunda where the concert is going on. You stroll through the saloons and corridors, and, taking a seat where you can be seen of the mult.i.tude, you listen to the music. About ten or eleven o'clock, you beat a retreat and return to your own hotel.

Wis.h.i.+ng to set my mind at rest on this matter, I went one evening about half-past nine to the Casa Monica and Florida House. There, in the rooms where the musicians engaged by the proprietors play every evening, were, at the most, a score of people.

Heard at the St. Augustine station as I was leaving: