Our hotel being just a nice driving distance from London, and a very easy and convenient distance by train, and the village being really very quaint and pretty, and nice scenery and walks all round us, we made up our minds that, if we were lucky, we should soon be able to make it a staying-place—that is, a place people would come and stop at for a day or two, or perhaps a week, who wanted a little fresh air and not to be too far from town. We had every accommodation, and very pretty bedrooms, and private sitting-rooms, and all we wanted was the connection—the last people never having worked it up as an hotel, being satisfied with the local trade and the coffee-room customers, of which there were a good many in the summer. Harry said, as soon as we had put our nice new furniture in and done the rooms up a little, that he thought we ought to advertise. The refurnishing was very nice, but it cost a lot of money; and, as we paid for everything in cash, of course we had to buy useful cheap things. I had to select the things, as Harry said he was no good at that; so we went to London together, and looked over one or two big furniture places.
It was a great treat, but, of course, nothing was very new to me, as I had lived in good houses and seen lots of beautiful furniture and had the care of it—and a nice bother it was to keep dusted, I can tell you, especially in London, where directly you open a window the dust and dirt seem to blow in in clouds, and if you don’t open a window it gets in somehow. It was the ornamental{58} carving, and the chairbacks and things with fret-work, that used to be the greatest worry. Fret-work it was, and no mistake, and I used to fret over it, for it would take me hours to work my duster in and out and get the things to look decent.
Harry had never seen such beautiful things as we were shown before, and he kept standing and staring at them really with his mouth almost open, and it was as much as I could do to get him to leave the beautiful things and look at the ordinary ones that we wanted.
The salesman—a very nice young man—when he saw Harry admired the things, kept showing us cabinets and suites and bookcases that were really grand. “How much is that wardrobe?” said Harry, pointing to a very fine one. “Two hundred and forty pounds,” said the salesman; and I thought Harry would have dropped into a thirty-pound armchair that was just behind him.
He whispered to me that it seemed wicked for people to give all that money for a wardrobe just to hang a few old clothes up in.
“A few old clothes?” I laughed, and wondered what he would have said if he could have seen the number of dresses some ladies have, and known the prices they pay for them. But I didn’t begin talking to him about that, because I wanted to get our business done and get back again home, and he would have liked to stop there all day looking at the things and talking to the nice salesman.
We chose what we wanted—a few simple things, cheap but pretty, and in the very newest style, and Harry gave a cheque for them. I can’t tell you how proud I felt as I stood by and saw my husband take out his cheque-book and flourish the pen round; and the way he said, “Let’s see, what’s the day of the month?” was really quite grand.
It was three days before the goods came down, and when they did, on a big van, there was quite a little crowd outside to see them unloaded. When they had been carried upstairs and put in their places, and I had finished off the rooms with the mats and the toilet-covers that I had made all ready, and had put the antimacassars in the sitting-rooms, and stood the ornaments that we had bought on the little cabinet, everything looked lovely.{59}
And all that afternoon I kept going into the different rooms and looking at them and admiring them, and I fancied I could hear the guests, when they were shown in, saying, “How very nice! how very neat and comfortable! what excellent taste!” and paying me compliments on my sitting-rooms and bedrooms.
Oh dear me! I know more about hotel customers now than I did then, and I don’t expect any of them to go into raptures about anything. It’s generally the other way; they always find something to grumble at. We had one gentleman who, all the time he was with us, did nothing but grumble at the pattern of the wall-paper in his bedroom (a very pretty paper it was, being storks with frogs in their mouths, and some other animal sitting on its hind legs that I’ve never met anybody who could tell me its name), and he declared that he had the nightmare every night through looking at it; and another gentleman wanted all the furniture shifted in his room because it was green, and he hated green; and another said the pattern of the carpet made him bilious; and we had a lady who used to go on all day long to me about the bedroom furniture, and say it was so vulgar that if she lived with it long she believed that she would begin to use vulgar language. Then she went into a long rigmarole about the influence of your surroundings, or whatever you call it, till I quite lost my patience, and said we couldn’t refurnish the house for everybody who came.
It was the same with the beds. One person wouldn’t sleep in a wooden bedstead, because—— Well, you know the usual objection to wooden beds, but such a thing, I am sure, need never have been mentioned in my house, for one has never been known; and if they do get into bedsteads it’s the fault of the mistress of the house and the servants in nine cases out of ten.
Another gentleman, who was put in a room with a brass bedstead—the only room we had to spare—shook his head, and said he was sorry he had to sleep on brass, as it destroyed the rural character of the place. Give him a good old four-poster and he felt he was sleeping in the country, but with a brass bedstead you might just as well be in London.{60}
And if the customers didn’t grumble about the bedsteads, they did about the beds. It was really quite heart-breaking at first, when we were very anxious to please, and so, of course, listened to everything people had to say, so as to alter what was wrong, if possible. But it was no use. We had nearly all feather beds at first, and then the customers all hated feather beds and said they weren’t healthy, and we bought mattresses, and then half the people that came said they preferred feather beds, and couldn’t sleep on mattresses.
And as to the bolsters and the pillows, the grumbling about them used to be terrible. I think we must have had an extra fanciful lot of people, for one swore the pillows were too hard, and another that they were too soft. There was one old gentleman who stayed with us three weeks, and all that time we never managed to make his bed right. I made it myself, the housemaid made it, and I even got cook to come and make it, to see if by accident she could make it right. But it was no use; every morning he swore he hadn’t slept a wink because the bed wasn’t made his way, and he kept on about it till he had his breakfast, and then he began to grumble about the tea, and say nobody in the house knew how to make a decent cup of tea. Then it was the same with the bacon, and with the eggs: they were never right. I believe that old gentleman was what you call a born grumbler; nothing was ever right while he was with us. He grumbled so much that I said to Harry we must be careful with his bill, for I felt sure he would fight every item, as some of them do; but when I took it to him he just looked at the total and threw down a couple of banknotes, and never said a word or examined a single item.
I’ve found that often with people who grumble at everything—they don’t grumble at the bill; and people you think have been pleased with everything, you have to argue with them for half an hour to make them believe they’ve had a meal in the house.
But these people aren’t so much bother as the customers who make it a rule to grumble at the wines and the spirits and the beer. Harry used to get quite wild at first when they used to send for him over a bottle of wine, before a{61} lot of people, and say, “Landlord, just taste this wine.” Harry used to have to take a glass, of course, and put on a pleasing expression, and taste it and say, “There’s nothing the matter with it, sir!”
But, they would have it that it wasn’t sound, or it was new, or it was corked, or it was something or the other; and the same with the spirits. There are a lot of people who go about and pretend to be great judges of sixpenny-worths of whiskey and brandy, and sniff at it, and taste it, and palate it as if you were selling it ten shillings a bottle and warranting it a hundred years old. And they’re not at all particular about saying out loud that it isn’t good. I heard one gentleman say one day, when our coffee-room was quite full of customers, “Very nice people who keep this house; pity they sell such awful stuff.”
It made me go crimson; I felt so indignant, because it wasn’t true. Harry is most particular, and if anything were wrong he would speak to the distillers at once; but there is nothing wrong, for he is an excellent judge of whiskey and brandy himself, and we always pay the best price to have the best article, because that is what we believe in. Some people, especially young beginners, do doctor their stuff, I know, to make a larger profit; but it is a great mistake, for it soon gets known, and the house gets a bad name.
I’ve heard a gentleman myself, when asked to go into a certain house with a friend, say, “No, thank you; if I have anything to drink there, I’m always ill for a week afterwards.” The tricks of the trade are all very well, but trade that’s done by trick doesn’t last long, and in inn-keeping, as in any other business, honesty is the best policy in the long run.
These complaints worried us very much, and made Harry almost swear—a thing which, being a sailor, he can’t help sometimes, but doesn’t do often, and then only something very mild, quite different to real sea-swearing, which I’ve heard is very strong indeed.
He was telling another gentleman in our business who came to see us one day about it, and the gentleman said, “My boy, we all have to put up with that sort of thing. But I’ll tell you what to do. If you give a man a good{62} bottle of wine, and he grumbles at it, and pretends there’s something wrong with it, the next bottle he orders give him the worst you’ve got in your cellar, and it’s ten to one he’ll smack his lips and say, ‘Ah, that’s something very different now.’ Then you say, ‘Yes, sir; it was a mistake yesterday—a mistake of the cellarman’s.’ ‘Ah,’ he will say, ‘I am a connoisseur, and my opinion of a wine is taken by the best judges.’ You humour him and flatter him a bit, and if he stays long enough he’ll drink up all the common wine that you’ve got, pay the top price, and recommend your house everywhere for its ‘capital cellar.’”
Of course Harry wouldn’t play such a trick, but it would have served some of the customers right if he had. There are people who think it shows what a lot they know to grumble at the quality of everything—especially at hotels, where some gentlemen never forget to let everybody know that they are capital judges of wines and spirits. With the cigars, too, there is trouble sometimes, though, of course, not so much, as hotel customers who smoke good cigars generally carry their own Havannahs, and for the ordinary cigars, except in the bar and the smoking-room, there is not much call.
But sometimes a gentleman who is sitting in our parlour talking to us, will ask for a Havannah cigar, and Harry will offer him one of the best—and they are really good, for Harry is a judge, and has been with his ship to Havannah, and smoked them green. And I’ve known a gentleman—after smoking the Havannah a little while—say, it was a British cigar in a Havannah box; he could tell by the flavour. And the same gentleman, one evening that we were out, asked for a cigar, and our barmaid gave him one of the threepenny ones by mistake, and he liked it, and said that was something like a cigar. He said Harry had been swindled in the others.
Of course I don’t say all gentlemen are like this. Plenty of them who come to our place do know good wine and good cigars, and when they get them, appreciate them, and don’t mind paying for them.
It is always the people who grumble so much about the quality that are the worst judges, and they do it to be thought good judges. I only mention these things to{63} show what innkeepers have to put up with, and how difficult it is for them always to please their customers, though they try as hard as they can.
Soon after our hotel was quite ready and repainted and repapered, we determined to advertise. We put an advertisement in a London paper, and the next morning we had twenty or thirty letters. “Oh, Harry,” I said, “that advertisement has brought us a lot of customers already.” I expected all the letters were ordering apartments. So when I opened them I was very disappointed. They were all from different newspapers, and guide-books, and railway time-tables, and things of that sort, enclosing our advertisement cut out, and saying, “The cost for inserting this advertisement in so-and-so will be so much;” and soon after that, we began to be pestered with men coming in with big books in a black bag which were just coming out, and they talked for an hour to try and convince us that we ought to put our advertisement in their books.
Some of these books were going all over the world, and everybody was sure to read them; they would be put in every hotel in Europe and Asia and Africa and America, and I don’t know where else besides.
Harry listened for a long time, till the advertisement man began to point out that we should be advertised all over the world for thirty shillings, and then Harry said, “Thank you—but we can’t go into your book till we’ve enlarged our premises. If we are to have customers from Europe and Asia and Africa and America, we shall want a barracks instead of a village hotel.”
But our first advertisement did bring us some customers, and from London, too. It was very nicely worded, because we had copied one that was in the Daily News, and altered it to suit our hotel. We said: “Pretty and quiet little country hotel. Charming apartments. Picturesque scenery. Moderate terms. Very suitable for ladies and gentlemen desiring home comforts, perfect privacy, and salubrious air.”
We got several answers to the advertisement from people who didn’t come. The questions they asked were awful—it took me a whole day nearly to answer them. Were we on gravel soil? Where did we get our water from?{64} Was the church High or Low? How far off was the nearest doctor? Was the air bracing or relaxing?—and, some of them, if these things were all satisfactory, were good enough to say that they would come if we could take them on inclusive terms. One lady and her three daughters, after writing four pages every other day, wanted the best sitting-room and three bedrooms, fire and light, breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, and late dinner, for two guineas a week for the four of them, no extras to be charged.
It was about a week after our advertisement appeared that we got our first visitor through it. A very nice old gentleman, with beautiful silver hair and gold spectacles, and a hand portmanteau, arrived one evening, and told us that he’d seen our advertisement, and he’d come to give the place a trial.
He told us that he was a London physician, and had been ordered a few days’ holiday; and he had seen our advertisement, and thought, if it suited, it would be just the place for him to send some of his patients to. He said he had a big practice among City men, and he had often to tell them to go and sleep in the country for a week or so because of their nerves; but as they wanted to get to business every day he couldn’t send them far, and we were just the right distance.
Harry was delighted when he heard the gentleman say that, because it was just the sort of connection he wanted—people who wanted to be quiet and go to bed early, and wouldn’t want a lot of waiting on till all hours of the morning; and people of that sort, business people, are always so respectable.
You may be sure we made the celebrated London physician as comfortable as we could, and gave him the best rooms, and waited on him hand and foot, and I went into the kitchen myself to look after cook while his meals were being prepared, because our cook was what you call “unequal.”
One day everything would be beautiful, a credit to the best hotel in the kingdom, and the next day everything would be spoiled. And she always was at her best when we’d nobody particular in the house, and she was always{65} at her worst when it was a very particular customer. And she had a vile temper, too, as most cooks have, through standing so much over the fire, and wanted a lot of humouring, especially when she knew everything depended on her and I was anxious.
When the London physician came, I remembered how particular doctors are about food for their patients, especially for those that have nerves, and stomachs, and gout, and other things that come from overwork and anxiety, some of them saying that a badly-cooked dinner is at the bottom of many ailments that people suffer from, such as dyspepsia and indigestion.
So I stopped in the kitchen as much as I could to keep cook up to the mark for the London physician, and, to make her try her best, I told her if she suited she was to have her wages raised when we began to get busy.
She did try her best, and came out really quite grand once or twice in entrées and fancy puddings that I didn’t know she knew anything about, so that all the time the London physician was with us his dinners were fit for a nobleman.
He enjoyed them, too, and no mistake, and there wasn’t much that went up that came down again. “Ah, my dear madam,” he said to me one day, when I came to clear away and found that he’d finished a whole apple charlotte, and only left a quarter of a wine-jelly that cook had made—“ah, my dear madam, your salubrious air has made a new man of me. Why, before I came down here the very sight of food almost made me ill!”
He was very affable and chatty, not only to me, but to everybody, and we all liked him very much. Of an evening, he said he felt lonely in his sitting-room, so he would come down and sit in the bar-parlour, and have his pipe and talk with Mr. Wilkins, and the one or two of our neighbours that made it a sort of a local club.
He was a very nice talker, and full of anecdotes. So he soon got to be quite a favourite, and Mr. Wilkins told him about the people in the neighbourhood, and of course that story about the Squire’s room that I told you when I began these Memoirs.
He said it was a very pretty story, and then he asked{66} about the people who lived at the Hall now. “Oh,” said Mr. Wilkins, “it’s the eldest son of the Phillipses, the wholesale clothes people, who lives there now. The old people are dead, and he’s the master of the place, and lives there with his family. They’re very rich, for his father made an immense fortune in business.” (Mr. Phillips was the gentleman I told you about who comes and talks to Harry sometimes about foreign parts, through having run away to sea himself when a boy.)
“Is he married?” said the London physician.
“Oh yes,” I said, joining in the conversation; “he married a very rich young lady, and has a large family.”
“Let’s see,” he said, “she was a Miss Jacobs, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, sir; that was the name. She’s a very beautiful woman. I’ve got a picture of her in an illustrated newspaper, if you’d like to see it.”
“Thank you, I should very much.”
I went and got out a back number of an illustrated lady’s paper that had Mrs. Phillips in it, sketched at the Lord Mayor’s ball.
“That’s her, sir,” I said, pointing to her picture; “but she’s really handsomer than she looks here. That dress was made for her in Paris, it says here. Everybody noticed her at the ball, not only because she was so beautiful, but because of her diamonds. They say she’s got the finest jewellery in the county.”
The London physician looked at the picture, and said she was certainly very handsome; and then he asked about the house they lived in, and if the grounds were very fine.
“Fine!” said Mr. Wilkins; “they’re grand! Haven’t you seen them?”
“No; I didn’t know that they were open.”
“They aren’t,” said Mr. Wilkins; “but I can always go when I like and take a friend. I’m going up there to-morrow to see the head gardener. If you’d like to go, sir, I should be very pleased to show you over the place.”
“Thank you. I’ll go with pleasure. I should like to leave a card at the hall, as I knew Mrs. Phillips’s brother once. I might inquire after his health. Is Mr. Phillips at home?{67}”
“No; he’s on the Continent. Mrs. Phillips would have been with him, but she’s ill in bed.”
“Oh, I’m sorry for that,” said the physician. “Never mind, I can see the grounds with you.”
The next day Mr. Wilkins called and took our guest up to the Hall, and when he came back he said, “What a delightful old place! I don’t wonder at the old Squire feeling the loss of it so much.”
“Did you see the house, sir?” I said.
“Oh, yes; Mr. Wilkins got the butler to take me over it. What a beautiful drawing-room!”
“Yes, it is, sir,” I said. “Ah, you can do a lot with money—and they’re rolling in it.”
He had been with us nearly a week when this happened. The morning after that he said he must go to London for the day to make some arrangements, but he would be back in the evening, and he hoped, if he found all well at home, to be able to stay a few days longer. He said he’d be back by the six o’clock train, and would I have dinner ready for him at half-past.
He came back and said he was very sorry, but he found he shouldn’t be able to stay as he had hoped, so would I have his bill ready for him in the morning, when he would have to return to town.
“I hope you have been comfortable, sir?” I said.
“Very comfortable indeed, Mrs. Beckett, and I shall certainly recommend all my patients who want a few days’ change and rest to come to you.”
That evening, about nine o’clock, one of our customers came into the bar-parlour looking very pale. It was Mr. Jarvis, the miller, whose mill was about five minutes’ walk from the lodge gates of the Hall.
“What’s the matter, Jarvis?” everybody said, for they saw something was wrong directly they looked at him.
“Oh,” he said; “it’s nothing. I shall be all right directly; but I’ve had a narrow escape. You know how narrow the lane is near my place. Well, as I was walking along coming here I heard wheels, and before I could get out of the way a dog-cart came along at a fearful pace, and the shaft caught me and threw me into the hedge. It was a mercy I wasn’t killed. I shouted after the man{68} who was driving, and he turned round and used the most fearful language at me. What with the fright and my rage at being treated like that, it’s no wonder if I look queer. Give me six o’ brandy neat, Mrs. Beckett, please.”
“How disgraceful!” said the London physician. “Do you know the driver?”
“No, he don’t belong about here. I couldn’t see his face, because he didn’t carry no lights; but he were a Londoner. I could tell by the way he spoke.”
The conversation turned on Londoners and their horrid ways in the country, and how they drove over people; and Mr. Wilkins said that there ought to be something done to stop it, for at holiday times and on Sundays a lot of roughs came from London, and, when they got drunk in the evening, drove at such a rate and so carelessly that it was a mercy people weren’t killed every day.
He said there ought to be two or three of the inhabitants in places that suffered from the nuisance made special constables, and be about every Sunday evening to look out for the wretches, and have them caught and brought to justice.
The conversation was still on the same subject when it was closing time, and they all had to go. The London physician told me he was going by the half-past nine train in the morning, and to be sure and have his bill ready: and I promised to see that it should be. Then he said good night and went to bed; and we went to bed about a quarter of an hour after, and I went to sleep and dreamed that a man in a dog-cart was driving over me, and I was running away, and the faster I ran the faster he drove, and I was just falling down and the dog-cart was coming over my body, when somebody shouted, “Hi! hi! hi!” and I woke up with a start.
And somebody was shouting “Hi!” and hammering at our bedroom door.
I sat bolt upright in bed to see if I was awake, and then I woke Harry, who’d sleep, I believe, if somebody was hammering on his head instead of on the door.
“Harry!” I screamed, “there’s something the matter. See who it is.{69}”
He got up and opened the door, and there was Jones, our village policeman.
“Hullo!” says Harry, “how the devil did you get in?”
“Walked in,” he said; “do you know your front door’s open?”
“What!” said Harry. “Why, I bolted and barred it myself.”
“It’s open now, then,” said Jones. “I only found it out by accident. It looked shut all right when I passed it twice before, but just now when I came by I could see a streak of light, and I pushed it and it flew back wide open, so I found my way upstairs and woke you. You’d better come down.”
Harry was out after the policeman in a minute, and I got up and dressed, knowing something must be wrong, for I’d seen Harry bolt up that door with my own eyes.
It was about five in the morning, and just getting daylight. I went down all of a tremble, and my heart beating loud enough to be heard all over the house. I found Harry and the policeman examining the door.
“It’s been done from the inside,” said Harry; “that’s certain. What can it mean?”
“Who’s in the house?” said the policeman.
“Only the servants and ourselves and the gentleman who’s been staying here for a week,” I said.
“Go and see if the servants are in bed, please, ma’am,” said Jones.
I went and knocked at their doors, and they thought they were all oversleeping themselves, and late, and jumped up directly I knocked.
“Well,” said the policeman, when I told him, “you’d better see if that gentleman’s in the house still.”
“Oh, nonsense!” I said; “I can’t go and disturb him at this hour. Whatever would he think? Besides, it mightn’t be wise to let him know about this. It isn’t a thing to do the house good.”
“I’d like you to go,” said Jones, “just for me to be able to say I ascertained as no one had left the house. Which is his room?”
“I’ll take you,” said Harry; and they went upstairs together. Presently Harry came tearing down.{70}
“Mary Jane;” he said, looking as scared as if he’d seen a ghost, “the London physician’s gone, and he’s taken his portmanteau with him!”
I couldn’t speak. I dropped down flop on the stairs with horror.
And at that very minute a man on horseback came dashing through the streets, and pulled up by our door as Jones ran out to see what it could be.
It was a groom from the Hall. “I’m going to the station for help,” he said. “The Hall’s been broken into in the night by burglars, and the missus’s jewellery——”
* * * * *
“What’s that? It’s in the best sitting-room, Susan. It’s something smashed. Oh dear me, whatever can it be? What! the best vase! Of course; the cat got on the mantelpiece! Well, whose fault is it? I told you you’d shut it in one day by accident, and now you see what’s happened!{71}”