If there is one thing that is unpleasant in a small hotel, it is to have anybody very ill in it. I dare say it is unpleasant in a big hotel; but there it isn’t noticed so much, as, of course, nothing is noticed much in a large place, which makes up hundreds of beds every night. A gentleman, who used to stay with us now and then—an artist, who had been all over the world nearly, and every year went away abroad—was very fond of gossiping with us of an evening, and he told me a lot about these big hotels, which was very interesting, and especially so to Harry and myself, we being in the hotel business, though, of course, only in a small way, compared with the huge concerns that call themselves Grand Hotel Something or other, and are small towns.
Mr. Stuart—that was the artist’s name who stayed with us—said that he hated these huge hotels, because you were only a number; that you ceased to be a human being, and became No. 367 or No. 56 or No. 111, as the case might be, and if you were ill, or if you died, it was all the same to the management. He said he always had visions of lying ill in one of these places, and hearing somebody call down the speaking-tube outside in the corridor, “Doctor wanted, No. 360,” and perhaps after that, “Coffin wanted, No. 360.” And if ever he felt the least bit ill he always got out of a big hotel as quickly as possible, and went to a small one, so as to leave off being a number, and become a human being again.
He said it was bad enough in the big hotels in our{169} country, but abroad it was something awful to be ill in them. He had a friend of his taken very ill in Italy, in a Grand Hotel, and he used to go and sit with him and try to cheer him up, and he said directly he began to be ill and it was thought he was going to die, the hotel tariff went up about two hundred per cent. for everything. The poor gentleman died in the hotel, and the friends had to be telegraphed for to come and settle up, and a nice settle up it was. Not only was the bill something terrible—such a thing as a cup of beef-tea being about five shillings, and double and treble charged for every little thing in the way of refreshment for the invalid, brought up into the room—but, after the poor gentleman was dead, the manager of the hotel sent the friends in a bill, charging them for the bed, the bed-linen, the curtains, the carpets, and the furniture, and even the wall-paper.
When Mr. Stuart told me that, I said, “Good gracious! whatever for?” And then he explained to me that it is the custom in some of the countries in the South of Europe to be awfully afraid of death—especially in Naples, where the poor gentleman died—and everybody shrinks away from death; the friends leaving the poor invalid to die alone, with only a priest in the room, even though the dying person has all his senses about him; and after there has been death in a room no one will touch anything that has been in it, and so everything is given away or sold cheap to the poor, and everything is had in new, even the walls being stripped and all new paper put on them.
You may be sure in a Grand Hotel in these places the refurnishing is made as expensive as possible, because it is all put down in the corpse’s friends’ bill.
Mr. Stuart—or, as we got to call him, after he’d stayed at the ‘Stretford Arms’ Hotel several times, “The Traveller”—when he found that Harry and I were interested in these things about hotels abroad, and the ways of the people, told us a lot of things, and I put them down in my book, thinking perhaps they would be useful to me some day.
What brought it up about people dying in hotels, was our having a young lady very, very ill indeed, in our house at the time, and we were really afraid that she was going{170} to die, for the doctor shook his head over her; and it was talking about the case, and the worry it was to us having it in the hotel, that led Mr. Stuart to tell us what he did.
Fancy everybody going away and leaving their own relations directly the doctor says that their last moments are coming! It must be awful to the dying people to look round and find all the faces that they love gone from the bedside. Mr. Stuart told us that this custom is so well known among the Naples people, that one day a little girl, who was dying of consumption and had come to her last hour, opened her eyes and saw her father, who was her only relation, stealing out of the room. She looked at him a moment, and then, in a feeble voice and with tears in her eyes, she whispered, “Ah, papa, I see it is all over with me now, for you are going away.”
That made her father feel so sorry that he came back, and sat down, and held his little girl’s hand till she died. But everybody in Naples, when they heard of it, said, “How awful! and how could he do such a thing?” and for a long time afterwards people seemed to shrink from him.
I shouldn’t like to live in a country like that, especially as you are put under ground in twenty-four hours, and the men who put you in your coffin, and go to your funeral, are covered with a long white sack from head to foot, with two holes cut in it for their eyes. So Mr. Stuart said, and he showed us some photographs of them, and made me feel ill for a week.
I said to Harry, when Mr. Stuart had gone to his room and left us thinking over what he had told us, that I hoped the young lady wasn’t going to die in our hotel. To have anybody die in the place—especially a small place like ours—is most unfortunate, and makes everybody uncomfortable, besides interfering with business.
I don’t say this in a hard-hearted way; but I am sure everybody who knows anything about our business will understand what I mean. The other people staying in the house don’t like it, and they generally leave, and, if it gets about, people avoid the hotel for a time, for fear they should be put in the same room directly after. I dare say they are in big hotels, because I know that when anybody{171} dies in them they are fetched away at once, and nothing is said about it. Harry told me about an hotel a friend of his was manager of in the City, where the undertaker in the same street kept a special room for hotel customers. I said, “Oh, Harry, don’t talk like that!” And Harry said, “It’s quite true, and the undertaker’s man calls round the last thing of a night and asks if there are any orders.”
I knew that couldn’t be true, so I told Harry it was very dreadful of him to make light of such awful things. It always seems strange to me, but how many people there are who will make jokes about death and tell comic stories about it! I think there is some reason for it in human nature, but I am not clever enough to say what it is. I always notice, in our parlour, if one of the customers tells a very awful story, and the conversation gets on things to freeze your blood, there’s always somebody ready with another, and they go on until, when it’s closing time, I’m sure that some of them are half afraid to go home in the dark.
Writing about people dying in hotels reminds me of what I heard one of my masters tell one of my missuses, while I was in service. He had been down to Brighton, staying at an hotel, and one Sunday afternoon, in the smoking-room, he met a nice, middle-aged gentleman, and they got into conversation. The middle-aged gentleman told my master that he had been very ill, and had been travelling about for six months in search of health, but that he was quite well now, and that the day after to-morrow he was going to his house in the country. He seemed so pleased, for he said he had not seen his wife and children for six months, and they would be so delighted to see him well and strong again.
That evening, my master and the gentleman dined together in the coffee-room, and over their dinner it was arranged that they would go for a long walk together in the morning to the Devil’s Dyke. They would have breakfast early and start directly after, so as to take their time for the excursion.
The next morning my master was down early to his breakfast; but the other gentleman hadn’t come down at{172} nine o’clock, so my master asked the number of his room, and thought he would go and hurry him up.
He went upstairs, and knocked at the bedroom door, but got no answer. Then he knocked louder, and said, “What about our walk to the Dyke? It’s nine o’clock now.”
Still no answer.
“He must be very fast asleep,” said master to himself; and then he banged quite hard.
Still no answer.
It was so strange, that my master got frightened, and called the waiter up; and when they had both banged and could hear nothing, they sent for the landlord, and he ordered the door to be burst open.
The gentleman was there. He was sitting fully dressed at the table in the room. In front of him was a letter which he had been writing; but his head was down on the table, as if he had fallen asleep writing it.
The landlord went up to him and touched him on the shoulder. Then he started back, with an exclamation of horror.
The poor gentleman was dead.
He had evidently died as he was writing the letter; but he looked for all the world as if he was sleeping peacefully.
My master saw the letter, and read it.
It was this:—
“My dear Mary,
This will, I think, reach you only just before I arrive. I am counting the hours, my darling, till I see you and the children again. You will be so pleased to see how well and strong I look. Oh, how I long to be home once more! It is the longest parting we have had, dear, since God gave you to me for my wife; but it will soon be over now. I shall post this letter to-morrow early. I find that the train I shall come by arrives at 4.30 in the afternoon. So at five, my darling, all being well, you may expect to see me. I should like——”
And there the letter ended. The last three words were written differently to the others. There must have been{173} a sudden trembling of the hand, a mist before the eyes, perhaps, and then the pen dropped where it was found—on the floor. And the poor gentleman fell forward and died—died just as he was thinking of the happy meeting with his wife and little ones, and bidding them be ready to welcome him.
Of course, the doctor was sent for, and there had to be an inquest. The doctor said that it was heart disease, and that the gentleman had died in a moment.
It was very awful, and most painful to my master and the landlord, or, rather, the landlord’s brother, who managed the hotel.
Of course the poor wife had to be told what had happened. At first they were going to send her a telegram to the address they found on a letter in the gentleman’s pocket, but they decided it would be such a terrible shock, and so the landlord’s brother, “Mr. Arthur,” as he was called, and quite a character, so master said, decided that he would go himself and break the terrible news to the poor lady as gently as possible.
He couldn’t go till the next day. And so it happened that he arrived by the very train that the poor gentleman was to have gone by himself. He took a fly from the station to the house—a lovely little villa, standing in its own grounds—and when he drove up, two sweet little girls came rushing down the garden-path, crying out, “Papa, dear papa! Mamma, mamma, papa’s come home—papa’s come home!”
And then their mamma, her face flushed with joy, came quickly out, and ran down after the children to the gate to welcome her husband.
Poor Mr. Arthur! Master said that when he told him about it his eyes filled with tears, and he could hardly speak.
He said it was a minute before he could open his lips; but the poor lady had read bad news in his face, and she gasped out,
“My husband! he is ill! he is worse! Oh, tell me; tell me. For God’s sake, tell me!”
And the little girls looked up with terrified faces, and ran to their mamma, and clung to her.{174}
And then Mr. Arthur begged the lady to come into the house; and then, as gently as he could, he told her the terrible news.
Wasn’t it dreadful?
Oh, dear me! if anything of that sort had happened in our house it would almost have broken my heart.
Harry would have had to go; and all the time he was away I should have been picturing that poor lady——
But I won’t write any more about it. It makes me feel so unhappy. Oh dear, oh dear! what terrible sorrows there are in the world! When one thinks of them, and contrasts one’s own happy lot with them, how thankful one ought to be! Fancy, if my Harry were ever away, and—— No! no! no! I will not think of such things. I’m a little low to-day and out of sorts, and when I am like that I get the most melancholy ideas, and find myself crying before I know what I’m doing.
Harry says I want a change; that I’ve been working too hard, and been too anxious—and that’s quite true, for our business has got almost beyond us, and the trouble of servants and one thing and another has upset me.
But I must get this Memoir done while I have a few minutes to spare. I call them Memoirs from the old habit; but, of course, they are hardly that, though I suppose an hotel could have memoirs.
It was about the young lady who was taken so seriously ill in our house, and that we were afraid was going to die.
She came down with her mamma early in the spring, having been recommended for change of air; but not wanting to be too far away, because she was under a great London doctor—a specialist I think he was called—and she had to go up and see him once a week.
Her mamma was about fifty—a very grave, I might say “hard,” lady. I didn’t like her much when she first came; there was something about her that seemed to keep you at your distance—“stand-offish” Harry called it—and she never unbent an atom, no matter how civil you tried to be.
But the daughter, who was about two-and-twenty, was the sweetest young lady, so pale and delicate-looking; but with a sweet, sad smile that Harry said was heavenly.{175} And certainly it was, though I couldn’t say myself what is the difference between a heavenly smile and an earthly one: but there must be, or people wouldn’t use the word.
Miss Elmore—that was the young lady’s name—always had a kind word for me when I went into her room; but she talked very little, only thanking me for any little attention I showed her, and saying she was afraid she was giving a great deal of trouble.
Of course I said, “Oh dear no,” and it was a pleasure to wait on her. And so it was, for she was so patient, and I could see that she was a great sufferer, and it seemed to me that she was very unhappy.
Her mother was generally sitting by her when she didn’t get up, and used to read to her; but whenever I heard her reading, it was a religious book, and full of things about death—solemn and sad things, not at all fit to be continually dinned into the ears of an invalid.
Perhaps it was the lady herself being so stern, and having such a hard, rasping voice, that made the things I heard her read seem so unsympathetic. Of course, I don’t want to say that people who are very ill oughtn’t to have religious books read to them—we ought all to be prepared, and to think of our future; but I nev............