I.

THE OPEN DOOR.

There are many interesting hotels scattered about the world, with a few
of which I am acquainted and with a great many of which I am not. Of
course all hotels are interesting, from one point of view or another. In
fact, the surest way to fix an audience's attention is to introduce your
hero, or to display your opening chorus in the lobby or along the facade
of a hotel. The life, the movement and colour, the drifting
individualities, the pretence, the bluff, the self-consciousness, the
independence, the _ennui_, the darting or lounging servants, the very
fact that of those before your eyes seven out of ten are drawn from
distant and scattered places, are sufficient in themselves to invest the
smallest hostelry with glamour. It is not of this general interest that
I would now speak. Nor is it my intention at present to glance at the
hotels wherein "quaintness" is specialized, whether intentionally or no.
There are thousands of them; and all of them well worth the
discriminating traveller's attention. Concerning some of them--as the
old inns at Dives-sur-Mer and at Mont St. Michel--whole books have been
written. These depend for their charm on a mingled gift of the unusual
and the picturesque. There are, as I have said, thousands of them; and
of their cataloguing, should one embark on so wide a sea, there could be
no end. And, again, I must for convenience exclude the altogether
charming places, like the Tour d'Argent of Paris, Simpson's of the
Strand,[1] and a dozen others that will spring to every traveller's
memory, where the personality of the host, or of a chef, or even a
waiter, is at once a magnet for the attraction of visitors and a reward
for their coming. These, too, are many. In the interest to which I would
draw attention, the hotel as a building or as an institution has little
part. It is indeed a facade, a _mise en scene_before which play the
actors that attract our attention and applause. The set may be as
modernly elaborate as Peacock Alley of the Waldorf or the templed lobby
of the St. Francis; or it may present the severe and Elizabethan
simplicity of the stone-paved veranda of the Norfolk at Nairobi--the
matter is quite inessential to the spectator. His appreciation is only
slightly and indirectly influenced by these things. Sunk in his
arm-chair--of velvet or of canvas--he puffs hard and silently at his
cigar, watching and listening as the pageant and the conversation eddy
by.