A Candle for Saint Boniface

I

MUCH going to and fro in the earth and walking up and down therein have bred in me if not perpetual at least occasional benediction. The object of this gratitude is a figure little celebrated in modern liturgies, whom I venture to canonize as Saint Boniface. Not, of course, the well-known martyr of that name who evangelized Germany, though in my adventurous youth I have found comfort in many a German inn. Nor that jovial pope who, allunconscious of prohibition, promised indulgence to all good fellows who should ever drink his health. Precise hagiologists, indeed, will pompously declare my Boniface no saint at all, but a mere figment of modern fiction.

This puny origin is, I submit, an utterly unworthy and unsatisfying one for the eponym of universal hospitality. If such an order have not a patron saint, who of us should? Have not hunters Saint Hubert? And Democrats Saint Tammany, though they make little of his honors, being content to relate that he was a very, very good Indian, the wise chief of the LenniLenape? But I can bear witness to his sainthood, for I have been in his parish, dined at his hotel, and traveled on the good ship that bears his name.

I therefore invite all travelers, which is to say everybody, to join me in offering saintly honors to Boniface. And I now place my slender taper before his modest shrine. It is, in short, the modern hotel keeper — or, more exactly, the keeper of the modern hotel — whom I would celebrate. He shall be my muse supreme, and light and lead me to my theme.

Bigger things than candles have been offered to Saint Boniface before now, and those who rate saints by the size of the offerings made to them may well take note of this. For, in a beautiful village I wot of, a man has erected and actually endowed a delightful hotel, richly furnished within, and without — pace Saint Andrew! — equipped with a golf course all its own. Myself, as a devotee of Saint Boniface, I see in this incident everything to admire, and rate the donor above the givers of libraries and playgrounds, if not of hospitals and schools. Would that every successful son of an inhospitable town might thus ennoble his native place, endowing it with the perfect grace of hospitality! Surely generations of pilgrims would rise up to call him blessed.

And if the hotel be the index of civilization, what better thing can one do than to build a good one and set the index forward, thus giving civilization something to overtake? But this is hardly a fair way of putting it, either. For who has not motored up a broad, shady street, bordered with stately houses, where people dwell in comfort and at ease, only to find that the place has no spot fit to eat in, to say nothing of sleeping?

II

Which brings me to the heart of the matter, and the real cause of my unfeigned gratitude to Saint Boniface. For it has suddenly occurred to me that the wonder and marvel of it all is that in a place I never heard of till yesterday Boniface has been for years prepared for my reception and comfort, and has been, as it were, waiting for me.

Of course, not for me alone; but none the less really ready and waiting for me. And if I stay away a generation and then go there again he will once more be ready and waiting. Ready at the Rhone Glacier, just beyond the summit of the Furca Pass, if you please; and ready at the Beaurivage in Geneva, where you stopped once thirty years ago, and where our patient Boniface has been taking down the shutters and opening the salle à manger every day these thirty years and more, in readiness for your return. Surely there is something saintly in all this. It is nothing less than the perseverance of the saints, and has something of the sublime regularity of nature itself, by virtue of which, while the earth remaineth, summer and winter and day and night shall not cease.

And if, sometimes, prices seem a trifle in excess of what we could buy and cook the breakfast for ourselves, we must remember that it is only fair to pay something toward all the preparations that have been at our service and steadily waiting our convenience all the times we have not been here. But this may be a dangerous suggestion to offer to the order of Saint Boniface and I will not pursue it.

If the age and size of his shrines be criteria, the architecture of Boniface will hold its own with the best of them. The Crown at Slough is centuries older than Saint Peter’s, and who does not know that the largest dome in the world is part of a hotel at West Baden, Indiana? And if it comes to atmosphere, what are Karnak and Stonehenge to the decayed but mighty splendors of Saratoga Springs?

That Boniface is a creation of English fiction is, I submit, an idea decisively negatived by his English style. Indeed the extraordinary possibilities of our noble English tongue remain quite unexplored by the stay-at-home element of our population. The stateliest of Madrid hotels has its floors obligingly numbered 1th, 2th, 3th, and so on, a sight to cheer the elevator rider even in the warmest weather. ‘ Please not expel any cigarettes and no matches to the windows,’ plaintively pleads the Métropole Suisse in Como. Could the thing be more engagingly and disarmingly presented? It is simply impossible to take offense.

This restraint of expression surely reaches its climax at Ivrea, as you come down the valley from the Great St. Bernard Pass, where you have just paid your respects to the famous stuffed life-saver in the convent parlor. At Ivrea you read without surprise, ‘Client has not to draw dogs into his room or into restaurant.’ What a relief! Clearly you might have had to. But you do not. By the mercy of Saint Boniface you can retire peacefully to rest without having to draw dogs anywhere.

Perhaps you have never drawn a dog, and hardly know how to begin. Of course dogs do draw travelers; A traveler by the faithful hound Half buried in the snow was found, and it may be necessary in some circumstances for the traveler, acting as the animal’s client, to return the compliment. But why into the restaurant? If it is what it should be, it should not be necessary to draw the dog within. The thing is full of problems. And what a relief it is, this first day in many years on Italian soil, to know that, weary as you are with the long ride from Territet over the pass and down that glorious valley, you need not attempt the feat to-night.

Then, too, there is a positively pastoral solicitude about the modern Boniface. The precautions he takes against losing us by fire are an example. There is always the primitive method of leaving under the bed a long rope, made fast to the bedpost. The operation of this device is, of course, obvious. You simply seize the loose end firmly in both hands and jump from the window. Far more enjoyable is the coiled-spring contrivance sometimes seen in resort hotels. The directions instruct you to seat yourself upon the crossbar and slip lightly from the window sill to the ground. There was to be a fire drill the day after we left the Grand Canyon Hotel, and it was a bitter disappointment to me not to remain and see the guests gracefully parachuting from their several windows to the ground, and then, presumably, sailing lightly up again, as the powerful spring reasserted itself. Strange that no hotel has thought to advertise itself with a picture of this commanding spectacle, so appealing to the timid and the adventurous alike.

III

Of course it goes without saying that one must not approach Boniface emptyhanded. Besides the check book, one will often need a set of tools, and some simple practical devices such as wedges to stop the window’s rattling, some black cloth to suspend before them to keep out the intermittent electric signs which are found in the more barbarous settlements, perhaps a nail or two to hang the shaving mirror on, and a small can of thick black paint to smear over the transom to keep the hall light out. A British guide earnestly advises visitors to France to take along a brick to place on the heater in the car floor to keep their feet from being burned. But far more essential is a set of football pads to be worn in scrambling on French trains, when all the reckless daring of the Gallic bourgeoisie appears in full flood.

But fashions change, and Boniface is getting so fastidious and exclusive about his votaries that I am resolved before visiting his foreign shrines again to provide myself with a rubber stamp declaring my name, age, rank, religion, politics, nationality, nativity, parentage, matrimonial state, purpose in life, and the like, so that I may not have to stand at his portal trying to remember and set down these particulars before being shown a place to lay my head. Especially when physically wearied after a long day’s ride, and mentally exhausted with trying to remember all the various Louis’s and Philips, and their miscellaneous womankind, and what (if anything) each was noted for, it is tedious to have to write out where you spent last night, and where you mean to spend the next one, when you landed and what you are doing here anyway, besides answering ingenious questions which you never thought of before, the answers to which cannot possibly be of any value or even interest to anyone in the world. What do they do with all these materials afterward, one wonders. Have you and I really our respective dossiers in the Sûreté and Scotland Yard, or the Home Office? And if my purpose in life underwent a change in the course of my travels, and was duly so reported, would it matter very much to them, and what would they do about it?

It is surely saintly business to rouse us, as Boniface does, to frenzies of benevolence or iconoclasm; to raise us to heights of crusading enthusiasm or plunge us into depths of asceticism. An American gentleman at Tours last summer was ruefully regarding the well-known frugal Continental breakfast set before him. Questioned as to his state of mind, he reported unfavorably. He said he had slept between two damp sails, with a rock for a pillow. What does asceticism require of its votaries more than this?

And as for ecstasies of benevolence, who has not felt the swelling inner impulse to bestow all the residue of his estate to provide bathrooms for England or sanitation for France? The sewers of Paris, I have come to fear after touring the French provinces, owe their fame chiefly to the fact that they were apparently the only ones Victor Hugo knew.

As for a crusade of iconoclasm, have you never felt a burning zeal to go through the inns and hostelries of England with axe and hammer, breaking in pieces the ponderous Victorian washbowls and pitchers that still fill the land, to make room for the running hot and cold water of to-day? What a glorious smash they would make, too — always an important point with iconoclasts.

In the pleasant land of France, last summer, a sock failed to come back from the wash. The chambermaid investigated and with infinite regret made her report: The chaussette of Monsieur had fallen into the water! Fatal fall, in France, where, as French writers faithfully inform us, labor is not dully standardized as here, but the washerwoman kneels gayly on the river bank and blithely washes the clothes in ice water. Truly a short life, but a merry one.

In the south of England, so entrancingly beautiful (in fine weather), there is still shown the spot where once stood an inn in which Dr. Samuel Johnson descanted to Mr. James Boswell on the felicity of England in the possession of her inns and taverns. That was long ago, of course, and it must be admitted that the posture of things has somewhat altered. Few of us would to-day pitch upon this particular point for especial dilation, though Mr. J. S. Fletcher still utters an occasional chirp of satisfaction over it. Beyond question, points of view differ. Thus it does not allure me to read upon the sign of the Old Crown Hotel, at Slough, that it was established in 1315. It may indeed still offer all the comforts of the Middle Ages, but I had rather stay the night in one established in 1915 — if such there be.

Yet I must insist that the best of all motor guides, in prefacing its list of British hotels with Christina Rossetti’s poem on Death, while undoubtedly headed in the right general direction, goes too far: —

If I understand Miss Rossetti, she is not here speaking of hotel accommodations, although a hasty reader might gain that impression. On the other hand, I cannot believe that the genial Mr. Dunlop intended this as a malicious fling at the British hotel industry, of which, as we have seen, Englishmen have been loud in their praises at least from the days of Samuel Johnson. I prefer to see in the incident one of those subtle exhibitions of sturdy British humor, which are, alas! too often lost upon our untraveled fellow countrymen.