Pomona's Travels. Frank Richard Stockton
we went back to our lodgings to pack up, and I looked in the glass and saw what a smeary, bedraggled state my hat and head was in, from being rained on, I said to Jone, "I don't see how those people ever let such a person as me have a room at their hotel."
"It doesn't surprise me a bit," said Jone; "nobody but a very high and mighty person would have dared to go lording it about that hotel with her hat feathers and flowers all plastered down over her head. Most people can be uppish in good clothes, but to look like a scare-crow and be uppish can't be expected except from the truly lofty."
"I hope you are right," I said, and I think he was.
We hadn't been at the Babylon Hotel, where we are now, for more than two days when I said to Jone that this sort of thing wasn't going to do. He looked at me amazed. "What on earth is the matter now?" he said. "Here is a room fit for a royal duke, in a house with marble corridors and palace stairs, and gorgeous smoking-rooms, and a post-office, and a dining-room pretty nigh big enough for a hall of Congress, with waiters enough to make two military companies, and the bills of fare all in French. If there is anything more you want, Pomona—"
"Stop there" said I; "the last thing you mention is the rub. It's the dining-room; it's in that resplendent hall that we've got to give ourselves a social boom or be content to fold our hands and fade away forever."
"Which I don't want to do yet," said Jone, "so speak out your trouble."
"The trouble this time is you," said I, "and your awful meekness. I never did see anybody anywhere as meek as you are in that dining-room. A half-drowned fly put into the sun to dry would be overbearing and supercilious compared to you. When you sit down at one of those tables you look as if you was afraid of hurting the chair, and when the waiter gives you the bill of fare you ask him what the French words mean, and then he looks down on you as if he was a superior Jove contemplating a hop-toad, and he tells you that this one means beef and the other means potatoes, and brings you the things that are easiest to get. And you look as if you was thankful from the bottom of your heart that he is good enough to give you anything at all. All the airs I put on are no good while you are so extra humble. I tell him I don't want this French thing—when I don't know what it is—and he must bring me some of the other—which I never heard of—and when it comes I eat it, no matter what it turns out to be, and try to look as if I was used to it, but generally had it better cooked. But, as I said before, it is of no use—your humbleness is too much for me. In a few days they will be bringing us cold victuals, and recommending that we go outside somewhere and eat them, as all the seats in the dining-room are wanted for other people."
"Well," said Jone, "I must say I do feel a little overshadowed when I go into that dining-room and see those proud and haughty waiters, some of them with silver chains and keys around their necks, showing that they are lords of the wine-cellar, and all of them with an air of lofty scorn for the poor beings who have to sit still and be waited on; but I'll try what I can do. As far as I am able, I'll hold up my end of the social boom."
You may think I break off my letters sudden, madam, like the instalments in a sensation weekly, which stops short in the most harrowing parts, so as to make certain the reader will buy the next number; but when I've written as much as I think two foreign stamps will carry—for more than fivepence seems extravagant for a letter—I generally stop.
Letter Number Three
LONDON
t dinner-time the day when I had the conversation with Jone mentioned in my last letter, we was sitting in the dining-room at a little table in a far corner, where we'd never been before. Not being considered of any importance they put us sometimes in one place and sometimes in another, instead of giving us regular seats, as I noticed most of the other people had, and I was looking around to see if anybody was ever coming to wait on us, when suddenly I heard an awful noise.
I have read about the rumblings of earthquakes, and although I never heard any of them, I have felt a shock, and I can imagine the awfulness of the rumbling, and I had a feeling as if the building was about to sway and swing as they do in earthquakes. It wasn't all my imagining, for I saw the people at the other tables near us jump, and two waiters who was hurrying past stopped short as if they had been jerked up by a curb bit. I turned to look at Jone, but he was sitting up straight in his chair, as solemn and as steadfast as a gate-post, and I thought to myself that if he hadn't heard anything he must have been struck deaf, and I was just on the point of jumping up and shouting to him, "Fly, before the walls and roof come down upon us!" when that awful noise occurred again. My blood stood frigid in my veins, and as I started back I saw before me a waiter, his face ashy pale, and his knees bending beneath him. Some people near us were half getting up from their chairs, and I pushed back and looked at Jone again, who had not moved except that his mouth was open. Then I knew what it was that I thought was an earthquake—it was Jone giving an order to the waiter.
I bit my lips and sat silent; the people around kept on looking at us, and the poor man who was receiving the shock stood trembling like a leaf. When the volcanic disturbance, so to speak, was over, the waiter bowed himself, as if he had been a heathen in a temple, and gasping, "Yes, sir, immediate," glided unevenly away. He hadn't waited on us before, and little thought, when he was going to stride proudly pass our table, what a double-loaded Vesuvius was sitting in Jone's chair. I leaned over the table and said to Jone that if he would stick to that we could rent a bishopric if we wanted to, and I was so proud I could have patted him on the back. Well, after that we had no more trouble about being waited on, for that waiter of ours went about as if he had his neck bared for the fatal stroke and Jone was holding the cimeter.
The head waiter came to us before we was done dinner and asked if we had everything we wanted and if that table suited us, because if it did we could always have it. To which Jone distantly thundered that if he would see that it always had a clean tablecloth it would do well enough.
Even the man who stood at the big table in the middle of the room and carved the cold meats, with his hair parted in the middle, and who looked as if he were saying to himself, as with a bland dexterity and tastefulness he laid each slice upon its plate, "Now, then, the socialistic movement in Paris is arrested for the time being, and here again I put an end to the hopes of Russia getting to the sea through Afghanistan, and now I carefully spread contentment over the minds of all them riotous Welsh miners," even he turned around and bowed to us as we passed him, and once sent a waiter to ask if we'd like a little bit of potted beef, which was particularly good that day.
Jone kept up his rumblings, though they sounded more distant and more deep under ground, and one day at luncheon an elderly woman, who was sitting alone at a table near us, turned to me and spoke. She was a very plain person, with her face all seamed and rough with exposure to the weather, like as if she had been captain to a pilot boat, and with a general appearance of being a cook with good recommendations, but at present out of a place. I might have wondered at such a person being at such a hotel,