Sometimes, however, if you go somewhat out of the season, and before the rush of visitors begins, you get to a certain degree behind the scenes, and learn a little of the heart and humanity of the management. The chambermaid has time to have a little chat with you in the morning, and the head waiter gives you bits of local information both interesting and new. The manageress is not too busy for a few minutes' gossip across the counter which separates her from the hall, and screens her off in a sanctuary of her own. And you may find her cheerful, chatty, kindly, and willing to please for the mere pleasure of pleasing.
In the monster hotels of London and the great cities, while there may yet be a "season"--a period of extra pressure and overcrowding--there is no such slack time as the giant caravanserais of holiday resorts experience.
The pioneer of the many-storeyed, "palatial" hotels, gorgeous with marble pavements, polished granite columns, lifts and gigantic saloons, was the "Great Western Railway Hotel" at Paddington.[11] Since that huge pile set the fashion, hundreds of others, huger and more magnificent, have been built at Charing Cross, Euston, St. Pancras, Marylebone and other London termini, with big brothers--in every way as big and well-appointed--in provincial towns. They are the logical outcome of the times, the direct successors of the coaching and posting inns that originally came into existence to supply the wants, in food and lodging, of travellers set down at the places where the coaches stopped. The final expression of the coaching hostelry is still to be seen in London, in instructive company with one of the largest of the railway hotels, in the Strand, where the "Golden Cross," built in 1832, looks upon the "Charing Cross Hotel" of the South-Eastern Railway.
The management of a great modern hotel is no easy thing. It demands the urbanity of an ambassador, the marketing instincts of a good housewife, the soldier's instinct for command, the caution of a financier, and a gift for judging character. All these things--natural endowments, or the result of training--must go to the making of an hotel-manager who has, perhaps, a couple of hundred people on his staff, and hundreds of guests, many of them unreasonable, to keep satisfied.