The Closing of the Hotel
It scarcely began before the last of August, when the guests ebbed away by floods, in every train. The end of the season was purely conventional. One day the almanac said it was August, and the hotel was full; another day the almanac said it was September, and the vast caravansary was instantly touched with depletion, and within a week it hung loose upon its inmates like the raiment upon the frame of a man who has been Banting. There was no change in the weather; that remained as summerlike as ever, and grew more and more divinely beautiful. The conditions continued the same, only more agreeable; the service was still abundant and perfect; the table was of an unimpaired variety; there was no such sudden revival of business or pleasure in the city that people should abandon the leisure of the sea-shore; the ocean smiled as serenely, the breakers crashed as lyrically along the beach; the country, for those who were to prolong their outing, would be dry and dusty. But a certain fiction of the calendar had reported itself in the human consciousness; and as men are the prey of superstition and emotion, the population of the huge hostelry yielded by a single impulse to the pressure of the pretence that it was September.
I
Huge, I have called the hostelry, and I do not know that I can add to the effect of size which I wish to impart by saying that it is of a veritably American immensity. It stretches along the sea like the shore of a continent; and when I walked from one end of its seaward veranda to the other, I felt as if I were going from Castine in Maine to St. Augustine in Florida. Really, it is only the fifth of a mile in length, but I have ordinarily lived in houses so much shorter that my fancy takes wing when I think of it, and will not brook a briefer flight. In like manner, when I speak of its thousand dwellers as a population, I am perhaps giving way to an effect of habitually sharing my roof with four or five persons.
They were nearly a thousand when I came, but the place was so spacious that I had large areas of the piazza to myself whenever I liked, and I was often a solitary wayfarer up and down the halls that projected themselves in dimmer and dimmer perspective between the suites of rooms on the right hand and on the left. It was the dining-room, with its forest of pine posts, its labyrinth of tables, its army of black waiters, and its only a little larger army of guests, which gave that impression of a dense overpeopling, such as one could not feel in greater degree even in the tenement quarters of the East Side. This was peculiarly the case on a Sunday, when the guests had guests; and in the tramp of the black forces, the clash of crockery, and the harsh jangle of the cutlery, mingled with the dull, subdued sound of the guttling and guzzling, there was something like the noise of a legion stirring in its harness, and hailing Cæsar with the warlike devotion inspired by a munificent donative.
In the early morning there was a hardly less powerfull impression of numbers, when the crying children, the half-hushed quarrelling of some husbands and wives, and the loud and loving adieux of others parting for the day, burst the frail partitions of their rooms, and mixed in the corridors with the rush of the porters’ trunk-bearing trucks, pushed over the long carpeted stretches with the voluble clatter of so many lawn-mowers, the flight of the call-boys’ feet, the fierce clangor of the chambermaids’ bells, and the strongly brogued controversies and gossip of the chambermaids themselves. No doubt all these effects were exaggerated by the senses just unfolding themselves in the waking consciousness, and taking angry note of the disturbing influences without. But the multitude sheltered by a single roof was nevertheless very great: at the height of the season, the guests and the servants, the drones and the workers, were some fifteen hundred together.
II
All at once, as I say, a great part of the multitude vanished. All at once, on the verandas, and in the wide office swept with yet cooler currents from the sweet-breathed sea, I was sensible of a sudden decimation. I cannot fix the date with precision, but one night at about half-past eight the great moony electrics which swung in space high over the floors of the office, the ball-room, and the dining-room paled their effectual fires, which they never afterward relumed, and left us to the batlike waverings of the naphtha gas. I remember the sinking of the heart with which my senses took cognizance of the fact. No one spoke, or audibly noted it; the talking groups talked on in fallen tones; the people who were reading books or papers drew them a little nearer, or put them a little farther; those who were writing letters at the long tables in the reading-room silently adjusted their vision to the obscurity. It was like the effect of some august natural catastrophe; the general disposition was to ignore the fact, as we shall perhaps try to ignore the fact that the world has begun to burn up when it begins to burn, and pretend that it is merely a fire over in Hoboken or Long Island City that the department will soon have under control.
It may have been the morning of that day, or the morning of the next, but it was at least some neighboring morning, that I sauntered down to one of the forenoon trains and saw a large detachment of our colored troops departing. They were very gay, as they nearly always are, poor fellows; and they were exchanging humorous and derisive adieux with a detachment of those who were to remain, and who pretended on their part to mock their departing comrades. These helped them off with their baggage, wheeling the heavy truck-loads of the trunks which the porters left to them; and, when all was ready, shaking hands again and again, and telling them to be good to themselves. At the last moment a very short, stout, little black man appeared with a truck heaped high with baggage, and rushed it down the long esplanade to the platform beside the train, amid the wild cheers and wagers of the going and staying spectators. He had all the cry till the train actually started, when a young colored brother burst out of the front door of a car from which it had detached itself, and began to run it down with a heavy grip-sack flying wildly about and beating his legs and flanks. He had taken his place in this car unaware of its fate, and had remained in it, exulting from the open window in his sole possession; and now the secret of his proprietorship had been revealed to his dismay. But it was a very kindly train; when his pursuit became known, the locomotive obligingly slowed to a stand, and he was pulled aboard the rear platform amidst a jubilation which few real advantages inspire in this world.
III
An indefinable gloom settled upon me as the train curved out into the marsh, and the laughing, chattering, cheering, hat-waving remnant came back to the hotel and dispersed about their work. There were still a great many of them, and there were still a great many of us, but I felt that the end had begun. I do not know whether I felt this fact more keenly or not when the dentist, whose presence I had been tacitly proud of all through August, abandoned the house which he had helped to render metropolitan. But I am sure that it was a definite shock to lose him; and that the tooth which his presence had held in abeyance asserted itself in a wild throe at his going. Once as I passed the door of his office his name was on it and his hours; when I returned fifteen minutes later to ask an appointment with him his name was gone, and the useless hours alone remained. On his way to take passage in his cat-boat for the farthermost parts of the Great South Bay, he kindly stopped and advised about the grumbling tooth. Then he passed out of the hotel, and left it to ache if it must, with an unrequited longing for the filling fatally delayed.
The doctor went a week later, but before this other changes had taken place, among which the most cataclysmal was the passing of the band, which vanished as it were in a sudden crash of silence. The whole month long I had heard it playing in the afternoon midway of the long veranda, and in the evening on its platform in the ballroom, and with my imperfect knowledge of music had waited each day and night till it came to that dissolute, melancholy melody to which the Eastern girls danced their wicked dance at the World’s Fair; not because I like dissolute and melancholy things, but because I was then able to make sure what tune the band was playing. I had in this way become used to the band, and I missed it poignantly, if one can miss a thing poignantly; which I doubt. Other people seemed to enjoy it, and I like to see people enjoying themselves. Besides, its going brought the dancing to a close, which I enjoyed myself.
I mean that I enjoyed looking at the dancing. This was for the most part, even at the height of our gayety, performed by boys and girls, and very young children, whom I saw led away to bed heart-broken at nine o’clock. One small couple of these I loved very much. I fancied them a little brother and sister, and I delighted in their courage and perseverance in taking the floor for every dance, and through all changes of tune and figure turning solemnly round and round with their arms about each other’s waists. One night there came a bad, bad boy, who posted himself in front of them, and plagued them, jumping up and down before them and hindering their serious gyration. Another evening the little brother was cross and would not dance, and the little sister had to pull him out on the floor and make him.
Sometimes, however, there were even grown people on the floor. Then I chose a very pretty young couple, whom I called my couple, and shared their joy in the waltz without their knowing it. We were by all odds the best dancers and the best looking. We stayed long enough to poison the others with jealousy, but we always went away rather early. When the band left, all this innocent pleasure ended. There was one delirious evening, indeed, when the floor-manager, in default of other music, whistled a waltz, and the young ladies, in default of young men, trod a mad measure with each other to his sibilation. But this was a dying burst of gayety: it did not and could not happen again.
IV
I have to accuse myself of giving no just idea of the constant flowing and dribbling away of the guests, who never ceased departing. The trains that bore them and their baggage brought no others to replace them, and the house gradually emptied itself until not more than a poor three hundred remained. With each defection of a considerable number of guests there followed a reduction of the helping force, who now no longer departed laughing, but with a touch of that loneliness falling upon us all. It must be understood that we were all staying on in our closing hotel by sufferance. It closed officially on the 10th, but the landlord was to remain, and such guests as wished might remain too. This made us eager to linger till the very last moment we were allowed.
Ever since the elevator had ceased to run, there had been a sense of doom in the air. One day we noted a fine reluctance in the elevator; when people crowded it full, it would not go up. Then it began to waver under a few; it made false starts and stops. A placard presently said, “Elevator not running.” Then this was removed, and the elevator ran again for a day or two. At last it ceased to run so finally that no placard was needed. The elevator boys went away; it was as if the elevator were extinct.
I think it was on the same day that the hall clock stopped. The clock was started again by the head porter, but after that the hotel ran on borrowed time. Once it borrowed the time of me, whose watch has not once been right in thirty-three years, a whole generation!
The temperature of the water ceased to be reported even before the end of August; the hours of high and low tide were no longer given. Twice when the reporters came down to see the yacht-race off our beach the bulletin-board was covered with yellow telegrams from the coast where it was really seen, boasting the victory and triumphant defeat of the Defender. This quickened our pulses for the moment; and one night the ladies all put on their best dresses, and assembled for a progressive euchre party in the vast acreage of the parlor. It was a heroic but perhaps desperate act of gayety.
V
One of the most striking natural phenomena of the hotel closing was the arrival of the gulls on our beach, or rather on the waters beyond the beach. I had wondered at their absence all August long, but punctually on the first day of September they came. The weather had not changed for them any more than it had for the guests who fled the place at the same date, but perhaps the wild wheeling and screaming things had a prescience of the autumnal storms, and came with prophetic welcome in their wings.
Otherwise the premonitions of change were within the hotel itself, and they were more impressive whenever they assumed an official character. It was with a real emotion that one day I missed one of the clerks out of the number within the office. He was there, and then he was not there; it was as if he had been lost overboard during his watch. I had scarcely recovered from his loss when another clerk, upon whose distribution of the mail we all used to hang impatient for the equal disappointment of letters or no letters, ceased from his ministrations as if he had all along been a wraith of mist, and had simply melted away. The room clerk, who was a more definite personality to us, went next, with a less supernatural effect; he even said he might come back, but he did not come back, and the office force was reduced to the cashier and a young clerk not perceptible earlier in the season.
At all great hotels the landlord is usually a remote and problematical personage, and so it was with ours until the office force began to thin away around him. Then he became more and more visible, tangible, conversable, and proved a distinctly agreeable addition to our circle, in which the note of an increasing domesticity was struck. I do not know of anything that gave so keen a sense of our resolution into a single family, still large, but insensibly drawn together by the need of a mutual comfort and encouragement, as the invasion of the hotel by a multitude of crickets. Whether it was the departure of the human host which tempted the crickets in-doors, or whether it was some such instinct as brought the gulls to our seas, they were all at once all over the place, piercing its deepening silence with their harsh stridulation. In the chambers they carked so loud and clear that one could hardly sleep for them, and in the glooming reaches and expanses of the corridors, parlors, halls, and dining-room they shrilled in incessant chorus.
VI
After the first moment, when the association with the home hearth and the simple fireside evenings of other days had spent itself, the crickets were rather awful, and personally I would rather have had the band back. But their weird music prompted a closer union of the guests, and our chairs were closer together on the veranda and in the office. We found that we were very charming and interesting people, and I began to wonder if I had not lost more than I could ever make good by not seeking the acquaintance of the seven hundred others who were gone. From day to day, from night to night, our numbers were lessened, but we never spoke of the departures; we instinctively recognized that it would have been bad form; we were like the garrison of a beleaguered city, that lost a few men by famine or foray from time to time, but kept up a heroic pretense that they were as many as ever. Or, we were like a shipwrecked crew clinging to a water-logged vessel, and caught from it now and then by a hungry shark or a hungry wave, or dropping away into the gulf from mere exhaustion.
These figures are rather violent, and present only a subjective effect in the more sensitive spirits. As a matter of fact we lived luxuriously all the time. The time came when we heard that on a certain day the chef was going, but we should not have known he was gone by any difference in the table. It grew rather more attractive; if there were fewer dishes, they were better cooked; one could fancy a touch of personal attention in them, which one could not have fancied when we were seven hundred and fifty at table, and the help who served us were three hundred and fifty.
VII
The help had gradually dwindled away till there were not more than fifty. I had kept my waiter through all; he was a quiet elderly man of formed habits, whom I associated with the idea of permanency in every way, so that I could scarcely believe that we were to be parted. But one morning he was seized by the curious foreboding of departure which seemed really one of its symptoms among his tribe, and he said he did not know but he should be going soon. I said, Oh, I hoped not; and he answered bravely that he hoped not too, but he shook his head, and we both felt that it was best to let a final half-dollar pass between us in expression of a provisional farewell.
That was indeed the last of him, and that day when I came in to lunch I found that I was appointed another table, in another place, with another waiter to take my order. It was a little shock, but I was not unprepared. I had noted the gradual dismantling of the tables until now they stretched long rows of barren surfaces down the tenth of a mile which the dining-room covered, and showed their reverberated labyrinth in the mirrors of the vast sideboards at either end of the hall. The remaining guests were snugly grouped on the seaward side of the room, where our tables commanded the marine views that I had long vainly envied others.
But after the first transition I was changed to another table with another waiter, a tall student from Yale, who joined to a scholarly absence of mind concerning my wants an appreciation of my style of jokes that went far to console me, though I was not sure that it was quite decorous for him to laugh at them when they were addressed to others. I tried to grapple him to me with early and frequent donatives, and he would have been willing enough to stay; but the guests kept going and the helpers were cut off, one by one, till the hour came when we both felt—
“The first slight swerving of the heart
That words are powerless to express,
And leave it still unsaid in part,
Or say it in too great excess.”
The next morning he told me he was going; and as I sauntered down to take the train for a brief flight to New York, I saw him on the platform in citizen’s dress and smoking a cigarette. He was laughing and joking with some of the waiters who still lingered, and bidding them take care of themselves, and promising a like vigilance of his own welfare.
After that there was the short interval of a single meal when I was served by a detached waiter, before I was handed over to the kindly helper who next had charge of me. I clung to him anxiously, for I did not know what day or hour I should lose him; I did not know how soon he might lose me!
In the passing of the head porter there was something deeply dramatic, almost tragic for me. We had become acquaintances, friends, even, I hope, and I had become sensible of the gradual disappearance of his subordinates until they were reduced to what I may call the tail porter in contradistinction to the head porter. Then the head porter said that he had a great mind to be going himself; but when I asked him why, he could not well say, and he agreed with me that it might be better for him to stay. We counted up the remaining families together, and found them twenty, and I convinced him that by the most modest computation here were twenty dollars in fees before him. I thought that I had secured his allegiance to the end, but the very morning before the pensive record of these events I went to look for him in his accustomed place to get my shoes “shined,” and he was not there. The barber was there, looking in a vague disoccupation across the marshes to the northward of the hotel, and I asked him where the porter was. He closed his eyes that he might open his lips more impressively, and breathed the word, “Andato.”
“Gone?” I echoed.
The barber was a beautifully smiling, richly languaged Sicilian, and he responded in an elegant sympathy with my dismay: “Sì; andato. Me ne vado anch’io, fra pochi giorni. M’impazzo quì. Guardi!” (Yes; gone. I am going, I myself, in a few days. I madden here. Look!) With the last word he touched my arm lightly to make me turn, and pointed to the long plank footway, stilted upon the marshes from one to the other side of the railroad curve, and leading to the boat-house on the bay beyond their wide levels. Midway of this I saw a solitary figure, whose lank length and forward droop I could not mistake. The departing porter looked like the last citizen abandoning the ruins of Persepolis, and I—I felt like Persepolis!
VIII
I strive, perhaps in vain, to impart a sense of the slowly creeping desolation, the gradual paresis, that was seizing upon the late full and happy life of our hotel; and I have not strictly observed the order of the successive events. I have not spoken of the swift evanescence of the bell-boys, the first of whom began so jubilantly with me when I came, covenanting to deliver a pitcher of ice-water at my door every morning at ten, and every evening at eight. He was faithful to his trust, and embarrassed me with a superfluity of ice-water, which ten men could hardly have drunk, and lived; but when the economic frame of our hotel began to be shaken, he was early in warning me that he might go at any moment. He was No. 18, but he promised me that No. 10 would see that I was daily and nightly deluged with ice-water, and No. 10 was exemplarily true to me for a day. Then he vanished too, with a grateful sense, I hope, of my folly in bestowing a preliminary half-dollar upon him. But he had made interest for me, I found, with No. 4, and No. 4 deluded me by his fleeting permanency for a week. One morning he told me he was going, and he took a last half-dollar from me with a true compassion for my forlorn case. He was so visibly the last of the bell-boys that he could not assign me to a lower number. For one night the head porter brought my ice-water. Now the night porter brings it, and if he should leave before I do— But I will not anticipate, as the older romancers used to say. I will not look forward, even in the case of the chambermaids, of whom there have been already three changes, with the prospect next week of having in some of the laundry girls to do up the work.
IX
The laundry itself was attacked ten days ago by the general paralysis of the hotel’s functions, so far as the guests’ linen was concerned, which has since had to be sent far inland by the enterprise of one of the bathing-pavilion men, and precariously returned on a variable date. I forget whether the laundry succumbed before or after the closing of the refreshment-room. The hotel sold no strong drinks, and the magnificent facilities of the bar were inadequately employed by a soda fountain, a variety of mineral waters in bottles, a supply of ginger ale, and lemons for lemonade. On an opposite counter were Huyler’s candies, and a choice of chewing-gum; the salubrious pepsin, or the merely innocent peppermint. When the moment for dismantling this festive place arrived, with the unexpectedness of all the other moments of our slow dehabilitation, I was present, and saw the presiding genius packing up his stock of lemons. It gave me a peculiar pang. I had never bought any of them, or wanted any, but I had personally acquainted myself with almost every example of the fruit; I knew those lemons apart, and from often study of them on their shelf, as I stood hardily sipping my ginger ale before the counter, I was almost as intimate with them as with the stock of the news-dealer.
I must say that as to the books his stock was terribly dull. He owned himself that it was dull, and when I asked him where in the world he got together such a lot of stupid books, he could only say that they were such as were appointed to be sold in summer hotels by the news company. The newspapers were rather better: if they were not livelier, they were lighter, or at least more ephemeral. I bought freely of them; the dailies in the mornings, and the weeklies in the afternoons, with their longer leisure. I bought the magazines, which are now often as cheap as the papers, and, unlike the books, are seldom dull all through. Then I formed the intimacy of many illustrated papers which I did not buy, but studied on the strings where they hung stretched high over the counter. In one was the picture of a young lady habited in the mingled colors of Yale and Princeton, with a Cupid throwing a football at her heart. She was a great resource, and could not be stared out of countenance.
Besides, there was on a wire frame over the showcase a platter, of native decoration, representing the whole of Long Island in a railroad map. It was a strangely ugly object, like some sort of sad, dissected fish, but fascinating. The news-dealer and I had often discussed its price, and I had invariably refused it at $1.25, though it was originally put upon the market at $2.50.
After he had packed up his stock, I could hold out no longer. I looked about for him, and found him playing checkers with the ex-keeper of the refreshment-room. I asked him if that hideous platter had now got down to a dollar, and he went and hunted it out of his stock. Upon inspection he seemed to discover that it was still $1.25. In a desperation I paid the money; and almost at the same moment the news-dealer’s place knew him no more, and I remained with my platter for a memorial of one of the weirdest experiences of a life which has not been barren of weirdness.
X
“You ought to have seen an old-time closing of this hotel,” said the clerk one evening toward the last. He had by this time resumed in his own person almost as many functions as the ancient mariner of the Bab Ballad who had eaten the former survivors of the Nancy brig, and claimed to represent them all by virtue of his superior appetite and digestion. Our clerk was now cashier, postmaster, room-clerk, night-clerk, and day-clerk, with moments of bell-boy; he spoke with authority, and we listened with the respect due to his manifold quality.
“The guests,” he continued, “would run down toward the end of August to about two hundred. Then notice would be put up in the office, ‘The hotel will close to-morrow after breakfast.’ The band would be still here, and the bell-boys all on duty; and the night before, all the guests would gather in the office. The band would play, and the talking and laughing would go on all through the evening, like the height of the season, and perhaps there would be a little dancing. Everybody would say good-night, the same as ever, and as soon as breakfast was over in the morning you would see them streaming away to the train, till there wasn’t a soul left in the house but clerks and the help. Then this stair carpet would come down with a run.” He pointed to the wide stairway. “The rugs would come up all through the halls; the dining-room would be cleared before you could look, and all the chairs would be on the tables with their legs in the air. The help would come to the desk in a steady file, and get their money and go. Before noon the cleaners would have the whole house to themselves.”
We owned that it must have been fine, that it was spectacular and impressive, even dramatic, but in our hearts we felt that there was a finer poetic quality in our closing, which was like one of the slow processes of nature, and emulated the pensive close of summer, when the leaves do not all fall in a night, or the flowers wither or the grass droop in a single day, but the trees slowly drop their crowns through many weeks, and the successive frosts lay a chill touch on a blossom here, and a petal there, and the summer passes in a euthanasy which suffers you to say at no given moment, “The summer is dead,” till it has long been dead.
Several aspects of the elementally simple landscape about us seemed peculiarly to sympathize with the quiet passing of the life of the great hotel. There could be no change in the long, irregular, gray sand dunes before it, which dropped themselves in lumpish masses, like the stretched and twisted shape of some vast bisected serpent. The stiff grasses and arid weeds that clothed them thinly, like a growth of dreadful green hair, kept their rigidity and their color with a sort of terrestrial immortality, or rather of an imperishable lifelessness; but over them fluttered a multitude of butterflies, thick as the leaves of autumn, and of much the same ultimate color, like spirits already released to their palingenesis. Flights of others, of a gay white and yellow, like the innocent souls of little ones, haunted the leaf-plant beds before the hotel, or tried to make friends with the harsh little evergreens surviving the plantations of a more courageous period of the enterprise, and stolidly presenting a wood at the borders of the plank walks. To the landward the mighty marshes stretched their innumerable acres to the sunrise and the sunset and the northern lights, one wash of pale yellow-green. Before we left, this began to be splashed as with flame or blood by the reddening of that certain small weed which loves the salt of tide-flooded meadows. The hollyhocklike bells of the marsh-roses drooped and fell, but other and gayer flowers, like ox-eye daisies of taller stem, came to replace them; and still, with the rising tide, the larger and the lesser craft that plied upon the many channels of the meadows blew softly back and forth, and seemed to sail upon their undulant grasses.
In all, the large leisure, the serene lapse of nature toward decay, seemed to express a consciousness of the hotel’s unhurried dissolution, to wait gently upon it, and to stay in a faithful summer loveliness till the last light should be quenched, of all those that had made it flame like a jewel in the forehead of the sea, and that had faded from veranda and balcony to the glitter of the clustered lamps in the office and dining-room.
XI
There came, indeed, about the middle of September, a sudden rude shock of cold, which seemed to express an impatience with the dying hotel, hitherto unknown to the gently varying moods of nature. The wind blew for a day from the northwest, and stiffened its wasted and flaccid frame until one fancied its teeth chattering, as it were; but even then the sea did not share the harsh sentiment of the inland weather. It lay smiling as serenely as ever, and the fleet of fishing sloops and schooners that began to flock before our beach about the end of August rocked and tilted, like things in a dream, as they had for the last fortnight. It was said that one of them dragged her anchor and came ashore in the night, but this happened in the dark, and we knew of it only by hearsay, after she had got off and sailed away. A day later they were all there again, and some flew in close to the beach, and skimmed back and forth, as fearless of its ever-shifting sands as the fish-hawks that sailed the deeps of blue air above them.
The water remained as warm as ever; warmer, they said, who tried it in a bath. I did not. The next to the last time I bathed I had for sole companion a literary clergyman, with whom I walked down to the beach discussing the amusing aspects of the Ninth Crusade, which the Venetians so cannily turned aside from the conquest of the Holy Land to the conquest of Constantinople. The New York Dump was unpleasantly evident in the sea that day; and the last time the Dump had the sea all to itself. It is not agreeable to bathe among old brooms, bottles, decayed fruit, trunk lids, vegetable cans, broken boxes, and the other refuse of the ash-barrel, and I came out almost before the life-guard could get ready to throw me a life-preserver.
He was not the gaudy giant of bronze who posed between the life-lines at the height of the bathing-season, when twoscore spectators on the benches provided for them watched a half-dozen men and women weltering in the surf, or popping up and down after the manner of ladies taking a sea-bath. But I dare say he was quite as efficient, and as I had the good fortune to make his acquaintance, I liked him better. I specially liked his pelting about the bathing-pavilion before he went on duty with me, in his bare legs and feet, and wearing over his bathing-tights a cut-away coat, with a derby hat, to complete his ceremonial costume.
He was not so much in keeping with the inlander’s ideal of bathing-beaches, where summer girls float in the waves or loll upon the sands in the flirtatious poses familiar to the observer of them in the illustrated papers. To guard these daring maids from the dangers of the deep the gaudy bronze giant, with his yachting cap, his black jerseys, his white shoes, and his brown arms folded upon his breast, where they half revealed, half hid his label of Life-Guard, was a far fitter figure. But for the real bathers, I think the guard in the cut-away, derby, and bare feet was much more to be trusted; he was simple, substantial, and unpretentious; and surf-bathing, let me whisper in the innumerable ear of the inland myriads who have never seen it, is not often the gay frolic they have fancied: rather, it is sober, serious, sloppy.
XII
At first the mental frame of us lingerers in the closing hotel was one of heroic self-applause. We wore a brave and smiling front; we said it was so much nicer than when the house was full, than when there were a thousand or even a hundred in it; and we all declared that we were going to stay as long as the landlord would let us. But from time to time there were defections; one table after another was dismantled; face after face vanished; first a white face, then a black face. I do not think we were so smiling after four of the beach trains were taken off; secretly, I think each of us wondered, What if we should stay till the last train was taken off, and we could not get away! What should we do then?
We have become rather more serious; we do not talk trivially when we talk, and we scarcely talk at all; we have traversed each other’s conversable territory so often that there is no longer the hope of discovery in it. We have not only become serious; I have reached the point where I have asked in thought if we are not a little absurd. Why should we stay? What is keeping us? The waves of autumn will soon reach the kitchen fires; and then?
Last night, our waiter said he was going on Monday. This morning the newsboy passed through the office on his way to serve the cottagers with the papers. Asked if he were not going to serve the hotel guests, he went on without answering. It may be because he is an officer of a railroad, whose officers reluctantly answer questions; but perhaps he has come to feel a ghostly quality in us, and regards us as so many simulacra incapable of interest in the affairs of real men.
The gas was not lighted in the ballroom after dinner yesterday; the halls gloomed like illimitable caverns late in the gathered dusk.
Shall I be able to stay till Friday? We shall see.
XIII
A most resplendent Sunday is passing. The cold wind of last night has blown the whole world clean of clouds. One has a sense of the globe swinging in depths of translucent ether, stainless through all the reaches of space.
The sea is blue as the sky. It quivers where the sun slants upon it, and reflects the rays from myriad facets of steel. You cannot look at it long there, but now you begin to understand what Tennyson meant when he called it
“The million-spangled sapphire marriage-ring of the land.”
All day yesterday, which was the great day for the arriving European steamers, they came hurrying in. We counted ten or twelve, each blocking the length of an express train out of the rim of the horizon. To-day there are none: only a few far-off full-sailed ships, and nearer shore the fleet of fishing sloops and schooners, tilting and swaying, and now and then flying in so close to the beach that we can see the men on board, and trailing their small boats through a drift of foamy sea.
There are twenty-three guests in the house now—the house that holds a thousand! Two hunters came down with their guns Friday night, and re-enforced us. After breakfast a gay group gathered on the great midmost stairway of the veranda, and one of the men told the ladies stories and made them laugh. Every one is acquainted now, and speaks freely to every one else. It is rather weird. Should we be so civil if we were normally conditioned?
We have a very good two-o’clock dinner: the cook still remembers it is Sunday. After dinner two of us go down to the bathing-beach, and from the spectators’ benches watch a soft-shell crab which has been bathing, and is now lying in the warm sand where the rising tide has flung him. We wait to see it reach him again, and draw him back, but it does not. It seems to me that he is unhappy in the sun, and I take a stick and tilt him into the sea. I do not know whether he likes that either; but he cannot help himself. He could not help himself in the sun.
XIV
It is Monday morning now, and the world is wrapped in cold gray clouds, which seem to have meant something unpleasant to the fishing craft, for they have all vanished but two of the bolder sail. It rains a little and then stops. A wind, heavy with the salt breath of the sea, rises steadily, and bemoans itself in all the angles and projections of the house. The lanterns of the veranda, which have not been lighted for a week, rattle dolefully in the blast. Under them, the long line of rocking-chairs in which a quarter of a mile of ladies used to sit and gossip together stretches emptily away. The wind pushes against the tall backs of the chairs, and they rock softly to and fro, as if the ghosts of the gossipers invisibly filled them, and still inaudibly babbled on. Where some of the chairs are grouped facing one another, the effect is very creepy. Will they keep up their spectral colloquies all winter?
I escape from this eery sight to my own room, and in the corridor, three uptown blocks away, I behold a small chambermaid balancing herself against a large bucket as she wavers slowly down. It is tragic.
The wind rises, and by mid-afternoon blows half a gale. The sea froths and roars and tumbles on the beach, and far out the serried breakers toss their white-caps against the sky-line, like so many cooks abandoning the hotel kitchen.
About three o’clock, the life-guard of the bathing-beach, having cast his derby and cut-away, appears with three other men in tights, and pulls in the life-lines and the buoys. Now the Dump will have the ocean for its own.
A stranded boat which lies on the beach to the northward came ashore in the gale last night from some of the fishermen. It is in good condition, and if the trains should stop running before noon to-morrow we can be taken off in it. Eighteen of our number went away this morning; and there are now but four of us left. We could easily get away in that boat.
XV
The wind rose till nightfall, and then its passion broke in tears. A tempestuous night threatened; but the weather changed its mind as swiftly as a woman, and the day dawned as sweetly and softly this morning as a day of young June. The sea is again a shining level, veiled in a tender mist. Out of this the fishing sail come stealing silently one after another till again a fleet of them is tilting and swaying in front of the hotel. One large, goblin sail, which remained throughout the threats of the weather, looks like the picture of the goblin in the Bab Ballad which tries to frighten the image before the tobacconist’s shop.
The gang of Italians who have toiled for three months to hide the infamies of the Dump, burying them in the sand as fast as the sea cast them ashore, are taking up the plank walks to the bathing-beach. The season is over. The barrel, which formed the outermost buoy, swings monumentally (if monuments can swing) at anchor among the breakers.
At the station the railroad people have become unnaturally amiable. They call me by name; they take a personal interest in getting off my telegrams and express packages. In one of my visits to them, I meet the life-guard in full citizen’s dress, with even shoes on. He salutes me, but I have to look twice before I know him.
XVI
A generous contention has arisen between ourselves and the other remaining family as to which shall be last to leave the hotel. They go on the 10.25, and we have outstayed them! We are the last guests in the house. The landlord’s Italian greyhound seems instinctively to feel our pathetic distinction. He rushes upon me from far down the veranda, and fawns upon me.
The cook and a last helper of some unknown function carry our trunks to the station. But it has now suddenly become a question whether we shall go on the 12.20 or wait for the 5.20. It depends finally upon our getting a last lunch at the restaurant of the bathing-beach. We ask, limiting our demands to a clam chowder. We are answered that there are still clams, but the man who knows how to make chowder is gone. The restaurant family are going to lunch upon a ham bone, which is now being scraped for them. We refuse to share it with many thanks, and decide to go on the 12.20.
I have paid my last bill.
On the 10th of August a pomp of liveried menials met me as I alighted from the train, and contended for the honor and profit of carrying my umbrella into the hotel.
On the 17th of September I myself carry a heavy satchel in each hand out through the echoing corridors down the wide veranda stairs to the train, unattended by a single fee-taker.
The hotel is closed.