Delphi Complete Works of William Dean Howells

by William Dean Howells

  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 146 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 pretence that they were as many as ever. Or, we were like a shipwrecked crew clinging to a waterlogged 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 sa
y, 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: “Si; andato. Me ne vado anch’ io, fra pochi giorni. M’ impazzo qui. 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 newsdealer.

  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 newsdealer and I had often discussed its price, and I had invariably refused it at one dollar and twenty-five cents, though it was originally put upon the market at two dollars and fifty cents.

  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 one dollar and twenty-five cents. In a desperation I paid the money; and almost at the same moment the newsdealer’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 d
ead,” 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 hollyhock-like 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 he 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.