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!