“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.