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+***The Project Gutenberg Etext of Last Days in a Dutch Hotel***
+#32 in our series by William Dean Howells
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+Title: Last Days in a Dutch Hotel
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+Author: William Dean Howells
+
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+
+LITERATURE AND LIFE--Last Days in a Dutch Hotel
+
+by William Dean Howells
+
+
+
+
+LAST DAYS IN A DUTCH HOTEL
+
+
+When we said that we were going to Scheveningen, in the middle of
+September, the portier of the hotel at The Hague was sure we should be
+very cold, perhaps because we had suffered so much in his house already;
+and he was right, for the wind blew with a Dutch tenacity of purpose for
+a whole week, so that the guests thinly peopling the vast hostelry seemed
+to rustle through its chilly halls and corridors like so many autumn
+leaves.  We were but a poor hundred at most where five hundred would not
+have been a crowd; and, when we sat down at the long tables d'hote in the
+great dining-room, we had to warm our hands with our plates before we
+could hold our spoons.  From time to time the weather varied, as it does
+in Europe (American weather is of an exemplary constancy in comparison),
+and three or four times a day it rained, and three or four times it
+cleared; but through all the wind blew cold and colder.  We were
+promised, however, that the hotel would not close till October, and we
+made shift, with a warm chimney in one room and three gas-burners in
+another, if not to keep warm quite, yet certainly to get used to the
+cold.
+
+
+
+
+I.
+
+In the mean time the sea-bathing went resolutely on with all its forms.
+Every morning the bathing machines were drawn down to the beach from the
+esplanade, where they were secured against the gale every night; and
+every day a half-dozen hardy invalids braved the rigors of wind and wave.
+At the discreet distance which one ought always to keep one could not
+always be sure whether these bold bathers were mermen or mermaids; for
+the sea costume of both sexes is the same here, as regards an absence of
+skirts and a presence of what are, after the first plunge, effectively
+tights.  The first time I walked down to the beach I was puzzled to make
+out some object rolling about in the low surf, which looked like a
+barrel, and which two bathing-machine men were watching with apparently
+the purpose of fishing it out.  Suddenly this object reared itself from
+the surf and floundered towards the steps of a machine; then I saw that
+it was evidently not a barrel, but a lady, and after that I never dared
+carry my researches so far.  I suppose that the bathing-tights are more
+becoming in some cases than in others; but I hold to a modest preference
+for skirts, however brief, in the sea-gear of ladies.  Without them there
+may sometimes be the effect of beauty, and sometimes the effect of
+barrel.
+
+For the convenience and safety of the bathers there were, even in the
+last half of September, some twenty machines, and half as many bath-men
+and bath-women, who waded into the water and watched that the bathers
+came to no harm, instead of a solitary lifeguard showing his statuesque
+shape as he paced the shore beside the lifelines, or cynically rocked in
+his boat beyond the breakers, as the custom is on Long Island.  Here
+there is no need of life-lines, and, unless one held his head resolutely
+under water, I do not see how he could drown within quarter of a mile of
+the shore.  Perhaps it is to prevent suicide that the bathmen are so
+plentifully provided.
+
+They are a provision of the hotel, I believe, which does not relax itself
+in any essential towards its guests as they grow fewer.  It seems, on the
+contrary, to use them with a more tender care, and to console them as it
+may for the inevitable parting near at hand.  Now, within three or four
+days of the end, the kitchen is as scrupulously and vigilantly perfect as
+it could be in the height of the season; and our dwindling numbers sit
+down every night to a dinner that we could not get for much more love or
+vastly more money in the month of August, at any shore hotel in America.
+It is true that there are certain changes going on, but they are going on
+delicately, almost silently.  A strip of carpeting has come up from along
+our corridor, but we hardly miss it from the matting which remains.
+Through the open doors of vacant chambers we can see that beds are coming
+down, and the dismantling extends into the halls at places.  Certain
+decorative carved chairs which repeated themselves outside the doors have
+ceased to be there; but the pictures still hang on the walls, and within
+our own rooms everything is as conscientious as in midsummer.  The
+service is instant, and, if there is some change in it, the change is not
+for the worse.  Yesterday our waiter bade me good-bye, and when I said I
+was sorry he was going he alleged a boil on his cheek in excuse; he would
+not allow that his going had anything to do with the closing of the
+hotel, and he was promptly replaced by another who speaks excellent
+English.  Now that the first is gone, I may own that he seemed not to
+speak any foreign language long, but, when cornered in English, took
+refuge in French, and then fled from pursuit in that to German, and
+brought up in final Dutch, where he was practically inaccessible.
+
+The elevator runs regularly, if not rapidly; the papers arrive
+unfailingly in the reading-room, including a solitary London Times, which
+even I do not read, perhaps because I have no English-reading rival to
+contend for it with.  Till yesterday, an English artist sometimes got it;
+but he then instantly offered it to me; and I had to refuse it because I
+would not be outdone in politeness.  Now even he is gone, and on all
+sides I find myself in an unbroken circle of Dutch and German, where no
+one would dispute the Times with me if he could.
+
+Every night the corridors are fully lighted, and some mornings swept,
+while the washing that goes on all over Holland, night and morning, does
+not always spare our unfrequented halls and stairs.  I note these little
+facts, for the contrast with those of an American hotel which we once
+assisted in closing, and where the elevator stopped two weeks before we
+left, and we fell from electricity to naphtha-gas, and even this died out
+before us except at long intervals in the passages; while there were
+lightning changes in the service, and a final failure of it till we had
+to go down and get our own ice-water of the lingering room-clerk, after
+the last bell-boy had winked out.
+
+
+
+
+II.
+
+But in Europe everything is permanent, and in America everything is
+provisional.  This is the great distinction which, if always kept in
+mind, will save a great deal of idle astonishment.  It is in nothing more
+apparent than in the preparation here at Scheveningen for centuries of
+summer visitors, while at our Long Island hotel there was a losing bet on
+a scant generation of them.  When it seemed likely that it might be a
+winning bet the sand was planked there in front of the hotel to the sea
+with spruce boards.  It was very handsomely planked, but it was never
+afterwards touched, apparently, for any manner of repairs.  Here, for
+half a mile the dune on which the hotel stands is shored up with massive
+masonry, and bricked for carriages, and tiled for foot-passengers; and it
+is all kept as clean as if wheel or foot had never passed over it.  I am
+sure that there is not a broken brick or a broken tile in the whole
+length or breadth of it.  But the hotel here is not a bet; it is a
+business.  It has come to stay; and on Long Island it had come to see how
+it would like it.
+
+Beyond the walk and drive, however, the dunes are left to the winds, and
+to the vegetation with which the Dutch planting clothes them against the
+winds.  First a coarse grass or rush is sown; then a finer herbage comes;
+then a tough brushwood, with flowers and blackberry-vines; so that while
+the seaward slopes of the dunes are somewhat patched and tattered, the
+landward side and all the pleasant hollows between are fairly held
+against such gales as on Long Island blow the lower dunes hither and yon.
+The sheep graze in the valleys at some points; in many a little pocket of
+the dunes I found a potato-patch of about the bigness of a city lot, and
+on week-days I saw wooden-shod men slowly, slowly gathering in the crop.
+On Sundays I saw the pleasant nooks and corners of these sandy hillocks
+devoted, as the dunes of Long Island were, to whispering lovers, who are
+here as freely and fearlessly affectionate as at home.  Rocking there is
+not, and cannot be, in the nature of things, as there used to be at Mount
+Desert; but what is called Twoing at York Harbor is perfectly
+practicable.
+
+It is practicable not only in the nooks and corners of the dunes, but on
+discreeter terms in those hooded willow chairs, so characteristic of the
+Dutch sea-side.  These, if faced in pairs towards each other, must be as
+favorable to the exchange of vows as of opinions, and if the crowd is
+ever very great, perhaps one chair could be made to hold two persons.
+It was distinctly a pang, the other day, to see men carrying them up from
+the beach, and putting them away to hibernate in the basement of the
+hotel.  Not all, but most of them, were taken; though I dare say that on
+fine days throughout October they will go trooping back to the sands on
+the heads of the same men, like a procession of monstrous, two-legged
+crabs.  Such a day was last Sunday, and then the beach offered a lively
+image of its summer gayety.  It was dotted with hundreds of hooded
+chairs, which foregathered in gossiping groups or confidential couples;
+and as the sun shone quite warm the flaps of the little tents next the
+dunes were let down against it, and ladies in summer white saved
+themselves from sunstroke in their shelter.  The wooden booths for the
+sale of candies and mineral waters, and beer and sandwiches, were flushed
+with a sudden prosperity, so that when I went to buy my pound of grapes
+from the good woman who understands my Dutch, I dreaded an indifference
+in her which by no means appeared.  She welcomed me as warmly as if I had
+been her sole customer, and did not put up the price on me; perhaps
+because it was already so very high that her imagination could not rise
+above it.
+
+The hotel showed the same admirable constancy.  The restaurant was
+thronged with new-comers, who spread out even over the many-tabled
+esplanade before it; but it was in no wise demoralized.  That night we
+sat down in multiplied numbers to a table d'hote of serenely unconscious
+perfection; and we permanent guests--alas! we are now becoming transient,
+too--were used with unfaltering recognition of our superior worth.  We
+shared the respect which, all over Europe, attaches to establishment, and
+which sometimes makes us poor Americans wish for a hereditary nobility,
+so that we could all mirror our ancestral value in the deference of our
+inferiors.  Where we should get our inferiors is another thing, but I
+suppose we could import them for the purpose, if the duties were not too
+great under our tariff.
+
+We have not yet imported the idea of a European hotel in any respect,
+though we long ago imported what we call the European plan.  No travelled
+American knows it in the extortionate prices of rooms when he gets home,
+or the preposterous charges of our restaurants, where one portion of
+roast beef swimming in a lake of lukewarm juice costs as much as a
+diversified and delicate dinner in Germany or Holland.  But even if there
+were any proportion in these things the European hotel will not be with
+us till we have the European portier, who is its spring and inspiration.
+He must not, dear home-keeping reader, be at all imagined in the moral or
+material figure of our hotel porter, who appears always in his shirt-
+sleeves, and speaks with the accent of Cork or of Congo.  The European
+portier wears a uniform, I do not know why, and a gold-banded cap, and he
+inhabits a little office at the entrance of the hotel.  He speaks eight
+or ten languages, up to certain limit, rather better than people born to
+them, and his presence commands an instant reverence softening to
+affection under his universal helpfulness.  There is nothing he cannot
+tell you, cannot do for you; and you may trust yourself implicitly to
+him.  He has the priceless gift of making each nationality, each
+personality, believe that he is devoted to its service alone.  He turns
+lightly from one language to another, as if he had each under his tongue,
+and he answers simultaneously a fussy French woman, an angry English
+tourist, a stiff Prussian major, and a thin-voiced American girl in
+behalf of a timorous mother, and he never mixes the replies.  He is an
+inexhaustible bottle of dialects; but this is the least of his merits, of
+his miracles.
+
+Our portier here is a tall, slim Dutchman (most Dutchmen are tall and
+slim), and in spite of the waning season he treats me as if I were
+multitude, while at the same time he uses me with the distinction due the
+last of his guests.  Twenty times in as many hours he wishes me good-day,
+putting his hand to his cap for the purpose; and to oblige me he wears
+silver braid instead of gilt on his cap and coat.  I apologized yesterday
+for troubling him so often for stamps, and said that I supposed he was
+much more bothered in the season.
+
+"Between the first of August and the fifteenth," he answered, "you cannot
+think.  All that you can do is to say, Yes, No; Yes, No."  And he left me
+to imagine his responsibilities.
+
+I am sure he will hold out to the end, and will smile me a friendly
+farewell from the door of his office, which is also his dining-room, as I
+know from often disturbing him at his meals there.  I have no fear of the
+waiters either, or of the little errand-boys who wear suits of sailor
+blue, and touch their foreheads when they bring you your letters like so
+many ancient sea-dogs.  I do not know why the elevator-boy prefers a suit
+of snuff-color; but I know that he will salute us as we step out of his
+elevator for the last time as unfalteringly as if we had just arrived at
+the beginning of the summer.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+It is our last day in the hotel at Scheveningen, and I will try to recall
+in their pathetic order the events of the final week.
+
+Nothing has been stranger throughout than the fluctuation of the guests.
+At times they have dwindled to so small a number that one must reckon
+chiefly upon their quality for consolation; at other times they swelled
+to such a tide as to overflow the table, long or short, at dinner, and
+eddy round a second board beside it.  There have been nights when I have
+walked down the long corridor to my seaward room through a harking
+solitude of empty chambers; there have been mornings when I have come out
+to breakfast past door-mats cheerful with boots of both sexes, and door-
+post hooks where dangling coats and trousers peopled the place with a
+lively if a somewhat flaccid semblance of human presence.  The worst was
+that, when some one went, we lost a friend, and when some one came we
+only won a stranger.
+
+Among the first to go were the kindly English folk whose acquaintance we
+made across the table the first night, and who took with them so large a
+share of our facile affections that we quite forgot the ancestral
+enmities, and grieved for them as much as if they had been Americans.
+There have been, in fact, no Americans here but ourselves, and we have
+done what we could with the Germans who spoke English.  The nicest of
+these were a charming family from F-----, father and mother, and son and
+daughter, with whom we had a pleasant week of dinners.  At the very first
+we disagreed with the parents so amicably about Ibsen and Sudermann that
+I was almost sorry to have the son take our modern side of the
+controversy and declare himself an admirer of those authors with us.
+Our frank literary difference established a kindness between us that was
+strengthened by our community of English, and when they went they left us
+to the sympathy of another German family with whom we had mainly our
+humanity in common.  They spoke no English, and I only a German which
+they must have understood with their hearts rather than their heads,
+since it consisted chiefly of good-will.  But in the air of their sweet
+natures it flourished surprisingly, and sufficed each day for praise of
+the weather after it began to be fine, and at parting for some fond
+regrets, not unmixed with philosophical reflections, sadly perplexed in
+the genders and the order of the verbs: with me the verb will seldom
+wait, as it should in German, to the end.  Both of these families, very
+different in social tradition, I fancied, were one in the amiability
+which makes the alien forgive so much militarism to the German nation,
+and hope for its final escape from the drill-sergeant.  When they went,
+we were left for some meals to our own American tongue, with a brief
+interval of that English painter and his wife with whom we spoke, our
+language as nearly like English as we could.  Then followed a desperate
+lunch and dinner where an unbroken forest of German, and a still more
+impenetrable morass of Dutch, hemmed us in.  But last night it was our
+joy to be addressed in our own speech by a lady who spoke it as admirably
+as our dear friends from F-----.  She was Dutch, and when she found we
+were Americans she praised our historian Motley, and told us how his
+portrait is gratefully honored with a place in the Queen's palace, The
+House in the Woods, near Scheveningen.
+
+
+
+
+V.
+
+She had come up from her place in the country, four hours away, for the
+last of the concerts here, which have been given throughout the summer by
+the best orchestra in Europe, and which have been thronged every
+afternoon and evening by people from The Hague.
+
+One honored day this week even the Queen and the Queen Mother came down
+to the concert, and gave us incomparably the greatest event of our waning
+season.  I had noticed all the morning a floral perturbation about the
+main entrance of the hotel, which settled into the form of banks of
+autumnal bloom on either side of the specially carpeted stairs, and put
+forth on the roof of the arcade in a crown, much bigger round than a
+barrel, of orange-colored asters, in honor of the Queen's ancestral house
+of Orange.  Flags of blue, white, and red fluttered nervously about in
+the breeze from the sea, and imparted to us an agreeable anxiety not to
+miss seeing the Queens, as the Dutch succinctly call their sovereign and
+her parent; and at three o'clock we saw them drive up to the hotel.
+Certain officials in civil dress stood at the door of the concert-room to
+usher the Queens in, and a bareheaded, bald-headed dignity of military
+figure backed up the stairs before them.  I would not rashly commit
+myself to particulars concerning their dress, but I am sure that the
+elder Queen wore black, and the younger white.  The mother has one of the
+best and wisest faces I have seen any woman wear (and most of the good,
+wise faces in this imperfectly balanced world are women's) and the
+daughter one of the sweetest and prettiest.  Pretty is the word for her
+face, and it showed pink through her blond veil, as she smiled and bowed
+right and left; her features are small and fine, and she is not above the
+middle height.
+
+As soon as she had passed into the concert-room, we who had waited to see
+her go in ran round to another door and joined the two or three thousand
+people who were standing to receive the Queens.  These had already
+mounted to the royal box, and they stood there while the orchestra played
+one of the Dutch national airs.  (One air is not enough for the Dutch;
+they must have two.)  Then the mother faded somewhere into the
+background, and the daughter sat alone in the front, on a gilt throne,
+with a gilt crown at top, and a very uncomfortable carved Gothic back.
+She looked so young, so gentle, and so good that the rudest Republican
+could not have helped wishing her well out of a position so essentially
+and irreparably false as a hereditary sovereign's.  One forgot in the
+presence of her innocent seventeen years that most of the ruling princes
+of the world had left it the worse for their having been in it; at
+moments one forgot her altogether as a princess, and saw her only as a
+charming young girl, who had to sit up rather stiffly.
+
+At the end of the programme the Queens rose and walked slowly out, while
+the orchestra played the other national air.
+
+
+
+
+VI.
+
+I call them the Queens, because the Dutch do; and I like Holland so much
+that I should hate to differ with the Dutch in anything.  But, as a
+matter of fact, they are neither of them quite Queens; the mother is the
+regent and the daughter will not be crowned till next year.
+
+But, such as they are, they imparted a supreme emotion to our dying
+season, and thrilled the hotel with a fulness of summer life.  Since they
+went, the season faintly pulses and respires, so that one can just say
+that it is still alive.  Last Sunday was fine, and great crowds came down
+from The Hague to the concert, and spread out on the seaward terrace of
+the hotel, around the little tables which I fancied that the waiters had
+each morning wiped dry of the dew, from a mere Dutch desire of cleaning
+something.  The hooded chairs covered the beach; the children played in
+the edges of the surf and delved in the sand; the lovers wandered up into
+the hollows of the dunes.
+
+There was only the human life, however.  I have looked in vain for the
+crabs, big and little, that swarm on the Long Island shore, and there are
+hardly any gulls, even; perhaps because there are no crabs for them to
+eat, if they eat crabs; I never saw gulls doing it, but they must eat
+something.  Dogs there are, of course, wherever there are people; but
+they are part of the human life.  Dutch dogs are in fact very human; and
+one I saw yesterday behaved quite as badly as a bad boy, with respect to
+his muzzle.  He did not like his muzzle, and by dint of turning
+somersaults in the sand he got it off, and went frolicking to his master
+in triumph to show him what he had done.
+
+
+
+
+VII.
+
+It is now the last day, and the desolation is thickening upon our hotel.
+This morning the door-posts up and down my corridor showed not a single
+pair of trousers; not a pair of boots flattered the lonely doormats.  In
+the lower hall I found the tables of the great dining-room assembled, and
+the chairs inverted on them with their legs in the air; but decently,
+decorously, not with the reckless abandon displayed by the chairs in our
+Long Island hotel for weeks before it closed.  In the smaller dining-room
+the table was set for lunch as if we were to go on dining there forever;
+in the breakfast -room the service and the provision were as perfect as
+ever.  The coffee was good, the bread delicious, the butter of an
+unfaltering sweetness; and the glaze of wear on the polished dress-coats
+of the waiters as respectable as it could have been on the first day of
+the season.  All was correct, and if of a funereal correctness to me, I
+am sure this effect was purely subjective.
+
+The little bell-boys in sailor suits (perhaps they ought to be spelled
+bell-buoys) clustered about the elevator-boy like so many Roman sentinels
+at their posts; the elevator-boy and his elevator were ready to take us
+up or down at any moment.
+
+The portier and I ignored together the hour of parting, which we had
+definitely ascertained and agreed upon, and we exchanged some compliments
+to the weather, which is now settled, as if we expected to enjoy it long
+together.  I rather dread going in to lunch, however, for I fear the
+empty places.
+
+
+
+
+VIII.
+
+All is over; we are off.  The lunch was an heroic effort of the hotel to
+hide the fact of our separation.  It was perfect, unless the boiled beef
+was a confession of human weakness; but even this boiled beef was
+exquisite, and the horseradish that went with it was so mellowed by art
+that it checked rather than provoked the parting tear.  The table d'hote
+had reserved a final surprise for us; and when we sat down with the fear
+of nothing but German around us, we heard the sound of our own speech
+from the pleasantest English pair we had yet encountered; and the
+travelling English are pleasant; I will say it, who am said by Sir Walter
+Besant to be the only American who hates their nation.  It was really an
+added pang to go, on their account, but the carriage was waiting at the
+door; the 'domestique' had already carried our baggage to the steam-tram
+station; the kindly menial train formed around us for an ultimate
+'douceur', and we were off, after the 'portier' had shut us into our
+vehicle and touched his oft-touched cap for the last time, while the
+hotel facade dissembled its grief by architecturally smiling in the soft
+Dutch sun.
+
+I liked this manner of leaving better than carrying part of my own
+baggage to the train, as I had to do on Long Island, though that, too,
+had its charm; the charm of the whole fresh, pungent American life, which
+at this distance is so dear.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of this Project Gutenberg Etext of Last Days in a Dutch Hotel,
+by William Dean Howells
+