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.