THE CLOSING OF THE HOTEL.
It scarcely began before the last of August, when the guests ebbed away by floods, in every train. The end of the season was purely conventional. One day the almanac said it was August, and the hotel was full; another day the almanac said it was September, and the vast caravansary was instantly touched with depletion, and within a week it hung loose upon its inmates like the raiment upon the frame of a man who has been Banting. There was no change in the weather; that remained as summerlike as ever, and grew more and more divinely beautiful. The conditions continued the same, only more agreeable; the service was still abundant and perfect; the table was of an unimpaired variety; there was no such sudden revival of business or pleasure in the city that people should abandon the leisure of the sea-shore; the ocean smiled as serenely, the breakers crashed as lyrically along the beach; the country, for those who were to prolong their outing, would be dry and dusty. But a certain fiction of the calendar had reported itself in the human consciousness; and as men are the prey of superstition and emotion, the population of the huge hostelry yielded by a single impulse to the pressure of the pretence that it was September.
I.
Huge, I have called the hostelry, and I do not know that I can add to the effect of size which I wish to impart by saying that it is of a veritably American immensity. It stretches along the sea like the shore of a continent; and when I walked from one end of its seaward veranda to the other, I felt as if I were going from Castine in Maine to St. Augustine in Florida. Really, it is only the fifth of a mile in length, but I have ordinarily lived in houses so much shorter that my fancy takes wing when I think of it, and will not brook a briefer flight. In like manner, when I speak of its thousand dwellers as a population, I am perhaps giving way to an effect of habitually sharing my roof with four or five persons.
They were nearly a thousand when I came, but the place was so spacious that I had large areas of the piazza to myself whenever I liked, and I was often a solitary wayfarer up and down the halls that projected themselves in dimmer and dimmer perspective between the suites of rooms on the right hand and on the left. It was the dining-room, with its forest of pine posts, its labyrinth of tables, its army of black waiters, and its only a little larger army of guests, which gave that impression of a dense overpeopling, such as one could not feel in greater degree even in the tenement quarters of the East Side. This was peculiarly the case on a Sunday, when the guests had guests; and in the tramp of the black forces, the clash of crockery, and the harsh jangle of the cutlery, mingled with the dull, subdued sound of the guttling and guzzling, there was something like the noise of a legion stirring in its harness, and hailing Cæsar with the warlike devotion inspired by a munificent donative.
In the early morning there was a hardly less powerfull impression of numbers, when the crying children, the half-hushed quarrelling of some husbands and wives, and the loud and loving adieux of others parting for the day, burst the frail partitions of their rooms, and mixed in the corridors with the rush of the porters’ trunk-bearing trucks, pushed over the long carpeted stretches with the voluble clatter of so many lawn-mowers, the flight of the call-boys’ feet, the fierce clangor of the chambermaids’ bells, and the strongly brogued controversies and gossip of the chambermaids themselves. No doubt all these effects were exaggerated by the senses just unfolding themselves in the waking consciousness, and taking angry note of the disturbing influences without. But the multitude sheltered by a single roof was nevertheless very great: at the height of the season, the guests and the servants, the drones and the workers, were some fifteen hundred together.
II.
All at once, as I say, a great part of the multitude vanished. All at once, on the verandas, and in the wide office swept with yet cooler currents from the sweet-breathed sea, I was sensible of a sudden decimation. I cannot fix the date with precision, but one night at about half-past eight the great moony electrics which swung in space high over the floors of the office, the ball-room, and the dining-room paled their effectual fires, which they never afterward relumed, and left us to the batlike waverings of the naphtha gas. I remember the sinking of the heart with which my senses took cognizance of the fact. No one spoke, or audibly noted it; the talking groups talked on in fallen tones; the people who were reading books or papers drew them a little nearer, or put them a little farther; those who were writing letters at the long tables in the reading-room silently adjusted their vision to the obscurity. It was like the effect of some august natural catastrophe; the general disposition was to ignore the fact, as we shall perhaps try to ignore the fact that the world has begun to burn up when it begins to burn, and pretend that it is merely a fire over in Hoboken or Long Island City that the department will soon have under control.