Impressions and experiences

by William Dean Howells

The temperature of the water ceased to be reported even before the end of August; the hours of high and low tide were no longer given. Twice when the reporters came down to see the yacht-race off our beach the bulletin-board was covered with yellow telegrams from the coast where it was really seen, boasting the victory and triumphant defeat of the Defender. This quickened our pulses for the moment; and one night the ladies all put on their best dresses, and assembled for a progressive euchre party in the vast acreage of the parlor. It was a heroic but perhaps desperate act of gayety.

V.

One of the most striking natural phenomena of the hotel closing was the arrival of the gulls on our beach, or rather on the waters beyond the beach. I had wondered at their absence all August long, but punctually on the first day of September they came. The weather had not changed for them any more than it had for the guests who fled the place at the same date, but perhaps the wild wheeling and screaming things had a prescience of the autumnal storms, and came with prophetic welcome in their wings.

Otherwise the premonitions of change were within the hotel itself, and they were more impressive whenever they assumed an official character. It was with a real emotion that one day I missed one of the clerks out of the number within the office. He was there, and then he was not there; it was as if he had been lost overboard during his watch. I had scarcely recovered from his loss when another clerk, upon whose distribution of the mail we all used to hang impatient for the equal disappointment of letters or no letters, ceased from his ministrations as if he had all along been a wraith of mist, and had simply melted away. The room clerk, who was a more definite personality to us, went next, with a less supernatural effect; he even said he might come back, but he did not come back, and the office force was reduced to the cashier and a young clerk not perceptible earlier in the season.

At all great hotels the landlord is usually a remote and problematical personage, and so it was with ours until the office force began to thin away around him. Then he became more and more visible, tangible, conversable, and proved a distinctly agreeable addition to our circle, in which the note of an increasing domesticity was struck. I do not know of anything that gave so keen a sense of our resolution into a single family, still large, but insensibly drawn together by the need of a mutual comfort and encouragement, as the invasion of the hotel by a multitude of crickets. Whether it was the departure of the human host which tempted the crickets in-doors, or whether it was some such instinct as brought the gulls to our seas, they were all at once all over the place, piercing its deepening silence with their harsh stridulation. In the chambers they carked so loud and clear that one could hardly sleep for them, and in the glooming reaches and expanses of the corridors, parlors, halls, and dining-room they shrilled in incessant chorus.

VI.

After the first moment, when the association with the home hearth and the simple fireside evenings of other days had spent itself, the crickets were rather awful, and personally I would rather have had the band back. But their weird music prompted a closer union of the guests, and our chairs were closer together on the veranda and in the office. We found that we were very charming and interesting people, and I began to wonder if I had not lost more than I could ever make good by not seeking the acquaintance of the seven hundred others who were gone. From day to day, from night to night, our numbers were lessened, but we never spoke of the departures; we instinctively recognized that it would have been bad form; we were like the garrison of a beleaguered city, that lost a few men by famine or foray from time to time, but kept up a heroic pretense that they were as many as ever. Or, we were like a shipwrecked crew clinging to a water-logged vessel, and caught from it now and then by a hungry shark or a hungry wave, or dropping away into the gulf from mere exhaustion.

These figures are rather violent, and present only a subjective effect in the more sensitive spirits. As a matter of fact we lived luxuriously all the time. The time came when we heard that on a certain day the chef was going, but we should not have known he was gone by any difference in the table. It grew rather more attractive; if there were fewer dishes, they were better cooked; one could fancy a touch of personal attention in them, which one could not have fancied when we were seven hundred and fifty at table, and the help who served us were three hundred and fifty.

VII.

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.