Last Days in a Dutch Hotel | Page 4

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