Last Days in a Dutch Hotel | Page 5

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