Last Days in a Dutch Hotel | Page 7

his dining-room, as I
know from often disturbing him at his meals there. I have no fear of the
waiters either, or of the little errand-boys who wear suits of sailor blue,
and touch their foreheads when they bring you your letters like so many
ancient sea-dogs. I do not know why the elevator-boy prefers a suit of
snuff-color; but I know that he will salute us as we step out of his
elevator for the last time as unfalteringly as if we had just arrived at the
beginning of the summer.

IV
It is our last day in the hotel at Scheveningen, and I will try to recall in
their pathetic order the events of the final week.
Nothing has been stranger throughout than the fluctuation of the guests.
At times they have dwindled to so small a number that one must reckon
chiefly upon their quality for consolation; at other times they swelled to
such a tide as to overflow the table, long or short, at dinner, and eddy
round a second board beside it. There have been nights when I have
walked down the long corridor to my seaward room through a harking
solitude of empty chambers; there have been mornings when I have
come out to breakfast past door-mats cheerful with boots of both sexes,
and door- post hooks where dangling coats and trousers peopled the
place with a lively if a somewhat flaccid semblance of human presence.
The worst was that, when some one went, we lost a friend, and when
some one came we only won a stranger.
Among the first to go were the kindly English folk whose acquaintance
we made across the table the first night, and who took with them so
large a share of our facile affections that we quite forgot the ancestral

enmities, and grieved for them as much as if they had been Americans.
There have been, in fact, no Americans here but ourselves, and we have
done what we could with the Germans who spoke English. The nicest
of these were a charming family from F-----, father and mother, and son
and daughter, with whom we had a pleasant week of dinners. At the
very first we disagreed with the parents so amicably about Ibsen and
Sudermann that I was almost sorry to have the son take our modern
side of the controversy and declare himself an admirer of those authors
with us. Our frank literary difference established a kindness between us
that was strengthened by our community of English, and when they
went they left us to the sympathy of another German family with whom
we had mainly our humanity in common. They spoke no English, and I
only a German which they must have understood with their hearts
rather than their heads, since it consisted chiefly of good-will. But in
the air of their sweet natures it flourished surprisingly, and sufficed
each day for praise of the weather after it began to be fine, and at
parting for some fond regrets, not unmixed with philosophical
reflections, sadly perplexed in the genders and the order of the verbs:
with me the verb will seldom wait, as it should in German, to the end.
Both of these families, very different in social tradition, I fancied, were
one in the amiability which makes the alien forgive so much militarism
to the German nation, and hope for its final escape from the
drill-sergeant. When they went, we were left for some meals to our own
American tongue, with a brief interval of that English painter and his
wife with whom we spoke, our language as nearly like English as we
could. Then followed a desperate lunch and dinner where an unbroken
forest of German, and a still more impenetrable morass of Dutch,
hemmed us in. But last night it was our joy to be addressed in our own
speech by a lady who spoke it as admirably as our dear friends from
F-----. She was Dutch, and when she found we were Americans she
praised our historian Motley, and told us how his portrait is gratefully
honored with a place in the Queen's palace, The House in the Woods,
near Scheveningen.

V.
She had come up from her place in the country, four hours away, for
the last of the concerts here, which have been given throughout the

summer by the best orchestra in Europe, and which have been thronged
every afternoon and evening by people from The Hague.
One honored day this week even the Queen and the Queen Mother
came down to the concert, and gave us incomparably the greatest event
of our waning season. I had noticed all the morning a floral
perturbation about the main entrance of the hotel, which settled into the
form of