Last Days in a Dutch Hotel | Page 8

banks of autumnal bloom on either side of the specially
carpeted stairs, and put forth on the roof of the arcade in a crown, much
bigger round than a barrel, of orange-colored asters, in honor of the
Queen's ancestral house of Orange. Flags of blue, white, and red
fluttered nervously about in the breeze from the sea, and imparted to us
an agreeable anxiety not to miss seeing the Queens, as the Dutch
succinctly call their sovereign and her parent; and at three o'clock we
saw them drive up to the hotel. Certain officials in civil dress stood at
the door of the concert-room to usher the Queens in, and a bareheaded,
bald-headed dignity of military figure backed up the stairs before them.
I would not rashly commit myself to particulars concerning their dress,
but I am sure that the elder Queen wore black, and the younger white.
The mother has one of the best and wisest faces I have seen any woman
wear (and most of the good, wise faces in this imperfectly balanced
world are women's) and the daughter one of the sweetest and prettiest.
Pretty is the word for her face, and it showed pink through her blond
veil, as she smiled and bowed right and left; her features are small and
fine, and she is not above the middle height.
As soon as she had passed into the concert-room, we who had waited to
see her go in ran round to another door and joined the two or three
thousand people who were standing to receive the Queens. These had
already mounted to the royal box, and they stood there while the
orchestra played one of the Dutch national airs. (One air is not enough
for the Dutch; they must have two.) Then the mother faded somewhere
into the background, and the daughter sat alone in the front, on a gilt
throne, with a gilt crown at top, and a very uncomfortable carved
Gothic back. She looked so young, so gentle, and so good that the
rudest Republican could not have helped wishing her well out of a
position so essentially and irreparably false as a hereditary sovereign's.
One forgot in the presence of her innocent seventeen years that most of
the ruling princes of the world had left it the worse for their having

been in it; at moments one forgot her altogether as a princess, and saw
her only as a charming young girl, who had to sit up rather stiffly.
At the end of the programme the Queens rose and walked slowly out,
while the orchestra played the other national air.

VI.
I call them the Queens, because the Dutch do; and I like Holland so
much that I should hate to differ with the Dutch in anything. But, as a
matter of fact, they are neither of them quite Queens; the mother is the
regent and the daughter will not be crowned till next year.
But, such as they are, they imparted a supreme emotion to our dying
season, and thrilled the hotel with a fulness of summer life. Since they
went, the season faintly pulses and respires, so that one can just say that
it is still alive. Last Sunday was fine, and great crowds came down
from The Hague to the concert, and spread out on the seaward terrace
of the hotel, around the little tables which I fancied that the waiters had
each morning wiped dry of the dew, from a mere Dutch desire of
cleaning something. The hooded chairs covered the beach; the children
played in the edges of the surf and delved in the sand; the lovers
wandered up into the hollows of the dunes.
There was only the human life, however. I have looked in vain for the
crabs, big and little, that swarm on the Long Island shore, and there are
hardly any gulls, even; perhaps because there are no crabs for them to
eat, if they eat crabs; I never saw gulls doing it, but they must eat
something. Dogs there are, of course, wherever there are people; but
they are part of the human life. Dutch dogs are in fact very human; and
one I saw yesterday behaved quite as badly as a bad boy, with respect
to his muzzle. He did not like his muzzle, and by dint of turning
somersaults in the sand he got it off, and went frolicking to his master
in triumph to show him what he had done.

VII.
It is now the last day, and the desolation is thickening upon our hotel.
This morning the door-posts up and down my corridor showed not a
single pair of trousers; not a pair of boots flattered the lonely doormats.
In the lower hall I found the tables