Battered Caravanserais

THE abandoned farmhouse is one of the most melancholy of objects. With its mute story of long human endeavor frustrated by time, it commands the respect due to tragedy, a tragedy with the wilderness as its back drop, the generations for characters, and a lowering of the curtain through centuries ‘to denote the lapse of time.’

But who has sung the abandoned summer hotel? Here is something much nearer the three unities of classic tragedy. In time, the drama lasted but a day, a morning of fashion and an afternoon of declining fortunes. In action, the story was limited to a dance and a departure. In place, it was always Nowhere. No one ever called it Home; it was spectral even in its brief sojourn among the verbal actualities. And since it was always built, owing to the untamable perversity of mankind, in a situation sure to mock its ‘life’ when it had any, — beside the sea or beneath the mountain, — in its best moments it was more ghostly than now, when the sand has drifted in over the parquet dancing floor or pine needles have choked the paneless windows. Now it is more a part of the natural forces so soon to devour it altogether.

I suppose it has found small favor in literature because it must rank among things unheroic, perhaps even sordid. Yet, to confront suddenly after a walk along a wind-swept beach the evidence of man’s playtime, every shutter banging and every chimney awry, imbues one with a deeper sense of human pathos than the more obvious symbol of the dead farmhouse, where, though man has failed, he has at least failed during his nobler moments. The briary hillside rusted a cosmic plough at last, but what have these rotting piazzas to remember but the rhythmic taptap of dowagers peering through the glass at the dancing within, or the self-conscious kiss between Seventeen and Eighteen — those two so soon to part on separate ways toward Seventy and Eighty. The summer hotel is nowhere in any life. It witnesses only the nothings, and those who dallied there look back on their summer selves as nobodies. It has naught to do with the serious business of life, the sustenance, the mating, the begetting, the dying. Surely no one was ever born in a summer hotel; surely no one ever died there. And when it falls into ruins, it shows only a jackstraw pantomime against the unchanging sea.

Years ago, I was so legitimately shipwrecked in Barnegat Bay that after fourteen hours of being tossed about in my catboat I was taken off by the life guards. On the spit of sand separating bay and ocean I saw a towering hotel, alone in that vast expanse between sky and sea. The prospect of warm human comforts amid the desolation appealed to me so much that I was eager to repair at once to that hotel, splash in a warm tub, enjoy a fine dinner, and sink into bed. All these fireside longings took shape as a mere question concerning the hotel and the possibilities of my getting a room there. Dusk was coming down over the inland pines seaward, the light still looked angry from the retreating storm, and between dusk and sea I gazed as toward salvation at the gaunt hotel on the beach. My rescuers chuckled. The hotel had been abandoned for more than fifteen years.

As we rowed nearer, I saw they had spoken the most modest truth. Unshuttable doors stood agape on the piazzas, the windows were all broken, gables leaned on each other for support, and the wind roared. What would one find within of all the gayety once assembled there for so short a season?

A square piano with a few rusty strings, some bottomless chairs, in the closet of room 221 the ribs of a moth-eaten fan — nothing important in any life apparently, and, even if important, of what account as the sea crept year by year up to the front steps? Since the place had been deserted, someone had scrawled dirty limericks on the walls, and someone else, in counter attack: ‘Shame to the boys of Barnegat!’ But who were the boys of Barnegat? And who, before them, had signed the register of that wind-whispering hotel? I camped out there, to the astonishment of the life guards, and amused myself by dancing a saraband in the ballroom. But I was nowhere, I was no one, and all the throngs who once had danced there were like unto me.

There was also that old hotel on Katama Bay (and, since my own experience in these matters is so rich, I must hope my readers have been equally impressed). It stood some miles from the nearest house. North of it was Edgartown; in the other direction was South Beach, in those days a quite ‘unimproved’ waste of sands, wrecks, and sea. At one time a little railroad had connected the hotel with Edgartown, but only a few ties here and there showed the course of it. I know now that the architecture of the hotel was not bad, although at the time I took my photographs I had no such notions of taste. It was a rather comely building in the manner of a château, an octagonal tower at one end, a high mansard gable at the other, and between the two a low roof looking down on the lawn. Even then the place had been deserted for many years. To-day nothing of it remains except a cottage in Edgartown which was reconstructed from the gable end of the structure.

It was one of the most romantic retreats of my boyhood, and is connected in my mind with boats, for one had to sail down Katama Bay to reach it; with jeopardy, for the roofs always tempted one to risk one’s neck; and with comrades, for it was too vast and terrrifying to explore alone. First, one came to the broken spiles of the wharf, then, disembarking, to a cinder bed that had once been the railroad. Tennis courts could still be traced in the sand, and signs of an old road recalled the legendary trotters of our grandfathers. Inside the hotel everything was in place, though mutilated by yahoos. The rumor was that some great railroad company had owned the hotel and when it failed had been too indifferent to remove the furnishings. In any event, the floors were still carpeted, chairs stood about awaiting the chatterers, and in the rooms upstairs the beds and bedroom crockery were intact. From the second story one looked out over endless miles, the distant town, the scrub oaks, the bays beyond. And even to the boy’s mind, as he listened to the wind whimpering down the long corridors, occurred the importance of all this.

If man has accomplished anything, it is his ability to do his work in nature, and then, in spite of nature, to make her his playmate. When he has garnered his sustenance from the sea, let him play in the sea; when he has sweated over his soil, let him lie back on it and listen to the sound of the pines. Nature has every reason to be grateful to man for his brief articulation of her. To be sure, he often mars her, both by his industry and by his leisure. But the deepest scars he can carve into her will be long since obliterated before she feels the frosts of the eventual winter. Man has suffered so much of damnation, both in his toil and in his idleness, who would not look upon the deserted farms with tears in his heart? Or who upon the abandoned hotels without a smile of pity? Yet, for this while, it is good to think that there are other farms to take the place of the old, and that Seventeen and Eighteen are still pledging their foolish troth on the piazza of a summer hotel.

ROBERT HILLYER