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Updated: June 6, 2025
She had fancied that a figure had stopped outside the gate and stood looking in, but the next moment the gate had swung to and the Portier was fumbling at the lock behind her. The Portier had put on his trousers over his night garments, and his mustache bandage gave him a sinister expression, rather augmented when he smiled at her.
You ask the portier at what hours the trains leave he tells you instantly; or you ask him who is the best physician in town; or what is the hack tariff; or how many children the mayor has; or what days the galleries are open, and whether a permit is required, and where you are to get it, and what you must pay for it; or when the theaters open and close, what the plays are to be, and the price of seats; or what is the newest thing in hats; or how the bills of mortality average; or "who struck Billy Patterson."
A German gentleman told me that when he remained a week in a hotel, he gave the portier five marks, the head waiter four, the Boots three, and the chambermaid two; and if he stayed three months he divided ninety marks among them, in about the above proportions. Ninety marks make $22.50.
"I see perfectly well," said the other, quietly, but he looked round at Dunham with a face that was haggard. "I sent it out to be posted by the portier, and he got it mixed up with these letters for me, and brought it back." The young men were both silent, but the tears stood in Dunham's eyes. "If it hadn't been for me, it wouldn't have happened," he said.
He looked at it in a dull, mechanical way, and nodded his head with compressed lips. Then he scanned the portier, and glanced round once more at the bedevilled architecture. "Well," said he, at last, "there's a mistake somewhere. Unless there are two Kaiserin Elisabeths . Davis, ask him if there are two Kaiserin Elisabeths."
We stayed all night at the Hotel de Soleil; I remember it because the landlady, the portier, the waitress, and the chambermaid were not separate persons, but were all contained in one neat and chipper suit of spotless muslin, and she was the prettiest young creature I saw in all that region. She was the landlord's daughter.
The ancestral house of the Ariosti has been within a few years restored out of all memory and semblance of itself; and my wish to see the place in which the poet was born and spent his childhood resulted, after infinite search, in finding a building faced newly with stucco and newly French-windowed. Our portier said it was the work of the late English Vice-Consul, who had bought the house.
I believe he and the portier talked it over at great length, but, so far as I am aware, without arriving at any solution. I took little heed of the matter, being now fully absorbed in my studies; and it is to be hoped that Herr Kragendorf was not of a nervous temperament, otherwise he must have inveighed profanely against the constant piano-practice that went on over his head.
Still the Portier had not come back and the door chain swung in the wind. At four o'clock she retired to the bedroom again. Indignation had changed to fear, coupled with sneezing. Surely even the Schubert Society What was that? From the Portier's bed was coming a rhythmic respiration!
When we borrowed the feeing fashion from Europe a dozen years ago, the salary system ought to have been discontinued, of course. We might make this correction now, I should think. And we might add the portier, too.
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