It is usually said that in such partings as these--partings with definite hope of meeting and with nothing humanly tragic about them, so that the last interchange of voice is expected to be a laugh or a joke--the sadder part is for those who stay. But I think this is mistaken. There is indeed a little sense of flatness--almost of something in one's chest--when the train is gone or the carriage rolled off; and one goes back into one's house or into the just-left room, throwing a glance all round as if to measure the emptiness. But the accustomed details--the book we left open, the order we had to give, the answer brought to the message, and breakfast and lunch and dinner and the postman, all the great eternities--gather round and close up the gap: close the gone one, and that piece of past, not merely _up_, but, alas! _out_.
It is the sense of this, secret even in the most fatuous breast, which makes things sadder for the goer. He knows from experience, and, if he have imagination, he feels, this process of closing him out, this rapid adaptation to doing without him. And meanwhile he, in his carriage or train, is being hurled into the void; for even the richest man and he of the most numerous clients, is turned adrift without possessions or friends, a mere poor nameless orphan, when on a solitary journey. There is, moreover, a sadder feeling than this in the heart of the more sentimental traveller, who has engaged the hospitality of friends. _He knows it is extended equally to others_; that this room, which he may have made peculiarly his own, filling it, perhaps, in proportion to the briefness of sojourn, with his own most personal experience; the landscape made his own through this window, the crucial conversation, receiving unexpected sympathies, held or (more potent still) thought over afterwards in that chair; he knows that this room will become, perhaps, O horror, within a few hours, another's!
The extraordinary hospitality of England, becoming, like all English things, rather too well done materially, rather systematic, and therefore heartless, inflicts, I have been told, some painful blows on sentimental aliens, particularly of Latin origin. There is a pang in finding on the hospitable door a label-holder with one's name in it: it saves losing one's way, but suggests that one is apt to lose it, is a stranger in the house; and it tells of other strangers, past and future, each with his name slipped in. Similarly the guest-book, imitated from nefarious foreign inns, so fearfully suggestive of human instability, with its close-packed signatures, and dates of arrival and departure. And then the cruelty of housekeepers, and the ruthlessness of housemaids! Take heed, O Thestylis, dear Latin guardian of my hearth, take heed and imprint my urgent wishes in thy faithful heart: never, never, never, in my small southern home (not unlike, I sometimes fondly fancy, the Poet's _parva domus_), never let me surprise thee depositing thy freshly-whitened linen in heaps outside the door of the departing guest; and never, I conjure thee, offend his eye or nostril with mops, or _frotteur's_ rollers, or resinous scent of furniture-polish near his small chamber! For that chamber, kindly Handmaiden, is _his_. He is the Prophet it was made for; and the only Prophet conceivable as long as present. And when he takes departure, why, the void must follow, a long hiatus, darkness, and stacked-up furniture, and the scent of varnish within tight-closed shutters....