The Remains of the Day: Day One: Evening Summary & Analysis

Stevens is lodging in a guest house in Salisbury after his first day of travel, having left Darlington Hall along with Mrs. Clements and the two maids—leaving it empty for the first time this century. At first, he did not feel excitement, perhaps because he was familiar with the area, despite having traveled so little. But then the surroundings became unfamiliar: he was entering new territory, and initially felt a sense of alarm, like he was entering a wilderness.

Stevens stopped to stretch his legs and he walked up a hill where he saw an old, white-haired man smoking his pipe, sitting on a large stone on the footpath. The man asked if Stevens had fit enough legs to continue up the hill, because there’s no better view of the English landscape. The man said Stevens would be sorry if he doesn’t take that walk, since in a few more years it might be too late.

Later, it would occur to Stevens that the man might have meant this as a bantering remark, but he felt that he couldn’t offend him, so he continued on. He was happy he did, as he was presented with a magnificent view of rolling fields with hedges, trees, and a church tower in the distance. For the first time he felt anticipation, and a renewed sense of resolve in facing his professional task with Miss Kenton.

Now Stevens finds himself in a modest but clean establishment: the beds have been well made and the basin is clean. In the afternoon he ventures into Salisbury, strolling throughout the charming city and visiting the cathedral, which Mrs. Symons had highly recommended. Still, he finds what remains with him now is not the city sights but the magnificent view of the English countryside. While he admits that other countries may have spectacular scenery, he claims that English landscapes possess something special: he felt, that morning, in the presence of greatness.

Stevens asks what this “greatness” might mean, and suggests (though acknowledging that wiser men might be able to define it better) that it has to do with the lack of spectacle, with a sense of restraint, rather than an obvious demonstrativeness.

This question reminds Stevens of a constant debate in his profession, on what makes a great butler—a topic often discussed around the fire at the servants’ hall. There was no question who the generation’s greatest butlers were, but how to define what made a great butler was still a difficult question.

Stevens often had to host employees of various degrees of perception, and he recalls anecdotes about Mr. Jack Neighbours (who was very popular among servants for a time) being swapped frequently at the servants’ hall. Stevens notes that Neighbours may have had solid organizational chops, but he was far from a great butler; he was merely on everyone’s lips for awhile, before one trend yielded to another. Still, other servants, like Mr. Graham, never stooped to such gossip.

Returning to the question of what makes a great butler, Stevens is reminded of the Hayes Society as an example of a group that had attempted a definition. The society was influential in the 20s and 30s for only admitting butlers “of the very first rank.” It had between ten and thirty members at any time, and was rather secretive, but it did once publish prerequisites for membership in the Quarterly for the Gentleman’s Gentleman, writing that a butler must be a member of a “distinguished” household, not including those of businessmen or the newly rich. This provoked some controversy, and finally the Society clarified that the applicant had to “be possessed of a dignity in keeping with his position” (Stevens attempts to quote from memory). Though he has his differences with the Society, Stevens finds this to be true.

Nonetheless, the question then arises of what dignity entails. Mr. Graham always viewed dignity as something like a woman’s beauty—impossible to analyze—while Stevens objected that one could strive to have dignity; it was not a fluke of nature like beauty. He and Mr. Graham never came to any agreement, but their discussions allowed Stevens to better understand his own views.

Stevens proposes that his own father was the embodiment of “dignity.” Though he lacked some aspects of being a great butler, like a good accent and general knowledge, Stevens considers these issues to be superficial. Besides, those requirements of eloquence and the like only came to be valued for a later generation, when employers sometimes even had butlers study encyclopedias and then show off their trivial knowledge to visitors.

Stevens thinks of one anecdote in particular, which his father often repeated over the years: since he didn’t often relate anecdotes, Stevens sees this as a kind of critical reflection by his father on his profession. The story was one of a butler who had traveled with his employer to India. One day he came to inspect the dining room and saw a tiger under the table. He calmly went on to the drawing room, whispered in his employer’s ear, asking him if he might use the twelve-bore, and a few moments later three gun shots were heard from the other room. When the butler reappeared, he informed his employer that no “discernible traces of the recent occurrence” would be left by dinner. Stevens’s father always laughed at that part of the story especially. He always insisted that it was the utmost truth.

Stevens now sees that his father must have striven for years to become that butler, and he believes that his father succeeded. Once, for instance, a certain Mr. David Charles visited Darlington Hall and told Stevens he’d met his father years earlier at Mr. John Silvers’s home, where Stevens’s father worked. Mr. Charles had drunk too much in the company of two other guests, and after about an hour these men decided to go for an afternoon drive and enlisted Stevens senior as driver. They began to yell and sing, acting like schoolboys and ordering Stevens senior around, then proceeding to tease and insult him. While Stevens senior remained calm, the men subsequently began gossiping about their host, Mr. Silvers. After one particularly offensive remark, Stevens senior brought the car to a halt, opened the rear door, and stood there in silence. Severe and silent, he unnerved the two men, who immediately felt overcome by guilt. At last one of them muttered an apology. Stevens’s father closed the door and got back into the car, where the drive was completed in near silence.

Stevens also remembers another anecdote that makes clear his father’s dignity. Stevens’s brother was killed in the Southern African War, not gloriously but in an “un-British” attack on civilian Boer settlements, under the direction of a certain general who barely escaped being court-martialed. Ten years later, “the General,” as Stevens calls him, was to visit Mr. Silvers’s household in his new profession as businessman. The General proved an unpleasant man with unrefined manners, and since his own valet had taken ill, Stevens senior had to swallow his loathing and perform his duties, but he did so well that the General actually complimented Silvers on his service.

Stevens concludes that in these anecdotes the difference between a competent butler like Mr. Neighbours and one of dignity like his father becomes clear: it’s the butler’s ability to maintain professionalism at all times, rather than abandon his professional being at any provocation. Stevens compares the role of lesser butlers as being like a pantomime: at the slightest push, the façade will drop off, whereas great butlers wear their professionalism like a suit. Stevens tends to believe that true butlers only exist in England, as other races are incapable of such emotional restraint. Mr. Graham might counter that a great butler could thus only be identified through a severe test, but Stevens would respond that after a long time in the profession, one can judge the depth of a butler’s greatness. He thinks it’s important not to be defeatist and give up on any attempt to analyze or define dignity or greatness: only by thinking deeply about it can one strive towards dignity oneself.