The Hotel

by Elizabeth Bowen

  “Funk!” called Joan excitedly, and he pushed the doors open and went in. She heard wave after wave of exclamations arising. The door, which had swung to after him, did not open again; she could no longer see his shadow on the glass. She began to wish she had not thrown her glove into the lion’s den. Joan had a healthy contempt for women like Miss Fitzgerald, but she was a little daunted by the habitués of the drawing-room, who played bridge crushingly well, were impeccably manicured and had a hardish eye that negatived one’s importance. She sat watching the door anxiously. After all, he belonged to those people; it was possible he might not reappear.

  But Colonel Duperrier respected these ladies too deeply to wish to remain among them. He came out again modestly, but with an air of achievement.

  “Here you are! But I don’t know that it’s really much better.”

  “I’ll pretend it is, anyway. Did they mind your taking it?”

  “No,” said he, uncommunicative. He drew up a chair and sat not far away from her while she scribbled experimentally with the new pen. It gave him a restful, anchored feeling to sit beside somebody who was doing something. He looked at the back of Joan’s neck, from which the cropped hair fell away, with uncovetous appreciation. What he believed himself to be feeling was that it would have been jolly to have had a daughter. If Colonel Duperrier’s wife were to die, he would marry some girl of twenty-three who would be very much in love with him and with whom he would be very happy. Colonel Duperrier had never thought of this, but it was evident to any woman. As she continued to draw profiles on an envelope and showed no signs of going on with her letter, he inquired, “Have you any idea how long that lift’s been out of order? I rather wish they’d let me overhaul the thing. Of course, I don’t profess to know anything about mechanics, but I’ve always had a bent that way. I can’t help feeling I—”

  “It’s been getting sicker and sicker since this morning. I think the people going upstairs after lunch must have finished it. You see, Veronica and Victor were playing hide-and-seek with the Barry children, and some of them got into the lift and sent it up and down full speed about four times without stopping.”

  “Very high-spirited of them,” said Colonel Duperrier. “Can’t young Ammering get a job?”

  “No, he can’t,” Joan said defensively. “It worries him awfully. The War’s come very hard indeed on our generation. I don’t think people understand a bit.”

  “Perhaps they don’t,” said Colonel Duperrier, who had also fought.

  “We have to make allowances for ourselves,” continued Joan. “You see, nobody makes them for us. I know young people are always supposed to be fearfully idealistic and that sort of thing, but I suppose we can’t help feeling that, considering how hard things are on us, we aren’t really so bad.”

  “But do people criticize you all?” marvelled Colonel Duperrier, who was slightly out of the movement. “I personally can understand very well how hard this is on Ammering—having nothing to do but rot about here for a winter. At his age it would have driven me clean off my head.”

  “We think he takes it awfully well,” said Joan, a little flushed. “Of course, we all like him very much.”

  “Lucky fellow!”

  “Oh, well…Of course, for anyone like you to be out here must be awfully jolly. Everyone approves, and your work’s over and nobody wants you to do anything more.”

  “No, I shan’t be wanted again,” agreed Colonel Duperrier thoughtfully. “It’s a good thing I’m fond of tennis. I suppose that’s why one feels strongly about young fellows like Ammering; I mean, seeing them done out of what really is their due.”

  “I don’t suppose Victor would mind being you. I shouldn’t wonder if he sometimes suffered from the same awful feeling as I do, like being sleepy in the morning and wishing it were bed-time. About lunch-time one begins to buck up.” Joan rubbed her chin thoughtfully with the end of her pen. She was more imaginative than either of her sisters. “You’re just about at tea-time, aren’t you?”

  “I suppose I am,” agreed Colonel Duperrier. “Five o’clock tea.” He thought to himself that it was the kind of tea women sat over till it was time for dinner. At this he began to yawn cavernously, shivered and apologized.

  “One does miss one’s tea out here,” said Joan. “The tea-gardens are so breaking; we can’t afford to go there, and the pâtisserie place is stuffy and full of Italians and one does get sick of pigging it up in one’s room with a spirit-lamp.”

  “I’m too shy to go to the tea-gardens,” said Colonel Duperrier, “but I should like to. I hear the tea there is quite decent. Will you, some time, come and have tea with me there?”

  “Thanks very much, I should like to,” said Joan, in the business-like tone in which she accepted invitations from the opposite sex. She wanted to go on talking about Victor to somebody who did not at once suspect and smile. So she said, “It must be very nice for you, having no future to think of.” A moment ago she had seemed to understand so well that he almost believed she had said this to hurt him.

  “No future?” he repeated, and looked at her blankly.

  “Well,” said Joan, “you haven’t got to do anything that matters. I mean, there’s nobody but yourself to please and, of course, your wife. While a young man, like—well, oh, anyone—say Victor Ammering, has got the whole beastly thing ahead of him. I suppose it won’t all be beastly; I mean, he’ll fall in love and, I suppose, marry, and sooner or later his father’ll die and then he’ll have some money of his own; but in the long run it’s all rather an effort.”

  “He’s not ambitious?”

  “Oh no,” said Joan placidly, “he isn’t a bit that kind of man. Besides, what’s the good of being ambitious? There may be another war. And even it there isn’t, disappointed people are dreadful to live with.”

  “Why are you so cynical?” asked Colonel Duperrier.

  “But I’m not,” said Joan, and smiled at him with troubled but naive blue eyes.

  As she spoke, three people in mackintoshes, two women and a man, came in rustling and dripping from the porch. Their collars were turned up and over these they looked repudiatingly at one another. They had not been for their walks together, and they did not wish anybody to suppose that they had. They had followed one another for some kilometres along a streaming road, to close up unavoidably on the Hotel doorstep. Among them was James Milton, wondering why he had ever come abroad, cold, weary, amazed by the weather. Dripping audibly, they all got into the lift and slammed the gates upon their undesired contiguity. Here they remained for some moments shut up in silence.

  “I’m afraid it’s out of order,” shouted Colonel Duperrier at the risk of appearing officious. Joan had looked on with detachment.

  James Milton, only too glad to escape, let himself out at once and walked upstairs, after a wistful, inquiring glance in Joan’s direction. Numbed beyond the point of geniality, not one of his fellow-visitors had spoken to him during the day; he realized that this was the third Lawrence whom he did not know and that she was not going to speak to him either. Joan watched him critically till he had disappeared round the turn of the stairs.

  “That’s the parson,” said she. “He went with them yesterday, with the Lee-Mittisons’ picnic.”

  “Oh yes, the Lee-Mittisons’ picnic. We saw them start off. Wasn’t it rather a fiasco?”

  “Yes, it was. After lunch they were bored, so they all went off on their own, and Veronica met Victor and they went off, too. When they came back, quite a short time afterwards, the Lee-Mittisons had flitted—there wasn’t so much as an egg-shell. So they all halloed for a bit, and some of them lay down and went to sleep. Veronica and Victor came home on their own, and the others got tired of calling the Lee-Mittisons and came home, too, thinking nothing more of it. Eileen likes the parson, do does Sydney; they say he is rather an ass but wonderfully sporting. They expected to find the
L.-M.s at home, but the L.-M.s didn’t turn up till half-way through dinner, looking fearfully sick. Old L.-M. came over to Father between the soup and fish, simply snorting. He said to Father, ‘I suppose you realize what your daughter has been exposed to?’ We think old L.-M. is quite mad. I was awfully glad I hadn’t gone.”

  “I should think you were,” said Colonel Duperrier absently. He wanted to ask her: “Couldn’t we go off some day for a walk in the hills?” He tried this over and over in his head, but it didn’t sound right somehow. He supposed that the suggestion must be unsuitable, and that at all events she would be bored with him.

  As if to settle the matter once and for all, Joan said, with an unhappy note in her voice as she thought of the meeting of Veronica and Victor, “And anyway, I’m not much of a walker. I don’t care for walking at all.”

  8

  In the Drawing-Room

  After Colonel Duperrier had left the drawing-room the ladies round the fire folded back their skirts over their knees again to keep the stuff from scorching, drew their chairs in closer and resumed their discussion of Mrs. Kerr. Their backs were turned in a kind of contempt on three tall windows through which cold light from the sky and the sea poured in on them gravely.

  “I cannot think,” said one, “what a woman of that sort finds to do with herself.” She spoke with emphasis, this remark had been throughout a recurring-point in the conversation. “She has no interests. She hasn’t a large correspondence; she does nothing at all for herself. I personally find the day so very full here, it seems only too short.”

  “I wouldn’t say too short. But as days abroad go, one seems to get through them quickly enough.” To this there was a hum of agreement.

  “She sits on her balcony in the sun,” said Mrs. Hillier, “a thing which I for one should never have time to do. I suppose one has too much conscience. If I ever do go out on my balcony for a minute and look along, there she always is; and if I call out in a friendly way, ‘Whatever are you doing?’ she says, ‘Nothing’ and looks amused and rather superior.”

  “She doesn’t sketch, or one would understand her staring like that at the view. Of course, it is very beautiful.”

  “She may think,” said another of the ladies, looking up from some broderie anglaise over which she had been straining her eyes. She was of some prestige, her speech was slow and weighted down with implications. “She must think a good deal,” she decided; “nobody who was not thinking could do absolutely nothing all day and look so very superior about it, like a cat.”

  “You mean that she has something on her mind?”

  The lady of the embroidery rubbed her sore eyes with two fingers, revolving this slowly. She opened her eyes again tentatively, blinked once or twice and shut them again. “The light is very poor,” she said aggrievedly.

  “Very. Won’t you take my place, Mrs. Hepworth? It is nearer the window—you mean to say that she has something on her mind?”

  “No, thank you very much, I do not care to move from this side of the fire—I should rather say that she had something in her mind all the time, at the back of it. One is never comfortable in talking to her, though she is, I am sure, brilliant. I have said to myself over and over again, when I’ve been with her: ‘That woman has something at the back of her mind.’ ”

  “I wonder what?” asked someone rashly.

  “That,” said Mrs. Hepworth coldly, “would be quite impossible to say.”

  There were about seven ladies present, all embroidering something unpractical and therefore permissible, except Mrs. Duperrier, who, poor soul, was too restless, and another lady who with the aid of much gamboge and vermilion was touching up a water-colour, a sunset. At four o’clock they would all retire for tea; after that they would go downstairs to the basement into what was called the smoking-room and play bridge, with the intermission only of dinner, till it was time for bed. Though keen players, the seven were not to be numbered among the enthusiasts. Those, after a perfunctory glance at the weather, had sat down to their tables soon after eleven o’clock. Nobody who smoked but did not play bridge dared enter the smoking-room.

  Out of deference to Mrs. Bellamy, who was among them, nobody had so far touched on the aspect of Mrs. Kerr which most profoundly intrigued them—her friendship with Sydney. Tessa, however, now showed herself lacking in that appreciation of their delicacy with which it had pleased them to credit her. Stretching out a plump, pretty foot to the fire and looking down at it thoughtfully, she remarked, “She seems a very kind woman. She’s been so kind to my cousin.”

  “Ah, really, yes?” said someone innocently. “Your cousin’s often with her I believe.”

  “Yes, they are a lot together. Sydney is a very clever girl,” said Tessa simply; “she is too clever for girls of her own age, I sometimes think, though she is so high-spirited and cheerful and amusing that she is always popular. I often forget, when I am with her, how clever she is. Do you know, she studied for years…she has passed…” Here she enumerated, not accurately, Sydney’s academic distinctions, which while not conveying much to her audience vaguely depressed them.

  “Ah, yes, it is nice for a girl to have a career. But I shouldn’t,” said a lady with some restraint, tempering her suggestion with a smile, “say that Miss Warren was high-spirited exactly.” The others disagreed too forcibly with Tessa’s opinion of her cousin and respected Tessa too much to say anything at all.

  Tessa continued: “Sydney is very affectionate.”

  “She is very much…absorbed, isn’t she, by Mrs. Kerr?”

  “I have known other cases,” said somebody else, looking about vaguely for her scissors, “of these very violent friendships. One didn’t feel those others were quite healthy.”

  “I should discourage any daughter of mine from a friendship with an older woman. It is never the best women who have these strong influences. I would far rather she lost her head about a man.”

  “Sydney hasn’t lost her head,” said little Tessa with dignity.

  “Oh but, Mrs. Bellamy—I was talking about other cases.”

  “And how few men there are out here—can one wonder the girls are eccentric? They say it’s the same at all these places—not a man to be had. I can’t think why people go on bringing their daughters out.”

  “One wonders, indeed, why some types of women ever come out here.”

  “Mrs. Kerr? Oh, do you think—?”

  “Mmm-mmm.”

  “But she may believe in the sun,” said Tessa; “many people believe in the sun. Of course it’s always been known of, but quite recently a doctor at Baden—”

  “She is not a sick woman,” pronounced the lady of the broderie anglaise.

  “N-no?” said Tessa, petering out. “But I’m sure,” she resumed, after a pause for consideration, “that she has interests. I would say she was quite independent. Sydney tells me she likes to be a great deal alone.”

  “Well, there now,” exclaimed a lady indignantly, dropping her needlework into her lap in holding both hands out. “Then why should she want to come out to a hotel? She certainly is striking-looking, but I would have every sympathy with her and make every effort to be pleasant to her if she were lonely. One knows oneself that is insupportable. As winter comes on with those long evenings one begins to feel hardly human, sitting evening after evening in an empty room. One can’t always be going out or visiting people or inviting people to come to one. If I shut my drawing-room door, I begin to feel restless at once; it feels so unnatural shutting oneself in with nobody. If I open it, one hears the servants laughing, or something to worry one. I am fond of reading, but I always begin to feel that books are so bad; then of course I realize, well, it’s not fair, is it, to expect a book to take the place of human society? If the telephone bell rings, to hear a voice and then be cut off simply unsettles one; and if it doesn’t ring the whole evening, one begins to worry an
d imagine things about one’s friends. Once I sat with the door open and, believe me, I could hear four different clocks ticking—I counted them—in different parts of the flat. It’s not, of course, that I’m nervous, but I really begin to feel—if you’ll understand my saying anything so extraordinary—as if I didn’t exist. If somebody does come to the door or the telephone does ring, I’m almost surprised to find I’m still there. One would go mad if one were not able to get abroad.”

  She looked round with a shiver of retrospection at the semicircle which was her pleasant asylum. The others expressed their entire agreement. What they had all escaped was terrible.

  “But Mrs. Kerr,” said one, “seems to enjoy that—she’s a divorcée.”

  “No, he died.”

  “Fancy! She doesn’t give one a bit that impression…”

  “Isn’t there a son?”

  “Yes, she has a nearly grown-up son. I can’t think why she doesn’t make a home for him.”

  “But if one does make a home for anybody one is still very much alone. The best type of man is no companion.”

  “Still, he is someone there.”

  “Besides, my dear, make a home…! Of course, it’s what one would love to do, but it nearly kills one and it’s so expensive; and when all’s said and done it’s still so uncomfortable these days with all these difficulties, one can’t expect a man to stay in it. Of course, we don’t mind in the same way about comfort, but really it is scarcely fit for oneself. So I said to my husband…he agreed…It is so broadening to the mind, isn’t it? to travel and meet people; we have been so fortunate in the hotels that were recommended to us, and we have been passed on from introduction to introduction so that we have always got to know people at once.”

  “And as for the son,” put in another lady who had been waiting with parted lips, “he really may not want her. And I rather wonder about him, too. One of my boys was at school with him and said he was not at all popular. He won’t say why, of course, the Kerr boy wasn’t popular; you know what boys are, they are so reserved. But one felt, of course, that there was something. Boys, you know, are rather wonderful; they have a judgement that—well, a kind of instinct.”