The Hotel

by Elizabeth Bowen

  “Yes,” said James Milton, for whom the Hotel was at once in miniature. “If one could see people all at once like that they wouldn’t matter so much.” Quite apart from and yet somehow parallel with the intellectual conception he had another idea of God of which he permitted himself to be conscious, as of an enormous and perpetually descending Finger and Thumb. What Sydney had just said fitted in with this alarmingly.

  “If one could see them like that,” she continued, “one could see them so clearly as living under the compulsion of their furniture—or the furniture they happen to have hired. It would seem very doubtful, I dare say, whether man were not, after all, made for the Sabbath; and worse, for beds and dinner-tables and washstands, just to discharge the obligations all those have created.”

  “I don’t think I should ever believe that,” said Milton, amused.

  “Well, just think of this,” she continued. “Though it may have been an Idea in the first place that made churches be built, it was the churches already existing, with rows of pews for people to sit in and a pulpit and things all ready that had to be filled, that made you into a parson.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t agree with you at all,” said he with a finality that impressed her.

  “It really isn’t worth disagreeing with; I was only talking for the fun of the thing. Of course I don’t believe that more than anything else.” They had been walking under the windows of their own Hotel, and she now paused in the gateway with the light from the Hotel door streaming out on to her, looking at him remotely, as a gipsy might look over the garden fence at a householder mowing his lawn. “I dare say,” her look said, “that in your encumbered kind of way you are happy. I am not, in any way, and I don’t want to be.” It was with this air at once complacent and desolate that she seemed proposing to part from him, for she glanced at her wrist-watch, murmured something in the nature of a farewell and slipped ahead.

  “Oh, I say!” exclaimed Milton helplessly, and racked his brains for something further to say to her.

  “What?” asked Sydney, looking down from the steps and with faint impatience swinging her racquet.

  “I hope you didn’t think I was offended?” said he wildly.

  “No. Why should you be?”

  “What you said about churches…I was afraid you might have thought—”

  “Well,” said Sydney, “it’s no use trying not to offend people, so I don’t think I ever think much one way or the other. I’ve given up listening agonizedly for the possible reverberations of every remark which, if you’ll forgive me saying so, I think you do.”

  “I’m sorry,” said he, with the humility of twenty years’ seniority.

  “Oh, it doesn’t matter a bit. Good night.” He had pulled open the swing-door for her and she passed through it ahead of him, trailing her cloak which had slipped away from her shoulders. He gathered up the fringe of this from the floor and handed it to her. “Why good night?” said he, and several people sitting about the lounge looked up in astonishment. “I mean, don’t we see each other at dinner?”

  “Oh well, of course we see each other at dinner.” Sydney glanced round the lounge, took note of the astonished faces and, after another slight bow to Milton, went upstairs slowly, humming a tune.

  11

  The Dance

  On the night of Ronald’s arrival a dance was taking place in the Hotel dining-room. Chairs and tables had been stacked away in a corner, the floor polished and the walls festooned with paper flags and specially illuminated. The music, audible in every part of the Hotel, though generally as a sustained thin humming with the pianist’s undertone as an irregular and tuneless pulse-beat, had drawn everybody; lounge and drawing-room had been drained of their usual occupants. Dances at the Hotel were not usual and this was in the nature of a gala-night. The concierge’s face was wreathed in smiles, but Ronald felt his manner lacked empressement. It was irritating, when one had inquired for one’s mother, to be told with an appearance of indifference that she, too, would be, doubtless, at the ball. He had been sustained till now by the brilliant certainty of being expected and awaited, but he was tired after his journey and the lounge, from which the palms had all been taken away to decorate the dining-room, now seemed repellent, mean and artificial.

  “Tell my mother I have come,” he said to the concierge, and sat down in a wicker chair while the dance music throbbed at him. The concierge went away, but nobody came, though he waited; so at last he walked over to the dining-room door and, unable to see anything through the blind but twirling forms and wavering shadows, opened the door sharply and surveyed the scene from the threshold.

  It must be admitted that the impressions he received were coloured for him by a prejudice against the Riviera which he had cultivated from his childhood and believed to be innate.

  Veronica Lawrence was the first to remark and point out to her partner that a young man, probably Ronald Kerr, was standing in the doorway. She was wearing a tight green dress like a sheath, and every time she passed she looked thoughtfully at Ronald over her partner’s shoulder and once even smiled. Girls and young men had been asked in from the other hotels and the floor was crowded, while a close-packed row of onlookers sat or stood along the walls, pressing up so near to the band that the red-coated fiddlers began to look desperate, having scarcely elbow-room. The sexes were unequally represented, several couples of girls were dancing together. Some of the elder ladies had also taken the floor and were spinning round at a high velocity in the arms of their usual bridge-partners, whose coat-tails whirled horizontally, to the constant danger of more modern dancers whose poised totterings, hesitations and smooth forward rushes they perpetually interrupted.

  “He’s rather decorative,” said Veronica. She had at last elicited a bow from Ronald, who felt convinced that the girl must know him.

  “Oh well,” said Victor coldly, “if you like ’em floppy—” He set his jaw again and silent as ever they flitted across a pool of floor that opened for them, light as moths above the shadows. The Lawrences were remarkable everywhere with their burnished hair brushed up into haloes; they trailed enormous feather fans across their partners’ shoulders negligently and refused to waltz with elderly men, though they would make an exception in favour of Colonel Duperrier.

  Mrs. Duperrier sat against one of the walls, following couple after couple round with her eyes. Now and again she would smile metallically at a girl she knew and ask her whether she were having a good time. Though she never seemed to be watching Colonel Duperrier, she knew where he was all the time and could have pointed him out immediately. She had trained herself to remember distinctly whichever scene from her past had at the moment most torturous significance for her; now she could see herself at nineteen, admired to satiation, waltzing with Captain Duperrier at Darjeeling. A French window stood open on to a balcony, from which steps led down into the black-dark garden; couples dived in and out of the window perpetually, and presently Mrs. Duperrier, who had been expecting this the whole evening, saw her husband disappear with one of the Lawrences and waited in vain for him to come back. Mr. Lee-Mittison, who had been working his way round the room, bumped down beside her abruptly with his hands on his parted knees.

  “I hope you agree with me that our girls are doing us credit? There isn’t a girl in the room that can hold a candle to one of the Lawrences; Sydney Warren’s looking very distinguished (I can’t honestly tell you I care for this thing they’re all dancing), and even the little Bransomes light up well. Mark my word—”

  Mrs. Duperrier suddenly felt she could not bear this, made a queer little sound and shot up from her place. After one last look through the window she pushed her way between the dancers and out of the dining-room. She passed Ronald Kerr in the doorway and looked at him in amazement, then rushed past him and shut herself up in her room.

  Sydney wore a scarlet dress and danced as though she had for once forg
otten herself. A young Italian whose name she did not know had attached himself to her; she divided her dances between him and Colonel Duperrier and a gingery Captain Somebody-or-other from another hotel, who thought her conversation smart, and giggled ecstatically. The Italian danced, as Veronica afterwards said, “like a seraphim”; he taught Sydney the tango as it is danced in Rome, and it was while she was standing balanced against him to the slow music that she looked sideways and saw or rather for the first time apprehended Ronald: she realized that he must have been there some time.

  Cold all over and for the moment lost to the tango she thought: “Ronald!” then returned her eyes to her partner’s dispassionate face and slid her long step sideways across him; they both swung half round and balanced again at the conclusion of the bar. The floor was emptier; all but a few couples had been driven off it by the unnatural music; the remaining few were visible from every part of the room, and were reflected in the twirling mirror. Ronald was watching her, and before the end of the dance she excused herself to her partner and crossed the room to speak to him.

  “I beg your pardon—aren’t you Mr. Kerr?”

  “I am,” said Ronald gloomily.

  “Surely you have come early? Mrs. Kerr was not expecting you—”

  “Oh, thanks, but I happen to know my mother is expecting me.”

  “—not expecting you before half-past eleven,” said Sydney, finishing her sentence imperturbably. “The Paris train—”

  “Excuse me, but I didn’t come from Paris. I’ve come from Genoa.”

  “Really? You see you never said how you were coming, so we rather assumed—”

  Ronald’s long stare plainly inquired what right she had had to have “rather assumed”; and more, what she could know about his mother’s assumptions! It was diverted from Sydney by the arrival of Mr. Lee-Mittison, who hurried towards them, skidding slightly in his eagerness on the polished floor. “Can I do anything for you, my boy?” said Mr. Lee-Mittison.

  “Well, yes,” said Ronald, turning towards him. “I am looking for Mrs. Kerr, who happens to be my mother. Perhaps you will be able to tell me where—”

  “Mr. Lee-Mittison will certainly be able to help you,” said Sydney. She and Ronald bowed to one another and she walked away. “To the knife,” she thought, surrendering herself to her next partner, the gingery captain, who had waited meanwhile in the offing. In the succession of broken glimpses she had of him subsequently she saw Ronald being led round the edge of the room by Mr. Lee-Mittison, who had laid a hand on his shoulder, with bowed head, but with every sign of complaisance to being Mr. Lee-Mittison’s boy. After a few minutes’ conversation they left the lounge together. Their exit was watched with an equal interest by James Milton, who thought: “So that’s what Ronald is going to be like.”

  Milton had spent the evening propped against the empty fireplace wishing he could dance. The high mantelpiece caught him uncomfortably just between the shoulders, giving him a slight stoop forward. He was dissatisfied, but did not wish to take a seat along the walls among the women and the very old gentlemen. The men of his age were all dancing and his isolation irked him, yet he could not tear himself away from the music and the lit-up, hypnotizing circulation of the dancers. He had noticed Ronald at once and wondered whether he ought to go across and speak to him, but there was something about Ronald at once remote and ominous which forbade the hazards of so public an encounter. He resembled, in the cool, wide stare across which the dancers were allowed to sweep, while it never singled out or followed any of them, in the backward tilt of the head which sent the stare down over the protrusion of the cheekbones, and in a droop down at the corners of the mouth that lengthened the chin, a supercilious young Florentine among the retinue of the Magi standing apart and Gallio-like on its fringe, staring out of the picture. Ronald was not, however, at any one moment entirely superb; he could achieve a slouch in any attitude, and the lock of hair tumbling slantwise across his forehead towards one eyebrow broke up the design of his features into something irregular and rather baffled. There was a glitter about him which betrayed a cropping-out of the Shelley from behind the mask of Hellenic remoteness so carefully worn.

  “Snubbed!” smiled James Milton, watching Sydney, with a swirl of the red skirts, turn on her heel and return to her partner. The only sentiments she did not at present arouse in him were those of protectiveness or of pity. His own sensitiveness, however, made him turn away from her at this crisis of discomfiture, and he caught instead the eye of Eileen Lawrence, who, disconcerted at finding herself without a partner, was advancing towards him with the undulation of a Spanish dancer. She looked in her bright black so very striking, so very unlike the sort of young woman over whom he had even permitted his imagination to linger, that he was gratified at her coming up to strike an attitude before him. She said with a glance which in spite of his armour of subtlety did elate and disturb him: “Now then, Mr. Milton, you’re very diffident: aren’t you going to dance with me?”

  “There’s nothing I should like better, but I don’t, unfortunately.”

  “Oh, tut,” said Eileen. “But what a relief—I had been afraid we weren’t beautiful enough for you. Very well, then, take me out for a stroll in the garden.”

  “Rather,” said Mr. Milton, coming forward with alacrity. “But won’t you be cold?” Though he did not mind this at all he could not help noticing that she had less on than he could have imagined possible. She did not answer, only lashed her feather fan to and fro in a contemptuous gesture; so he said no more and followed her through the window.

  The Hotel garden, though not large, had been so laid out with screens of trees and with circuitous paths as to afford visitors the maximum of variety and exercise. It had taken on this evening from the insistent music and from the light that splashed down on to the trees a character so unusual, so vivid yet unearthly, that James Milton could hardly recognize it for the place of gravel and thin foliage where some days ago he had been talking to Miss Fitzgerald on an iron chair. There was no moon, but the sky was pale with starshine. “I suppose,” said Eileen Lawrence after a few moments, sniffing, “that this is what they’d call in books a balmy and languorous Southern night.”

  “It certainly smells good. Perhaps the lemon trees…”

  “A night made for love, that’s what they’d call it.”

  “I suppose they would…I say, are you certain you’re not cold?”

  She shivered, but at this delightful thought. “A night when men go out with pistols and shoot themselves on the Casino terrace…Heavens, if this were Monte!”

  “But it certainly is the Riviera,” said James Milton, and he thought of the whole band of white hotels like palaces along the line of coast into which their own seemed now to be knitted—hotels with light streaming out of them towards the tideless sea that, never advancing on the shore or receding from it, was like an inexorable unfailing Memory, not worked upon by thought or changed by sleep. “The Church Militant,” he thought ridiculously; then stared back at a conviction which stared at him that there could be no closer oneness than in this community of desire however unworthy, of emotion however false, and that perhaps in just this consisted—

  —Eileen Lawrence brushed against him as they turned a corner.

  “What jolly arms you’ve got!” he, feeling still immensely far from her, was moved to exclaim.

  They strolled together amicably, following the doublings and twists of the path, meeting or overtaking other couples and overhearing now some scrap of conversation, some interchange of personalities from behind a screen of trees or the depths of an occasional arbour. Their cigarette ends glowing and fading preceded them like a pair of luminous noses, and equidistant spots of fire advertised that other pairs of Dongs were promenading solemnly. “How ridiculous!” laughed James Milton at the music, in sudden elation. He had not been to a dance for years; he had forsaken even Christmas par
ties because they made him feel avuncular: all this was new to him. Eileen, who thought this was the dreariest dance she had ever been at, a travesty of all that was highest in human enjoyment, was as near depression as the Lawrences ever descended, and replied: “Yes, it’s pretty futile, isn’t it? I suppose the dowagers are enjoying it. Shall we go in?”

  Milton, who had been taking a keener pleasure than she understood in her nearness in the intimacy of the darkness, actually laid a hand on her arm to detain her. He entreated, “Not till the end of this dance!”

  His unwillingness to give her up was not decreased by a sharp irritation that she with her white arms and her attractiveness—which he was conscious of as something as material as phosphorescence, in which he could have dipped a finger curiously—should have stopped short at being Eileen Lawrence. He was convinced that if she had been anybody else, say Sydney (now dancing, indifferent, in the room above), the situation would have had a key for him, and he chafed with indignant longing. “I say, Eileen—” he began and, determined to understand himself, reached out a hand for her.

  “Well?” challenged Eileen, and they stared at the greyish blots of one another’s faces in the darkness. After a moment her expectancy broke into laughter. “I really thought,” said she, “that you were going to kiss me.”

  “So did I,” said James Milton, and following her back to the ballroom he tried in vain to decide whether she and the mood to which she had given colour had been base or very admirable. He gave her up to her next partner and returned to the fireplace, but the dance became meaningless; he could not see Sydney anywhere. Once he thought she appeared beyond the window, half in the darkness, but she was shut away from him by the spinning barrier. He determined to find her, to allay the restlessness which was beginning to sap his benignity and make him look with contempt at the older people and at the young with resentment. If he did not find her soon he would begin to believe that there was not a place in the world for him—he started at a flash of red in one of the mirrors, but it was only the sweep of Eileen’s crimson fan. He felt that he could no longer endure the ballroom, and that even if by leaving it he were to cut himself off for ever from all it contained, he must leave it to look for her.