The Hotel

by Elizabeth Bowen

  He went out into the lounge with his heart in his mouth, but there was no one there but Mr. Lee-Mittison, walking about and rubbing his hands, so happy that he had to expand here in solitude.

  “Charming boy, that,” said Mr. Lee-Mittison. “Really an acquisition—charming boy.”

  “Indeed?” said Milton, who had forgotten Ronald.

  “Found his mother for him. Nice woman, very nice woman. Pretty to see ’em together.” He beamed at Milton as he had not beamed for days.

  “Was it?” said Milton. He stared again round the emptiness of the lounge, went to the foot of the stairs and looked up, listened and with a last desperate inspiration looked into the drawing-room.

  “Looking for anybody?” asked Mr. Lee-Mittison, observing this.

  “No,” said Milton, and nodding good night to Mr. Lee-Mittison he went down the basement stairs into the smoking-room and out by a glass door into the garden again. Here he walked to and fro, repelled by the darkness, peering angrily into the arbours which were now all empty and silent and quickening his steps at every turn of a path. He looked at the great sheer façade springing upright above him with here and there a light coming out in a window, and thought, “Of course, she is tired; she has gone up to bed.”

  “But she was not tired at all: she did not look as though she would ever sleep again,” his memory told him.

  “I suppose I must love her?—But I cannot, she is so erratic and cold—”

  “It is because she’s erratic and cold that you’ve been able to surprise your emotion.”

  “Oh, rats!” said James Milton, kicking a stone. A figure that had come out on to one of the balconies started and peered down into the garden.

  The quick movement betrayed some tension of fear or expectancy. Mrs. Kerr, he thought in surprise, as having counted the windows up from the ground and then along from left to right he located the balcony. Why should she still and in such wretchedness be waiting for Ronald? He listened and watched; the room behind her was empty. Then, as the figure still with its arms stretched out gripping the balcony turned her head sideways, he recognized Sydney. It was on the tip of his tongue to call to her, as though she were a child for whose conduct he was somehow responsible. She should have left them alone tonight, he thought, and flamed with disinterested anger. He took a few steps backwards, propped himself against a tree and remained looking up at the balcony. She shivered; he shivered in sympathy. How much (though how properly) Mrs. Kerr had found to say to her son. It was long past midnight now and very cold; the dance was over and the music silent some time ago. All the other lights were out except one at the very top left-hand corner, where Ronald and his mother must still be talking.

  “Damn Ronald!” thought James Milton; “she and I will be catching our deaths.” A clock in the town struck the half-hour and a bell from a convent above them answered it. Emboldened by the breach these made in the silence he called, “Good night, Miss Warren.”

  Sydney started violently and after one more fierce glance on to the trees retreated from the balcony. He saw her pause a moment under the light and look round as though to take a farewell of her expectations; then the room was dashed from his sight by darkness. A panel of fresh light shone for a moment as the door on to the corridor opened and shut. Sighing, and with a sense of half-accomplishment, he too went in to bed.

  12

  Any Hope?

  “Well?” Mrs. Kerr said expansively, meeting Sydney on the stairs next morning. “Isn’t it rather a nice puppy?”

  She was dressed to go out, with a blue straw hat pulled down over her eyes. She had paused with a hand out to steady herself against the frame of the staircase window, and the north light defined the smiling curve of one cheek and drew prismatic colours out of an earring. She was evidently very happy.

  “What puppy?” Sydney said blankly, looking up from a few steps below her.

  “My Ronald. Isn’t it rather a nice—”

  “Oh very, yes. I thought it seemed a rather severe puppy last night, but I dare say that was the journey.”

  “Oh, severe?” said Mrs. Kerr delightedly. “Was he really severe? Sydney, you must tell me; how fearfully funny!” She narrowed her eyes for a moment as though she were trying to picture the meeting of Sydney and Ronald. “I don’t believe,” she admitted, “that he was pleased at finding everyone dancing. It didn’t, somehow, seem right. But I dare say he thought you severe; I must ask him—you sometimes terrify me. He seemed rather dazed by you all.”

  “I’m glad his first day is so fine,” said Sydney, and felt as though by this she were somehow including herself in the happiness of the Kerrs.

  “Yes, I’m always lucky,” agreed Mrs. Kerr. “Now we’re going out together. You can’t think what it is like to be going out with a son. It is ridiculously nice—I’d forgotten.”

  “Well, goodbye,” said Sydney, standing back against the wall for her friend to pass. “I don’t suppose we shall see each other again today.”

  “Oh, shan’t we? What a pity!” Mrs. Kerr said vaguely. “There’s that unfortunate Ronald,” she cried, glancing out of the window, “marching up and down out there—do look—in a panama hat. How horrid of me to dawdle!” She nodded to Sydney and went smoothly downstairs leaving behind her faint perfume, a sensible backrush of eagerness, expectancy and delight.

  Sydney stared out at the hills, then went on upstairs. She thought how ironic it was that a day made to order for two people’s occasion must be at the same time dealt out as a background for everyone else. She felt she had no energy and could never get as far as her room, choose her gloves, find her parasol and put on her hat. At the thought of anything beyond this, her prospect for the day, she faltered. With a sense of reprieve she let herself be waylaid by Cordelia Barry, who was hanging about the stairs.

  “I say, Miss Warren, it’s Thursday.”

  “Is it?”

  “I don’t go to the convent on Thursdays, I was wondering…I thought perhaps…No, but of course you wouldn’t, would you? I don’t suppose it would suit you at all…” Cordelia, with an air of infinite calculation looked sideways at Sydney under her lashes. Sydney, remembering the promise Cordelia had extracted, had a pang of acute nostalgia for that afternoon of the carnations, sundered by the eternity of a different mood.

  “I’m sorry, Cordelia: I’m going for a walk with Mr. Milton.”

  “O-oh! That is a pity. I suppose I couldn’t come, too? Oh no, but of course you wouldn’t want me, would you? But I don’t mind Mr. Milton if he doesn’t mind me, and I don’t see really why I shouldn’t come.”

  “Neither do I. I suppose—you can come along if you want to,” said Sydney, denying a sense that this was mischievous on her part and a shade dishonourable. At all events, to annoy somebody in her turn surely was owed to her? “He pretends,” she thought, “he professes to be fond of children. And it’s not as though we had anything to say to one another. We talk and talk and cancel out each other’s ideas until it all comes down to what it was before: that we do not agree. At the end of it all it is as though nothing had been said. I do not even understand myself any better at the end of it, and if that fails what is the use of conversation? Nothing will ever crystallize out of our being together; not so much as a notion.”

  She deliberated, however, for some moments over her hats and scarves and returned more than once to the looking-glass to review herself critically.

  Milton was waiting below in the lounge and his face did fall perceptibly as Sydney at last appearing at the turn of the stair indicated Cordelia, less in tow than towing, capering round possessively.

  “Oh!” said he, and, looking down at their two pairs of descending feet, could think of nothing better to say.

  Sydney wondered if her face had looked like that to Mrs. Kerr some moments ago: the comparison was distasteful. “This is Cordelia Barry,” she said wi
th bright hardiness, “the eldest of them. She would like to come with us; you don’t mind, do you?” To her surprise, Milton turned away without a word to take his walking-stick from the rack behind him.

  “You don’t mind, do you?” echoed Cordelia shrilly.

  “I’m very pleased, of course, if Miss Warren has invited you,” said Milton, holding open the door for them. But as Cordelia passed out behind Sydney with the self-assurance of a pet monkey he looked daggers at her profile.

  “I’ve just seen the Kerrs going off,” he said to Sydney as he came abreast with her. “Ronald looks brighter this morning: indeed, decidedly pleased with himself.” His pale grey eyes encountered Sydney’s thoughtfully.

  “Yes,” she said, “it’s nice to see them together.” She could tell by his tone that he was angry with her and was vaguely brandishing a weapon which he understood to be deadly but did not quite know how to use. He was nice-looking and at the moment unapproachable; she felt too spiritless to spar with him, and said, to propitiate, “It is a lovely day for a walk. I haven’t been for a walk for ages,” and looked at him gently. He noticed that her eyes had dark circles round them which were unbecoming and pitiful.

  Milton had woken up this morning with the determination to take Sydney for a walk. Nothing, in that moment of lucidity, had seemed simpler to arrange, and nothing could actually have been simpler, as things had turned out. He knew as well as she did, and would have been prepared to admit to her, that the time they had spent together up to now had been profitless and left them both sore. But he was convinced (the conviction emerged with what now seemed inevitability from the confusion and ill-spent emotion of last night) that a need corresponding to his must exist in her somewhere. A need, perhaps, less of each other exclusively than of something only attainable jointly, of something rooted in both. “But I do not know how to begin,” he had complained to himself till this morning. Now he felt a mastery of the situation to be possible. “If I could only make her understand,” he thought, “there would be time enough for her to care for me.” At any rate, here they were walking together. The presence of this confounded little girl he chose to discount.

  He turned, however, to talk to Cordelia kindly. They had chosen a road above the town for the sake of the view, and meant to drop down through the fishermen’s quarters and come home by the sea. Cordelia begged that she might be allowed to visit the graveyard. Milton observed conventionally that her taste seemed a little bit morbid.

  “Oh no, Mr. Milton; you really ought to see the graveyard here; it’s most uncommon and beautifully decorated. I suppose as a clergyman you’ve had so much experience of them that you get out of the way of noticing, but I am sure you’d be struck by the one here. It’s most blood-curdling.”

  “If you like that sort of thing,” said Milton in the somewhat top-heavy manner in which he could not help talking to children, “you should get your mother to take you to the Campo Santo at Pisa.” Cordelia evidently suspected from his tone that he did not think her taste sufficiently elevated, while Sydney remarked parenthetically that she did not see Mrs. Barry taking her children to Pisa.

  “I might, of course,” suggested Cordelia, “be sent to a convent there, to be taught to speak whatever they do speak. You see, my mother has got a perfect mania about languages. She would like me to be able to speak ninety-nine different ones even if I never learnt anything else. Though what, I should like to know, is the use of speaking ninety-nine languages if one had nothing to say? Now I think the nuns have no idea of teaching. I’ve never been so badly taught in my life. They flap about and go on and on at one, and half the time one can’t understand what they’re saying, and when one does it doesn’t make sense. I don’t wonder they got turned out of France—I’m not learning anything. However, the nuns think nothing matters so long as they go on being religious, and Mother thinks nothing matters so long as they go on being French, so there you are.”

  Sydney agreed that this was all very difficult. Milton, who wondered what would become of this little girl, was silent and looked so much depressed that Cordelia, to cheer him up, caught hold of his hand, and swinging herself along by it asked him whether he were fond of reading. “I am,” said she. “My two favourite authors are Rider Haggard and the Baroness von Hutten. Who are yours?”

  Milton hesitated, and Sydney and Cordelia looked at him with curiosity. Conscious of Sydney’s attention, he was still debating how to answer most fruitfully when she said to Cordelia across him: “I don’t think Mr. Milton ever reads at all. I never see him with a book.”

  “That’s not fair,” said Milton. “I read too much, as a rule. I came out here for…”

  “For what?” said Sydney, looking about her expressively.

  “For people,” said Milton unwarily.

  “Oh!” they both exclaimed. “What an extraordinary thing to come for!—To come here for,” Sydney added.

  “Don’t you know any people? Do you like them so much?” Cordelia inquired. “How funny! I only like people in books who only exist when they matter. I think it is being in danger or terribly in love, discovering treasure or revenging yourself that is thrilling and for that you have to have people. But people in hotels, hardly alive…!”

  “Well, you don’t know what may not be happening to them,” Sydney, emerging from her detachment, felt it necessary to point out instructively. The road, a favourite promenade of the natives and visitors, rounded the face of a high embankment; they could have been looked down upon from the terraces of villas on one hand, while on the other they were level with the tree-tops: the roofs of the town were below. Milton, distractingly engaged in conversation by Cordelia, and Sydney, released but not unfriendly, looking ahead of her, they emerged on to a gravelled plateau overlooking the sea. Here some seats had been placed, under umbrella pines forming a kind of pergola, to promote contemplation of the bright panorama of coast. Beyond, the remoter hills were still snow-capped; others ran down to the sea in a succession of fine blue noses, headland behind headland fading towards France. The earth had this brilliant morning a kind of independent luminousness; there were still no shadows anywhere and the rocks, flat clustered roofs and campanili seemed to shed light as well as to receive it. For miles the bright-blue swelling glassiness of the sea received the coast gracefully among ripples that frayed continually into foam, slipped back into themselves, and slid on again. When Sydney, Mr. Milton and Cordelia had seated themselves on a bench, the fleshy spears of some cacti fringing the plateau darkly occupied the foreground of their vision. “Ah!” said Milton, taking a deep breath of the air which here seemed to him stronger and fresher. Sydney was glad of his enjoyment of the day which to herself still seemed to be spilt out wastefully.

  “Doesn’t everything look as though it was cut out and painted?” exclaimed Cordelia, joyously swinging her legs.

  “Cordelia!” said Milton, looking at her with an air of inspiration, “do you like nuts?”

  “Very much. But I get plenty of them.”

  “Or figs?”

  “The seeds are bad for any teeth.”

  “Well, dates?”

  “I adore dates. I’m not encouraged to eat them much because they’re stickies. But I do adore dates,” said Cordelia thoughtfully. “I wonder if I shall ever eat a date again?”

  “You may at any moment,” said Milton, and he told her that there was a little fruit-shop that he knew of, just below, where she could buy for the three lire he proposed to give her enough dates for them all. “I adore dates, too,” he added. “The shop is on the left, by the tram-terminus, and they will talk any language you like.” He gave the child a slight push that was unnecessary, for she was already sliding off the bench. After a side-glance at Sydney, who had opened her mouth to protest, she fled to some concrete steps and with a yelp of excitement vanished down them.

  “But she isn’t allowed to run about the town by herself,�
�� said Sydney, vexed, “and she certainly isn’t allowed to eat between meals—she’s very much be-Nannied. Whatever made you do that?”

  “She’s not the sort of child to get talked to, and I’m sure she has an inside like an ostrich. If her people encourage her to attach herself to strangers like that, they’ll have to take the consequences. I sent her off because she’s been the most infernal nuisance all the morning.” He was crimson.

  “You feel strongly about it,” said Sydney, laughing at him, bathed in sunshine and forgetful of perils to Cordelia. “Moral indignation?”

  He did not interrupt her, but something in his silence, his arrested consciousness of the gap Cordelia’s disappearance left between them and the clear view they had of each other, made her interrupt herself.

  “I’m sorry she has bored you,” she said nervously. “I really ought not to have brought her.”

  “No, I don’t think you ought. I asked you to come for a walk; I didn’t ask you to collect an expedition.”

  “Well, you see—” she began, then stopped again. Their conspicuous if isolated situation, the matter-of-fact sunshine and the sense that with all said and done they were English Visitors, he and she, sitting appropriately on a bench before a view designed for their admiration, had up to now kept her purely impersonal. So objective did she feel that she imagined a delighted Commune gazing down at the two of them: “English Visitors.” In the expansion of the free air she had laughed and felt that neither of them were realler than the scenery. Now, at some tone in his voice she was surprised by a feeling that some new mood, not of her own, was coming down over them like a bell-glass. The bright reality of the view, the consciousness of the unimportant, safe little figures were shut away from her; they were always there but could no longer help. She felt the bell-glass finally descend as he, after a glance round at the other benches and over the edge of the plateau, said quickly, “The thing is, Sydney, aren’t I ever to know you?”