The Hotel

by Elizabeth Bowen

  “I don’t see what you mean,” she said, suffocated by his manner. “Like everybody else, we see each other every day. Which was what, according to you, we are here for.”

  Milton, losing touch with her, lost touch with himself and was terrified. He had said, “Yes, but I was wondering if you would marry me,” before he had had time to think, on an instinct that he must get out something at any price and have it there to stand by. She had understood what he said before he did, and answered: “You are very good, but no: I’m afraid it’s impossible”; so that he had proposed and been rejected before he had entirely realized that they were not still quarrelling about Cordelia. When this did dawn on him he turned to her in dismay. “I’m afraid,” he said with a return to his usual manner, “that that was terribly awkward of me.”

  “Oh no, not at all,” said Sydney, smiling shakily. “It’s supposed to be very gratifying.”

  “I did not mean to have said that today, I need hardly explain. It was unforgivable of me. But I suppose while we are on the subject that there is no further harm in my asking you, whether you can—as I think they call it—give me any hope?”

  “No, I’m afraid not,” said Sydney, feeling she had been asked something so preposterous that the answer was a matter for her common sense alone and that further inquiries need not be instituted.

  “Very well,” said Milton and the bell-glass lifted, though it hung above them. She felt as though this image must have presented itself to him also, for he drew as though released from constriction another deep breath of air. After staring straight ahead at the sea for a moment he said, “Thank you”: she did not know for what, she supposed for her courtesy. This implied, she felt, a dismissal: a “You may go now, I have done with you!”

  13

  Cemetery

  “But I thought he liked dates!” cried Cordelia. Panting at the top of the steps she stood clutching her package, appalled, to see Milton walk away rapidly in the direction from which they had come. She had run both ways so as to waste as little time as possible away from her friends, and she couldn’t help feeling that the escape of Milton in so short an interval could not but be due to some mismanagement on the part of Miss Warren, who now alone on the bench sat staring before her, smiling uneasily. There had seemed no risk in leaving him for a moment; he had had an appearance of being rooted there, or better perhaps, tethered.

  “But he said he liked dates,” she repeated, bringing up reason to support her astonishment.

  The remark, which was not answered, seemed further to contribute to a gloom that had taken the place of the affable Mr. Milton and which, momentarily, to both their perceptions, darkened the sunshine. Miss Warren now rose abruptly, shook out her pleated skirts and for the first time unfurling her parasol tilted it from her shoulder at an angle with a concentration upon these details of her elegance which implied dismally to Cordelia the exclusion of Mr. Milton even from memory. With a renewed, more genuine smile to Cordelia she suggested that they should continue their walk. Except for a few arcs and triangles in the gravel before the bench the friendly clergyman might never have existed.

  They followed the loops of the road in their gradual descent towards the cemetery. Sydney was talkative; they discussed novels, the difficulties of arithmetic and the superiority of cats to dogs. Once she turned and looked back at the benches as though horrified by the thought that they would still be there. Cordelia asked, “Have you forgotten something?” and she replied, “Oh no,” in confusion. It transpired that Mr. Milton had been recalled by an engagement of some importance, till then forgotten. Cordelia, who was able to estimate the probable importance of any engagement locally, said nothing. She suspected him to be a feeble walker, and moreover a man of quick appetites as quickly forgotten. She ate his dates and ceased to regret him; allowing the stones to accumulate in one cheek and spitting them out by half-dozens with great force. She proceeded downhill beside Sydney with a hop-skip-and-a-jump, kicking up the powdery dust so that it swirled round her feet and, settling, iced the top of her shoes. She derived keen pleasure from this, also from a sense of the enviableness of walking with this appearance of intimacy with the distinguished Miss Warren. She hoped in vain they might be met by some of her friends.

  “I do think two’s better company,” she said at last, “but I hope this hasn’t been a disappointment to you?”

  “It’s a pity, of course,” said Sydney, who could not help feeling it would have been more vigorous, more admirable on Milton’s part to have continued the walk with them. She believed herself able to recognize in what had occurred simply another of his nervous impulses; there had been, she was convinced, no impetus of emotion. In the unique encounter of eyes they had had, as with raised hat he was turning away from her, he had shown her nothing of what he felt but astonishment: a profound astonishment, at which of them she could not be sure. Those pale-grey eyes with their penetrating blankness were still vivid to her, but though she now intensely desired to reproach herself she could not wring from her memories any sense of his emotion. She came to doubt that she had witnessed anything more painful than the momentary topple of a shy but very potent vanity that had over-reached itself. A suspicion of having been casually snatched at hardened her towards him. He had not hurt her, but he had set the pain of the earlier morning free to renew itself; a nerve was insistently throbbing. She became aware with the knife-edge of a first realization, of each implication of the words, expression, gesture with which Mrs. Kerr had detached herself and in smiling expectation gone past her downstairs.

  In such a mood she was not proof against the ordinary reflections on mortality as she looked with Cordelia through the cemetery gates. To see better, they pressed their faces up against the cold bars. Cordelia for the last ten minutes had been hurrying, her whole self narrowed down; she had become silent with apprehension. She was tortured by an expectation that the cemetery with its ornaments might have rolled itself up and vanished, or worse, that it might fail in its pungent appeal, so that she would not this time experience what she had learned to describe as a frisson as she gazed through the gloom of the trees down that distracting prospective of monuments. Also, she had made herself responsible for the reactions of Miss Warren from the moment they turned down the suggestive cul-de-sac away from the sea, walled in steeply and vanishing at a succession of angles round the palm-tufted bases of the hills.

  The cemetery seemed quite deserted. Gashes of overcharged daylight pressed in through the cypresses on to the graves: a hard light bestowing no grace and exacting each detail. In the shade of the pillared vaults round the walls what already seemed the dusk of the evening had begun to thicken, but the rank and file of small crosses staggered arms wide in the arraignment of sunshine. In spite of the brooding repose of the trees a hundred little shrill draughts came between them, and spurting across the graves made the decorations beloved of Cordelia creak and glitter. A wreath of black tin pansies swung from the arm of a cross with a clatter of petals, trailing colourless ribbons; a beaded garland had slipped down slantwise across the foot of a grave. Candles for the peculiar glory of the lately dead had been stuck in the unhealed earth: here and there a flame in a glass shade writhed, opaque in the sunshine. Above all this uneasy rustle of remembrance, white angels poised forward to admonish. The superlatives crowding each epitaph hissed out their “issimi” and “issime” from under the millinery of death. Everywhere, in ribbons, marbles, porcelains was a suggestion of the salon, and nowhere could the significance of death have been brought forward more startlingly.

  “I must say,” remarked Cordelia, “I do like Italian graves; they look so much more lived in.”

  “They would certainly be more difficult than others to get clear of,” said Sydney; and quickly, in unthinking perturbation, she pushed open the cemetery gates, as though she were on a message to a friend’s house, and hurried in. Once among the graves she stood with Cordelia behind her, l
ooking round again. She was oppressed by the thought, less of death than of the treachery of a future that must give one to this ultimately. She was not accustomed to consider death as other than as a spontaneous fine gesture. Now it hinted itself as something to be imposed on one, the last and most humiliating of those deprivations she had begun to experience. She thought, “It is all very well to escape to the future and think it will always be that; but this is the end of the future.” Looking up to watch a bird fly slowly across the sky, she realized that living as she had lived she had been investing the future with more and more of herself. The present, always slipping away, was ghostly, every moment spent itself in apprehension of the next, and these apprehensions, these faded expectancies cumbered her memory, crowded out her achievements and promised to make the past barren enough should she have to turn back to it.

  James Milton’s attempt to come farther into her life, to regions by his acquaintance of them surely sufficiently ice-bound, appeared in the light of present considerations heroic: he had been staking his future. But his future, she recollected, spun itself off into infinity. He did not acknowledge finality anywhere; this made him leisurely-seeming and easily generous. His impulses in any direction were not intensified by her own sense of urgency. In the light shed serenely down from that ultimate spaciousness he was covering life at an equable pace. He presented himself an undriven, a comforting figure. She saw him conducting a funeral: voluminous, fluttering, milk-white, leaning like one of these angels over the yawn of a grave to scatter his handful of earth, his tribute to mortality; with the expression, a submerged beam, of this having in a cognizant Mind its order. The word “death” used in his presence would have a slow-dying ring to it, to which one would be able to feel him subconsciously listening. She contemplated with a faint inclination a life shared with someone for whom it would have this overtone of significance.

  And to be wanted! She remembered in what a mood she had climbed the stairs that morning, and she looked round her at the now for ever undesired dead. She tried to recall the feel of his handclasp and to imagine the touch of his lips. With a sigh: “I am very ordinary!” she tried over any terms of endearment which seemed within the range of his manner, listening for the reverberation which, like the word death, she felt they would have for him.

  Cordelia sat on the end of a grave among a little city of glass domes, looking up intelligently. The child had read so many novels that she might well have been expected to know what there was to be known about the affairs of the heart. Feeling the bright eyes of Cordelia fixed for some moments upon her, Sydney began to wonder whether her lips had been moving just now and, if so, what Cordelia had thought; she found that she might have gone so far as what in Cordelia’s novels would be called murmuring. Of this the child would approve too readily. For the moment, however, her attention did not seem to have wandered from the graves, and she was determined not to allow Sydney’s to do so either.

  “Did you know,” she began, “that it costs a great deal of money to be buried permanently?”

  “It never occurred to me.”

  “A girl at the convent had a grandmother who died and she told me that the grandmother’s last request was to be buried permanently. If you aren’t—and it is fearfully expensive—they come and dig you up again. Italians never think of this; they are most improvident. They spend a lot of money trimming up the graves—I must say, they do do it very nicely—and then after all their trouble the cemetery people come and dig their relation up again, because the cemetery is too small, and people keep on dying and dying, and they have to go in somewhere, if you see what I mean.”

  “Oh!” said Sydney, and glanced behind as though she might expect to see the new dead jostling one another in the gate. She felt that it had been a mistake to have come here at all, even to recover herself. This high-walled place with its one gate might well be a trap for her, and she wondered what she should do if, instead of the dead, Mrs. Kerr and Ronald were to come in suddenly talking and laughing (she could see them) as they stepped over the graves. Why they should come to the cemetery she could not imagine, except that her dread of them, even in thought, might well prove a magnet to their unconsciousness.

  “Of course, of course,” she said loudly, “people must keep on dying. They should have made allowances for that.”

  “There is a rubbish heap at the back of the chapel. If you’d come with me I could show you.”

  “What a horrid little ghoul you are!” Sydney said mechanically. She found that in actually dealing with children theories collapse and one must retreat on the conventions. But when Cordelia in her reasonable little voice objected “Why?” she could think of nothing to answer. There seemed no reason, even conventionally, why she should impose on Cordelia the adult idea of “morbidity.”

  “People wouldn’t like you to talk about being dug up,” she said at last weakly, “though it seems to me a very practical arrangement. The Italians are realists.”

  “What is a realist?” asked Cordelia, while, having gathered up some china flowers lying about on the ground she stuck these by their wire stalks into the band of her hat. “Haven’t I made my hat smart? What are realists?”

  “Ask Mr. Milton,” Sydney said promptly.

  “Is he—”

  “No, of course not. But he will tell you what unenlightened people they are.”

  “He is a long-winded man,” said Cordelia, looking at her friend sideways.

  “Not at all,” said Sydney irritably, “and, anyway, what do you know about it?”

  “Oh, nothing, nothing at all. I don’t know what ‘long-winded’ means, even.”

  “Then you shouldn’t—”

  “It was a sporting risk, after all,” said Cordelia gravely, and Sydney, rebuked, wished that she could be so honest. “Where,” she asked, “do they put the English?”

  “Over there; we have a very nice corner reserved. I’ll show you, shan’t I? There’s a little girl of just my age—musn’t the people in her hotel have been upset about it? I often think—” she brooded.

  “Yes, I dare say you do. I often used to. But it wouldn’t be much fun, really, dying to impress other people, or to be picturesque or pitied.”

  “I suppose not, really. But I couldn’t help just imagining, that day they were so stuffy with us ’cause we broke the lift. I put my tongue out after Mrs. Hillier when she stopped and been sarcastic at me in the passage, and I thought ‘Yah! if I like you’d be sobbing and sniffing tomorrow and putting flowers—carnations—on my coffin and saying what a darling little girl I’d been!’ ”

  They went on to look at the English end of the cemetery, where more discreet memorials had been hewn into shapes better suited to granite than to Carrara marble. All round the cypresses waited. How complete the Riviera was, thought Sydney, one could even die here. Birds were rare, she started as one dipped from a tree and flew zigzag with a shrill cry, skimming the gravestones. Like an echo of the bird’s cry they heard the creak of a hinge, as the gate hidden by trees was pushed open decorously. Sydney could feel her heart thump as they listened and waited.

  Presently Miss Pinkerton appeared between the cypresses, conscious even of the dead, her face composed into an expression of nobility. She looked to left and right of her through the graves, and though she saw Cordelia and Sydney she did not seem at first to recognize them. They might have been figures in a crowd. Did they intrude?…She was carrying narcissi. She approached: the path allowed her no alternative, but she approached serenely; the encounter did not seem distasteful. “Good morning,” she returned in a low voice when Sydney bowed. They turned to leave her.

  “Such a lovely spot,” remarked Miss Pinkerton, not unwilling to detain them.

  “Lovely,” Sydney agreed, “so peaceful!”

  “A friend of mine,” said Miss Pinkerton, looking at them with her mild august eyes, “has a cousin here.” She ind
icated the destination of the narcissi. Sydney stooped to read the inscription.

  “He was an Admiral,” said Miss Pinkerton, and sighed again.

  “Isn’t he an Admiral still?” exclaimed Cordelia, whom Sydney, pulling by the hand abruptly, began to lead away.

  “You shouldn’t have asked that, Cordelia.”

  “But why shouldn’t I?—Oh, Miss Warren, don’t hurry so! One would think you were running away from the Admiral—why shouldn’t I have asked that?”

  “I suppose,” said Sydney after some reflection, “because Miss Pinkerton doesn’t know.”

  14

  Music

  Suddenly the group round the doors had dispersed and everybody was leaning over the drawing-room balcony. Above, all the way up the front of the Hotel, faces blossomed out unexpectedly, flinging away like veils the first oblivion of siesta. One would have thought a note of music had never been heard before or that the man into whose deep mouth they were all gazing down were himself Orpheus.

  He plucked from his mandolin shaking notes which the tensity and blaze of noon and the gathered silence of his audience did invest with a strangeness, and sang while the whole of him quivered. He did not cease to parade beneath the balcony while maintaining fountainwise the spout of song. The child with red skirts clutching his coat-tails echoed, with the addition here and there of skip or quaver, his strut and his song. Her face, with a smile’s general glitter across it, was upturned to the balcony, eyes closed as though she could feel the benevolence of visitors descend upon the lids like rain.