The Hotel

by Elizabeth Bowen

  The airs were not classical. He sang “Funiculi-Funicula” and “O Sole Mio,” and presently (encouraging his little girl to dance for their English friends and quickening the measure till her brief skirts spun out into a disc) a song about the beauties of a doll.

  Ladies on either side of him began pressing Ronald closer, and more and more people came out through the window behind and leaned across his shoulders. He could hear, when he kept his head low, quite an orchestra of excited breathing.

  Ah ch’è bella la bambola mia

  Quasi, quasi più bella di me

  Un vestito di ràso celeste

  Un cappello di—

  “Splendid!” somebody cried out, and the wave of admiration mounting behind Ronald broke into clapping of hands and laughter. “This balcony,” he remarked to his mother under cover of this, “is like a print of a public execution.” He shone with an exhilaration induced by the music in spite of himself, but preserved his expression of disillusionment. “It will bust in a minute or two, and serve them all right for watching anything so beastly.”

  “But, Ronald, beastly?” She turned to him in consternation, innocent as never before of irony.

  “The little devil’s blind,” said Ronald, pointing down and moving his shoulders angrily, for there were two what he called great fat women leaning on his back.

  The word spread somehow, and when the child’s eyes again dropped open, then lazily shut, several people were alert to notice that the eyes were china-white. The minstrel, appreciative of the interest thus created, pulled his companion forward and stopped in his song to advertise her with a flourish. “Cieca, cieca!” he exclaimed, and straddled shining up at them, all teeth. The little girl, in the ecstasy of this, flung her arms out and began to dance again, whirling at such velocity that it was as though she tore the music from the mandolin to follow her. Ripples of “Shame” and “Cruel” crept down the balcony, but from the windows above the first drops of a shower of nickel were spinning already. The shower thickened, and there was for a moment or two in the air a continuous glitter. The little girl paused leaning against the wind of her movement and seemed to listen in ecstasy. She snatched up handfuls of air and surrendered them laughingly, then flung herself with cries of delight to and fro on the gravel and, groping, gathered up her harvest. There followed some heavier coins, the escape of a sigh and a faint burst of horrified laughter.

  “But she is happy,” maintained Sydney, standing back against the frame of the window, and a voice she could not trace but believed to be Milton’s supported her with “Yes, yes, she must be.”

  Ronald wriggled beneath the weight of the two good women, but could not extricate himself in time to see who, on either occasion, had spoken. He would have given much to do so. All today there had been phrases, broken-off, exclamatory, rising stark like this out of a hush or a hum with a significance for him foreign to their context, with startling relevance to something in his mind.

  He pushed his way back into the drawing-room, now quite vacant and in yellow shade from the awning. He sat down on a sofa, leaned back, crossing his legs, and waited for his mother to appear in the window, as she almost immediately did, and after a moment’s blank stare into the dusk to perceive him and come over royally. She did concede, and generously he could approve the concession, a few words back over her shoulder, perhaps to Miss Warren out there. Then she sat beside him, most beautiful in the half-light, her attitude settling into complete repose as silk settles into its folds. She had still a little amusement, a faint perturbation, but she was allowing these ripples to widen and fade in her mind. It would be clear of them soon, a smooth consciousness on to which he hoped to stream like light.

  They were still, after this lifelong strangeness to one another, at a stage when the novelty of being together made each seeking out of one another unique. A meeting was in the nature of a rendezvous, and the mise en scène queerly important. The isolation of rendezvous made indifferent such publicity as that of a bench, a waiting-room, or this rigid sofa pasted square to the wall of a drawing-room. As they sat here, Ronald exulted.

  “And now?” his mother said, after some moments in which the music, having come to an end, the shoal swept past from the balcony with a sympathetic aversion of glances. A lust for spectacle which the little blind girl had aroused was gratified by them passingly, and Ronald knew that many people had considered them “touching.” The room empty once more, it was as though Mrs. Kerr had had to expostulate with herself for being too happy. “And now?” she resumed with an air of obligation.

  “Why ‘now’?” said Ronald. “Can’t we stay here? I mean, unless you want to sleep. What is this room, anyway?” He looked round at the armchairs all facing one way with awful intelligence.

  “I think quite a number of women sit here.”

  “Obviously. But I’m not afraid of an atmosphere.”

  “Dear Ronald, you seem to be thickening. I was always alarmed and impressed by the idea that you were afraid of atmospheres: that they were dangerous.”

  He had been alarmed and impressed by the idea that she had not an inkling of his subtleties; or rather, would not exert herself to perceive them. But since his arrival at this hotel, he had been amazed by the fineness of her perceptions, not only from moment to moment but by a sudden vista of them along the past, perceptions so delicate, appreciations so faultless that it could only have been some lack of an equal fineness that had made him suffer an infinite deprivation. Now when she said that he was thickening he was able to smile at her.

  “I suppose I must have amused my mother?”

  “Ronald, you were so subtle. I was inadequate.”

  “I was inadequate. Shut up!” He shook her arm gently.

  “I can’t help laughing. Do you know, I—I respect you? Why should I have to confess this instead of announcing it? I do respect you,” she repeated, saying the word diffidently and looking back on what she had said with apparent misgiving.

  “As a matter of fact,” said Ronald gravely, “I don’t think we mind being respected. I think, Mother, if you don’t mind my saying so, that it is a mistake ever to confuse us with your fin-de-siècle friends. Of course a remark like that would have a thousand satirical reverberations in—say—a Wilde play. But really, one is able to take it quite simply.”

  “That’s where you all are so wonderful,” said Mrs. Kerr, with the deep thoughtfulness she brought to bear on his every remark. “Of course, I do date hopelessly, as Sydney says.”

  “Sydney? Oh, the girl, yes. Was she asked?”

  “Ronald, you’re unkind. Don’t say ‘gurl’ like that. I thought you’d like her; she’s immensely clever.”

  Ronald was surprised to realize that the fact that he did not like Sydney, of which he was himself only now aware, must long have been obvious to his mother. “If she were not a ‘gurl,’ she wouldn’t be here. Anyway, isn’t she rather unnatural? The young Lawrences have at least a certain crude attractiveness.”

  “She’s been crude enough to care for me.”

  “I thought you couldn’t tolerate schärmerie.”

  “Oh, but that suggests the backfisch. Could one be ungenerous enough not to take what is offered one finely? Don’t be tiresome to her; do justify yourself. She’s prepared to find you rather tiresome.”

  “Was she asked?”

  “She thinks twenty is a tiresome age. She’s twenty-two, you see. Anyway, don’t let’s bother about her now. This ‘respect’ that I’ve just discovered and you’ve authorized is so very comfortable to me. It does please me so—you may have felt this, but I haven’t put it into words because these large admissions are embarrassing—that you’ve come down to me from Germany, given up Germany. I hope it didn’t cost a lot?”

  Ronald looked embarrassed.

  “I meant in development. Pictures. Music.”

  “Oh,
those, no. Anyway, Mother, as I should have explained” (an irritated consciousness of having already done so at great length brought a note into his voice) “those were purely secondary—”

  “Of course they were. How dense I’ve been again, I mean; the Rentenmark.” She laid a hand on his knee, leaned back her head against the wall and, he believed, even blushed her contrition; yet this was all said with such a vivid disclosure, such a flash of her personality, that he was overwhelmed. In spite of a convinced Femininism which should have armoured him, Ronald never failed to be overwhelmed by sheer femininity. Not since little boyhood did he remember such flashes from her; she had seemed for those middle years rather withdrawn and perverse; in her very elegance, abstract.

  He stuttered his reasons for coming from Germany, sadly abashed. He told her how she had distracted him by a letter now and then, or a memory, from his regard of the economic confusion upon which he had so admirably concentrated himself. Her reprehensible undistress had been a constant temptation. Also he had not been able to see when else in the press of the next two years he could be with her for long. Also, he admitted scrupulously, it did happen to fit in very well with his project of meeting the Byngs in Sicily.

  He did not, however, admit to a childish feeling of homelessness or to having been lonely in Munich and bored in Dresden, while several people had been rude to him in Berlin. He did just glance for a moment tentatively at his mother, then he gulped the admission down; he drew in his feet and stared a little haggardly round the drawing-room. He may have guessed they were not likely to come nearer to each other than these precipitate little plunges into intimacy, this succession of rendezvous, would bring them.

  Round him stripes prevailed, on the tight brocades of the upholstery, on the mats methodically diamond-wise on the polish; stripes were repeated innumerably in the satiny wallpaper and the lace blinds over the door. One had a sense of being caged into this crowded emptiness. This seemed the strangest place to sit and make demands on motherhood, the strangest place for motherhood, answering, to make itself palpable. He felt impelled to ask his mother some fantastic question: “What do I mean to you?” or “What part do I play in your life?” or even (a final outrage), “Do you care for me?” (This he could not remember that she had ever avowed.) Even were the putting of such questions conceivable, a direct reply from her here was not; there must ensue some cataclysm, the stretched brocades would rip audibly, the potbellied vases crack. His most daring conception of an intimacy was that there would be freedom to ask or to answer such questions; though he also conceived that in such an intimacy the reserves would have trebly their value.

  “It will be dull for you here,” said his mother, interpreting his vague scrutiny. “I do nothing at all all day long, so I haven’t had time for a feeling of rootlessness, but if I’d known you were coming out I’d have taken a villino. Sydney found me the nicest little villino stuck to the side of a rock and wanted to take it for both of us, but it would have meant the dear muzzy cousin with the inside coming, too, and that Sydney wouldn’t consider; though she couldn’t for a moment, either, consider leaving the cousin. So the idea dropped. A pity, I think now,” Mrs. Kerr said reflectively.

  “A disappointment for Sydney.”

  “I’m afraid they seem inevitable. She is a very disappointable girl. But it really is a pity from our point of view, because she’d be moving out now and you would be moving in. How long is it, I wonder, since you and I have kept house? Perhaps I have deprived you of something?—I cannot feel that I have.”

  “The idea that you should what is called ‘live for me’ is quite barbarous,” said Ronald reassuringly.

  “Yet I cannot disentangle myself from the idea that it isn’t right for a woman not to be a little barbarous.”

  “Being rational,” Ronald considered, “should take them as far. You see, they can…they can canal the natural forces—”

  “Oh! But I don’t feel as if I had got any natural forces,” said Mrs. Kerr, alarmed. “And—you know, Ronald, you would hate me to be rational. It’s forbidding and horrible in a woman, I think.”

  “But one does want them to understand themselves.”

  “Oh, you know you wouldn’t be attracted by a woman who did!”

  “Do attractions really matter so much?” asked Ronald in the strained voice of one in whom a whole torrent of convictions banks itself up behind the narrow escape of speech, impending its own exit.

  “My darling…Shall we have to be so very hygienic and bald?”

  He could put nothing he felt into words.

  His mother took up one of his hands, turned it over thoughtfully, then laying it down on her knee pulled each finger gently, spreading each out and feeling the tip with her own. “Nice hands,” she said with a sigh. “I do wish you hadn’t had to go to Germany.”

  That “hygienic” had stung Ronald. It was like getting a splash in the eye from a disinfectant. “I suppose,” he said, as though he were speaking to her in the dark and had to guess her position, “that you think I don’t like things to be beautiful.”

  “Don’t be chilly with me—I didn’t mean that. I’m frivolous, you see, and I can’t express myself. I only do mean that I think you and Sydney are a little inclined to overestimate the value of what you call ‘truth’ (though I do agree it is very important), and that this does tend to produce in your conversation rather an atmosphere of white tiles.”

  “It must be depressing for you to have a son like an operating theatre,” said Ronald with bitter mirth, and amended, more fatally apt, “or a bathroom.”

  Mrs. Kerr leaned her head against the wall again and shut her eyes; her lids remained closed as though she already were sleeping, and a faint and very mysterious smile suggested to him for some seconds a profound slumber. With an idea that it might be forbidden to sleep in the drawing-room (could one have imagined it possible to do so) he got protestingly up and stood over her.

  “May I go to sleep?” she said without moving. “Even for you, darling, I can’t do without my siesta.”

  “Tell me before you go quite away,” he exclaimed, “if I’ve been boorish and horrible?”

  “You’ve been lovely,” breathed out Mrs. Kerr on a sigh, and behind the mask of her face she perceptibly retreated from consciousness, in the attitude of the Beata Beatrix. Looking down at her he went back through his memory, past his admiration for Rossetti, to the day when at six years old he had called his mother “My Beautiful.” As she did not stir and, the Hotel being absolutely silent, there seemed no danger of anybody coming in to disturb her, he sat down again silently on a small chair. From here he could see, to the left of her sofa, the long strip of awning, orange against the sun, and, under it, the blue line of the sea, with clotted geraniums swinging down from their boxes. Across his panel of sea a fishing-boat made a slow progress; this had vanished behind the window-frame and another had followed it before Mrs. Kerr opened her eyes again or Ronald stirred from the profound meditation into which, with folded legs and limply hanging arms, he had relapsed.

  15

  Lucid

  Veronica was in despair. She slipped, after a doubtful tap, round Sydney’s door and, professing acute desire for sympathy and consolation, sank without further explanation into the billows of plump eiderdown on Sydney’s bed, kicked her white suede shoes across the room and flung her hat after them.

  “The floor hasn’t been swept,” said Sydney, looking up from her book. Notwithstanding the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon she had been enjoying Jude the Obscure. She did not mind Veronica coming in, but wished she did not have to talk to her.

  “I don’t care if I don’t put any of them on again,” announced Veronica in the toneless accents of sincerity. “They are abominable.”

  “I think the clothes you wear are nice,” said Sydney. “Have you got a pain?”

  “A
s a matter of fact, I hate all my clothes. And I don’t know what is to become of me. Does it ever occur to you that being alive is a mistake?” She swung a stockinged foot and sighed. “I do wish,” she said, “that I had brought my knitting. I do think conversation when one hasn’t got anything to do with one’s hands feels fearfully awkward, don’t you? And I really should like to talk, if you don’t mind. You’re not doing anything—I mean, only reading?”

  “Why don’t you go out?”

  Veronica explained that she was sick of other people’s faces, and was certain, comfortably, that Sydney would understand what she meant. Sitting here in Sydney’s room, to which she hadn’t yet been invited, among Sydney’s possessions, gave her a feeling of being listened to which she would never have had on neutral ground. Ordinarily, this would not have affected her one way or the other; she herself never listened very attentively to what other people were saying. The gist of their remarks was enough for her. This was a north room; the morning’s sun was reflected back to it faintly from the face of the hill. Veronica preferred her own room, and thought that it was just like Sydney to be at the back of the first floor instead of the front of the fourth, with a balcony and sunshine. She, Joan and Eileen shared a room with sloping ceilings that resembled a rabbit-hutch. This, she thought, looking round her, was rarefied but rather depressing.

  “Does it seem to you,” she said weightily, “that this world is entirely divided into rather stupid men and very silly women? And that the stupid are all one will ever have to hope for and that the silly are all one can ever become?”