The Hotel

by Elizabeth Bowen

  “I don’t think Sydney would like that at all,” said Milton, and was made to feel he had transgressed some delicate code by this hint of the proprietary.

  “I had an impression,” said Mrs. Kerr diffidently, “that Sydney always liked talking about anything she was perfectly sure of.”

  “In spite of being rather a quiet person?”

  “Quite compatibly with being rather a quiet person,” said Mrs. Kerr, illuminating, showing up his petty irritation with her lovely smile. “I didn’t, you know propose that poor Sydney, who has so very lately, as one might say, graduated, should deliver to Ronald a kind of extension lecture. I just vaguely conceived that she might make him feel what a silly, immature little gander he still is.”

  “I wish she would,” said Ronald, “it would be so cinquecento; a disquisition on Amor by an inspired young woman.” He looked carefully at Milton, trying, evidently, to consider him in the role of an inspiration.

  “You have picked up ‘cinquecento’ from Miss Fitzgerald. It becomes a rather silly expression, Ronald dear, when it’s used so often and so indiscriminately. But ‘an inspired young woman,’ ” she decided, turning to Milton, “is good. Don’t you find your inspired young woman rather lovely?”

  “Rather lovely,” echoed Milton, as though learning a lesson.

  “Sydney in love…” mused Mrs. Kerr, and as though stepping back from the brink of some profound experience not her own, she said, “I envy you!”

  Milton encountered Ronald’s clear, rather curious eye; they stared at one another profoundly. “One is fortunate,” Milton said, and a stabbing sense of this irony made him shut his eyes sharply for a moment, as though the light were too much. When he looked up again Mrs. Kerr’s son was still searching him, and put forward in explanation of this: “Do excuse me, please, staring so awfully, but I’ve never heard anyone point-blank profess themselves happy before.” It was on the tip of the clergyman’s tongue to protest that he hadn’t; however, he merely said blandly: “Oh, indeed? If you care to, do certainly look!”

  “You ought,” Ronald said, “to feel very responsible.”

  “—Ronald darling, you’re not Mr. Milton’s father.”

  “But I didn’t propose,” said her son, flushing hotly, “to apply the remark to Miss Warren. I merely meant he must feel very responsible for himself. A state of mind—”

  “Exactly,” said Mrs. Kerr briskly and waved him aside. She appeared to be rather oppressed by her Ronald; the boy became pompous. She looked at his overcast face in perplexity, puzzling herself again, it appeared, over some ancient error. Far back in the faraway history of Ronald—possibly in the espousal of Ronald’s father—there had been a mistake. She looked down the lounge. “Look, Ronald,” she cried with a happy inspiration, “there is one of the Lawrences, one of your curious girls. She is standing and looking too languishing, down by the door. She has seen you, and worse, she has seen you having something to eat. It would be nice to go over and talk to her, if you don’t mind. I don’t like to look selfish, you know.”

  She watched her son threading his way down the lounge, however, with such wistfulness, such an air of bereavement, and returned her attention to Milton with so courageous a smile, and with eyes for an instant so vacant, that he could not but believe that she had made a real sacrifice in sending Ronald away. He reproached himself for a suspicion of being closed in on, and of their oasis of silence, light and solitude having become for him a rather remote and dangerous island. Her personality had a curious way of negativing her surroundings, so that unless one made instant resort to one’s senses the background faded for one and one conjured up in one’s half-consciousness another that expressed her better, that was half an exhalation from herself. The crude and vivid glitter of the lounge, the hard light striking with an impact almost audible on glazed stuffs, noisy colours, reddened skins, the urgent hum of talk, all these relaxed their grip on Milton’s consciousness, subsided. A feeling was produced in him of tempered light and clear gloom and of a window open on profoundly dark and rather restless trees as Mrs. Kerr said thoughtfully: “Religion, I suppose, is an immense outlet for gratitude.”

  “One would be sorry to make use of one’s religion as an outlet for anything.”

  She retracted. “The psychologists have led one so astray.”

  “The fallacy’s older than they are.”

  “I suppose so,” agreed Mrs. Kerr. She went on with an effort, going against, obviously, all the fine instincts she had for reserve. “You have felt, I dare say, that force of—of religion in Sydney. I’ve had to draw back there, because I don’t, as you see, understand. One never would hold her, lacking that.”

  “I don’t see her ever as a person to be absolutely held.”

  She was moved by a deep-down amazement, caught a breath as though she must have misheard him and lifted her eyebrows. “Not held? You forget,” she said, “I’ve been her friend.” She reflected: “Does new power bring with it, perhaps, its own disabilities? You are, aren’t you, quite newly her lover? You mayn’t see yet, may not admit intellectually, but you must surely feel that.”

  “You don’t think I quite understand what I’ve got.”

  “I don’t think you can trust yourself yet to look down very deep. But you ought—she is yours; absolutely. We have all of us fallen away.” There was not a note in her voice of anything but triumph; she smiled at him like a priestess.

  “You feel I need to be told this?” he said, and felt his own smile twist his face awkwardly.

  “There is no need,” she said with a penetrating, long look. “You do know.” He felt again, through that window behind her, that dark garden distressed by the wind; around her those undisturbed shadows, that never-ebbing, mild light.

  “Suppose,” he began uneasily, “suppose I were less fortunate. Suppose—you see, I am secure enough to indulge myself with these curiosities—she had simply caught at my hand, were gripping it desperately because she was frightened, or had been misdirected, say, and lost her way—I would be right, knowing that, to keep hold of her, for her protection?”

  “—A protection!” interposed Mrs. Kerr, “that you think with most innocent cynicism she would be capable of accepting? But go on, please, I won’t interrupt you.”

  “That was all.” He laughed. “Vague curiosity. Should I be right?”

  “If you cared to be just a convenience,” said Mrs. Kerr thoughtfully, “it wouldn’t be wrong. But can you believe she’d—make use of you? Would it be, in the most ordinary woman, pretty or admirable? Could you reconcile that with the only Sydney possible for either of us? For our two Sydneys, I’m sure, are the same.”

  “But there’s panic…”

  “Panic doesn’t last more than its moment. Of course, there’s opportunism.” She caught Milton looking at her haggardly. “You didn’t think,” she said gently, “that I thought you meant that?”

  He gave, to express scorn, a rather ghastly little monosyllabic laugh.

  “It does sound silly,” agreed Mrs. Kerr. “It is silly, I think, to let oneself play, just because of one’s sense of absolute security, with even the most far-fetched idea of her doing anything so careful and mean. An idea,” she said, shivering slightly, “has a curious power; it preys on one. Oh, you must promise me that you won’t,” she cried. “It frightens me—you could send yourself mad!”

  “It’s nice of you to care,” said Milton.

  “Do you think I don’t value my Sydney?” she exclaimed and stared darkly at something, then brushed it away with her hand and smiled with a return of tranquillity. “One’s idea of a person,” she told him, “refuses to take certain possibilities, like a material refusing to take certain dyes. Don’t you feel so? For instance: for anyone else, any woman, as angry and hurt in her pride, and as disappointed as I’m afraid Sydney’s been with me lately, to have taken you up with the stron
g position you’ve given her would have been the inevitable, rather sordid, perhaps, but effective, complete little gesture. One would have looked for it, wouldn’t one? and—taking the thing at its own valuation—rather applauded. One can’t help applauding the score-off, the adequate pat little retaliation, all the more perhaps because, oneself, one could never achieve it. And we both of us know,” said Mrs. Kerr radiantly, “that for you it would never be possible either. And even supposing we didn’t, that we weren’t so exclusive on her behalf, hasn’t she given us proof?”

  “If it were needed,” said Milton, and began chafing his hands together as though they were cold. He was silent a moment, staring down at the edge of her skirts, at the ground. He dragged himself back to consider something. “What did you, by the way, mean by a proof?”

  “But her loving you,” exclaimed Mrs. Kerr, wide-eyed, “her loving you absolutely! Mr. Milton, do try and make her less hurt with me. Surely you can, can’t you? Make her happy enough to come back.” Mrs. Kerr, with her eyes and a gesture, gave herself away to him in perfect humility. “I do miss the child so!”

  “But how’m I to know she’s still hurt?” her lover said dully, and looking at Mrs. Kerr in remote admiration had a quick sense of being identified with Sydney.

  “Perhaps,” said Mrs. Kerr, recollecting Sydney’s change of position, “she’s not. But I was impatient and clumsy; I think she was hurt in her pride.”

  “I cannot believe, Mrs. Kerr,” said Milton in a tone of such infinite irony that his voice sounded gentler than ever, “I can’t really believe that you’ve ever been clumsy. I should say that your patience was infinite. But she has this queer appetite for pain: it brings with it its own ingenuity, against which one can’t be defended at all points.”

  With a sigh, with raised eyebrows, she allowed herself to accept this as possible. “Thank you, you’re generous,” she said and examined him. “You, if you like, would have infinite patience. You two can’t, I think, fail to be happy together. I’m so happy about you”—she looked round with relief as though rising again to the surface and by taking everything in with such eagerness readmitted the lounge to his consciousness—“and, as middle-aged women do feel, quite important; as though I were standing, like your good Moses, at some kind of vantage-point and seeing ahead of both of you plainer than you can. It would be equally nice, I believe,” she concluded, swimming back to the plane she had come from, kind superficiality, “to be married to either of you.”

  He was dismissed; she appeared to have done with him. The laughter and voices packed round them between the four looking-glassed walls seemed to rise to a climax, a positive shout. The lounge seemed for a moment to mean something—he glanced for a hint of the revelation at some of the faces, but whatever it was had escaped him; the faces were shut-up and blank.

  “If you will,” said Mrs. Kerr, “can you look out for Ronald? I don’t want him disturbed if he’s happy—just tell him I’m going to bed. It’s been so nice of you to talk to me about this, Mr. Milton. I’ve always felt that we knew each other and yet, do you realize? we’ve not spoken for more than a moment before. If I’ve kept you from Sydney, forgive me. You must go now and find her. Good night.”

  When she had gone he sat down on the rather hard sofa, across which the cushions had, as she got up, tumbled down into disorder. He felt the light slanting down on him stupefyingly from the mirrors and ceiling a protection from feeling, a barrier, like an orchestra above which one could not, even if one had wanted to, make oneself heard.

  21

  Valley

  For two days the sun had been cut away by an opaque, pale-grey, absolutely cloudless sky; this made the shapes of hills and houses more important; an ascent of the heights became arduous in the cool, close air and one was loath to go far up any one of the valleys because one felt it shutting on one like a book. The disappearance of sunlight from the flowers deadened the colours of them; from being like flames, spontaneous, they became tawdry and adventitious; bougainvillæa traced a heavy pattern on the walls, geraniums were the flat stale pink of old confectionery, and the mimosa blotched the faces of the hills as monotone and pale as mustard. The distances were pellucid; one would see for miles every detail of the coast, every ripple of the light sea, and these became important and a little ominous; one felt weighed down by them and half uneasy. Ronald, going alone up a riverbed in one of the valleys, found himself hurrying.

  The river had once been expansive and impetuous, it had carried some of the hills along with it and flowed widely; at some points it had taken up the whole floor of the valley, leaping past the foot of the rocks hilariously or, dividing, made a long string of lemon-shaped islands. Now its wide bed lay parched, a petrified torrent up which Ronald, taking some pleasure in the performance, walked painfully with a sharp, continuous, loudly-echoed clattering together of stones. The river was young no longer; it had made an end of its variations and detours and had worn away for itself a very deep channel down which it flowed swiftly, and with a sinister effect of purpose; steel-smooth, impenetrable to the eye of Ronald, to whom it was no longer a companion. They should have known one another centuries before.

  The margins of land on either side, before the walls of the valley went up, were under cultivation; they were divided cross-wise, and when Ronald scrambled up out of the riverbed to sit down on a sagging lip of turf and nurse a barked ankle or extract a stone from his shoe it is more than probable that he was trespassing. In such a country, however, one is bound to trespass everywhere; much is forgiven if one be sufficiently beautiful, have an innocent expression and do not seem to understand Italian shouted from above. Ronald’s expression, ingenuous and nervous as a foal’s, would have disarmed the angriest proprietor, but for this there was no occasion; the valley seemed to be quite empty. Since he had left behind the three young women, the goats, the staring man, there had been nobody. Perhaps, he thought, the valley was today just too narrow, too clothed in the echo of water, too deep beneath the tension of the sky from hill to hill, and they had all turned back instinctively. He wondered at himself for going on.

  The three young women leaning over the gate had admired Ronald, loudly and in every detail. They had spoken so very distinctly he could only suppose that they meant him to understand; he had slowed down in an effort not to seem to be trying to escape them; his ears changed colour, they remarked on this—it had been quite appalling. Their eyes had licked him up and down like the eyes of the American lady at Württemberg, who had compared him to a Donatello, and he could not revenge himself on them by making out a kind of mental chart of their repressions because one couldn’t well suppose that girls who behaved in this way had any repressions. Which, of course, as Ronald told himself without enthusiasm, was excellent. They gave him, quite disinterestedly, all sorts of encouragement and good advice.

  The man who stared also had shouted a word of encouragement, the same mystifying reference to some “bellissima.” Then the solitude had come slowly to grips with him: there was nothing but the deserted bed of the river, the vague disorderly gardens like some half-memory and, now and then, a bird flying slowly across the sky. Ronald had nothing but a little lonely gleam of intellectual pride to sustain him; he felt that it must be good for him to be here, but he was very depressed. He felt trapped; if he turned to run back down the valley there would be nothing but valley to run to. “O Solitude,” he exclaimed in a thin voice, “ton sein vigoreux et morne déjà j’ai pu l’adorer…” He could not remember the rest of the paragraph, and besides, had not Barrès lapsed from this to the excesses of nationalism? What unaccountable lapses, thought Ronald, precede maturity which they are even believed to constitute. He suddenly gave up clattering among the stones, did not speak any more, and hugging the side of the valley away from the river walked on the turf quietly, because it appeared to him that one could best enforce oneself on this noisy solitude, not by more noise, but by silence. So quite
quietly he rounded the turn of the valley and came in sight of the rock where Sydney was sitting looking up the valley away from him. After gazing for some moments at her apparent unconsciousness, he said slowly, “Oh…you?”

  “Oh, you?” she exclaimed, mystified, but not startled.

  “I hope I didn’t alarm you!”

  “No. I heard you coming, but I didn’t turn round because I thought I knew who it was. Were you expecting to find anybody in particular?”

  “Well, no, not really anybody. They all told me to hurry up because there was a bellissima Inglese, but I imagined that that, you know, was just a general allusion to the ‘not impossible She’ and thought nothing more of it.”

  “They?”

  “Some girls at a gate and a man doing nothing particular.”

  “Whenever anybody just says ‘they,’ ” said Sydney, who showed signs of being pleased to see him, “one thinks of Lear, doesn’t one? and an infinite perspective of long noses. ‘They’ watched me, too, coming up here, but they didn’t say anything. I am glad to know they were impressed.”

  “They are impressionable,” said Ronald. “If it is Mr. Milton you’re expecting, he won’t like those girls a bit. They are a positive barrage. Their conversation was very free.”

  “I expect they liked you,” said Sydney, glancing at him with indifferent admiration. “Also, of course, they wouldn’t be able to imagine why you should want to walk up a valley alone unless there were a woman at the end of it. Unless, of course, you had carried a long gun and wore tight green velvet knickerbockers and showed every sign of going out to shoot linnets.”

  “I’m afraid,” said Ronald, “that’s very English of you.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t like these people at all. I cannot see why they should ever have been born, or why, at least, they should need to go on being born over and over again so frequently.”

  “I dare say,” said Ronald, “they enrich the soil.”