The Hotel

by Elizabeth Bowen

“How horribly quiet it is,” she said, still with a hand on his arm, as he let her go again. “Don’t remind me I came here: I won’t ever again—an experiment’s failed. James, I won’t let you be happy if you mean to surround me with silences—sinister silences that bulge like a bubble and never quite burst.”

  He laughed. “You don’t like the ineffable.”

  “Nothing’s ineffable.”

  “You are.”

  “No, I’m not. I am not elemental and dumb. If you like I’ll explain myself perfectly. Now be practical: talk about plans. Have you written those letters?”

  “I wrote them this morning.”

  “That is splendid. I do want to feel we’ve some sort of attachment outside this improbable place. I wrote last night and slipped down last thing, when the lounge was quite empty, to put them into the concierge’s box. It was locked, so I couldn’t take them out again, and I went to bed hugging myself. When did you post yours?”

  “I haven’t posted them yet,” he said ruefully.

  “Oh, why didn’t you?” she exclaimed, then recovered herself confusedly. “I mean, doesn’t that make me seem horribly eager? But I had to, I couldn’t resist it; I couldn’t go on carrying this bomb about. They’ll all say, at home, ‘Well what has she done now?’ They’ll be quite sure that there must be something wrong somewhere, because I somehow always just manage not to do anything right. All the people I like are rotters. I can’t pay my bills. If I don’t use my brains I get dissipated, and if l do use my brains I get ill. I wonder if you’ve any idea what I’m like—well, I don’t mean that exactly, I’m sure you’ve got heaps of ideas about me. But I don’t think you’re much good at outlines—you see a kind of haze of possibilities with a very faint nucleus. It’s a fatal combination, I’m sure, to be clever and kind; you can never see clear: it’s a sort of squint. The stupidest person out here could describe me immediately.”

  “I tell you one thing we have in common,” said Milton—“we do both like running ourselves down. I shall never tell you what I’ve thought about myself—I couldn’t bear you to agree with me.”

  “I should hate you to believe all I’ve said. You never would, James, would you?”

  “Not while you look with those eyes—”

  “Oh, yes, yes, yes,” she said, and, sighing and shutting her eyes, leaned her head on his shoulder. “I do love you.” With his arm round her he began to speak impetuously, but she pressed a hand over his mouth to silence him, and kept it there while she went on: “There is nobody else in the world now, nobody else in the world. I’ve thought so much about you. I must be with you always. You’re so kind.”

  He felt the hand tremble and drew it away to say: “Kind?”

  “Yes, kind. Do you think that is ordinary? Do you know, I thought you were never coming. I was so afraid, up here this afternoon, that you wouldn’t come at all. I thought you’d been sent away from me. I thought Some One knew better.”

  “Who could know better?” he said, with a cold feeling.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, beginning to laugh. “I am an idiot. Come on, let’s walk faster; it’s beginning to be chilly. One loses one’s way in the day here when there’s no sun.”

  They went quietly on in the direction of the convent, anxious to be clear of the valley; discussing as they walked their plans for the immediate future. Sydney promised that if Tessa could spare her she would go back with Milton to England; though if Tessa seemed at all reluctant she should feel obliged to stay on another three or four weeks. They agreed to be married in June. “I do hope,” she said, smiling doubtfully, “that I shan’t be utterly useless to you.” Before they came out on to the road she stopped him again and said she was hungry and wanted to eat some more nuts. She took a handful of walnuts and almonds out of her pocket and he cracked them by twos for her, one against the other, between the palms of his hands.

  “I wonder why I can’t do that,” she exclaimed; “my hands are really like iron!…I’ve been eating these on and off all today—they are better than lunch.”

  “Extraordinary idea!” he exclaimed, and threw up his hands expressively. She replied that her day appeared to her to have been spent intelligently, and that she was not yet incapable of planning out a day for herself, though she could not answer for what might become of her after marriage.

  He suggested that if she were not by now too tired and hungry they should, instead of returning tamely to the Hotel by the road, strike out across the base of the next two hills and drop down on the Hotel through the olive trees. The alacrity with which she jumped at this made him suspect her of flagging inwardly, but he did not dare to withdraw his suggestion. Seen again from the mouth of the valley the horizon, the suddenly revealed expanse of sky, appeared beyond all memory to have enlarged themselves. He could not have believed in such clear air. The afternoon was yet more coldly grey; the trees stood out from one another in the absolute distinctness of this hour before they should begin to run together into dusk. Under the opaque sky the sea was white, glassy except where now and then a hundred ripples gave the effect of a shiver. Here and there a cypress waited, dark among the olives. The evening had an ache about it, a hush of timelessness, and Milton wondered if he should forget this, too. They walked in the half-light of the olive trees, as though deep down under water; Sydney’s face was pale, and some deception of shadow made it look melancholy, but the colours of her scarf burnt. “This is a wonderful thing,” he said, and caught at the end of the scarf. “I love it. I like all the colours you wear, especially white—”

  “That’s not—”

  “Yes, it is. It’s the clearest and brightest. Don’t ever be frightened and muddled and dark, my dear, even in clothes.”

  “But James, for a clergyman’s wife—I can’t wear scarlet and flame colour. Your life—”

  “Do you think of that as muddled and dark?” he said, realizing how little they knew of each other, and how difficult it would be for her ever to know him.

  “I don’t think of it, I think of you. I confess I don’t half like the sound of it.”

  “But, Sydney—” He glanced round a moment as though Mrs. Kerr were behind him, smiling at Sydney.

  “But we’re going to live it. Any life would look bad from the brink; if we had to make the decision we’d probably never be born. But most lives are the same, I’m sure once one’s in mid-stream. Ours will be lovely. But you won’t see me often again in a Roman scarf.”

  “Don’t change, don’t be different,” he cried. “I love you so much as you are.” She looked at him in reproach: at that moment he loved her as sharply as though she already were lost to him. He snatched at the moment, and letting go of everything asked to be carried away by it; shutting his eyes to be nearer and holding her close. They were both blotted out, himself and herself were forgotten: he came to a brink.

  Time carried him on again after he could not say how long a cessation of being. He knew that through all this the hill had been waiting with their two figures upon it framed in solitude. Coming back to her there in his arms at a sound or a movement she made, he did not dare to ask her where she had been. Eye to eye they looked at each other questioningly, as though trying to learn from one another if they had been together; then each looked away, as though afraid to read they had been forgotten.

  “I’m rather afraid,” she said, making a movement to break away from him, and in answer to all his questions kept repeating, “I am rather afraid.” He could smile at this, feeling exalted; he let her go, but later drew an arm of hers through his own, and made her walk on again. Her air was irresolute; she seemed to be trying to shape her thoughts into words. She said at last, having looked again at him solemnly as though enjoining him to understand this better than she could, “Haven’t we—or I, at least, for my part—undertaken rather too much?”

  He saw some shadow of what she meant but nothing mo
re than a shadow. He was inclined to take her gesture as traditional, her mood as generic; she was a young woman—very young as a woman. With compressed lips she withdrew her arm. “Oh no,” she said, “why should I ask you? The difficulty is my own.”

  “No, look here, Sydney…why should we be afraid? It’s a way out for us both—can’t you see it so?—a way out of ourselves. Don’t you remember the boy—Curdie—in the fairy tale, who opened a door straight on to the sky and was told to walk through it? He didn’t like it all—naturally—there was just the sky there and some of the stars were under him. However, he went forward, and just found himself walking—he had no idea how. If we go straight ahead—”

  “I’d have gone back through the door. I’m not the stuff for a fairy tale. I’ve no faculty of wonder, James. Nothing is new to me.”

  He didn’t like to say, “Do I offer you nothing, then?” He found himself guilty of having supposed that he did. She was new to him in every aspect, in all that she was and meant. He could not imagine a time when he would not take a stranger’s pleasure in looking at her across a room. He could not imagine a time when her movements would be calculable to him, or when she would cease to reappear just as he had not expected from behind the veil of his thought.

  “I think you’re wrong there,” he said gently. “After all, you haven’t lived so very long. You may be surprised—”

  She interrupted him here, not by saying anything, but by an odd silence. Her face had a strained kind of stillness as though it might at any moment break up into tears. She tramped beside him doggedly, as though she were really very tired, along the rough track, ducking her head mechanically now and then to avoid the branches. She seemed so drawn away from him that he could not realize his arms had been round her a moment ago. He cried, “Sydney, you’re not happy!” The exclamation was torn from him; he would have given much to recall it.

  “I tell you I am,” she said obstinately and coldly; “if you’re happy, I’m happy.” She managed to make him feel he had blustered at her, and he said with less warmth, “Oh, very well, my darling, I don’t want to bully you.” He had never been in love before and he had never quarrelled with anybody. This, he supposed, was now (or would soon be) a “lovers’ quarrel,” coming with a too-obliging promptness to link up for him the two experiences. Was this, then, a glimpse of their composite temper—irrational, touchy and vain? He longed to ask her this—he believed her to be saner than he was. His face, bright with an incommunicable glow of speculation, suddenly angered her.

  “Anyhow—happy!” she cried. “What is happiness?—what comes out of it? Why must we always be feeling each other’s pulses to see if we’re happy?” She flung the word at him distastefully. It had evidently nothing to do, where she was concerned, with the purest, most exhausting kind of nervous exaltation, and she could make no use of it. He could have wept for her, and longed to say, “Can’t you be more of a woman?” Instead, he smiled with an effect of tolerance and said, “You are very impatient.”

  “Oh, really,” said she.

  “You jump on your feelings and put a pistol up to their heads to make the poor creatures explain themselves. You don’t give them a chance. You don’t, honestly, Sydney, give them a chance.” He spoke with some energy.

  “Oh, all right, all right,” said Sydney. “Don’t shout at me, James! The wood is quite quiet: I hear—I hear you quite well.”

  She did not, after all, make him angry by this; he looked round through the trees in surprise, seemed to accept a reproof from the quiet line of the sea, and agreed with her. “Yes, the wood is quiet. I’ve been making a horrible noise. I’ll—”

  “Now don’t make a silence—”

  “Yes, I’m going to—listen—”

  She clutched at his arm with elaborate manifestations of terror.

  They listened.

  “I won’t let you,” she cried, “you shan’t—it’s as bad as the valley. How we ever sleep at the Hotel with all this saving itself up behind us, and that idiotic little tame sea slipping up and down, up and down the beach, I can’t think.” She stamped her foot and shouted again and again; an echo woke up in the hills. “Now we’ve got a noise again, now we’re at home, James, now we’re perfectly at home.”

  “Sydney—” Something had caught his attention; he looked speechlessly at her; there was something he wanted to ask. She went ahead of him, her bright scarf flickered ahead like a flame through the olives. He took some long strides to catch up with her. “Sydney—” he said.

  “James?”

  “You won’t mind coming home with me. You’ve no qualms about leaving this place?”

  All her high spirits came back to her. “Never a qualm,” she said loudly and cheerfully, and looked at him with a bright eye. “Never a qualm…”

  23

  Next Corner

  Tessa was so happy about Sydney’s engagement. She wrote long letters about it to her husband Anthony out in Malay; she spent less time upstairs with Baudouin lying down on the sofa and more time sitting alertly in the drawing-room, glowing at friends. She laid aside her air of a devotee and put on all the dignity of matronhood: one could never have guessed how well all this would become her. The effect on her digestion was extraordinary. She smiled indefatigably and followed Sydney about with her eyes, and remained on behalf of the abstracted Milton and the less than ever approachable Sydney a shining testimony to the efficacy for all ills of Love. For the unconscious pair her confidence, had they taken their stand on it, might have been as a rock among the tangled undercurrents of criticism, of amusement, of pity, of speculation as to whether it would “last.” The thing was more than suitable; it was a coming together for which Time itself might have laboured to shape the couple; one could not look in her face and deny the possibility. Her friends sighed out that they at least were glad she was glad. Mrs. Kerr remarked: “That dear little woman looks positively bridal.”

  Everybody, Tessa thought, was being so nice to her Sydney; charming things were said to the girl in her presence, and many others that she happened to miss were reported. She glowed for her brilliant Sydney, loved her better than ever and became speechlessly shy of her. Of Milton she was not shy at all; she could talk to him by the hour about Elective Affinities, and about Health, which she said was very important. “You know there is no need,” she would say, looking at him reproachfully, “for any of us to be ill at all.” And Milton, who had scarcely ever been ill in his life, would nod back at her wisely. He had a particular softness for Sydney’s dear little cousin. She told him how wonderful it would be to her to see Sydney in a home of her own and with children, who would be, she was sure, the supreme children. “And I’m sure,” she would add, “that you’ll both be so wise and bring them up right, quite right from the very beginning. Our health, you know, has to be built up from the very foundations. Our health—” He began to recognize this as the recurring decimal point in her conversation.

  Tessa thought that it would be so nice for James to get to know Sydney’s friend Mrs. Kerr really well before they went back to England, so she planned a surprise on her own account, hired a car for the afternoon and invited Mrs. Kerr and Milton to drive with herself and Sydney up to a village high in the hills; from which, she had heard, one could look right over a ridge and see a quite unbelievable number of other hills whose similarity to one another made one surprised at the size of the world. There would be also a church with a very dark, old-looking painting, and a pâtisserie kept by a lady from Nice where they gave you an excellent tea. The weather never let Tessa down; the afternoon was delicious. Milton sat in front with the driver, Mrs. Kerr and Sydney behind with Tessa, protesting that this was ideally comfortable, wedged in tightly between them. The old Fiat rushed up the valley with a loud rattling sound, screeched at a change of gear and took the ascent laboriously. The hill leaned forward over a void, and the hundred hairpin corners they bumped round ne
gligently made Tessa catch her breath. “We would be killed at any moment,” said Mrs. Kerr, “if Mrs. Bellamy were not too valuable.” When they came to the top they got out painfully, looked at the view at the other side then walked out two by two to the monastery, followed by all the little boys of the town. Tessa every now and then whispered to Sydney that Mrs. Kerr and James seemed to be making such friends—didn’t they?—and getting on excellently. “I was sure they would, they are both so clever. I think we’ll keep a little farther behind them. Sydney, they may be wanting to talk about you.”

  The painting in the church was so dark that it might have been anything; Tessa could not help wondering why no connoisseur had already discovered it. The idea of this possible beauty stored up in secrecy made her quite dumb; she gripped Milton and Sydney each by an arm and forced them to stand and look at it. She hoped that they might understand the picture better than she did and say what they felt about it, but when after a moment or two of attention they simply turned to smile to one another across her she felt constrained to put forward: “There’s something about that face…I know there’s something about the expression. If only it could be cleaned a little without destroying the value…I should never feel the same, you know, about any picture in Florence; they are so known.” The air of the church was stale with the incense of years, the breath of long-dead congregations had not been disturbed; it was cold with the exhalations of stone for ever in darkness. Mrs. Kerr wandered off by herself and stood in abstraction in front of the altar; a shaft of light from a window above her leant solid across the gloom. “I expect,” thought Tessa, “she is really very religious,” and she felt stirred again, as she had been by the picture. She kept the others waiting about because she did not like to interrupt Mrs. Kerr—she had always known that there was something in Mrs. Kerr, and at the moment perhaps it was near them. “I can’t stand this air any longer, I shall be sick,” exclaimed Sydney suddenly, and after a last glance towards the altar pushed aside the leather curtain on the door and went out hurriedly. The church stood on the rim of hill between the known and unknown landscapes, a melancholy outpost, and it would be pleasant for Sydney to wait outside, though not, Milton seemed to think, to wait alone: he went out after her. Tessa sat down by herself at the end of the church and presently, after one or two uncertain glances round her, knelt.