Grand Hotel

by Vicki Baum

  “In Vienna then?” Grusinskaya said with moist eyelids. “In three days? You will follow me. And after that you will come with me to Tremezzo. It will be beautiful, wonderful. I’ll give myself a vacation, six weeks or eight. We shall do nothing but live. We shall live. Everything else shall be left behind, all the nonsense, and we’ll do nothing but live. We’ll be perfectly silly from sheer idleness and happiness— and then you’ll go with me to South America. Do you know Rio? I—no, enough. It is time. Go—go, and thank you.”

  “In three days at the latest,” said Gaigern.

  Grusinskaya quickly assumed something of the air of a great lady.

  “See that you get back to your room without compromising me too much,” she said as she unlocked both doors for him.

  As Gaigern wordlessly released his hand from hers, it began to hurt. It was bleeding again. The hotel corridor was deserted. The doors ran together in the long perspective and boots slept lop-eared at their thresholds. The elevator was descending and someone in a hurry to catch a train was running along the passage on the third floor. One of the frosted-glass windows on the stairs was open to let out the cigar smoke of the night before. Gaigern stole in his boxing shoes over the pineapple carpet to Room No. 69 and opened the door with a skeleton key. For the other was still hanging, for the purpose of his alibi, on the board above the hall porter’s desk.

  Grusinskaya took her bath and then gladly resigned herself to Suzette’s hands for massage. She felt strong, elastic and full of energy. She had a boundless desire to dance and longed for her next appearance. She was sure that a successful appearance was in store for her. She was always a success in Vienna. She felt it already in her legs and hands, in her neck as she threw back her head; felt it in her mouth that would not stop smiling. She dressed and went off like a top with a whip behind it. She plunged with irresistible energy into the morning’s business, the dispute with Meyerheim, the subsurface battle with the problems in the company and the patient dealings with Pimenov and Witte.

  At ten o’clock, pageboy No. 18 brought a bouquet of roses. “Au revoir, beloved lips,” was written on a scrap of paper torn from a hotel envelope. Grusinskaya kissed the signet ring with the Gaigern crest. “Porte bonheur,” she whispered as if to an intimate friend. Now she had something to bring her luck again. Michael was right. I shall give away the pearls for poor children, she thought. Suzette in darned cotton gloves gripped the handle of the jewel case, while the luggage porter carried out the rest. Grusinskaya had no sentimental feelings at parting from this eventful hotel bedroom with the wallpaper that always got on her nerves. Another was reserved for her at the Hotel Imperial in Prague, and also at the Bristol in Vienna, her usual room overlooking the court, Room No. 184, with bathroom. And rooms, too, in Rio, Paris, London, Buenos Aires, Rome—an endless perspective of hotel bedrooms with double doors and running water and the indefinable odor of restlessness and homelessness . . .

  At ten minutes past nine, a drowsy chambermaid fleetingly swept up the dust in Room No. 68, threw away the faded floral tributes, took out the tea tray and finally came back with fresh linen—still damp from the iron—for the next occupant . . .

  WITH THE treachery common to alarm clocks, General Manager Preysing’s failed to rouse him from sleep with the thoroughness and punctuality expected of it. At half-past seven it emitted a brief, raucous rattle, and that was all. Preysing, whose mouth was open and parched, moved a little in his sleep and the springs of his bed murmured in response. A gleam of sunlight showed behind the yellow curtains. Then at eight o’clock the hall porter duly roused him by telephone, but by that time it was far too late. Preysing held his drowsy head under the shower, cursing his forgotten razor. It needed no more than that to deprive such a slave to routine of all joy in life. In spite of being late, he wasted several minutes selecting a suit to wear. And when he had decided on his cutaway, he took it off again in a fit of impatience. He calculated—and perhaps with reason— that a morning coat would put him at a disadvantage. His gray suit, on the other hand, would show the Chemnitz people at once that the whole affair meant very little to him. He made unusual haste, but by the time he had put away all his cases and oddments, searched for, discovered, and pocketed all his keys, looked once more through his papers and once more counted his money, it was after nine. He shot out of his room and at once collided with a man in the passage.

  “Sorry,” said Preysing and came to a stop in front of his door, partly to let the other pass and partly to get his second arm into his jacket.

  “Not at all,” the man replied and walked on along the passage. It seemed to Preysing that he had seen that back before. When Preysing reached the elevator, the man was just descending in it. He now presented his front and this too, Preysing thought, he had seen before, though he could not remember where. It was fairly clear, though, that he had grinned at him as he went off with the elevator under his very nose. Preysing, in nervous impatience, ran down the stairs and along the corridor and down into the tiled basement where the hotel barber plied his trade in an odor of damp cellar and peau d’espagne. There, enveloped in white sheets like babies, sat several gentlemen waiting hopefully for the manipulations of the white-jacketed barbers. Preysing began to dance with impatience in his thick rubber-soled shoes.

  “Will I have long to wait?” he asked, rubbing his unshaven chin with his hand.

  “Ten minutes at the most. There is only this gentleman ahead of you,” was the reply.

  The gentleman who was ahead of him was the gentleman from the elevator, and Preysing looked at him with disfavor. He was a rather insignificant creature, thin and diffident, and he sat squinting into a newspaper with his pince-nez almost falling off his sharp nose. Preysing was distinctly aware that he had come across the man in the course of his work, but he could not recall the occasion. He went up to him and, making a perfunctory bow, said with all the amiability he could muster:

  “Would you be so very kind as to let me go first? I am in a great hurry.”

  Kringelein, hunched together behind his paper, collected all his forces. Emerging from behind the lead article and extending his lean neck, he blinked straight into the general manager’s face and replied “No.”

  “Excuse me, but I am in a great hurry,” Preysing stammered reproachfully.

  “So am I,” returned Kringelein.

  Preysing turned on his heels in a fury and left the barber shop. And there sat Kringelein breathing heavily in an atmosphere of shaving soaps, utterly exhausted and done-up after this prodigious effort, but a hero in triumphant possession of the field . . .

  Behind time, unshaven, and with the tip of his tongue scalded by burning coffee, the general manager was the last to enter the conference room. The others had had time to puff plentiful clouds of blue cigar smoke into the room, which, with its green tablecloth, imitation damask wallpaper and its portrait in oils of the founder of the Grand Hotel, presented an appearance of the highest solidity. Doctor Zinnowitz had his papers all ready at hand, and old Gerstenkorn presided at the head of the unnecessarily long table. He acknowledged the new arrival by rising only slightly in his chair, for he belonged to the same stalwart generation as Preysing’s father-in-law. He had known Preysing as a young man and had no great opinion of him.

  “Behind time, Preysing,” he said. “Quarter of an hour late, eh? A long night? Yes, we all know Berlin!”

  He laughed with a bronchial wheeze and pointed to a chair at his side. Preysing sat down opposite Schweimann. He had the cursed feeling of having got out of bed on the wrong side and his upper lip was moist under his mustache, even before the show had begun. Schweimann, who had red edges to his eyelids and the large protruding and flexible mouth of an ape, introduced a third gentleman.

  “Our company lawyer, Doctor Waitz,” he said.

  Doctor Waitz was a young man who looked absent-minded, but was very far from being so. With his domineering and aggressive trumpet of a voice he could be a very ugly customer in a discus
sion. So, the Chemnitz people had brought him along with them, thought Preysing.

  “We’ve met before,” he said with little enthusiasm.

  Schweimann offered the general manager a cigar across the table, and Doctor Zinnowitz took a fountain pen from his breast pocket and laid it down on the table beside his papers. Farther down the table, on the far side of the water bottle and the glasses quivering on a black tray whenever a bus went by, there was still another person, a colorless creature, Flamm the First. She had a shorthand pad in her hand. She looked elderly and faded, with a thin white moth-like dust on her cheeks. She was silent and businesslike and by no means easily mistaken for Flamm the Second.

  “That’s a nice fountain pen,” said Schweimann to Zinnowitz. “What make is it? Very nice.”

  “Do you like it? Got it from London. It is nice, isn’t it,” said Zinnowitz as he wrote his flowing signature on a memorandum pad. Everybody watched him.

  “How much was it, if I may ask?” inquired Preysing, and taking his own from his breast pocket, laid it on the table in front of him, whereupon everyone looked at it.

  “A little over three pounds without the duty. A friend of mine brought it over,” said Zinnowitz. “Rather a jolly thing, isn’t it?”

  They craned their heads like schoolboys to gaze at the malachite green fountain pen from London. It was an object well worth the attention of these five adult businessmen for three minutes.

  “Well now, let’s get on to business,” said old Gerstenkorn at last, in his hoarse voice, and Zinnowitz, resting his white anemic fingers on the green tablecloth, began at once in fluent and well-prepared words to launch his speech into the blue haze of the conference room.

  Preysing allowed himself to relax slightly. He was not much of a speaker, and he was therefore devoutly thankful that Zinnowitz was relieving him of this task and also that his sentences flowed off his tongue with the smoothness and precision of a machine. This, however, was no more than a prelude. In fact, he said nothing new, only what had already been gone over again and again in preliminary negotiations. He was merely reviewing the state of affairs once more, and, in doing so, he fished one document after another out of his portfolio, holding the long columns of figures close to his shortsighted eyes in order to read them off fluently.

  This, to repeat, was the state of affairs: the Saxonia Cotton Company, which dealt chiefly in cotton textiles and blankets, and, utilizing waste products, also produced a very popular brand of floor cleaning cloths, was a medium-sized undertaking with plenty of capital. Its assets in land, buildings and machinery, in raw material and finished goods, in patents, etc., and particularly, in debts outstanding, stood at a very respectable figure. The annual turnover and the net profits maintained a sound average level. The dividend for the previous year was nine-and-a-half percent.

  Zinnowitz read out these, after all, very gratifying figures, and Preysing listened with pleasure. Everything in the business was aboveboard and in order, and he had organized the production of items made from scraps, which alone brought in three hundred thousand marks gross. He glanced at Gerstenkorn. Gerstenkorn, in the meditative and rather simple fashion of an old, sly man was moving his gray head to and fro. Schweimann was fussing with his cigar and appeared not to be listening. Waitz checked every figure that was quoted against some notes he had in a small leather-bound book. Flamm the First, a model of a private secretary, strove to efface herself by staring at the reflections in the water bottle, while she held her pencil like a small, pointed, fixed bayonet. Zinnowitz drew forth another lot of papers from the pile before him and went on to consider the position of the Chemnitz Manufacturing Company, his long thin Chinese goatee bobbing up and down as he spoke.

  The Chemnitz Manufacturing Company—as the figures showed—was an appreciably smaller undertaking. It had scarcely half the assets, and its balance sheet revealed an extremely shaky state of affairs. The least possible amounts had been written off, but in spite of that an astonishingly high dividend was declared. The annual sales were high. The net receipts, however, scarcely corresponded to the level of sales. For all that, the Chemnitz Company showed a surprisingly large balance. Zinnowitz’s voice, as he read the last figures, implied that he queried the figures he had just read; he looked at old Gerstenkorn.

  “Rather more,” said Gerstenkorn. “Rather more. You can put it at two hundred fifty thousand marks in round figures if you like.”

  “You can’t reckon in that fashion,” said Preysing, who had gotten nervous. “You have to make allowance for the depreciation of the new machinery for the new process. You cannot simply write off the old machinery.”

  “Yes, we can. Yes, we can,” said Gerstenkorn obstinately.

  Doctor Waitz trumpeted: “Our figures are underestimated, rather than overestimated.”

  Doctor Zinnowitz handed a paper across to the general manager, who proceeded to study the figures on it with close attention. He was familiar already with the upshot. The Chemnitz Manufacturing Company was not by any means a sound enterprise. Floated at the outset with insufficient capital, its credit was stretched to the utmost. Nevertheless it had a big turnover; it earned money; it was obviously thriving, and it had the market on its side. Saxonia Cotton, on the other hand, hung fire. Sound and well capitalized as it was, it was all the same a somnolent concern. Cottons, blankets and cleaning cloths. The world at the moment was not demanding blankets and cleaning cloths. And the old man in Fredersdorf knew what he was doing when he wanted above all to come in on the top of the market for knitted goods and turn it to the advantage of his own firm.

  “It doesn’t matter. Let’s move on,” he said with the tolerant air of a man in the weaker position. Gerstenkorn took the balance sheet from Preysing’s hand and tapped the paper. He laughed hoarsely.

  Zinnowitz had meanwhile turned his eloquence to the situation of the shares, and here there was plainly a snag. The actual value of the assets of Saxonia was almost twice that of Chemnitz. Accepting this as the basis, all the preliminary negotiations for the fusion of the two concerns had reckoned two shares of Chemnitz as the equivalent of one of Saxonia. Now, however, the Chemnitz shares had gone up and the Saxonia Cotton shares had gone down. Hence the center of balance had shifted and—as Doctor Zinnowitz admitted with a conciliatory hand gesture—the basis of exchange, owing to the astonishing boom in the shares of the Chemnitz Manufacturing Company, was no longer the same. Preysing listened with irritation to the smooth legal voice as it presented with pedantic exactitude nothing but unpleasant facts he already knew only too well. His cigar ceased to afford him any pleasure, and after a few strenuous drags he put it down. At a certain moment in Zinnowitz’s exposition of the case, Doctor Waitz leapt forward like an actor at his cue. He made objections with rapid gesticulations of his hands over the green table; he read figures from his notebook without so much as glancing at it, new figures, different figures. Preysing contracted the muscles of his forehead till his eyes started from his head, so intense was his effort to retain it all and to see through it all and to keep a clear view of it all. He took one or two hotel envelopes that were lying on the table and scribbled notes on them secretly and agitatedly like a schoolboy in a fix.

  Doctor Zinnowitz, for his part, threw the merest glance towards the dependable Flamm the First, and she duly took down the aggressive remarks in shorthand on her blue-lined steno pad. Doctor Waitz summed up in his bellowing voice. No, there was no way that the shareholders of the Chemnitz Manufacturing Company were going to submit to an amalgamation that halved the value of their stock. There was no reason whatsoever, in his opinion, to give the Saxonia priority over the Chemnitz Company, supposing an eventual (he mouthed the word “eventual” like a strolling player) fusion between the two. Why should this flourishing concern be brought into submission, as it were, and shoved into a corner?

  Zinnowitz looked at Preysing, and Preysing obediently began to speak. It was his habit to give utterance to matters of importance in a soft, nasal voi
ce and with a dreary lack of emphasis. He employed this method of showing an outward calm and superiority because inwardly he had no confidence in himself. The backs of his hands were moist as he threw himself into the battle. Schweimann’s eyes crept like little gray mice out of the red cavities where they lived, and Gerstenkorn stuck his thumbs in his waistcoat with the air of a man who was enjoying himself. Such conferences took place every day in the Grand Hotel—here in this “great pub” many a deal was rigged which afterwards shareholders had to make the best of. Sugar got more expensive; silk stockings, cheaper; coal became scarce—these and a thousand other contingencies depended on the issue of battles fought out in the conference chamber of the Grand Hotel.

  So Preysing spoke, and the longer he spoke in that voice of his that sounded as if it had been kept on ice and the closer he came to the business at hand, the more ground he lost. Gerstenkorn’s telling little interjections whistled through the air like bullets. There were moments when Preysing would gladly have turned tail and fled the field, dropped the whole rotten business of the amalgamation and gone home to Fredersdorf to Mulle and Pepsy and Babs. But since he was the managing director, and since life was not a bed of roses, and since this amalgamation meant a lot to the business and everything to his own personal standing, he stuck bravely to his post. He produced once more his statements of the assets and clung fast to this thoroughly sound demonstration of a thoroughly sound business. He wearied the Chemnitz people by falling into rambling details, and several times Zinnowitz had to get him afloat again like an unwieldy boat gone aground. He tied nooses and hanged himself in them. He took obstinate stands on mere side issues with the pigheadedness of sheer stupidity. He devastated them with the exact figures of the manufacture of cleaning cloths from cotton waste, for this was his pet subject, and forgot to make the important points he had scribbled on his envelopes. And at last he got stuck in the middle of a sentence that had begun like a flourish of trumpets and ended in a blind alley. He took out his handkerchief and wiped his mustache and lit a cigar that tasted like hay. And suddenly it occurred to him that he was sitting at the table with hustlers, men of no principle; he felt the deep embitterment of a decent man who is thought a fool for his pains.