The Hotel

by Elizabeth Bowen

  “I suppose he won’t mind being older than the people in his year?”

  “I suppose not,” said Mrs. Kerr. “I should have thought it was a pity. However, I know very little about boys of that age. He will be twenty soon.”

  “An impossible age,” said Sydney.

  “I suppose it really is,” agreed Mrs. Kerr.

  Sydney had by this time made up her mind that their future must not be devastated by the descent upon them of Ronald. She looked about her undecidedly, not certain whether to say, “This is very generous of him,” with irony, or, without irony but with a display of emotion sure to be distasteful, “Oh, this is lovely for you; I am ever so glad,” or “It will be interesting to see you together,” with an implication of detachment and of relegating her friend to maternity. She could not guess to which of these observations Mrs. Kerr would be likely to react most desirably, and she felt herself embarrassed by a lack of insight into her friend’s personality of which she had always been conscious, but which had till now added charm to their intercourse. Now that she might have to come to grips with the hypothetical mother in Mrs. Kerr, she realized that she was powerless to estimate the force and scope of that relationship of being to being, from consideration of which, as something out of proportion with life as she saw it, she had always withheld herself.

  Mrs. Kerr, her hands behind her head, gazed delightedly at the future. “How very nice,” she laughed, “how very nice and amusing…Oh, no, don’t laugh like that, Sydney; why should it seem funny to you? It’s very natural, only it’s so funny that we—he and I—never seem to have happened to be together in a place where there was nothing to look at and no one to visit and nowhere to go. So that I suppose one might almost say we had never been together…It is absurd for me to laugh,” she went on, in a glow of speculation, “but I’m so touched; it is so ridiculously touching of him. Fancy him writing like that and wanting to come from Dresden…I wonder where he will sleep: we must find him somewhere to sleep…I think that will be all right, don’t you, Sydney?”

  “Have I been very dense?” asked Sydney in a tone strange to herself. “I do not even seem to have realized you missed him, or thought of him much, or would be glad if he came.”

  “But I suppose,” said Mrs. Kerr, looking back at the past in surprise, “that I didn’t realize it either.”

  “Has it been lonely and dull? They all said it must be lonely and dull for you, but I never—”

  “Oh no, Sydney dear. You’ve made such a difference.”

  “Have I?” Sydney said hungrily. Mrs. Kerr nodded; she was enclosed in her thoughts, but this gleam of affection emboldened Sydney to ask, with a desperate directness, “And you do want him now—you are fearfully glad?”

  “Sydney, you really are too clever sometimes to understand me. Can’t I be glad?”

  Sydney felt herself beaten back by something that in spite of nature’s whole precedent she knew for a falsity; an imposture her immaturity sensed but could not challenge. She knelt down again in bewildered, still angry, submission by the side of her friend. “Of course I don’t mean that you shouldn’t be glad. On the other hand, you know that to me the conventions don’t seem to fit you, and bar the conventions, why should I assume that you are? You see, I’m not a mother and I don’t know any mothers well.”

  She allowed herself to be reconquered as Mrs. Kerr, putting a hand out and vaguely touching her hair, said thoughtfully, “No, you aren’t, and you don’t; that’s quite true. Well, won’t you be generous enough to take me for granted?”

  10

  Mr. Milton

  For James Milton, after his first few days in the Hotel, everybody with whom he had exchanged a word or a glance or been brought even indirectly into contact had already divided themselves into his friends or enemies. Those who had not yet detached themselves hung about the outskirts of his consciousness as a kind of mist behind which possibilities were for ever stirring, to be glimpsed for an instant, then subsiding again. He suffered, as he did at last confess to himself, and began to wonder why he had ever left his parish, where the crippling sensitiveness of his childhood had at least been deadened by the activity of every day, and where in the assured retreat of office he had had no need to ask what he was. But the place was beautiful and completely satisfied him once he had been able to reconcile what he saw with what he had imagined, and to recognize that while an ultimate Riviera could only have existence in the mind of God, this was as fair an imitation as it was reasonable to expect. He walked for the allied pleasures of coloured experience and of hardening his muscles; he tried to talk Italian to the natives, to be answered incomprehensibly in patois or the local French; he played tennis not so badly, and was to be surprised, in consequence, by the friendliness of the Lawrences, and he admitted to some vague attractions which it entertained him to discuss with himself.

  He became friendly, comfortably and without attraction, with Miss Fitzgerald and Miss Pym. These two in spite of their experience of clergymen could not “place” him. From his moustache, one would have been inclined to take him for an Evangelical; on the other hand, it is Anglicans who step with fewest scruples into secular clothes. He had attended the conferences of neither party and remained irresponsive to the shibboleths of both. Miss Pym wrote, on an inspiration, to ask particulars of him from the friend in Derbyshire that he and she had early discovered to be mutual. But the friend in Derbyshire was an Anglo-Catholic and did not acknowledge the finer shades; she simply wrote back that he was a delightful man, adding a string of messages for him that gave no key. Colonel Duperrier also liked Milton; they exchanged stories about fishing in Donegal, discussed Europe and respected one another’s reserves. The Lawrences made him an apple-pie bed and used to send him suggestive Italian picture post cards anonymously to see how much he would stand.

  But he was still avid for popularity. Though devoid of the more odious kind of vanity, he had been given to understand that as an unattached, personable man he must be persona grata anywhere: and he was troubled to find that this was not the case. He had avoided Sydney since that day of the Lee-Mittisons’ picnic: for some reason that he could not explain it was impossible to think of her without embarrassment, though at times she was nothing more to him than some curious picture whose worth he could apprehend but felt unable to analyse. It was with some unavowed idea of a circuitous approach to her that he sought out her friend Mrs. Kerr, preparing to find himself to a degree, but not beyond that degree, disturbed by her.

  He was oppressed by some patent hostilities.

  “I am afraid,” he said to Miss Fitzgerald, as during the half-hour before lunch they sat together in the Hotel garden in iron chairs under an orange tree, “that I have done something to offend Mrs. Pinkerton.”

  “Oh, I don’t see how you could have. Anyhow she’s a fearful old snob,” said Miss Fitzgerald, who knew all about the bathroom but had neither the face nor the heart to tell him.

  “Oh, do you think so? She is the sort of old lady I have so often been asked to lunch with that I cannot help wondering why we do not get on.”

  “She is the patroness of a living—”

  “Well, I don’t want the woman’s living,” said Milton indignantly. “Does she think I’m going to pick her pocket for it?”

  “How ridiculous you are!” laughed Miss Fitzgerald, who was exhilarated by violence. “You know she would make a splendid Lady Catherine de Bourgh.”

  “Ye-es,” said Milton thoughtfully, wondering who should be his Charlotte. He resumed: “Another person I should like an explanation with is Mr. Lee-Mittison. He took me up a mountain my first day here, lost me and has been looking daggers at me ever since. He seems to have forgiven the Lawrences and Miss Warren who were equally his victims, and I cannot see why I am singled out. After all, I was stranger to the hills than any of them.”

  “I am very sorry for his wife,” said Miss Fitzg
erald, sighing pleasurably.

  “I don’t know. I think he’s her fault. She mayn’t seem a very buoyant woman, but I don’t suppose she’d like to be.”

  “It’s very curious,” said Miss Fitzgerald, turning to look at him, “most men, I have noticed, are hardest on men, but with you it seems just the opposite. I don’t know whether it’s personal prejudice”—she sweetened the impertinence with a smile—“or the curious sombre rigidity of some old school of thought; perhaps Pauline?”

  “I can’t think,” Milton said vaguely. At this particular hour of the morning he did not want to talk about himself and was still less interested in St. Paul.

  “Perhaps,” she suggested, “you are brought too much into contact with women, the tiresome type. A clergyman’s life—”

  “It never really strikes me that there’s very much difference. I mean, there are a certain rather limited number of ways in which people can be idiotic—or, if you like, wicked—and men and women seem to fall into them indiscriminately. It always irritates me to see anybody being bolstered up in their own particular kind of insufferableness by the friend who ought to be helping them, and I do think women (for their own ends, which makes it unpardonable) are worse about doing this than men. If that’s what you mean by my being severer on women? Otherwise I can’t see that, in my department, at any rate, men and women are noticeably different.”

  “Or in any department,” said Miss Fitzgerald, earnestly rallying to her standard. “And it interested me to hear you use the word ‘friend’ in that context. Meaning that friend and husband—or wife, as the case may be—should be synonymous.”

  “Practically,” said Milton, looking round and wondering whether it would be possible to order an apéritif, and wishing, since he feared this was not possible, that he had gone down to the town. “I suppose,” he continued conscientiously though with a slight effort, “that you think I am intolerant?”

  “Oh no, not that: too, too acute…One feels at a disadvantage. I suppose one is oneself too much in the habit of generalizing.” She broke off and reached up suddenly in apparent confusion to pluck a small, still rather sickly orange from a branch above her. This, without looking at him again, she bit, right into the peel.

  “Surely that is rather bitter?” asked James Milton, looking on solicitously.

  “Yes,” said she with a wry face, wiping her mouth, “it was very bitter!” She turned crimson and began to laugh awkwardly. “Such an extraordinary thing to do: I do do extraordinary things sometimes…without thinking…when I’m thinking hard.”

  James Milton, who did think this was an extraordinary thing to have done, was silent. She glanced shamefacedly at her tooth-marks in the orange, then guiltily up at the windows of the Hotel, then she wiped the orange and tucked it quietly away behind her.

  “Look!” cried out James Milton considerately. “There’s Mrs. Kerr again, out on her balcony.”

  “So she is—how nice she looks up there! You know, my friend Miss Pym is so fond of her; she says she is marvellously sympathetic. She is certainly an unusual woman, but so very charming. She is very much criticized here by a certain set, but then I am afraid some women have very small minds. Did you hear, her son is coming out next week? We are so glad, it will be delightful for her.”

  “I say, is he really? I’m glad.”

  “We are wondering,” continued Miss Fitzgerald, “what he and Sydney Warren will say to each other.”

  “Really?” said James Milton, whose mind had leapt at once to this.

  “Not of course that I mean anything…well, you know, sentimentally. The boy is hardly grown up. No, I mean she has been so much in possession, really rather monopolizing Mrs. Kerr, who of course is incapable of not being nice to anybody and is so patient and sympathetic and good.” Miss Fitzgerald sighed. “She’s been victimized…”

  Later on, when Milton had followed Miss Fitzgerald into the dining-room, he stared with renewed curiosity at the back of Miss Warren’s head across the dining-room, as though he expected its shape and colour to be somehow different, or expected her to disclose her whole self to him in some gesture or attitude. He sat at his lonely table crumbling his bread exaltedly and wondering how soon Ronald could possibly arrive. He promised himself that, if Ronald were not delayed, it should be possible for him in a fortnight or even ten days to know Sydney absolutely. Then he had to recollect how unfriendly to him she had shown herself, and wonder whether being thrown back on his society would tend to make her like him better. Tessa’s bright, vague eyes surprised him in their wandering; he smiled and nodded.

  “Mr. Milton keeps on looking at us,” whispered Tessa to Sydney. “I do wonder what he wants.”

  Many people who admired Mrs. Kerr had already congratulated her; others who had still to do so sought her out as they streamed from the dining-room. A small crowd gathered about her as she stood in the doorway, like a tall bride, confused and elated. Many who did not like her at all had also congratulated, as they were anxious to see how she was taking it. “Splendid!” shouted and smiled Mr. Milton over the intervening heads; his long, rather pink face also towering.

  “Yes, it’s splendid, isn’t it?” agreed Sydney from behind him. She was jostled against him all at once by more people pushing out from the dining-room and he said, putting out a hand to steady her: “I’m sure you must be glad?”

  At the end of that afternoon’s tennis he waited for Sydney and walked up with her from the club. “This young man, this Ronald,” he asked, “do you know him?”

  “I feel I do,” said Sydney. “Mrs. Kerr has shown me his letters, and she laughs at me occasionally and says I am like him. And there is a photograph, anyway, that one couldn’t help noticing. Altogether I feel he is to be a kind of comic character.”

  “Oh! Does his mother think he is funny?” said James Milton, slightly jarred.

  “But young people are always funny: as we get more sophisticated we can’t help realizing that ourselves—I don’t know whether that makes us less funny or more so.”

  The sun had dipped to the line of the hills, so that the sky had a kind of gold sparkle which reflected itself on figures and faces. Even before the moment of sunset the air was already tingling with cold; the dark, keen, upstanding trees about them seemed slightly to shiver. Sydney flung the folds of her white fleecy cloak across her breast, and holding them gathered against her paused a moment, looking back towards the tennis-courts with a wild Beatrice Cenci expression which did not correspond with her thoughts, and of which she was wholly unconscious. Milton’s heart leapt to his mouth for that moment; then he felt the chill of dusk lay an ice-cold hand on him, and he shuddered. He asked her impatiently if she were waiting for anyone else.

  She said “No” in surprise, and walked beside him up the path to the Hotel, treading noiselessly in her rope-soled shoes. “It is an alarming idea,” said he, unable to maintain a silence of whose peculiar quality he became intolerably conscious, “that the young should be getting progressively more and more sophisticated. It is as bad as it is to be told, if one is a reader of adventure stories, that no part of dark Africa remains undiscovered, and that one-inch maps of all parts of the world will be available shortly.”

  “I suppose it would be if one ever seriously considered youth were romantic.”

  “But I never said I did. Romantic—I’m not that kind of middle-aged man. When I compared it to Africa, I didn’t mean I liked Africa; I dislike the thoughts of the wilds intensely, but they make me so appreciative of the state of civilization in which I am living that I should be sorry if they disappeared.”

  “So you feel civilized?” said Sydney, beginning to like him. Till now she had been discouraged by his facile (what she called “professional”) manner, and by a middle-aged whimsicality that reeked of the Barrie play.

  “Much more so,” said James Milton, cursing himself for going on
like this, and for that very manner and habit of mind of his, of which no one could have been more contemptuously aware.

  “More than whom?” said Sydney idly; but he refused to continue and she allowed him with unusual complaisance to swing her with him into a new mood. He stood looking up. The rocky crest of a hill to the east, at a great height, had been suddenly ribbed with scarlet. This vivid colour against the profound and quickly darkening sky was to Northern eyes a challenge to credulity: and Sydney looking up after him with admiration and hostility said, “I should never have believed it.”

  “I have always believed it,” said James Milton, “but it is surprising to see.”

  “You’ll see a hundred others,” she told him; and they hurried on, discussing in relation to this line of coast the phenomena of sunset. When they had come out into the road they walked more slowly between the lines of chestnut trees, watching the light fade from the enormous faces of the hotels, then from the villas above, which though suffused in dusk still glimmered. Night had come as always, with the catastrophic suddenness which does not for a long time cease to be alarming. They could hear forgotten windows being slammed indignantly, while lights springing up behind the curtains brought them out in hundreds in their uniformity; with here and there some figure passing regularly as a pendulum to and fro across the screen of lace. The hill smoked over with olives loomed, by some trompe-l’œil of twilight seemed to topple, above the larger hotels; but their own, in silhouette against the sea, stood out as they approached with a greater significance.

  She said, “I have often thought it would be interesting if the front of any house, but of an hotel especially, could be swung open on a hinge like the front of a doll’s house. Imagine the hundreds of rooms with their walls lit up and the real-looking staircase and all the people surprised doing appropriate things in appropriate attitudes as though they had been put there to represent something and had never moved in their lives. Like the cook-doll that I always had propped up against the kitchen stove and the father-doll propped against the library book-shelves and the sitting-up doll in the bath that was really a china ornament and had no other attitude, and the limp dolls that wouldn’t do anything so had to be kept in the spare-room beds, which I always think was an unconscious reflection on the ideal habits for visitors.”