The Hotel

by Elizabeth Bowen

  A number of disappearing pathways darted off from the avenue; Corinthian pillars suggested themselves through a net of undergrowth, and the arch of a stone bridge let one suppose water. The party hung fire, embarrassed by this choice of attractions, then continued to move slowly up the avenue in a close formation. This was more than a villa, it was a country-house, with, for the moment, nothing but the distinct shadows and an irregular splash of water to give away its foreignness. Then Miss Fitzgerald caught Ronald by the arm and pulled him sideways, pointing excitedly as though they were to surprise some living thing. “Look,” she cried, “up there—the Villa!” They all had a glimpse of it and were repelled, forty supercilious white windows, blankly shuttered, a vacillating shabbiness across its grey face that was neither old nor new. It had a solidity that was not local, an assured air of having been finally answered for; but it was as disappointing as one’s first princess.

  “Of course it isn’t like a cinquecento villa,” said Miss Pym, anxious to make all allowances.

  “It is amusingly suggestive, isn’t it,” Ronald said to Milton, “of the Nuit de Portofino Kulm?” and was made to feel himself utterly isolated by Milton’s kind, blank stare. “I’m afraid I haven’t read—” said Milton. Ronald felt with complacency. “Oh…” said Ronald. He would have liked to discuss also, in the light of his own recent observations in Germany, that mild baron of Charlottenburg who kept snakes in his parlour behind violet silk curtains. He sighed as though a door had been slammed in front of him. Perished civilizations interested Ronald, who had come too late to share a mild distress at their demise. Soon he was thinking fruitfully about Russia, and was glad when Milton again gave him another opening by saying to Mrs. Hillier: “I often wonder whether the Russians weren’t, after all, the only people with any real notion of aristocracy.”

  “Does that mean you did or didn’t like Russians?” said Mrs. Hillier, looking at him cautiously: while Ronald, almost simultaneously, exclaimed, “So real it was that this world was no place for them!”

  “Do you at all mean to suggest,” asked Milton, giving full attention to this last remark, “that they have simply been translated? Because I think that’s very tenable. It strikes me more and more as I live that this world’s no place for anyone with any real notion of anything, and that its expulsion of them must be almost automatic.”

  “Their type was very refined,” said Mrs. Hillier, “lovely creatures—but one can never altogether like them.” She looked about at the garden which, with its profound and hidden hollows around them, seemed to be waiting. “I must say,” she confessed, “this is delightful. Shall we go over that bridge? The garden must go on indefinitely—Look, there’s a seat with steps up to it right on the hill!” She made for the bridge, appearing, so abrupt was the turn of the path, to have plunged waist-deep into the shiny dark leaves that flopped back, heavy as fishes, from the sweep of her skirts. These plants with their overpowering glossiness must have sprung from wet soil. Milton and Miss Pym went after her; Ronald and Miss Fitzgerald seemed to have been delayed by a short argument—perhaps as to the nature of aristocracy. The garden gave Milton a distinct feeling of nervousness, as though he were being scornfully watched. To allow this was to underrate oneself, so he asked abruptly, “If one comes to think of it, what was the good of them?” There was a pause filled in by the agitation of leaves; then Miss Pym, upon whom an ever-deeper despondency must have been working, replied, “If you come to think of it, what is the good of us?”

  “Well, really…” said Mrs. Hillier.

  “Us three?” asked Milton, in an attempt to evade the issue. He could tell from the set of Mrs. Hillier’s back that in another minute or two they might be at grips with the problem of Empire.

  “No,” said Miss Pym, still more wildly, “I mean us all, our class…”

  Mrs. Hillier stared at her, then decided to laugh. “I didn’t know you were a Socialist!”

  “But must one be a Socialist,” went on Miss Pym defiantly, “to wonder sometimes what is the good of us? Because one can’t help it (without wishing to attach oneself to any party) these days, when so much is in the melting-pot.”

  “It’s hardly easy to talk about, is it?” said Mrs. Hillier lightly, with the same well-bred instinct to cover this that she had when anybody tried to discuss religious experiences (though at present, with the excuse of a specialist, that would have been more permissible). “I suppose,” she elected to say, “it’s a matter of example, really, isn’t it? I mean, giving the others something to go by. I mean, people do notice. Why, one feels it even out here—Italians notice.”

  “But don’t you wonder if they don’t just think we’re lazy?” Miss Pym exploded. “I do: when my friend and I have been walking or reading and one feels them up on those terraces looking down on one and working away. Why, even in the Hotel, you know, one does wonder if the waiters—”

  “You’re just getting acutely self-conscious, Miss Pym, that’s what’s the matter with you,” laughed Mrs. Hillier, bluntly and kindly. “The creatures are positive parasites. If you’d lived out of England as long as I have, and seen how—”

  “—I’ve lived all over the Continent—”

  “—Oh, but that’s different. I mean, that just tends to make one cosmopolitan.”

  “Yes, but that’s just it—” cried Miss Pym, then subsided, thoroughly confused.

  This engagement left Milton free to escape from them, which, while walking decorously enough alongside and keeping back here and there a branch with his walking-stick, it is to be feared that he did. The path, by going up steeply for short distances and only gradually coming down again, presented a clever effect of being Alpine: one felt one must have climbed to a great height. One was humoured in this by being railed away solicitously from small precipices, and by being made to walk dizzily over the arch of bridges from which ravines with water seemed to drop away. Every now and then an artful perspective would be offered, to be veiled once more by trees. Once, in a Corinthian arbour that seemed balanced on the top of a tree like a ball upon a jet of water, he had a glimpse of Miss Fitzgerald talking to Ronald…“And I expect,” she said, after a prolonged and breathless inspection of all the profile he vouchsafed her, “that you write poetry, too, don’t you?” Before his path dipped again he heard Ronald reply in a very nearly extinguished voice, “Well, as I said before, you see, my subject is economics.” Milton, whose sympathies were all with Miss Fitzgerald, ground his teeth. He considered Ronald definitely disobliging in his refusal to give hostages anywhere. He had been prepared for clever indolence or for a cool kind of wantonness in Mrs. Kerr’s son, or for polite nullity or resentful dullness in the son of Mrs. Kerr’s husband; he had begun to build, successively, on each of these probabilities. But he had not foreseen this refusal to emerge from behind a noncommittal mannerliness, or the long ray to be directed upon them that showed them all up, even Sydney, in the maze of a gnat’s dance, an aimless passionate jiggle apart and together. It had not been in Ronald to precipitate a crisis on any plane: he was not, thought Milton, either vivid or generous enough. He had come to stare, one could only imagine, and Milton had a view of him lounging along a row of cages. He wondered how much Ronald had hurt Sydney, whether she had been able to make her hurt him at all; though she had been so visibly “out” from the earliest word of his coming, to make a juggernaut of her friend’s son. Milton did not know whether, except for that brief encounter in the ballroom, they had ever exchanged a word. The reservation would be enough to engage this perverse girl in still deeper designs on him and to make her, to merely a lover, more inaccessible than before.

  They climbed up to the skeleton of a summer-house; the walls might have blown away or might simply have rotted. Miss Pym began to search about diligently, looking under the seat and into the corners and running the point of her walking-stick along the cracks of the pavement. She explained that “they” might ha
ve dropped something. This for a moment seemed so probable that Milton went just as eagerly down on one knee. “Think,” said she, “if one were to find a little purse, or a bangle that had slipped off, or even a button! I can’t believe they wouldn’t have left something; they must have come here day after day.” Milton laughed at her tolerantly, getting up again and dusting his knee. She didn’t explain why she should have concentrated her hopes on this arbour; she perhaps left the arbour to do so, for perched out over the garden it was as intimate as a nest. Mrs. Hillier, sitting down dreamily, said, “It would have been a nice place for a proposal or something.”

  Another allusion to a technique he had disregarded! Milton said quickly, “But we wouldn’t understand—do you realize?—a word that has ever been said here!”

  “But people in the better-class Russian stories always seem to talk French or English.”

  “I can’t imagine anybody who wasn’t obliged to making love in English.”

  “I suppose,” said Mrs. Hillier, looking at him thoughtfully, “that one only feels one’s own language a limitation if one is not sufficiently carried away.”

  “Oh!” cried Miss Pym, waving, “here is Eleanor coming up!”

  Mrs. Hillier said she did hope that she really were coming alone. “Though, of course,” she added, “I should be sorry if Ronald had actually fallen into a tank or anything. Though one can’t say that it might not be for the best. For I can’t think what is going to become of him!”

  “I will go and look,” said Milton and, full of determination, left the arbour.

  Descending, he called Ronald everywhere: the silence that received his voice gave him back an infuriating sensation, less of being unheard than of not being answered. The boy might be round any corner listening compassionately, telling himself that there went poor old Milton hollering away. So he pressed on in a shut-down kind of silence, and was surprised and aggrieved as at each turn the emptiness renewed itself down pergola, lawn or glade. A flitting echo of Mrs. Hillier’s remark sent him suddenly towards the gleam of water. There was no path: he had to push his way through some bushes to the rim of a larger tank that had been cut out, a square of vivid green water, under the jut of a cliff. The tank had a kerb of yellow marble, and he saw, looking across it, that the smooth streaked sides went down about three feet before they came to the water, which might be lower than usual but gave some suggestion by its unmuddied yet complete opaqueness of being very deep. The water looked solid; if a body disappeared through the surface it might leave a dint, perhaps, a gash which would slowly heal, but never a ripple. He could not imagine the green line swelling up or fretted for even a moment against the face of the marble. He leant farther over it, after a glance up of instinctive watchfulness at the cliff which, like a lid on a hinge, had seemed at that very moment to lean farther over him, and inwardly smiled at a picture, a fanciful composition to which his attitude and manner consciously leant themselves, that could be called “Temptation to Murder.” He saw his own head and shoulders reflected, and the cliff and sky (though none of these impinged on the greenness), and presently, after some recorded disturbance of branches, the figure of Ronald which, coming out from under the cliff, stood on the kerb of the tank nonchalantly, then sat down, dangling its legs. “He might say something,” Milton thought resentfully; but after some seconds of silence, whose duration seemed insulting and ludicrous, he had to throw a “Well, hullo!” across the water in impatient concession.

  “Hallo,” answered Ronald. “Exploring on your own?”

  “Yes—you, too?”

  “Not quite,” said Ronald politely. “I’ve been exploring with Miss Fitzgerald.”

  “Biggest tank I’ve seen,” said Milton, nodding down.

  “Yes, isn’t it? More of a swimming-bath.”

  “What on earth—it’s like talking to about ten people!”

  “Yes, it’s this cliff.”

  “Can’t you come round?” said Milton impatiently.

  “Beg your pardon?” asked Ronald, and when the invitation had been repeated conveyed by an instant’s pause some surprise at it. He looked round the tank carefully, but had to point out, with regret, that this seemed quite impossible owing to the way the bushes hung over. “But I dare say we’ll meet farther on,” he said; “these curly paths are wonderfully good for meeting people. At least, so one would expect, but Miss Fitzgerald and I didn’t meet anybody. Not a ghost, even, though we were sure we could and were very anxious to.”

  “What have you done with Miss Fitzgerald?”

  “I think she went to find Miss Pym. I think perhaps she was lonely. You don’t believe, I hope, that I’ve dropped her into the tank?”

  “The way you haunt it does seem suspicious!”

  “But she’d have come to the surface again: if I had, you know, I shouldn’t dare come back. No, I came back for the tank; itself—I like water.” Ronald, gripping the edge of the tank, leaned forward to watch with a smile the reflection of his dangling feet. Milton, sitting down opposite him, took out his pipe and lit it. He observed, “You ought to have brought your mother—she would have liked this.”

  “She’s a bad walker—don’t mean she’s got corns or a heart or anything; she’s just lazy.”

  “Or was not sorry, quite possibly, to get you off her hands for the morning,” laughed Milton with the bluff and stunning impertinence of which only the nervous are capable, and by which no one can be more appalled than themselves.

  “I dare say,” said Ronald. “One does get tired of people.” He gazed across thoughtfully, not at Milton but at Milton’s reflection, which he was able to watch without raising his eyes, while remaining as impenetrable to his vis-à-vis as the water below him. “Such an intelligent girl,” he remarked—“that Miss Warren.”

  “Oh, you think so? Have you been talking?”

  “No,” said Ronald, “she is one of the few people in this caravanserai who have nothing to say to me. I would not say, you know, that she was one of those casual talkers. She would have, I imagine, her moments that she saves herself up for.”

  “She’s considered unfriendly.”

  “Oh! But would you want her to be friendly?”

  “It scarcely affects me—I have known her some time,” said Milton, making the slight reservation that Hotel time was reckoned differently.

  “Oh, really?” said Ronald respectfully. “You see, where I am concerned she doesn’t appeal as an enterprise. She is already in the family.”

  “Like a disease or a ghost?” suggested Milton, with a smile that must have been lost to Ronald since his faint image did not reproduce it.

  “More like a ghost, I think. She is to be seen on the stairs—still, I dare say, if my mother hasn’t already gone out with her.”

  “An hotel, you know, is a great place for friendships.”

  “Musn’t that be,” said Ronald, “what people come out for?”

  “Perhaps some—”

  “But are there really people who would do that?” asked Ronald sharply, in a tone of revulsion, as though he had brought himself up more squarely than he had anticipated to the edge of some kind of abyss. “You mean women?”

  “Yes, I suppose so,” said Milton, smiling across at the agitation of Ronald, very secure and avuncular.

  “There is nothing now to prevent women being different,” said Ronald despondently, “and yet they seem to go on being just the same. What is the good of a new world if nobody can be got to come and live in it?” Sitting above his impassive and pale reflection, crumpled forward on his folded arms, he remained immobile while the echoes of his last exclamation still seemed palpably to hang about under the slant of rock that roofed him into a cave. The decay of the garden must have seemed to him for a dark instant to have profited nothing. Such a collapse at a mere glance at feminine frailty into the most profound despair suggested, more than
loss of balance, a sharp assault from the rear by some exterior, malignant force. Milton justified his own silence, his unwillingness to go to the rescue of Ronald, by a feeling that this collapse had its austere fitness and that the garden had been, after all, fully entitled to revenge itself.

  17

  Pâtisserie

  The Pâtisserie had a dozen little blue tin tables dotted about under a happy-looking striped awning. Hither many people gravitated early in the day. Mrs. Kerr, who had insisted they should visit the shops, had for the last half-hour’s slow parade of the plate-glass given her companion about a quarter of her attention and a little less than her quarter-face. She had meanwhile chosen for Sydney and presented charmingly a string of dull amethysts, saying it seemed too good to be believable that they should be together again. When she saw the little tables and the English people round them sitting sideways and eating pâtisserie off the tips of their forks with an amused air of concession, she exclaimed with pleasure and her attention became entirely distracted. The scene appeared to delight her and she concentrated her delight into each of the smiling nods she sent across to acquaintances.

  “Do look, Sydney—how civilized!”

  “How greedy!” said Sydney, who was trying to direct her friend to the older end of the town, where she would at least find nothing but fruit shops.

  “Yes, that’s just what I mean—how civilized! Anybody can eat at meal-times. Come over—oh, Sydney, we must!”

  “But we’re not hungry!”

  “No, of course we’re not.” Mrs. Kerr, propping up her parasol against a table, positively beamed. The table was as small as a mushroom between them; she looked helplessly at her handbag, then passed it over to Sydney to be disposed of, and drawing off her gloves eagerly looked round to see what other people were eating. “I’m so seldom allowed to do this. Ronald is spending his own sort of morning—a very genuine dead villa—the Riviera, you see, is so tinny”—she tapped the table—“so why shouldn’t I?”