The Little Hotel (4 page)

He and Clara and Luisa the Italian girl with her sister Lina, who’s tubercular, though I never say so to guests, form an old guard upon whom I can always rely. The only surprise I got that afternoon was when Lina, a good Catholic girl, and a married woman, led a little spearhead of Italian servants into my office and said, The Italians must not be treated like dogs: I must make Francis behave or get rid of him.

And at the very moment I was scolding Charlie for moving the bed, Mrs Trollope came up from lunch and said:

Oh, Madame, I see you have been thinking about my sciatica: for I see that this bed does not sag in the middle.’

I had quite a scene with her while everything was explained, and I had to get very cross with her too. And what happens at this very moment? Naturally, the telephone rings in the office and the woman from Geneva speaks to me and tells me she expects every moment to be arrested.

When Mrs Trollope found that the bed was not for her, she went crying to her friend Madame Blaise. They were on good terms at that moment; and the next thing I knew was that Madame Blaise had moved her chaise-longue into Mrs Trollope’s room. I flew into a temper at that, and scolded them both. I was really furious. It’s simple. To keep order in a hotel, everything must stay in the same place; and then there’s the logic of equality. If one guest has new linen curtains, the other must have the best of the older curtains; if one guest has a new plush armchair, the other must have a cane lounge, if one has an extra table to write on, the other must have a footstool. I sometimes let Charlie fetch things from the attic or even from my own room to be sure of this equality; but I cannot allow others to make changes; I have a plan of it all in my mind. Take the cane lounge in Mrs Trollope’s room. The next time the two women quarrelled, Madame Blaise would come down to me and shout that I grovelled to the English and trampled on the Germans (she being like myself, Swiss-German), because I allowed Mrs Trollope to have a plush armchair and a cane lounge; and that this was because the Germans lost the war owing to the intervention of the Jews, and that Mrs Trollope was most likely a Jew. I am very firm. It is the only way to manage these disorderly people. They are just like spoiled children. It’s funny, isn’t it? Here I am, only twenty-six, and I am running men and women of forty, fifty, sixty and seventy, like schoolchildren. The secret is simple. You must have your own rules. We have another simple secret. Our hotel, the Swiss-Touring, which is near the station and near the esplanade, is the cheapest hotel in town for visitors. Cheaper than us are only the workmen’s pensions and students’ lodging-houses. No one ever mentions this fact, among our guests; but it is this thing that keeps them from boiling over.

They are counting their pennies. They have some money, some are rich, all are getting on and getting anxious about their years; and besides them there are a few poor travellers, people without a home who go from one cheap place to another, all over Europe; there are some refugees now settled with us; some collaborators who escaped in time after the war; then the night-club people and, in winter, the people going up to the snowfields.

Mrs Powell was there for the first time then. She had taken a house in another canton, in Thun, and then gave it up when she found out she had to pay heavy residence taxes. Mrs Powell had the little table near the radiator. This table was next to the corner table occupied by Mrs Trollope and Mr Wilkins. Mr Wilkins sat with his back to the wall and under a large mirror. They both could look out upon Acacia Passage and the gardens of the next villa. We kept the side-shutters closed in really cold weather, with long curtains; in those early days we had old curtains which had come to us with the hotel. Mrs Trollope sat facing Mr Wilkins and the mirror in which she saw reflected all the guests in the dining-room, and the kitchen when the service door or the trapdoor opened. She spent a good deal of the mealtime looking into it. She slept badly on account of her sciatica and had stomach pains due to her nervousness. She ate very lightly and very often would not finish her soup or her salad. Mr Wilkins spent most of his mealtimes reading the
Financial Times
, the
Spectator
or some popular book on science or politics. Mrs Trollope felt humiliated and complained; but he did just as he pleased and answered either with a derisive smile or a remark such as, ‘I assure you no one notices it, Lilia, but yourself.’

If he was not reading, Mrs Trollope would talk about her diet or the new car Mr Wilkins wanted her to buy. She did not want to buy it. She was tired of travelling and she was afraid of motoring in such mountainous country. Mr Wilkins said, ‘Very well, we shall strap a coffin to the roof.’

Sometimes, when he opened his book, she would go up to her room at once, saying that she had a headache or that her back was aching. Mr Wilkins would rise politely as she left the table and would tranquilly go back to his reading. On these occasions he would stay at the table and read till they were clearing the tables. Mrs Trollope was very sensitive to appearances. If she came down first, she would go and sit at the neighbouring round table, occupied by Madame Blaise. If she saw that Mr Wilkins had already come down and was reading, she would go to their table, say a few polite words to him and go and sit with Madame Blaise, dawdle there till half the meal had passed. We never served a guest at another guest’s table. When Mrs Trollope’s soup came to her table Mr Wilkins would call, after a moment:

‘Lilia, do come and get your soup; it will be quite cold.’

Usually she would go to him, sometimes not. He would go back to his reading. She would play with her soup and, when the meat came, say:

‘Robert, please pay some attention to me. Madame Blaise says I should drink herb tea; what do you think?’

‘Madame Blaise is not a doctor. I don’t know how you have become such a faddist, Lilia.’

And that afternoon she would have herb tea at four o’clock with Madame Blaise; though at seven she and Mr Wilkins had their usual whisky and soda. Another time she ate meat dishes for a whole week because Robert suggested that it was hunger that was keeping her awake. Again she said to Robert:

‘Mrs Powell said perhaps I need some mental activity; but I told her I always finished the crossword puzzle before I went to bed; and that the solutions kept me awake in the night.’

Sometimes he would not answer at all, but with a superior air go on reading; or would remark with his cool and charming laugh, something like:

‘There was only one copy of the
Financial Times
at the stand and the Major and I reached for it at the same time. We both laughed and I said, “Please take it, Major!” But he said, “Not at all! Let me glance over it, if you will be so kind, and then I shall be satisfied”.’ And he laughed. The Major was this resident who dressed in plusfours and lined gaiters. He belonged to the old community of English in town which never acknowledged English visitors. Mr Wilkins was of a small middle-class family in Yorkshire and was snubbed and ignored by the resident English, even those drunk or in debt. If, however, Mr Wilkins talked about what was in the
Financial Times
, Mrs Trollope was interested and gave him advice. She was a lightning calculator and had great business sense; yet she did not want to do anything with it.

Mr Wilkins got up early in the morning, about seven, got out his sheets and prepared his daily chart, for analysis of the currency fluctuations and stock-market quotations. He would say with a smile:

‘You see, I can tell you the quotations anywhere in the world at a glance now.’

When he had to go to the bank to change a cheque, he went armed with these figures; but he pretended (if they did not know him) to be an ignorant British tourist, to see if the exchange man would give him a tourist rate. Then he would tell acquaintances about it and become indignant: he might threaten to change his bank; then he would lay his plans for another exchange operation. If nothing occurred, and with his
Financial Times
in the pocket of his well-worn overcoat, he would dawdle along the esplanade, watch the workmen, study the timetable to Evian, read an old geography he borrowed from our library. The gardeners would be rooting up, setting, netting against the birds, the fishermen would be painting and mending boats, lake scows would be discharging pebbles and boulders, labourers tipping stones along the lake-front to protect the lake wall. In spring come squalls and floods; there are washaways. At this time, too, they were repairing the road down beyond the tin factory; they had pneumatic drills, steam-rollers, barrels of tar along the wharves and boat-sheds. Mr Wilkins would come back smiling to lunch:

‘I get real amusement out of watching the men at work.’

Then he would be pleasant to his wife and talk to her. By his wife I mean Mrs Trollope. I am sure they were not cousins; and we all thought of them as husband and wife; but for reasons of his own Mr Wilkins kept up the transparent comedy.

Half an hour after lunch, he would go to sleep, and sleep till the sun descending shone into his room from across the lake. Then he would get up, take a walk and put out the things for their whisky and soda.

Mrs Trollope did not sleep. She went to the Catholic church, and went shopping and to tea with Madame Blaise; and when she came home she was consoled.

‘The real reason I can’t sleep, Robert, is that I have nothing to do.’

‘Why do you want to do anything, Lilia? We are retired,’ said Mr Wilkins.

‘I am going to ask them at the church if there isn’t something I can do.’

‘I hope you are not going to make us ridiculous, Lilia. Please remember the absurd Nice affair.’

Mrs Trollope grew desperate and told me everything. When they had been staying in Nice two years before, she had absented herself every afternoon while Robert slept; until Robert, who had got up early from his nap, saw her wheeling an old woman in an invalid chair into a pharmacy. Mr Wilkins prudently pretended not to see her; but that night he found out that she had answered an advertisement and become companion for a wealthy invalid.

‘Does she pay you?’

‘I use the money for myself. You are always asking me what I want it for.’

‘You are disgracing us.’

‘What harm did I do, Robert?’

‘Surely you can see how very absurd you make me look! You will give this up at once, Lilia. Remember, we are retired, now.’

‘I shall die of boredom! Supposing we live to be eighty? I am sick with boredom.’

One day I found her in the dining-room helping Clara polish the tables. I made her some tea myself and sent one of the maids into the sitting-room with it; and then I told her it was bad for discipline.

It’s easy to see why she made so much of even a horrible person like Madame Blaise; though I suppose I should not speak that way of the unfortunate woman. When Dr Blaise came on his weekends, Mrs Trollope was always at their table and so eager for fun that she did not notice Dr Blaise’s impatient smiles, glances, shrugs. These fits of intimacy, especially at the weekends, were always followed by tiffs between the two women; and all these events were so routine that no one noticed them. It was necessary for Dr Blaise to come every two weeks, for he brought his wife the supply of drugs she needed; if he did not come, she was wretched. The Blaises had much to keep them together, a daughter, a son, Madame Blaise’s fortune, a beautiful old house in Basel. And notwithstanding all that went on, Mr Wilkins and Mrs Trollope were devoted and could not live without each other.

But I want to finish about the Mayor of B. I mentioned that Number 29 at that time was Mrs Powell, the old American woman. She married a Washington official at the age of nineteen; she was now seventy-eight and her husband had died thirty-nine years before. She inherited from him a small fortune and at once began to travel. She had scarcely seen the United States since. She lived in hotels, sometimes took a villa, moved from place to place, always avoiding the income-tax. She looked many years younger than seventy-eight; she was round-cheeked, blue-eyed, with a delicate skin. She was able to dress in powder-blue, pale rose, cream, and looked pretty with flowers in her hat or on her shoulder. She walked smartly. Seen from the hotel, as she tripped along the promenade, she might have been in her thirties. She was a little deaf but not so deaf as she said. She showed her age only by a heavy snoring which could be heard all over that part of the house, and in our bedroom through the hot-water pipes; and perhaps by her dabbling in mischief. At first she was agreeable and interesting.

She and the Dutch ladies frequently talked about backward peoples. One of the Dutch ladies said:

‘Naturally, backward peoples need administrators; the clash between their old tradition and our modern one is too great; the one crumbles and the other is a hardship. They need us to find the way out for them.’

Mrs Powell was very much concerned about race itself. She was from the South, she told the Dutch ladies. She was modern, she did not believe in what she called southern talk; but she had very strong ideas about races.

‘You see, I understand them. It isn’t right to mix the races. You see a lot of them married to other races here in Europe. I’ve seen it everywhere. People here say it makes no difference, but I feel something when I see it. Now if there was nothing, if it did not shock, I wouldn’t notice, would I? But everyone feels a sort of shock. Don’t you feel a shock?’

‘Well, one thinks about it.’

‘Now that is not natural. You see there hasn’t been enough time. Now that is one argument I had with Mr Roosevelt, but he was such an egotist, so much wanted his own way that he wanted to realize everything in his own lifetime. That’s unreasonable and egotistic; it takes generations. Were the Roosevelts made in a day? I asked him. And the same thing is true of others, of Jews. A lot of them are very pleasant at first; they have fine manners, you like them and they seem very bright; but it soon breaks down and they have ways you feel are different.’

‘But the Jews are older than we are,’ said the younger Dutch lady.