The Little Hotel (5 page)

Mrs Powell paid no attention.

‘It’s, as I see it, a question of generations. Now James Truslow Adams, you may have heard of him, says something like this, that one of the disasters of the war between the States was that all that fine flower was destroyed and that is one of the reasons for the troubles and confusions we see today. And Darwin showed that God has arranged it so that blood will tell. I have seen a good deal over here, I have seen some who have got through, and what is the result? You see it all about you, this disorder, this ruin of the fine old culture. Not only they but other races have got through; and how can we go back to the time before, when that has happened? No one would approve of Hitler, but he understood the danger. He pointed it out; but very few people took any notice. It’s unworkable, he said; it simply doesn’t work. Now I cannot approve of the extermination of peoples and yet you might say he was like a surgeon cutting out the disease. Yes, people have seen it, Darwin saw it, he was of a fine old family; but we of the good families are too few. Everywhere you turn, in every street, almost in every hotel, in this hotel, you will find some of them. But it’s unworkable. It will break down. Our culture will break down and the Russians come in. Unless what few of the old cultured people are left will get together and bring order into this confusion, however hard it may be and go against our feelings. We must make a stand and do something whenever and wherever we see it.’

I did not know at that time that Mrs Powell had a purpose; and Roger was very much impressed by this. He had no education, a poor farmer’s boy from a stone farm—that is, a farm covered with stones. He thinks the Germans are very clever: they gave him his first chance. ‘You were very clever, not the Germans,’ I say; ‘you are a funny kind of French boy.’ He gets very morose and angry at this. As for me, I laughed to myself about all that the old fools were saying. Chemistry and physics do not seep in through generations but are learned in school in four or five years. Americans come from a new country though: their views are strange and original. Ideas are not very important to them; it is their own aim that counts. I learned this from Mrs Powell. I did not know her nature then. She had been away from her country for nearly forty years and yet she was the most exaggerated American I ever knew. How could I guess that Mrs Powell was beginning a campaign to get rid of Mrs Trollope, and that she thought about it at night and carried out her plans in the daytime?

On the third floor the rooms were rather small. Number 31 is the corner room kept for Dr Blaise on alternate weekends. Number 30 is the one Madame Blaise has all the year round. The one opposite, Number 32, was occupied by Mrs Powell, who thus lived opposite all four. These rooms, all but Number 32, face the lake and they are connected by a whole series of communicating doors so that if necessary a whole family could take a suite; we had a Greek family which did so.

At night Mrs Powell’s snoring had an intermittent roar; it was like a seaside geyser; you could hear the sucking and the gurgle. Madame Blaise came to me and wanted Mrs Powell moved. Mrs Powell did not want to pay more; and did not want to go up to the fourth floor where the rooms are for artistes and skiers. Madame Blaise was rude to Mrs Powell. Mrs Powell at once approached Mrs Trollope:

‘I am afraid I bother you with my snoring.’

Mrs Trollope said, ‘Oh, no, not at all; I assure you not at all.’

Mrs Powell soon began giving out cuttings from newspapers and magazines about the Russians and American policy. It’s better not to read the books and papers guests give you; besides, I had no time and my English is not very good. I gave them back with that excuse. One was a magazine with a gaudy picture of Karl Marx on the cover and a description of his ideas inside; and of his insides too. I think it said that he was a revolutionary because of his liver trouble. This magazine appeared an hour later in Mrs Trollope’s letterbox. Mrs Trollope took it upstairs and before dinner time it was returned to Mrs Powell’s letterbox with a note pinned to it. They met outside the dining-room door as they waited for the bell.

‘What did you think of the article?’ said Mrs Powell, who spoke loudly in her deafness.

‘I don’t understand politics,’ said Mrs Trollope.

‘What did you say?’

‘I don’t understand politics,’ shouted Mrs Trollope.

‘You don’t want to talk in public?’ inquired Mrs Powell.

Mrs Trollope was the same height as Mrs Powell; both were very small women. She bent towards the old lady and said sharply and slowly:

‘Don’t like politics.’

The old woman looked her straight in the eye and said:

‘Last night you said you approved of the British Labour Government!’

Mrs Trollope stared at her and then turned to me. I stepped forward and asked the ladies about their health. Mrs Powell answered that her health was always very good and she went. Mrs Trollope said:

‘Well, I think her hearing must be good, too. What I said last night to my cousin was that the Labour Government was doing its duty in trying to save the pound.’

Mrs Trollope went into the dining-room and sat in her place with her back to the room. It was a rainy day, the shutters on the ragged damp gardens were shut and the lights were on. I had my work to do and went round to the service kitchen. Clara was waiting on table that day. She is a lively woman and likes fun. Mrs Powell with a grimace, part wink and part smile, placed her magazine at the little round table at the other side of the room where the Dutch lady sat waiting for her daughter. She walked trimly across the room, nodded to the girl at the table beside her, and herself sat down with her back to the radiator. She had begun her soup and was lifting a spoonful to her mouth when she froze as it were, shivered all over. Her eyes opened, her jaws shut fast, she put down the spoon and seemed about to rise. Instead, she watched with a singular intentness a young Negro dancer, ready to go out to work, who had come in and who went to her seat at the back of the dining-room. At the back we kept little tables where the artistes from the Toucan could sit among themselves unobtrusively. They always behaved very quietly. There were two more Negroes, one man and one woman in the act with her: they were from the French colonies. Mrs Powell sat quite still and staring and only after a long pause put the soup again to her mouth. When the younger Dutch lady came in, Mrs Powell tried to attract her notice, but the older lady having said something to the younger, they took care not to catch her eye; and they seemed to have some slight joke between them. Madame Blaise had come in. Mrs Trollope, who had seen everything in the mirror, got up excitedly and went over to her friend’s table. Mrs Powell’s gaze, still incredulous, moved from the dark-skinned artistes to the others in the room and she even looked for sympathy to Mrs Trollope; but Mrs Trollope was too busy with her friend.

Mrs Trollope and Mr Wilkins slept a good deal in the daytime and so they often went to the Toucan or the Casino to drink and dance after dinner. You don’t have to dress to go to the Toucan or the Casino, just simple afternoon frocks or suits. They hobnobbed with all the artistes and would often drink with them. It was rather expensive, said Mrs Trollope, but then she and her cousin liked a good time. Mrs Trollope was always quite eager to talk to the artistes and would smile and ‘bow’ as she said, that is incline her head, when they came in; and she did this now. Mrs Powell fixed her outraged glance on Mrs Trollope’s face. When dinner was finished Mrs Powell came to me in the office and said:

‘You said when you’re busy in summer you turn that little writing room into a dining-room for the extra table?’

‘Yes.’

‘I think the dancers at the cabaret would be happier if they had a place to themselves. They don’t eat at the same time, they eat differently, and they must feel out of place with us.’

‘They are quite happy, Mrs Powell. With our system of separate tables, which is so different from so many hotel-pensions, everyone keeps to himself. Mr Bonnard and I are very proud of having separate tables instead of long tables which you will find in other hotels at our rates.’

Mrs Powell went upstairs, put on her hat and went out for a brief walk. From then on she made a detour when she entered the dining-room, to say hello to the Dutch ladies and straight from there to her own table. Thus she avoided Madame Blaise who had complained about her snores, and Mrs Trollope whom she now called nothing else but ‘that Asiatic.’

I laughed the first time. ‘She is not an Asiatic.’

The old woman insisted: ‘She is not one of us: you don’t feel she’s like you and me.’

‘She was very beautiful as a girl, I’ve seen a photograph.’

‘They often have a showy prettiness when they’re young; that’s one of the signs.’

‘But she’s as white as you or me,’ I said; though I knew and everyone knew that Mrs Trollope had something strange, foreign, which I thought very interesting in her pale-skinned face.

‘White! With those eyes,’ said Mrs Powell.

Mrs Trollope had beautiful long dark eyes and not a grey hair. She dressed this fine black hair in a crown or aureole. She had thickened and coarsened, but her wrists and hands, her ankles and feet remained delicate; and she was always shopping for shoes small enough to fit her. On the nails of her small pale oval hands she wore pale pink enamel, and they made me think often of a bush we have along the esplanade, the flowering judas. In early spring when the first green buds appear on other trees, this bush puts out pale rose sessile buds, the size of rice. She and Madame Blaise would sit together on the esplanade and when I passed sometimes out walking with Olivier I would see them, holding each other’s hands. Madame Blaise’s were heavy, knotty and thick with rings; Mrs Trollope’s were veined but reminded me of these bushes. She also wore many rings, thin rings of different colours and a good many bracelets going up her arm. The two were fond of jewellery. They would often go shopping for jewellery, visit all the expensive jewellers in Lausanne and Montreux, get a powder-case, a lighter, get a ring mended, substitute a more expensive movement in a wristwatch for the old one, have their initials put on things, buy a handbag. Then they would spend days saying they didn’t care for the things and in the end change one or several for others still more expensive.

So they would sit talking in low voices, explaining about their rings and their children. It was a touching sight, their aged hands on their laps. I would think of them living in a foreign town, unhappy with their men, away from their children. They were mothers and both were very rich. What had they but a tiny room in a fourth-class hotel? That’s how we’re classified.

How Mrs Trollope came to be there, I’ll explain later on. Madame Blaise blew in one morning in a fuss and said she would never set foot in her house in Basel again if she lived to be a hundred. She was staying here and the Doctor could come and plead, she was staying here for ever.

‘Who knows what a doctor can do to you? A doctor can do anything, even in your sleep,’ she said, and she was speaking of her husband Dr Blaise, a very well-known practitioner.

About this time there were several cases of stealing in the hotel. Mrs Trollope and Mr Wilkins never locked their doors. Mrs Trollope explained, ‘We trust the servants; never have we locked our doors.’ But most of the others locked their doors. Madame Blaise had a door into Mrs Trollope’s room which was never locked, and the door between the rooms of the ‘cousins’, as we called them, was always open. One day Mrs Trollope came down to lunch early, leaving her door ajar and her big crocodile handbag on the plush armchair, facing the door. Mr Wilkins came to the table immediately afterwards, and a few minutes later Madame Blaise came down. She was as usual dressed in hat, jacket, coat, scarf and with her handbag, which she never let out of her sight.

Mr Wilkins was reading a book about nuclear fission. He kept showing bits to Mrs Trollope. She turned her face away and said:

‘Robert, I should have a better appetite if you paid attention to me at meals. We are not made to eat like pigs from a trough.’

He said in his starched way, laying down his book:

‘I cannot very well eat your food for you, can I, Lilia?’

I was at the serving-hatch. I should have laughed if Roger had said that to me, but Mrs Trollope burst into tears and went upstairs, though for once Madame Blaise stirred herself and called,

‘Liliali, Liliali, come and sit with me.’

‘Oh, I can’t, Gliesli, I am too unhappy; I must bear my sorrows alone.’ Out she trotted weeping and said to me:

‘Oh, Ma-dame, if you only knew, but may you never know! You have your good husband and your little one with you!’

Mr Wilkins read, and Madame Blaise ate more deliberately than ever. In the afternoon, instead of the usual quiet, which I take advantage of to do my accounts, there was some running about and discussion. I looked through the brass lift-cage upwards and saw Mrs Powell standing in the corridor, while Madame Blaise was in Mrs Trollope’s room turning things upside down and Mr Wilkins was standing in his own doorway, saying crossly:

‘You’re so careless with money, Lilia! You’ll probably find it in one of your pockets.’

I went up and Mrs Trollope ran out to me.

‘Oh, Ma-dame, I have lost a hundred-franc note. You know I always keep one in my purse.’

She then described how she had left things, the door ajar, almost wide open, and she said:

‘There’s a strange-looking man I don’t like at all who is always creeping up and down stairs with a briefcase, an underhand kind of man who tries to avoid notice and looks as if he would be glad of money.’

Madame Blaise said: ‘It is that dark man who flirts with Clara.’

But the man in question was the accountant who was in to look over my accounts.

‘And there is another man, who keeps to his room, he shuts himself up and does not eat with us. He lurks about the stairs.’

I said: ‘That is Herr Altstadt. He is most respectable.’

Mrs Powell said that the Belgian Mayor had locked himself in the bathroom since before lunch. She had knocked at the door, but it had remained obstinately shut.