The Little Hotel (6 page)

I called Charlie, the old porter. He came laughing.

‘Yes, what a card he is! He’s been sitting in the bathroom crying for three hours. I spoke to him through the door. He won’t say anything but this, “How miserable I am, what a rascal I am, I owe my misfortunes to myself”.’

I told Charlie to get him out at once. The Mayor had just paid his bill, but perhaps he was cleaned out and could not go out for his champagne.

Charlie and I called out in turn, ‘Mr Mayor, come out, we’re all friends here, come out. What is the matter?’

But he wasn’t crying then, he was laughing and I thought he might have taken the money. He might have wanted to play a trick on them. At that moment Luisa the chambermaid came upstairs and said:

‘Poor man, oh, poor man. I am sure he is in trouble. He was crying all the morning. I knocked at the door and said, “What is the matter, Mr Mayor? I will help you.” But he went on weeping.’

We all three knocked, but now he sat there laughing to himself and humming a song. I felt sorry. My heart was touched. I said:

‘Come out, Mr Mayor. There is someone here wants to see you.’

I thought he might be drunk. At these words he was quiet. Then he said in a strange tone:

‘Who are they?’

We were all silent, reflecting. Then Luisa said:

‘Mr Mayor, it is only the employees of the hotel who wish to thank you for your goodness to them. You know me, Luisa!’

She whispered to Clara, ‘Go on, go quickly! Get some flowers out of the dining-room.’

But they were only dried-up everlastings which had been there the whole winter.

Mrs Trollope quickly unpinned her violets and gave them to Luisa.

Suddenly the Mayor called: ‘Charlie! Very well, Charlie, go and get me some clothes. I have nothing on. I can’t receive people like this.’

Charlie winked. ‘How the devil did he get there?’

Charlie got a dressing-gown, hat, muffler and shoes. The door was unlocked, Charlie handed in the clothes and the Mayor came out dressed in hat, muffler, sunglasses, dressing-gown but with his shoes in his hand.

Said Charlie: ‘You see, he wore his sun-glasses at any rate.’

‘These shoes must stand in front of the doors of my suite,’ said the Mayor severely and replaced them.

His feet were well-shaped, pale, clean. He was, in fact, a good-looking man in all ways.

Luisa gave him the violets, making a speech to him in Italian. He smiled. At his door, the Mayor turned and cried:

‘Champagne for all! Thank you, friends!’ and then told Charlie to go for champagne. He commanded:

‘To the Hoirs! To the Hoirs! I like them. During the street-fair they gave me twenty little bottles for nothing at all.’

These twenty little sample bottles, wine and liqueurs, he had wrapped into a parcel, which he carried into the sewing-room to give to Lina, ‘For the Italians, you understand’.

It was as if a little bird had told him about the awful quarrel at that time between the Italians and the French cook. He was a very clever man, I know that.

The Hoirs he mentioned were just up the street. Charlie lost no time and came shuffling back with four bottles of champagne at eleven-fifty each. Well, to pay for it, the Mayor gave Charlie a hundred-franc note and there were some strange glances at that. But whose really was it?

Roger was now out frequently with friends in the town. When he returned this time, he got rid of the worry in his usual practical way: ‘The thief is either Mr Wilkins or Madame Blaise, their doors are open into Mrs Trollope’s room. No servant would dare take so much. Mr Wilkins would do it for discipline and Madame Blaise is a big spender. She despises Mrs Trollope and everyone here. For that matter I myself despise rich people who live meanly in a fourth-class hotel.’

‘That doesn’t mean you would steal from them.’

‘And she takes more drugs than the doctor brings her.’

‘How do you know that?’

He said no more.

A FEW DAYS LATER
, Luisa came to me about what we called the
forbici
affair. For days we heard about nothing but
i forbici
, which is Italian for scissors. For troubles of this sort we relied on Luisa’s good sense. She was a thin brown-haired girl, and had come with Lina her sister who had had tuberculosis, was almost cured but wanted to work on the Lake of Geneva for her health. When I met the sisters, Lina was almost cured, and I took her in. We just had to conceal the state of her health from guests. There are a lot of walking cases and convalescents about; people must work and you have no trouble with them. They would not dare make trouble.

Lina works in the sewing-room and never comes in contact with the guests. It is the younger one, Luisa, whom I rely on. She sometimes makes friends of the guests, and she likes order kept among them. She scolds them, she smiles at them, she cries for their troubles if she likes them. If she takes an interest in a guest, not the same as liking but nearly, she tries to teach him Italian. ‘You must learn, come, listen, I’ll teach you, it’s easy. One word after another. Bu-on-gior-no! Buon-gior-no! Good-day! Buon giorno! Good morning! Say it, Madame, please.’

The conversation you see was all in Italian except for the few English words she had learned herself. And all the time she talked she worked. In the morning she hurried to Mrs Powell’s little room and she could be heard saying:

‘Aren’t you going out, Madame, Ma-da-me? Sortir. Sortire. Sorr-tirr? Go-ah-oot? Sortire? It’s lovely now. But, of course, Madame must learn Italian. I teach her. I-ta-li-a-no, Madame. Volete parlare italiano, Signora? Si?’

And she would apply herself, while she turned a mattress, shook out linen, dusted, to teaching one Italian word. Very early in the morning, about six, Roger and I studied English in the basement near the furnace while Gennaro or Charlie made up the furnace. Charlie knew English very well; Gennaro knew quite a bit too. There was a window on the narrow light-well and every word we said could be heard clear as birds at the top of the air-shaft. Luisa leaned out of the window as she was dressing, catching the warm air and the English words.

Mrs Powell was always losing things. Though she did not speak Italian and scarcely a word of French, she managed to let Luisa know about them. When Mrs Powell went out for her walk Luisa would start moving furniture and looking for them. Mrs Powell had mending-bags, sachets, numerous paper parcels. She wrapped things up and tied them with ribbon or string and would have to unwrap them to see what was in them. Luisa begged her,

‘Buy those plastic bags, Madame; you can see through them.’

Luisa would see the little lady tripping in her pink and blue along the esplanade and would go through the room looking for what was lost. Afterwards Luisa would say in Italian:

‘Supposing I packed for you a bit, Madame? Arranged things in drawers, eh? But of course you lose things like this. Perdere-è-facile. Lo-oose eezy! I arrange everything? She doesn’t understand! Too bad.’

Mrs Powell cried out in her strong loud voice: ‘Luisa, my stockings have been stolen! Vous compre-nay? Volay—volay, stolen.’

‘Si, si, Signora, leave it to me, ho capito,’ said Luisa very fast, but she would think it over before she really understood. To me she would say pettishly:

‘Why can’t she learn a few words?’

I explained to Luisa: ‘She says that she thinks it vulgar in Americans to go abroad and come back home and say words with a foreign accent.’

Luisa cried, ‘Indeed, indeed! Then let me assure the lady that she is in no danger of being vulgar. Never. She is very elegant. The height of elegance.’

And yet when Mrs Powell at breakfast said, ‘One off, for my breakfast, one off with bacon, vous comprenay?’ Luisa called ‘Oui, oui’ with a smile and would say in the kitchen, ‘She is trying hard.’

Luisa went on with her teaching efforts. ‘Sun, soleil, Madame, sole.’

The deafish old woman cried, ‘Volay, volay, stolen; kelkun, someone, stole my scissors. The man. L’homme. Get l’homme. The new man on the stairs. The sulky one.’

‘De quoi? Che dice, Signora?’

‘Volay, volay.’

‘Ho capito. Stockings, eh? Ha-ha. There they are!’

‘No, no, scissors!’

‘That’s bad. I’ll look. Behind the boxes. Feld down, eh?’

‘No, no, pas tombay, volay, volay.’

‘No, no, pas volés, no stolen, feld down, Madame.’

‘My scissors! Volay. L’homme.’

It took Luisa two days to find out what had been stolen this time. She came running up from the sewing-room where it had come to her. She ran to Mrs Powell.

‘Signora! I understand! I forbici—click-click, like that, eh?’

‘Yes, scissors.’

‘I forbici, allora, ah, i forbici.’

For some reason Luisa became alarmed. She asked advice from Mrs Trollope. Mrs Trollope herself went down at ten-thirty at night to talk to Gennaro, who was on night duty. Gennaro was getting ready to lie down on the sofa. We were then trying out Herman, a new man from Lucerne. He was tall, dark, strong but sulky, lazy. He would look straight down into your eyes and wear a slight smile and then go away mumbling. Everyone but Clara disliked him. Luisa said to Mrs Trollope, ‘I have an idea she is going to have our boxes searched, this Signora Powell.’

Meanwhile, Clara was conspiring and flirting with the new man, Herman, on the quiet upper floors. Mrs Powell had lost three pairs of nylon stockings, a silver-backed comb and the scissors. Herman, said she, stood up against the wall in the dark to watch her go to the toilet and rushed into her room when he heard the door close. Madame Blaise, too, said when she came from the w.c. she found Herman in the dark part of the hall, between the linen-cupboard and her room. Mrs Trollope believed he looked through keyholes. She had been sitting in a certain place at a certain time, her clothes round her waist, when straight in front of her she had seen the strangest thing—a soft dark fringed living thing, a human eye in the keyhole. This Herman was an imp of disorder. I don’t know that he did anything wrong, but he disturbed everyone. Herman’s little room was on the top floor, between the lavatory and the bathroom. He was there when he should have been working, and in the legal rest-hour he was elsewhere. Mrs Trollope said: ‘He is always skulking about. What can Clara find so interesting in him? Clara is such a refined woman. But then she is too good-hearted to be suspicious as we are.’

I said: ‘Clara is not refined, Mrs Trollope. This air she has is to fool you. She is a mischievous old maid and always hatching plots.’

Well, Luisa found the stockings but not the scissors. Said Luisa:

‘Something must be done. She is talking about the police. She’s a regular bulldog: she’ll never let go.’

When I came upstairs there was Clara between two cupboards flashing her nails and talking something into Herman. She scurried away smiling and waving her hands to me. ‘Another German alliance,’ I thought to myself. Clara was a restless intriguer: she tried to get all the German-Swiss servants into her plots.

I called Herman down to the office and told him he must get on with the floors upstairs. Old dirt and wax made them dark. They had to be cleaned off with steel wool and re-waxed. Herman always got into a huff when told to work. He took his time about going upstairs and I heard no sound of scraping for half an hour, but I heard whispering. That was Clara again. They were both on the top floor near the servants’ bedrooms. I went upstairs and met Clara coming down smirking. She had knitting-needles in her hands which she was going to lend to Mrs Trollope. At this moment I was short-handed because Charlie had just taken to his bed with his floating kidney. The Italians were all muttering among themselves, saying
i forbici
and were slow at their work.

Later on that day, the scissors were found on Mrs Powell’s dressing-table. Luisa said both to me and to Mrs Powell: ‘I put them there; they were not lost.’

More than that she would not say, not where, nor whether she had any suspicions, not even if Mrs Powell herself had lost them. ‘Enough is enough.’

After this, whenever Mrs Powell lost anything, Luisa would say emphatically:

‘Like the scissors, eh, Madame, like
I forbici
?’

I had a suspicion that Herman had taken them for some purpose; but I don’t know.

That was the end of lost things with Mrs Powell. She returned to her political work, which consisted in making cuttings about communism and putting them on the tables before meals, or in the letterboxes. She was the most patriotic American I ever met.

MRS POWELL SAT IN THE
dining-room and if Mr Wilkins had not yet come down, but Mrs Trollope was there, would make loud conversation about communists, to annoy Mrs Trollope. She told a good many people that Mrs Trollope was a communist. If she was, pigs have wings.

One night after such a scene, I invited Mrs Trollope to the movies. The film was
Goodbye, Mr Chips
and I was longing to see it. Mrs Trollope wanted to see it again. She said:

‘It gives you such a feeling of the dear old world still being with us in the new; though the young seem so old nowadays.’

Just as Mrs Trollope and I were talking about this in the office, Mrs Powell went past with Clara. Luisa was putting my boy Olivier to bed and Clara was going to baby-sit and had her knitting under her arm.

Said Mrs Powell to Clara:

‘I never imagined there would be so many coloured people and half-breeds about in Switzerland. Communism attracts such unfortunates.’

Clara was smirking and she winked at me.

Mrs Powell continued: ‘I heard of one who was sent to a convent and married straight out of the convent young; that was before the colour could show, of course. They very often have an exotic beauty when young, though they coarsen with age and you can see it then.’

I closed the door and told Mrs Trollope to come into the sewing-room while I got ready. I had to lock up my desk. I would just say good night to Olivier and give Clara a stiff look to cool her down.

But Mrs Trollope put her head on my shoulder:

‘In the East, in Malaya, it never happened to me; they’re much kinder in the East.’