The Hotel

Miss Fitzgerald hurried out of the Hotel into the road. Here she stood still, looking purposelessly up and down in the blinding sunshine and picking at the fingers of her gloves. She was frightened by an interior quietness and by the thought that she had for once in her life stopped thinking and might never begin again. Ladies under discs of coloured shade from their parasols came walking down the middle of the road; they deflected their course to pass her. Their faces conveyed nothing, but now and then they would smile, and Miss Fitzgerald would feel her throat and chin contract as custom wrenched from her a small, stiff bow. She stood there helplessly, as though she were waiting for a friend.

That Miss Fitzgerald should, after so violent an exit, simply continue to stand there had been beyond the calculations of Miss Pym. She, after a short blank pause of astonishment up in her room, had begun to creep down the stairs warily. She listened, she clung to the bannisters; taut for retreat at every turn of the staircase. The lift shaft rose direct from the lounge and the stairs bent round and round it; she stared down for a long time through the wire-netting case of the shaft to assure herself that the lounge was empty. It was. There was not a soul down there, not a movement among the shadows; it was eleven o’clock and everybody would have gone out to the shops or the library, up to the hills or down to the tennis-courts.

Three or four minutes after this announcement Tessa, thoughtfully taking her hair down with Baudouin propped up before her, was surprised by the entrance of Sydney, unusually animated.

“Mrs. Pinkerton and Rosina,” said Sydney, “cannot get into their bathroom. They simply can’t. I’ve been watching. Both their doors are open and they take it in turns to come and rattle incredulously at the bathroom door. It is really funny; I wish you would peep out and look. That determined little rat of a maid of theirs is being the man of the party; she heaved her shoulder against the door just now as though she were going to force it and Rosina cried ‘No, don’t, I forbid you—there may be somebody there!’”

“Oh poor things!” said Tessa. “How awkward for them. Do you think they will send for the manager?”

Tessa with her fluffy hair falling down round the innocent, interrogatory O of her face looked younger, looked really rather—there was no other word for it—sweet. She wrapped her kimono closer round her and followed Sydney into the dusk of their end of the corridor, from whence they expected to watch unobserved. But a moment later Miss Pinkerton, down at the other end, turned in their direction a wild face of appeal. She hesitated, then something in the essential Tessa brought her towards them. She ignored Tessa’s déshabille. “Oh, Mrs. Bellamy,” she began, “I wonder if you.... It is rather embarrassing....”

“I know. I am so sorry. Have you any idea?”

“We cannot understand,” said Miss Pinkerton. “We cannot believe——”

“I cannot think,” said one, “what a woman of that sort finds to do with herself.” She spoke with emphasis, this remark had been throughout a recurring-point in the conversation. “She has no interests. She hasn’t a large correspondence, she does nothing at all for herself. I personally find the day so very full here, it seems only too short.”

“I wouldn’t say too short. But as days abroad go, one seems to get through them quickly enough.” To this there was a hum of agreement.

“She sits on her balcony in the sun,” said Mrs. Hillier, “a thing which I for one should never have time to do. I suppose one has too much conscience. If I ever do go out on my balcony for a minute and look along, there she always is, and if I call out in a friendly way ‘Whatever are you doing?’ she says ‘Nothing’ and looks amused and rather superior.”

“She doesn’t sketch, or one would understand her staring like that at the view. Of course, it is very beautiful.”

“She may think,” said another of the ladies, looking up from some broderie anglaise over which she had been straining her eyes. She was of some prestige, her speech was slow and weighted down with implications. “She must think a good deal,” she decided; “nobody who was not thinking could do absolutely nothing all day and look so very superior about it, like a cat.”

“You mean that she has something on her mind?”

“Well,” Mrs. Kerr said expansively, meeting Sydney on the stairs next morning, “isn’t it rather a nice puppy?”

She was dressed to go out, with a blue straw hat pulled down over her eyes. She had paused with a hand out to steady herself against the frame of the staircase window, and the north light defined the smiling curve of one cheek and drew prismatic colours out of an earring. She was evidently very happy.

“What puppy?” Sydney said blankly, looking up from a few steps below her.

“My Ronald. Isn’t it rather a nice——”

“Oh very, yes. I thought it seemed a rather severe puppy last night but I daresay that was the journey.”

“Oh, severe?” said Mrs. Kerr delightedly. “Was he really severe? Sydney, you must tell me; how fearfully funny!” She narrowed her eyes for a moment as though she were trying to picture the meeting of Sydney and Ronald. “I don’t believe,” she admitted, “that he was pleased at finding everyone dancing. It didn’t, somehow, seem right. But I daresay he thought you severe; I must ask him—you terrify me. He seemed rather dazed by you all.”

“I’m glad his first day is so fine,” said Sydney and felt as though by this she were somehow including herself in the happiness of the Kerrs.

“Yes, I’m always lucky,” agreed Mrs. Kerr. “Now we’re going out together. You can’t think what it is like to be going out with a son. It is unbelievably nice—I’d forgotten.”

Veronica was in despair. She slipped, after a doubtful tap, round Sydney’s door, and professing an acute desire for sympathy and consolation, sank without further explanation into the billows of plump eiderdown on Sydney’s bed, kicked her white suède shoes across the room and flung her hat after them.

“The floor hasn’t been swept,” said Sydney, looking up from her book. Notwithstanding the slight sense of degeneracy induced by reading novels before luncheon she had been enjoying “Jude the Obscure.” She did not mind Veronica coming in but wished she did not have to talk to her.

“I don’t care if I don’t put any of them on again,” announced Veronica in the toneless accents of sincerity. “They are abominable.”

“I think the clothes you wear are nice,” said Sydney. “Have you got a pain?”

“As a matter of fact, I hate all my clothes. And I don’t know what is to become of me. Does it ever occur to you that being alive is a mistake?” She swung a stockinged foot and sighed. “I do wish,” she said, “that I had brought my knitting. I do think conversation when one hasn’t got anything to do with one’s hands feels fearfully awkward, don’t you? And I really should like to talk, if you don’t mind. You’re not doing anything—I mean, only reading?”

“Why don’t you go out?”

Veronica explained that she was sick of other people’s faces and was certain, comfortably, that Sydney would understand what she meant.