The Hotel quotes

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.

L. Milton—John? Three letters for him and something that looked like a bill (or perhaps a receipt) had been forwarded from an address she knew quite well, a country house in Derbyshire. Gratifying how one’s intimate world contracted itself, how one’s friends wove themselves in!

Society was fascinating, like a jigsaw puzzle!

Miss Pym heard somebody beginning to come downstairs and moved quickly back to the notice board. Those firm steps coming down unhurriedly in a light, continuous, increasing ripple sounded like Mrs. Kerr’s: it was Mrs.

Her profile did not commit her, it expressed an ironic indulgence to fashion in the line of a hatbrim, the soft undulation of hair, an earring’s pendulous twinkle, the melting suave lines of a scarf round the throat.

Mrs. Kerr took fashion in and subdued it and remained herself.

Miss Pym with a welling-up in the depths of her, was moved to tell Mrs. Kerr everything and did not know where to begin. She was a timid woman but had for a moment the sufferer’s arrogance.

It had been a flare—or a blotting-out, how could she better describe it?—like the horrible blackness of spilt ink, suddenly everywhere, that makes one crinkle one’s face up.

They had seen each other crudely illuminated, and they had seen each other as vulgar.

She could not remember how it began, she could not remember anything leading up to it, just that there had been something intolerable about Emily from the moment she came to the door.... That is the worst of anger, that terrible clarity.

She could not remember how it began, she could not remember anything leading up to it, just that there had been something intolerable about Emily from the moment she came to the door....

That is the worst of anger, that terrible clarity.

They had had, at that moment when everything tottered, worse than a sense of destruction; they had felt the whole force of a doubt in that moment: had there ever been anything there?

Where was she, what had she been going to say? This was the way that she and Emily talked all day long, climbing the hills or sitting among those warm rocks that fringe the Mediterranean.

They drew in each other’s ideas and gave out their own by a gentle process, like respiration.

They had pinned down the most slippery ethical subtleties for absorbing, tireless analysis. Everything they said to each other was so true. Now this was all becoming nonsense, futile in the ears of Mrs. Kerr. Her waves came back bewildered, broken against something.

“My dear child, I’m her age. We do date when we talk. She had quarrelled, I think, with her friend, the other artistic one. I came on her down in the lounge nearly crying and the other, still nearer it, was out in the road.

You know, women’s lives are sensational.

Aren’t you inclined to be intolerant with us all?”

“Well, I suppose it’s inconsistent of me,” said Mrs. Kerr. “

I’m not a Feminist but I do like being a woman.

”

Kerr never praised them, seemed in fact rather flatly to take them for granted, was fresh reason for self-laceration. “A delightful woman ... rather a charming person ... I thought, an amusing man....” These haunted Sydney, aloofly inimical, these friends of her friend.

People one did not know remained on a different plane, inaccessible to one’s criticism.

Sydney professed herself (to friends of her own age) a Realist, and it was perhaps because of this that her imagination which she dealt with austerely was able to revenge itself obliquely upon her.

Kerr as a tennis-player, in this most ordinary, popular of her aspects, had she reason to feel she existed at all? It became no longer a question of—what did Mrs. Kerr think of her? but rather—did Mrs. Kerr ever think of her?

The possibility of not being kept in mind seemed to Sydney that moment, a kind of extinction.

Mrs. Kerr had many friends; all these demi-gods would leap up at a reference to one of the least of them, shadowy and menacing.

“Oh no, don’t do that ... Sydney darling. I suppose I may be incorrigible.

I still seem to read for amusement.

”

She wanted something that would settle down with her, simple and unexigent like an old family servant, so that they might get to know each other and understand each other’s little ways. She was distressed by any suggestion of impermanence; she was a homely woman.

One had to have Something in one’s life.

She lay on a velvet sofa in her bedroom with the head pulled round away from the window and wished that she were a religious woman and that it were time for lunch and that Sydney would soon come in.

She wished so much that she could make up her mind about this, turned her head among the cushions and with a sigh refolded her hands on her bosom.

In Life one seemed always to be making decisions.

When Sydney came in she thought that Tessa, lying with closed eyes in the thick green dusk of the closed jalousies, must be asleep.

She was accustomed to stare at people as from a point of vantage, forgetting she too had a face. They had thoughts too (with these she often forgot to credit them). Did they also think as they looked at oneself?

The strangeness is that a cat can look at a king and see him; we kings forget so often that cats are more than objective.

“—a lucky girl you are,” Tessa was remarking, “to be able to walk about like that in the sun without burning your face.—We’re to have an asparagus omelette, Sydney: you know, à l’Asperge! We might come on down, if you’re ready:

Women appearing before their husbands remained alert, gazed into an opposite space resentfully and ate with an air of temporizing, off the tips of their forks. When the husbands did come in it seemed a long time before there was something to say.

It seemed odder than ever to Sydney, eyeing these couples, that men and women should be expected to pair off for life.

During intervals between the courses women reft from intimate conversation looked across at each other’s tables yearningly. Mrs. Hillier held out by the fringe for a friend’s admiration a beautiful crêpe-de-chine scarf she had bought in the shops.

Beyond the dining-room along the expanses of the lounge people risen early from their tables were awaiting one another, meek beneath the rule of precedent, to fulfil a hundred small engagements.

Leisure, so linked up with ennui, had been sedulously barred away.

Each armchair, each palm and bureau had become a trysting place where couples met to hurry off or groups were reunited.

They were part of the immense assumption on which the Pinkertons based their lives.

The Pinkertons imposed themselves on the world by conviction.

The damage at which they now stood aghast was not a personal affront and they were ennobled by the absence of personal resentment. The poor old things had, after all, ventured out into the world along a kind of promontory.

He hoped to sleep till the palm-trees outside were posed in blue air and white sunshine; when on opening his eyes a first picture should spring to them brilliantly, vivid, as he leaned from his window, with all the vividness of ideality.

He still had a childish pleasure in arriving at places at night, as though he had been brought there blindfold.

Humming a Gregorian chant he clicked back the bolt sharply and came face to face with two ladies, one in a dressing-gown, emerging simultaneously from an opposite room.

“Wouldn’t it be nice,” she said, suddenly smiling, “if the Saracens were to appear on the sky-line, land, and ravage the Hotel? They all take for granted—down there—that there aren’t any more Saracens, but for all we know they may be only in abeyance.

The whole Past, for a matter of fact, may be one enormous abeyance.

But I wonder,” she added while a cloud of depression crept over her, “how many of us they would really care to take away?”

Veronica paused, and did her reputation the credit of a long enquiring guarded upward glance, which the steepness of the ground, the long grass and the closeness of the trees at a point combined to baffle.

One’s own visibility is impossible to calculate.

Then she scooped something out of the tank and put it down Victor’s neck. He seized her wrist and doubled it backwards. She writhed, and with a voluminous and graceful movement kicked him.

James Milton offered cigarettes about spasmodically, his cheeks burned. He kept striking matches, burning his fingers with them and throwing the matches away again with exclamations of unnecessary violence.

He had never seen a man and woman kiss before and was battering in a kind of despair against the glass wall that divided him from experience.

He was thankful, with a tinge of regret, that Sydney had not been among them; then he turned and saw her behind him, talking to Eileen Lawrence. He could not tell how long she had been there.

She was saying to herself, “Oh, my dear Herbert, my poor Herbert!” and her mind grew dark with resentment against the others. If one might only, in intimation of what one felt, have pressed up ever so gently against his arm.

But he had always to be considered successful; his head, though frequently bloody, might never be admittedly bowed.

“Very lucky,” she repeated, “in our weather.”

The lounge with its grouped furniture was of an isolating vastness. A man, unrecognizable from here, sat leaning his back against one radiator; Mr. Miller with his patience-board had drawn up as close as possible to another.

One longed for the disorder of firelight among the orderly shadows.

One missed one’s dog. One missed the tug of association and habit towards one chair: there were too many, groves of chairs through which Colonel Duperrier wandered sadly. He could not even remember where he had been sitting before.

A man, unrecognizable from here, sat leaning his back against one radiator; Mr. Miller with his patience-board had drawn up as close as possible to another. One longed for the disorder of firelight among the orderly shadows.

One missed one’s dog.

One missed the tug of association and habit towards one chair: there were too many, groves of chairs through which Colonel Duperrier wandered sadly. He could not even remember where he had been sitting before.

“Oh no, thanks.

Nothing but grief and bitterness comes of borrowing other people’s Onotos.

Do go and get me that pen! I dare you....” She drew down her upper lip and stared at him with solemnity. Both liking each other better than ever, they laughed again.

Though keen players, the seven were not to be numbered among the enthusiasts. Those, after a perfunctory glance at the weather, had sat down to their tables soon after eleven o’clock.

Nobody who smoked but did not play bridge dared enter the smoking-room.

Out of deference to Mrs. Bellamy, who was among them, nobody had so far touched on the aspect of Mrs. Kerr which most profoundly intrigued them—her friendship with Sydney.

It’s not of course that I’m nervous but I really begin to feel—if you’ll understand my saying anything so extraordinary—as if I didn’t exist. If somebody does come to the door or the telephone does ring I’m almost surprised to find I’m still there.

One would go mad if one were not able to get abroad.

”

“But if one does make a home for anybody one is still very much alone.

The best type of man is no companion.

”

She left the street but delayed her return to the Hotel by following a series of bye-paths, pausing now and then to stare idly through some barred gate into a garden.

She was mapping out for herself a deep-down life in which emotions ceased their clashing together and friends appeared only as painted along the edge of one’s quietude.

At a turn of the footpath she met the Barry children going down to the shore with their nurse. There were several of them, very much alike; their number appalled Sydney who stood back against the wall.

Sydney’s day had been so far as perfect as a bubble; she felt careless of it, as though the bubble could not burst.

Happiness, she said to herself, is not to be solicited, but coming, for however short a time, comes with an appearance of finality, to be juggled with off-hand.

It seems to be some kind of balance, as in riding a bicycle, attempted painfully a thousand times and achieved at last without effort.

“I am sorry, that was horribly vulgar of me.

It is so much easier to be vulgar and so much less noticed.

I mean, you and I are supposed to assume, or to seem everywhere to assume, that that man down in the garden could be more to either of us than the other.

“

But young people are always funny: as we get more sophisticated we can’t help realizing that ourselves—I don’t know whether that makes us less funny or more so.

”

When they had come out into the road they walked more slowly between the lines of chestnut-trees, watching the light fade from the enormous faces of the hotels and retreat even from the villas above, which though suffused in dusk still glimmered.

Night had arrived, as usual, with the catastrophic suddenness which does not for a long time cease to be alarming.

They could hear forgotten windows being slammed indignantly, while lights springing up behind the curtains brought them out in hundreds in their uniformity, with here and there a figure passing regularly as a pendulum to and fro across the screen of lace.

“Yes,” said James Milton, for whom the Hotel was at once in miniature. “

If one could see people all at once like that they wouldn’t matter so much.

” Quite apart from and yet somehow parallel with the intellectual conception he had another idea of God, of which he permitted himself to be conscious, as an enormous and perpetually descending Finger and Thumb. What Sydney had just said fitted in with this alarmingly.

Sydney stared out at the hill, crude in sunshine, then went on upstairs.

She thought how ironic it was that a day made to order for two people’s triumphant occasion must be at the same time dealt out as a background to everyone else.

She felt she had no energy and could never get as far as her room, choose her gloves, find her parasol and put on her hat. At the thought of anything beyond this, her prospect for the day, she faltered.

You see, my mother has got a perfect mania about languages. She would like me to be able to speak ninety-nine different ones even if I never learnt anything else.

Though what, I should like to know, is the use of speaking ninety-nine languages if one has nothing to say?

Now I think the nuns have no idea of teaching; I’ve never been so badly taught in my life.

“Don’t you know any people? Do you like them so much?” Cordelia enquired. “How funny!

I only like people in books who only exist when they matter.

I think it is being in danger or terribly in love or discovering treasure or revenging yourself that is thrilling, and for that you have to have people. But people in hotels, hardly alive...!”

She was not accustomed to consider death as other than a spontaneous fine gesture. Now it hinted itself as something to be imposed on one, the last and most humiliating of those deprivations she had begun to experience. She thought, “

It is all very well to escape to the future and think it will always be there; but this is the end of the future.

” Looking up to watch a bird fly slowly across the sky she realized that living as she had lived she had been investing the future with more and more of herself.

but this is the end of the future.” Looking up to watch a bird fly slowly across the sky she realized that living as she had lived she had been investing the future with more and more of herself.

The present, always slipping away, was ghostly, every moment spent itself in apprehension of the next and these apprehensions, these faded expectancies cumbered her memory, crowded out her achievements and promised to make the past barren enough should she have to come back to it.

James Milton’s attempt to come further into her life, to regions by his acquaintance of them surely sufficiently ice-bound, appeared in the light of present considerations heroic: he had been staking his future. But his future, she recollected, spun itself off into infinity.

They went on to look at the English end of the cemetery, where more discreet memorials had been hewn into shapes better suited to granite than to Carrara marble. All round the cypresses waited.

How complete the Riviera was, thought Sydney, one could even die here.

Birds were rare; she started as one dipped from a tree and flew zigzag with a shrill cry, skimming the gravestones. Like an echo of the bird’s cry they heard the creak of a hinge as the gate, hidden by trees, was pushed open decorously.

She did concede—and generously he could approve the concession—a few words back over her shoulder, perhaps to Miss Warren out there.

Then she sat beside him, most beautiful in the half-light, her attitude settling into complete repose as silk settles into its folds.

She had still a little amusement, a faint perturbation, but she was allowing these ripples to widen and fade in her mind. It would be clear of them soon, a smooth consciousness on to which he hoped to stream like light.

They were still after this life-long strangeness to one another at a stage when the novelty of being together made each seeking-out of one another unique.

A meeting was in the nature of a rendezvous and the mise-en-scène queerly important.

The isolation of rendezvous made indifferent such publicity as that of a bench, a waiting-room, or this rigid sofa pasted square to the wall of a drawing-room. So they sat here, Ronald exalted.

Round him stripes prevailed on the tight brocades of the upholstery, on the mats methodically diamond-wise on the polish; stripes were repeated innumerably in the satiny wall-paper and the lace blinds over the door.

One had a sense of being caged into this crowded emptiness.

This seemed the strangest place to sit and make demands on motherhood, the strangest place for motherhood in answering to make itself palpable. He felt half impelled to ask his mother some fantastic question: “What do I mean to you?”

“I’m afraid they seem inevitable.

She is a very disappointable girl.

But it really is a pity from our point of view, because she’d be moving out now and you would be moving in. How long is it, I wonder, since you and I have kept house?

That “hygienic” had stung Ronald.

It was like getting a splash in the eye from one’s own disinfectant.

“I suppose,” he said, as though he were speaking to her in the dark and had to guess her position, “that you think I don’t like things to be beautiful.”

“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?

“Yes—no. What would be the good?

Everybody’s the same and I must have somebody.

”

“Oh, I daresay. But what am I to do? I don’t want to be anything. I’m not modern.

I’d be perfectly happy the way I am if only other people weren’t exactly like they are.

Sydney, you give me the creeps sitting there like an idol. Do say something. Tell me what you think will become of me.”

“I know,” said Veronica willingly. “I did feel like nothing on earth. But you’ve cheered me up immensely.

It’s queer how the most ridiculous little worry of somebody else’s will often take one’s mind off one’s own.

But there really was something I wanted to ask you about. I’m engaged to Victor—would you advise me to be?”

“—I don’t suppose I should understand, should I?

Funny how well we know each other—I’ve never given myself away like this before—and yet how little we know....

In an ordinary way, in London, we should run miles I daresay, rather than meet. Of course, I should have met Victor anywhere. I say, I hope I haven’t made your bed uncomfy, rolling about? I really can’t sit on foreign armchairs; they’re so steep.”

Then they pressed in behind her, looking to left and right of them up at the palm-trees or between the boles which had an exotic, rather horrible fatness.

The tangled gloom and the expanse of silence swallowed up their cries of admiration.

Miss Fitzgerald, after checking off with nods of satisfaction all she still found here, invited Ronald to tell her whether this was not all he had hoped.

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.”

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?

”

… yellow marble and he saw looking across it, that the smooth streaked sides went down for 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.

“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 to hang about under the slant of rock that roofed him into a cave.

“Yes, that’s just what I mean—how civilized!

Anybody can eat at mealtimes.

Come over—oh Sydney, we must!”

Mrs. Kerr, however, sitting there with her half-smile, her evident deprecation of the interlude, her invincible air of fastidiousness, had maintained her own plane whereon “vulgarity” would be meaningless.

Sydney could only suppose that cruelty, as supremely disinterested as art, had like art its own purity which could transcend anything and consecrate the nearest material to its uses.

The friend sitting back to back with Mrs. Kerr had gone away minutes ago; the little blue tables one by one were deserted. The business of the Patisserie wilted temporarily before the approach of lunch-time.

Mrs. Lee-Mittison knew so few people who could look at a paper without rumpling it. Whenever anybody strolled through the lounge with the air of exhausted resources peculiar to this half-hour before lunch-time, she knitted faster than ever and looked unconscious.

Life had developed in Mrs. Lee-Mittison a fine set of jungle instincts; she could apprehend and be rigid before, looking over her glasses, she had actually discerned with her usual mildness the approach of the predatory.

“I do wonder if there is any news this morning,” said somebody (one of the talkers) drifting about with her wool-work and looking distastefully at each of the chairs. “There seems to me to have been no news for a long time.”

She had offered herself as a break in what seemed, as he was growing older, a general closing-down of horizons. “She mustn’t be like this,” he said in his desperation and, to hide her, clattered the shutters together and turned away.

He felt that most profound concern possible for another human being, when it becomes a question no longer of the extent of one’s own possession of them, but, transcending this, of what in their untouchable selves they are.

He went for a walk up the hill to the back of the villas, along the precarious terraces from which the town looked small and the coast, in spite of its uniform blueness, disordered and desolate.

… his relief and chagrin he could not see Sydney anywhere, his day bade fair to have simplified itself and he contemplated his future, over which an afternoon still to be filled up seemed to stretch enormously, with a proper sense of reprieve but without appetite.

One had to amuse oneself, but he did not see the necessity.

At a point in his reflections she must have come up behind him inaudibly, for her voice said abruptly, “Do you never play now-a-days?”

It’s a pity, because Sydney would look very well in black, rather hard satin when she’s about forty-five, much more herself than she does now, here.

Isn’t it funny that for everybody there seems to be just one age at which they are really themselves?

I mean, there are women you meet who are obviously born to be twenty (and pretty at that) and who seem to have lost their way since, and men you do wish you’d known when they were say, thirty, or twenty-four or feel sorry you …

“Here, come and sit down,” and twisting round so that her legs, which had been stretched out in front of her, could leave more room for him by dangling over the edge. “

What a lot of energy is wasted,

” she observed, “in replacing one lot of people by another exactly the same.”

leaning back on his elbow he subjected her profile, covertly, to a perplexed and grieved scrutiny. “And does this worry you at all?” he asked in the hope that while preserving an equal detachment, he might make her at least aware of her strange anæsthesia.

An intelligent person, Ronald thought, should never be entirely unperturbed.

She turned to look at him with the dark attentiveness of wandering thoughts.

He wondered if anyone ever tried to describe the experiences of love without a bottomless suspicion of imposing upon themselves, of falsity.

Momentous letters should be posted white-hot; they impinge too much on the memory, are weighed over and over again by the conscience.

He felt an indecorum in going to meet Sydney with these in his pocket, these meanly adequate little summings up of his position vis-à-vis to herself, his praises of her already qualified by a faint possessiveness. So at least he assured himself;

The momentary impacts of colour and smells and lights on his senses that had built up the place for him would be forgotten, only the sum of them that he might have received in an idle half-day would remain.

A thousand hours superimposed on each other would melt into one; a thousand that had in turn been unique, coloured differently each from the others by mood or circumstance.

“Will she ever,” he wondered, “be so complete to me; not a succession of moments but one? Will these evenings, mornings, lights, memories, shadows, half-apprehensions, glimpses ever fall away or run together and be merged in the whole of her?

Under the opaque sky the sea was white, glassy except where now and then a hundred ripples gave the effect of a shiver. Here and there a cyprus waited, dark among the olives.

The evening had an ache about it, a hush of timelessness, and Milton wondered if he should forget this too.

They walked in the half-light of the olive-trees as though deep down under water; Sydney’s face was pale and some deception of shadow made it look melancholy but the colours of her scarf burnt.

“But we’re going to live it.

Any life would look bad from the brink; if we had to make the decision we’d probably never be born.

But most lives are the same, I’m sure, once one’s in mid-stream. Ours will be lovely. But you won’t see me often again in a Roman scarf.”

“

You jump on your feelings and put a pistol up to their heads to make the poor creatures explain themselves.

You don’t give them a chance. You don’t, honestly, Sydney, give them a chance.” He spoke with some energy.