The Little Hotel Read online

  ‘The Americans are not such fine people; don’t think they care for us and our problems. For them it’s Number One; let them get their paws on our money and they stick to it. I have been fighting for years to get my money back and it is still sequestered. You see, it was war conditions; it could not be put in people’s own names; they had to trust Swiss people; and some of us did not know, so we put it into the U.S.A. Supposing Switzerland were invaded; why would they want our mountains? For the money! We are the richest country on earth. Why should we have all this worry? We must protect ourselves. So you see,’ (she said to Mrs Powell) ‘You should not think only of self, but you should see the Russians destroyed, because it is to your interest too. If we go down where will you be? All Europe is your buffer state.’

  ‘Not the English: you have a socialist government; you are collaborators with the Russians,’ said Mrs Powell turning accusingly to Mrs Trollope.

  Roger and I used to get them to disband as soon as we could; they all agreed in hating the Russians but they began to dispute, each blaming the other for their present worries. I had time to think that if Madame Blaise had property sequestered in America, since she is not an enemy alien, but a Swiss, then that property must have been enemy alien property entrusted to her, which she was now claiming. She would not be the first one. During the war many Swiss took charge of German property to prevent its being confiscated; some did it for kindness, others made a profit.

  One evening the Mayor said he would draw up a document giving his property in Zurich to my five-year-old son Olivier. It was only a temporary document, not witnessed or properly drawn, but he labelled it Document 157. He said we must call it between ourselves Document 157; never mention it to Roger and never refer to it when with others; and he told me to put it away in the safe. My safe was getting full.

  Apart from the Mayor’s papers, I had a parcel of jewels belonging to Madame Blaise and a packet containing thousands of Swiss francs and American dollars belonging to Mrs Trollope and her cousin Mr Wilkins. Madame Blaise would examine her jewels from time to time, for, she said, with Italians about, there was no security; then she would do it up again ready to fly with her to America.

  Mrs Trollope’s parcel was a source of worry too. It was labelled Property of Robert A. Wilkins, which was the name of Mrs Trollope’s cousin, but the money it contained belonged to Mrs Trollope. I never knew why it was there; for they had bank accounts in the local banks. But Mrs Trollope would come to me almost every day talking about it, crying about how short of money she was. Supposing something happened to Mr Wilkins, ‘which God forbid’? The odd thing about this was that Mrs Trollope was an heiress, richer than her cousin. That was a mixed-up story. Mrs Trollope told me everything and I soon understood; yet you are always astonished at how people can muddle their lives.

  Most of our guests are in bed by eleven, a middle-aged set. But we have a year-long contract with the local night-club, the Toucan, to lodge their touring artistes and we put up the road companies who play the Casino. The artistes for the Zig-Zag Club are a poorer crowd and put up in working-class pensions. We like the Toucan people. They are well-behaved and some of them come back each season. They get up at five or six in the evening, have coffee and rolls, lunch at the night-club and eat a snack in their rooms before going to bed. About this time there came back to us Lola-la-Môme, who does apache and South American and other dances. She is forty-two, short, strong and plump with thick black hair which she dresses like a savage; and she is still healthy and sexy enough to get applause doing belly-dances and acrobatics with her partner. Her manager is her husband, who is a few years younger; and her partner is her lover and about twenty-five. The three of them go about together and are quite famous. They quarrel and fight in public, but never here. The husband doesn’t like his position but can’t afford to lose Lola-la-Môme and her partner. But Lola insists upon picking up rich tourists in the night-club. It is dull enough here, let us admit it, at night; and all the places but night-clubs close at midnight. We’re a Calvinist country, very gaitered and neckbanded, parsonical. So after twelve the rich tourists resident in neighbouring towns have only the Toucan and the Zig-Zag and sometimes the Casino to go to. When Lola suggests bringing the men home, the men are eager, you can’t blame them. When her partner or her husband object, she says she will leave the act; and she has left them once or twice.

  She explained to me that I had no idea how dull it was living with two men who are always putting up with each other, and holding on to her; and I could understand. I told her she ought to live with just one man like I do; it is more difficult and you are never sure you can hold him. Lola thinks she can get a rich lover any time she wants to; that is an illusion, I suppose.

  Lola is a vulgar woman who wants to get money out of these rich tourists. I forbade them to dance in the house; they just talk, drink and make love. It is all upstairs out of sight on the top floor. The artistes get reduced rates, so they live in the smallest rooms and you can imagine that in so small a space it gets stuffy; the people often quarrel. The night-porter has to watch them and go up and knock on the door. Then Lola-la-Môme comes out and says she is just having a party. We can hardly prevent stage people from staying up at night after their work; and after one warning Lola usually cools down for the rest of the season. She does not want to go and live and eat in the working-class pensions where people go to sleep early and nothing of that sort would be permitted. Most of our guests know nothing whatever about Lola unless they go to the night-club.

  But how could you prevent the Mayor from knowing? He went to the Toucan many evenings. He bought drinks for Lola and her family and came home with them. They started to sit up all night and since the Mayor does not concede that they have to work, but pretends they are out for a good time, we had him running up and down the stairs and wildly about all night, singing and executing funny little acts on the carpet-runner on the landing. Some of our guests slept through it all; others became curious. Not to explain further, the Mayor began to do a strip-tease in order to dance an apache dance with Lola, although Lola told him over and over, and I believe this, that the male apache does not have to be naked to dance. She does a strip-tease at the club and ends her dance in nothing but a few beads, as my father used to say.

  Mrs Trollope said: ‘I have never seen anything quite like Lola’s act; it’s unnecessary to go so far, though it is a night-club. And Mr Wilkins and I are broadminded; we have seen a good deal.’

  I began to wish the Mayor would move to another hotel. We have had troublesome guests before and the servants can always get rid of them without anything having to be said by me. For instance, we had the Admiral here. She was an old Englishwoman who must have been a society beauty. Her fine white hair was always done as if a maid had done it and in it she wore at dinner a pale blue velvet crescent set with pearls. She had magnificent blue eyes, her skin was soft and her flesh so firm that everyone thought her about sixty-five. She was really eighty-two. Her voice had broken, she was deaf and had aristocratic manners, abrupt, overbearing or suddenly sweet and conciliating.

  We had a new electric lift which had just been installed and was always being adjusted. The engineer had to come several times from Zurich.

  She walked with a stick and would call out from the landing in her clear correct English French: ‘I am old, I must have the lift. Make the engineer operate it for me.’

  When no one came she would bellow: ‘Eh, the man up there, eh, the housekeeper! Where are the domestics?’

  It is true that this was at mealtimes; but it was also intentional that no one came near her till she had been shouting there for ten minutes or so. I used to stand at the bottom of the lift-shaft listening, until people began to come out of the dining-room to laugh or sympathize. Then I would send Clara up to her. This woman was not worse than others; but the staff did not like her. They would not serve her, so all I could do was to help them to get rid of her. She sat at the little table that all the old women like;
the chair-back is against the radiator. Usually there was no menu on her table. She would not wear glasses and so she could not read the menu that was always on the gate and in the lift. The waitresses knew this. They would hold the menu up to her and then whisk it away.

  ‘Give it to me, give it to me,’ she would call. The waitress would come again, and put it down on the tablecloth in front of her; and as she bent slowly over the waitress would pick it up and hand it to someone else at another table saying, ‘Yes, certainly, Madame, here is the menu.’

  Now the Admiral would study the menu card in the lift, but the new lift went so fast that she had no time; and whoever was in the lift would disturb her to prevent her reading, saying, ‘Have you room enough, Madame? Is Madame well today? Here we are, Madame,’ and so on, so that she never could study it. Everyone of us laughed at these little tricks; but it was not healthy laughter as with the Mayor, the kind that keeps the servants cheerful. As a result of their petty venom, they became disturbed, they hated her the more.

  They would leave her sitting there, beautiful for her age, grand and noble, flushing like a peach with humiliation. When she had ordered her food, they would bring it up cold and she would eat it cold to avoid another scene. Most of the people, Swiss and others, laughed at her: she just fitted in with their old-fashioned ideas of the out-of-date English milords.

  She was poor, yet she complained. She did not like it that the same woman who cleaned her room put her soup in front of her.

  ‘A chambermaid does not serve food.’ She did nothing unreasonable but she did not consider the low rates she was paying. ‘Pity them, the English are so poor now, the most unfortunate people on earth,’ my Papa says, ‘and yet they cannot lose their pride, their tradition, their history.’ I told Papa that nothing can be done when servants have made up their minds to get rid of someone. You see, she gave no tips: she paid her ten per cent service, but nothing extra. The servants are very poor and need the little extra. As it is, on their days out, you will find them sitting each by himself eating a roll perhaps, on the seats along the promenade getting a little fresh air and waiting to go home to sleep. We do not feed them on their days out. Very often too they spend the day in bed, eating a little bread or fruit. You see most of them send money home to their families, and their families think of them as the rich ones. Well, it is not the business of the guests to worry about that and not mine either; we must all live and eat, and out of the same pot. The way they see it is, there are people living in comfort, doing nothing and eating all day, who deny them a few extra pence. Yet I have seen them very kind to certain guests who do not pay extra; it is a question of luck and personality.

  This Englishwoman was unlucky. She was obliged to leave and went to a place along the esplanade just up the hill, much less convenient for her, since she had a stiff climb from the lake-front; and there I know she is just as badly treated, for after a while all their servants learned the joke from our servants.

  Good. You see the servants found the Mayor amusing and he was good to them. They began to get tired of him, though, when he woke them up at night. I forbade them to attend to him. Just the same he found out their doors and knocked on them, both at night and during the afternoon rest-hour. I told him not to.

  One day soon after this he asked for Document 157 back and his other documents too. He said they were false, fraudulent, poisoned documents and would do him and me a lot of harm: they were illegal and must be drawn up afresh; and in place of these he gave me a signed receipt, Document 158. He never lost count and his documents seemed quite legal to us. Roger was worried, but he had no excuse to go in and look through his luggage. This is absolutely forbidden to hotel-keepers in Switzerland; and though we do it when we are desperate and afraid of being cheated, we do not like to. Roger, also, wears rubber soles and controls the guests by listening on the stairs, on the landings or in an empty room where he pretends to be shifting furniture, examining the radiator or feeling the floor-boards for rot. The water and heat-pipes act as a telephone and the air is so still and the guests usually so quiet that there is little we miss, especially in the off seasons. Roger would have made a good secret-service man. He was born in French Switzerland but in an upland valley close to the German side. He was miserably poor, very ambitious and went first to Zurich to a German hotel, since when he has always believed in the Germans as a serious, highly educated, orderly people. It was there that he learned the value of being documented about everyone. ‘You never know,’ he says. Yet it is for himself: there is a strong nugget of obstinacy and independence in him which prevents him from talebearing to our police. ‘They’re paid for it; let them get it for themselves,’ he says. I am very thankful for this: to tell the truth the other is very like spying. Some of the guests come upon Roger when he is spying; that is the way I put it, to annoy him.

  One day Mrs Trollope came down to see me, and after beating about the bush she asked if Roger was ill: he seemed strange. They had noticed him walking around muttering in the dark places of the landing; he stood for a long time on the stairs near their doors, making believe to polish the railings with his bare hand. She said to me nervously: ‘This morning he was standing in the dark outside our doors, and when I came out unexpectedly he went silently as a ghost down the side corridor and opened the door of one of the empty rooms; and he spoke into the room. He said, “Is everything all right, Madame?” But I knew there was no one there, for I had just been looking for Clara to give her a skirt. I went back into our rooms and told Mr Wilkins to look out of his door. He looked and saw Mr Bonnard pulling the lever on the radiator outside our room back and forth. When he saw Mr Wilkins, he cleared his throat and said, “I believe we shall have to take the heating off and fix the boilers.” Mr Wilkins came in and I went out a few minutes later to the bathroom; and there was your husband on the floor near my door, tapping with his finger at a floor-board. This is very upsetting, Madame, to Mr Wilkins and me.’

  In excuse, I told her about the Mayor who was quite a poser for Roger. The Mayor said to us this morning: ‘If any Belgians come here you will let me know, won’t you? I don’t want to see them. I am here incognito and I don’t want people to think I am ill. I am a very well-known man.’ He followed this with the usual document which he this time called: Memorandum to Madame German Bonnard.

  Mrs Trollope said with much interest, ‘You don’t suppose that he has something to hide?’

  I said we were watching the papers to see if any scandal was blowing up. They were still shooting collaborators in Belgium. It was very strange the amount of money he had; he washed his hands in it, threw it out of the windows. Yet he received letters from firms and lawyers in Zurich addressed to the name he had given, and underneath always, ‘Mayor of A.’

  I teased him: ‘Why do they call you the Mayor of A. when you are the Mayor of B.?’

  ‘It is because I am here incognito,’ he explained.

  If the letter was not addressed to the Mayor of A. he sent it back.

  One of Roger’s nervous fits was coming on. He chainsmokes and spies more when he is going to have a fit of the blues. As for me I was glad to have the Mayor, who now occupied two adjoining rooms. He said he must have a bedroom and a study.

  The morning this arrangement was made, he rang all the bells, assembled the whole staff and showed a pair of shoes, one shoe outside each door.

  ‘Those shoes are not to be touched; I have staked my claim.’

  We sent up the bill; he paid it at once. He insisted however upon keeping the pair of shoes in their position outside the doors. He said, ‘In case you are tempted to give the rooms to another German family.’

  ‘That was a Greek family.’

  So far, all was easy. We had at that moment only five permanent guests in the hotel. There was Mrs Trollope and her cousin Mr Wilkins, English people from the East, who had been with us for over a year and who occupied two adjoining rooms. On the same floor, next to Mrs Trollope was Madame Blaise, who had been with u
s the whole winter. Next to her was the large corner room, a double bedroom with a fine view, which Dr Blaise occupied every second weekend when he came over from Basel.

  On the other side of Mr Wilkins at this moment was Miss Abbey-Chillard, an Englishwoman who was a great worry to us. A custom began during and after the war of allowing some English people to stay on at the hotels with only promises to pay, for it was felt that ordinary exchanges would soon be re-established and the English visitors would be allowed to pay their bills in Switzerland. Switzerland received many English visitors in the old days. The English like to come away and stay in a place for a long time. For example there was a couple, a Major and his wife, seen every day along the esplanade, who had been on this part of the lake shore for over forty-five years. They were beginning to worry about dying among foreigners; but they were afraid to go home for they believed the Labour Government would enrol them at the labour exchanges and send the man out to work on the roads, since he had no occupation. These were fancies they had among themselves.

  Thus Miss Abbey-Chillard was troublesome; but one never knows; a hotel-keeper cannot be too cynical or harsh. People who do nothing for a number of years are naturally eccentric. Miss Abbey-Chillard wanted invalid dishes and wished to pay less for them because they contained no meat. At first she ate in the dining-room and then in her room, and we had too few servants for that. Her meals often enough were brought back untouched; and then she did not want to pay anything for ‘this beastly swillʼ.