The Little Hotel Read online

  Emma came to us with only a cotton dress. She had not even a shirt or drawers, nothing but her dress and a coat belonging to someone. Someone in the train had lent her a pair of bedroom slippers, high-sided plush shoes with a fur edging, to pass the frontier; and Gennaro found her barefooted at the station, when he went with his little handcart to pick up any tourists and to collect her luggage.

  Gennaro left her in the waiting-room at the station while he ran all the way downhill to the hotel, got his money, hurried back and bought her a pair of shoes in a shop up Great Oak Street; and so after several hours he brought her to us in a new pair of shoes; and I was very angry with Gennaro for dawdling. She had brought absolutely nothing with her, not the smallest bundle. She was only allowed over the frontier because she had a letter from me, saying that we would employ her as a maid in the hotel. The next day, Gennaro went out, bought some underwear and gave it to her to wear in the hotel.

  Everyone who has lived in our hotel knows how severe and proud the Italians are: there was never any hint of impropriety. Gennaro’s age made Emma respect him. He treated her like a young ignorant sister and taught her everything. And last Christmas, the first Christmas, they agreed to become sweethearts and he had already decided he would not ask for a dowry.

  The family had a cabin on a few square yards of mountain earth and not even a spade, not a rope, nor a basket to carry things in; not even a pail. There he spent his holidays. He went down to the nearest village, bought a washtub, a pail, a spade, a fork, a hoe, a basket and some seed; and in spite of the winter weather he showed them how to use the stones he had loosened in the soil to pave part of the floor of their cabin. The stones bruised their bare feet and they had no rags to wrap them in, so he bought one pair of sabots. They agreed to let him marry Emma. He told Emma what had taken place and said to her with our consent:

  ‘I love you and in due time, when we have some savings, I should like to marry you. You are my idea of a good wife and I am quite sure you never looked at another man. Do not answer me at once but think it over for a week. I know I am old and only a man-of-all-work in a small hotel, but if we work hard together we will become something better. It is my duty to see you do not do anything against your wishes, for I am an experienced older man, a city man, and you only a peasant from the mountains.’

  Emma agreed to this and a year later they were married. Emma had developed and had begun to laugh; she had grown rosier and stouter.

  Gennaro was a small man and more talkative than his wife. He took his position as married man and as elder son very seriously. He thought about it too much. Then Gennaro grew jealous. He said Emma should be kept in the laundry and kitchens until she had learned everything; she was so ignorant that she would be embarrassed in public; she ought not to serve in the dining-room, the bedrooms were no place for her.

  He should have been satisfied. His mother came past every morning. She had much more sense than her son and he listened to her respectfully. She said:

  ‘She’s a woman in a thousand, there’s not a better woman in the world. Be good to Emma and do what she says.’

  Then she told me that Gennaro was unfortunate.

  ‘My poor boy’s head is not quite right. He was obliged to join the Mussolini youth, he was a Ballilla as a child. I could say nothing. Gennaro is honest and he thinks others are too; he is credulous.’

  Gennaro would come in happy and refreshed from these morning conversations with his mother; and perhaps from the fresh breeze, the air of the lake, the view of the steep peaks on the French side and the Bernese Oberland and the water rippling.

  Emma would be working inside somewhere and he would say a cheerful word to her, go upstairs to his work, be by her side when she was preparing the vegetables and salads for lunch. After the day’s work, Gennaro’s spirits fell and sometimes at the servants’ meals, which took place in the kitchen one hour before the guests’ mealtimes, he would sit pinched, depressed, unable to say a word and eating little. Emma understood him and kept up a cheerful manner, sitting next to him and answering people in a quietly friendly way but always reserved. She took it for granted that her husband would be jealous and tired from his work. It happened that the Mayor one Friday morning was in a gay mood. He sent in Document 191 to say that the coffee was very good, remarkably German, and asked who made it. The answer came back that no one knew. Friday was a quiet day. You would not think perhaps from what I say, how very peaceful the hotel is in that off season just before spring. You could hear a ski-boot drop on the attic floor. It was too quiet. The servants began to think of their homes and whether they would lose their jobs if the season continued quiet. Gennaro had time to be jealous. Luisa and Emma went on making things for their linen-chests. Mrs Trollope began to feel her sciatica more. Meanwhile Rosa, the schoolteacher’s daughter from Lucerne, had got the star part in a play run by the German-Swiss Catholic Daughters’ Association. She stuck her thumb showily in Madame Blaise’s soup, she swaggered about the dining-room. She was to be found in the street, garden and house shadowed by a tall young German-Swiss, a businessman, who said she was his cousin. Mrs Trollope met them on the stairs going up to the servants’ rooms.

  ‘This is my cousin,’ said Rosa boldly.

  ‘How do you do?’ said Mrs Trollope politely, but even she noticed their smiles.

  Rosa had sold Mrs Trollope two tickets for the play, which was called The Dark Spot, meaning a dark spot in someone’s career, and was in dialect. The tickets also had lottery numbers on them. Mrs Trollope was quite excited about the play, saying Rosa was bold but smart and ambitious. She said:

  ‘I don’t understand German and I don’t suppose I’ll know what it is about.’

  ‘If you did understand German you wouldn’t know what it is about,’ said my husband, smiling disagreeably and meaning that no one could understand the dialect in the play but someone like myself.

  But Mrs Trollope asked what colour dress Rosa would be wearing in the last act and she sent her a shoulder-spray to match. Mrs Trollope did not understand that this kind of thing upsets the servants and makes them jealous. During the two days after that, Mrs Trollope would call to Luisa as usual when she heard her on the stairs, saying, ‘My head aches so much, do come and rub it, please, Luisa’; and Luisa, so kindhearted, pretended to be deaf. When she did at last come in, it was with the expression of an angry cat and she said:

  ‘Madame thinks Rosa is very clever, the German young lady is very clever, eh? Like an electric lamp! When she wants to! She pulls it on and off, like a lamp. No doubt she is beautiful too? As beautiful as a dancing bear! And I can imagine how beautifully she would dance the ballet. Beautiful! Bell-is-si-ma!’

  Luisa gave a rascally laugh. She was pale and irritable. ‘The English admire horses also.’

  She came down to me and said, ‘She is a very wellborn English lady, a little altered in appearance by her residence in the Orient!’

  ‘Luisa! That is forbidden,’ I said firmly.

  ‘Ah, yes. I am not beautiful and clever. A Catholic daughter indeed. An occasional Catholic daughter, a semi-occasional Catholic daughter.’

  Mrs Trollope asked me: ‘What is the matter with Luisa? She won’t come near me and my head is so bad.’

  I tried to explain about sending the shoulder-spray.

  ‘Ah, Selda, I must love people. It is all that consoles me for living abroad. And you know, my daughters and my son are not writing to me, to punish me, to force my hand. It is not my fault.’

  I could not stop her calling me Selda. She said I was the same age as her eldest daughter. She had married very young out East.

  On the Saturday morning Mrs Trollope and Madame Blaise set off along the esplanade. Sometimes they walked as far as the crumbled Haldiman Tower, sometimes only as far as the Sandoz monkeys in the public gardens. At other times they went beyond the Tower, round the elbow turn where a clear gutter runs into the lake. The swans dabble there and you can see far up the lake towards the Rhone mouth,
the Devil’s Horns, the great west wall of the Rhone valley and, above, the first peaks of the Bernese Oberland, rolling on like heavy surf. From there they might turn up to the bus-stop just above the school and go into Lausanne, or they would come back again, dawdling from seat to seat.

  We tidied up their rooms and I measured Mrs Trollope’s bedroom. In summer, if busy, we squeeze two beds into her room, and I had just engaged a bed-maker to make two stout but narrow cots which would fit in, one into her room, one into Mr Wilkins’s. If they did not move or double up, I should have to charge them double for the summer season. Mrs Trollope had noticed the bed-maker working in the backyard and was very pleased.

  I put up the menus on both entrances and in the lift. I went into the kitchen at eleven to see that all was going forward. Gennaro was there looking so cross that I did not speak to him. Luisa made a sign to me, followed me out and said rapidly:

  ‘This yellow woman’—meaning Clara—‘has made trouble. Gennaro has sent Emma to her room and is doing her work. Go and see her please, Signora. It is very bad.’

  Emma was sitting on her bed sewing. When I came in, she arose and looked me in the face, without concealing her tears. She handed me, without a word, a postcard, a coloured postcard, with edelweiss, gentian, the sort of thing you can buy anywhere in Switzerland for twenty-five centimes. It was postmarked Lausanne, dated the day before, and written crabbed, anonymous, as follows:

  Who made the worst coffee ever made in this hotel on Friday morning? Emma has other things to think about than coffee. Emma is too much interested in young men to work. What happened the day of the street-fair? What happened about ten o’clock this week, Thursday evening, when Emma went upstairs with a strange man she met in Acacia Passage? While Gennaro was helping Charlie to bed? Signed: Someone who sees and doesn’t like hypocrites.

  I sent Emma back to the kitchen and made Gennaro come to me in the office.

  ‘Who are you, Gennaro, to change the roster round? It is Emma’s turn in the kitchen. We are not pleased with you. You have begun to make trouble, just like some others not to be named. We have been very good to you, helped you to get married, stood by you when the police came about your work-permit. We have had an Italian waiter sent back to Italy already because there was not enough work for him. We have not only you, but Luisa, Lina, Clara, Rosa, I don’t know how many mouths to feed, more servants than guests in the off season and you spend your spare time making trouble. Emma is not yours to send to her room, she is mine: she is my employee. I shall speak to your mother.’

  He said: ‘I am a disgraced man. She has been talking to men. I don’t know what to do. She cannot be in the same room as me. It is too much. An honest man can’t bear it. They are mocking me.’

  I told him to go upstairs and help Herman with the floor-waxing. I said, finally:

  ‘Mr Bonnard will be back shortly and he will talk to you, Gennaro. What you are doing to your wife is very wicked and I doubt if God will forgive you. I know what your mother will say to you.’

  He went out sulkily. When Roger came back from up town, I told him. For the first time, Roger had been invited to join a little friendly association of five or six restaurant and hotel proprietors of our sort who felt that prices should be raised a little on the table d’hôte meals to raise the tone of the place. It was quite an honour that they should worry about whether we undercut them or not. But with Roger nothing is too small. He is at his best in a crisis; and it is then one understands his success.

  If he has been up all night in some cellar drinking with officers in the army and cabaret managers, he will come home green and sorry, but will say:

  ‘The lease on the Venice Café can be called in any day. The man was fool enough to trust the good nature of his landlord; and he is going to find himself without a penny next week and will have to start again as head waiter.’

  Roger’s head is always clear, no matter what his stomach says.

  Roger said: ‘We will stop this before it starts.’

  At lunchtime the guests were absorbed as usual by the menu and the poor quality of the meal the poor old German cook served them. If they noticed anything it was Clara’s wonderful good-humour. She was everywhere, chatting with everyone, sweet-tempered, willing, her languages were better than usual, she was happy as a child. Only when Luisa put her head with its pointed tongue in the door of the serving-hatch and sang like Figaro, Nu-me-ro quin-di-ci! did Clara’s expression change. ‘Fünfzehn you mean,’ she said suddenly in German. I said to Roger, ‘Look at her.’

  He frowned. He is a man of stern unprejudiced justice. As soon as everything was cleaned up and the cook had taken himself off, Roger sent for the servants in a body. He shut the office door and took them into the inner room, the sewing-room. Then he showed them the anonymous postcard suddenly, told them what it said and remarked:

  ‘One of you wrote it. I don’t suppose it was Emma or Gennaro. It is one of you and you had better confess it at once or I shall send for the police. If I find you out and you have not confessed, you will march right out of this hotel without a reference and I will see you get on the police record.’

  Luisa said at once: ‘And also it cannot be Charlie. He is in bed with a floating kidney. And it cannot be me. I am not jealous or mad.’

  ‘You will go out on the landing and come in one by one. Emma will remain here. Gennaro will go out. Emma! Perhaps you suspect someone?’

  Emma gravely shook her head. ‘If I knew I would tell you.’

  I said quickly, ‘I want to tell you that the handwriting is disguised and I think it is a disguised German script and there is a funny mistake in French such as a German might make. I do not think it is any Italian. Now, Emma, who made the coffee on Friday morning?’ (That was the morning the Mayor sent me the Document about it. The coffee was bad.)

  There was no one there but Gennaro himself, and Clara of course.

  They came in one by one but no one confessed. Rosa seemed angry and red, talked about her pride and said she was sorry she had ever left home. I told her the play A Dark Spot had gone to her head; she was only a waitress. She tossed her head.

  ‘I am only a waitress, as you put it; but very soon I shall be in a very different situation. I am merely learning the business for my own reasons.’

  ‘If you are learning the business, you will learn to get rid at once of anyone writing an anonymous letter. Please let us see your handwriting.’

  She said: ‘I’m afraid I’m like yourself, Madame. I don’t write very good French.’

  In the end no one confessed and we had to be satisfied with the idea that Clara had organized the whole thing and had out-manœuvred us. Gennaro and Emma did not speak for nearly two weeks. Rosa left to work in the Hotel Acacias and soon left that to go home. I believe this terrible incident formed Emma’s character, which was always firm. A few days later Gennaro’s mother told me Gennaro’s soul and mind had been warped by his experience as a child.

  ‘He had not a very active mind and was never able to grasp the ideas which I had and his father had: we were pacifists. I made a mistake and did not think the Italian people would accept Mussolini and then I kept saying he would last only another year or two. Gennaro became a blackshirt when he was nine years old. I could not come back to Switzerland where I was born and he was born and I could not explain anything to him because of the terror. At his school when they were only six or seven the children were asked to name the different kinds of pigs and one child got up to say, My father says that Mussolini is the biggest of the pigs. The Fascists visited his house and the parents were taken away and never seen again. That is why he is like this. I did not belong to the party for years. I kept on asking to come back to Switzerland to work and at last someone said to me, “Join the Fascists and you will get your permit easily.” I held out and did not believe it. In the end I joined the Fascists and three months later I got my permit. That is the way Gennaro was brought up—anxious and ignorant; but he is very good.’


  However, she talked to him about Emma and he forgave his wife.

  When Clara’s day off came, she said she was sick and stayed in bed. Mrs Trollope sent up a bottle of vermouth, Clara’s favourite drink. The next day Clara was quite yellow and suffering from pains in the stomach. I told Mrs Trollope Clara was suffering from a guilty conscience and greed; she had probably hoped to marry Gennaro herself. Mrs Trollope sighed and said:

  ‘Oh, poor Clara: jealousy and loneliness are cruel diseases, it is a sickness. When I am passing the church I shall go in and pray for Clara, for I know what loneliness is. Do you know what she told me, she said, “I am glad to be sick in bed, it makes me forget my old age when I will be chucked out on the street. There’s nothing ahead and no one is going to take care of me.” And she laughed, she didn’t cry.’

  The next Thursday, Clara and I went out on an expedition right after dinner, leaving Luisa to baby-sit. Clara and I were hurrying along, giggling, for we were on a secret mission. We met Mrs Trollope walking out by herself. Madame Blaise never went out in the evening for fear of catching cold. We explained where we were going, to the Zig-Zag night-club to look at the photographs of the artistes posted outside. I told Mrs Trollope that when business was quiet Roger was out in town a good deal at night. My best friend Julie, the one who was trying to have an affair with Roger, had been in the day before, smoking, talking and trying to upset me. She said she really was my friend, and to give proof of it she would now tell me that Roger was disgracing himself by going out with a strip-tease dancer who wore a leopard skin and was now at the Zig-Zag Club. While she was telling me this, she was taking powder from my box, shaking my puff in the air, telling me my make-up was of the wrong colour; and she turned and noticed a new photograph of Olivier.