Authors: Christina Stead
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 Most of the people, Swiss and others, laughed at her: she just fitted in with their old-fashioned ideas of the out-of-date English milords.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 us 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.
Francis the French cook would howl when he heard what she wanted for lunch; and I or one of the girls would prepare the soup or milk dish on a small burner. Hence, it was not always very good.
Then Madame Blaise, who had poor mountain girls to work for her in Basel, expected abject servility. She always quarrelled with Rosa, a maid we then had from Lucerne who was a schoolteacher’s daughter and had come to learn French. Educated servants are always more difficult than the others. Madame Blaise and Rosa quarrelled in public. Rosa tramped and swirled round the dining-room, pleasant to some, rude to others. Madame Blaise, sitting at the table, as always, in her jacket and dress and even in fur coat, with her big hat and bags and shawls hung round the chairs, made service difficult. Rosa took advantage: she shoved Madame Blaise and spilled the dishes on her shawls. Madame Blaise took advantage: she sent back the dishes three or four times. While all this was going on in the dining-room, Francis the chef, a very nervous and proud man, would be creating scenes with the Italians and Germans. One day Gennaro, who had been scrubbing the floors, had to peel the vegetables. He took hot water in a basin in the kitchen and washed his arms up to the elbows in it. Francis was just coming in to prepare lunch. He instantly flew into a temper saying he would not tolerate dirty—I leave you to imagine—Italians washing off their dirt in his kitchen. Gennaro trembled: ‘There is no hot water in my room.’ I came in and the Italian girls came in to support Gennaro: there was a noise and I threatened to send for the police and send Gennaro to the frontier. Francis said, as usual, that he would cook no lunch. He agreed to do it at length only if the dirty Italians worked elsewhere. I had to get Clara to help with the vegetables. All the Italians were mad with rage; the atmosphere was frightful; a silent uproar was going on all round me. In the meantime I had to make sure lunch was ready at the usual time for the guests who were as usual spending the morning walking up and down waiting for their food. At this very moment I found the old porter Charlie staggering upstairs to the attic with a bed. ‘What are you doing, Charlie?’
‘The Mayor wants one room for his study and says I must take this bed to the attic.’
‘Take it back this instant. Mr Bonnard and I alone have the right to have the furniture moved. The idea of guests moving furniture! Take it right back.’
He grinned grimaces, said: ‘What can I do with a circus number like that? What a card! You could run a whole circus with just one number like that!’
He turned slowly round, shouldering the bed, and crept downstairs. Charlie is sixty-five, a real Frenchman, who has sailed all around the world. He is getting too old for his work, but he’s been a very strong man and he’s reliable and has sense. He has a very bad police record and is always going up there to answer some charge or other—the fact is, it’s a quiet sort of joke we have; even Mrs Trollope and Madame Blaise found out about it. They are close friends and spend many days together. They were walking along on a shopping tour in Lausanne, one afternoon, when they saw Charlie going into a shabby little hotel with a schoolgirl. We could not help giggling together when they came back and told me. One of these days he will go too far. The very next week, the father of a twelve-year-old girl came rushing down here with a stick; and Charlie has already spent three months in jail, for a thing like that. But he’s a decent man, knows everything about hotel life, he’s well broken in, a clever old Frenchman, who no doubt is not very anxious to return to France. He understands all the guests and they rely on him. There is something very soothing about the intelligence of a broken good-natured old scamp: and then he’s a poor old man. What has he to look forward to? He’ll end up on the roads; and be picked up and go to jail again.