Authors: Christina Stead
‘I have a haunted feeling; and I dreamed I saw the Mayor standing glowering in a corner of the landing, with his hat, muffler and smoked glasses and his hands out ready to jump on me!’
Tonight I had left orders for the Mayor to be left outside the door until Roger came home, whatever time that was. When Roger came back this afternoon, I told Clara and Mrs Trollope, I flew at him and told him what Julie said. His pride was hurt. Without a word he went straight out again and did not come back for dinner. The Dutch ladies did not have their wine, and Madame Blaise was angry because she could not have her walnuts. That was because Roger took with him the key of the dessert-cupboard. Mrs Trollope said:
‘Still, it is no use bottling those things up; you see, now you are quite lighthearted. I don’t believe your dear husband would ever wrong you.’
When we got to the Zig-Zag Club we looked at all the photographs, but the strip-tease dancer was not among them. Mrs Trollope said we would go inside and ask; so we all went in laughing. The man at the entrance of course knew me and told us that Wanda the strip-tease dancer had gone to Geneva a few days before. Mrs Trollope was delighted.
‘Oh, good. Let’s celebrate. I feel like a good time.’
The man knew Mrs Trollope too; so he called the manager, who was glad to see us and made us come in to have a drink on the house. Said he:
‘We’re glad of the company, come along. You’ll be my guests. It will make the floor show glad to see some more faces.’
‘How can they see our faces when their backs are turned?’ said Clara, for there was a picture of the floor-show in that position. We were all in the highest spirits.
‘What a pity Charlie is not with us; he would make us roar,’ said Clara.
‘Well, what a pity the Mayor is not along, he would buy us a case of champagne,’ said I.
‘The Mayor would make a good floor-show dressed in his smoked glasses,’ said Clara.
Mrs Trollope was shocked; but she said:
‘Madame Blaise will never forgive me for not moping at home with her and discussing her great lump of a daughter and her son who looks like a jockey. We shall have a tiff.’
At everything we burst out laughing. It was a long time since I had had such a good time. I said:
‘It is too good: I am sure something awful will happen. You will see.’
‘This is quite an adventure,’ said Mrs Trollope.
The manager of the Zig-Zag came and sat at our table. He is a man I don’t like. He said not to mind about paying. But the question soon came up about our paying for another round of drinks. That is the custom here. Each guest feels obliged to stand treat in his turn. Mrs Trollope began with:
‘I haven’t much money with me but I can manage a bottle of champagne.’
After that, I was obliged to too; and that is how I got into debt at the Zig-Zag that evening. The manager brought along some people, a jeweller in Lausanne, a café-owner. He stood the whole table to champagne, they reciprocated and so it went. In the end we all were tipsy and I owed for one bottle of champagne. But no one regretted it. Mrs Trollope said:
‘This is more like old times. In the East we had never a dull moment. This place is like heaven on a sunny morning but it is rather quiet.’
‘My father always said heaven would be a bore,’ said I.
‘Drink, fall on your face and be merry, for tomorrow you die,’ said Clara.
It is a long walk down to the lake shore from Lausanne centre. The air gets richer and richer till it is almost like a fish stew. Clara said there were wild boars which come down because of the cold and they would get us. I said we would catch one and take him home for the kitchen. We had to keep stopping for breath and to giggle, but in the end we got home. We got in about two o’clock and found Charlie in his dressing-gown and pyjamas dozing on the couch in the sitting-room. He came at length to the door.
‘Bad little girls,’ he said grinning sourly.
‘Is everyone home, Charlie?’ said I.
He answered gaily, ‘Mr Bonnard is not home. The Mayor of B. is now filling a long-felt want in the lunatic asylum.’
‘Charlie, don’t clown so much.’
We were all breathless with the descent, dizzy too; and dizzier still when we heard.
It seems that just after midnight there was a rattling at the front door. Gennaro ran upstairs and looked out from the second floor, so that he could see under the glass awning that fans out over the door. There was the Mayor entirely naked, except for his hat and muffler, but with his two shopping-bags. Gennaro wanted to open up quickly, for he thought the Mayor would catch cold. ‘Supposing some ladies came along,’ said Charlie. ‘I’m not strong enough to deal with a circus number like that.’
He told Gennaro to phone the police, though they would probably be angry at being called on such a calm cold night. Gennaro telephoned the police, but before they arrived the Mayor had gone. He ran to the Hotel Royal where he got inside the door before the night-clerk, who was stretched out on a lounge in the sitting-room, knew what was happening.
He asked for a room, said something rude about us, the Hotel Swiss-Touring. The clerk, who had taken refuge behind the desk, was shouting:
‘No, no, we have no rooms, the hotel is full up, sir.’
But the Mayor yelled:
‘It’s the offseason, you haven’t three wretched sinners in the whole mausoleum, there are five miles of corridor occupied by ghosts of dead bankrupt Englishmen in this damp mausoleum; that is all.’
You know, they expected no one but a rajah doing the night-clubs, and the night-clerk, only a schoolboy, was limp with fear. The Mayor took himself up in the lift, quite naked of course, except for his top-piece and neckpiece with his two shopping-bags, while the boy was saying:
‘But, sir, you have no luggage.’
The Mayor ran up and down the corridors and then there was a crash. He had taken a chair and was beating one of the mirror-doors leading into an upstairs sitting-room. In the dim light of the corridor he had seen a strange naked man advancing upon him and had rushed at him with a plush-and-gilt chair.
Meantime, the clerk had telephoned the police, but the available men were now at our hotel, looking for the Mayor. The boy came running out of the hotel for help, fell in the snow, found the police and very soon they had got the Mayor and delivered him, a pretty little package, to a local institution. The reception office made no trouble about admitting him and there he was.
Mrs Trollope said: ‘Oh, poor man. I told you, Selda, he was ready to jump on any one of us!’
‘Did you know Mrs Trollope said he was mad?’ I said to Charlie.
Charlie winked. ‘And now, ladies, go and get some shut-eye.’
‘Wait till Mr Wilkins hears what fun and excitement we had. He thinks I am moping here all alone,’ said Mrs Trollope.
‘Wait till Mr Bonnard hears that we paid twenty-five francs a bottle for champagne in the Zig-Zag when it is only eleven francs fifty in the Hoirs. I shall have to send the money over in the morning.’
Charlie said: ‘Now that the Mayor is gone, Christmas is over: no more free bubbly.’
Roger did not return till seven in the morning. He said nothing to me, looked at Olivier, went down to the basement to see to the furnace. He and Clara were very sick all day; but these mountain people are wiry. When Roger heard about the champagne, he took fifty francs from the safe and went up town to pay the manager of the Zig-Zag.
As for the Mayor: his relatives came with a lawyer ten days later and it turned out to be a very sad case. He had a wife and three grown children who had to be kept in ignorance of his condition. They put the Mayor on a train to take him back to Belgium; but the way to Belgium is through France; and the French law is that no one can be committed as insane or kept in custody without being committed by a French court and French alienists. The Mayor was always very bright. He knew this and he stepped off the train at the very first stop the express made in France. Perhaps he is still having a good time.
‘I think I’ll go and find him and join him,’ Charlie said.
I NOW HAD
two more rooms vacant and it was then that I took back Miss Chillard, who was coming from Zermatt. She owed us money and had left some of her luggage with us as security; I did not give her her old room, a large double room, but a small one, Number 27.
Mr Wilkins had been away for a few days, in Paris where he had to meet an old acquaintance from Singapore. When he returned, the cousins met with the joy and effusion of lovers and married people. Then things went on as before.
It was an afternoon. The hotel guests were walking or resting. Mr Wilkins as usual was stretched out on a lounge-chair in the sun, before his open window in his little room; and through the communicating door he could talk to Mrs Trollope, who was on her bed, with several cushions underneath her head and her hips. She had spread out on her windowsill several handfuls of white breadcrumbs that she had made from the white bread she brought up from lunch. She kept the windows open, the curtains apart, and had made a trail of crumbs from the windowsill across the carpeted floor to several chairs upon which she had trained the sparrows to sit. These chairs were on a wedge-shaped step, a sort of dais, in front of the windows. She lay on her bed with her black curly head raised, waiting. With her black wide eyes, black-rimmed as if lined with make-up, she watched the fat sparrows look, call, hesitate, hop, enter and fly as far as the edge of the little dais; and so to the chairs. She was careful not to make a movement, though her neck was aching. They knew she was there and kept looking up at her as they pecked; but they made a busy sweet sound, ‘Veet, veet, veet,’ which she liked. ‘It means food,’ she said to Robert. About four o’clock, Robert called out to her:
‘Lilia, there is a knocking on my wall.’
‘Oh, that must be that poor thing, Miss Chillard. I saw a lot of her while you were away and I promised to go in at teatime. You know I meant to take her some cakes.’
Mrs Trollope rose cautiously, but the sparrows flew. She slipped on her shoes, tidied her hair and went out of the hotel. About a hundred yards down the street was a cake-shop patronized by herself and Madame Blaise. There she now bought one hundred grams of dry biscuits, just what Miss Chillard had asked for, and a hundred grams of chocolate biscuits, such as Mr Wilkins liked to have before dinner with his rum and vermouth. When she returned, he said to her:
‘Lilia, do make haste and see what that woman wants. She has been knocking on my wall for half an hour. I think she expected me to go in; but I’m blessed if I will and I told her that. I called out, I can’t come in, Miss Chillard; I’m a man and I’m in my underwear.’
‘Robert, the poor thing is in bed; and you have been away—she thought it was I.’
‘I wish I could believe it.’
‘I am not staying here to listen to your jokes in bad taste.’
‘No one listens to jokes in good taste.’
‘I cannot laugh at your jokes, Robert.’
He said calmly: ‘No wonder everyone takes us for husband and wife.’
‘To that, Robert, I am not going to say anything. You know only too well what I think and you are trying to provoke me for your own amusement.’
‘Wake me up about five-thirty, Lilia. We’ll have our drink; and don’t invite that woman.’
‘Oh, poor woman. She makes my heart bleed.’
‘She would probably rather make your bankbook bleed.’
‘Robert, she is a descendant of William the Fourth, she says.’
‘Did he leave her enough to live on?’
‘She didn’t discuss it with me.’
‘Then he didn’t. Be careful, Lilia. Don’t commit us. I shall give her nothing and I shall not allow you to give her anything.’
‘Your years in business, Robert, made you hardhearted.’
But Lilia smiled slightly as she knocked at the door of Number 27. She was grave and sympathetic as she looked at the woman in the bed.
She had seen her, though not known her, on her previous visit. At that time Miss Chillard had been with an older woman, very humble in manner, respectable, whom Mrs Trollope had taken for a paid companion or poor toady. No one knew her name; she was never introduced. She came down to dinner as soon as the bell rang, ate her soup and then would wait, with her head bowed, for Miss Chillard. If Miss Chillard did not appear, she was nervous, shamefaced, and on one or two nights in succession went up to their room to fetch her companion. Miss Chillard, brought in like this, remained distant, spoke only in a cold peremptory and complaining way to the servants; at the table there was a miserable silence. For a few nights after this the poor relative or aged travelling companion ate her soup, her meat dish and her dessert with hearty appetite alone and would look friendly at the other diners. If Miss Chillard came down for dessert, again she shrank and the silence followed. Miss Chillard rarely ate soup, had special dishes of eggs or vegetables, and took few sweet things. She often finished this slight meal earlier than her companion, when she would sit with an air of rebuke. When she spoke to her friend, it was to say, in her high-bred insulting voice, something like this:
‘Perhaps, thinking it over, you had better go back. You can do nothing for me. I shall try to get a position
au pair
to pay my expenses. I’m sure I don’t want you wasting any more money or time here.’
Though tall and well-built, Miss Chillard was underweight and her shoulders deeply bowed. She had certificates from doctors in England and Switzerland that she was always sending home, that is to England, to prove to the Bank of England that it was necessary for her to stay abroad. And it was at this moment, when funds were low, that she must have heard Mrs Trollope and Mr Wilkins speaking of money. Mrs Trollope under a capital export scheme was gradually getting her money out of England. A considerable part of her fortune was in England; but as she had agreed to live abroad for the rest of her life the Bank of England was permitting her gradually to transfer her funds.
Miss Chillard spoke to Mrs Trollope only after her companion had left for England; and it then turned out that her poor humble companion was her mother. Miss Chillard, the only unmarried daughter of four, a girl with brilliant chances, educated in Switzerland, had had to work on her mother’s farm during the war, had had an accident, hurt her back, become a permanent invalid. The British authorities held that she did not need Switzerland, that she would do well enough on the farm in Devonshire.