Chapter IV

The Honourable Mrs. and Miss Pinkerton occupied two wide-balconied rooms at the end of the first-floor corridor. Five times across the Hotel, each on a floor, these corridors ran, dark, thickly carpeted, panelled with bedroom doors. The front rooms looked over the town into dazzling spaciousness, sky and sea; the back rooms were smaller, never so bright, and looked over the road with its chestnut-trees into the side of the hill. Into these the north light came slanting; no sky was visible until one leant far out, only the scrambling olives and scared little faces of the villas. Eyes from the villas could have peered down into the vacant eyes of newly-awakened sleepers. At this side of the Hotel, screened by opaque glass from the possibility of such observation, were the bathrooms.

Mrs. and Miss Pinkerton were of course on the sunny side, with their balconies from which the view could be patronized. The view was their own; they were to enjoy the spiritual, crude and half-repellent beauty of that changing curtain, so featureless save for the occasional passing of a ship. They barricaded themselves in from the assault of noonday behind impassable jalousies. No private suite with a bathroom was available; it was possible, they brought themselves to comprehend dimly, that in Hotels of this type none existed. They therefore had had reserved, at some expense, the bathroom opposite to their doors for their own exclusive occupation. One says “occupation” advisedly: here in white-tiled sanctuary their bowls of soap, their loofahs, their scented bath-salts could remain secure from outrage; here too their maid could do their smaller washing and hang the garments up to dry before the radiator. There generally were garments drying there; the two distrusted foreign laundresses, perhaps with reason.

Other visitors on the first floor respected this arrangement which had a certain beauty for them, the accretion of prestige. They bathed at the other end of the corridor; if that bathroom was full they went up to the second floor where people could not afford to have baths so often. James Milton, a clergyman, was however unaware of this, and going upstairs directly after his arrival locked himself into Miss Pinkerton’s bathroom. Here he hoped to remove by steaming and by prolonged immersion the grime, ingrained in one till one is almost polished, of a transcontinental journey. This was the bath that he had been promising himself for the last thirty-six hours: it had come to shine before his numbing intelligence as in itself the journey’s bourne. He did not notice the bath-salts but unthinkingly made full use of the loofah, which he was surprised and pleased to find there.

He had arrived late, having dined on the train, and few people were at hand to witness the arrival: a big man talking Italian above the folds of a muffler and making abundant, baulked gestures at the boots and concierge. He seemed unwilling to admit how well they could speak English. The few onlookers, by hanging poised in their talk for an infinitesimal second’s observation, bore in a sense of his squalor upon him sharply. He was aware of the glow of clean faces, the glaze of immaculate shirt-fronts. He felt them avert their eyes considerately. Relegated, alien, blinking like an owl after his long dark drive in the light’s untempered scrutiny he stood for a moment, then fled upstairs on the way to Mrs. Pinkerton’s bathroom.

He took in enough of his No. 19, when the chambermaid switched the lights up, to know that it faced out the wrong side, offered no space for his baggage and was so furnished as to confuse thought, distract contemplation and impede the movements of the body. The lace-veiled window was pallid against the dark; pushing it open a little he let in some cold air and heard the rustle of a palm-tree. Unwinding his muffler and throwing off his great coat he waited only to take out his sponge-bag and dressing-gown and sweep his towels along with him; then made off down the corridor calling back to the chambermaid in three languages that he was going to have a bath. He was an independent man with a bump of locality on which he had grown with years increasingly reliant, and he brought himself without difficulty to the door of a hospitable-looking bathroom.

Mrs. Pinkerton and her sister-in-law never sat for more than a minute or two in the drawing-room where other ladies foregathered. They withdrew early to their own rooms, where they would embroider, eat little pastries and drink coffee. No one else had ever been invited to join them there; such an invitation was hardly to be expected; though the Pinkertons had consented to be present once or twice at Mrs. Lee-Mittison’s coffee parties. They felt, perhaps, a little lonely these evenings, the comfortable feeling of enclosedness would fall away when there was nobody to be enclosed against. In the high room, among marble-topped furniture, they sat listening with well-bred attentiveness to one another’s breathing. Through the thin walls every foot-step, every shutting of a door should have been audible in the velvety silence of the corridor. Yet the ladies had this evening no inkling of what was to occur; no premonition seems to have troubled them.

The Honourable Edward Pinkerton had died before his father, Lord Parke. Though he had not been young when he died such a frustration of life’s high purpose for him—he was an only son—had lent him the pathos of youth. Had his widow been less substantial and less palpably recent he might have passed, by the references to him, as having died before his majority. He remained “Poor Edward,” embalmed like a dead child in the pity and patronage of the living. He was making a third with them, this evening as ever, his mild, be-whiskered face, with that expression of awe on it with which fancy is wont to invest the pictured faces of the dead, looked out from a vast scrolled frame that over-shadowed the silver-stoppered bottles on the dressing-table. A similar photograph commanded the bedroom of Rosina, his sister to the exclusion of other relationships. Rosina sat in an armchair pulled out under the light with her work held up to her eyes, embroidering diligently. She and her sister-in-law had grown very like one another, coiffured and dressed by the same hands, worked upon from within by similar preoccupations. They were more closely allied to one another in the memory of Edward than they had either of them been to Edward himself. Somehow, up to the moment of death, Edward had eluded both of them; it was after death they had closed in on him relentlessly. Cherished little animosities reinforced their ties to one another; Rosina maintained to herself implacably that if she had been Edward’s wife she would have borne him children; while Louisa was enough aware of this to be a little markedly generous to Rosina, who was not in a position to refuse anything that might be offered.

Mrs. Pinkerton sat turning over the pages of the _Tatler_ and talking to Rosina while she embroidered.

“I see,” she said, “the Wyntons’ girl is to be married.”

“Ah?” remarked Rosina, snipping with her gilt scissors. “Who is he?”

“A _Barre_, apparently.”

“Are there Barres? I never heard of any. Where does it say he comes from?”

“It says here,” replied her sister-in-law, looking at the paper closely, “Hampshire.”

“There are no Barres in Hampshire,” said Rosina definitely.

“Then it is another of these marriages.” They both sighed.

“Elissa Howard,” Mrs. Pinkerton went on more cheerfully, “with a very pleasant, cheerful letter. She is so considerate when one is abroad, or ill. She is a woman that I always like to hear from. She is coming out next month, to Nice, you know.”

“It will be pleasant to have Elissa within reach. One feels very isolated.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Rosina, that you don’t _like_ the Hotel.... I cannot understand how anyone can go to Nice: they say it is a kind of French Brighton.”

“They say the Carnival is very pretty.... But I daresay,” Rosina unguardedly added, “that it’s more expensive than we——”

“It’s not a question—” Mrs. Pinkerton was beginning. “_Come_ in!” she cried in an exasperated voice. Lurgan, the maid, put her long wedge of a face round the door.

“I beg your pardon, Madam, I’m sure,” she said, “but I put the Shetlands to air an hour ago and now I cannot get into the bathroom....”

* * * * *

Three or four minutes after this announcement Tessa, thoughtfully taking her hair down with Baudouin propped up before her, was surprised by the entrance of Sydney, unusually animated.

“Mrs. Pinkerton and Rosina,” said Sydney, “cannot get into their bathroom. They simply can’t. I’ve been watching. Both their doors are open and they take it in turns to come and rattle incredulously at the bathroom door. It is really funny; I wish you would peep out and look. That determined little rat of a maid of theirs is being the man of the party; she heaved her shoulder against the door just now as though she were going to force it and Rosina cried ‘No, don’t, I forbid you—there may be somebody there!’”

“Oh poor things!” said Tessa. “How awkward for them. Do you think they will send for the manager?”

Tessa with her fluffy hair falling down round the innocent, interrogatory O of her face looked younger, looked really rather—there was no other word for it—sweet. She wrapped her kimono closer round her and followed Sydney into the dusk of their end of the corridor, from whence they expected to watch unobserved. But a moment later Miss Pinkerton, down at the other end, turned in their direction a wild face of appeal. She hesitated, then something in the essential Tessa brought her towards them. She ignored Tessa’s _déshabille_. “Oh, Mrs. Bellamy,” she began, “I wonder if you.... It is rather embarrassing....”

“I _know_. I am so sorry. Have you any idea?”

“We cannot understand,” said Miss Pinkerton. “We _cannot_ believe——”

“It can’t be deliberate,” said Tessa consolingly.

“Why don’t you ring for the manager?” asked Sydney, anxious to precipitate a crisis.

“I think it would be better for us, under the circumstances, to send for Madame.”

“But it may be a man.”

“It cannot be a _gentleman_....”

Mrs. Pinkerton appeared at the door of her bedroom. She looked expressionlessly out from under an Olympic cloud of hair and seemed immense. She said: “My sister may have told you of our difficulty?”

“You’ve _no_ idea?” Tessa said again, hopefully.

Mrs. Pinkerton shook her head. “One doesn’t like to be seen standing here,” she said, and, an invitation seeming to be implicit, they followed her back into her room. They must have been the first in the Hotel to cross that threshold, it was a tribute to the humanity of Tessa. Keeping the door a little open they listened and heard the uninterrupted crash of water from two taps turned full on. Sydney covertly pulled the “_Tatler_” towards her and glanced at its pages but the stricken air of the two ladies pervaded the room and began to oppress her. She realized that this must be something worse for them than not, simply, getting what they paid for. It went deeper than that. They were stupid but not, she felt, vulgar; all this lace and leather, monograms everywhere and massive encrustations of silver meant less to them, probably, than to herself to whom wealth and position would have been conveniences to be made use of. 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.

Lurgan came in and stood by the door. “You would ’ave thought,” said she, “that ’e would at least ’ave noticed Madame’s Shetlands, ’anging by the radiator.”

“I don’t see why you should assume that it’s——”

“’Ark!” said Lurgan putting up a hand peremptorily.

The taps had been turned off and a fine baritone voice rose clear at the cessation of the water. “Hail, gladdening Light,” ... it sang; an evening hymn.

“Singing!” said Lurgan. It was inexpressible.

“It’s a lovely hymn,” Tessa said, propitiatory. Her face lighted up, and she looked round at them. “I expect,” she said, “it’s the clergyman. There was that Mr. Milton....”

“One would have expected greater delicacy,” said Mrs. Pinkerton and indeed on that score Tessa did feel Milton to be indefensible. The testimony of the radiator.... She looked helplessly at Sydney who, overcome at the moment by a simultaneous desire to yawn and to laugh, suggested that they should go back to their rooms—since there seemed nothing at all to be done—and leave the Pinkertons and Lurgan to their vigil.

“One could take steps ...” Mrs. Pinkerton was saying, frozen into an attitude of reflection.

“Or would you wait till to-morrow to do so, and just let him finish his hymn now and come out.”

“There are situations in life,” said Mrs. Pinkerton, “face to face with which one is powerless.” Though she only meant that in the struggle for life one is sorely handicapped by the obligations of nobility, Tessa and Sydney gathered that Mrs. Pinkerton was prostrated. After a blank little silence intended to express the inexpressible they murmured a solicitous “Good-night” and slipped through the door.

James Milton met them coming out. The asceticism of a life time in such matters had drawn him after ten minutes out of his bath. He had stood and steamed in the warm air, then scrubbed himself dry and got into his dressing-gown sooner than he had expected. The water now receding from a rich black rim along the sides of the bath had done its work, he felt his own man again, clear-brained and vigorous. He looked forward to stretching out his limbs in a bed again—cramped by last night in the train—when once he had unpacked and been able to come to terms with his ridiculous room. 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.

Tessa, horrified, fled down the corridor, they heard her door slam. Sydney stared. She did not see why she should retreat, as she momentarily expected Milton to do so, and she could not help being amused at his discomfiture. Milton looked boiled, his face, neck and ears were bright scarlet; his fine thin hair stood erect and his damp moustache drooped at the ends like a sea-lion’s. He clasped his clothes and towels against him in an ungainly bundle.

Milton also stared; it did not occur to him to retreat and there seemed to be nowhere to go to. He felt quite sure he had met Sydney before. Her dark eyebrows, square forehead and arrogant chin seemed already familiar. On this evening of strangeness and new impressions she was out of place, stepping out as she did from among his own recollections. Unaware of himself he bowed gravely, while in the doorway behind her horrified faces appeared for the moment, then vanished again.