Free The Little Hotel by Christina Stead Page A

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