The Little Hotel by Christina Stead Read Free Book Online Page A

care for the things and in the end change one or several for others still more expensive.
    So they would sit talking in low voices, explaining about their rings and their children. It was a touching sight, their aged hands on their laps. I would think of them living in a foreign town, unhappy with their men, away from their children. They were mothers and both were very rich. What had they but a tiny room in a fourth-class hotel? That’s how we’re classified.
    How Mrs Trollope came to be there, I’ll explain later on. Madame Blaise blew in one morning in a fuss and said she would never set foot in her house in Basel again if she lived to be a hundred. She was staying here and the Doctor could come and plead, she was staying here for ever.
    ‘Who knows what a doctor can do to you? A doctor can do anything, even in your sleep,’ she said, and she was speaking of her husband Dr Blaise, a very well-known practitioner.
    About this time there were several cases of stealing in the hotel. Mrs Trollope and Mr Wilkins never locked their doors. Mrs Trollope explained, ‘We trust the servants; never have we locked our doors.’ But most of the others locked their doors. Madame Blaise had a door into Mrs Trollope’s room which was never locked, and the door between the rooms of the ‘cousins’, as we called them, was always open. One day Mrs Trollope came down to lunch early, leaving her door ajar and her big crocodile handbag on the plush armchair, facing the door. Mr Wilkins came to the table immediately afterwards, and a few minutes later Madame Blaise came down. She was as usual dressed in hat, jacket, coat, scarf and with her handbag, which she never let out of her sight.
    Mr Wilkins was reading a book about nuclear fission. He kept showing bits to Mrs Trollope. She turned her face away and said:
    ‘Robert, I should have a better appetite if you paid attention to me at meals. We are not made to eat like pigs from a trough.’
    He said in his starched way, laying down his book:
    ‘I cannot very well eat your food for you, can I, Lilia?’
    I was at the serving-hatch. I should have laughed if Roger had said that to me, but Mrs Trollope burst into tears and went upstairs, though for once Madame Blaise stirred herself and called,
    ‘Liliali, Liliali, come and sit with me.’
    ‘Oh, I can’t, Gliesli, I am too unhappy; I must bear my sorrows alone.’ Out she trotted weeping and said to me:
    ‘Oh, Ma-dame, if you only knew, but may you never know! You have your good husband and your little one with you!’
    Mr Wilkins read, and Madame Blaise ate more deliberately than ever. In the afternoon, instead of the usual quiet, which I take advantage of to do my accounts, there was some running about and discussion. I looked through the brass lift-cage upwards and saw Mrs Powell standing in the corridor, while Madame Blaise was in Mrs Trollope’s room turning things upside down and Mr Wilkins was standing in his own doorway, saying crossly:
    ‘You’re so careless with money, Lilia! You’ll probably find it in one of your pockets.’
    I went up and Mrs Trollope ran out to me.
    ‘Oh, Ma-dame, I have lost a hundred-franc note. You know I always keep one in my purse.’
    She then described how she had left things, the door ajar, almost wide open, and she said:
    ‘There’s a strange-looking man I don’t like at all who is always creeping up and down stairs with a briefcase, an underhand kind of man who tries to avoid notice and looks as if he would be glad of money.’
    Madame Blaise said: ‘It is that dark man who flirts with Clara.’
    But the man in question was the accountant who was in to look over my accounts.
    ‘And there is another man, who keeps to his room, he shuts himself up and does not eat with us. He lurks about the stairs.’
    I said: ‘That is Herr Altstadt. He is most respectable.’
    Mrs Powell said that the Belgian Mayor had locked himself in the bathroom since before lunch. She had knocked at the door, but