Chapter VII

The lift was out of order. Mrs. Hillier, who was in a hurry, had for some time been pushing the third floor button unavailingly: the lift did not even tremble. She then pushed the second and fourth floor buttons as an experiment, but to this also there was no response. She slid back the iron gates again and stepped out into the lounge so suddenly and so angrily that Miss Fitzgerald who had been watching sympathetically was quite frightened.

“The lift is out of order,” she said tersely. “Where can the concierge be?”

“He is always out at this hour. They say he has a wife in the town.”

“I do not see why we should be prevented from going to our rooms because the concierge happens to be married.”

“Anyhow, he is no good with the lift. They ought to keep a boy who thoroughly understands it.”

“He would have an attachment too,” said Mrs. Hillier, who was really a cheerful and humorous person. With renewed determination she got back into the lift, and Miss Fitzgerald, getting in also for company, sat down beside her on the narrow seat. This was the most comfortable, intimate and exclusive corner of the hotel and Miss Fitzgerald dreamily desired it. It was the kind of place in which one could have talked. They pushed each button successively and even struck chords of two or three at a time. A wire twanged somewhere above and a chain rattled but they did not move an inch.

“At any rate,” said Miss Fitzgerald, “it is better than to be taken half way up and then stuck between two of the floors. My friend told me she once saw that happen to some ladies at a hotel in Switzerland. They were there for more than half an hour with their feet just visible below the ceiling of the lounge. The hotel was full of foreigners and it was most unpleasant.”

“Dreadful,” said the Anglo-Indian lady. She at all events could congratulate herself on her feet. “Oh,” she cried, peering birdlike through the bars of the gate, “can’t some of you help us?”

Colonel Duperrier and a Mr. Miller had risen and were approaching politely from different corners of the lounge. The ladies got out of the lift and the gentlemen, getting in, assured themselves that there was really something very wrong indeed.

“I _cannot_ see,” said Mrs. Hillier mutinously, “why I should have to do without my scissors.” Colonel Duperrier felt very sorry for her, she seemed to be beating her wings. “Couldn’t I—?” he began.

“Oh no, thank you.” The scissors were in her bedroom, as they both knew. One was drawn up from here out of ken, feet last, into the region of intimacies.

“And I cannot see why they should expect one to walk up. _I_ shan’t,” said Mrs. Hillier flinging her gauntlet, to applause, in the face of the Management. “I can’t see why they should,” agreed Miss Fitzgerald while Mr. Miller, sighing over this insoluble enigma, returned slowly to his patience-board. Colonel Duperrier rang twice for the Management, then looked into the dining-room to see whether the head waiter were there and could be asked to do anything. At three o’clock in the afternoon the Management and the personnel seemed to be equally inaccessible. They were perhaps asleep, like many of the visitors.

Sleep, the thin uneasy sleep of daylight, had to-day been the refuge of many, for cold rain fell ceaselessly past the windows. It was a transparent rain without mist, like summer rain in England, through which trees and buildings for a great distance could be seen distinctly in a Japanese conventionality and flatness. Leaves and long palm-fronds shone and trickled. Curtained in this pale gloom, the Hotel seemed permeated by a sense of the rain’s despairing persistency, against which the reasonable conviction of visitors that the sun, bound by contract with the locality, was soon to appear again put up cold walls around an inward emptiness. In many rooms the tick of travelling-clocks, the stutter of rain along the balconies were being listened to attentively.

Mrs. Hillier snuggled up her woolly wrap round her ears, nodded to Colonel Duperrier and went back into the drawing-room. She seemed, from the desolation, dusk and excludedness of the lounge to return at least into _something_. As she opened and shut the glass doors he heard a kind of gasp of feminine conversation and saw his wife and many other ladies sitting round in a semicircle with firelight on their knees. There was one open fireplace in the Hotel and it was in the drawing-room. She must have told them at once that the lift was out of order, for there arose staccato indignation which the door shut off from him. The lounge with its grouped furniture was of an isolating vastness. A man, unrecognizable from here, sat leaning his back against one radiator; Mr. Miller with his patience-board had drawn up as close as possible to another. One longed for the disorder of firelight among the orderly shadows. One missed one’s dog. One missed the tug of association and habit towards one chair: there were too many, groves of chairs through which Colonel Duperrier wandered sadly. He could not even remember where he had been sitting before.

Miss Fitzgerald, standing on tiptoe, peeped over the lace blind through the glass of the drawing-room doors, sighed and shook her head. The room presented too unbroken a front of matronhood. She was expressing her feelings in dumb show for the benefit of nobody in particular, as is the habit of lonely, self-conscious women. She observed, still to nobody in particular, “Well, I suppose if piggy _won’t_ get over the stile, I’ll have to walk.”

“—I beg your pardon?” asked Colonel Duperrier.

“Oh, nothing,” said Miss Fitzgerald, startled, and began her painful ascent. Her room was on the highest floor. She disappeared.

A girl with fair hair proved on closer inspection to be one of the Lawrences. She was hunched over one of the writing-tables, trying to write a letter with a Hotel pen that screeched and staggered. She leant on her elbows, tilting her chair up. At an impatient movement from her, two or three sheets of letter-paper, thinly covered, fluttered to the ground. “Oh _Lord_!” she exclaimed and dived after them.

“Let me!” said Colonel Duperrier, hurrying across the lounge. “Got it, thanks,” replied Joan Lawrence, once more arranging the sheets round her elbow so that the slightest movement must again disturb them. Her writing was enormous and watching her absently he could not help seeing “the very limit” “macaroni” and “torn it.” He looked quickly away.

She twirled her pen and stared at the nib resignedly. “Pen’s the limit.”

“It looks it. You might find a better one in the drawing-room.”

“I daresay. Thanks very much, but I’m not going into the drawing-room.” She was being friendly and pleasant with him: they both laughed. When she laughed, the sunburnt copper-pink of her cheeks deepened. She was not so difficult, after all, to distinguish from her sisters.

“Oh, come,” said he, “you’ve never turned your back on don or devil! Go in and look for a pen. They won’t eat you.”

“If you were a kind man, _you_ would.”

“Look here, take my Onoto.”

“Oh no, thanks. Nothing but grief and bitterness comes of borrowing other people’s Onotos. _Do_ go and get me that pen! I dare you....” She drew down her upper lip and stared at him with solemnity. Both liking each other better than ever, they laughed again. He was a tall brown man with long legs, a little younger than the Lawrences’ father. His fair hair was going white round the temples; strictly speaking it was pepper-and-salt. He was one of their finest tennis-players and waltzed beautifully in the old-fashioned manner, holding one gingerly. His wife was the limit; she was one of the drawing-room set.

“Go on, I dare you to!” repeated Joan. He stood a moment longer tugging his short moustache, then braced himself, magnificently squaring his shoulders. “Oh, very well,” said he. He hesitated in front of the lace-hung doors, whose appearance seemed to appall him. “Funk!” called Joan excitedly, and he pushed the doors open and went in. She heard wave after wave of exclamations arising. The door, which had swung to after him, did not open again; she could no longer see his shadow on the glass. She began to wish she had not thrown her glove into the lion’s den. Joan had a healthy contempt for women like Miss Fitzgerald, but she was a little daunted by the habituées of the drawing-room who played bridge crushingly well, were impeccably manicured and had a hardish eye that negatived one’s importance. She sat watching the door anxiously. After all, he _belonged_ to those people, it was possible he might not reappear.

But Colonel Duperrier respected these ladies too deeply to wish to remain among them. He came out again modestly but with an air of achievement.

“Here you are! But I don’t know that it’s really much better.”

“I’ll pretend it is, anyway. Did they mind your taking it?”

“No,” said he, uncommunicative. He drew up a chair and sat not far away from her while she scribbled experimentally with the new pen. It gave him a restful, anchored feeling to sit beside somebody who was doing something. He looked at the back of Joan’s neck, from which the cropped hair fell away, with uncovetous appreciation. What he believed himself to be feeling was that it would have been jolly to have had a daughter. If Colonel Duperrier’s wife were to die he would marry some girl of twenty-three who would be very much in love with him and with whom he would be very happy. Colonel Duperrier had never thought of this, but it was evident to women. As she continued to draw profiles on an envelope and showed no signs of going on with her letter he enquired, “Have you any idea how long that lift’s been out of order? I rather wish they’d let me overhaul the thing. Of course I don’t profess to know anything about mechanics, but I’ve always had a bent that way. I can’t help feeling I——”

“It’s been getting sicker and sicker since this morning. I think the people going upstairs after lunch must have finished it. You see, Veronica and Victor were playing hide-and-seek with the Barry children and some of them got into the lift and sent it up and down full speed about four times without stopping.”

“Very high-spirited of them,” said Colonel Duperrier. “_Can’t_ young Ammering get a job?”

“No, he can’t,” Joan said defensively. “It worries him awfully. The War’s come very hard indeed on our generation. I don’t think people understand a bit.”

“Perhaps they don’t,” said Colonel Duperrier, who had also fought.

“We have to make allowances for ourselves,” continued Joan. “You see, nobody makes them for us. I know young people are always supposed to be fearfully idealistic and that sort of thing, but I suppose _we_ can’t help feeling that considering how hard things are on us, we aren’t really so bad.”

“But do people criticize you all?” marvelled Colonel Duperrier who was slightly out of the movement. “I personally can understand very well how hard this is on Ammering—having nothing to do but rot about here for the winter. At his age, it would have driven me clean off my head.”

“We think he takes it awfully well,” said Joan, a little flushed. “Of course we all like him very much.”

“Lucky fellow!”

“Oh well.... Of course, for anyone like you to be out here must be awfully jolly. Everyone approves, and your work’s over and nobody wants you to do anything more.”

“No, I shan’t be wanted again,” agreed Colonel Duperrier thoughtfully. “It’s a good thing I’m fond of tennis. I suppose that’s why one feels strongly about young fellows like Ammering; I mean, seeing them done out of what really is their due.”

“I don’t suppose Victor would mind being you. I shouldn’t wonder if he sometimes suffered from the same awful feeling as I do, like being sleepy in the morning and wishing it were bedtime. About lunch-time one begins to buck up.” Joan rubbed her chin thoughtfully with the end of her pen. She was more imaginative than either of her sisters. “_You’re_ just about at tea-time, aren’t you?”

“I suppose I am,” agreed Colonel Duperrier. “Five o’clock tea.” He thought to himself that it was the kind of tea women sat over till it was time for dinner. At this he began to yawn cavernously, shivered and apologized.

“One does miss one’s tea out here,” said Joan. “The tea-gardens are so breaking; we can’t afford to go there, and the patisserie place is stuffy and full of Italians and one does get sick of pigging it up in one’s room with a spirit-lamp.”

“I’m too shy to go to the tea-gardens,” said Colonel Duperrier, “but I should like to. I hear the tea there is quite decent. Will you, sometime, come and have tea with me there?”

“Thanks very much, I should like to,” said Joan, in the business-like tone in which she accepted invitations from the opposite sex. She wanted to go on talking about Victor to somebody who did not at once suspect and smile. So she said, “It must be very nice for you, having no future to think of.” A moment ago she had seemed to understand so well that he almost believed she had said this to hurt him. “No _future_?” he repeated and looked at her blankly.

“Well,” said Joan, “you haven’t got to do anything that matters. You’ve got nobody but yourself to please and, of course, your wife. While a young man, like—well, oh anyone—say Victor Ammering, has got the whole beastly thing ahead of him. I suppose it won’t all be beastly, I mean, he’ll fall in love and I suppose, marry, and sooner or later his father’ll die and then he’ll have some money of his own, but in the long run it’s all rather an effort.”

“He’s not ambitious?”

“Oh no,” said Joan placidly, “he isn’t a bit that kind of man. Besides, what’s the good of being ambitious, there may be another war. And even if there isn’t, disappointed people are dreadful to live with.”

“Why are you so cynical?” asked Colonel Duperrier.

“But I’m not,” said Joan, and smiled at him with troubled but naïve blue eyes.

As she spoke three people in mackintoshes, two women and a man, came rustling and dripping from the porch. Their collars were turned up and over these they looked repudiatingly at one another. They had not been for their walks together, and they did not wish anybody to think that they had. They had followed one another for some kilometres along a streaming road, to close up unavoidably on the Hotel doorstep. Among them was James Milton, wondering why he had ever come abroad, cold, weary, amazed by the weather. Dripping audibly they all got into the lift and slammed the gates upon their undesired contiguity. Here they remained for some moments shut up in silence.

“I’m afraid it’s out of order,” shouted Colonel Duperrier at the risk of appearing officious. Joan had looked on with detachment.

James Milton, only too glad to escape, let himself out at once and walked upstairs, after a wistful, enquiring glance in Joan’s direction. Numbed beyond the point of geniality, not one of his fellow-visitors had spoken to him during the day; he realized that this was the third Lawrence whom he did not know and that she was not going to speak to him either. Joan watched him critically till he had disappeared round the turn of the stairs.

“That’s the parson,” said she. “He went with them yesterday with the Lee-Mittisons’ picnic.”

“Oh yes, the Lee-Mittisons’ picnic. We saw them start off. Wasn’t it rather a fiasco?”

“Yes, it was. After lunch they were bored, so they all went off on their own, and Veronica met Victor and they went off too. When they came back, quite a short time afterwards, the Lee-Mittisons had flitted—there wasn’t so much as an egg-shell. So they all halloed for a bit, and some of them lay down and went to sleep. Veronica and Victor came home on their own, and the others got tired of calling the Lee-Mittisons and came home too, thinking nothing more of it. Eileen likes the parson, so does Sydney; they say he is rather an ass but wonderfully sporting. They expected to find the L.-M.’s at home, but the L.-M.’s didn’t turn up till half way through dinner, looking fearfully sick. Old L.-M. came over to father between the soup and the fish, simply snorting. He said to father, ‘I suppose you realize what your daughter has been exposed to?’ We think old L.-M. is quite mad. I was awfully glad I hadn’t gone.”

“I should think you were,” said Colonel Duperrier absently. He wanted to ask her—“Couldn’t we go off some day for a walk in the hills?” He tried this over and over in his head but it didn’t sound right somehow. He supposed that the suggestion must be unsuitable: and that at all events she would be bored with him. As if to settle the matter once and for all, Joan said, with an unhappy note in her voice as she thought of the meeting of Veronica and Victor, “And anyway, I’m not much of a walker. I don’t care for walking at all.”