The Little Hotel Read Online Free PDF Page A

imagine—Italians washing off their dirt in his kitchen. Gennaro trembled: ‘There is no hot water in my room.’ I came in and the Italian girls came in to support Gennaro: there was a noise and I threatened to send for the police and send Gennaro to the frontier. Francis said, as usual, that he would cook no lunch. He agreed to do it at length only if the dirty Italians worked elsewhere. I had to get Clara to help with the vegetables. All the Italians were mad with rage; the atmosphere was frightful; a silent uproar was going on all round me. In the meantime I had to make sure lunch was ready at the usual time for the guests who were as usual spending the morning walking up and down waiting for their food. At this very moment I found the old porter Charlie staggering upstairs to the attic with a bed. ‘What are you doing, Charlie?’
    ‘The Mayor wants one room for his study and says I must take this bed to the attic.’
    ‘Take it back this instant. Mr Bonnard and I alone have the right to have the furniture moved. The idea of guests moving furniture! Take it right back.’
    He grinned grimaces, said: ‘What can I do with a circus number like that? What a card! You could run a whole circus with just one number like that!’
    He turned slowly round, shouldering the bed, and crept downstairs. Charlie is sixty-five, a real Frenchman, who has sailed all around the world. He is getting too old for his work, but he’s been a very strong man and he’s reliable and has sense. He has a very bad police record and is always going up there to answer some charge or other—the fact is, it’s a quiet sort of joke we have; even Mrs Trollope and Madame Blaise found out about it. They are close friends and spend many days together. They were walking along on a shopping tour in Lausanne, one afternoon, when they saw Charlie going into a shabby little hotel with a schoolgirl. We could not help giggling together when they came back and told me. One of these days he will go too far. The very next week, the father of a twelve-year-old girl came rushing down here with a stick; and Charlie has already spent three months in jail, for a thing like that. But he’s a decent man, knows everything about hotel life, he’s well broken in, a clever old Frenchman, who no doubt is not very anxious to return to France. He understands all the guests and they rely on him. There is something very soothing about the intelligence of a broken good-natured old scamp: and then he’s a poor old man. What has he to look forward to? He’ll end up on the roads; and be picked up and go to jail again.
    He and Clara and Luisa the Italian girl with her sister Lina, who’s tubercular, though I never say so to guests, form an old guard upon whom I can always rely. The only surprise I got that afternoon was when Lina, a good Catholic girl, and a married woman, led a little spearhead of Italian servants into my office and said, The Italians must not be treated like dogs: I must make Francis behave or get rid of him.
    And at the very moment I was scolding Charlie for moving the bed, Mrs Trollope came up from lunch and said:
    Oh, Madame, I see you have been thinking about my sciatica: for I see that this bed does not sag in the middle.’
    I had quite a scene with her while everything was explained, and I had to get very cross with her too. And what happens at this very moment? Naturally, the telephone rings in the office and the woman from Geneva speaks to me and tells me she expects every moment to be arrested.
    When Mrs Trollope found that the bed was not for her, she went crying to her friend Madame Blaise. They were on good terms at that moment; and the next thing I knew was that Madame Blaise had moved her chaise-longue into Mrs Trollope’s room. I flew into a temper at that, and scolded them both. I was really furious. It’s simple. To keep order in a hotel, everything must stay in the same place; and then there’s the logic of equality. If one guest has