The Little Hotel Read Free Page B

midnight. We’re a Calvinist country, very gaitered and neckbanded, parsonical. So after twelve the rich tourists resident in neighbouring towns have only the Toucan and the Zig-Zag and sometimes the Casino to go to. When Lola suggests bringing the men home, the men are eager, you can’t blame them. When her partner or her husband object, she says she will leave the act; and she has left them once or twice.
    She explained to me that I had no idea how dull it was living with two men who are always putting up with each other, and holding on to her; and I could understand. I told her she ought to live with just one man like I do; it is more difficult and you are never sure you can hold him. Lola thinks she can get a rich lover any time she wants to; that is an illusion, I suppose.
    Lola is a vulgar woman who wants to get money out of these rich tourists. I forbade them to dance in the house; they just talk, drink and make love. It is all upstairs out of sight on the top floor. The artistes get reduced rates, so they live in the smallest rooms and you can imagine that in so small a space it gets stuffy; the people often quarrel. The night-porter has to watch them and go up and knock on the door. Then Lola-la-Môme comes out and says she is just having a party. We can hardly prevent stage people from staying up at night after their work; and after one warning Lola usually cools down for the rest of the season. She does not want to go and live and eat in the working-class pensions where people go to sleep early and nothing of that sort would be permitted. Most of our guests know nothing whatever about Lola unless they go to the night-club.
    But how could you prevent the Mayor from knowing? He went to the Toucan many evenings. He bought drinks for Lola and her family and came home with them. They started to sit up all night and since the Mayor does not concede that they have to work, but pretends they are out for a good time, we had him running up and down the stairs and wildly about all night, singing and executing funny little acts on the carpet-runner on the landing. Some of our guests slept through it all; others became curious. Not to explain further, the Mayor began to do a strip-tease in order to dance an apache dance with Lola, although Lola told him over and over, and I believe this, that the male apache does not have to be naked to dance. She does a strip-tease at the club and ends her dance in nothing but a few beads, as my father used to say.
    Mrs Trollope said: ‘I have never seen anything quite like Lola’s act; it’s unnecessary to go so far, though it is a night-club. And Mr Wilkins and I are broadminded; we have seen a good deal.’
    I began to wish the Mayor would move to another hotel. We have had troublesome guests before and the servants can always get rid of them without anything having to be said by me. For instance, we had the Admiral here. She was an old Englishwoman who must have been a society beauty. Her fine white hair was always done as if a maid had done it and in it she wore at dinner a pale blue velvet crescent set with pearls. She had magnificent blue eyes, her skin was soft and her flesh so firm that everyone thought her about sixty-five. She was really eighty-two. Her voice had broken, she was deaf and had aristocratic manners, abrupt, overbearing or suddenly sweet and conciliating.
    We had a new electric lift which had just been installed and was always being adjusted. The engineer had to come several times from Zurich.
    She walked with a stick and would call out from the landing in her clear correct English French: ‘I am old, I must have the lift. Make the engineer operate it for me.’
    When no one came she would bellow: ‘Eh, the man up there, eh, the housekeeper! Where are the domestics?’
    It is true that this was at mealtimes; but it was also intentional that no one came near her till she had been shouting there for ten minutes or so. I used to stand at the bottom of the lift-shaft