Читать книгу They Winter Abroad - T. H. White - Страница 3

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Statistics shew, or they ought to shew, that one out of every four of those young ladies whom you meet in the hunting-field is doomed to die a maiden. That nearly-young person, for instance, who wears a bowler hat and a cigarette drooping beneath her prominent nose, who has just nibbled your horse’s tail, bumped you into a ditch, and accused your mount of kicking: her pale viperish eye seems unlikely ever to gleam upon a sweetheart. Her father will die, her elder brother will inherit the estate. Even after he is married that auburn vixen will continue to ride his horses. But she will be so rude to his wife, so unpleasant to his servants, and so bad for his stable, that something will be bound to happen sooner or later. By slow attrition, or by a single downright uproar, she will be ousted from her father’s house. She will no longer cram herself in front of you at the gates: her strident vituperation of other people because she cannot hold her own horse will cease to echo round the warm-lying coverts: she will disappear.

You will wonder whether she has died; whether some sagacious creature has had the sense to fall with her into a deep ditch, and there to lie upon her in good holding mud until she suffocated. You will imagine her corpse, with fragments of that hanging cigarette stuffed into the mouth, with the glazed indefatigable eyes staring upwards in a last accusation. You may even be sorry that she died such a pleasant death.

Meanwhile Miss Handsaw will be wintering in Italy. Stouter now, and with a malingering expression, she will be staying at Bordighera with the relic of a papal count. Miss Handsaw will have taken to travel.

There are five reasons for leaving one’s native country. One may go on one’s honeymoon, in order to have leisure for private debauchery more or less incognito. One may make the Grand Tour from mere juvenile effervescence and secret hopes of vice. One may go to a place with the object of saying that one has been there. One may be a crusader or an expeditionary force. Or one may find oneself not wanted by one’s relations, and possibly wanted by the police, at home.

The Continent has done its best to provide for all these wants. The crusaders are accommodated in houses with red lights over the doors. The fugitives from justice can live at the Ambassadori in Rome, for five or six pounds a night. The newly-weds and the grand tourists can stay with great discomfort at expensive hotels in Naples. They are in the best of humours, and therefore stomach the expense; they are interested in other matters, and therefore do not feel their privations.

And for the people who visit a place in order to say they have been there—for the people who winter abroad so that they can write home about it—there is the Hotel Santo Biagio in Positano.

The Hotel Santo Biagio was the best hotel on the Sorrentine Peninsula, not as the most expensive or exclusive (the principle of exclusion being expense) but as the most considerate within the means of a normal income. All the guests of the Hotel Santo Biagio said it was the best hotel on the Sorrentine Peninsula for this reason. Secretly they would have preferred to stay at the Quisisana in Amalfi or the Vittoria Grande in Sorrento or the Cappuccini in Capri. But, since their incomes were not large enough to purchase exclusion as well as consideration, they united in supposing that the one was not compatible with the other. They always came for a week and stayed two months; and they did not forget to record the fact in the hotel album when they left. The hotel album began with:

My husband and I have stayed in the Hotel Santo Biagio for six weeks and we think it is a very comfortable hotel and we shall always recommend this hotel to our friends.—Angela Hopwood.18.3.06.

Gathering momentum on its way, it ended with a burst of music:

Oh! when with winter’s frozen breeze

In London we coldly freeze,

Sweet Mem’ry will unroll the past

Of Positano’s balmy blast.

Francis and Mary Preston.2.2.32.

The hotel itself stood on the eastern side of the valley at Positano. When the sun rose in orange mystery, like the ribbon of a war medal, if not worse, from behind the still slightly snow-capped summits of Monte Capaccio, tinting the plain of Salerno and the exhausted flat miles of sea, the hotel was far from receiving its warmth. Not until midday would the observant deity have noted its three rows of nude middle-aged gentle-people taking a short pre-prandial sunbath behind the three rows of blank semi-curtained windows which formed the frontage.

The guests during the winter were largely English, with a smattering of Swedes and Germans and an occasional Frenchman. The French, however, were birds of passage, generally love-birds, who seldom stayed more than a night. So the real ballast was Anglo-Saxon.

It was a ballast of gold. The proprietor calculated on a fixed population between December and March, from which he derived his security, and a small superficial driftage of Americans to keep his single rooms engaged. The main clientèle were treated with every care, so that they should return next winter and bring their friends. The passing trippers were received with even more attention, in case they might be induced to remain among the fixtures. All the meals, for instance, were as abundant and English as possible, but the fixtures were given dolci only for dinner whilst the strangers were so regaled at luncheon as well.

In the summer the English disappeared and the hotel performed a volte-face. The English cooking was relinquished, the notices of the Cosulich line and the American Express Company were removed, the box for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals was taken down, and the Italian week-enders began to pour in from Naples: eight to a bedroom, singing from four of the morning till two at night.

The proprietor was a small prosperous Italian who looked like a Belge. He had been associated with the profession since he was fourteen, and had learned a large number of maxims in the course of his career: never to present himself unshaved before his guests, never to speak of politics or religion, never to allow the most sociable of his patrons to become really friendly with him (whilst none would be permitted to be actually formal), and to buy new boots. He had always lived with his mother and sister, latterly he had married a wife, and the guests who usually joked and associated with him, finding his assumed personality quite charming, were maiden ladies. He had a high-pitched giggle, and the more fanciful of his patrons occasionally suspected him of a harder subtlety than might appear. He was supposed to be deeply honest, and a great philanthropist where the affairs of his neighbouring peasantry were concerned. He never grossly overcharged, being wise enough to see that his regular visitors were his greatest asset, and that even a chance visitor might be charmed into regularity.

He insisted that every member of his staff should assume the same hospitable attitude as himself. This foible produced a certain number of catch phrases, which one was constantly hearing, such as ‘tutto quello che Lei vuol.’ He kept all rooms scrupulously clean, supervised everything personally, and seldom sat down. The most attractive thing about him, which his friends the maiden ladies never found out, was that in all personal matters he was invincibly stubborn. He would state a fact and hold to it, however unreasonable it was, with the intricate and elusive logic common amongst obstinate people. This was human and therefore a relief in one who was so constantly affable and polished; but he was not often sufficiently interested to be sincere in argument. He would usually defer to his opposite, without in the least changing his own opinion, merely in order to save trouble. He was a smiling man in the early forties, and he had a double chin; but there was nothing soft inside him.

In the mild winter of 1932 the Hotel Santo Biagio gave the proprietor satisfaction by being pleasantly full. Miss Albino had done her work of liaison well, and there had been any number of maiden guests.

Miss Albino herself was a maiden lady. Perhaps, indeed according to scientific law quite certainly, she had once even been a maiden girl. But when one looked at Miss Albino it was difficult to believe in science. It was not possible to understand how this material agglomeration of fatty tissues, this very pronounced mental attitude hidden behind spectacles which looked as though they had come out of a boy’s electric torch, had ever been nurtured in the usual way. Miss Albino as a very fat and goggling baby, perhaps. But Miss Albino as a schoolgirl or a débutante: no, it was beyond imagination. By all artistic laws she ought to have started from the ground fully armed, or from the brain of an L.C.C. Minerva: parturated immaculately at a mental birth, already middle-aged.

Miss Albino had come to Positano in her twenties. What fabulous urge had brought her there was past conjecture. Perhaps she had wanted to say that she had been to Vesuvius: perhaps she was one of the legion who were not wanted at home. Coming to Positano in the first place may have been like joining the Foreign Legion with Major Wren. The main thing was that she had come. And, having come, she stayed.

Miss Albino was the proprietor’s right hand. She had returned so persistently, had so tirelessly demanded a reduced rate for returning, that she had finally become an institution. The proprietor had become accustomed to her, had found it cheaper to employ her unofficially. Rather than reduce her pension to a figure which would show him no profit at all, he had reconciled himself to supporting her gratis, on condition that she dealt with his English correspondence. She had become a liaison officer. She had secured a post.

Miss Albino’s métier was the securing of posts. Had she been able to afford a life in the suburbs she would undoubtedly have been the secretary of the local golf club. She would also have been on the committee of her club in London. But Miss Albino was poor. Perhaps that was the real reason why she wintered abroad. She could not afford to live in England and interest herself in Women’s Suffrage, so she lived in Positano and consoled herself as the proprietor’s unofficial secretary. She found time, collaterally, to run the R.S.P.C.A., to organise a dispensary for the D.F.L., and to play the harmonium at the English church.

Miss Albino had made so many acquaintances during her residence at the Santo Biagio that she really was invaluable to the proprietor. She kept her clientèle in correspondence, and attracted the right sort of guests. It was directly owing to the efforts of Miss Albino that the Misses Cowfold had come this year. Indeed, the whole Drawing Room faction had come at one time or another through the instrumentality of Miss Albino. That is to say, half the hotel.

For the Hotel Saint Blase preserved the duality of nature. A microcosm of the world, it was divided against itself. There were two factions: of the Drawing Room, and of the Smoking Room. The Drawing Room faction, recruited from the acquaintances of Miss Albino, was the party of Right, of Decency, of Sabbath Observance. Members of this faction were generally maiden or widowed ladies. They had but one occupation. It was to steal the Continental Daily Mail. Hanging about the hall of the hotel with invincible meanness, with the patience conferred by lack of any other interest, they would await delivery of the paper. They would pounce upon it. They would pass it round among themselves. If a member of the Smoking Room ventured to seek it in the stronghold of the enemy, they would conceal it, by sitting on it, till the danger passed.

The Drawing Room faction, as their name implies, lived in the drawing-room. They would sit there, forbidding, solitary, and genteel, exuding an atmosphere of disapproval. Scarcely anybody in the low-class camp of the Smoking Room dared put his nose inside the door.

The Smoking Room faction consisted of the party which, after dinner in the evening, retired to the smoking-room: there it practised vulgarity and gambled at bridge. These people had not been introduced by Miss Albino. They had drifted to Positano on strange errands of their own.

The two parties were fairly divided, so that the internecine war seemed likely to outlast the siege of Troy.

Miss Albino was on the side of the Angels, and with her stood Mrs. Skimlit (the Nestor and Ulysses of the party), Mrs. Prune and her daughter, Frau Kunst, Dr. and Mrs. Arnold-Browne, the Misses Cowfold.

The vulgar section, led by the professor, numbered Mr. McInvert, Mr. and Mrs. Menzies with their daughter, and the Joneses.

Four ladies from Devonshire patronised the Smoking Room without being definitely of any party. Their hearts were still in Devonshire, prophetically mentioning there the glorious fact that they had wintered in Italy.

Such was the society into which Mr. Pupillary, the hero of this story, was plunged from the University. He had come to Italy some months before, in order to say that he had been there. Mrs. Skimlit, although she was over seventy, came with the same object. So did the whole rank of the Drawing Room; except Frau Kunst, who really appeared to have come because she liked it.

The professor had arrived, as he did everything, out of sheer perversity.

Mr. and Mrs. Menzies had come in order to give their daughter a treat.

The Joneses came because they had seen a picture of Vesuvius in the Sydney Herald.

Mr. McInvert had romantic leanings.