The Little Hotel Read Online Free

listening, until people began to come out of the dining-room to laugh or sympathize. Then I would send Clara up to her. This woman was not worse than others; but the staff did not like her. They would not serve her, so all I could do was to help them to get rid of her. She sat at the little table that all the old women like; the chair-back is against the radiator. Usually there was no menu on her table. She would not wear glasses and so she could not read the menu that was always on the gate and in the lift. The waitresses knew this. They would hold the menu up to her and then whisk it away.
    ‘Give it to me, give it to me,’ she would call. The waitress would come again, and put it down on the tablecloth in front of her; and as she bent slowly over the waitress would pick it up and hand it to someone else at another table saying, ‘Yes, certainly, Madame, here is the menu.’
    Now the Admiral would study the menu card in the lift, but the new lift went so fast that she had no time; and whoever was in the lift would disturb her to prevent her reading, saying, ‘Have you room enough, Madame? Is Madame well today? Here we are, Madame,’ and so on, so that she never could study it. Everyone of us laughed at these little tricks; but it was not healthy laughter as with the Mayor, the kind that keeps the servants cheerful. As a result of their petty venom, they became disturbed, they hated her the more.
    They would leave her sitting there, beautiful for her age, grand and noble, flushing like a peach with humiliation. When she had ordered her food, they would bring it up cold and she would eat it cold to avoid another scene. Most of the people, Swiss and others, laughed at her: she just fitted in with their old-fashioned ideas of the out-of-date English milords.
    She was poor, yet she complained. She did not like it that the same woman who cleaned her room put her soup in front of her.
    ‘A chambermaid does not serve food.’ She did nothing unreasonable but she did not consider the low rates she was paying. ‘Pity them, the English are so poor now, the most unfortunate people on earth,’ my Papa says, ‘and yet they cannot lose their pride, their tradition, their history.’ I told Papa that nothing can be done when servants have made up their minds to get rid of someone. You see, she gave no tips: she paid her ten per cent service, but nothing extra. The servants are very poor and need the little extra. As it is, on their days out, you will find them sitting each by himself eating a roll perhaps, on the seats along the promenade getting a little fresh air and waiting to go home to sleep. We do not feed them on their days out. Very often too they spend the day in bed, eating a little bread or fruit. You see most of them send money home to their families, and their families think of them as the rich ones. Well, it is not the business of the guests to worry about that and not mine either; we must all live and eat, and out of the same pot. The way they see it is, there are people living in comfort, doing nothing and eating all day, who deny them a few extra pence. Yet I have seen them very kind to certain guests who do not pay extra; it is a question of luck and personality.
    This Englishwoman was unlucky. She was obliged to leave and went to a place along the esplanade just up the hill, much less convenient for her, since she had a stiff climb from the lake-front; and there I know she is just as badly treated, for after a while all their servants learned the joke from our servants.
    Good. You see the servants found the Mayor amusing and he was good to them. They began to get tired of him, though, when he woke them up at night. I forbade them to attend to him. Just the same he found out their doors and knocked on them, both at night and during the afternoon rest-hour. I told him not to.
    One day soon after this he asked for Document 157 back and his other documents too. He said they were false, fraudulent, poisoned documents