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UNCOLLECTED
SHORT STORIES

Salon des Dames
I
t was a wet summer season, the second for which the
hotel had opened since the war. The fine rain made a desolate, even
sound like breathing in the pinewoods, and below, milky layers of
mist covered the lake, and were stained here and there by the
darkness of the water beneath. Sometimes, for an hour or two, the
sun would show his face tremulously, and the ladies, picking their
way up and down the wet gravel of the terrace, would say that
Switzerland must be sometimes very nice.
    For the last week there had been no arrivals. In the enormous
salle-à-manger many tables made a brave and glittering show of
expectancy, but their number diminished; the visitors dined together
in a group by one window, inevitably huddled, starting at the echoes
of their voices in the spectral void. The third and second floors were
closed, not a slit from any doorway lightened the long perspective
of the corridors. Each of the hundred bedrooms with their shuttered
windows might have held a corpse, rotting in humidity beneath the
glacial swathings of the bed. In the lounge, a mist perpetually filmed
the mirrors; the wicker armchairs gathering sociably around the
glass-topped tables creaked at one another in the silence, so that
now and then an apprehensive human head would bob up from over
a writing table or the back of a settee. The rain was always audible
on the glass roof of the verandah.
    It is terrible to be alone in the darkness of rain, swept aside by
one’s world’s indifference into a corner of a house. It is still more
terrible to be swept aside into a corner of a continent. M. Grigoroff
was staying at Seestein indefinitely, because he could think of no
specific reason for going anywhere else. Travelling was expensive,
and besides, he knew the manager. He really knew the manager
quite well, though his diffident inspection of Herr Müller’s eye
brows, seen above the office roll-top through the glass panels of
the office door, did not encourage him to enter and improve the
acquaintance ship. There was something sinister, this afternoon,
about Herr Müller’s eyebrows.
    The war had caused M. Grigoroff considerable inconvenience.
He had spent the greater part of it in Switzerland, and was not at all
sure that he really liked the country. It is true that he had dallied
away the summer before the war very pleasantly here at Seestein.
The place was different then; a band at nights and amorous pink
lights along the terrace. He had met and loved an English lady
called Connie. He was wondering now, as he patrolled the corridor
outside the office in his greatcoat (the heating was not satisfactory),
what had become of her, and whether she was married.
C’était une
jeune fille superbe . 1
    Every time he reached the end of the corridor he hesitated, in
turning, before a door. The panels were all wooden and impen
etrable; to the centre one was screwed a small enamelled plate,
announcing:
Salon des Dames . M. Grigoroff yearned to enter.
    He did not like men, especially English husbands. Of these,
there was an unusually large percentage among the visitors. They
roared at him, making observations about the weather, to which
M. Grigoroff responded vaguely, sympathetically, “
Oh, mon Dieu .” If
he entered the salon there would be ladies; too many ladies perhaps,
or there might, infinitely more desirably, be a few. There would be
the warmth of radiators and draped curtains. M. Grigoroff found
great comfort in the society of women. He entered.
    The click of knitting-needles was suspended as the three women
turned their faces to the door. They were sitting close together by
the big window, looking out into the wet, black pinewoods, with
their knees pressed against the radiator under the window-sill. Mrs.
Hobson was knitting, Miss Pym
2 was mending something which
she rolled into a ball and sat on as