The Little Hotel by Christina Stead Page B

would catch one and take him home for the kitchen. We had to keep stopping for breath and to giggle, but in the end we got home. We got in about two o’clock and found Charlie in his dressing-gown and pyjamas dozing on the couch in the sitting-room. He came at length to the door.
    ‘Bad little girls,’ he said grinning sourly.
    ‘Is everyone home, Charlie?’ said I.
    He answered gaily, ‘Mr Bonnard is not home. The Mayor of B. is now filling a long-felt want in the lunatic asylum.’
    ‘Charlie, don’t clown so much.’
    We were all breathless with the descent, dizzy too; and dizzier still when we heard.
    It seems that just after midnight there was a rattling at the front door. Gennaro ran upstairs and looked out from the second floor, so that he could see under the glass awning that fans out over the door. There was the Mayor entirely naked, except for his hat and muffler, but with his two shopping-bags. Gennaro wanted to open up quickly, for he thought the Mayor would catch cold. ‘Supposing some ladies came along,’ said Charlie. ‘I’m not strong enough to deal with a circus number like that.’
    He told Gennaro to phone the police, though they would probably be angry at being called on such a calm cold night. Gennaro telephoned the police, but before they arrived the Mayor had gone. He ran to the Hotel Royal where he got inside the door before the night-clerk, who was stretched out on a lounge in the sitting-room, knew what was happening.
    He asked for a room, said something rude about us, the Hotel Swiss-Touring. The clerk, who had taken refuge behind the desk, was shouting:
    ‘No, no, we have no rooms, the hotel is full up, sir.’
    But the Mayor yelled:
    ‘It’s the offseason, you haven’t three wretched sinners in the whole mausoleum, there are five miles of corridor occupied by ghosts of dead bankrupt Englishmen in this damp mausoleum; that is all.’
    You know, they expected no one but a rajah doing the night-clubs, and the night-clerk, only a schoolboy, was limp with fear. The Mayor took himself up in the lift, quite naked of course, except for his top-piece and neckpiece with his two shopping-bags, while the boy was saying:
    ‘But, sir, you have no luggage.’
    The Mayor ran up and down the corridors and then there was a crash. He had taken a chair and was beating one of the mirror-doors leading into an upstairs sitting-room. In the dim light of the corridor he had seen a strange naked man advancing upon him and had rushed at him with a plush-and-gilt chair.
    Meantime, the clerk had telephoned the police, but the available men were now at our hotel, looking for the Mayor. The boy came running out of the hotel for help, fell in the snow, found the police and very soon they had got the Mayor and delivered him, a pretty little package, to a local institution. The reception office made no trouble about admitting him and there he was.
    Mrs Trollope said: ‘Oh, poor man. I told you, Selda, he was ready to jump on any one of us!’
    ‘Did you know Mrs Trollope said he was mad?’ I said to Charlie.
    Charlie winked. ‘And now, ladies, go and get some shut-eye.’
    ‘Wait till Mr Wilkins hears what fun and excitement we had. He thinks I am moping here all alone,’ said Mrs Trollope.
    ‘Wait till Mr Bonnard hears that we paid twenty-five francs a bottle for champagne in the Zig-Zag when it is only eleven francs fifty in the Hoirs. I shall have to send the money over in the morning.’
    Charlie said: ‘Now that the Mayor is gone, Christmas is over: no more free bubbly.’
    Roger did not return till seven in the morning. He said nothing to me, looked at Olivier, went down to the basement to see to the furnace. He and Clara were very sick all day; but these mountain people are wiry. When Roger heard about the champagne, he took fifty francs from the safe and went up town to pay the manager of the Zig-Zag.
    As for the Mayor: his relatives came with a lawyer ten days later and it turned out to be a very