She said “Good-by-e-e” to Borowki and moved on, emitting a mouthed cloud of smoke and a faint fragrance of whisky.
The insult had been as stinging as the crack of a whip, and as Fifi’s pride of her wardrobe was swept away from her, she heard all the comments that she had not heard, in one great resurgent whisper. Then they said that she wore her clothes here because she had nowhere else to wear them. That was why the Howard girl considered her vulgar and did not care to know her.
For an instant her anger flamed up against her mother for not telling her, but she saw that her mother did not know either.
“I think she’s so dowdy,” she forced herself to say aloud, but inside she was quivering. “What is she, anyhow? I mean, how high is her title? Very high?”
“She’s the widow of a baronet.”
“Is that high?” Fifi’s face was rigid. “Higher than a countess?”
“No. A countess is much higher—infinitely higher.” He moved his chair closer and began to talk intently.
Half an hour later Fifi got up with indecision on her face.
“At seven you’ll let me know definitely,” Borowki said, “and I’ll be ready with a car at ten.”
Fifi nodded. He escorted her across the room and saw her vanish into a dark hall mirror in the direction of the lift.
As he turned away, Lady Capps-Karr, sitting alone over her coffee, spoke to him:
“I want a word with you. Did you, by some slip of the tongue, suggest to Weicker that in case of difficulties I would guarantee your bills?”
Borowki flushed. “I may have said something like that, but—”
“Well, I told him the truth—that I never laid eyes on you until a fortnight ago.”
“I, naturally, turned to a person of equal rank—”
“Equal rank! What cheek! The only titles left are English titles. I must ask you not to make use of my name again.”
He bowed. “Such inconveniences will soon be for me a thing of the past.”
“Are you getting off with that vulgar little American?”
“I beg your pardon,” he said stiffly.
“Don’t be angry. I’ll stand you a whisky-and-soda. I’m getting in shape for Bopes Kinkallow, who’s just telephoned he’s tottering back here. He and his chaffeur and his vallet stopped off in Sierre and have been lying there ever since in a stupor. But he’s run out of “happies”, so he’s arriving tonight.”
Meanwhile, upstairs, Mrs. Schwartz was saying to Fifi: “Now that I know we’re going away I’m getting excited about it. It will be so nice seeing the Hirsts and Mrs. Bell and Amy and Marjorie and Gladys again, and the new baby. You’ll be happy, too; you’ve forgotten how they’re like. You and Gladys used to be great friends. And Marjorie—”
“Oh, mamma, don’t talk about it,” cried Fifi miserably. “I can’t go back.”
“We needn’t stay. If John was in a college like his father wanted, we could, maybe, go to California.”
But for Fifi all the romance of life was rolled up into the last three impressionable years in Europe. She remembered the tall guardsmen in Rome and the old Spaniard who had first made her conscious of her beauty at the Villa d’Este at Como, and the French naval aviator at St. Raphael who had dropped her a note from his plane into their garden, and the feeling that she had sometimes, when she danced with Borowki, that he was dressed in gleaming boots and a white-furred dolman.
She had seen many American moving pictures and she knew that the girls there always married the faithful boy from the old home town, and after that there was nothing.
“I won’t go,” she said aloud.
Her mother turned with a pile of clothes in her arms. “What talk is that from you, Fifi? You think I could leave you here alone?” As Fifi didn’t answer, she continued, with an air of finality: “That talk doesn’t sound nice from you. Now you stop fretting and saying such things, and get me this list of things uptown, and later we can have tea at Nussneger’s.”
But Fifi had decided. It was Borowki, then, and the chance of living fully and adventurously. He could go into the diplomatic service, and then one day when they encountered Lady Capps-Karr and Miss Howard at a legation ball, she could make audible the observation that for the moment seemed so necessary to her: “I hate people who always look as if they were going to or from a funeral.”
“So run along,” her mother continued. “And look in at that café and see if John is up there, and take him to tea.”
Fifi accepted the shopping list mechanically. Then she went into her room and wrote a little note to Borowki which she would leave with the concierge on the way out.
Coming out, she saw her mother struggling with a trunk, and felt terribly sorry for her. But there were Amy and Gladys in America, and Fifi hardened herself.
She walked out and down the stairs, remembering halfway that in her distraction she had omitted an official glance in the mirror; but there was a large mirror on the wall just outside the grand salon, and she stopped in front of that instead.
She was beautiful—she learned that once more, but now it made her sad. She wondered whether the dress she wore this afternoon was in bad taste, whether it would minister to the superiority of Miss Howard or Lady Capps-Karr. It seemed to her a lovely dress, soft and gentle in cut, but in color a hard, bright, metallic powder blue.
Then a sudden sound broke the stillness of the gloomy hall and Fifi stood suddenly breathless and motionless.
III
At eleven o’clock Mr. Weicker was tired, but the bar was in one of its periodical riots and he was waiting for it to quiet down. There was nothing to do in the stale office or the empty lobby; and the salon, where all day he held long conversations with lonely English and American women, was deserted; so he went out the front door and began to make the circuit of the hotel. Whether due to his circumambient course or to his frequent glances up at the twinkling bedroom lights and into the humble, grilled windows of the kitchen floor, the promenade gave him a sense of being in control of the hotel, of being adequately responsible, as though it were a ship and he was surveying it from a quarterdeck.
He went past a flood of noise and song from the bar, past a window where two bus boys sat on a bunk and played cards over a bottle of Spanish wine. There was a phonograph somewhere above, and a woman’s form blocked out a window; then there was the quiet wing, and turning the corner, he arrived back at his point of departure. And in front of the hotel, under the dim porte-cochére light, he saw Count Borowki.
Something made him stop and watch—something incongruous—Borowki, who couldn’t pay his bill, had a car and a chauffeur. He was giving the chauffeur some sort of detailed instructions, and then Mr. Weicker perceived that there was a bag in the front seat, and came forward into the light.
“You are leaving us, Count Borowki?”
Borowki started at the voice. “For the night only,” he answered. “I’m going to meet my mother.”
“I see.”
Borowki looked at him reproachfully. “My trunk and hat box are in my room, you’ll discover. Did you think I was running away from my bill?”
“Certainly not. I hope you will have a pleasant journey and find your mother well.”
But inside he took the precaution of dispatching a valet de chambre to see if the baggage was indeed there, and even to give it a thoughtful heft, lest its kernel were departed.
He dozed for perhaps an hour. When he woke up, the night concierge was pulling at his arm and there was a strong smell of smoke in the lobby. It was some moments before he could get it through his head that one wing of the hotel was on fire.
Setting the concierge at the alarms, he rushed down the hall to the bar, and through the smoke that poured from the door he caught sight of the burning billiard table and the flames licking along the floor and flaring up in alcoholic ecstasy every time a bottle on the shelves cracked with the heat. As he hastily retreated he met a line of half-dressed chasseurs and bus boys already struggling up from the lower depths with buckets of water. The concierge shouted that the fire department was on its way. He put two men at the telephones to awaken the guests, and as he ran back to form a bucket line at the danger point, he thought for the first time of Fifi.
Blind rage consumed him—with a precocious Indian-like cruelty she had carried out her threat. Ah, he would deal with that later; there was still law in the cantons. Meanwhile a clangor outdoors announced that the engines had arrived, and he made his way back through the lobby, filled now with men in pajamas carrying brief cases, and women in bedclothes carrying jewel boxes and small dogs; the number swelling every minute and the talk rising from a cadence heavy with sleep to the full staccato buzz of an afternoon soirée.
A chasseur called Mr. Weicker to the phone, but the manager shook him off impatiently.
“It’s the commissionaire of police,” the boy persisted. “He says you must speak to him.”
With an exclamation, Mr. Weicker hurried into the office. “’Allo!”
“I’m calling from the station. Is this the manager of the Hotel Trois
