PAYING GUESTS. E. F. Benson
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is sure to make a fuss if there's hammering and workmen going on all day and night next her room."
Mrs. Oxney felt this point was worth considering, for though it was worth while to please Colonel Chase, it was certainly not worth while to displease Miss Howard. These two were not guests who came for a three weeks' cure and were gone again, but practically permanent inmates of Wentworth, who had lived here for more than a year, and when their interests conflicted, it was necessary to be wary.
"I'm sure I don't want to fuss Miss Howard," she said, "though I don't know how I can get out of it now. I've promised the Colonel, that there shall be a new bathroom put in, and I let him choose that white tile-paper--"
Amy gave a short hollow croak.
"That's the most expensive of all the patterns," she said.
"And lasts the longer," said Mrs. Oxney. "But it might be as well to put it off till after Christmas, for Miss Howard is sure to go down to Torquay for a couple of weeks then, and it could be done in her absence."
"As like as not she won't be able to get away," said Mrs. Bertram, "for if the coal-strike goes on, the railways will all have stopped long before that. I saw a leader in the paper about it this morning, which said there wasn't a ray of hope on the whole horizon. Not a ray. And the whole horizon. Indeed I don't know what we shall do as soon as the cold weather begins, as it's bound to do soon, for after a warm autumn there's always a severe winter. How we shall keep a fire going for the kitchen I can't imagine: I could wish there weren't so many rooms booked up till Christmas. And as for hot water for the baths--"
"Oh, that's coke," said Mrs. Oxney. "As soon as we start the central heating, it and the bath water are run by the same furnace. You know that quite well, so where's the use of saying that? There's plenty of coke. You just try to get into the coke-cellar, and shut the door behind you. You couldn't do it."
Amy sighed: there was resignation more than relief in her sigh.
"Anyhow the coal is getting low enough," she said to console herself. "I'm sure I don't see how we shall keep the house open at all, when we have to begin fires in the rooms, unless you mean to burn coke in them. There's Miss Howard: she likes the drawing-room to be nothing else but an oven by after breakfast, and there's the Colonel as grumpy as a bear if the smoking-room isn't fit to roast an ox in after tea. I'm not sure that it wouldn't be better to shut Wentworth up altogether when the frosts begin. There's nothing that makes guests so discontented as a cold house. Once get the reputation for chilliness, and ruin stares at you. People coming here for the cure won't stand it. They'll pack up and go to the Bolton Arms or to Balmoral. Better say that we're closed. Belvoir too: I was walking along the road to the back of it yesterday, and the coal-cellar door was open. Crammed: I shouldn't like to say how many tons. Where they get it from I don't know: some underhand means, I'm sadly afraid."
Mrs. Oxney had not been attending much to her sister's familiar litanies, but the thought of those semi-detached hovels, suggested by the mention of Belvoir, put a bright idea into her head.
"I'll tell you what I shall do," she said. "I shall take a whole page in the Baths Guide-book to Bolton, and advertise Wentworth properly, so that everybody shall know that it isn't an ordinary boarding house in a row with the butcher's opposite. Golf links, twenty holes, two tennis courts, one hard, croquet-lawn, kitchen- and flower-gardens, and a tasteful view of the lounge."
"It will be very expensive," said Mrs. Bertram, who was really enthusiastic about this idea of her sister's, but was compelled by all the dominant instincts of her nature to see the objection to any course of action.
"Not a bit," said Mrs. Oxney. "It will pay for itself ten times over. Let people know they can play lawn-tennis all the winter--"
"Not if it snows," said Mrs. Bertram.
"Amy, let me finish my sentence. Tennis all the winter, and the breakfast lounge as well as the drawing-room and central heating and no extras for baths and three bathrooms, and standing in its own grounds--"
"But they all stand in their own grounds," said Mrs. Bertram.
"Stuff and nonsense, Amy. Grounds mean something spacious, not a gravel path leading round a monkey-puzzle. And no cold supper on Sundays. I shall say that too."
That point was debated: to say that there was no cold supper on Sunday night implied, so Mrs. Bertram sadly surmised, that there was cold supper all the week, and nothing at all on Sundays, and such a misconception would be lamentably alien to the effect that this sumptuous advertisement was designed to produce. Mrs. Oxney therefore agreed to word this differently or omit altogether, and hurried indoors to find the most tasteful view of the lounge for the photographer.
The morning hours between breakfast and lunch were always the least populated time of the day at Wentworth, for the majority of its guests were patients who went down to the baths in the morning to drink the abominable waters or lie pickling in tubs of brine, and returned, some in the motor-bus, and the more stalwart on their feet, in time to have an hour's prescribed rest before lunch. The two permanent inmates of the house, Colonel Chase and Miss Alice Howard were, so far from being patients, in the enjoyment of the rudest health, but they too, were never at home on fine mornings like this, for Miss Howard had left the house by ten o'clock with her satchel of painting apparatus and a small folding stool, which when properly adjusted never pinched her anywhere or collapsed, and sketched from Nature till lunch-time. On her return she put up on the chimney-piece of the lounge the artistic fruit of her labours for the delectation and compliments of her fellow-guests. These water-colour sketches were, for the most part, suave and sentimental, and represented the church tower of St. Giles's, seen over the fields, or trees with reflections in the river, or dim effects of dusk (though painted by broad daylight, since it was impossible to get the colours right otherwise) with scattered lights gleaming from cottage windows, and possibly a crescent moon (body-colour) in the west. Garden-beds, still-life studies of petunias and Mrs. Oxney's cat were rarer subjects, but much admired.
Colonel Chase's occupations in the morning were equally regular and more physically strenuous, for either he bicycled seldom less than thirty miles, or walked not less than eight as recorded by his pedometer. He had two pedometers, one giddily affixed to the hub of his bicycle's hind-wheel, and the other, for pedestrian purposes, incessantly hung by a steel clip into his waistcoat pocket: this one clicked once at each alternate step of his great strong legs, and it was wonderful how far he walked every day. Thus, though his fellow-guests at Wentworth could not, as in Miss Howard's case, feast their eyes on the actual fruit of his energy since this would have implied the visualization of so many miles of road, they could always be (and were) informed of the immense distances he had traversed. This he felt sure, was a source of admiring envy to the crippled and encouraged them to regain their lost activity. Mrs. Holders, for instance, who, a fortnight ago, had only just been able to hobble down to the Bath establishment on two sticks and was always driven up again in the motor-bus, and who now was able, on her good days, to walk both ways, with the assistance of only one stick, had great jokes with him about her increasing mobility. She used to say that when she came back in the spring, she would go out with him for his walk in the morning, and take her treatment in the afternoon when he was resting. She seemed to take the greatest interest in his athletic feats, and used to drink in all he said with an air of reverent and rapt attention. Occasionally, however, when Colonel Chase was least conscious of being humorous (though no one could be more so if he wished) she gave a little mouse-like squeak of laughter and then became intensely serious again. This puzzled him till he thought of what was no doubt the right explanation, namely, that Mrs. Holders had suddenly thought of something amusing, which had nothing to do with him and his conversation. For the rest, she was a middle-aged, round-about little personage, with a plain vivacious face and highly-arched eyebrows, so that she looked in a permanent state of surprise though nobody knew what she was surprised about. Miss Howard thought of her as 'quaint' and Mrs. Holders did not think of Miss Howard at all.
There had lately been a tree felled in the field where the twenty-hole golf links lay, and when her sister went indoors to select a tasteful view of the lounge, Mrs. Bertram walked through the garden and out on to the links to see what it was worth in the way of logs for the fires in this shortage of coal. The tree had been