§11

In spite of this, Joanna could not help feeling a little nervous and lonely when she found herself at the Palace Hotel. It was so very different from the New Inn at Romney, or the George at Rye, or any other substantial farmers' ordinary where she ate her dinner on market days. Of course she had been to the Metropole at Folkestone—whatever place Joanna visited, whether Brodnyx or Folkestone, she went to the best hotel—so she was not uninitiated in the mysteries of hotel menus and lifts and hall porters, and other phenomena that alarm the simple-minded; but that was many years ago, and it was more years still since she had slept away from Ansdore, out of her own big bed with its feather mattress and flowered curtains, so unlike this narrow hotel arrangement, all box mattress and brass knobs.

The first night she lay miserably awake, wishing she had never come. She felt shy and lonely and scared and homesick. After the dead stillness of Ansdore, a stillness which brooded unbroken till dawn, which was the voice of a thick darkness, she found even this quiet seaside hotel full of disturbing noise. The hum of the ascending lift far into the night, the occasional wheels and footsteps on the parade, the restless heaving roar of the sea, all disturbed the small slumbers that her sense of alarm and strangeness would let her enjoy. She told herself she would never sleep a wink in this rackety place, and would have sought comfort in the resolution to go home the next morning, if she had not had Ellen to face, and the servants and neighbours to whom she had boasted so much.

However, when daylight came, and sunshine, and her breakfast-in-bed, with its shining dish covers and appetizing smells, she felt quite different, and ate her bacon and eggs with appetite and a thrilling sense of her own importance. The waitress, for want of a definite order, had brought her coffee, which somehow made her feel very rakish and continental, though she would have much preferred tea. When she had finished breakfast, she wrote a letter to Ellen describing all her experiences with as much fullness as was compatible with that strange inhibition which always accompanied her taking up of the pen, and distinguished her letters so remarkably from the feats of her tongue.

When she had written the letter and posted it adventurously in the hotel letter-box, she went out on the parade to listen to the band. It was Easter week, and there were still a great many people about, couples sitting round the bandstand, more deeply absorbed in each other than in the music. Joanna paid twopence for a chair, having ascertained that there were no more expensive seats to be had, and at the end of an hour felt consumedly bored. The music was bright and popular enough, but she was not musical, and soon grew tired of listening to "tunes." Also something about the music made her feel uncomfortable—the same dim yet searching discomfort she had when she looked at the young couples in the sun ... the young girls in their shady hats and silk stockings, the young men in their flannels and blazers. They were all part of a whole to which she did not belong, of which the music was part ... and the sea, and the sun, and the other visitors at the hotel, the very servants of the hotel ... and Ellen at Ansdore ... all day she was adding fresh parts to that great whole, outside which she seemed to exist alone.

"I'm getting fanciful," she thought—"this place hasn't done me a bit of good yet."

She devoted herself to the difficult art of filling up her day. Accustomed to having every moment occupied, she could hardly cope with the vast stretch of idle hours. After a day or two she found herself obliged to give up having breakfast in bed. From force of habit she woke every morning at five, and could not endure the long wait in her room. If the weather was fine she usually went for a walk on the sea-front, from Rock-a-Nore to the Monypenny statue. Nothing would induce her to bathe, though even at that hour and season the water was full of young men and women rather shockingly enjoying themselves and each other. After breakfast she wrote laborious letters to Broadhurst, Wilson, Mrs. Tolhurst, Ellen, Mene Tekel—she had never written so many letters in her life, but every day she thought of some fresh thing that would be left undone if she did not write about it. When she had finished her letters she went out and listened respectfully to the band. The afternoon was generally given up to some excursion or charabanc drive, and the day finished rather somnolently in the lounge.

She did not get far beyond civilities with the other visitors in the hotel. More than one had spoken to her, attracted by this handsome, striking, and probably wealthy woman—through Ellen's influence her appearance had been purged of what was merely startling—but they either took fright at her broad marsh accent ... "she must be somebody's cook come into a fortune" ... or the more fundamental incompatibility of outlook kept them at a distance. Joanna was not the person for the niceties of hotel acquaintanceship—she was too garrulous, too overwhelming. Also she failed to realize that all states of society are not equally interested in the price of wheat, that certain details of sheep-breeding seem indelicate to the uninitiated, and that strangers do not really care how many acres one possesses, how many servants one keeps, or the exact price one paid for one's latest churn.