AN APOLOGY THAT MADE THINGS WORSE.
We had a fancy-dress ball on December 30th. They have these things in nearly all Swiss Hotels and you have to put up with them. As a matter of fact Matilda and I enjoyed ourselves. We supped well and danced quite often. At 3.30 a.m. we set out for our rooms. We took a lighted candle with us to keep us warm as we went. The way to get the most warmth from a candle is to sit round it. As the corridor was cold, we sat round the candle outside Miss Wortley's room, but this was quite accidental.
We didn't know that she had gone to bed at 10.30 p.m. with the primary object of sleeping and the ulterior motive of getting up the next morning in time to catch an early train. We weren't to know that she had wasted her time from 11 p.m. to 3.25 a.m. listening to a procession of revellers retiring to their rooms. We had no suspicion that she was just dozing off for the first time when we stopped to warm ourselves. We really made very little noise, though we may have laughed just a little. The report which has got about, that I tried to climb up the wall to see the time, is inaccurate. The clock is not nearly high enough up the wall to render this necessary, and I didn't care a button what the time was.
If we had known that the Germans who ought to have been asleep in the room opposite to Miss Wortley would come out into the corridor and shout in their nasty guttural language, we should probably not have tried to find out whether anything was attached to the other end of a piece of tape that protruded from under their door. It was quite a long piece of tape, and there was something attached to the end of it, though we never found out what that something was. Anyway, it was too large to pass under the door, though we pulled the tape quite hard. We had just given up our investigation and reached our respective rooms when the German family arrived in the corridor and commented on the matter.
I can't see that we were really to blame because Miss Wortley suffered from insomnia, missed her early train next morning and had to pay an extra half franc for having breakfast in her bedroom. She was very unpleasant about it and went round telling everybody that we had kept her awake all night. She was one of those women who——But there, I don't want to be nasty, and anyone who reads this will guess the kind of woman she was.
The next day was New Year's Eve. After dinner we took part in an Ice Carnival, then we saw the New Year in, and then we drank practically everybody's health. At 2 a.m. I was sitting in the lounge talking to Matilda when a kind of peaceful sensation came over me, and I began to be sorry that there was any bad feeling between Miss Wortley and us; so I said to Matilda, It's New Year's Day and I should like to start it on friendly terms with everyone, including Miss Wortley. I think I shall apologise to her about last night; we may have been a little thoughtless."
"I don't see what there is to apologise for," said Matilda, "but I suppose it can't do any harm and it may help to make things pleasant all round. If you're going to apologise I suppose I ought to do the same."
"Come on then," I said.
"Where to?"
"To apologise."
"Don't be absurd; we can't apologise now. We'll apologise to-morrow."
"We might miss her to-morrow, and we ought to do a thing like this without delay and as early in the New Year as possible. If I don't do it now, I may not feel apologetic later on, and I don't want to go through the year with even a tittle of Miss Wortley's insomnia on my conscience."
Matilda seemed rather uncertain about it, but after a time recognised that I was right, and we went up to Miss Wortley's room. I had to knock loudly on her door before I got any answer, but eventually a sleepy voice said, "Come in."
I didn't think that we had better do that, so I knocked again.
"All right, you can bring in the water."
"It isn't exactly your shaving water—in fact it's hardly time to get up yet," I shouted.
"What's the matter? Is the place on fire?" I heard sounds as of a person getting out of bed, so I said, "You needn't get up, it's only us. We wanted to apologise about last night. We're sorry you didn't sleep very well. Of course it wasn't altogether our fault, but still we thought that we should like to apologise; in fact we didn't feel that we could go to sleep until we had apologised; and—and we wanted to wish you a Happy New Year."
I am not sure that I did the thing very well, but I am sure that it would have sounded better and that I shouldn't have ended so lamely if Matilda hadn't been so tactless as to laugh in the middle. Somehow I got the idea that the apology hadn't been accepted in the spirit in which it had been tendered. Suspicious sounds came from within, including the click of a water jug; also the German family opposite seemed to be under the impression that it was time to get up—so we didn't wait to say Good-night, but slipped quietly out of the way. Miss Wortley's door and the door opposite opened simultaneously. There were two splashes like water thrown from jugs, and I fancy that more than one person got wet. It isn't easy to discover exactly what is happening when two people are shouting at the tops of their voices in different languages, but I didn't gather that they quite cleared the matter up to their mutual satisfaction.