One of those novel chapters that should be enshrined…

THE DANCE (Chapter Eleven of ’The Hotel’ by Elizabeth Bowen)

“…a close-packed row of onlookers sat or stood along the walls, pressing up so near to the band that the red-coated fiddlers began to look desperate, having scarcely elbow-room.”

This is almost as if the hotelbow has been turned into one of those fairy-tale balls rather than tennis ones, while still harbouring the various characters and their interactions, but potentially with any inhibitions removed…

“…several couples of girls were dancing together. Some of the elder ladies had also taken the floor and were spinning round at a high velocity in the arms of their usual bridge-partners,…”

Mrs Duperrier watches her husband vanish into the garden after …Veronica, is it?

But the main outcome that Ronald’s sudden arrival in the role of Mrs K’s son is almost unnoticed, an anticlimax he feels, as if snubbed, while he watches the dances. Mr L-M takes charge of him, I recall.

Milton, meanwhile…is flirted with by Eileen Lawrence, I think.

“…she had less on than he could have imagined possible.” 

“Heavens, if this were Monte!” Or Monet? …

Milton “thought of the whole band of white hotels like palaces along the line of coast into which their own seemed now to be knitted – hotels with light streaming out of them towards the tideless sea that, never advancing on the shore or receding from it, was like an inexorable unfailing Memory,…”

What a wondrous image. Bowen is second to none.

Gauche Milton with so much attention on Eileen’s arms without even mentioning her elbows, but the elbows are of course absurdistly inferred, at least for me!

“‘What jolly arms you’ve got!’ he, feeling still immensely far from her, was moved to exclaim.”

But it is Sydney whom Milton so gauchely wants, not Eileen? But he still wants to dip a finger in the latter… with the smouldering of a luminous-nosed Dong?

“…laid a hand on her arm to detain her. He entreated, ‘Not till the end of this dance!’ His unwillingness to give her up was not decreased by a sharp irritation that she with her white arms and her attractiveness. […]….which he was conscious of as something as material as phosphorescence, in which he could have dipped a finger curiously…”

Love is spoken of in the same breath of his mind as the name Sydney, as Milton counts the balconies in the night and Mrs K at her balcony turns into Sydney and, so, who is the shadowy third to his hopes of ‘love’ with Sydney? Ronald or Mrs K? 

Meanwhile, to explain my startling Dong thought above…

“Their cigarette ends glowing and fading preceded them like a pair of luminous noses, and equidistant spots of fire advertised that other pairs of Dongs were promenading solemnly.”

One of those chapters of literature that should be enshrined.

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My ongoing review of THE HOTEL here: https://elizabethbowensite.wordpress.com/2021/11/27/the-hotel/