Rose for Winter Read Online Free Page A

the town. No boats would put out, so there was a lack of fresh fish. No one would go into the streets if they could help it, and those who must stole awfully about, wrapped up to the eyes with scarves as though the wind spelt plague. Another consequence of the storm was the glut of stranded travellers in the hotel. There was no way across the Straits save by the Algeciras ferries, and all travellers by train from Europe to Morocco came here to catch these boats. But with such seas running the boats refused to sail.
    Suddenly, therefore, the bars and dining-rooms of the hotel were full of the lost and surprised from all over Europe. They sat around all day, staring at the walls, nibbling nuts and waiting for deliverance. Unprepared as they were for more than an hour in Algeciras, the delay seemed to rob them of all power to express themselves, and the waiters kept running to me in despair to ask the French for flan, the German for banana, or the English for soft-boiled eggs.
    There was a wide variety among the travellers: a Huguenot hotel-keeper from Dublin, going to Tangier for his blood-pressure; a poor American painter with his French-Arab wife; three caravaning Swedes; a Norwegian-American and her two blonde daughters; an ex-sailor from Alamos in trouble with the police; and a thin, pale, pendantic young civil servant from the Channel Islands.
    The effects of the delay upon them were also various, and at times quite startling. The Huguenot hotel-keeper drank brandy all day long and blew up paper bags to test his wind. The Norwegian and her daughters tiptoed in shocked horror about the passages, pale and martyred by the plumbing. One of the Swedes, in gritty English, made love to the sailor and was punched on the nose. And the American painter, in bad French, sat quarrelling with his wife over the works of Donatello, striking the table every so often and crying out to the amazed fishermen: ‘Jeeze, ain’t she dumb though? She jus’ don’t know from Harry! Good ker-ripes!’
    But the prim young man from the Channel Islands was probably in a worse state than any of them. He was making a rapid tour of France, Spain and Morocco, every stage of which he had worked out beforehand to the split second. Delay was calamity. For two miserable days he sat in the hall, checking his timetables, making nervous calculations in his notebook, looking at the clock, and clucking. For two days he would not eat, because eating in Algeciras was not included in his itinerary. The second evening we forced him to have dinner with us, and afterwards to try some coñac. Quite soon, in a kind of white-faced desperation, growing more and more formal, he grew more and more drunk. In the end, speaking with Whitehall precision, he broke down altogether.
    â€˜In my position,’ he said, ‘as Assistant to the Postmaster, I am assured … of an adequate salary. And later, of course … of a pension … concomitant with my grade. And yet … The tears streamed down his face. ‘What does it all mean? I would like to be famous, my name to be remembered. But how? I ask, but how?’
    We picked him up – and his time-table – off the floor, and put them both to bed.
    Among others stranded in the port were several shaggy groups of yachtsmen – British, French and Italian. One met them in the bars at night, a false-faced lot, all drinking heavily, all wearing braided caps. The French and Italians looked like film extras, with an anxious shiftiness about them as theatrical as greasepaint. The British included young men with polar beards, middle-aged captains with flaring faces and half-drowned eyes, and several ageless girls whom the captains always introduced as their pursers. They were quarrelsome and intensely suspicious of each other, and although they seemed to hang together, the presence of a stranger revealed some queer cracks in their solidarity.
    A young man would lead me darkly aside. ‘You want