CHAPTER X
AT watering-places and, I believe, in Europe generally, hotel-keepers and ober-kellners, in assigning rooms to their visitors, are guided not so much by the demands and desires of the latter as by their own personal opinion of them, and, one must add, they are rarely mistaken. But for some reason I cannot explain, they had assigned Granny such a splendid suite that they had quite overshot the mark. It consisted of four splendidly furnished rooms with a bathroom, quarters for the servants and a special room for the maid, and so on. Some grande duchesse really had been staying in those rooms the week before, a fact of which the new occupant was informed at once, in order to enhance the value of the apartments. Granny was carried, or rather wheeled, through all the rooms, and she looked at them attentively and severely. The ober-kellner, an elderly man with a bald head, followed her respectfully at this first survey.
I don't know what they all took Granny to be, but apparently for a very important and, above all, wealthy lady. They put down in the book at once: "Madame la générale princesse de Tarasyevitchev," though Granny had never been a princess. Her servants, her special compartment in the train, the mass of useless bags, portmanteaux, and even chests that had come with Granny probably laid the foundation of her prestige; while her invalid-chair, her abrupt tone and voice, her eccentric questions, which were made with the most unconstrained air that would tolerate no contradiction—in short, Granny's whole figure, erect, brisk, imperious increased the awe in which she was held by all. As she looked at the rooms, Granny sometimes told them to stop her chair, pointed to some object in the furniture and addressed unexpected questions to the ober-kellner, who still smiled respectfully, though he was beginning to feel nervous. Granny put her questions in French, which she spoke, however, rather badly, so that I usually translated. The ober-kellner's answers for the most part did not please her and seemed unsatisfactory. And, indeed, she kept asking about all sorts of things quite irrelevant. Suddenly, for instance, stopping before a picture, a rather feeble copy of some well-known picture of a mythological subject, she would ask:
"Whose portrait is that?"
The ober-kellner replied that no doubt it was some countess.
