He stepped into the dark hall, damp like a well, with a whirring
snarling clock on the wall and a heavy glass door pulled by a rope
swinging and shifting, the walls and door and rack with the letters
shifting too. In this rocking world there seemed to be no stable thing.
He was dirty and tired and humiliated. He explained to his host, who
smiled but seemed to be thinking of other things, that he wanted a bath
and a room and a meal. He was promised these things, but there was no
conviction abroad that the "France" had gone up in the world since Henry
Bohun had crossed its threshold. An old man with a grey beard and the
fixed and glittering eye of the "Ancient Mariner" told him to follow
him. How well I know those strange, cold, winding passages of the
"France," creeping in and out across boards that shiver and shake, with
walls pressing in upon you so thin and rocky that the wind whistles and
screams and the paper makes ghostly shadows and signs as though unseen
fingers moved it. There is that smell, too, which a Russian hotel alone,
of all the hostelries in the world, can produce, a smell of damp and
cabbage soup, of sunflower seeds and cigarette-ends, of drainage and
patchouli, of, in some odd way, the sea and fish and wet pavements.
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