Scoop-Evelyn-Waugh [33]
There was not much sleep that night for anyone in William's room. The photographer who was dossing down found the floor wet and draughty and, as the hours passed, increasingly hard. He turned from side to side, lay flat on his back, then on his face. At each change of position he groaned as though in agony. Every now and then he turned on the light to collect more coverings. At dawn, when the rain began to drip near his head, he was dozing uneasily, fully dressed in overcoat and tweed-cap, enveloped in every available textile including the tablecloth, the curtains and Corker's two oriental shawls. Nor did the other photographer do much better; the camp bed seemed less stable than William had supposed when it was sold to him; perhaps it was wrongly assembled; perhaps essential parts were still missing. Whatever the reason, it collapsed repeatedly and roused William's apprehensions about the efficacy of his canoe. Early next morning he rang up Bannister and, on his advice, moved to Frau Dressler's pension. "Bad policy, old boy," said Corker; "but since you're going I wonder if you'll take charge of my curios. I don't at all like the way Shumble's been looking at them." The Pension Dressler stood in a side street and had, at first glance, the air rather of a farm than of a hotel. Frau Dressler's pig, tethered by one hind trotter to the jamb of the front door, roamed the yard and disputed the kitchen scraps with the poultry. He was a prodigious beast. Frau Dressler's guests prodded him appreciatively on their way to the dining-room, speculating on how soon he would be ripe for killing. The milch-goat was allowed a narrower radius; those who kept strictly to the causeway were safe, but she never reconciled herself to this limitation and, day in, day out, essayed a series of meteoric onslaughts on the passers-by, ending, at the end of her rope, with a jerk which would have been death to an animal of any other species. One day the rope would break; she knew it and so did Frau Dressler's guests. There was also a gander, the possession of the night watchman, and a three-legged dog, who barked furiously from the mouth of a barrel and was said to have belonged to the late Heir Dressler. Other pets came and went with Frau Dressler's guests � baboons, gorillas, cheetahs � all inhabited the yard in varying degrees of liberty and moved uneasily for fear of the milch-goat. As a consequence perhaps of the vigour of the livestock, the garden had not prospered. A little bed edged with inverted bottles produced nothing except, annually, a crop of the rank, scarlet flowers which burst out everywhere in Jacksonburg at the end of the rains. Two sterile banana palms grew near the kitchens and between them a bush of Indian hemp which the cook tended and kept for his own indulgence. The night watchman, too, had a little shrub, to whose seed-pods he attributed medical properties of a barely credible order. Architecturally, the Pension Dressler was a mess. There were three main buildings disposed irregularly in the acre of ground � single-storied, tin-roofed, constructed of timber and rubble, with wooden verandahs; the two larger were divided into bedrooms; the smallest contained the dining-room, the parlour and the mysterious, padlocked room where Frau Dressler slept. Everything of value or interest in the pension was kept in this room and whatever was needed by anyone � money, provisions, linen, back numbers of European magazines � could be produced, on demand, from under Frau Dressler's bed. There was a hut called "the bathroom," where, after due notice and the recruitment of extra labour, a tin tub could be filled with warm water and enjoyed in the half-darkness among a colony of bats. There was the kitchen, not far from the other buildings, a place of smoke and wrath, loud with Frau Dressler's scolding. And there were the servants