AtBertram'sHotel - (EPUB全文下载)

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At Bertram's Hotel
 
 
 By
 
 
 Agatha Christie
 
 
  
 
 
 For Harry Smith
 
 
 because I appreciate the scientific way he reads my books
 
 
 1
 
 In the heart of the West End, there are many quiet pockets, unknown to almost all but taxi drivers who traverse them with expert knowledge, and arrive triumphantly thereby at Park Lane, Berkeley Square, or South Audley Street.
 
 If you turn off on an unpretentious street from the Park, and turn left and right once or twice, you will
find yourself in a quiet street with Bertram's Hotel on the right-hand side. Bertram's Hotel has been there
a long time. During the war, houses were demolished on the right of it, and a little farther down on the left
of it, but Bertram's itself remained unscathed. Naturally it could not escape being, as house agents would
say, scratched, bruised, and marked, but by the expenditure of only a reasonable amount of money it
was restored to its original condition. By 1955 it looked precisely as it had looked in 1939--dignified,
unostentatious, and quietly expensive.
 
 Such was Bertram's, patronized over a long stretch of years by the higher echelons of the clergy,
dowager ladies of the aristocracy up from the country, girls on their way home for the holidays from expensive finishing schools. ("So few places where a girl can stay alone in London but of course it is quite
all right at Bertram's. We have stayed there for years.")
 
 There had, of course, been many other hotels on the model of Bertram's. Some still existed, but nearly
all had felt the wind of change. They had had necessarily to modernize themselves, to cater for a different
clientele. Bertram's, too, had had to change, but it had been done so cleverly that it was not at all
apparent at the first casual glance.
 
 Outside the steps that led up to the big swing doors stood what at first sight appeared to be no less than a field marshal. Gold braid and medal ribbons adorned a broad and manly chest. His deportment was
perfect. He received you with tender concern as you emerged with rheumatic difficulty from a taxi or a car, guided you carefully up the steps and piloted you through the silently swinging doorway.
 
 Inside, if this was the first time you had visited Bertram's, you felt, almost with alarm, that you had
reentered a vanished world. Time had gone back. You were in Edwardian England once more.
 
 There was, of course, central heating, but it was not apparent. As there had always been, in the big
centra ............

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