houses was beautiful, sharp, clear, as if she had never seen it before, and there was a thin delicious feeling all about her, like champagne, like being born, perhaps.
The man was sitting opposite her, bending forward with such concern that she could no longer ignore him. She turned away resignedly from the window.
He was tall and heavy, with a full grayish face and pale eyes, an unhealthy burgher who had once perhaps been dashing. At least he would not bother her: he was completely ordinary. She looked impassively at him, knowing that the full stare from her large gray eyes, set wide apart and fantastically lashed with black, would frighten him. It amused her to see him draw back sharply, and then redden a little on his flabby cheeks and his high crinkled forehead. The trick always worked. Men were always disconcerted by it. Men were stupid. She kept on staring at him, not rudely, but passively, and the silence that amused her was, she knew, increasingly embarrassing to him. But why should she help him? She was comfortable, even enjoying herself in a mild way. There was plenty of time. She let her eyes widen a little more.
“If Madame will forgive me,” he said finally, with a pleasant middle-class accent, a heavy voice.
“Certainly, Monsieur.”
“A thousand pardons, but I notice that Madame has stupidly been given the wrong seat. All ladies prefer to ride facing the engine, to avert any possible touch of faintness. May I not have the pleasure of changing places with Madame?”
Jennie looked at him a little longer, without blinking, so that he reddened even more. He was an interfering dolt, and now she would hurt him, as he deserved. She said, without letting interest or disinterest, pleasure or displeasure, show on her face or in her voice, “Thank you, Monsieur. I prefer to ride backward.”
She turned to the window, not bothering to pretend to read her book. The man disappeared from her world, ant under an unconscious heel.
The country was coming, more and more of it, through the clusters of neat, repulsive villas. There were farms, with fine gray horses pulling the earth up straight behind them, and tendered wheatfields splattered with blood-scarlet poppies, and hydrangeas blooming blue and pink and sturdy in the windows of the little houses of the crossing-guards. Jennie thought that she had never seen such a stout freshness anywhere, such a rich promise from the land. It was a part of her own new feeling of rebirth, so that she seemed to be humming silently with all the bees, flying through the sweet air with any meadowlark at all. She closed her eyes, smiling.
When she opened them it was deliberately into the look of the man across from her, as she had known it would be. He flushed again and slid his own rather small pale gaze past her and out the window.
For a time she read. The book was amusing still, perverse in such a catlike malicious way—it must be horrid to have a brother, but if Jennie had ever had one she might have liked it if he and she had been Cocteau’s siblings.
She took a ticket for the second service of luncheon and noticed that the man did too, with hesitation that said he really preferred the first. When she went to the water closet, he stood up with surprising grace for his bulk and slid back the compartment door for her. She thanked him gravely, and he bowed without speaking.
When she came back, apparently no different in her smooth soft elegance, but with new lipstick on and her nose powdered for her private aplomb, she put one toe under the cushion on her seat and swung up to the rack and down again with her little jewel case before the man could help her. He leaped to his feet, and Jennie brushed against him in spite of herself as she stepped down.
“But Madame should have asked me,” he protested, and his voice sounded truly concerned and hurt, as if she had touched the inner vanity in him, the male core, instead of just the part that made him do what he had been taught to do: be attentive, be courteous, be discreet . . .
Jennie thanked him. “I am used to traveling alone,” she said without any pretense of ambiguity, and she sat down and opened the little case and took her gold flask from it. Unconcernedly she flipped up the top and tipped her head back for a full fine swallow of the brandy.
When everything was in place again, she held out the jewel case to the man. She smiled dazzlingly, trustingly, at him, like a pleased child, and he took it as if he had been struck, put it carefully above her on the rack, and then sat down in a heavy tired way, without looking at her.
Jennie was grateful to him for reacting so typically to her: it made her feel powerful and sure. She was like a basket full of ripe plump strawberries, with one more just this instant added on the top.
She leaned forward, her lips parted. The man did not turn his head toward her. “Did you ever see the country more beautiful?” she asked warmly.
He looked up, openly startled, and then made his face stiff. Jennie liked that. After all, she had hurt him and rebuffed him, and she liked him for being cold now: it proved that he was not such a lumpish man as he appeared to be. She smiled at him, and when she said again, in her correct, rather singsong French, which could have been spoken by a Swede, an unusually linguistic Englishwoman, or even an American, “The country, isn’t it exquisite in June?” he smiled back at her. First it was with his eyes, which did not then seem pale or flat. Next his gray sagging face lifted itself in gaiety and relief. Indeed, he suddenly sent out such a gust of grateful friendliness that Jennie almost drew back, alarmed for her next few hours of yearned-for isolation. But she was very sure of herself, and if this man proved as dull as she expected, she could easily stun him again into weariness and silence.
“I have never seen it so beautiful,” he said thoughtfully. He leaned forward, at ease now, as if they were old acquaintances discussing a rather weighty but not pressing problem. “Last year it was lovely, true, but this year there is a kind of richness about it that I have never felt before. It is in a way as if I had never seen it, as if this were the first time.”
“But that’s the way I feel too,” Jennie cried, and her heart beat happily. “It’s as if I had just been born into it!”
“Full-fledged,” he said, smiling.
Jennie spoke little during the next two hours or so, but she smiled and frowned so prettily, and let her creamy face fall into such open sympathy at the man’s words, that he did not realize, then or ever, how much of a monologue was their opening conversation. Part of her mind went on watching the sliding countryside, planning new clothes, thinking with glee of her foxy disappearance from the old life. And part of it found what Monsieur Jeannetôt said extremely interesting, in rather the same way that she would have found a banal and hackneyed novel absorbing on an otherwise unbearably dull voyage. She let the pages turn casually, reading and yet not reading, mildly held by the thread of plot. There was no suspense, because the story had been written so many times before. But the characters, underneath their bourgeois behavior, held a certain piquancy for her, a kind of subevident decay.
He was an electrical engineer, one of the best in Switzerland, he said without any smirk or fuss. He was well-to-do. But—and here Jennie knew that he was going to tell her that his wife was an invalid—his wife was an invalid, and had been for many years. Their life was very quiet. Inevitably he managed to imply, perhaps even a little sooner than Jennie knew he would, that his home life was far from satisfying. That meant, she knew, that he either had a mistress, or wished he had, or was at least wondering why he had not. It meant that he was beginning to be alarmed at the flight of time and to wonder if it were too late. It meant that she was making him wonder, she, Jennie.
He had a son and a daughter. He talked a great deal about them, and there was a kind of bewildered anguish in his heavy voice and in the way he kept wiping his palms with his fine white handkerchief as he spoke of their lives.
