irresponsible youngsters, as if they were Paul’s age. Their wives are neglected, wronged. And yet they look like healthy women and full of animation when I meet them. What a contrast they are to my own poor companion! Their children make good marriages—they even accept their fathers’ mistresses socially in some cases . . .”
Yes, Jennie thought, he is definitely considering the obvious pleasures of infidelity before it is too late! He is trying not to say to himself that if his son can do it, he still can too. Poor clown! How easy it would be, she thought casually, to give him a really fine fat holiday from all his cautious ways. Perhaps she could talk a little more to him before Geneva, and goad him to take the Little Thing away from Paul! She felt highly amused, and looked with solemnity out the window until she was sure her eyes would not betray her.
Then they were at the border. There was a long wait: some trouble with two thin little men in kaftans and bowler hats, who were trying to take a rug into Switzerland. They spoke only Polish. One of them stood silently weeping. The other wept too, and screamed and wrung his delicate hands, as tiny and bleached as a pickled frog’s. Jennie watched, frowning a little with distaste for their abandon. She moved away from them, her own simple luggage already inspected, and drank a glass of beer at the station restaurant. It was good to be alone. She would have dinner served in her room that night, perhaps on her balcony, unless the lake breeze blew too coolly. In the morning she would shop. She loved the clothes in Geneva, such a mixture: Bavarian ski suits for the English, English tweeds and pullovers for the French, French scarves and dainty silver purses and little nonsensities for the fat Germans. She might go to see the consul and hear all the gossip about people she had left behind her . . .
“Why didn’t you wait for me, my dear lady?” Jeannetôt’s implication that there was any reason why she should annoyed her almost to the point of snubbing him again, but when she looked up over her last swallow of beer at his eager eyes, the surprising youthfulness underneath his flabby graying skin, she could only smile at him.
“I wanted to be alone,” she said candidly. “I am used to it. I told you that this morning. Do you remember?”
“There is only one thing I can say—it’s not right! It’s against the laws of nature!”
“Others have thought so too,” she said, and they were laughing at their foolishness. “But here I am. And now do we have time for you to drink a beer with me?”
“No,” he said. “Unfortunately for me, but fortunately for my digestion and my waistline, we do not.”
“You could have ordered one of those bottles of lemonade,” she said as they went toward the train. “I’ve always wanted to see someone drink it. I’m sure it’s ghastly.”
“On the contrary. I often enjoy it. It is very good on hot walks in the country on Sundays, slightly acidulous and highly carbonated.”
How pompous he was! No wonder his daughter had hysterics, his wife megrims, his son a succulent Little Thing. No wonder he was lonely. Was it too late for him after all? Jennie hoped not, in an easy uncaring way.
As they got into the train she saw the two little black-gowned refugees again. One was half lying against his companion’s shoulder, his mouth open like a dead child’s. They and the station slid past the window. Perhaps they had been arrested. It was too bad, Jennie thought. They should stay in their own countries, all those thin pale people . . . although Poland was not a pretty homeland for the Jews, she’d heard. But they should at least know better than to travel with rare rugs over their shoulders, delaying trains and making trouble . . .
In the compartment she felt upset and sat looking remotely out of the window at the craggy hills of the borderland. It annoyed her not to have now any of the morning’s excitement. She always felt this way in the afternoon on trains. Perhaps the English were right to insist on pots of bad tea and slabs of cake in the dining-car, no matter what country they sped across. She leaned forward impulsively.
“Monsieur Jeannetôt,” she said, “let’s go see if there is any of that lemonade in bottles! On the train, I mean.” He smiled delightedly at her and stood up.
“We’ll drink one bottle,” she said, and all her happiness was back again, as if the swiftness of the train had wiped from her spirits the remembrance of the refugees, of Jeannetôt’s sententiousness, of whatever it was that for a few minutes had been treacherous. “That will give me plenty of time to collect myself before I get off.”
He stood as still as a tree, as if the train could not possibly make him sway and jiggle. “Get off?” he asked.
“Certainly,” Jennie said, and as she stood close beside him in the narrow aisle between the seats she looked up at him with her wide gray eyes.
He was still immobile, in a way that suddenly excited her so that she wanted to touch him, to test her power to break what it was that held him thus. She wanted to embrace him. She drew back, still looking up at him, and as she looked she remembered how free she was, how far now from the past. She was Jennie, looking for people who could give to her, not take and take. Jeannetôt could give. He was brimming with eagerness to give, to give as he had never known it possible . . . Jennie could teach him how.
She smiled a small polite smile as she answered. “Certainly,” she said. “At Lausanne. I’m staying at the Palace.”
BY FIVE O’CLOCK the next afternoon she was inexpressibly bored, and cross too. The day had seemed endless. If she had only bought a pretty little watch in one of the souvenir stores, Jennie thought wryly, she would have been the perfect tourist, killing time between trains.
She sat now on the terrace at Ouchy-Lausanne, watching the silly gulls swoop and cry and the silly people toss crumbs at them along the quai, drinking her tea like a proper lady, dribbling her stiff brown honey on her toast so neatly, so sweetly. God, how dull it was! The slanting sun twinkled in a well-bred way upon the orderly lake, and behind Jennie in the teashop three decayed gentlewomen sawed expertly at “Tales from the Vienna Woods” on their stringed instruments, with the youngest doubling on a bird whistle when the score called for it. Tweet tweet tweet, she went, embarrassed to the top of her graying head. Murmurmurmur went all the English people above the tweets and the sound of their own relentless chews and swallows.
Well, what had she expected, Jennie asked herself savagely—hampers of red roses with her breakfast tray, protestations of undying passion before lunch, lovers’ flight to Lake Como with her demitasse? She had acted stupidly, like a gauche schoolgirl, and that was what irked her so, and she sat turning the little goads round and round in the raw wound to her self-respect. It was intolerable that she, Jennie the inviolate, had let herself be so clumsy.
She paid her bill impatiently and sped from the place. The tram up to the city crept like a toad. Halfway there she swung down to the cobbles. She could feel the other passengers staring back at her as they ground on upward.
She walked swiftly, past the little stores all on a slant on the steep hill, their windows palely lighted in the summery twilight, their sausages and baby clothes and carefully iced cakes a kind of respectable soporific to her too wakeful nerves. By the time she turned the corner to the hotel door she was breathless and no longer angry, except in a remote, scornful way, as she might have been toward a long dead and almost forgotten family scapegoat, the kind whose small sins soon became a ridiculous and faintly affectionate legend. Yes, once Jennie, drunk with freedom, got off a train with a fat burgher and sat waiting in a fat-burgher-town for him to say he loved her, so that she could laugh at him and go on. But he never said
