Vera said, “There should be a thing on the table you could hit that would go cling, cling.”
“A bell,” said Lottie, taken in. “The thing is a bell.”
“I know. I was showing you how Al talks.” Smoking, Vera told about walks in Roma and meals when she and her Polish friend from home had nothing to eat but hard-as-a-rock cheese. Once, he gave his share to a dog.
“Are you hard up for money, Vera?” Lottie did not mean by this she had any to lend.
“No, not really. But I sort of am when I’m with him. I pretend not to have any at all and live the way he does.” Vera was bored; she was always quickly bored. Blowing smoke all over Lottie, she began defending the four Americans. “You’ve never seen how abominable Canadians can be.”
Americans could be trained to set an example, Lottie insisted. They should be loved. Who was to blame if they were not?
Vera mashed her cigarette out on her plate. “D’you know how Canadian soldiers used to cut the Germans’ throats?” she said. “Al showed me. You push the helmet like this,” and she reached across quick as a snake and pressed the long helmet Lottie Benz would have been wearing had she been a soldier into the nape of her neck and drew her forefinger under Lottie’s chin.
Lottie understood that an attempt had been made against her life and that she was safe. She said, “I love my country, Vera, and even if I didn’t I wouldn’t run it down.”
“I’m not running it down. I’m telling you stories.”
The bill was nineteen hundred francs. Vera said it was grossly excessive. “They took you for an American,” she said. “It’s those damned overshoes.”
The air outside smelled of earth and eternally wet leaves, as though this place were unmindful of seasons. At the end of a walled lane the walled graveyard was a box. The sky (the sun was covered up now) was the lid. Lottie was still disturbed by Vera’s attack. She knew if you show nothing, eventually you feel nothing; presently, feeling nothing, she was just herself, a visitor here — not a guest, because she was paying her way. She walked a pace or two behind Vera, who had taken on a serious and rather reproachful air, sniffing at rusty iron crosses, shaking her head beside a fresh grave covered over with planks. At the only plot of grass in the cemetery, she stopped and announced that this was it. A brownish shrub had been clipped so that it neatly surrounded a stone bench. Someone — now, in December — had planted a border of yellow pansies. Vera, stalking dramatically in her cape, left Lottie to think her thoughts. A restless pilgrim, she slashed at weeds with her handbag and all at once called, “It’s not where you are, Lottie. It’s over here.” Lottie rose slowly from the bench, where she had not been thinking about Katherine Mansfield but simply nursing her several reasons for not feeling well. Where Vera stood, a block of polished granite weighed upon a block still larger. The base was cemented to the ground.
“ ‘Katherine Mansfield,’ ” Vera droned. “ ‘Wife of John Middleton Murry. 1888–1923. But I tell you, my lord fool, out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety.’ Well, I don’t know what that means. Another thing I wish you’d tell me — what is that awful china rose doing there instead of real flowers? It’s so puritan. You can’t just abandon people that way, under all that granite. It’s less than love. It’s just considering your own taste.”
“She is not abandoned, Vera; she is buried.”
The orator heard only herself. “The stone is even moss-resistant,” she said. But no, for the first wash of green crept up the granite step and touched a capital “M.”
Lottie, whose ears might have been deaf to everything but Vera until now, heard other sounds — a rooster crowing, a sudden rush of motors somewhere, a metallic clanging that certainly had to do with troops. Vera planted one foot upon the step and with more effort than seemed needed removed the rose. She tossed it aside; it landed in the tall grass of another grave. Then she picked a handful of yellow pansies and strewed them where the rose had been. Like all gestures, it seemed to Lottie suspect.
Lottie need never have seen Vera again after this. Vera departed for Rome, having first turned out her bureau drawers and left at Lottie’s hotel a number of things she did not require. Lottie still had not looked up all the people to whom she had been given introductions. She woke up early each day wondering whom she would be seeing that night. Despite Vera’s remark about overshoes, she went on wearing hers, and she wore her hats — the gardenia bandeau, the feather toque with veil, the suède beret — even though people turned and smiled and stared. Lottie told her new acquaintances that she had only just arrived and was eager to get to Strasbourg, where the university library contained everything she wanted; but she made no move to go. One mild rainy night, like a night in April displaced, a couple she had talked to on the plane from Canada invited her to the Comédie-Caumartin to see Danièle Delorme in an Ibsen revival. The theatre reminded Lottie of Vera, although she could not think why. It was stuffy and hot, and had been redecorated, and it smelled of paint. “We may get a headache from this,” Lottie warned. The new friends, whose name was Morrow, thought she had said something remarkable about the play. The Morrows were dressed as if they had not planned to spend the evening together — he in tweeds and flannel, she in a sleeveless black dress with layers of silk fringe overlapping down the skirt. The bracelets on her arm jangled. Her hair was short (it had been long on the plane) and pushed behind the ears. They had both changed since the journey, but nothing about them seemed definite. Lottie thought they were not wearing their clothes from home but new outfits they were trying for effect.
Soon after the lights went down, a quarrel began in the audience. Groans and hisses and shouts of “Mal élevé!” covered the actors’ voices, and the curtains had to be drawn. The actors tried again, and got on safely until one of them said how hot it was, upon which the audience began to laugh, a spectator shouted “Oui, en effet!” and threats were exchanged, though no one was struck. Baited by the public, the actors seemed to Lottie too intimate, too involved. She lost the thread of the story and became self-conscious, as though she were on the stage.
Languidly, the Morrows glanced about as if they knew people, or expected to know them soon. “I can’t imagine why she revived it,” Mrs. Morrow said during the interval.
“The sets are dull,” said the husband. “The rest of the cast is weak.”
Lottie said, “We had better stuff than this in Winnipeg; we had these really good actors from England, and the audience knows how to behave.” Why should that make the Morrows so distant, all at once?
The husband was the first to unbend. Forgiving Lottie for her provincialism, he described the play he was over here to write — a murder, and several people who are really all one person. The several persons are either the victim, or the murderer, or a single witness. It was all the same thing.
“What will you be doing apart from that?” said Lottie.
“Nothing. That is what I am doing.”
There was something fishy about him. He was too old to be a student, yet clearly wasn’t working. Did he have money, or what?
“What do you think Ibsen did apart from that?” said the wife, turning her big black-rimmed eyes on Lottie. She held her elbow in one hand and a cigarette holder in the other.