At the railroad station, Harold and Barbara looked around for Nils Jensen, and Harold considered buying third-class tickets, in case he turned up later, but in the end decided that he was not coming and they might as well be comfortable. When the train drew in, there he was. He appeared right out of the ground, with a second-class ticket in his hand—bought, it was clear, so that he could ride with them.
The god of love could be better represented than by a little boy blindfolded and with a bow and arrow. Why not a member of the Actors’ Equity, with his shirt cuffs turned back, an impressive diamond ring on one finger, his long black hair heavily pomaded, his magic made possible by a trunkful of accessories and a stooge somewhere in the audience. Think of a card—any card. There is no card you can think of that the foxy vaudeville magician doesn’t have up his sleeve or in a false pocket of his long coattails.
The train carried them past Monteux, past Chaumont on the other side of the river. There was so much that had to be said in this short time, and so much that their middle-class upbringing prevented them from saying or even knowing they felt. The Americans did not even tell Nils Jensen—except with their eyes, their smiles—how much they liked being with him and everything about him. Nils Jensen did not say: “Oh I don’t know which of you I’m in love with—I love you both! And I’ve looked everywhere, I’ve looked so long for somebody I could be happy with.… ” Nevertheless, they all three used every minute that they had together. The train, which could not be stopped, could not be made to go slower, carried them past Onzain and Chouzy. At Brenodville they shook hands, and Angle A and Angle B got out and then stood on the brick platform waving until the train took Angle C (as talented and idealistic and tactful and congenial a friend as they were ever likely to have) away from them, with nothing to complete this triangle ever again but an address in Copenhagen that must have been incorrectly copied, since a letter sent there was never replied to.
Walking through the village, with the shadows stretching clear across the road in front of them, they saw windows and doors that were wide open, they heard voices, they met people who smiled and spoke to them. They thought for a moment that the man returning from the fields with his horse and his dog was one of the men who were sitting on the café terrace the day they arrived, and then decided that he wasn’t. Coming to an open gate, they stopped and looked in. There was no one around and so they stood there studying the courtyard with its well, its neat woodpile, its bicycle, its two-wheeled cart, its tin-roofed porch, its clematis and roses growing in tubs, its dog and cat and chickens and patient old farm horse, its feeding trough and watering trough, so like an illustration in a beginning French grammar: A is for Auge, B is for Bicyclette, C is for Cheval, etc.
When they were on the outskirts of the village, they saw Mme Viénot’s gardener coming toward them in the cart and assumed he had business in the village. He stopped when he was abreast of them, and waited. They stood looking up at him and he told them to get in. Mme Viénot had sent him, thinking that they would be tired after their long day’s excursion. They were tired, and grateful that she had thought of them.
In the beautiful calm evening light, driving so slowly between fields that had just been cut, they learned that the white horse was named Pompon, and that he was thirty years old. The gardener explained that it was his little boy who had taken Harold by the hand and led him to the house of M. Fleury. They found it easy to talk to him. He was simple and direct, and so were the words he used, and so was the look in his eyes. They felt he liked them, and they wished they could know him better.
On the table in their room, propped against the vase of flowers, was a letter from Mme Straus-Muguet. The handwriting was so eccentric and the syntax so full of flourishes that Harold took it downstairs and asked Alix to translate it for them. Mme Straus was inviting them to take tea with her at the house of her friends, who would be happy to meet two such charming Americans.
He watched Alix’s face as she read the protestations of affection at the close of the letter.
“Why do you smile?”
She refused to explain. “You would only think me uncharitable,” she said. “As in fact I am.”
He was quite sure that she wasn’t uncharitable, so there must be something about Mme Straus that gave rise to that doubtful smile. But what? Though he again urged her to tell him, she would not. The most she would say was that Mme Straus was “roulante.”
He went back upstairs and consulted the dictionary. “Roulante” meant “rolling.” It also meant a “side-splitting, killing (sight, joke).”
Reluctantly, he admitted to himself, for the first time, that there was something theatrical and exaggerated about Mme Straus’s manner and conversation. But there was still a great gap between that and “side-splitting.” Did Alix see something he didn’t see? Probably she felt that as Americans they had a right to their own feelings about people, and did not want to spoil their friendship with Mme Straus. But in a way she had spoiled it, since it is always upsetting to discover that people you like do not think very much of each other.
When he showed Barbara the page of the dictionary, it turned out that she too had reservations about Mme Straus. “The thing is, she might become something of a burden if she attached herself to us while we’re in Paris. We’ll only be there for ten days. And I wouldn’t like to hurt her feelings.”
Though they did not speak of it, they themselves were suffering from hurt feelings; they did not understand why Alix would not spend more time with them. For reasons they could not make out, she was simply inaccessible. They knew that she slept late, and she was, of course, occupied with the baby, and perhaps with her sister’s children. But on the other hand, she had brought a nursemaid with her, so perhaps it wasn’t the children who were keeping her from them. Perhaps she didn’t want to see any more of them.… But if that were true, they would have felt it in her manner. When they met at mealtime, she was always pleased to see them, always acted as if their friendship was real and permanent, and she made the lunch and dinner table conversation much more enjoyable by the care she took of them. But why didn’t she want to go anywhere with them? Why did she never seek out their company at odd times of the day?
She was uneasy about Eugène—that much she did share with them. She had hoped that he would write and there had been no letter. Harold suggested that he might be too busy to write, since the government had jumped after all, without waiting this time for the August vacation to be over. He asked if the crisis would affect Eugène’s position, and she said that, actually, Eugène had two positions in the Ministry of Planning and External Affairs, neither of which would suffer any change under a different cabinet, since they were not that important.
The dining-room table was now the smallest the Americans had seen it and, raising her hearing aid to her ear, Mme Cestre took part in the conversation.
Alix explained that her mother’s health was delicate; she was a prey to mysterious diseases that the doctors could neither cure nor account for. There would be an outbreak of blisters on the ends of her fingers, and then it would go away as suddenly as it had come. She had attacks of dizziness, when the floor seemed to come up and strike her foot. She could not stand to be in the sun for more than a few minutes. Alix herself thought sometimes that it was because her mother was so good and kind—really much kinder than anybody else. Beggars, old women selling limp, tarnished roses, old men with a handful of pencils had only to look at her and she would open her purse. She could not bear the sight of human misery.