Not Now but Now. M.F.K. Fisher
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 it, not he; he left her politely, from his taxi, at the hotel door; and there Jennie was, feeling like a fatuous ninny, until suddenly she came to her cool, intelligent, proud senses and got on the train again and went away from that fat-burgher-town.
She walked straight to the desk in the lobby. A tea-dance orchestra sounded faintly, teasingly, through the endless marble pillars and the aspidistras. She would have the concierge call the station for her. What train was the best and the soonest, going south or west or east? She must have first class in a wagon-lit. No, she would sit up, third class. She would put her head in its little skullcap upon the nearest shoulder and sleep peacefully, going far away.
Jeannetôt stood at the long desk. She bowed politely to him and he to her, and he raised his stiff wintery hat to her and stood holding it while Jennie took her key and a letter from the clerk.
“I have just left that for you, dear lady,” Jeannetôt said. “Until very soon, let us hope, until very soon.” And he bowed and hurried away.
Jennie went to her room without speaking to the concierge. She would read the letter, pack her things peacefully, go to the station and eat a good dinner in the first-class dining-room, take any train anywhere.
What an uncouth man, Jeannetôt! How it would ease her to give him one final hurt! She would go away and forget him, but he would be there in Lausanne for the rest of his life, wondering.
“Madame,” the letter said. “I beg you to forgive my writing in the place of my wife, unhappily indisposed. She presents her compliments and the assurance that as soon as possible she will be happy to send cards, awaiting the pleasure of making your acquaintance. Meanwhile, may I have the great honor of introducing my daughter Léonie to you over a cup of tea or an ice tomorrow at 4:45 at the Tea Salon St. Martin. Please accept, dear Madame, my most respectful salutations. Emile Jeannetôt.”
Jennie burst out laughing, so spontaneously and loudly in the emptiness of her big room that she looked around, feeling foolish. This was wonderful! Never had she imagined anything so amusing, so completely in character. The stolid arrogance of the man! Who else in the world would dare issue such a royal order to Jennie, Jennie, to appear to eat at a certain hour, a certain place, to enjoy the favors of his sallow-faced daughter, simply because he had been spoken to on a train? Oh, poor Jeannetôt!
Gaily she dressed in thin wool shot with silver, bought that morning near the Palace, perfect for the hour of the cocktail, the sales-duchess had assured her, infinitely more perfect for the tea dancing. But when she got downstairs the orchestra was silent, and there was a pre-dinner hush everywhere. She shrugged and walked light as thistledown along the dim corridors to the bar.
As she pushed open the heavy door, so soundproof that it made her feel as if she were sneaking into the sanctum sanctorum of a Piccadilly club, two people stood aside for her, and she knew in the first second of her cool glance at them that they were Paul Jeannetôt and his Petit’ Chose. He was tall and sulky and well dressed in the inevitable brown tweed jacket and gray Oxford-bags that all young stylish Europeans believed was English-style. She was tiny and as toothsome as a piece of molded almond paste, deeply tinted, soon to be mustached. They looked furious.
Jennie ordered a dry Martini. There were two or three couples sitting at the low tables, and she sat easily by herself at the bar, watching the man behind it and remembering him at every good hotel bar she had ever drunk in, on every good ship. He would be named Duval and be called Harry. She felt comfortable and at home, and amused at her certainty that young Jeannetôt would soon be back, which he was, and alone, which he was.
He stood scowling near the door for a minute, quarrel still heavy on his face, and then he said, “Another, Harry,” to Duval. The first half of the Scotch and soda he drank in one swallow, and then he swirled the rest slowly in his glass and looked down into it, and his expression lightened so that it was merely sulky, not furious. When he was twenty-three years older and twenty-three kilos heavier, Jennie saw, he would look almost like his father, except for his dark un-Swiss eyes.
She