As commonly happens in boarding-houses, the rustle of petticoats was, at
the Pension Beaurepas, the most familiar form of the human tread. There
was the usual allotment of economical widows and old maids, and to
maintain the balance of the sexes there were only an old Frenchman and a
young American. It hardly made the matter easier that the old Frenchman
came from Lausanne. He was a native of that estimable town, but he had
once spent six months in Paris, he had tasted of the tree of knowledge;
he had got beyond Lausanne, whose resources he pronounced inadequate.
Lausanne, as he said, “_manquait d’agréments_.” When obliged, for
reasons which he never specified, to bring his residence in Paris to a
close, he had fallen back on Geneva; he had broken his fall at the
Pension Beaurepas. Geneva was, after all, more like Paris, and at a
Genevese boarding-house there was sure to be plenty of Americans with
whom one could talk about the French metropolis. M. Pigeonneau was a
little lean man, with a large narrow nose, who sat a great deal in the
garden, reading with the aid of a large magnifying glass a volume from
the _cabinet de lecture_.
One day, a fortnight after my arrival at the Pension Beaurepas, I came
back, rather earlier than usual from my academic session; it wanted half
an hour of the midday breakfast. I went into the salon with the design
of possessing myself of the day’s _Galignani_ before one of the little
English old maids should have removed it to her virginal bower—a
privilege to which Madame Beaurepas frequently alluded as one of the
attractions of the establishment. In the salon I found a new-comer, a
tall gentleman in a high black hat, whom I immediately recognised as a
compatriot. I had often seen him, or his equivalent, in the hotel
parlours of my native land. He apparently supposed himself to be at the
present moment in a hotel parlour; his hat was on his head, or, rather,
half off it—pushed back from his forehead, and rather suspended than
poised. He stood before a table on which old newspapers were scattered,
one of which he had taken up and, with his eye-glass on his nose, was
holding out at arm’s-length. It was that honourable but extremely
diminutive sheet, the _Journal de Genève_, a newspaper of about the size
of a pocket-handkerchief. As I drew near, looking for my _Galignani_,
the tall gentleman gave me, over the top of his eye-glass, a somewhat
solemn stare. Presently, however, before I had time to lay my hand on
the object of my search, he silently offered me the _Journal de Genève_.
“It appears,” he said, “to be the paper of the country.”
“Yes,” I answered, “I believe it’s the best.”
He gazed at it again, still holding it at arm’s-length, as if it had been
a looking-glass. “Well,” he said, “I suppose it’s natural a small
country should have small papers. You could wrap it up, mountains and
all, in one of our dailies!”
I found my _Galignani_, and went off with it into the garden, where I
seated myself on a bench in the shade. Presently I saw the tall
gentleman in the hat appear in one of the open windows of the salon, and
stand there with his hands in his pockets and his legs a little apart.
He looked very much bored, and—I don’t know why—I immediately began to
feel sorry for him. He was not at all a picturesque personage; he looked
like a jaded, faded man of business. But after a little he came into the
garden and began to stroll about; and then his restless, unoccupied
carriage, and the vague, unacquainted manner in which his eyes wandered
over the place, seemed to make it proper that, as an older resident, I
should exercise a certain hospitality. I said something to him, and he
came and sat down beside me on my bench, clasping one of his long knees
in his hands.
“When is it this big breakfast of theirs comes off?” he inquired.
“That’s what I call it—the little breakfast and the big breakfast. I
never thought I should live to see the time when I should care to eat two
breakfasts. But a man’s glad to do anything over here.”
“For myself,” I observed, “I find plenty to do.”
He turned his head and glanced at me with a dry, deliberate, kind-looking
eye. “You’re getting used to the life, are you?”
“I like the life very much,” I answered, laughing.
“How long have you tried it?”
“Do you mean in this place?”
“Well, I mean anywhere. It seems to me pretty much the same all over.”
“I have been in this house only a fortnight,” I said.
“Well, what should you say, from what you have seen?” my companion asked.
“Oh,” said I, “you can see all there is immediately. It’s very simple.”
“Sweet simplicity, eh? I’m afraid my two ladies will find it too
simple.”
“Everything is very good,” I went on. “And Madame Beaurepas is a
charming old woman. And then it’s very cheap.”
“Cheap, is it?” my friend repeated meditatively.
“Doesn’t it strike you so?” I asked. I thought it very possible he had
not inquired the terms. But he appeared not to have heard me; he sat
there, clasping his knee and blinking, in a contemplative manner, at the
sunshine.
“Are you from the United States, sir?” he presently demanded, turning his
head again.
“Yes, sir,” I replied; and I mentioned the place of my nativity.
“I presumed,” he said, “that you were American or English. I’m from the
United States myself; from New York city. Many of our people here?”
“Not so many as, I believe, there have sometimes been. There are two or
three ladies.”
“Well,” my interlocutor declared, “I am very fond of ladies’ society. I
think when it’s superior there’s nothing comes up to it. I’ve got two
ladies here myself; I must make you acquainted with them.”
I rejoined that I should be delighted, and I inquired of my friend
whether he had been long in Europe.
“Well, it seems precious long,” he said, “but my time’s not up yet. We
have been here fourteen weeks and a half.”
“Are you travelling for pleasure?” I asked.
My companion turned his head again and looked at me—looked at me so long
in silence that I at last also turned and met his eyes.
“No, sir,” he said presently. “No, sir,” he repeated, after a
considerable interval.
“Excuse me,” said I, for there was something so solemn in his tone that I
feared I had been indiscreet.
He took no notice of my ejaculation; he simply continued to look at me.
“I’m travelling,” he said, at last, “to please the doctors. They seemed
to think they would like it.”
“Ah, they sent you abroad for your health?”
“They sent me abroad because they were so confoundedly muddled they
didn’t know what else to do.”
“That’s often the best thing,” I ventured to remark.
“It was a confession of weakness; they wanted me to stop plaguing them.
They didn’t know enough to cure me, and that’s the way they thought they
would get round it. I wanted to be cured—I didn’t want to be
transported. I hadn’t done any harm.”
I assented to the general proposition of the inefficiency of doctors, and
asked my companion if he had been seriously ill.
“I didn’t sleep,” he said, after some delay.
“Ah, that’s very annoying. I suppose you were overworked.”
“I didn’t eat; I took no interest in my food.”
“Well, I hope you both eat and sleep now,” I said.
“I couldn’t hold a pen,” my neighbour went on. “I couldn’t sit still. I
couldn’t walk from my house to the cars—and it’s only a little way. I
lost my interest in business.”
“You needed a holiday,” I observed.
“That’s what the doctors said. It wasn’t so very smart of them. I had
been paying strict attention to business for twenty-three years.”
“In all that time you have never had a holiday?” I exclaimed with horror.
My companion waited a little. “Sundays,” he said at last.
“No wonder, then, you were out of sorts.”
“Well, sir,” said my friend, “I shouldn’t have been where I was three
years ago if I had spent my time travelling round Europe. I was in a
very advantageous position. I did a very large business. I was
considerably interested in lumber.” He paused, turned his head, and
looked at me a moment. “Have you any business interests yourself?” I
answered that I had none, and he went on again, slowly, softly,
deliberately. “Well, sir, perhaps you are not aware that business in the
United States is not what it was a short time since. Business interests
are very insecure. There seems to be a general falling-off. Different
parties offer different explanations of the fact, but so far as I am
aware none of their observations have set things going again.” I
ingeniously intimated that if business was dull, the time was good for
coming away; whereupon my neighbour threw back his head and stretched his
legs a while. “Well, sir, that’s one view of the matter certainly.
There’s something to be said for that. These things should be looked at
all round. That’s the ground my wife took. That’s the ground,” he added
in a moment, “that a lady would naturally take;” and he gave a little dry
laugh.
“You think it’s slightly illogical,” I remarked.
“Well, sir, the ground I took was, that the worse a man’s business is,
the more it requires looking after. I shouldn’t want to go out to take a
walk—not even to go to church—if my house was on fire. My firm is not
doing the business it was; it’s like a sick child, it requires nursing.
What I wanted the doctors to do was to fix me up, so that I could go on
at home. I’d have taken anything they’d have given me, and as many times
a day. I wanted to be right there; I had my reasons; I have them still.
But I came off all the same,” said my friend, with a melancholy smile.
I was a great deal younger than he, but there was something so simple and
communicative in his tone, so expressive of a desire to fraternise, and
so exempt from any theory of human differences, that I quite forgot his
seniority, and found myself offering him paternal I advice. “Don’t think
about all that,” said I. “Simply enjoy yourself, amuse yourself, get
well. Travel about and see Europe. At the end of a year, by the time
you are ready to go home, things will have improved over there, and you
will be quite well and happy.”
My friend laid his hand on my knee; he looked at me for some moments, and
I thought he was going to say, “You are very young!” But he said
presently, “_You_ have got used to Europe any way!”