A Prologue To Love (23 page)

Even the Italians on the train — businessmen from Milan and Rome — appeared subdued in the reproving atmosphere of the Swiss train. Their mustaches seemed to lose a measure of their stiff pugnacity, their manners some assurance; their attitudes became less melodramatic. They stopped talking vivaciously and applied themselves diligently to papers, which apparently pained them. “Why do you stare?” John Ames asked his daughter. She did not answer for a moment; she was thinking of the little painting she had bought, of blue Vesuvio and Soma against a scarlet sky, of flower markets incredibly blazing, of painted buildings and red roofs. She looked through the window at Switzerland. She had no words and merely smiled deprecatingly.

The mountains in Italy had appeared green and violet and soft. Here they had frozen into vast and granite forms, with only an occasional steep emerald meadow among pines and boulders. The day was dim and somber, enhancing the awesome landscape of narrow valley and looming stone. Vapor gushed through high passes, and an infrequent waterfall, slender and the color of illuminated lead, broke from rock. Swiss hamlets stood diminished in the little valleys, the houses built of slate-colored stone and dark wood or of some stark-white mortar with black roofs curiously shaped and curving, and all dominated by grim little churches, pale and harsh and pointed. The mountains climbed higher, white and dark gray, ribbed and striped with white slashes of snow, though this was the middle of May. Caroline could feel the icy wind along the window sash, and she shivered and pulled her brown traveling shawl closer over her shoulders. A lake, steel-blue and surrounded by purple cliffs and crags, wheeled into sight, and Caroline thought of the Bay of Naples at sunset. She had glimpses of streets, chill and barren and winding and very neat, and little tidy carts and carriages, and children so covered with heavy brown clothing that they appeared shapeless and nublike.

Her thoughts shifted. It was only the hard gray light that made her father appear wan and desiccated and very tired. Timidly she asked whether he would like some chocolate. A waiter was coming into the car with a linen-covered tray of cups and pitchers and little plates of cakes. John said impatiently, “No, but have some yourself. Swiss chocolate is the best in the world.” Caroline sipped her chocolate mournfully.

“We will soon be in Geneva,” said John, shuffling his papers together and replacing them in his brief case. “I always stay at the Hotel Grande. Economy doesn’t pay abroad. All Americans are supposed to be rich; if you’re as sober as most Europeans, except for the Italians, the Parisians, and the Austrians, they think you are poor and so you lose authority and influence with them. We’re alleged to have dash, at least when it comes to spending.” He smiled a little grimly.

Caroline no longer said to her father, “I am afraid,” though she was always frightened. She had acquired a quiet, monosyllabic kind of conversation which added to her dignity, so that people said, “She is still quite a young woman, but she isn’t foolish. Solid and firm and observant.” Not only Bostonians thought this; New Yorkers approved of her, and she had been especially respected in London. She was, on this first visit to Switzerland, only twenty and appeared ten years older. Strangers often believed she was her father’s wife, to be sure, but one eminently suited to him.

Geneva, on this first visit, did not impress her. It had a kind of purposeful bustle, orderly and hard and excessively clean and dull. The confidence of the people awed Caroline. The manager, surrounded by servants, received them with restrained cordiality and no excitement. He conducted them to their suite, gave Caroline only the slightest of curious glances, and inquired after Monsieur’s health. Even the Swiss of French origin, thought Caroline, had taken on the cold stoniness of their country, and the intonations of their voices were frigid. Later she was to encounter the owner of the hotel, a Swiss of German origin, and she thought him stiff and unfriendly and his look at her father glacial.

To Caroline, the suite appeared very luxurious and, as always, she compared new places to her Aunt Cynthia’s house, which she privately and disdainfully referred to as a ‘boutique’. These rooms could under no circumstances inspire thoughts of a ‘boutique’, and Caroline liked them. She liked the long double windows opening onto a stiff iron balcony; she could see small and geometrical gardens below, then a cold rigid street, then the flat, grayly shining lake, and always the omnipresent and gloomy mountains. The sun came out briefly as Caroline looked at the grayish-white houses across the lake; it gave no life or vivacity to the landscape, but rather a strange sullenness, like a reluctant smile forced onto an impersonal face. She turned back to the rooms, to the heavy walnut and mahogany furniture and lumbering carved tables and chandeliers and thick crimson carpet. Everything was on a large scale, and Caroline felt no cramping as she had felt in the elegance of her aunt’s home. She fingered draperies of spongy red or dark blue velvet, tasseled and brushed, with valances and gilt hardware. She surveyed her bedroom with its four-poster bed, its marble-topped commode, its cumbersome rocking chairs or tufted dark green seats, its tall wardrobe. A girl in a navy-blue linen uniform and white apron and cap came in, curtsying, to help ‘Madame’ unpack and assist her.

“Mademoiselle. Mademoiselle Ames,” said Caroline awkwardly. “I am Monsieur Ames’ daughter.”

The girl lifted a polite eyebrow, curtsied again, and turned her attention to Caroline’s small amount of baggage. Caroline had learned not to interfere. But she watched uneasily as the girl deftly unpacked her meager wardrobe, and she thought this servant, as did the others in London and Paris, expressed by the set of her shoulders the poor opinion of the expensive but poorly designed and poorly cut frocks and gowns.

The girl finished unpacking. Caroline fumbled in her purse. She found some French and Italian coppers. She put them on the table. The girl ignored them, curtsied, and left. They should be grateful for anything, any thing at all, from an American! thought poor Caroline hotly. Her tips in Italy had been accepted with a humor which she had considered gratitude. She decided she did not like Switzerland. In fact, with the exception of Italy, she did not like Europe. Proud and mighty London offended her belief in her father’s importance — there was no Englishman as important as John Ames. Shrewd and laughing Paris had frightened her; Vienna had appeared cynical and uncaring. Rome, indifferent to passing ages, had only tolerated her.

John had smiled at her oddly. “We are still a young frontier country, and these countries are old. Give us time, my dear. We’ll not always be young and na
ï
ve. And good,” he had added. “No, no. We’ll not always be good and kind and just and free. We’ll be the greatest despot and murderer of them all. Just be patient.”

Caroline had been startled and puzzled at this extraordinary remark. That night she had met her father’s friends, had found them ambiguous, frightening, and too adult for her youth and inexperience. There was something about them that repelled and appalled her, though she did not know what it was. Her father changed in their presence, and this frightened her more than anything else. He became one with them. She listened to them acutely when they spoke in German or French or Italian. Something was astir in them that was terrible, and her father was part of it. She had tried to get him to explain later, but he had said wearily, “It will come to you in time. At present, you need only listen.”

“But, Papa, they were Englishmen and Germans and Italians and Frenchmen. Yet they didn’t seem, really, to have any country — ” She looked at him helplessly.

“They don’t,” said John Ames. “They have no country, just as I have no country.”

She had nothing to say to that. There seemed nothing adequate to say, nothing to question.

She knew now, three years later, on another May night in Geneva, in the very same suite, a great deal more than she had known earlier. These men and these women — English, German, Swiss, American, French, Austrian, and Italian — had indeed no country, no allegiances, no nation, no honor, no principles. They had but one loyalty: money. In the presence of money they were one nation, one people, one mind, and one soul. They respected and liked each other and used each other. When they spoke of their native countries it was with objectivity and no patriotism. They would betray and plunder if it brought them fortune. A Russian banker had joined them but two years ago; he was smoothly enveloped in their bland and watchful anonymity. His face had taken on the contours of theirs; he spoke French without an accent. He was a small, rotund man with a jolly expression and brilliant black eyes, and they called him Alex, and Caroline had never quite been able to pronounce his surname. He was as American, or as French, German, Italian, Austrian, English, Swiss, as any of his colleagues.

The women were few; there were only three of them — one, from a place she vaguely described as Mitteleuropa, the wife of a German, another the French wife of Alex, and still another the English wife of an Austrian. The Englishwoman was very soignee and reminded Caroline smartingly of Cynthia, the Frenchwoman was dowdy, and the lady from Mitteleuropa was dark and wicked and very suave. Caroline feared and disliked all of them, but she really detested the women who, though so aware of all that was transpiring and so involved, were still women with women’s malices and private little pettinesses and tendencies to exchange mirthful and personal glances at another’s expense. They murmured to her affectionately, brought her small expensive gifts, and spoke of her ‘future’, but she knew they considered her ugly and gauche and a very bad mistake, indeed.

These people would also be here tonight. Dinner would be served in the large sitting room of the suite, and the servants would be impeccable and chill. The guests were always the same: the Slebers, the ‘Alexes’ (Monsieur Alexander Polevoi and Madame), Mr. Montague Brookingham, Herr und Frau Gottfried Ernst (the Austrian banker and his English wife). Madame Polevoi, the French lady, would, as usual, appear even more dowdy than Caroline, but she would have a grace and a charm which would bring the eyes of the gentlemen more often to her than to Frau Ernst, who bought all her gowns from Worth and whose jewels were astounding.

There would be nine of them tonight, with Caroline and her father. Caroline restlessly moved to the sitting room, where the waiters were already setting up the long white table. The linen glistened in the cold May light which was reflected back from the ash-colored mountains and the gray lake. The silver sparkled icily, and so did the crystal. The waiters appeared unaware of Caroline’s presence; they murmured to each other in French, German, or Italian as they smoothed and arranged. The centerpiece was of jonquils; unlike the American flower, these had a poignant and sorrowful scent which pervaded the room with funereal sweetness. The two long windows were open to the gelid air, and Caroline, in her bunchy crimson wool, felt tendrils of invisible cold moving over her face and hands.

All at once she wanted to be part of this homely if efficient ritual. She moved hesitantly to the table and pretended to be absorbed in the flowers. She meticulously moved a perfectly set arrangement of silver. She suddenly shivered in the hard cold of the mountain air. She said to one of the waiters, “I should like a fire if you please,” and she pointed to the black marble fireplace and its mantel covered with elaborate German beer steins and a pair of sentimental porcelains. The waiter, bowing, pulled a bell rope for the man who cared for the fires. He came in, in his uniform of white and blue stripes, with a cap of the same material on his head, and laid the fire. The tops of the formidable mountains turned a faint scarlet as the declining sun touched their glaciers and white caps.

The usual Swiss guests would be absent tonight, and so would the Italians. These bankers — they were always bankers — were in Russia, John Ames had explained to his daughter. No matter what else they did, or what their obscure affairs, they were always bankers, he would say wryly. “There is much more to banking, Caroline,” he had once said, “than the taking in of money, letting it out on local mortgages or farm loans and enterprises, and paying it out with interest.” ‘Banking’ was the power behind the throne of the Czar, the thrones of Austria-Hungary, Germany, France, the British Empire, Spain, Scandinavia, the obscure palaces in South America, and, of course, the chair of the President of the United States. Caroline was now well aware that the bankers had only to raise a delicate forefinger, to nod disinterested heads, and thrones would fall, armies would march, the thunder of arms would shatter the peace of the skies, kings would be deposed, empires and nations rearranged or blasted, and the destiny of millions changed irrevocably.

There was one thing that John Ames, among many others, did not know about his daughter, the tall, impressive, silent young woman with her meager coronet of fine black braids. She had a year ago come to the strong and passionate decision that she herself would never be engaged with these people, would never speak to them again when her father died. Intrigue sickened her, but she exonerated her father. After all, he had suffered; he had been desperately poor and had been persecuted for his poverty. He used these people. In a way, she thought na
ï
vely, it was a retribution.

She knew that her father was enormously wealthy. She had been taught all about the stock market. It appeared to her to be exciting, part of the growth of the industrial world, and contained opportunities for the discreet and affluent. If there were men who manipulated the stock market in New York, London, the Bourse, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, it was very well. It was a splendid game, and profitable. She would keep her father’s fleet of ships, for legal cargo only. Again, she exonerated John; he had been forced to do as he had done. He had had no choice in a ravenous world.