Well, five days more, and they were all sailing. It was a long time since she had crossed on an eight-day boat, and it would be lazy and pleasant—if anything could ever again be really lazy and pleasant. Maybe this was just another boiling up in the war of nerves; maybe it would simmer away again as the other horrible brews had done. But with all Europe again mobilizing, with ten million men in uniform, with the arrogant deadline of September 2 on which Hitler demanded a “German solution” of the Polish question—yes, it would be good to be sailing for home.
This was her second stay of the month in Paris. She had been there for the fall fashion openings during the first eight days of August, as she had been for so many years. It was as though the outside world were scheming to bring her and the Vederles together, for during that week they had arrived from Switzerland. Franz’ first words at the station had been exultant. “Well, Vee, we crossed a border.” It had hit her hard. Merely to be free to move again, to cross borders and get on a boat and sail from a harbor! Before she could answer, Ilse raised her voice in a rocking singsong, “We got our vi-sas; we got our vi-sas.” Paul was excited, too. Only Christa seemed tired and quiet.
She took them off to tea with her, to be brought up to date. Their trip to Zurich for the final routine at the Consulate had gone smoothly. And once they had the priceless visas to show, it was a matter of hours only to get their French travel permits. One small hitch had developed—immediate passage of any kind on any boat was impossible. There never had been such an exodus. The first sailing they could get was on the twenty-fifth. Franz said, “Why don’t you sail a week earlier, Vee, and go with us? You told the Consul General a lie, otherwise.” And she had gone to the steamship office, where one man knew her very well, and had cajoled him into finding an inner cabin for her on the same ship.
They had spent two evenings together, before she had had to leave for Brussels and Amsterdam. They had been disappointing evenings. The gentle spirit that had threaded the hours at Ascona was no longer there. Christa half apologized; the children had worn them all out sight-seeing during the daylight hours. But it was more than her fatigue. Vee guessed that Franz felt it, too, though he tried hard to conceal it.
They were to lunch together today, and she telephoned their hotel to tell them she was back. By now they were probably counting the hours to the boat train.
But their luncheon date was canceled. “Christa is ill, Vee, one of those heavy summer colds. Just about a year ago, she had one and it was very stubborn. She’s in bed.”
She went to their hotel, in spite of Franz’ protests. In the small sitting room, she saw that Franz was worried. His face was still tan with the deep-laid color of many months of Swiss sun, but there were lines in it she had not seen before, and his eyes were grave. Their greetings were the rapid greetings of old friends. The children were out with a paid tourist guide. He wanted to keep them away from Christa’s bed and it was hard in small quarters.
“This stifling heat must make her even more uncomfortable,” Vee said.
“It is very disturbing to me, the way she is,” he said. “The cold is not too bad, her temperature is low. But—”
He shook his head several times.
“Please let me go in, Franz. I never catch things.”
Christa lay back on her pillows in the darkened room. She smiled apology to Vee, and said, “I am so much nuisance.” Vee was startled to see how ill she looked, her hands lax on the sheet covering her, her whole personality damped down.
“Summer colds can flatten you right out,” Vee said. “It’s too bad you’re missing Paris this way.”
The moment she spoke the words, they sounded false and banal in her own ears. Something had appeared for a moment in Christa’s eyes that carried a message she could not catch.
“Christa has no love for Paris,” Franz put in quickly.
“I know not French,” Christa said. “It is hard, always to be—without.”
Franz asked Vee about her trip, then, and they talked of other things. A few moments later, he took her back into the sitting room.
“Franz, what is it? She seems so unhappy. She—”
“This is so strange to you, Vee. But for so long I have watched her through one stage after another of a fear you could not understand. First, leaving Vienna—that was terrible for both of us of course, but for her in a special way. Then Zurich, where she first felt people’s distaste for refugees; a hundred small things told her of it every day, and she shrank from always being the foreigner, the queer one.”
“I know—”
“I took her to Ascona partly because I knew there was there a large group of Austrians. It worked—for a while I was reassured. But then she wished we might stay there—it was a pseudo-home there. I began to wonder how she would stand leaving ‘home’ a second time.”
“Yes, I can see. Couldn’t you make her understand that it—”
He shook his head. “To her I can never be an analyst, only a husband. But I tried, as her husband. It would do some good for a while. But with such deep insecurity—if you press too much, it covers itself and goes—more underground. Then we came here. This is the worst.”
“Is it just that she doesn’t speak French and feels outside everything?”
“How many foreign tourists come here cheerfully without a word of the language? No, she uses that only as one more symbol. And the crowd of refugees here, everywhere one sees them—they are too painful to her; it’s that more than the language. I am really worried, I can barely wait for that boat.”
She sat silent. Now she wanted to comfort him, to tell him that she knew he was sick at heart, but she sat silent. He began to walk up and down slowly. She did not know whether to leave him or whether he wanted her to stay. It had dragged out so long, their journey from their old life to the new one they would one day build again. Depletion—she knew well its limp enervation. Poor Christa.
From the other room, Christa was calling. Franz went in. When he came out a few moments later, he looked cheered.
“She feels the heat so,” he said, “it gave her an idea. I think it is a good one. She wonders why we don’t go now to Le Havre, to wait for the sailing there. It’s on the Channel, it would surely be cooler.”
“Oh, Franz, that is a good idea. Will you do it?”
“I told her if her temperature drops to normal, we’ll go at once. I will start the room maid on the packing. Perhaps tomorrow morning we can go.”
She telephoned for news after dinner that evening. Christa was more comfortable; she and the children were already asleep. He had made all arrangements and they were leaving in the morning.
“Can you—would you like, perhaps, to come over?” he asked. “I do not like to leave the hotel. But there is a small lounge; we could talk?”
“Oh, I’d like to, I really would. I—maybe I’m getting homesick, but I’ve been sort of—well, never mind.”
In the small, dim lounge, they sat talking until midnight. For the most part they talked impersonally, for the towering subject of the possible war dwarfed every other. But Vee found herself so absorbed, so responsive to everything he said that she found every moment personal and compelling. Once he said, “And America—can anybody really believe she’ll stand by, forever isolated and indifferent to—” He broke off, remembering something. He reached into his inside pocket and drew out his passport. He opened it to the page that bore his American visa and held it out to her. She took it, not understanding. He pointed to the seal, deeply embossed in the page.
“You know, once I sat in the Consulate at Zurich and tried to decipher that seal,” he said. A remembering look came into his eyes, and his lips smiled as he spoke. “The eagle, the spreading wings, the striped shield, all that I could make out. I could see that in one claw the eagle holds an olive branch. But I simply could not decide what he holds in the other.”
She looked closely at the seal. She must have seen it a hundred times, but she had never paid any attention to it
at all.
“I remember the fantastic notion even crossed my mind that it looked like the Fascist bundle of faggots in Italy. I laughed at myself and gave up.”
She held the page closer, but the light was too dim for details.
“But the moment I looked at it on the page there, stamped clear and deep,” he went on, his voice intent and excited now, “then I knew what it was your eagle holds to balance off the olive branch of peace. They’re arrows, Vee, a sheaf of arrows, to fight with.”
Her breath caught at his words, the mysterious and eternal stoppage that happened when, after months on foreign soil, she suddenly saw the flag.
“Franz, you can’t guess what it did to me, hearing you say that. No; we won’t stand by forever while every bit of freedom—”
“No.”
“Oh, Franz,” she said illogically. “You’ll love it there. Christa and the children, and you—there’s something there, I don’t know, it’s so hard to talk about.”
“I know,” he said. “I really know that. When I was angry and humiliated all that time, it was the officials and the rules I was angry at. Never, at the country; never at what it is.”
And now it was she who said, “I know. I know that.”
Later he walked her back to her hotel. Past the shuttered windows of the shops, under the arcade of the Rue de Rivoli, they walked, talking now of the future in their own lives. Franz had some assurance that he could practice in New York and meant to try for that. But he was keeping his plans fluid and would shift them if the need arose.
“It would be so important for us,” he said, rather shy as he spoke the words, “if we could be near you and see you.”
“And for me. Don’t think I haven’t thought of it, too; I have.”
They were standing now at the doorway to the Hôtel du Rhin.
Behind them lay the shadowed octagonal of the Place Vendôme, pierced by its slender monument. She could see his face clearly in the light from the doorway. It was alive now with some intent feeling.
“It seems still strange,” he said, “how from half the world away we should become neighbors.”
She said nothing. His voice reminded her of their first greetings at the railroad station in Ascona. Then he reached for her hand, and raised it and kissed it. She was embarrassed, and laughed a little, awkward laugh.
“That’s the most European thing you’ve ever done,” she said, and knew it was gauche to say and could not help it.
“It’s not as European as all that,” he said quietly. “We have all of us a—a feeling about you, Vee, you must know.”
“Oh, Franz, and I about you.” Suddenly her embarrassment and surprise evaporated. “I think I’m in love with the Vederles; I really do.”
And upstairs in her room, she suddenly said half aloud, “I really do.”
***
It was the Vederles’ last day in Europe. At noon next day, they would sail. For the children the waiting was exasperating. Every few minutes, Ilse would ask, “Are we going soon, Daddy?” until his patience fretted through and he sharply ordered her not to ask it again. Paul looked up at him with owl-wise speculation. His father rarely spoke in that tone to anybody.
Only Christa seemed indifferent to the tempo of the hours. She had stood the short trip from Paris without too much fatigue, and her temperature remained steady, though the cold seemed unshakable. She had gone to bed at once on their arrival at Le Havre.
Now in the afternoon of their last day, he found himself obsessed with impatience to be aboard and at sea. On Monday the news from Berlin had burst the eardrums of the world—a ten-year nonaggression pact with Soviet Russia. Yesterday the news that there was no “escape clause” had added to the still shattering repercussions. The pact was disaster personified, cynicism personified. Whatever and however it would be explained, as Munich had once been explained, it was, the final signal Hitler waited for. Now he was safe on his eastern front. Now he could begin.
It took superhuman effort, but he did not discuss this news with Christa. He spoke of it only with Paul, whose twelve-year intelligence on these great affairs constantly astounded him now. But he asked Paul also not to speak of it with his mother, since it would upset her and might make her cold worse again.
He lunched with the children and sent them out to play in the hotel garden. All over the hotel dining room the voices had been excited, hot with feeling. He was glad when he was alone again. He went for a short walk and then went up to Christa. At the door he stopped short. She was looking at him with wide eyes, from a face that was white. He could see she was shivering, and when he reached for her hand, it was damp and cold. He bent over her, and he heard her teeth chatter as she told him she was suddenly chilled through and through.
He covered her, sent for hot drinks, tried to stop the gnawing thing in his heart. He took her temperature; it was just over normal. She said soon that she was warmer.
An hour later, her face was flushed, her eyes were brilliant. Once again he slipped the thermometer between her lips. His hand against her cheek felt the heat, and for a moment he was gripped by the worst panic he had ever known. When he read the thermometer again, he knew.
He telephoned the main hospital in the city, asked them to send the best man in pneumonia cases. When at last Dr. Marreux arrived, Franz met him in the hall. “My wife has pneumonia; she has had a heavy cold for four days, lassitude, fatigue. Today she changed for the worse, a chill, followed by fever. I feel certain that it is pneumonia.”
The Frenchman looked astonished, and Franz explained that he was a doctor himself, though he did not practice internal medicine. Then the other nodded and his manner became that of a colleague in collaboration on a case.
They went up. Twisting and straining through Franz the fear went, while the stocky figure of the doctor examined her, listening, sounding, asking questions. He watched him open his bag, take out a small bottle, and take a specimen of sputum. And then the moment came when Marreux nodded his head solemnly.
“Madame is very ill,” he said at last. “She should be hospitalized at once.”
Christa stirred impatiently. “What did he say, Franz?”
“That you should go to the hospital, Christl.”
“But it’s impossible. Did you tell him I cannot?”
“No.” He turned to the doctor. “We are to sail at noon tomorrow for America. I will have to cancel our passage.”
For several seconds, the doctor stared at him. Consternation was in his friendly eyes, under contracted brows. “That is a complication, a serious one.” He gave two large white tablets to Christa, and she washed them down. Franz motioned to the door, and they went out into the hall together. There the Frenchman put a hand on his arm, as if they were friends.
“I did not know you were sailing, when I said she must be hospitalized at once. Perhaps—”
“Can you know soon what type it is?”
“A few hours at the most. I will have the typing started at once; if it is a pneumococcus pneumonia, it should respond to drugs.”
“That was sulfapyridine?”
“Yes, it should be tried with any such fever. If it’s not a virus pneumonia, this new drug is a miracle.” He hesitated, frowning. “The clinical picture looks more like the atypical.”
“Then she should go at once to the hospital?”
“Forgive me, you are—your slight accent tells me—you are German? Ah, Austrian, that is good. I—Dr. Vederle, let us not rush her to the hospital, not yet. You should stop and consider. The news—it will be war this time, surely. In war, enemy aliens—”
“I know, my God, I do know.”
“Do not cancel yet.” He glanced at his watch. “I will go direct to the laboratory; then I will return. When we know more, we can decide better what is best for her in such a crisis of events as this.” He wrote out a prescription. “Give her two more at five-thirty precisely, “and every four hours through the night. Wake her to give them.”
Upstairs,
Franz sat by the bed, watching her as she slept. As she lay there, unaware of him, breathing through opened lips, she seemed more precious to him than every other thing he cherished in the world. He thought of the children—he must save her from this sickness and save them all from the crashing horror of being caught in France if war was indeed upon them. He must keep cool; there was no time for mistakes now.
Time. Time. How often had the merciless breath of time blown away his courage. But never before had he been so ridden by it as now.
She opened her eyes, and found him leaning over her. His hand went to her forehead. In his palm he felt an arc of heat.
“You must go ahead, without me, if I am in the hospital.” They were her first words. As though while she slept.
“Hush, Christl. Never. I will never leave you.”
“But the boat, tomorrow. The children must get away. I heard the news—some people in the hall this noon, while you were down at lunch, said it will be war any hour. If I must go to the hospital—”
“Never. We all go together, or we all stay together.” He gripped her hand. “Darling one, don’t disturb yourself now. You must sleep, rest. The doctor is coming back. He will advise us.”
She quieted down obediently. Again the fever closed her eyes. Half asleep, she murmured, “You leave me behind, it is better.”
God, dear God, for months she had silently clung to that one idea. Ever since that night when the cable had come from Vee’s secretary, ever since that night when she had collapsed into her hysterical plea that he leave her and go on with the fearful journey alone.
Deep in the unconscious, the idea had persisted, the private motive had intensified.
The minutes passed. When the children came up, he took them into their room and explained only that the cold was much worse, and that they must be as quiet as possible. He tried to filter every tone of anxiety out of his vice, but the deep disquiet of the child who knows his mother is sick stole into their eyes.
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