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 ***es 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'agrements."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, Icame 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 Iimmediately 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 Geneve, a newspaper of about the size of a pocket-handkerchief.As Idrew 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 Geneve.
"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 Iseated 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--Iimmediately 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 ******.""Sweet simplicity, eh? I'm afraid my two ladies will find it too ******.""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.