Heggen was sitting at the outer side of the marble table, taking no part in the conversation; now and then he cast a glance at Jenny, who sat pressed into the corner, with a whisky and soda before her. She was chatting very merrily with a young Swedish lady across the table, without taking the slightest notice of her neighbours, Dr. Broager and the little Danish artist Loulou Schulin, who both tried to draw her attention. Heggen saw that she had had too much to drink again. A company of Scandinavians and a couple of Germans had met in a wine shop, and were finishing the night in the inmost corner of a somewhat dingy café. They were all of them more or less affected by what they had drunk, and very much opposed to the request of the landlord that they should leave, as it was past time for locking up and he would be fined two hundred lire. [257]
Gunnar Heggen was the only one who would have liked the symposium to come to an end; he was the only sober one, and in a bad temper.
Dr. Broager was constantly applying his black moustache to Jenny’s hand; when she pulled it away he tried to kiss her bare arm. He had succeeded in placing his arm behind her and they were squeezed so tight in the corner that it was useless to try and get away from him. Her resistance was, to tell the truth, somewhat lame, and she laughed without offence at his boldness.
“Ugh!” said Loulou, shrugging her shoulders. “How can you stand it? Don’t you think he is disgusting, Jenny?”
“Yes, I do, but don’t you see that he is exactly like a blue-bottle?—it is useless trying to drive him away. Ugh! stop it, doctor!”
“Ugh!” said Loulou again. “How can you stand that man?”
“Never mind. I can wash myself with soap when I get home.”
Loulou Schulin leaned against Jenny, stroking her arms. “Now I will take care of these poor, beautiful hands. Look!” She lifted one of them to be admired by the company round the table. “Isn’t it lovely?” and, loosening the green motor veil from her hat, she wrapped it round Jenny’s arms and hands. “In a mosquito net, you see,” she said, thrusting out a small tongue swiftly at Broager.
Jenny sat an instant with her arms and hands enveloped in the green veil before undoing it and putting on her coat and gloves.
Broager leaned back with eyes half closed, and Miss Schulin raised her glass: “Your health, Mr. Heggen.”
He pretended not to hear, but when she repeated her words he seized his glass: “Pardon—I did not see”—and, after taking a sip, looked away again.
[258]
One or two people in the company smiled. Heggen and Miss Winge lived next door to each other on the top floor of a house somewhere between Babuino and Corso; intimate relations between them seemed therefore to be a matter of course. As to Miss Schulin, she had been married to a Norwegian author, but after a year or so of married bliss had left him and the child, gone out into the world under her maiden name as “Miss,” and calling herself an artist.
The landlord came up once more to the company, urgently soliciting their departure; the two waiters put out the gas at the farther end of the room and stood waiting by the table, so there was nothing else to be done but pay and leave the place.
Heggen was one of the last as they came out into the square. By the light of the moon he saw Miss Schulin taking Jenny’s arm, both running towards a cab, which some of the others were storming. He ran in the same direction and heard Jenny calling out: “You know, the one in Via Paneperna,” just as she jumped into the already filled cab and fell into somebody’s lap.
But some ladies wanted to get out and others to get in—people kept on jumping out from one door and in at another, while the driver sat motionless on his seat waiting, and the horse slept with its head drooping against the stone bridge.
Jenny was in the street again now, but Miss Schulin reached out her hand—there was plenty of room.
“I’m sorry for the horse,” said Heggen curtly, and Jenny started to walk at his side behind the cab, the last among those who had not got room in the vehicle, which rolled on ahead.
“You don’t mean to say you want to be with these people any longer—to walk as far as Paneperna for that?” said Heggen.
“We might meet an empty cab on the way.”
[259]
“How can you be bothered with them?—they are all drunk,” he added.
Jenny laughed in a languid way.
“So am I, I suppose.”
Heggen did not answer. They had reached the Piazza di Spagna when she stopped:
“You are not coming with us, then, Gunnar?”
“Yes, if you absolutely insist on going on—otherwise not.”
“You need not come for my sake. I can get home all right, you know.”
“If you go, I go—I am not going to let you walk about alone with those people in that state.”
She laughed—the same limp, indifferent laugh.
“You will be too tired to sit to me tomorrow.”
“Oh, I shall be able to sit all right.”
“You won’t; and anyhow, I shan’............