“Didn’t you know him?”
“No. I remember all of the people of that time. But now they ask me only about him.”
“What do you tell them?”
“Anything interesting that they wish to hear. What will please them. But tell me, who was he?”
“He was an American writer of the early Twenties and later who lived some time in Paris and abroad.”
“But why would I not remember him? Was he a good writer?”
“He wrote two very good books and one which was not completed which those who know his writing best say would have been very good. He also wrote some good short stories.”
“Did he frequent the bar much?”
“I believe so.”
“But you did not come to the bar in the early Twenties. I know that you were poor then and lived in a different quarter.”
“When I had money I went to the Crillon.”
“I know that too. I remember very well when we first met.”
“So do I.”
“It is strange that I have no memory of him,” Georges said.
“All those people are dead.”
“Still one does not forget people because they are dead and people keep asking me about him. You must tell me something about him for my memoirs.”
“I will.”
“I remember you and the Baron von Blixen arriving one night—in what year?” He smiled.
“He is dead too.”
“Yes. But one does not forget him. You see what I mean?”
“His first wife wrote very beautifully,” I said. “She wrote perhaps the best book about Africa that I ever read. Except Sir Samuel Baker’s book on the Nile tributaries of Abyssinia. Put that in your memoirs. Since you are interested in writers now.”
“Good,” said Georges. “The Baron was not a man that you forget. And the name of the book?”
“Out of Africa,” I said. “Blickie was always very proud of his first wife’s writing. But we knew each other long before she had written that book.”
“But Monsieur Fitzgerald that they keep asking me about?”
“He was in Frank’s time.”
“Yes. But I was the chasseur. You know what a chasseur is.”
“I am going to write something about him in a book that I will write about the early days in Paris. I promised myself that I would write it.”
“Good,” said Georges.
“I will put him in exactly as I remember him the first time that I met him.”
“Good,” said Georges. “Then, if he came here, I will remember him. After all one does not forget people.”
“Tourists?”
“Naturally. But you say he came here very much?”
“It meant very much to him.”
“You write about him as you remember him and then if he came here I will remember him.”
“We will see,” I said.
There Is Never Any End to Paris
When there were the three of us instead of just the two, it was the cold and the weather that finally drove us out of Paris in the winter time. Alone there was no problem when you got used to it. I could always go to a café to write and could work all morning over a café crème while the waiters cleaned and swept out the café and it gradually grew warmer. My wife could go to work at the piano in a cold place and with enough sweaters keep warm playing and come home to nurse Bumby. It was wrong to take a baby to a café in the winter though; even a baby that never cried and watched everything that happened and was never bored.
There were no baby-sitters then and Bumby would stay happy in his tall cage bed with his big, loving cat named F. Puss. There were people who said that it was dangerous to leave a cat with a baby. The most ignorant and prejudiced said that a cat would suck a baby’s breath and kill him.
Others said that a cat would lie on a baby and the cat’s weight would smother him. F. Puss lay beside Bumby in the tall cage bed and watched the door with his big yellow eyes, and would let no one come near him when we were out and Marie, the femme de ménage, had to be away. There was no need for baby-sitters. F. Puss was the baby-sitter.
But when you are poor, and we were really poor when I had given up all journalism when we came back from Canada, and could sell no stories at all, it was too rough with a baby in Paris in the winter. At three months Mr. Bumby had crossed the North Atlantic on a twelve-day small Cunarder that sailed from New York via Halifax in January. He never cried on the trip and laughed happily when he would be barricaded in a bunk so he could not fall out when we were in heavy weather. But our Paris was too cold for him.
We went to Schruns in the Vorarlberg in Austria. After going through Switzerland you came to the Austrian frontier at Feldkirch. The train went through Liechtenstein and stopped at Bludenz where there was a small branch line that ran along a pebbly trout river through a valley of farms and forest to Schruns, which was a sunny market town with sawmills, stores, inns and a good, year-around hotel called the Taube where we lived.
The rooms at the Taube were large and comfortable with big stoves, big windows and big beds with good blankets and feather coverlets. The meals were simple and excellent and the dining room and the wood-planked public bar were well heated and friendly. The valley was wide and open so there was good sun. The pension was about two dollars a day for the three of us, and as the Austrian schilling went down with inflation, our room and food were less all the time. There was no desperate inflation and poverty as there had been in Germany. The schilling went up and down, but its longer course was down.
There were no ski lifts from Schruns and no funiculars, but there were logging trails and cattle trails that led up different mountain valleys to the high mountain country. You climbed on seal skins that you attached to the bottoms of the skis. At the tops of mountain valleys there were the big Alpine Club huts for summer climbers where you could sleep and leave payment for any wood you used.
In some you had to pack up your own wood, or if you were going on a long tour in the high mountains and the glaciers, you hired someone to pack wood and supplies up with you, and established a base. The most famous of these high base huts were the Lindauer-Hütte, the Madlener-Haus and the Wiesbadener-Hütte.
In back of the Taube there was a sort of practice slope where you ran through orchards and fields and there was another good slope behind Tchagguns across the valley where there was a beautiful inn with an excellent collection of chamois horns on the walls of the drinking room. It was from behind the lumber village of Tchagguns, which was on the far edge of the valley, that the good skiing went all the way up until you could eventually cross the mountains and get over the Silvretta into the Klosters area.
Schruns was a healthy place for Bumby who had a dark-haired beautiful girl to take him out in the sun in his sleigh and look after him, and Hadley and I had all the new country to learn and the new villages, and the people of the town were very friendly. Herr Walther Lent who was a pioneer high-mountain skier and at one time had been a partner with Hannes Schneider, the great Arlberg skier, making ski waxes for climbing and all snow conditions, was starting a school for Alpine skiing and we both enrolled.
Walther Lent’s system was to get his pupils off the practice slopes as soon as possible and into the high mountains on trips. Skiing was not the way it is now, the spiral fracture had not become common then, and no one could afford a broken leg. There were no ski patrols. Anything you ran down from, you had to climb up. That gave you legs that were fit to run down with.
Walther Lent believed the fun of skiing was to get up into the highest mountain country where there was no one else and where the snow was untracked and then travel from one high Alpine Club hut to another over the top passes and glaciers of the Alps. You must not have a binding that could break your leg if you fell. The ski should come off before it broke your leg. What he really loved was unroped glacier skiing, but for that we had to wait until spring when the crevasses were sufficiently covered.
Hadley and I had loved skiing since we had first tried it together in Switzerland and later at Cortina d’Ampezzo in the Dolomites when Bumby was going to be born and the doctor in Milan had given her permission to continue to ski if I would promise that she would not fall down. This took a very careful selection of terrain and of runs and absolutely controlled running, but she had beautiful, wonderfully strong legs and fine control of her skis, and she did not fall. We all knew the different snow conditions and everyone knew how to run in deep powder snow.
We loved the Vorarlberg and we loved Schruns. We would go there about Thanksgiving time and stay until nearly Easter. There was always skiing even though Schruns was not high enough for a ski resort except in a winter of heavy snow. But climbing was fun and no one minded it
