The Swiss Watch

LIKE many other Italian women whom marriage has passed by, Pia Chiantella had gone abroad, a miniature Christopher Columbus, to escape from the real or imagined miseries of her homeland and to make her living elsewhere. Too sentimental for bitterness, she worked in Paris as daily help in the house of a French banker, Monsieur Petiton, who ignored most of her qualities but appreciated her honesty, a virtue toward which bankers have an extraordinary sensitivity, more especially on the level of petty cash and minute gestures of confidence.

When Christmas approached, the Petiton family made preparations, as always, to move to their chalet in Switzerland, a new and rather vulgar building conceived in the fertile imagination of Monsieur Petiton himself, who, as many self-made men, believed he knew more about architecture than those trained in it. The chalet stood on a sunless slope watching over a sunlit village, with something medieval about its arrogance and hostility, lightened only by lavish use of modern wrought iron on a background of pink Mediterranean stucco and pinewood, and by grounds peppered with hideous dwarfs and gnomes in colored stone and a handful of monstrously stylized rabbits and gigantic squirrels.

It was Madame Petiton who suggested that on this occasion they might take Pia with them, both as a reward and in order for her to do a great deal of hard work, helping to look after the four rebellious children which the banker had sired almost negligently in the midst of his multifarious activities. Monsieur Petiton agreed at once, and several days before Christmas the group left Paris, the family by fast train, Monsieur and Madame Petiton in their chauffeur-driven Cadillac.

Pia had the children all to herself on the first day up in the mountains, aided only by Madame Demoruz, a local lady who cleaned the chalet the year round, two hours a day. A kind of firm friendship was struck between these two, who had nothing in common, but then, the world over, firm friendships are formed for no reason at all except loneliness, especially if there is the cement of a sensed mutual unhappiness to lend poignancy to the unspoken moments.

The Cadillac had become ignominiously stuck in a snowdrift some sixty miles away, and Monsieur and Madame Petiton had been reduced to spending the first night of their holiday in a hotel on the banks of Lake Leman. The Dutch chauffeur, who might have been a hero in saving the huge car from a flood, was completely nonplussed by conditions in the mountains, which he had never seen before. It was typical of Monsieur Petiton to place his trust in foreign servants, believing in a remotely uneasy way that he sensed criticism from those of his own nationality, and allowing this complex free reign by declaring that the French could no longer be honored with his esteem.

IT WAS during this first evening alone in an overheated kitchen that Pia felt the exasperating solitude of all great public holidays. They tend to bring people together, and thereby leave people who are alone with nowhere to go. The children were running about upstairs with wild shrieks, but officially they had been put to bed. The parents were away, and they were not Pia’s children. There was a Christmas tree in the village, lit with colored lights. The snow was falling. A lump formed in Pia’s throat. She had agreed to go to Switzerland with a show of willingness and even of excitement, but that was merely her instinctive devotion to anyone who was kind to her. It had meant leaving her man in Paris. Her man (she called him it min homo) was a spendthrift, reprobate ne’er-do-well of an Italian waiter who could never keep a place. Nothing really passed between them except money, of which she always had a little and of which he had none, but they talked in Italian, and she felt sure of herself and even safe in his company. There was something of the mysterious relationship between prostitute and pimp in their attachment, and now she wondered what he would be up to in Paris without her. He would probably get drunk, and in his festive stupor find another girl to protect.

In her mounting rage at these nagging thoughts, she switched on her little transistor radio, and found that the Italian network was broadcasting a performance of Cavalleria Rusticana in its entirety direct from La Scala. This didn’t help matters. During the affecting scene in which Turiddu bids farewell to his mother, Pia broke down and wept, and having wept, she prayed. Deriving a little solace from the act of prayer, she began to think against the background of dramatic verismo at its most untrue.

She thought of her sister Margherita, who had been such a good companion until her marriage, but who subsequently seemed to adopt a condescending attitude toward her unmarried sister and resented any contact, however formal, between her sons and their “aunt in domestic service.” They were fine boys, Giorgio and Manlio, aged twentyeight and twenty-six, even if they had not yet chosen professions for themselves. Of the two, Manlio was easier to forgive for his indolence because he was very handsome, while Giorgio was frankly ugly, but the fact was that both tended to lie about in the sun, waiting for something to happen. While they waited, they dreamed of emigrating to Australia, of opening snack bars in Rome, of winning the Giro d’ltalia on their bicycles, but neither of them had the energy to cycle the distance of a block without lying down again and dreaming of something else — as often as not of the misery of Italy’s deep South, with its ancient jealousies and age-old habits, its sickeningly blue sea and sky, and its servitude to the sun. Poor Italy and poor us, and yet, as is the way with those who are good for nothing, they never seemed to lack pocket money, although nobody ever knew where it came from or how much it amounted to.

Now, under the influence of Mascagni’s musical excesses, Pia began to form a fierce and unreasoning love for these two boys, who were of her blood by proxy, and who would surely have been hers if a capricious God had not decreed otherwise. She also developed a fierce hatred for the snow, that slippery apparel of the earth in high places which hides its malice behind a show of innocence. She longed for the hot cracked earth which burned her bare feet, for the pungency of warm pines, and for the harsh smell of dried fish and herbs in the shops.

The next morning, after the arrival of Madame Demoruz, she took the opportunity of slipping down to the village. There was a shop at the other end of it which sold practically everything, from coat hangers in the shape of reindeer antlers to ski boots, and from lesser Swiss watches to wooden souvenirs. Here she bought Manlio a Christmas present, with a hundred eighty francs and all her love. She didn’t buy one for Giorgio for a variety of reasons. First of all, he was ugly, and if it came to the pinch, she would gladly surrender him to her sister, even in her imagination. Secondly, if she had to cater to Giorgio as well, she couldn’t afford to buy a really fine present for Manlio. Lastly, Giorgio was the older of the two, and could look after himself.

With the help of Monsieur Knüsperli, the shopkeeper, she selected an octagonal wristwatch which not only told the date but had an alarm system as well. He packed it in a handsome box, decorated with a recurrent holly motif, and she mailed it to her nephew.

The Petitons arrived a few hours later, and life took on a routine: Monsieur Petiton going for long walks of a few hundred yards, armed with a stick and wearing a green alpine trilby studded with shaving brushes and lucky favors; Madame Petiton, who was younger than her husband, skiing in the eternal company of a celebrated alpine guide; and the children creating havoc on the nursery slopes, with the forlorn figure of Pia, dressed awkwardly in her city clothes, holding a sledge and an armful of garments at the bottom.

The days passed quickly, and soon the time came for school to begin again. Pia was asked to take the children back to Paris, where Miss Frazer, the Scottish nanny, was waiting for them after home leave for Christmas. The Petitons decided to stay on a little longer — she because the great guide had promised to show her some new tricks on the remoter slopes; he because he had found a nonskiing companion of the opposite sex in a neighboring chalet. The Cadillac obediently awaited their fancy in the plain, so that Pia was compelled to take the squealing rabble back to the stern gaze and hard palm of Miss Frazer by night train. She arrived in Paris in a state of physical and mental exhaustion to find a packet awaiting her. It was the watch back again, with an apologetic and uncertain note from Manlio asking her if it were possible to exchange it for another model which didn’t have an alarm, since this one had waked him up on occasion when he had least expected it, and he feared it might prove bad for his heart.

The note was as short as one would expect from a person of his limited stamina, and he forgot to thank his aunt for her gift. She bore him no malice, since men don’t have to remember such things as gratitude, but she racked her brains to think how she could possibly exchange the watch now.

Eventually she put it back in an envelope and addressed it to Madame Demoruz, the only human contact she had made in the village. Cheerfully, she asked Madame Demoruz to take it back to Monsieur Knüsperli’s shop, and to exchange it for a watch without an alarm. She said she was willing to honor any adjustment in price, but stated that, in her opinion, a watch without an alarm should logically cost less than a watch with one. On the envelope she declared the contents of the envelope to be a “Gift of No Value,” as she had been taught to do in Italy.

WHEN Madame Demoruz received the watch, she took it to her husband to deal with. Since he was a man whose profession was officially that of a farmer, but who had always gone to great lengths not to possess a farm, he had more time on his hands than his wife, who slaved away cleaning four or five chalets a day to keep her family in pocket.

Monsieur Demoruz cast his great envious black eyes on the watch and rattled it. He set the alarm, and derived visible pleasure from hearing it ring. After he had repeated this process for over half an hour, Madame Demoruz permitted herself to warn him that he ran the risk of breaking it.

“Shut up,” said Monsieur Demoruz, and downed another glass of Lie, a white liquor made from the sediment of grapes. His spirit fired, he put on his heavy farmer’s boots, and walked down to the village to see Monsieur Knusperli. There was no love lost between the two men. This had little to do with their characters, but more with tradition. For centuries the Demoruz and Knusperli families had peopled this alpine valley, with its indeterminate and special character, hemmed in between German, French, and Italian worlds, and with the residue of lost Roman legions thrown in. They had intermarried and interdeceived each other, and yet, preposterously, they had maintained their own proud identities, together with a handful of other families. The phone book was dominated by six names. All the rest were outsiders or latecomers.

Now Monsieur Knüsperli looked up from his counter with undisguised displeasure as a Demoruz, never mind which one, entered his shop.

“What d’you want?” he asked, or rather, “What dost thou want?” to emphasize his annoyance.

“It’s a question of this watch,” replied Monsieur Demoruz.

“What watch?”

“This one,” said Monsieur Demoruz, opening the packet. “It was bought here by an Italian maid who works up at the banker’s.”

“Yes?”

“It’s not what she wants.”

“How d’you know?”

“She wrote my wife. She wants one without an alarm. I think she’s crazy, mark you. It’s a nice watch. I wouldn’t mind having a watch like that.”

“You could never afford a watch like that.”

Something about Knüsperli’s tone aggravated Demoruz, but that was nothing new.

“It’s none of your business what I can and what I can’t afford,” he countered, “and you can be sure that if one day you see me with a watch like this, I won’t have bought it here.”

“What does this Italian woman want me to do?”

“I told you. What’s the matter, you deaf or something? She wants to exchange it for one without an alarm.”

“A cheaper one?”

“She said in her letter that she’d be willing to make an adjustment, but thought one without an alarm ought to cost less.”

“That’s not necessarily so,” said Knüsperli, shaking his head. “No, not at all. Your white-gold Vacherin, biscuit-thin, hasn’t an alarm or even the date, and yet it comes out about twenty times the cost of the Zona Wakemaster. It’s a different class of timepiece altogether.”

“I’m not saying I don’t agree with you,” declared Demoruz with a sly look, “but an Italian maid wouldn’t want to go overboard, would she? And then,” he added, with gratuitous malice, “you don’t stock the really good watches, do you?”

“I only have to send a cable to any one of the major manufacturers to have any watch in any catalogue here tomorrow morning,”snapped Knüsperli, riled.

“I’m prepared to believe you,” replied Demoruz, with his mocking sidelong look, “but you don’t stock them, do you? I mean, the Italian maid couldn’t come in here, could she, and say, give me that Vacherin or that Piaget out of the window?”

“She could if I showed her the catalogues. Yes, she could.”

“But she didn’t, did she? I mean, you didn’t, did you? Show her the catalogues, I mean.”

“What are you driving at?” asked Knüsperli coldly.

A wild look of innocence burst on Demoruz’s face. “Driving at? I’m making conversation!”

Knüsperli frowned, and there was a long pause.

“You know what she did?” Demoruz went on in a voice suddenly small and moralizing.

“No.”

“She sent the watch back in an ordinary envelope — unregistered, that is — and written on it was ‘Gift of No Value.’ ”

Knüsperli emitted a low whistle of disbelief.

“I’ve got the envelope here! I’ve brought it with me!” Demoruz cried, as he dug in his pockets for the evidence.

Knüsperli smoothed out the envelope, and then looked up, his own eye as dramatic in its smaller, sourer way as Demoruz’s. “Attempting to deceive the Swiss customs,” he said.

“That’s a federal offense!”

“If they’d opened the packet, it’d have meant confiscation, at least.”

“Or a fine,” added Demoruz, “or even prison. They’re getting very tough these days. Or even all three of them, running concurrently. That’s what happened to my wife’s sister Edith. She got it concurrently. First time ever in the canton anyone ever got it concurrently. And she’s a woman at that, although you’d never know it. What’s more, your name’s on the packet, see? That’s the way they got my wife’s sister too. She used to take things out of shops. What got her was the name of the shop on the bag. And such things get around. I mean, they get distorted. It starts out someone smuggled a watch bought at your shop, and by the time it’s been the rounds, it’s you who’s been smuggling watches into your shop.”

“I’ll tell you one thing,” said Knüsperli, after a moment of dour reflection on these verities, “I’m not taking the watch back. It’s been abroad. And it’s come through customs with a false declaration of content. I’m not going to soil my hands.”

“Quite right,” agreed Demoruz. “And yet it’s a lovely watch.” He produced it and fondled it. “ Though it seems to be dented . . . Look, here.”

“No,” said Kniisperli. “That’s a feature of the design. It’s goL a dent on the other side too, see?”

“Mm, I admit that, but this dent seems a bit bigger, doesn’t it? The longer you stare at it, the bigger that dent becomes . . .”

The two men looked deep into each other’s souls.

“Can you afford forty francs?” asked Kniisperli.

“Can I afford forty francs?” Demoruz laughed.

“Don’t try to pull the wool over my eyes. I know you for what you arc —a drunk ... a wastrel ... a disgrace to the entire valley.”

“I can afford whatever I want for whatever I want whenever I want it,” said Demoruz at the top of his voice. “The point is, do I want to afford forty francs?”

“Well, do you?”

“For this watch? Yes, I do.”

“Right. Take it. But there’s one condition.”

“What’s that?”

“Here’s a watch worth forty francs. It’s a Pomona Evergo, in a shockproof chromium-type case. For the price, it’s a good value. You send it to the woman, and tell her you picked it out yourself and that it’s of equal value to the one she sent back. That’s your responsibility.”

“Done,” whispered Demoruz, forking out forty francs in change which became smaller and smaller toward the end.

Knüsperli counted the money twice, and put it in the till.

“There’s only one thing,” said Demoruz.

“Yes?”

“Who pays for the postage?”

Knüsperli thought quickly. He had made a good deal and wished to appear generous. “We share the postage.”

The two men shook hands.

THERE days later, Pia received the substitute watch in Paris.

It had traveled in the same envelope, which had been readdressed. Her claim that it contained a gift of no value was still written on it in her handwriting. The new watch looked suspiciously cheap to her, and when she tried to wind it, the winder dropped out. She took it quickly to a watchmaker, who told her it was hardly worth repairing, since the repairs, which would be frequent, would quickly amount to more than the cost of the watch. She asked him to put a value on it, but he told her he had no experience with merchandise of that nature. When pressed, he thought twenty francs would be exorbitant.

Pia returned home in a fury, and in her desperation she wrote a long letter to Monsieur Petiton, explaining the nature of the deceit to which she had fallen prey. Monsieur Petiton read the letter at breakfast, at first with amusement, but eventually with a welcome anger. Frankly, Monsieur Petiton was bored being up in the mountains. He disliked the snow. What made it tolerable was the manner in which the women dressed to face it. He had a predilection for the smart blouses they liked to affect, and especialiy for the skintight aprés ski pants, which featured the female figure in a way that was at once subtle in repose and gross in motion. He was the kind of voyeur who would never stoop to a keyhole. But even this innocuous pastime had now begun to pall. The telephone and the television were not sufficient to engage his attention or to challenge his acumen. However, his profession was one which had made him conscious of fraud and transgression — in fact, he often fancied he recognized symptoms where none existed. Now Pia’s letter came to him like a chance bone to a somnolent dog. He decided to deal with the problem, and mobilized all his vast and bitter experience in the field of mortal duplicity in order to carry out his delicate charge.

He entered Knüsperli’s shop just before lunch, when Madame Knüsperli was helping her husband out. Knusperli quickly abandoned a couple of other customers and smiled egregiously at his distinguished client.

“It isn’t often we have the honor to see you in person, Monsieur Petiton,” he said. “I trust there is no complaint about the ski boots for your son?”

“I didn’t even know they had been purchased in this shop,” Petiton replied.

“Oh, yes . . . we have fitted the entire family. In fact, Madame was in here only yesterday with her instructor, selecting some more advanced skis. I suggested Lone Eagles — the champion’s favorite.”

Petiton looked at him sharply.

“I am not here to make a purchase,” he said. “On the contrary, I want some money out of you.”

“Out of me?” Knusperli paled.

“ There is the question of a watch,” Petiton went on, in his quiet, efficient way.

“A watch? I don’t seem to remember—”

“On the contrary, I have reason to believe you know exactly what I mean. My maid bought a watch here —”

“An Italian lady? Oh, yes—” Knusperli’s affected innocence compelled him to be as helpful as possible.

“Precisely. An Italian lady. She bought a watch here for a hundred eighty francs.”

“It actually cost one hundred ninety-eight francs, Monsieur, but I made a special price for her.”

“That was most generous of you, I’m sure. We will now consider whether your subsequent actions were motivated by the same spirit of generosity. I understand that the watch in question proved unsuitable, and so she sent it back to you with the idea of exchanging it, a practice which is normal in all the better shops.”

“I agree, Monsieur.”

“I am glad to hear it. In fact, you proved your point by sending her in exchange a watch worth about twenty French francs . . . about eighteen Swiss francs at the present rate of exchange —”

“Oh, Monsieur, I protest! Who valued the watch?”

Monsieur Petiton consulted a piece of paper on which he had prepared his brief.

“The firm of Augier, Dupont et Fils, 118 Boulevard de la Victoire, in Paris, the official agency for at least three reputable Swiss watches.”

“But, Monsieur, the watch is a Pomona Evergo!”

“I’ve never heard of such a company,” said Monsieur Petiton, “and I do a great deal of work with the major companies in Geneva and in La Chaux-de-Fonds. However, it is always possible that there is a deficiency in my knowledge. In that case, all you have to do is to produce the Pomona catalogue, and we will see together how much you owe my maid.”

Knusperli faltered, especially now that his wife was listening. “The Pomona people don’t put out a catalogue,” he said.

“Why not? Isn’t it usual business practice?”

“I don’t know, Monsieur. They’re a curious company in many respects.”

“I can well believe it. Perhaps you could give me their address and telephone number so that we can clear this matter up.”

“I don’t have their address on me.”

“Then how do you get the watches?” asked Monsieur Petiton. “You don’t make them yourself, by any chance?”

“I’ll be frank with you, Monsieur—”

“Ah, at last.”

“What’s the matter, Heinrich?” asked Madame Knusperli.

“Nothing. Nothing’s the matter.” He leaned forward. “You have in your employ a certain Madame Demoruz, who cleans your chalet.”

“That is correct.”

“When your Italian maid selected the onehundred-eighty-franc watch —

“And paid for it!”

“Pm not saying she didn’t! I never said that! Never, Monsieur!”

“All right, go on . . .”

“She — the maid, that is —sent the watch away to Italy, I believe, as a present. This present turned out not to be suitable. Instead of sending it back to me, as she should have done, she sent it to Madame Demoruz, who gave it to her husband, whose name is Monsieur Demoruz.”

“That seems logical.”

“Now, this Monsieur Demoruz came down to see me, and point-blank refused to surrender the watch. He said it wasn’t a new watch anymore, since he was wearing it. He also pointed out that it had been dented in transit. What was I to do? I couldn’t afford to be out of pocket. I told him to buy the maid another watch and to sort it out with her, since she had sent him the watch in the first place. He selected the Pomona Evergo, which he said was suitable. He paid for it. Both watches have been paid for, and as far as I am concerned, it’s a closed chapter. People come in here all the time and buy things, and so long as they pay, I’m not going to concern myself with what happens to the merchandise once it has left the shop. After all, I’m not a charitable institution!”

“Very well,” Monsieur Petiton said quietly, “I have your story. All I can tell you is that someone will be compelled to pay up the difference between eighteen and one hundred eighty francs, and the next time you sec me I may well be accompanied by a gendarme.”

“The watch cost forty francs, Monsieur, not eighteen!”

“I prefer to believe the assessment of a reputable watchmaker, especially since you seem unable to put your hands on any official Pomona price list. Bon appétit.”

“Damn Demoruz!” shouted Knüsperli after Petiton had gone, but his show of fire didn’t prevent him from being scolded by his wife in a most degrading fashion.

PETTITION lunched at the ski club, and watched the elegant ladies parade before him. After lunch, he returned to his chalet, knowing that Madame Demoruz would be cleaning there.

“Your husband has a handsome new watch, I am told,” he said, apparently reading Le Figaro.

“A new watch, Monsieur? I really haven’t noticed.”

“Oh, come, come, Madame Demoruz, of course you’ve noticed. By the brilliant manner in which you winkle out every speck of dirt in this chalet, I can see that you notice everything.”

“He may have a watch, but it isn’t new,” said Madame Demoruz doggedly.

“Not new? How old is it? A couple of weeks, shall we say?”

“What are you getting at, Monsieur?”

“Just this, Madame Demoruz,” he replied, looking straight at her, almost kindly. “Pia sent you a watch she had bought for her nephew and which had been found unsuitable, didn’t she?”

“That’s right.”

“Perhaps you’d care to continue telling the story yourself from there on?”

“Why, what’s up?”

“I’ll tell you when you’ve finished.”

Madame Demoruz shrugged her shoulders. She certainly behaved in a less suspicious manner than Monsieur Knüsperli, but then she was a woman. Monsieur Petiton reflected, and even if there is not enough beauty to be shared by the sisterhood, the art of lying is a mine of inexhaustible profusion.

“When Pia sent me the watch, 1 gave it to my husband, naturally. I haven’t got time to do more than my work. That evening, when i saw my husband, I remarked on the watch on his wrist, and asked him how he’d got hold of it. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Knüsperli refused point-blank to take it back.’ ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘so he gave it to you.’ ‘No? he said, ‘it’s been paid for. He can’t keep it, especially since he won’t take it back, so somebody’s got to have it.’ ‘Well,’ I said, ‘Pia paid for it—she ought to have it.’ ‘But she doesn’t want it,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a letter telling us that much.’ ‘That’s all very well,’ I said, ‘but she wanted another one.’ ‘I know that,’ he said, ‘and out of the goodness of my heart,’ he said, ‘I bought her one. It cost me all of forty francs.’ ‘Forty francs!’ I said. ‘Well, thirty,’ he said. ‘You can’t buy a decent watch for thirty francs,’ I said. ‘Well, forty,’ he said. So he needn’t have bought Pia anything, you see, Monsieur. It was, as he said, out of the goodness of his heart. He didn’t wish her to go emptyhanded, she being a foreigner, you see, Monsieur, and not Swiss.”

“In other words, Madame Demoruz, you maintain that Monsieur Knüsperli refused to take the watch back?”

“That’s what my husband told me,” said Madame Demoruz, one of her lips quivering in premature outrage.

“Well, Monsieur Knusperli maintains that your husband refused to give the watch up. I am not calling anyone a liar,” Monsieur Petiton remarked coolly. “All I am interested in is the reimbursement of a sum which I estimate at one hundred sixty-two francs, and I will go to the gendarmerie this afternoon.”

MONSIEUR DEMORUZ was with Monsieur Knüsperli when Monsieur Petiton arrived with the local gendarme, Broglio, who was a cousin of Knüsperli’s and a nephew of Demoruz’s, and who had reason to mistrust both. Madame Demoruz had hurried home and told her husband what Monsieur Petiton had said. Monsieur Demoruz, who could always be found at home during the day, bestirred himself, and bellowing with rage, rampaged down to the village. Now he and Knüsperli were frozen like statues at the height of their argument. They both greeted the gendarme by saying “Adieu, Jules,” rather sullenly. The gendarme took off his cap in order to keep the row within the family.

“Shall I start?” asked Monsieur Petiton.

“I already have cognizance of the facts, Monsieur,” said the gendarme.

“You have cognizance of the two different stories, Monsieur le gendarme. It is up to us, to you, to unravel the facts,” corrected Monsieur Petiton.

“As you wish, Monsieur,” said the gendarme, who struggled to hide his slow-wittedness behind an affectation of weariness. Slowly he took out a pad, and found the appropriate place after a lengthy examination of a blank sheet of paper.

“Where is the watch?” he inquired.

“Which watch?” asked Knüsperli. “There are two watches.”

“Two watches,” agreed Monsieur Demoruz passionately.

“Two watches?” The gendarme looked at Monsieur Petiton as though he had been told an untruth. “If there are as many as two watches, this may be a matter for headquarters,” he said.

“I told you the whole story in your office,” Monsieur Petiton remarked with elaborate patience.

“I know that Monsieur. I’m not an imbecile.”

“You stated that an Italian lady, Chiantella, Pia, in service with you at Number 91 bis Avenue Foch, Paris, Seine, France, had bought a watch — one watch,” he emphasized powerfully “— one watch, at the shop of Monsieur Knüsperli, Heinrich, for a sum of one hundred eighty francs—”

“Swiss francs,” interrupted Monsieur Petiton.

“Since we are on Swiss soil, Monsieur, francs will be taken to mean Swiss francs unless specified as being French. On receiving the watch, she decided that it would be unsuitable, and sent it to Madame Demoruz, Irène, of the Chalet Souriante Colline in this village, for her to take and exchange for a watch of similar value or less without an alarm attachment. Whatever transpired, she received in return a watch in a chromium-type case claimed to be a Pomona Evergo, estimated by the firm of Augier, Dupont et Fils of 118 Boulevard de la Victoire in Paris as worth twenty French francs, without any reimbursement for the difference in price. The watch in question, when wound, refused to go, and the winder fell to the floor. Is that correct?”

“That is correct,” agreed Monsieur Petiton.

“Then it is a question of only one watch,” said the gendarme. “Since it was not the intention of Mademoiselle Chiantella, Pia, to purchase more than one.”

“She hardly expected to receive one at the cost of another, more expensive one; therefore the case involves two watches,” argued Monsieur Petiton.

“Did she expect to own two watches?” asked the gendarme.

“Of course not.”

“Then it is a case involving one watch,” he insisted. “You wish her to pay the correct sum for the Pomona Evergo?”

“Yes.”

“Then that is the watch which concerns us here.”

“But she has already paid for the more expensive watch!” cried Monsieur Petiton, losing his composure.

The gendarme sighed. “Who is conducting this inquiry, Monsieur, you or I?”

“You are,” agreed Monsieur Petiton, with evident regret.

“Very well, then.” The gendarme faced Knüsperli and Demoruz. “Now, when Demoruz, Albert, brought in the watch to you, Knüsperli, Heinrich, did you refuse to take it back?”

“I did not,” stated Knüsperli, categorically.

“That’s a brazen lie!” shouted Demoruz, banging his gnarled fist on the glass counter.

“Take that back,” flared Knüsperli, “or leave the shop!”

“Nobody’s leaving the shop while I’m here,” said the gendarme. “You were willing to take the watch back?”

“As Monsieur Petiton correctly pointed out, it is normal business practice.”

“Then why didn’t you take it back?”

“Demoruz refused to surrender it.”

“As God is my witness—” roared Demoruz, bringing down his fist again, and this time breaking the glass on the counter, “as God is my witness, that is a stinking lie. The Italian woman sent the witch back in an ordinary envelope marked ‘Gift of No Value’ in an evident plan to defraud the customs.”

The gendarme’s eyebrows shot up to meet his hairline. “Are you making this part of the record?” he asked.

“Yes, I am!”

“Prove it!” cried Petiton.

“I can prove it, and will!”

“Produce the envelope!”

The steam suddenly vanished from Demoruz’s boiler. “Oh, no,” he said, “I used the same envelope to send the other watch back.”

“Still allegedly marked ‘Gift of No Value’?”

“I — I don’t remember.”

“So much for the high moral principles of these people,” Petiton declaimed.

“At least it was a much cheaper watch!” yelled Demoruz. “It really was a gift of no value.”

“Ah, you agree!”

“Of course I agree.”

“An admission at last,” said Petiton, satisfied.

“I never denied it was a cheaper watch,” warned Monsieur Knüsperli.

“You evaded the issue every time I asked you its worth,” accused Petiton.

“Forty francs he charged me, while you tell me, Monsieur, it’s only worth twenty!” Demoruz howled.

“And who’s going to pay for the damage to my counter?” Knüsperli roared back.

“Gentlemen,” said the gendarme, with that pained dignity which schoolmasters use in order to impress on their pupils that they are disappointed in them, “gentlemen, what is at stake here, as I see it, is not so much a few francs as the honor of the commune.” With an instinct shrewder than his conscious thought, he made a move to shift the discussion onto the plane of pride and away from the facts, of which he understood not one. Knüsperli was the quicker of the two litigants to realize that an escape road was being opened for him. “ I’m not a fool,” he said, suddenly reasonable. “I value Monsieur Petiton as a customer more than I value a slight extra profit, and I care for my reputation even more deeply. This shop was opened in 1902, by ray grandfather—”

“You take after him, the old bastard,” said Demoruz.

Knüsperli brushed aside the insult with a sadly indulgent smile. “—and we have served the community faithfully ever since,” he went on, “so that I am prepared, if all the parties are willing, to reimburse the difference in price myself. The sum in question is one hundred forty francs. Is that agreeable to everyone?”

“You can’t do that!” cried Demoruz. “Don’t you think I can see through you, you hypocrite? You’re trying to put me in the wrong!”

“Perhaps you’re willing to join me? We’ll put down seventy francs each,” suggested Knüsperli.

“You think I’m an idiot or something?” growled the cornered Demoruz. He looked at the others, and then back at the hated Knüsperli, who was smiling, a meaningless, fixed, maddening smile. “I won’t pay a centime,” Demoruz said in anger, “but you’re all mad if you think I’ll continue to sully my wrist with this tainted watch!” He took it off, and placed it on the cracked counter. “There!”

“I wouldn’t touch that watch now. You take it right out of here, and I never want to see either of you again.”

Demoruz looked hunted and outdignified. Suddenly, foolishly, he held it out to the gendarme.

“Are you trying to bribe me, Uncle Albert?” asked the gendarme coldly. “I’m on duty, you know.”

Desperately Demoruz presented it to Monsieur Petiton, who waved it away impatiently. “I’ve got more watches than I know what to do with,” he said, “’and of better quality than that.”

“All right!” shouted Demoruz, who suddenly saw daylight. “Tell you what, I’ll send it back to the Italian woman, and I’ll declare what it is and its value on the envelope. That’s what I’ll do. The rest of you do what you damn well please!”

“Does that satisfy you, Monsieur?” the gendarme asked Petiton.

Petiton was frankly a little disappointed by these unexpected fireworks of generosity. He had not foreseen them, since they never occurred in the field of investment banking. “I suppose the solution is reasonable,” he said, “although the palpable attempt to defraud a domestic servant is going unpunished. If I hadn’t taken the matter in hand, we could today be confronted by a grave example of social injustice.”

“How much do you pay the Italian?” asked Demoruz, his eyes huge and ironical.

“That is, I suggest, none of your business,” Petiton replied cuttingly.

“While we’re talking about social injustice, I thought I’d bring it up,” Demoruz added. “I just hope it’s a bit more than the miserly pittance you pay my wife. Six francs an hour. He’s stinking rich, rolling in money, and he pays the lowest wages in the whole damned village. Easy on the social injustice, Monsieur. Easy on it.”

Petiton flushed with anger.

Knüsperli came to his help. “Six francs an hour? That means it took your poor wife over six and a half hours to buy you that watch. You’d better go easy on the social injustice, too, Albert.”

“I’ll kill you if you call me by my first name! I’m Monsieur Demoruz to you, you scum!”

THE gendarme separated them, and frog-marched Demoruz unsteadily and elaborately back to his chalet. That evening he got really drunk. He hated everybody, hit his wife, and drank his Lie straight from the bottle. The front of his shirt was wet from the times he had missed his mouth. When his wife put his meal before him, he threw it across the room. He lit a vile cigar, and it made him sick to his stomach, so he threw it out of the window. It landed on a pile of straw, which soon began to smolder and then burn, in spite of the cold. Madame Demoruz was the first to smell the burning, and she rushed out with a pail of water, but the wind blew some bits of flaming straw against the walls of the old barn, which quickly took fire. The local firemen, volunteers all, appeared on the scene when the barn was already an empty shell. They were never very quick off the mark on these occasions because of their insistence on appearing at the scene of a conflagration in uniform. All they could do was to abandon the barn to its fate, and to throw snow against the walls of the chalet in case the wind should change direction.

Demoruz stood and watched, a fiendish expression on his face. He muttered the one word “Knüsperli,” relieved himself on the embers, took an ax out of the woodshed, and reeled down to the village. There he destroyed the window of Knüsperli’s shop, and offered no resistance to the gendarme when the latter came to arrest him.

Relatively sober the next morning, he refused to believe that Knüsperli hadn’t set fire to the barn. “He had it in for me, because I showed him up for what he is!” he repeated endlessly.

Knüsperli proved that he was in the café playing cards with relatives, but Demoruz insisted that these relatives had to be liars if they were relatives of Kniisperli’s. He even claimed be had seen various suspicious characters flitting about in the twilight while he was eating his supper, and remembered that he had said to his wife, “That’s funny. Those people running about in the dark outside look like Knüsperli’s relatives. They’ve no business out there.”

Madame Demoruz agreed rather shamefacedly to everything her husband alleged, and explained her black eye by saying that she slipped and fell while trying to identify Knüsperli’s relatives in the dark.

Knüsperli resorted to the law in his exasperation, but while these due processes were tortuously underway, Demoruz was manhandled and left bleeding one night on his way from the café, an empty bottle of Lie in his hand. Soon after, the tires of Knusperli’s car were found gashed. It became clear to the gendarme that factions had been formed and that the venerable hatreds of the valley had been revived. Rather than resorting to Lausanne, and dragging all these sinister happenings into the open to the degradation of the village, he convened a meeting of the ciders.

The doyen, Monsieur Willy Demoruz-Knésperli, who was related to everyone’s relatives, and who was ninety-two years old, put forward his views at this meeting. He stood up, his sparse hair standing like a field of exclamation marks on a red and freckled soil, his alpine eyes blue suns setting in rivers with scarlet banks, his nose a crystal drop trembling among the hairs of its prow, his carelessly shaved neck rising to his jaw in a series of corrugations, his toothless gums biting on memories, and he spoke.

“To destroy each other’s goods is as blind as destroying one’s own. We are here, by God’s will, to live in peace. We fought all our wars at the beginning of history. We have learned to do without. God, in His infinite mercy, gave us high mountains to protect ourselves, good cows to milk, good wood to build with. And, as if that were not enough, He even sent us foreigners to exploit. We have everything we need, and more. But I tell you, if now we have fallen out among ourselves, it is only because there are two uneasy consciences at the root of the trouble. I won’t say who is right and who is wrong. It takes two uneasy consciences to make the kind of unpleasantness we’ve been having. One is not enough. I’ve no more to say, except that it will serve us right if the Almighty, whose wisdom passeth all understanding, takes away die foreigners. Then we’ll be reduced to exploiting each other as we did when we still had wars.”

“Why do we see you so rarely in church?” asked the priest, smiling, when the meeting was over.

“Don’t like it. Bores me. Sleep better at home,” murmured the old man.

Meanwhile, Pia, in Paris, was amazed and gratified not only to have her money refunded but to receive both watches as well. She sent the valuable one back to Manlio in a fresh envelope marked “Gift of No Value,” explaining to him that the shop refused to take it back, and that it had cost her a lot of money, and that every time the alarm rang he should think of the love which had motivated its being sent. The other watch she sent to Giorgio.

When she went back to Italy in the summer, she noticed that the two boys hadn’t changed. Giorgio was as ugly as ever, Manlio perhaps even more beautiful. Only the bicycles seemed to have aged a bit.

“Well, and how are the watches?” she asked.

The boys looked at one another.

“Mine arrived broken,” said Giorgio.

“Porca la miseria,” Pia grumbled, “you can’t trust the posts. It left Paris in perfect condition.”

“Zannonelli said it wasn’t worth mending.”

“As bad as that?” moaned Pia. “Madonna. And yours?” She smiled winningly at Manlio.

“Mine? I lost it.”

“Lost it! You’re lying!” Pia accused.

Manlio shrugged his shoulders in a noncommittal way.

In a fury, Pia took him by his bare arms, and shook him. “Where is it?” she screeched.

“I sold it,” Manlio said, only half apologetic. “I needed the money more than the watch. I sold it to an American sailor.”

“How much for?” Pia whispered dramatically

“Four thousand lire.”

Pia slapped his face so violently that it had to be a gesture of love. “Mascalzone!” she cried. “You sold it for less than I paid for it!”

Manlio shrugged his shoulders again, and lay down in the sun.