“THESE IDEAS OF YOURS are foolish and will not work,” Jean Allegret said an hour later.
“Perhaps not,” Harold said.
They were sitting on a bench on the lawn, facing the lighted windows but in the dark. On another bench, directly in front of them, Barbara and Sabine and another girl whose name Harold didn’t know were sitting and talking quietly. There were five or six more people here and there, on the steps, in chairs, or on other benches, talking and watching the moon rise. The others were inside, in the library, dancing to the music of a portable record player.
“Perhaps they are foolish,” he said, “but I prefer them, for my own sake. If it is foolish to think that all men are brothers, it is at least more civilized—and more agreeable—than thinking that all men—you and I, for instance—are enemies, waiting for a chance to run a bayonet through each other’s back.”
The wine had made him garrulous and extravagant in speech; also, he had done much less than the usual amount of talking since they had landed in France, and it gave him the feeling of being in arrears, of having a great deal backed up that he urgently needed to say.
“If it is really a question of that,” he went on, “then I will get up and turn around and—since I like you too much to put a bayonet in your back—offer you my back instead. Hoping that you won’t call my bluff, you understand. Or that something will distract your attention long enough for me to—”
“Very dear, your theories. Very gentle and sweet and impossible to put into practice. Nevertheless, you interest me. You are not the American type. I didn’t know there were Americans like that.”
“But that’s what I keep telling you. Exactly what I am is the American type.”
“You have got everything all wrong, but your ideas interest me.”
“They are not my ideas. I have not said one original thing all evening.”
“I like you,” Jean Allégret said. “And if it were possible, if there was the slightest chance of changing human nature for the better, I would be on your side. But it does not change. Force is what counts. Idealism cannot survive a firing squad.… But in another way, another world, maybe, what you say is true. And in spite of all I have said, I believe it too. I am an artist. I paint.”
“Seriously?”
“Excuse me,” the Frenchman said. “I neglect my duties as a host. I will be back in a moment.” He got up and went across the lawn and into the house.
The moon was above the marshes now, round and yellow and enormous. The whole sky was gilded by it. The house was no longer ugly. By this light you could see what the Victorian architect had had in mind. Harold stood behind Barbara, with his hand on her shoulder, listening to the girls’ conversation. Then, drawn by curiosity, he went up the steps and into the house, as far as the drawing-room door. The fruitwood furniture was of a kind he had little taste for, but around the room were portraits and ivory miniatures he would have liked to look at. But would it (since the French were said to be so reluctant to ask people into their homes) be considered an act of rudeness for him to go around looking at things all by himself?
He turned back toward the front door and met Jean Allégret in the hall. “Oh there you are,” the Frenchman said. “I was looking for you.”
They went and sat down where they had been before, but turned the bench around so that they could watch the moon rising through the night sky.
“I do not like the painting of our time,” Jean Allégret said. “It is sterile and it has nothing to do with life. What I paint is action. I stand and watch a man cutting a tree down, a farmer in the field, and I love the way he swings the ax blade, I see every motion, and it’s that motion that interests me—not color or design. It’s life I want to paint.”
“You are painting now?”
“I have not painted since the war. I am rebuilding what was destroyed, you understand. I cannot do that and also paint. The painting is my personal life, which has to give way to the responsibilities I have inherited.”
“You are not married?”
The Frenchman shook his head. “When the house is rebuilt and the farms are under cultivation again, then I will find a wife who understands what I expect of her, and there will be children.”
“And she must expect nothing of you? There can be no alteration of your ideas to fit hers?”
“None whatever. I do not approve of American ideas of how to treat women. They are gallant only on the surface. You lose control over your women. And you have no authority over your children or your home. You continually divorce and remarry and make a further mess of it.”
“Modern marriage is very complicated.”
“It need not be.”
Harold saw Eugène stop in front of Barbara and say something. After a moment he walked away. He did not appear to be having a good time. The tweed coat, Harold thought.
Turning to Jean Allégret, he said: “You do not know my name, do you?”
The Frenchman shook his head.
“Very good,” Harold said. “I have a suggestion to make. Suppose I do not tell you my name. Some day you may find that you cannot go on carrying the burden of family responsibilities, or that you were wrong in laying aside your personal life. And you may have to drop everything and start searching for what you once had. Or for something. Everybody at one time or another has to go on a search, and if I do not tell you my name, or where I live, then you will have an object to search for, an excuse. America is a large country, it may take years and years to find me, but while you are searching you will be discovering all sorts of things, you will be talking to people, having experiences, and even if you never find me— You don’t like my idea?”
“It’s completely impractical. Romantic and charming and impractical—a thoroughly American idea.”
“I suppose it is,” Harold said. He took his financial diary out of his pocket and wrote his name and forwarding address in Paris and their address in America. Then he tore the page out and handed it to the Frenchman, and went over to the bench where the three girls were sitting. They looked up as he approached.
“Do you want to come and join us?” he asked.
“Are you having a pleasant conversation?” Barbara asked.
“Very.”
“Then I think I’ll stay here. We’re talking about America.”
“When you come back to Paris in September,” Jean Allégret said as Harold sat down, “I’d like very much to have you come and stay with me in the country. At my own place, I mean. This is my uncle’s house, you understand.”
Harold noticed that he had said “you,” not “you and your wife.”
“We’d like to very much,” he said.
“We could have some shooting. It’s very primitive, you understand. Not like this. But I think you will find it interesting. Actually,” Jean Allégret said, his voice changing to accommodate a note of insincerity, “I am young to have taken on so large a responsibility. I’m only twenty-seven, you know.” Behind the insincerity was the perfectly sincere image that he projected on the screen of his self-approval—of the man who lays aside his youth prematurely.
Like those people who, weeping at the grave of a friend, have no choice but to dramatize the occasion, Harold thought, and search around in their mind for a living friend to write to, describing how they stood at the grave, weeping, etc. The grief is no less real for requiring an audience. What the person doubts and seeks confirmation of is his own reality.
“There are six farms to manage,” the Frenchman went on, “and I am—in spite of my lack of experience—in the position of a father to the village. They wanted to make me mayor. They bring all their problems to me, even their marital problems. I am also working with the boys.… The whole life of the community was destroyed, and slowly, a little at a time, I am helping them rebuild it. But it means that I have very little time to myself, and no time for painting. If the Communists take over, I will be the first to be shot, in our village.”
“Are there many?”
/>
“Five or six.”
“And you know who they are?”
“Certainly. They have nothing against me personally, but if I am successful I will defeat their plans, and so I will be the first person taken out and shot. But you must come and see my village.… I want to give you my address, before I forget it.”
Harold produced the financial diary again and while the Frenchman was writing, he sat looking at the dancers framed by the lighted windows. He still felt amazed and numb when he thought of what happened in the dining room, but most of the time he didn’t think about it. A curtain had come down over his embarrassment. After a startled glance at the wreckage of the children’s table, the guests had politely turned away and filed from the room as if nothing had happened. Jean Allégret went to the kitchen and came back with a damp cloth and scrubbed at the wine stain in the rug. Harold started to pick up the broken glass and found himself gently pushed out of the dining room. The sliding doors closed behind him. In a few minutes, Jean Allégret reappeared and brushed his apology aside—it was nothing, it was all the fault of the table pliante—and took him by the arm and led him outdoors and they went on talking.
Now, when the financial diary and the pencil had been returned to him, Harold said: “Would you take me inside and show me the house? I didn’t want to walk around by myself looking at things. Just the two rooms they’re dancing in.”
To his surprise, the Frenchman stood up and said stiffly: “I will speak to my uncle.”
“If it means that, never mind. I don’t want to bother anyone. I just thought you could take me around and tell me about the portraits, but it isn’t in the least important.”
“I will speak to my uncle. It is his house.”
Twice in one evening, Harold thought with despair. For it was perfectly clear from the gravity with which his request had been received that it was not the light thing he had thought it was.
Jean Allégret conducted him up the steps and into the hall and said: “Wait here.” Then he turned and went back down the steps. Watching through the open doorway, Harold saw him approach a tall elderly man who was standing with a group of people in the moonlight. He bent his head down attentively while Jean Allégret spoke to him. Then, instead of turning and coming toward the house, they left the group and walked up and down, talking earnestly. A minute passed, and then another, and another. Harold began to feel more and more conspicuous, standing in the lighted hall as on a stage, in plain sight of everyone on the terrace. He had already been in those two rooms. The others were dancing there now. And he could have looked at the pictures, the tapestries, the marble statuary, by himself, if he hadn’t been afraid that it would be bad-mannered. And in America people were always pleased when you asked to see their house.
Uncle and nephew made one more complete turn around the terrace, still talking, and apparently arrived at a decision, for they turned suddenly and came toward the house. Jean Allégret introduced Harold to his uncle and then left them together. M. Allégret spoke no English. He was about sixty, taller than Harold, dignified, and soft-spoken. For a minute or two he went on making polite conversation. Then he said abruptly, as if in reply to something Harold had just said: “Vous prenez un intérêt aux maisons?”
“Je prends un intérêt dans cette maison. Mais—”
“Alors.” Turning, M. Allégret led him over to a lithograph hanging on the wall beside the door into the salon. “Voici un tableau d’une chasse à courre qui a eu lieu ici en mille neuf cent sept,” he said. “La clef indique l’identité des personnes. Voici le Kaiser, et auprès de lui est le Prince Philippe zu Eulenberg … le Prince Frédéric-Guillaume … la Princesse Sophie de Württemberg, portant l’amazone noire, et le roi d’Angleterre … Mon père et ma mère … le Prince Charles de Saxe … avec leurs chasseurs et leurs laquais. Le tableau a été peint de mémoire, naturellement. Ces bois de cerf que vous voyez le long du mur.…”
AT ELEVEN O’CLOCK Alix came toward the circle in the library, where Harold and four or five young men were talking about French school life, and said: “Eugène thinks it is time we went home.”
Harold shook hands around the circle and then sought out Jean Allégret.
“We have to go,” he said, “and I wanted to be sure I said good night to all your cousins. Would you take me around to them? I am not sure which—”
This request presented no difficulties. Barbara and Harold said good night to Mme Allégret, to various rather plain young girls, and to M. Allégret, who came out of the house with them. The others were waiting with the bicycles, under the grape arbor. Jean Allégret and his uncle conducted the party from the château along the driveway as far as the place where it dropped steeply downhill, and there they said good night. Harold and Jean Allégret shook hands warmly, one last time. Calling good night, good night, they coasted down the hill, through the dark tunnel of branches, with the dim carbide bicycle lamps barely showing the curves in the road, and emerged suddenly into bright moonlight. Dismounting at a sandy patch before the bridge, Harold risked saying to Eugène: “Did you have a pleasant evening?”
“No. They were too young. There was no one there who was very interesting.” His voice in the moonlight was not unfriendly, but neither was it encouraging.
Out on the main road, Harold pedaled beside Barbara, whose lamp was brighter than his. “Wasn’t it awful about the folding table?” he said.
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“I felt terrible about it, but they were so kind. They just closed the doors on it, and it was exactly as if it had never happened. But I keep thinking about the broken china and glasses that can never be replaced probably. And that stain on the carpet.”
“What were you talking about?”
“I don’t remember. Why?”
“I just wondered.”
“They attacked poor dead Woodrow Wilson. And then they started on the Jews and Negroes. I thought France was the one country where Negroes were accepted socially. They sounded just like Southerners. What was it like at dinner?”
“All right. I didn’t like the boy I sat next to.”
“He was very handsome.”
“He is coming to America on business, and he thought we could be useful to him. I didn’t like him at all.”
“And Alix’s friend, who sat on the other side of you?”
“He was nice, but he was talking to Alix.”
“I had a lovely time. And I saw the house. Jean Allégret’s uncle showed me all through the downstairs, as far as the kitchen, and then he took me upstairs, through all the bedrooms, which were wonderful. It was like a museum. And in a dressing room I saw the family tree, painted on wood. It was interminable. It must have gone back at least to Charlemagne. And then we went outside and saw the family chapel. Jean Allégret wants us to come and stay with him up near the Belgian border.… Did you have a nice evening? Afterward, I mean?”
“All except for one thing. I think I hurt Eugène’s feelings. He came and asked me to dance with him and I refused. I was interested in what Sabine was saying, and I didn’t feel like dancing at the moment, and I’m afraid he was offended.”
“He probably understood.… They don’t use the chapel as a chapel any more. They keep wine in it.”
“And I don’t think Sabine had a very good time,” Barbara said. “She sat with Alix or me all evening, and the boys didn’t ask her to dance. I don’t understand it. She’s very pretty, and Mme Viénot said that she was so popular and had so many invitations.”
“The money,” he said.
“What money?”
They were overtaking Alix, and so he did not answer. The winding road was almost white, the distant hills were silver, and they could see as well as in daylight. They rode now in single file, now all together.
“Think of going five miles to a party on bicycles,” Barbara said to Harold, “and coming home in the moonlight!”
In a high, thin, eerie voice, Sabine began to sing: “Au clair de la lune, mo
n ami Pierrot, prête-moi ta plume pour écrire un mot …” The tune was not the one the Americans knew, and they drew as near to her as their bicycles permitted. After that she sang “Cadet Rouselle a trois maisons qui n’ont ni poutres ni chevrons …” and they were so taken with the three houses that had no rafters, the three suits, the three hats, the three big dogs, the three beautiful cats, that they begged her to sing it again. Instead she told them a ghost story.
In a village near here, she said, but a long time ago, there was a schoolmaster who drove himself into a frenzy trying to teach reading and writing and the catechism to boys who wanted to be out working in the fields with their fathers. He had a birch cane, which he used frequently, and an expression which he used still more. Whenever any boy didn’t know his lesson, the schoolmaster would say: “One dies as one is born. There is never any improvement.” Then he’d reach for his birch rod.
One rainy autumn evening when he got home, he discovered that he had left his examination books at the school. And though he could have waited until next day to correct them, he was so anxious to find what mistakes his pupils had made that he went back that night, after his supper. A waning moon sailed through black clouds, and the wind whipped his cloak up into the air, and the familiar landscape looked different, as everything does on a windy autumn night. And when he opened the door of the schoolhouse, he saw that one of the pupils was still there, sitting on his bench. “Don’t you even know enough to go home?” he shouted. “One dies as one is born.” And the boy said, in a voice that chilled the schoolmaster’s blood: “I was never born, and therefore I cannot die.” With that he vanished.
Now I know what she’s like, Harold thought. This is her element—telling ghost stories. And this filtered moonlight. All this silveriness.
The supernatural shouldn’t be understood too well; it should have gaps in it for you to think about afterward.… What he missed because he didn’t know the words or because their bicycles swerved, drawing them apart for a moment, merely added to the effect.
The next day, the schoolmaster was very nervous when he came to teach the class. He looked at each face carefully, and saw with relief only the usual ones. But one thing was not usual. André, who had never in his life recited, knew his whole day’s lesson without a fault. Growing suspicious, the schoolmaster stopped calling on him. Even then the hand waved in the air, so anxious was he to recite. That evening, the schoolmaster walked home the long way round, and stopped at Andre’s house, and learned that he was sick in bed. So then he knew.
The Chateau Page 21
