“Where will we find another room like this?” he said, and closed the door gently on that freakish collection of books, on the tarnished mirrors, the fireplace that could not be used, the bathtub into which water did not flow, the map of Ile d’Yeu, the miniatures, the red and black and white wallpaper, the now familiar view, through that always open window, of the bottom of the sea. As he started down, he thought: We will never come here again.…
Mme Viénot was waiting for them at the foot of the stairs, and they followed her along the back passageway by which they had first entered the house, around a corner, and then another corner. A door opened silently, on the right, and Harold found himself face to face with a maniacal old woman, who clawed at his coat pocket and for a second scared him out of his wits. It was the cook. He was seeing the cook at last, and she had put something in his pocket. Too astonished to speak, he pressed a five-hundred-franc note into her hand, and she withdrew behind the door. He glanced ahead of him and saw Mme Viénot’s skirt disappearing around the next corner. He was more than half convinced that she had seen—that she had eyes in the back of her head. She must, in any case, have sensed that something strange was going on. But when he caught up with her in the courtyard, she made no reference to what had happened in the corridor and, blushing from the sense of complicity in a deception he did not understand, he also avoided any mention of it.
Mme Bonenfant and Mme Cestre were waiting outside with the two children, whom the Americans had scarcely laid eyes on, and Alix’s baby in her stroller. The Americans shook hands with their hostess, with Mme Bonenfant, with Mme Cestre. They disposed of the dressing case and the two small suitcases among the three of them. Sabine kissed her mother and grandmother, and then, mounting their bicycles, waving and calling good-by, they rode out of the courtyard, past the Lebanon cedar that was two hundred years old, and down the cinder drive.
Harold did not dare look at the piece of paper until they had turned into the road and there was no possibility of his being seen from the house. He let Barbara and Sabine draw ahead and then, balancing a suitcase with one hand, he put his other into his pocket. By all the rules of narration it should have been a communication from M. Viénot, a prisoner somewhere in the attic, crying out for help through his only friend, the cook. It was, instead, a recipe for French-fried potatoes, and with it, on another piece of paper three inches square, a note:
Si, par hasard, M. et Mme Rhodes connaissaient quelqu’un desirant du personnel français mon fils et moi partirions très volontiers à l’Etranger. Voici mon addresse Mme Foëcy à St. Claude de Diray Indre-et-Loire.…
So he was not so far off, after all. It was the cook who wanted them to rescue her, from Mme Viénot and the unhappy country of France.
IN ALL THE FIELDS between the château and the village, the grain had been cut and stacked. The scythe and the blades of the reaper had spared only those poppies that grew along the road, among the weeds and the wildflowers. The bluets had just come into flower.
“My sister was married at Beaumesnil,” Sabine said, “and because of the Occupation we couldn’t have the kind of flowers that are usual at weddings, so, half an hour before the ceremony, the bridesmaids went out and picked their own bouquets, at the side of the road.”
“It sounds charming,” Barbara said.
“It was.” Sabine swerved to avoid a rut. “There were some people from the village present, and they thought that if my sister had field flowers for her wedding it must be the fashion. Since that time, whenever there is a wedding in Brenodville the bride carries such a bouquet.”
The note of condescension he heard in her voice was unconscious, Harold decided, and had nothing to do with the fact that she belonged to one social class and the village to another but was simply the smiling condescension of the adult for the child. He kept turning to look back at the château, so white against the dark woods. Since he couldn’t do what he would have liked to do, which was to fold it up and stuff it in the suitcase and take it away with him, he tried to commit it to memory.
Then they were at the outskirts of Brenodville, and it looked as if the whole village had come out to meet them and escort them to their train. Actually, as he instantly realized, it was simply that it was Sunday afternoon. The people they met spoke to Sabine and sometimes nodded to the Americans. They cannot not know who we are, he thought, and at that moment someone spoke to him—a middle-aged man in a dark-blue Sunday suit, with his two children walking in front of him and his wife at his side. Surprised and pleased, Harold answered: “Bonjour, monsieur!” and when they were past, he turned to Sabine and asked: “Who is that?”
“That was M. Fleury.”
He looked back over his shoulder to see if their old friend had stopped and was waiting for him to ride back, but M. Fleury had kept on walking.
“Have I got time to ride back and speak to him?” he said.
“You did speak to him,” Barbara said.
“But I didn’t recognize him. He looked so different.”
The girls were talking and didn’t hear him.
Riding past the cemetery, he took one last look at the monuments, which were surely made of papier-mâché, and at the graves decorated with a garish mixture of real and everlasting wreaths and flowers. As for the village itself, in two weeks’ time they had come to know every doorway, every courtyard, every purple clematis, climbing rose, and blue morning-glory vine between here and the little river.
In the cobblestone square in front of the mairie they turned left, into a street that led them downhill in the direction of the railway station, and soon overtook Eugène, striding along by himself, with his coat on one arm and in the other hand his light suitcase. Alix was not with him. Harold looked around for her and saw that she wasn’t anywhere. He slowed down, ready to ride beside Eugène. Receiving no encouragement, he rode on.
“What do we do with the bicycles?” he asked, when the two girls caught up with him.
“Someone will call for them,” Sabine said.
On the station platform, he saw their two big suitcases and the dufflebag, checked through to Paris. The smaller suitcases they could manage easily with Eugène’s help, even though they had to change trains at Blois. Traveling with French people, there would be no problems. He wouldn’t have to ask the same question four different times so that he would have four answers to compare.
Eugène arrived, and drew Sabine aside, and stood talking to her farther down the platform, where they were out of earshot. Harold turned to Barbara and said in a low voice: “Where is Alix?”
“I don’t know,” she answered.
“Something must have happened.”
“Sh-h-h.”
“It’s very queer,” he said. “She didn’t say good-by. There is only one direct way home—the way we came—and we didn’t meet her, so she must have wanted to avoid us.”
“Possibly.”
“Do you think they quarreled?”
“Something has happened.”
“Do you think it has anything to do with us?”
“What could it have to do with us?”
“I don’t know,” he said.
When Sabine came and joined them on the station platform, he thought: Now she will explain, and everything will be all right again.… But her explanation—“Alix has gone home. She said to say good-by to you”—only deepened his sense of something being held back.
The station was surrounded by vacant land, and the old station still existed, but in the form of a low mound covered with weeds. Harold kept looking off in the direction of the château, thinking that he might see Alix; that she might suddenly appear in the space between two buildings. She didn’t appear. Eugène remained standing where he was. The bell started to ring, though there was no train as far as the eye could see down the perfectly straight tracks in the direction of Blois, Orléans, and Paris or in the direction of Tours, Angers, and Nantes. The ringing filled the air with intimations of crisis. The four men seated on the terr
ace of the Café de la Gare paid no attention to it, which meant that they were either stone deaf or long accustomed to this frightful sound.
After five minutes the station agent appeared. He walked the length of the brick platform and, cranking solemnly, looking neither at the avenue Gambetta on his right nor at the bed of blue pansies on his left, let down the striped gates and closed the street to traffic.
A black poodle leaning out of the window of the house next to the café waited hopefully for something to happen, with its paws crossed in an attitude that was half human. The woolly head turned, betraying a French love of excitement, and the poodle watched the street that led toward the river. The bell went on ringing but with less and less conviction, like a man giving perfectly good advice that he knows from past experience will not be followed. Just when it seemed that nothing was ever going to happen, there was a falsetto cry and the four men on the terrace turned their heads in time to see the train from Tours rush past the café and come to a sudden stop between the railway station and the travel posters. Carriage doors flew open and passengers started descending. They reached up for suitcases that were handed down to them by strangers. They shouted messages to relatives who were going on to Blois, remembered a parcel left on the overhead rack, were alarmed, were reassured (the parcel was on the platform), held small children up to say good-by, or hurried to be first in line at the gate.
Eugène found a third-class compartment that was empty, and they got in, and he pulled the door to from the inside. Harold let the glass down and kept his head out, with all the other heads, until the train had carried them past the place where they had waited for the bus. Having seen the last of the country he wanted especially to remember, he sat down. Barbara and Sabine were talking about their schools. He waited to see what Eugène would do. Eugène had a book in his coat pocket, and he took it out and read until the train drew into the station at Blois.
Eugène made his way along the crowded cement platform, and Harold followed at his heels, and the two girls tagged along after him, as relaxed as if they were shopping. Suddenly they came upon a group of ten or twelve of the guests at the Allégrets’ party. Their youth, their good looks, their expensive clothes and new English luggage made them very noticeable in the drab crowd. Harold would have stopped but Eugène kept on going. Several of them nodded or smiled at Harold, whose eyes, as he spoke to them, were searching for Jean Allégret. He was there too, a little apart from the others. Harold started to put the suitcase down and shake hands with him, and then realized that he had just that second received all that was coming to him from Jean Allégret—a quick, cold nod.
Fortunately, the suitcases were still in his hands and he could keep on walking. He remembered but did not resort to a trick he had learned in high school: when you made the mistake of waving to somebody you did not know or, as it sometimes happened, somebody you knew all right but who for some unknown reason didn’t seem to know you, the gesture, caught in time, could be diverted; the direction of the hand could be changed so that what began as a friendly greeting ended as smoothing the hair on the side of your head. Bewildered, he took his stand beside Eugène, a hundred feet further along the platform.
In giving him the money to buy Sabine’s ticket, Mme Viénot had explained that third class was just as comfortable as second and only half as expensive. The second part of this statement was true, the first was not. He didn’t look forward to a four-hour ride, on a hot July night, on wooden slats.
Just before the train drew in, the announcer’s voice, coming over the loud-speaker system, filled the station with the sound of rising panic, as if he were announcing not the arrival of the Paris express, stopping at Orléans, etc., etc., but something cataclysmic—the fall of France, the immanent collision of the earth and a neighboring planet. When the train drew to a stop, they were looking into an empty compartment. Again Eugène closed the door from the inside, to discourage other passengers from crowding in. Just before the train started, the door was wrenched open and a thin, pale young man—Eugène and Alix’s friend—looked in. Behind him, milling about in confusion, was the house party. Surely they’re not traveling third class, Harold thought.
Eugène told them there was room for four in the compartment. After a hurried consultation, they decided that they did not want to be separated. Leaning out of the window, Harold saw them mount the step of a third-class carriage farther along the train. Were they all as poor as church mice, he wondered. The question could not be asked, and so he would never know the answer.
As the train carried them north through the evening light, Sabine and Barbara and Harold whiled away a few miles of the journey by writing down the names of their favorite books. A Passage to India, he wrote on the back of the envelope that Sabine handed to him. Barbara took the envelope and wrote Fear and Trembling. He gave Sabine the financial diary and on a blank page she wrote Le Silence de la Mer, while he looked over her shoulder. “Vercors,” she wrote. And then, “un petit livre poétique.” Barbara wrote Journey to the End of the Night on the back of the envelope. He took it and wrote To the Lighthouse. He glanced carefully at Eugène, who was sitting directly across from him. Eugène looked away. A Sportsman’s Notebook, he wrote, and turned the envelope around so that Sabine could read it.
Shortly after that, Eugène got up and went out into the corridor and stood by an open window. After Orléans, Barbara and Sabine went out into the corridor also and stood by another window, and when Barbara came back into the compartment she said in a low voice: “I asked Sabine if she knew what was the matter with Eugène, and she said he was moody and not like other French boys.” Though, during the entire journey, Eugène had nothing whatever to say to the three people he was traveling with, he had a long, pleasant, animated conversation with a man in the corridor.
In the train shed in Paris, they met up with the house party again, and this time Jean Allégret acknowledged the acquaintance with a smile and a wave of his hand, as if not he but his double had had doubts in the station at Blois about the wisdom of accepting an American as a friend.
Harold put his two suitcases down and searched through his pockets for the luggage stubs. After four hours of ignoring the fact that he was being ignored, it was difficult to turn casually as if nothing had happened and ask where he should go to see about the two big suitcases and the dufflebag. Eugène shrugged, looked impatient, looked annoyed, looked as if he found Harold’s French so inaccurately pronounced and so ungrammatical that there was no point in trying to understand it, and Harold felt that his education had advanced another half-semester. (Though there is only one way of saying “Thank you” in French, there are many ways of being rude, and you don’t have to stop and ask yourself if the rudeness is sincere. The rudeness is intentional, and harsh, and straight from the closed heart.)
Too angry to speak, he turned on his heel and started off to find the baggage office by himself. He had only gone a short distance when he heard light footsteps coming after him. Sabine found the right window, took the stubs from him, gave them to the agent, and in her calm, soft, silvery voice dictated the address of her aunt’s apartment.
The four of them took the Métro, changed at Bastille, and stepped into a crowded train going in the direction of the Porte de Neuilly. More and more people got on. Farther along the aisle a man and a woman, neither of them young, stood with their arms around each other, swaying as the train swayed, and looking into each other’s eyes. The man’s moist mouth closed on the woman’s mouth in a long, indecent kiss, after which he looked around with a cold stare at the people who were deliberately not watching him.
Harold and Barbara found themselves separated from Sabine and Eugène. Barbara whispered something that Harold could not hear, because of the train noise. He put his head down.
“I said ‘I think we’d better go to the Vouillemont.’ ”
“So do I. But I’m a little worried. It’s after eleven o’clock, and we have no reservations.”
“If there
’s no room at the Vouillemont, we can go to some other hotel,” she said. “I’d rather spend the night on a park bench than put up with this any longer.”
“But why did he ask us?”
“Something is wrong. He’s changed his mind. Or perhaps he enjoys this sort of thing.”
“The son of a bitch. You saw what happened when I asked him where to go about the big suitcases?… The only reason I hesitate at all is Alix and Mme Cestre. I hate to have them know we were—”
“He may not tell them what happened.”
“But Sabine will.”
The train rushed into the next station. They peered through the window and saw the word Concorde. Over the intervening heads, Eugène signaled that they were to get off.
Harold set the suitcases down and extended his hand. “We’ll leave you here,” he said stiffly. “Good night.”
“But why?” Eugène demanded, astonished.
“The hotel is near this station, and we don’t want to put you to any further trouble. Thank you very much.”
“For what?”
“For taking care of us on the way up to Paris,” Harold said. But then he spoiled the effect by blushing.
There was a brief silence during which both of them struggled with embarrassment.
“I am extremely sorry,” Eugène said, “if I have given you any reason to think—”
“It seemed to us that you are a trifle distrait,” Harold said, “and we’d rather not put you to any further trouble.”
“I am not distrait,” Eugène said. “And you are not putting me to any trouble whatever. The apartment is not being used. There is no need for you to go to a hotel.”
A train drew in, at that moment, and Harold had the feeling afterward that that was what decided the issue, though trains don’t, of course, decide anything. All decisions are the result of earlier decisions; cause, as anyone who has ever studied Beginning Philosophy knows, is another way of looking at effect. They got on the train, and then got off several stations farther along the line, at the Place Pierre-Joseph Redouté. A huge block of granite in the center of the square and dark triangular buildings, with the streets between them leading off in six directions like the rays of a star, were registered on Harold’s mind as landmarks he would need to know if they suddenly decided to retrace their steps.
The Chateau Page 23
