The Chateau

by William Maxwell

  “Aren’t you going in?” Harold called, and, getting no answer, he turned to Alix and said: “Isn’t he going in swimming with us?”

  She shook her head. “He doesn’t feel like swimming.”

  “Why not?”

  “He says the water is dirty.”

  Then why did he bring his bathing suit if he didn’t feel like swimming in dirty water, Harold wondered. Didn’t he know the river would be dirty?

  The water was also lukewarm and the current sluggish. And instead of the sandy bottom that Harold expected, they walked in soft oozing mud halfway up to their knees, and had to wade quite far out before they could swim. Alix had a rubber ball, and they stood far apart in the shallow water and threw it back and forth. Harold was self-conscious with Sabine. They had not spoken a word to each other since she arrived. The ball passed between the four of them now. They did not smile. It felt like a scene from the Odyssey. When the rubber ball came to him, sometimes, aware of what a personal act it was, he threw it to Sabine. Sometimes she sent it spinning across the water to him. But more often she threw it to one of the two girls. He didn’t dislike or distrust her but he couldn’t imagine what she was really like, and her gray wool bathing suit troubled him. It was the cut and the color of the bathing suits that are handed out with a locker key and a towel in public bathhouses, and he wondered if she was comparing it with Barbara’s, and her life with what she imagined Barbara’s life to be like.

  From down river, behind a grove of trees, they heard some boys splashing and shouting. On the other bank, sheep appeared over the brow of the green hill, cropping as they came. Farther down the river, out of sight, was Chaumont, with its towers and its drawbridge. Then Amboise, and back from the river, on a river of its own, Chenonceau. Much farther still were those other châteaux that he knew only by their pictures in the guidebook—Villandry and Luynes and Langeais and Azay-le-Rideau and Ussé and Chinon. And no more time left to see them.

  They stopped throwing the ball, and he waded in deeper and started swimming. The current in the channel was swifter but it did not seem very strong, even so, and he wanted to swim to the other bank, but he heard voices calling—“Come back!” (Barbara’s voice) and “Come back, it’s dangerous!” (Alix’s voice) and so, reluctantly, rather than cause a fuss, he turned around. “People have drowned near here,” Alix said as he stood up, dripping, and walked toward them. “And there is quicksand on the other bank.”

  They wiped their feet on the grass and then, using their towels, managed to get the mud off. Near the highway, two girls with bicycles and knapsacks were putting up a small tent for the night. Eugène stood watching them. The bathers went into the grove to dress and came out and sat on the ground and dutifully, without appetite, ate the thick ham sandwiches. Alix called to Eugène to come and join them and he replied that he was not hungry.

  “Why is Eugène moody?” Sabine asked.

  “He is upset because he has to wear a tweed coat to the Allégrets’ party,” Alix said.

  “But so do I!” Harold exclaimed.

  “No one expects you to have a dinner coat,” she said gently. “It is quite all right. If Eugène had known, he could have brought his dinner coat down with him. That is why he is angry. He thinks I shouldn’t have accepted without consulting him. Also, he is angry that there aren’t enough bicycles.”

  “Aren’t there?” Sabine asked.

  “There are now,” Alix said. “Eugène went and borrowed two from the gardener. But it annoys him that he should have to do that—that there aren’t bicycles enough to go round.”

  She herself had long since reverted to her usual cheerful, sweet-tempered self.

  Harold went into the trees and brought out the bicycles and they started home, the three girls pedaling side by side, since the highway was empty. After a quarter of a mile, Harold slowed down until Eugène drew abreast of him, and they rode along in what he tried to feel was a comfortable silence. The afternoon had been a disappointment to him, and not at all what he expected, but perhaps, now that they were alone, Eugène would open up—would tell him why he was in such an unsociable mood. For it couldn’t be the coat or the bicycles. Something more serious must have happened. Something about his job, perhaps.

  Eugène began to sing quietly, under his breath, and Harold rode a little closer to the other bicycle, listening. It was not an old song, judging by the words, but in the tune there was a slight echo of the thing that had moved him so, that day in Blois. When Eugène finished, Harold said: “What’s the name of that song you were singing?”

  “It’s just a song,” Eugène said, with his eyes on the road, and pure, glittering, personal dislike emanating from him like an aura.

  The painful discovery that someone you like very much does not like you is one of the innumerable tricks the vaudeville magician has up his sleeve. Think of a card, any card: now you see it, now you don’t.…

  Struggling with the downward drag of hurt feelings, as old and familiar to him as the knowledge of his name, Harold kept even with the other bicycle for a short distance, as if nothing had happened, and then, looking straight ahead of him, he pedaled faster and moved ahead slowly until he was riding beside the three girls.

  THE BICYCLES WERE BROUGHT out of the kitchen entry at six o’clock, and just as they were starting off, Mme Viénot appeared with three roses from the garden. Alix pinned her rose to the shoulder of her dress, and so did Sabine, but Barbara fastened hers in her hair.

  “How pretty you look!” Mme Viénot said, her satisfied glance taking in all three of them.

  With Eugène leading and Harold bringing up the rear, and the girls being careful that their skirts did not brush against the greasy chain or the wire wheels, they filed out of the courtyard and then plunged directly into the woods behind it. There were a number of paths, and Eugène chose one. The others followed him, still pushing their bicycles because the path was too sandy to ride on. After a quarter of a mile they emerged from the premature twilight of the woods into the open country and full daylight. Eugène took off his sport coat, folded it, and put it in the handlebar basket. Then he got on his bicycle and rode off down a dirt road that was not directly accessible to the château. Harold disposed of his coat in the same way. At first they rode single file, because of the deep ruts in the road, but before long they came to a concrete highway, and the three girls fanned out so that they could ride together. The two men continued to ride apart. Sometimes they all had to get off and push their bicycles uphill as the road led them up over the top of a long arc. At the crest, the land fell away in a panorama—terraced vineyards, the river valley, more hills, and little roads winding off into he wondered where—and they mounted their bicycles and went sailing downhill with the wind rushing past their ears.

  “Isn’t this a lovely way to go to a party?” Barbara said as Harold overtook her. “It’s so unlike anything we’re used to, I feel as if I’m dreaming it.”

  “Are you getting tired?” Alix called to them, over her shoulder.

  “Oh no!” Barbara said.

  “How far is it?” Harold asked.

  “About five miles,” Alix said.

  “Such a beautiful evening,” he said.

  “Coming home there will be a moon,” Alix said.

  Just when the ride was beginning to seem rather long, they left the highway and took a narrow lane that was again loose sand and that forced them to dismount for a few yards. Pushing their bicycles, they crossed a small footbridge and started up a steep hill. When they got to the top, they had arrived. The Americans saw a big country house of gray stone with castellated trimming and lancet windows and a sweep of lawn in front of it. The guests—girls in long dresses, young men in dinner jackets—were standing about in clusters near a flight of stone steps that led up to the open front door.

  The party from the château left their bicycles under a grape arbor at the side of the house. The two men put on their coats, and felt their ties. The girls straightened their shor
t skirts, tucked in stray wisps of hair, looked at their faces in pocket mirrors and exclaimed, powdered their noses, put on white gloves. In front of the house, Alix and Eugène and Sabine were surrounded by people they knew, and Harold and Barbara were left stranded. It was a party of the very young, they perceived; most of the guests were not more than eighteen or nineteen. How could Mme Viénot have let them in for such an evening!

  “I foresee one of the longest evenings of my entire life,” Harold said out of the corner of his mouth.

  Just when he was sure that Alix had abandoned them permanently, she came back and led them from group to group. The boys, thin and coltlike, raised Barbara’s hand two thirds of the way to their lips, without enthusiasm or gallantry. The gesture was not at all like hand-kissing in the movies, but was, instead, abrupt, mechanical: they pretended to kiss her hand.

  Alix was called away, and the Americans found themselves stranded again but inside the party this time, not outside. They struck up a conversation in French with a dark-haired girl who was studying music; then another conversation, in English, with a girl who said that she wanted to visit America. They talked about America, about New York. Alix returned, bringing a blond young man who was very tall and thin. An old and very dear friend of hers and Eugène’s, she said. He bowed, started to say something, and was called away to answer a question, and didn’t return. Then Alix too left them.

  Barbara began to talk to another young man. Harold turned and gave his attention to the view—an immense sweep of marshland, the valley of the Cher, now autumn-colored with the setting sun. He looked back at the house, which was Victorian Gothic, and nothing like as handsome as Beaumesnil. It was, in fact, a perfectly awful house. And he was the oldest person he could see anywhere.

  Once when he was a small child, he had had an experience like this. He must have been about six years old, and he was visiting his Aunt Mildred, who took him with her on a hay-ride party. But that time he was the youngest; he was the only child in a party of grownups; and so he opened his mouth and cried. But it didn’t change anything. The hay-ride party went on and on and on, and his aunt was provoked at him for crying in front of everybody.

  There was a sudden movement into the house, and he looked around for Alix and Sabine, without being able to find them. And then he saw Barbara coming toward him, against the flow of people up the stone steps to the front door. With her was a young man whom he liked on sight.

  “I am Jean Allégret,” the young man said as they shook hands. “Your wife tells me you are going to Salzburg for the Festival. I was stationed there at the end of the war. It is a beautiful city, but sad. It was a Nazi headquarters. Don’t be surprised if—You are to sit with me at dinner.” Taking Harold by the arm, he led him toward the stone steps.

  As they passed into the house, Harold looked around for Barbara, who had already disappeared in the crowd. He caught a glimpse of rooms opening one out of another; of large and small paintings on the walls, in heavy gilt frames; of brocade armchairs, thick rugs, and little tables loaded with objets. The house had a rather stiff formality that he did not care for. In the dining room, the guests were reading the place cards at a huge oval table set for thirty places. Jean Allégret led him to a small table in an alcove, and then left him and returned a moment later, bringing a tall pretty blonde girl in a white tulle evening dress. She looks like a Persian kitten, Harold thought as he acknowledged the introduction. The girl also spoke English. Jean Allégret held her chair out for her and they sat down.

  “In America,” Harold said as he unfolded his napkin, “this would be called ‘the children’s table.’ ”

  “I saw a great deal of the Americans during the war,” Jean Allégret said. “Your humor is different from ours. It is three-quarters fantasy. Our fantasy is nearly always serious. I understand Americans very well.… ”

  Harold was searching for Barbara at the big table. When he found her, he saw that she was listening attentively, with her head slightly bowed, to the very handsome young man on her right. He felt a twinge of jealousy.

  “—but children,” Jean Allégret was saying. “I never once found an American who knew or cared what they were fighting about. And yet they fought very well.… What you are doing in Germany now is all wrong, you know. You make friends with them. And you will bring another war down on us, just as Woodrow Wilson did.”

  “Where did you get that idea?” Harold asked, smiling at him.

  “It is not an idea, it is a fact. He is responsible for all the mischief that followed the Treaty of Versailles.”

  “That is in your history books?”

  “Certainly.”

  “In our history books,” Harold said cheerfully, “Clemenceau and Lloyd George are the villains, and Wilson foresaw everything.” He began to eat his soup.

  “He was a very vicious man,” Jean Allégret said.

  “Wilson? Oh, get along with you.”

  “Well, perhaps not vicious, but he didn’t understand European politics, and he was thoroughly wrong in his attitude toward the German people. My family has a house in the north of France, near St. Amand-les-Eaux. It was destroyed in 1870, and rebuilt exactly the way it was before. My grandfather devoted his life to restoring it. In 1914 it was destroyed again, burned to the ground, and my father rebuilt it so that it was more beautiful than before. Thanks to the Americans, I am now living in a farmhouse nearby, because there is no roof on the house my father built. I manage the farms, and when it is again possible, I will rebuild the house for the third time. My life will be an exact repetition of my father’s and my grandfather’s.”

  “Does it have to be?” Harold asked, raising his spoon to his lips.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why not try something else? Let the house go.”

  “You are joking.”

  “No. Everyone has dozens of lives to choose from. Pick another.”

  “I am the eldest son. And if the house is destroyed a fourth time, I will expect my son to rebuild it. But if the Americans were not such children, it wouldn’t have to be rebuilt.”

  “We didn’t take part in the war of 1870,” Harold said mildly. “And we didn’t start either of the last two wars.”

  The Frenchman pounced: “But you came in too late. And you ruined the peace by your softness—by your idealism. And now, as the result of your quarrel with the Russians, you are going to turn France into a battlefield once more. Which is very convenient for you but hard on us.”

  Harold studied the blue eyes that were looking so intently into his. Their expression was simple and cordial. In America, he thought, such an argument was always quite different. By this time, heat would have crept into it. The accusations would have become personal.

  “What would you have us do?” he asked, leaning forward. “Stay out of it next time?”

  “I would have you take a realistic attitude, and recognize that harshness is the only thing the German people understand.”

  “And hunger.”

  “No. They will go right back and do it over again.”

  Harold glanced at the girl who was sitting between them, to see whose side she was on. Her face did not reveal what she was thinking. She took a sip of wine and looked at the two men as if they were part of the table decorations.

  Caught between the disparity of his own feelings—for he felt a liking for Jean Allégret as a man and anger at his ideas—Harold was silent. No matter what I say, he thought, it will sound priggish. And if I don’t say anything, I will seem to be agreeing.

  “It is true,” he said at last, “it is true that we understand machinery better than we understand European politics. And I do not love what I know of the German mentality. But I have to assume that they are human—that the Germans are human to this extent that they sleep with their wives”—was this going too far?—“and love their children, and want to work, at such times as they are not trying to conquer the world, and are sometimes discouraged, and don’t like growing old, and are afr
aid of dying. I assume that the Japanese sleep with their wives, the Russians love their children and the taste of life, and are sometimes discouraged, don’t like growing old, and are afraid of—”

  “You don’t think that your niggers are human,” Jean Allégret said triumphantly.

  “Why not? Why do you say that?”

  “Because of the way you treat them. I have seen it, in Normandy. You manage them very well.”

  “We do not manage them at all. They manage us. They are a wonderful people. They have the virtues—the sensibility, the patience, the emotional richness—we lack. And if the distinction between the two races becomes blurred, as it has in Martinique, and they become one race, then America will be saved.”

  “They are animals,” the Frenchman said. “And you treat them like animals.”

  The girl stirred, as if she were about to say something. Both men turned toward her expectantly.

  “I prefer a nigger to a Jew,” she said.

  AT THE END OF THE MEAL, the guests at the large table pushed their chairs back. Barbara Rhodes, turning away from the young man who had bored her so with his handsome empty face, his shallow eyes that did not have the thing she looked for in people’s eyes but only vanity, glanced toward the little table in the alcove. She saw Harold rise, still talking (what could they have found to talk about so animatedly all through dinner?) and draw the little table toward him so that the girl could get up.… Oh no! she cried as the table started to tilt alarmingly. She saw the Frenchman with a quick movement try to stop it but he was on the wrong side of the table and it was too late. There was an appalling crash.

  “Une table pliante,” a voice said coolly beside her.

  Unable to go on looking, she turned away, but not before she had seen the red stain, like blood, on the beautiful Aubusson carpet, and Harold, pale as death, standing with his hands at his side, looking at what he had done.