The Chateau (31 page)

After a time, Joseph left his seat and went to the desk and in a voice of the utmost sweetness began to conduct the lesson.

“Are you the spirit?” the boys asked.

“No, I am Joseph,” he said.

“Then how is it you know the lesson?”

“I learned it last night. It took me a long time and it was very hard, but now I know it.”

The next day, the same thing happened, only it was André who went to the front of the class. And right straight through the room, they took turns, each day a different boy, until it was the schoolmaster's turn. Looking very pale, he stood in front of them once more, and they waited, expecting him to say: “One dies as one is born.” Instead, he began to hear the lesson, which they all knew. “But are you really the schoolmaster, or are you the spirit that takes our place?” they asked. “I am the schoolmaster,” the man said sadly. “One dies as one is born, and I was born a man. But through the grace of Heaven, one is—one can hope to be of the company of spirits.” That was the last time they ever heard him utter this familiar expression,
though he stayed at his desk and taught them patiently, in a voice of the utmost gentleness and reasonableness, from that time on.

I
F THE RIDE TO THE PARTY SEEMED LONG
, the ride home was too brief. Harold found himself pushing his bicycle into the darkness of the woods behind Beaumesnil long before he expected to. The courtyard, like everywhere else, was flooded with moonlight. There was a lighted kerosene lamp on the kitchen table. All the rest of the château was either white in the moonlight or in total shadow.

They piled their bicycles in a heap in the kitchen entry. Alix lit the other lamps that had been left for them. In a procession, they went through the pantry and the dining room to the stairs and parted in the second-floor hallway. They were relaxed and sleepy and easy with each other; even Eugène. It was as if they had come home from any number of parties in just this way (“Good night”) and were all one family (“Good night, Barbara”) and knew each other's secrets (“Good night, good night”) and took for granted the affection that could be heard in their voices. (“It was lovely, wasn't it?… I hope you sleep well.… Good night.…”)

O
N
S
UNDAY MORNING
, Harold sat tense and ready, his week-old, wine-stained, really horrible-looking napkin rolled and inserted in its ivory ring. He refused another cup of coffee and pretended to be following the history of the Allégret family that Mme Viénot was telling with so much pleasure. He was waiting for her to leave the table. When she pushed her chair back, he got up also and followed her out into the hall.

“If it would be convenient,” he began, “if there is time before church, that is, could we—”

“Yes, of course,” Mme Viénot said, as if she were grateful to him for reminding her of something she should have thought of, herself. She led the way through the pink and white drawing room to a room beyond it, a study, which Harold had not been in before. Composed and businesslike, she indicated a chair for him and sat down at the flat-topped mahogany desk in the center of the room. To be embarrassed by a situation one has deliberately contrived to bring about in one's own interests is not realistic; is not intelligent; in short, is not French. As Mme Viénot opened a drawer and drew out a blank sheet of paper, she saw that his eyes were focused on the wall directly behind her and said: “That is a picture of Beaumesnil as it was when my father inherited it. As you see, it was a small country house. I find it
rather charming. Even though the artist was not very talented. As a painting it is rather sentimental.… I spoke to my cook about the pommes de terre frites.”

He looked blank.

“You remember that Mme Rhodes asked for the recipe—and it was as I suspected. She is unwilling to divulge her secret. They are so peculiar in this respect.”

“It doesn't matter,” he said.

“I'm sorry. I would have liked to have got it for her. You came here on the eleventh—”

He nodded.

“—and today is Sunday the twenty-fifth. That makes two full weeks—”

His eyes opened wide. So they were being charged, after all, for the three days they were in Paris.

“—and one day,” Mme Viénot concluded.

They had arrived at one o'clock; they would be leaving for the train at three thirty this afternoon. The extra day was two and a half hours long.

A moment later, Mme Viénot interrupted her writing to say: “I did not think it proper to allow M. Carrère to pay for the ices and the pâtisseries that afternoon in Blois. Your share of the
addition
came to a hundred and eighty francs.” The amount was written down, while he tried to reconcile M. Carrère's pleasant gesture toward America with the fact that he had afterward allowed the cost of the gesture to be deducted from his bill and added onto theirs. Only in dreams are such contradictions reconciled; in real life, fortunately, it isn't necessary. Nothing was deducted for the ten or eleven meals they had not taken at the château, or for the taxi ride to Blois that Mme Viénot had shared with them. The taxi to and from the ferry, the day they went to Chaumont, was six hundred francs. He had not intended that Mme Viénot, Mme Straus-Muguet, and Alix should have to pay a share of this amount; he would not have allowed it. Apparently it was, as Alix said, a question of sincerity. But
had
M. Carrère
allowed her to deduct their ices and pastry from his bill? It did not seem at all like him. And had Mme Straus-Muguet been charged for her share of the taxi to and from the ferry at Chaumont?

The sense of outrage, clotted in his breast, moved him to fight back, and the form his attack took was characteristic. In one of her letters she had written them that the
service
was included. He offered her now a chance to go the whole hog.

“What about the cook and Thérèse and Albert?”

“I shall give them something,” Mme Viénot said.

But will she, he wondered.

The sheet of paper that she handed across the desk read:

With the pen that she offered to him he wrote the date and his signature on four American Express traveler's checks—a fifty, two twenty-fives, and a ten—and handed them to her as he wrote.

“Will you also give me a statement that you have cashed these four checks?”

“Is that necessary?” Mme Viénot asked.

“For the customs,” he said. “The amount we brought in is declared in our passports, and the checks have to be accounted for when we leave.”

“I have been advised not to put down the money I receive from my clients, when I make out my tax statement,” Mme Viénot said. “If they do not ask to see the statement when you
go through customs, I would appreciate your not showing it.”

He agreed to this arrangement.

She opened a little metal box and produced four hundred-franc notes, a fifty, a twenty-five, and two tens, and gave them to him. He folded the huge paper currency and put it in his coat pocket. With the traveler's checks neatly arranged in front of her, she said: “It has been a great pleasure having you.… I hope that when you come again it will be as friends.”

He said nothing. He had paid the full amount, which was perhaps reasonable, since he had not asked outright if they would be charged for the three days they were in Paris. If she had really felt kindly toward them, or had the slightest impulse toward generosity or fairness, she could have made some slight adjustment. She hadn't, and he was therefore not obliged to pretend now.

His eyes met hers in a direct glance and she looked away. She picked up the checks and put them down again, and then said: “There is something I have wanted to tell you, something I would like to explain. But perhaps you guessed—We have not always lived like this.”

“I understand that.”

“There has been a
drame
in our family. Two years ago, my husband—”

She stopped talking. Her eyes were filled with tears. He leaned forward in his chair, saw that it was too late for him to say anything, and then sat back and waited for the storm of weeping to pass. He could not any more help being moved, as he watched her, than if she had proved in a thousand ways that she was their friend. Whatever the trouble was, it had been real.

F
IVE MINUTES LATER
he closed the door of their third-floor room and said: “I almost solved the mystery.”

“What mystery?” Barbara asked.

“I almost found out about M. Viénot. She started to tell me, when I finished paying her—”

“Did she charge us for the full two weeks?”

“How did you know that? And then she started to tell me about
him
.”

“What happened to him?”

“I don't know,” he said. “I didn't let her tell me.”

“But
why
, if she wanted to tell you?”

“She broke down. She cried.”

“Mme Viénot?”

He heard the sound of wheels and went to the window. The dog cart had come to a stop in front of the château, and the gardener was helping Mme Bonenfant up into the seat beside him. She sat, dressed for church, with her prayerbook in her hand.

Harold turned away from the window and said: “I could feel something. She changed, suddenly. She started searching for her handkerchief. And from the way she looked at me, I had a feeling she was asking me to deliver her from the situation she had got herself into. So I told her she didn't need to tell me about it. I said I was interested in people, that I observed them, but that I never asked questions.”

“But are you sure she changed her mind about telling you?”

“Not at all sure. She may have been play-acting. I may have given her the wrong cue, for all I know. But she didn't cry on purpose. That much I'm sure of.”

Leaning on his elbows, he looked out at the park. The hay stacks were gone, and the place had taken on a certain formality. He saw how noble the old trees were that lined the drive all the way out to the road. The horse restlessly moved forward a few paces and had to be checked by the gardener, who sat holding the reins. Mme Bonenfant arranged her skirt and then, looking up at the house, she called impatiently.

From somewhere a voice—light, unhurried, affectionate,
silvery—answered: “Oui, Grand'maman. A l'instant. Je viens, je viens …”

“What an idiotic thing to do,” Barbara said. “Now we'll never know what happened to him.”

“Yes we will,” he said. “Somebody will tell us. Sooner or later somebody always does.”