The Chateau (50 page)

On their way out of the building, they shook hands one last time with Mme Emile, who wished them bon voyage, and when they were outside in the street, Barbara opened the little package. It was a book—a charming little edition of Flaubert's
Un Coeur Simple
with hand-colored illustrations. On the flyleaf, Alix had written their names and her name and the date and the words: “Really with all my love.”

“Wasn't that nice of her,” Barbara said. And then, as they were crossing the square: “What about dinner?”

“Are you hungry?” he asked.

She shook her head. “There was somebody in the study.”

“I know,” he said. “Eugène.”

“You think?”

“Who else.”

“Françoise, maybe.”

“What would she be doing in there?”

“I don't know. Do you feel like walking?” she asked.

“All right.… He gave me four Swiss francs, to buy sugar for him in Switzerland. I didn't do it.”

“Why not?”

“It would have been a lot of trouble, and it turned out that we didn't have much time. Also, I didn't feel like doing it.”

“Do you still have the money?” she asked.

“Yes. It's not very much. About a dollar. I guess we can forget about it.”

They turned and took one last look at the granite monument.

“Do you think there was something going on that we didn't know about?” he said. “Like what?”

“That's just it, I have no idea what.”

“If you mean the ‘drama' that—”

“I don't mean the ‘drama.' That was two or three years ago. I mean right now, this summer.”

“There would be no reason for them to tell us if there was,” she said thoughtfully.

“No,” he agreed.

“You think they're all right? You don't think they're in any kind of serious trouble, all of them?”

“Maybe not all of them. Maybe just Alix and Eugène. It would explain a lot of things. The way he was with us. And why they stayed in the country so long. I don't suppose we'll ever know what it was.”

“Then you think there was something?”

“Yes,” he said.

“So do I.”

“Even when we thought we were on the inside,” he said, “we weren't really. Inside, outside, it's nothing but a state of mind, I guess.… Except that if you love people, you can't help wanting to—”

“Alix is having another baby.”

He took her hand as they walked along but said nothing. He was not sure at this moment what her feelings were, and he did not want to say something that would make her cry in the street.

They skipped dinner entirely and instead took the Métro halfway across Paris to a movie theater that was showing
Le Diable au Corps
. Harold wanted to see it, and they had missed it when they were here in the summer, and it had not been showing anywhere since they got back. In America it would be cut.

They were half an hour early, and walked up and down, rather than go in and sit in an empty theater. Over the ticket booth there was an electric bell that rang insistently and continuously;
the whole street was filled with the sound. They looked at all the shop windows on both sides of the street. He glanced at his wrist watch. It was still twenty minutes before it would be time to go inside, and at the thought of twenty minutes more of that dreadful ringing, and then the hocus-pocus and the delay that always went on in French movie theaters, and people passing through the aisles selling candy, while they waited and waited for the picture to begin, he suddenly stopped, swallowed hard, and, taking Barbara's arm, said: “Let's go home. I can't stand that sound.… And even if we do wait, I won't be able to enjoy the movie. I've had all I can manage. I'm through. I can't take in any more.”

T
HEY ARRIVED
at the Gare St. Lazare, with their hand luggage, an hour early. The boat train was running. It was due to leave at eleven ten, and they would get to Cherbourg about five. They walked down the platform, looking for their carriage and compartment, and found it. Barbara waited in the train, while Harold walked up and down outside. Magazine and fruit vendors had come to see them off, and a flower girl whose pushcart was covered with bouquets of violets, but there was no sign of Mme Straus. Minute after minute passed. The platform grew crowded. There was a sense of growing excitement. Harold wandered in and out among the porters and the passengers, who, standing in little groups along the track, were nearly all Americans. For the first time in four months it didn't require any effort on his part to overhear scraps of conversation. He didn't like what he heard. The voices of his compatriots were loud, and what they said seemed silly beyond endurance. It was like having home thrown at him.

At three minutes of eleven, he gave up all hope of finding Mme Straus in the crowd that was milling around on the platform
and started back to their coach, telling himself that it didn't matter that she had failed to come. It wasn't so much that she was insincere as that she loved to arouse expectations it wasn't always convenient or even possible to satisfy, when the time came.… Only it did matter, he thought, still searching for her among the faces. Now that they were leaving, he wanted some one person out of a whole country that they had loved on first sight and never stopped loving—he wanted somebody to be aware of the fact that they were leaving, and come to say good-by.

At the steps of their carriage he took one last look around and saw her, talking agitatedly to one of the train guards. He was close enough that he could hear her asking the guard to point out the carriage of M. and Mme Rhodes. The guard shrugged. Harold went up to her and took hold of her elbow, and she cried: “Ah, chéri!” and kissed him.

She had been delayed. She thought that she would never find them in the crowd.

Barbara saw Mme Straus from the train window and came out onto the platform. Mme Straus kissed her and then presented her with a farewell gift, a pasteboard box containing palmiers. “They're to eat on the train,” she said.

Edouard's mother had been taken ill on Sunday afternoon and he couldn't leave her. He was sorry to have missed them.

She wanted to see their compartment, so they mounted the steps and went down the corridor and showed her their reserved seats and their luggage, safely stowed away on the overhead rack.

“By the window,” she said approvingly. “Now that I have it firmly in mind, I can go with you.” She squeezed their hands in both of hers.

They went outside again and stood talking together on the platform. Mme Viénot appeared out of the crowd, with a boutonniere for Barbara. “From the garden at Beaumesnil,” she said. She and Mme Straus greeted each other with the comic
cordiality of two women who understand the full extent of their mutual dislike and are not concerned about it. Then, turning to Barbara and Harold, she said: “Sabine had something that she wanted me to bring you—a drawing. But she didn't get it finished in time. She said to tell you that she would be mailing it to you. I saw it. It is quite charming. It is of the old houses on the Ile St. Louis.… Au revoir, my dears. Have a good trip home.”

She went off to rejoin her cousin.

The train guards called out a warning, and Mme Straus embraced them both one last time and urged them back on the train. When they sat down, she was at the window, dabbing her eyes with a tiny white handkerchief. They tried to carry on a conversation in pantomime.

She said something but they couldn't hear what it was. Harold said something back and she shook her head, to show that she didn't understand. They got up and went down the corridor to the end of the car. The door was still open. Mme Straus was there waiting, with the tears running down her cheeks. They leaned down and touched her hands, as the train began to move. For reasons that there was now no chance of their knowing, she clung to them, hurrying along beside the slowly moving train, waving to them, calling good-by. When she could no longer find them among the other heads and waving arms they could see her, still waving her crumpled handkerchief, old, forsaken, left in her own sad city, where the people she knew did not know her, and her stories were not believed even when they were true.

I
S THAT ALL?

Yes, that's all.

But what about the mysteries?

You mean the “drama” that Mme Viénot didn't tell Harold Rhodes about?

And where M. Viénot was
.

Oh, that.

And why Hector Gagny didn't go up to Paris with the Americans. And why Alix didn't say good-by to them at the station. And why the actress was so harsh with poor Mme Straus-Muguet, when they went backstage. And why that woman who kept the fruit and vegetable shop
—
Mme Michot
—
was so curious about what was going on at the château
.

I don't know that any of those things very much matters. They are details. You don't enjoy drawing your own conclusions about them?

Yes, but then I like to know if the conclusions I have come to are the right ones
.

How can they not be when everything that happens happens for so many different reasons? But if you really want to know why something happened, if explanations are what you care about, it is usually possible to come up with one. If necessary, it can be fabricated. Hector Gagny didn't go up to Paris on Bastille
Day because Mme Carrère invited him to go driving with them, and he was perfectly happy to put off his departure until the next day. And the reason that Mme Michot was so curious is that her only daughter was married and had left home, and M. Michot had left home, too, years before, in a crowded box car bound for the German border, and there had been no word from him since. It is only natural that, having to live with an unanswered question of this kind, she should occupy her mind with other questions instead.… But if you concentrate on details, you lose sight of the whole. The Americans fell in love with France, the way Americans are always doing, and they had the experience of knowing some French people but not knowing them very well. They didn't speak French, which made it difficult, and they were paying guests, and the situation of the paying guest is peculiar. It has in it something of the nature of an occupation by force. Once they were home, they quickly forgot a good many of the people they met abroad and the places they stayed in, but this experience with a French family, and the château, and the apartment in Paris, they couldn't forget. Hearing the blast that departing liners give as they turn in the Hudson River, Harold Rhodes raised his head and listened for a repetition of the sound. For those few seconds his face was deeply melancholy. And he took a real hatred—briefly—to an old and likable friend whose work made it possible for him to live in Paris. Neither of these things needs explaining. As for those that do, when you explain away a mystery, all you do is make room for another.

Even so. If you don't mind
.

No, I don't mind. It's just a question of where to begin.

Begin with the drama
.

Which one?

Were there two?

There was a drama that occurred several years before the Americans came to stay at the château, and there was another, several years after. One was a tragedy, the other was a farce.
They don't belong together, except as everything that happens to somebody, or to a single family, belongs together. In that case, though, there is no question of why anything happened, but only what happened, and what happened then, and what happened after that—all of it worth looking at, as a moral and a visual spectacle.

Well, what happened to the money, then?

That's the first drama. You're sure you want to hear about it?… “Somebody will tell us,” Harold said, and sure enough somebody did. A cousin turned up, in New York, and called Mrs. Ireland, who invited her to lunch. She was the same age as Sabine and Alix, but a rather plain girl, and talkative. And what she talked about was the sudden change in the situation of the family at Beaumesnil. She said that shortly after the war ended, M. Viénot sold all the securities that Mme Bonenfant had been left by her husband, who was a very rich man, and bought shares in a Peruvian gold mine. The stocks and bonds he disposed of were sound, and the gold mine proved to be a swindle.

Then he was a crook?

It may have been nothing more than a mistake in judgment.… The cousin said that he himself profited by the transaction, but then she may not have got the facts straight. People seldom do.

But how could he have profited by reducing his wife's family from affluence to genteel poverty? It doesn't make any sense
.

No, it doesn't, does it? Neither did his explanations. So Mme Viénot left him and went to live with her mother. But quite recently Barbara had a letter from Sabine in which she said that her mother and father were living in Oran, and Beaumesnil was closed. So they must have gone back together again.