William Maxwell - The Chateau

“What time is it?” Barbara asked.

“Quarter of eleven. How time flies, doesn’t it. Are you warm enough?”

“Mmmm.”

“It’s like living at the bottom of the sea.”

He left the window and stood behind her, reading as she wrote. She had started a letter to her mother and father. The quick familiar handwriting moved across the page, listing the places they had been to, describing the château and the countryside and the terribly interesting French family they were now staying with. The letter seemed to him slightly stepped up, the pleasures exaggerated, as if she were trying to conceal from them (or possibly from herself) the fact that they were not as happy in their present surroundings as they had been in the Hôtel Ouest et Montgomery in Pontorson.

He moved on to the big round table in the center of the room. Among the litter of postcards, postage stamps, and souvenirs, a book caught his eye. Mme Viénot had come upon him in the drawing room after breakfast, and had made a face at the book he was looking at—corrections, additions, and objections to the recently issued grammar of the French Academy—and had said, with a smile: “I don’t really think you are ready for that kind of hair-splitting.” Taking the book out of his hands, she had given him this one instead. It was a history of the château of Blois. He opened it in the middle, read a paragraph, and then retired to the chaise longue.

Barbara finished her letter, folded it, and brought it to him to read. “Is it all right?”

“Mmmm,” he said.

“Should I do it over?”

“No,” he said. “It’s a very nice letter. Why should you do it over? It will make them very happy.”

“You don’t like it.”

“Yes, I do. It’s a fine letter.” The insincerity in his voice was so marked that he even heard it himself.

“There isn’t a thing wrong with that letter,” he said, earnestly this time. “There’s no point in writing it over.” But she had already torn it in half, and she went on tearing it in smaller pieces, which she dropped in the wastebasket.

“I didn’t mean for you to do that!” he exclaimed. “Really, I didn’t!” And a voice in his head that sounded suspiciously like the voice of Truth asked if that wasn’t exactly what he had wanted her to do.… But why, he wondered. What difference did it make to him what she wrote to her father and mother?… No difference. It was just that they were shut up together in a cold house, and it was raining.

She sat down at the desk and took a blank sheet of paper and began over again. Ashamed of his petty interfering, he watched her a moment and then retrieved the pocket dictionary from the rug and placed it on the chaise longue beside his knees. While he was trying to untangle the personal and political differences of Henri III and the Duc de Guise, he raised his eyes from the print and observed Barbara’s face, bent over her letter. Her face, on every troubled occasion, was his compass, his Pole Star, the white pebbles shining in the moonlight by which Hop-O’-My-Thumb found his way home. When she was happy she was beautiful, but the beauty came and went; it was at the mercy of her feelings. When she was unhappy she could be so plain it was frightening.

After a short while—hardly five minutes—she pushed the letter aside and said, quite cheerfully: “It’s stopped raining. Should we go for a walk?”

They went downstairs and through the drawing room and outdoors without seeing anyone. Something kept them from quite liking the front of the house, which was asymmetrical and bare to the point of harshness. They looked into the courtyard at the carriage house, the stables, the high brick wall, and windows they had now looked out of. They followed the cinder drive around the other end of the house. Climbing roses and English ivy struggled for possession of the back wing, which had a much less steeply sloping roof and low dormers instead of bull’s-eyes.

The drive took them on up a slope, between two rain-stained statues, and past a pond that had been drained, and finally to another iron gate. Peering through the bars, they saw that there was no trace of a road on the other side. Nothing but the forest. They tried the gate; it was locked. They turned and looked back, and had an uncomfortable feeling that eyes were watching them from the house.

On the way down again, they stopped and looked at the statues. They looked again at the clock that straddled the roof tree of the back wing. It had stopped at quarter of twelve. But quarter of twelve how long ago? And why was there no water in the pond? Seen from the rear, the whole place cried out that there had once been money and the money was gone, frittered away.

They noticed a gap in the hedge, and, walking through it, found themselves in a huge garden where fruit trees, rose trees, flowers, and vegetables were mingled in a way that surprised and delighted them. So did the scarecrow, which was dressed in striped morning trousers and a blue cotton smock. Under the straw hat the stuffed head had sly features painted on it. They saw old Mme Bonenfant at the far end of the garden, and walked slowly toward her. By the time they arrived at the sweet-pea trench her basket was full. She laid her garden shears across the long green stems and took the Americans on a tour of the garden, pointing out the espaliered fruit trees and telling them the French names of flowers. She did not understand their schoolroom French. They felt shy with her. But the tour did not last very long, and they understood that she was being kind, that she wanted them to feel at home. Leading them to some big fat bushes that were swathed in burlap against the birds, she told them to help themselves to the currants and gooseberries, and then she went on down the garden path to the house.

A few minutes later they left the garden themselves and followed the cinder drive down to the public road, where they turned left, in the opposite direction from the village. The road led them past fields on one side and the forest on the other. They came to a farmhouse and an excitable dog, detecting an odor that was not French, barked furiously at them; then to an opening in the forest, where a wagon track wound in through tall oak trees and out of sight. They left the road and followed the wagon track. The tree trunks were green with moss and there was no underbrush, which made the forest look unreal. The ground under their feet was covered with delicate ferns. Barbara kept stooping to gather acorns. These had a high polish and a beautiful shape and were smaller than the acorns she was accustomed to. Her pockets were soon full of them.

“We don’t have to stay,” she said, turning and looking at him.

“No,” he agreed doubtfully. He was relieved, now she had given voice to his own uneasiness. But at the same time, how could they leave? “Of course we don’t,” he said. “Not if we don’t want to.”

“But we said we’d stay two weeks. What if she’s counting on that, and has turned other people away?”

“I know.”

“So in a way, we’re bound to do what we said we’d do.”

“We could tell her, I guess,” he said. “The trouble is, we’ll never have anywhere else as good a chance to learn to speak French.”

“That’s true.”

“And later we may be glad we stuck it out. We may find when we get to Paris that it is possible to talk to people in a way that we haven’t been able to, so far.”

“So let’s stay,” she said.

“We’ll try it for a few days, and then if it doesn’t work, we can leave.”

There seemed to be no end to the forest. After a short while they turned back, not because they were afraid of getting lost—there was only one road—but the way swimmers confronted with the immensity of the ocean swim out a little way and then, though they could easily swim farther, give way to a nameless fear and turn and head for the shore.