William Maxwell: The Chateau

“How can they expect people to do this?” she exclaimed indignantly.

Track D was an ordinary station platform, not another rock pile, and all up and down the train the doors of compartments were slamming shut. “It’s like a bad dream,” he said.

He left her standing with the luggage beside a second-class carriage and ran back down into the underpass, his footsteps echoing against the cold concrete walls. When he emerged onto Track A again, the train from Cherbourg was gone. Far down the deserted rock pile he saw the big white suitcase and the dufflebag; they hadn’t been stolen. From that moment it was not merely France he loved.

He swung the dufflebag onto his shoulder and picked up the suitcase. It weighed a ton. The traveling iron, he thought. And Christ knows what else … His heart was pounding, and he had a stitch in his side. As he staggered up the steps of the underpass out onto Track D again, he saw that she was the only person left on the platform, beside the last open compartment door.

“Hurry!” she called. (As if he weren’t!)

He thought surely the train would start without them, not realizing that it was full of ardent excitable people who would have thrown themselves in front of the engine if it had. They leaned out of all the windows all up and down the train, shouting encouragement to the American tourists, shouting to the conductor and the brakeman that Monsieur was here, finally, but still had to get the luggage on.

When the luggage had been stowed away in the overhead racks, they sat trembling and exhausted and knee to knee with six people who did not speak a word of English but whom they could not under the circumstances regard as strangers. A well-dressed woman with a little boy smiled at them over the child’s head, and they loved her. They loved her little boy, too. Looking out of the train window, they saw the same triangular meadows and orchards as before, the same tall hedgerows, and poppies without number growing in the wheat.

“It was very nice of that man to hand the suitcases down to you,” she said.

“Wasn’t it.”

“I don’t know what we’d have done without him.”

“I don’t either.”

“What an experience.”

Conscious that by speaking English to each other they were separating themselves from the other people in the compartment, and not wanting to be separated from them, they lapsed into silence. He made himself stop counting the luggage. After a time, the man directly across from them—a farmer or a laborer, judging by his clothes and his big, misshapen, callused hands—took down a small cardboard suitcase. They saw that it contained a change of underwear, a clean shirt, a clean pair of socks, a loaf of bread, a sausage, and a bottle of red wine that had already been uncorked. The sausage was offered politely around the compartment and politely refused. With dignity the man began to eat his lunch.

“What time is it?” Barbara asked.

Harold showed her his watch. If only there were porters in the station in Coutances … He looked searchingly at the other faces in the compartment. He was in love with them all.

There were no porters in the railway station at Coutances, and the crisis had to be gone through all over again, but nothing is ever as bad the second time. The station platform was not torn up, and he did not wait for somebody to see that they were in difficulty; instead, he turned and asked for help and got it. As he shook hands with one person after another, looking into their intelligent French eyes and thanking them with all his heart, he began to feel as if an unlimited amount of kindness had been deposited somewhere to his account and he had only to draw on it. Coupled with this daring idea was an even more dangerous one: he was becoming convinced by what had happened to them that in France things are different, and people more the way one would like them to be.

At Pontorson he saw a baggage truck and helped himself to it, thinking that this time he had surely gone too far and an indignant station agent would come running out and make a scene. No one paid any attention to him. The bus parked in front of the station said Le Mont-Saint-Michel over the windshield but it was empty, and they discovered from a timetable posted on the wall nearby that it did not leave for an hour and a half. He looked at her drawn, white face and then walked out into the middle of the station plaza in search of a taxi. The square was deserted. For a moment he did not know what to do. Then he saw a bus approaching and hailed it. The bus came to a stop in front of him, and he saw the letters St. Servan–St. Malo and that there were no passengers.

“Nous cherchons un hôtel,” he said when the driver put his head close to the open window. “Nous avons beaucoup de baggages, et il n’y a pas de taxi.… Ma femme est malade,” he lied, out of desperation, and then corrected it in favor of the truth. “Elle est très fatiguée. Nous désirons—”

The door swung open invitingly and he hopped in. The big bus made a complete turn in the middle of the square and came to a stop in front of the pile of luggage. He jumped out and ran into the station and found Barbara, and they got in the bus, which went racing through the very narrow, curving streets, at what seemed like sixty miles an hour, and stopped in front of a small hotel. The driver refused to take any money, shook hands, and drove on.

Harold took the precaution of looking the hotel up in the Guide Michelin. “Simple mais assez confortable,” it said. He stuffed the Michelin back in his raincoat pocket.

The hotel was old and dark and it smelled of roasting coffee beans. The concierge led them up a flight of stairs and around a corner, to a room with windows looking out on the street. The room was vast. So was the double bed. So was the adjoining bathroom. There was no difficulty about hot water. The concierge took their passports and went off down the hall.

“Whenever I close my eyes I see houses without any roofs,” he said.

“So do I.”

“And church steeples.” He loosened his tie and sat down to take off his shoes. “And Cinzano signs.”

The automatic images fell on top of one another, as though they were being dealt like playing cards.

“There’s something queer about this bed,” she said. “Feel it.”

“I don’t have to. I can see from here. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble sleeping, though.”

“No.”

“The way I feel, I could sleep hanging from a hook.”

While she was undressing, he went into the bathroom and turned on both faucets. Above the sound of the plunging water, he heard her saying something to him from the adjoining room. What she said was, she was glad they hadn’t gone on to Mont-Saint-Michel.

“I am too,” he called back. “I don’t think I could bear it. If I saw something beautiful right now, I’d burst into tears. The only thing in the world that appeals to me is a hot bath.”

The waitress was at the foot of the stairs when they came down, an hour later. “Vous désirez un apéritif, monsieur-dame?”

She hadn’t the slightest objection to their sitting at one of the tables outdoors, in front of the hotel, and before they settled down, he raced back upstairs and got the camera and took Barbara’s picture. He managed to get in also the furled blue and white striped umbrella, the portable green fence with geraniums and salvia growing in flower boxes along the top and bottom, and the blue morning-glories climbing on strings beside the hotel door.

“Quel apéritif?” demanded the waitress, when the camera had been put away. Finding that they didn’t know, because they had had no experience in the matter, she took it upon herself to begin their education. She returned with two glasses and six bottles on a big painted tin tray, and let them try one apéritif after another, and, when they had made their decision, urged them to have the seven-course dinner rather than the five; the seven-course dinner began with écrevisses.