William Maxwell - The Chateau

But if Mme Viénot was coming to Chaumont with them, what about poor Mme Straus-Muguet? Wouldn’t she feel left out?

“And will you please invite Mme Straus-Muguet for us,” he said.

“Oh, that won’t be necessary,” Mme Viénot exclaimed. “It is very nice of you to think of it, but I’m sure she doesn’t expect to be asked, and it will make five in the taxi.”

When he insisted, she agreed reluctantly to convey the invitation, and a few minutes later, meeting him on the stairs, she reported that it had been accepted.

The taxi came promptly at two, and all five of them crowded into it, and still apologizing cheerfully to one another for taking up too much space they arrived at a point directly across the river from Chaumont, which was as far as they could go by car. The ferry was loading on the opposite shore, and Alix and Mme Viénot did not agree about where it would land. After they had scrambled down the steep sandbank to the water’s edge, they saw some hikers and cyclists waiting a hundred yards upstream, at the exact spot where Mme Viénot had said the ferry would come. She and Harold began to help Mme Straus-Muguet up the bank again. The two girls took off their shoes and waded into the water. The sound of their voices and their laughter made him turn and look back. Alix tucked the hem of her skirt under her belt. Then the two girls waded in deeper and deeper, with their dresses pulled up and their white thighs showing.

There are certain scenes that (far more than artifacts dug up out of the ground or prehistoric cave paintings, which have a confusing freshness and newness) serve to remind us of how old the human race is, and of the beautiful, touching sameness of most human occasions. Anything that is not anonymous is all a dream. And who we are, and whether our parents embraced life or were disappointed by it, and what will become of our children couldn’t be less important. Nobody asks the name of the athlete tying his sandal on the curved side of the Greek vase or whether the lonely traveler on the Chinese scroll arrived at the inn before dark.

He realized with a pang that he had lost Barbara. He was up here on the bank helping an old woman to keep her balance instead of down there with his shoes and stockings off, and so he had lost her. She had turned into a French girl, a stranger to him.

The girls’ way was blocked by a clump of cattails. They stopped and considered what to do. Then, taking each other by the hand, they started slowly out into still deeper water.… The water was too deep. They could not get around the cattails without swimming, and so they turned back and went the rest of the way on dry land.

The ferryboat coming toward them from the opposite shore was long and narrow, and the gunwales were low in the water. When it was about fifty yards from the bank, the ferryman turned off the outboard motor, which was on the end of a long pole, and lifted it out of the water. The boat drifted in slowly. Harold did not see how it could possibly hold all the people who were now waiting to cross over—hollow-cheeked, pale, undernourished hikers and cyclists, dressed for le sport , in shorts and open-collared shirts, with their sleeves rolled up. The slightest wind would have blown them away like dandelion fluff.

They pulled the prow of the boat up onto the mud bank and took the bicycles carefully from the hands of the ferryman. When the passengers had jumped ashore, the hikers and cyclists-stood aside politely while the party from the château went on board. Mme Viénot and Mme Straus-Muguet sat in the stern, in the only seat there was. Barbara and Alix perched on the side of the boat, next to them. Harold stood among the other passengers. Under the ferryman’s direction a dozen bicycles were placed in precarious balance. The boat settled lower and lower as more people, more bicycles with loaded saddle bags came on board. There were no oars, and the ferryman, on whom all their lives depended, was a sixteen-year-old boy with patches on his pants. He pushed his way excitedly past wire wheels and bare legs, shouting directions. When everybody was on board, he shoved the boat away from the shore with his foot, all but fell in, ran to the stern, making the boat rock wildly, and lowered the outboard motor. The motor caught, and they turned around slowly and headed for the other shore.

“This boat is not safe!” Mme Viénot told the ferryman, and when he didn’t pay any attention to her she said to Barbara: “I shall complain to the mayor of Brenodville about it.… The current is very treacherous in the middle of the river.”

Mme Straus-Muguet took Barbara’s hand and confessed that she could not swim.

“Harold is a very good swimmer,” Barbara said.

“M. Rhodes will swim to Mme Straus and support her if the boat capsizes,” Mme Viénot decided.

“Très bien,” Mme Straus-Muguet said, and called their attention to the scenery.

Harold’s mind ran off an unpleasant two-second movie in which he saw himself in the water, supporting an aged woman whose life was nearly finished, while Barbara, encumbered by her clothes, with no one to help her, drowned before his eyes.

Out in the middle of the river there was a wind, and the gray clouds directly over their heads looked threatening. Mme Straus-Muguet was reminded of the big painting in the Louvre of Dante and Virgil crossing the River Styx. She was so gallant and humorous, in circumstances a woman of her age could hardly have expected to find herself in and few would have agreed to, that she became a kind of heroine in the eyes of everyone. The cyclists turned and watched her, admiring her courage.

The shore they had left receded farther and farther. They were in the main current of the river for what seemed a long long time, and then slowly the opposite shore began to draw nearer. They could pick out details of houses and see the people on the bank. As Harold stepped onto the sand he felt the triumph and elation of a survivor. The ferryboat had not sunk after all, and he and everybody in it were braver than they had supposed.

The climb from the water’s edge up the cliff was clearly too much for a woman in the neighborhood of seventy. Mme Straus-Muguet took Harold’s arm and clung to it. With now Alix and now Barbara on her other side supporting her, she pressed on, through sand, up steep paths and uneven stone stairways, stopping again and again to exclaim to herself how difficult it was, to catch her breath, to rest. Her face grew flushed and then it became gray, but she would not hear of their turning back. When they were on level ground at last and saw the towers and drawbridge of the château, she stopped once more and exclaimed, but this time it was pleasure that moved her. “You do not need to worry any more about me,” she said. “I am quite recovered.”

While they were waiting for the guide, she bought and presented to Harold and Barbara a set of miniature postcards of the rooms they were about to see. She called Barbara’s attention to the tapestries in the Salon du Concert before the guide had a chance to speak of them. Confronted with a glass case containing portrait medallions by the celebrated Italian artist Nini, she said that she had a passion for bas-relief and could happily spend the rest of her life studying this collection. They were shown the dressing table of Catherine de Médicis, and Mme Straus insisted on climbing the steep stone staircase to the tower where the Queen had learned from her astrologer the somber fate in store for her three sons who would sit on the throne of France: one dead of a fever, within a year of his coronation, one the victim of melancholy, and one of the assassin’s dagger. As Mme Straus listened to this story, her sensitive face reflected the surprise and then the consternation of Catherine de Médicis, whose feelings she, a mother, could well appreciate, though they were separated by four centuries. Mme Viénot congratulated the guide on his diction and his knowledge of history, and Mme Straus-Muguet congratulated him on the view up and down the river. She was reluctant to leave the stables where the elephant had been housed, but perfectly willing to return to the river bank and for the second time in one day risk death by drowning.