William Maxwell - The Chateau

AVEZ-VOUS BIEN DORMI?” Harold asked, and Eugene held up his hand as if, right there at the breakfast table, with his hair uncombed and his eyes puffy with sleep, he intended to perform a parlor trick for them. Looking at Barbara, he said: “You don’t lahv your hus-band, do you?” and to Harold’s astonishment she said: “No.”

He blushed.

“I mean yes, I do love him,” Barbara said.” I didn’t understand your question. Why, you’re speaking English !”

Delighted with the success of his firecracker, Eugène sat down and began to eat his breakfast. He had enrolled at the Berlitz. He had had five lessons. His teacher was pleased with his progress. Still in a good humor, he went upstairs to shave and dress.

Thérèse brought the two heaviest of the Americans’ suitcases down from the third floor, and then the dufflebag, and put them in the dog cart. Mme Viénot had pointed out that the trip up to Paris would be less strenuous if they checked some of their luggage instead of taking it all in the compartment with them. Harold and the gardener waited until Eugène came out of the house and climbed up on the seat beside them. Then the gardener spoke to his horse gently, in a coaxing voice, as if to a child, and they drove off to the village. At the station, Eugène took care of the forms that had to be filled out, and bought the railroad tickets with the money Harold handed him, but he was withdrawn and silent. Either his mood had changed since breakfast or he did not feel like talking in front of the gardener. When they got back to the château, Harold went upstairs first, and then, finding that Barbara was washing out stockings in the bathroom and didn’t need him for anything, he went back downstairs and settled himself in the drawing room with a book. No one ever used the front door—they always came and went by the doors that opened onto the terrace—and so he would see anybody who passed through the downstairs. When Eugène did not reappear, Harold concluded that he was with Alix and the baby in the back wing of the house, where it did not seem proper to go in search of him, since he had been separated from his family for five days.

It was not a very pleasant day and there was some perverse influence at work. The village electrician could not find the short circuit, which must be somewhere inside the walls, and he said that the whole house needed rewiring. And Alix, who was never angry at anyone, was angry at her aunt. She wanted to have a picnic with Sabine and the Americans on the bank of the river, and Mme Viénot said that it wasn’t convenient, that it would make extra work in the kitchen. This was clearly not true. They ate lunch in the dining room as usual, and at two thirty they set out on their bicycles, with their bathing suits and towels and four big, thick ham sandwiches that they did not want and that Mme Viénot had made, herself.

The sunshine was pale and watery and without warmth. They hid the bicycles in a little grove between the highway and the river, and then withdrew farther into the trees and changed into their bathing suits. When Barbara and Harold came out, they saw Alix and Sabine down by the water. Eugène was standing some distance away from them, fully dressed, and looking as if he were not part of this expedition.

“Aren’t you going in?” Harold called, and, getting no answer, he turned to Alix and said: “Isn’t he going in swimming with us?”

She shook her head. “He doesn’t feel like swimming.”

“Why not?”

“He says the water is dirty.”

Then why did he bring his bathing suit if he didn’t feel like swimming in dirty water, Harold wondered. Didn’t he know the river would be dirty?

The water was also lukewarm and the current sluggish. And instead of the sandy bottom that Harold expected, they walked in soft oozing mud halfway up to their knees, and had to wade quite far out before they could swim. Alix had a rubber ball, and they stood far apart in the shallow water and threw it back and forth. Harold was self-conscious with Sabine. They had not spoken a word to each other since she arrived. The ball passed between the four of them now. They did not smile. It felt like a scene from the Odyssey. When the rubber ball came to him, sometimes, aware of what a personal act it was, he threw it to Sabine. Sometimes she sent it spinning across the water to him. But more often she threw it to one of the two girls. He didn’t dislike or distrust her but he couldn’t imagine what she was really like, and her gray wool bathing suit troubled him. It was the cut and the color of the bathing suits that are handed out with a locker key and a towel in public bathhouses, and he wondered if she was comparing it with Barbara’s, and her life with what she imagined Barbara’s life to be like.

From down river, behind a grove of trees, they heard some boys splashing and shouting. On the other bank, sheep appeared over the brow of the green hill, cropping as they came. Farther down the river, out of sight, was Chaumont, with its towers and its drawbridge. Then Amboise, and back from the river, on a river of its own, Chenonceau. Much farther still were those other châteaux that he knew only by their pictures in the guidebook—Villandry and Luynes and Langeais and Azay-le-Rideau and Ussé and Chinon. And no more time left to see them.

They stopped throwing the ball, and he waded in deeper and started swimming. The current in the channel was swifter but it did not seem very strong, even so, and he wanted to swim to the other bank, but he heard voices calling—“Come back!” (Barbara’s voice) and “Come back, it’s dangerous!” (Alix’s voice) and so, reluctantly, rather than cause a fuss, he turned around. “People have drowned near here,” Alix said as he stood up, dripping, and walked toward them. “And there is quicksand on the other bank.”

They wiped their feet on the grass and then, using their towels, managed to get the mud off. Near the highway, two girls with bicycles and knapsacks were putting up a small tent for the night. Eugène stood watching them. The bathers went into the grove to dress and came out and sat on the ground and dutifully, without appetite, ate the thick ham sandwiches. Alix called to Eugène to come and join them and he replied that he was not hungry.

“Why is Eugène moody?” Sabine asked.

“He is upset because he has to wear a tweed coat to the Allégrets’ party,” Alix said.

“But so do I!” Harold exclaimed.

“No one expects you to have a dinner coat,” she said gently. “It is quite all right. If Eugène had known, he could have brought his dinner coat down with him. That is why he is angry. He thinks I shouldn’t have accepted without consulting him. Also, he is angry that there aren’t enough bicycles.”

“Aren’t there?” Sabine asked.

“There are now,” Alix said. “Eugène went and borrowed two from the gardener. But it annoys him that he should have to do that—that there aren’t bicycles enough to go round.”

She herself had long since reverted to her usual cheerful, sweet-tempered self.

Harold went into the trees and brought out the bicycles and they started home, the three girls pedaling side by side, since the highway was empty. After a quarter of a mile, Harold slowed down until Eugène drew abreast of him, and they rode along in what he tried to feel was a comfortable silence. The afternoon had been a disappointment to him, and not at all what he expected, but perhaps, now that they were alone, Eugène would open up—would tell him why he was in such an unsociable mood. For it couldn’t be the coat or the bicycles. Something more serious must have happened. Something about his job, perhaps.

Eugène began to sing quietly, under his breath, and Harold rode a little closer to the other bicycle, listening. It was not an old song, judging by the words, but in the tune there was a slight echo of the thing that had moved him so, that day in Blois. When Eugène finished, Harold said: “What’s the name of that song you were singing?”