William Maxwell - The Chateau

“—but children,” Jean Allégret was saying. “I never once found an American who knew or cared what they were fighting about. And yet they fought very well.… What you are doing in Germany now is all wrong, you know. You make friends with them. And you will bring another war down on us, just as Woodrow Wilson did.”

“Where did you get that idea?” Harold asked, smiling at him.

“It is not an idea, it is a fact. He is responsible for all the mischief that followed the Treaty of Versailles.”

“That is in your history books?”

“Certainly.”

“In our history books,” Harold said cheerfully, “Clemenceau and Lloyd George are the villains, and Wilson foresaw everything.” He began to eat his soup.

“He was a very vicious man,” Jean Allégret said.

“Wilson? Oh, get along with you.”

“Well, perhaps not vicious, but he didn’t understand European politics, and he was thoroughly wrong in his attitude toward the German people. My family has a house in the north of France, near St. Amand-les-Eaux. It was destroyed in 1870, and rebuilt exactly the way it was before. My grandfather devoted his life to restoring it. In 1914 it was destroyed again, burned to the ground, and my father rebuilt it so that it was more beautiful than before. Thanks to the Americans, I am now living in a farmhouse nearby, because there is no roof on the house my father built. I manage the farms, and when it is again possible, I will rebuild the house for the third time. My life will be an exact repetition of my father’s and my grandfather’s.”

“Does it have to be?” Harold asked, raising his spoon to his lips.

“What do you mean?”

“Why not try something else? Let the house go.”

“You are joking.”

“No. Everyone has dozens of lives to choose from. Pick another.”

“I am the eldest son. And if the house is destroyed a fourth time, I will expect my son to rebuild it. But if the Americans were not such children, it wouldn’t have to be rebuilt.”

“We didn’t take part in the war of 1870,” Harold said mildly. “And we didn’t start either of the last two wars.”

The Frenchman pounced: “But you came in too late. And you ruined the peace by your softness—by your idealism. And now, as the result of your quarrel with the Russians, you are going to turn France into a battlefield once more. Which is very convenient for you but hard on us.”

Harold studied the blue eyes that were looking so intently into his. Their expression was simple and cordial. In America, he thought, such an argument was always quite different. By this time, heat would have crept into it. The accusations would have become personal.

“What would you have us do?” he asked, leaning forward. “Stay out of it next time?”

“I would have you take a realistic attitude, and recognize that harshness is the only thing the German people understand.”

“And hunger.”

“No. They will go right back and do it over again.”

Harold glanced at the girl who was sitting between them, to see whose side she was on. Her face did not reveal what she was thinking. She took a sip of wine and looked at the two men as if they were part of the table decorations.

Caught between the disparity of his own feelings—for he felt a liking for Jean Allégret as a man and anger at his ideas—Harold was silent. No matter what I say, he thought, it will sound priggish. And if I don’t say anything, I will seem to be agreeing.

“It is true,” he said at last, “it is true that we understand machinery better than we understand European politics. And I do not love what I know of the German mentality. But I have to assume that they are human—that the Germans are human to this extent that they sleep with their wives”—was this going too far?—“and love their children, and want to work, at such times as they are not trying to conquer the world, and are sometimes discouraged, and don’t like growing old, and are afraid of dying. I assume that the Japanese sleep with their wives, the Russians love their children and the taste of life, and are sometimes discouraged, don’t like growing old, and are afraid of—”

“You don’t think that your niggers are human,” Jean Allégret said triumphantly.

“Why not? Why do you say that?”

“Because of the way you treat them. I have seen it, in Normandy. You manage them very well.”

“We do not manage them at all. They manage us. They are a wonderful people. They have the virtues—the sensibility, the patience, the emotional richness—we lack. And if the distinction between the two races becomes blurred, as it has in Martinique, and they become one race, then America will be saved.”

“They are animals,” the Frenchman said. “And you treat them like animals.”

The girl stirred, as if she were about to say something. Both men turned toward her expectantly.

“I prefer a nigger to a Jew,” she said.

AT THE END OF THE MEAL, the guests at the large table pushed their chairs back. Barbara Rhodes, turning away from the young man who had bored her so with his handsome empty face, his shallow eyes that did not have the thing she looked for in people’s eyes but only vanity, glanced toward the little table in the alcove. She saw Harold rise, still talking (what could they have found to talk about so animatedly all through dinner?) and draw the little table toward him so that the girl could get up.… Oh no! she cried as the table started to tilt alarmingly. She saw the Frenchman with a quick movement try to stop it but he was on the wrong side of the table and it was too late. There was an appalling crash.

“Une table pliante,” a voice said coolly beside her.

Unable to go on looking, she turned away, but not before she had seen the red stain, like blood, on the beautiful Aubusson carpet, and Harold, pale as death, standing with his hands at his side, looking at what he had done.

“THESE IDEAS OF YOURS are foolish and will not work,” Jean Allegret said an hour later.

“Perhaps not,” Harold said.

They were sitting on a bench on the lawn, facing the lighted windows but in the dark. On another bench, directly in front of them, Barbara and Sabine and another girl whose name Harold didn’t know were sitting and talking quietly. There were five or six more people here and there, on the steps, in chairs, or on other benches, talking and watching the moon rise. The others were inside, in the library, dancing to the music of a portable record player.

“Perhaps they are foolish,” he said, “but I prefer them, for my own sake. If it is foolish to think that all men are brothers, it is at least more civilized—and more agreeable—than thinking that all men—you and I, for instance—are enemies, waiting for a chance to run a bayonet through each other’s back.”

The wine had made him garrulous and extravagant in speech; also, he had done much less than the usual amount of talking since they had landed in France, and it gave him the feeling of being in arrears, of having a great deal backed up that he urgently needed to say.

“If it is really a question of that,” he went on, “then I will get up and turn around and—since I like you too much to put a bayonet in your back—offer you my back instead. Hoping that you won’t call my bluff, you understand. Or that something will distract your attention long enough for me to—”

“Very dear, your theories. Very gentle and sweet and impossible to put into practice. Nevertheless, you interest me. You are not the American type. I didn’t know there were Americans like that.”