William Maxwell - The Chateau

Eugène told them there was room for four in the compartment. After a hurried consultation, they decided that they did not want to be separated. Leaning out of the window, Harold saw them mount the step of a third-class carriage farther along the train. Were they all as poor as church mice, he wondered. The question could not be asked, and so he would never know the answer.

As the train carried them north through the evening light, Sabine and Barbara and Harold whiled away a few miles of the journey by writing down the names of their favorite books. A Passage to India , he wrote on the back of the envelope that Sabine handed to him. Barbara took the envelope and wrote Fear and Trembling . He gave Sabine the financial diary and on a blank page she wrote Le Silence de la Mer , while he looked over her shoulder. “Vercors,” she wrote. And then, “un petit livre poétique.” Barbara wrote Journey to the End of the Night on the back of the envelope. He took it and wrote To the Lighthouse . He glanced carefully at Eugène, who was sitting directly across from him. Eugène looked away. A Sportsman’s Notebook , he wrote, and turned the envelope around so that Sabine could read it.

Shortly after that, Eugène got up and went out into the corridor and stood by an open window. After Orléans, Barbara and Sabine went out into the corridor also and stood by another window, and when Barbara came back into the compartment she said in a low voice: “I asked Sabine if she knew what was the matter with Eugène, and she said he was moody and not like other French boys.” Though, during the entire journey, Eugène had nothing whatever to say to the three people he was traveling with, he had a long, pleasant, animated conversation with a man in the corridor.

In the train shed in Paris, they met up with the house party again, and this time Jean Allégret acknowledged the acquaintance with a smile and a wave of his hand, as if not he but his double had had doubts in the station at Blois about the wisdom of accepting an American as a friend.

Harold put his two suitcases down and searched through his pockets for the luggage stubs. After four hours of ignoring the fact that he was being ignored, it was difficult to turn casually as if nothing had happened and ask where he should go to see about the two big suitcases and the dufflebag. Eugène shrugged, looked impatient, looked annoyed, looked as if he found Harold’s French so inaccurately pronounced and so ungrammatical that there was no point in trying to understand it, and Harold felt that his education had advanced another half-semester. (Though there is only one way of saying “Thank you” in French, there are many ways of being rude, and you don’t have to stop and ask yourself if the rudeness is sincere. The rudeness is intentional, and harsh, and straight from the closed heart.)

Too angry to speak, he turned on his heel and started off to find the baggage office by himself. He had only gone a short distance when he heard light footsteps coming after him. Sabine found the right window, took the stubs from him, gave them to the agent, and in her calm, soft, silvery voice dictated the address of her aunt’s apartment.

The four of them took the Métro, changed at Bastille, and stepped into a crowded train going in the direction of the Porte de Neuilly. More and more people got on. Farther along the aisle a man and a woman, neither of them young, stood with their arms around each other, swaying as the train swayed, and looking into each other’s eyes. The man’s moist mouth closed on the woman’s mouth in a long, indecent kiss, after which he looked around with a cold stare at the people who were deliberately not watching him.

Harold and Barbara found themselves separated from Sabine and Eugène. Barbara whispered something that Harold could not hear, because of the train noise. He put his head down.

“I said ‘I think we’d better go to the Vouillemont.’ ”

“So do I. But I’m a little worried. It’s after eleven o’clock, and we have no reservations.”

“If there’s no room at the Vouillemont, we can go to some other hotel,” she said. “I’d rather spend the night on a park bench than put up with this any longer.”

“But why did he ask us?”

“Something is wrong. He’s changed his mind. Or perhaps he enjoys this sort of thing.”

“The son of a bitch. You saw what happened when I asked him where to go about the big suitcases?… The only reason I hesitate at all is Alix and Mme Cestre. I hate to have them know we were—”

“He may not tell them what happened.”

“But Sabine will.”

The train rushed into the next station. They peered through the window and saw the word Concorde . Over the intervening heads, Eugène signaled that they were to get off.

Harold set the suitcases down and extended his hand. “We’ll leave you here,” he said stiffly. “Good night.”

“But why?” Eugène demanded, astonished.

“The hotel is near this station, and we don’t want to put you to any further trouble. Thank you very much.”

“For what?”

“For taking care of us on the way up to Paris,” Harold said. But then he spoiled the effect by blushing.

There was a brief silence during which both of them struggled with embarrassment.

“I am extremely sorry,” Eugène said, “if I have given you any reason to think—”

“It seemed to us that you are a trifle distrait,” Harold said, “and we’d rather not put you to any further trouble.”

“I am not distrait,” Eugène said. “And you are not putting me to any trouble whatever. The apartment is not being used. There is no need for you to go to a hotel.”

A train drew in, at that moment, and Harold had the feeling afterward that that was what decided the issue, though trains don’t, of course, decide anything. All decisions are the result of earlier decisions; cause, as anyone who has ever studied Beginning Philosophy knows, is another way of looking at effect. They got on the train, and then got off several stations farther along the line, at the Place Pierre-Joseph Redouté. A huge block of granite in the center of the square and dark triangular buildings, with the streets between them leading off in six directions like the rays of a star, were registered on Harold’s mind as landmarks he would need to know if they suddenly decided to retrace their steps.

Sabine took her suitcase from Eugène. Then she shook hands with Barbara and Harold. “I am leaving you here,” she said, and walked off down a dark, deserted avenue.

The other three turned into a narrow side street, and the Americans stopped when Eugène stopped, in front of the huge door of an apartment house. The door was locked. He rang the bell and waited. There was a clicking noise and the door gave under the pressure of his hand and they passed through a dimly lighted foyer to the elevator. Eugène put the suit cases into it, indicated that Harold and Barbara were to get in also, pressed the button for the sixth floor, and stepped out. “It only holds three,” he said. “And with the suitcases it would not rise.”

He shut the elevator door, and as they went up slowly, they saw him ascending the stairs, flight after flight. He was there in time to open the elevator door for them. He let them into the dark apartment with his key and then proceeded down the hall, turning on lights as he went, to the bedroom they were to occupy. “It is our room when Alix is here,” he explained.

“But we don’t want to put you out of your room,” Harold protested.

“During the summer I prefer to sleep in the study,” Eugène said.

He showed them the toilet, in a separate little room off the hall, and the bathroom they were to use. The gas hot-water heater was in the other bathroom, and he led them there and showed them how to turn the heater on and off when they wanted a bath.