William Maxwell - The Chateau

JEAN ALLÉGRET’S CLUB was in a little narrow street behind the Chamber of Deputies, and they did not allow enough time to get there from their hotel, and had trouble finding it, and when they walked into the courtyard, half an hour late, Jean Allégret was standing on the steps of the building. They felt that he felt that in not being punctual they had been guilty of rudeness, and so the evening began stiffly. Through dinner, they talked about Austria and Italy, and he talked about his farm—about how the people he was living with—the two old gardeners who had been in the family for fifty years—were sick, and would have to go, since they could not help him any longer, and he did not know who he would find to do his cooking, for he could not do it himself; and about the water system, which would be running at the end of the month; and about his efforts to bring a few improvements to his little village. There was no doctor or chemist nearer than four miles, and he had decided that there must be a dispensary. With the help of the men and boys of the place, he had fixed up an old uninhabited house, and got two nuns to come there, and provided them with supplies. The money they needed for this had been raised through benefits—plays given by boys and girls, bicycle races, that sort of thing; and a few days ago they had celebrated the hundredth case treated there. In his spare time he had been drawing, doing sketches of rabbits, pheasants, wild ducks, stags, wild boars, or of people working in the fields or going to market. Someday, perhaps, he would publish some of them in a book.

The club was an army-officer’s club, and he had done murals for it, which he showed them after dinner. Looking at the people around them, they thought: This is not at all the sort of place Americans usually see.… Neither was it very interesting. Then they sat down again and, over a glass of brandy, went on talking. But something was missing from the conversation. There were moments when they had to work to make it go. Why does it have to go, Harold wondered. Because it went before was the answer. His eyes came to rest on one figure after another at the nearby tables—the neat blond mustache, the trim military carriage, the look of cold pride.

He heard Barbara saying: “They gave Gluck’s Orpheus in the Riding Academy, and there was a wonderful moment. The canvas roof was rolled back without our knowing it, and as Orpheus emerged from the Underworld we saw the lights of Salzburg.…”

Jean Allégret nodded politely, and Harold thought: Has she left out something? The music, of course. The most important part of all.

“ Orpheus is a beautiful opera,” he said, but Jean Allégret’s expression did not change.

There is something he’s not saying, Harold thought, and that’s why the evening has gone this way. Instead of listening, he watched Jean Allégret’s face. It told him nothing, and he decided that, as so often happened, he was imagining things that did not really exist.

“In the mountains,” Jean Allégret was saying, “the political struggle and all the unsolved problems of modern life belong to a tiny lost spot over there in the evening fog, miles away in the bottom of the valley … the last village. We slept in any deserted hut or rolled up in our blankets in a hole between rocks. Our only concern was the direction of the winds, the colors of the sunset, the fog climbing from the valley, the bucks always on the top of the following peak …”

“My older brother loved to hunt,” Harold said.

Jean Allégret turned and looked at him with interest.

“He took me rabbit hunting with him when I was about eight years old. It was winter, and very cold, and there was deep snow on the ground. I still remember it vividly. We got up at five o’clock in the morning, to go hunting, and he missed three rabbits in a row. I think it flustered him, having me there watching him. And he swore. And then we went home.”

It seemed hardly worth putting beside a shooting expedition in the Pyrenees, but Harold, too, was holding something back, and it was: I never had a gun. I never wanted one. I always thought I couldn’t bear to kill anything. But once when we were staying in the country — this was after Barbara and I were married — there was a rabbit in the garden every day, and it was doing a lot of damage, and I killed it with a borrowed shotgun , and I didn’t feel anything. People are so often mistaken about themselves .…

Though they were close enough to have reached out and touched each other (and it would perhaps have been better if they had) the broad Atlantic Ocean lay between them. That first conversation, under the full moon, had been so personal and direct that it left no way open for increasing intimacy, and so they had reverted; they had become an aristocratic Frenchman and an American tourist.

Outside on the steps of the building, they thanked Jean Allégret for a very pleasant evening, and shook hands, and at the last possible moment the brandy brushed Harold’s hesitations aside and spoke for him: “There were no brown-eyed people in Austria.”

“Why not?” Jean Allégret said.

“You know why not,” Harold said solemnly.

“Yes, I’m afraid I do,” Jean Allégret said, after a moment.

“I kept looking for them everywhere. All dead. No brown-eyed people left. Terrible!” And then: “It was all right before, and now it isn’t.… Home, I’m talking about … not Austria. I didn’t know about any other place. Or any other kind of people. I didn’t have to make comparisons. I will never be intact again.”

“In the modern world,” Jean Allégret said gently, “nobody is intact. It is only an illusion. When you are home, you will forget about what it is like here. And be happy, as you were before.”

“No I won’t!”

“Well, you will be busy, anyway,” Jean Allégret said, looking into Harold’s eyes, the same person, suddenly, that he had been on that moon-flooded terrace in the Touraine. Having reached each other at last, they shook hands once more, and Jean Allégret said: “If you come back to France one day, come and spend a few days with me.”

WITH SABINE they did not feel any constraint. She came to their hotel on Saturday evening, and they took her to the restaurant in the alley off the Place St. Sulpice. She had a job, she told them. She was going to work for an elderly man who published lithographic reproductions of paintings and some art books. The salary was a little less than she had been earning at La Femme Elégante , but it was work that she would enjoy doing, she liked the man she would be working for, and perhaps it might lead to something better, in time. The job was to start on the first of November, and she had come up to Paris a few days early.

She was wearing the same white silk blouse and straight skirt that she invariably wore. Doesn’t she have any other clothes, Harold wondered. But it turned out to be one of those things men don’t understand; the white silk blouse was beautifully tailored, Barbara said later, and right for any occasion.

There were no awkward silences, because they never ran out of things to say. The few things Sabine told them about herself were only a beginning of all there was to tell, and each time they were with her they felt they knew her a little better. But there was something elusive about her. The silvery voice that was just right for telling stories and the faintly mysterious smile, though charming in themselves, were also barriers. It is possible to see the color of flowers by moonlight, but you can never quite read a book.