The Chateau Read Free Page B

staggered up the steps of the underpass out onto Track D again, he saw that she was the only person left on the platform, beside the last open compartment door.
    â€œHurry!” she called. (As if he weren’t!)
    He thought surely the train would start without them, not realizing that it was full of ardent excitable people who would have thrown themselves in front of the engine if it had. They leaned out of all the windows all up and down the train, shouting encouragement to the American tourists, shouting to the conductor and the brakeman that Monsieur was here, finally, but still had to get the luggage on.
    When the luggage had been stowed away in the overhead racks, they sat trembling and exhausted and knee to knee with six people who did not speak a word of English but whom they could not under the circumstances regard as strangers. A well-dressed woman with a little boy smiled at them over the child’shead, and they loved her. They loved her little boy, too. Looking out of the train window, they saw the same triangular meadows and orchards as before, the same tall hedgerows, and poppies without number growing in the wheat.
    â€œIt was very nice of that man to hand the suitcases down to you,” she said.
    â€œWasn’t it.”
    â€œI don’t know what we’d have done without him.”
    â€œI don’t either.”
    â€œWhat an experience.”
    Conscious that by speaking English to each other they were separating themselves from the other people in the compartment, and not wanting to be separated from them, they lapsed into silence. He made himself stop counting the luggage. After a time, the man directly across from them—a farmer or a laborer, judging by his clothes and his big, misshapen, callused hands—took down a small cardboard suitcase. They saw that it contained a change of underwear, a clean shirt, a clean pair of socks, a loaf of bread, a sausage, and a bottle of red wine that had already been uncorked. The sausage was offered politely around the compartment and politely refused. With dignity the man began to eat his lunch.
    â€œWhat time is it?” Barbara asked.
    Harold showed her his watch. If only there were porters in the station in Coutances … He looked searchingly at the other faces in the compartment. He was in love with them all.
    There were no porters in the railway station at Coutances, and the crisis had to be gone through all over again, but nothing is ever as bad the second time. The station platform was not torn up, and he did not wait for somebody to see that they were in difficulty; instead, he turned and asked for help and got it. As he shook hands with one person after another, looking into their intelligent French eyes and thanking them with all his heart, he began to feel as if an unlimited amount of kindness had been deposited somewhere to his account and he had only to drawon it. Coupled with this daring idea was an even more dangerous one: he was becoming convinced by what had happened to them that in France things are different, and people more the way one would like them to be.
    At Pontorson he saw a baggage truck and helped himself to it, thinking that this time he had surely gone too far and an indignant station agent would come running out and make a scene. No one paid any attention to him. The bus parked in front of the station said
Le Mont-Saint-Michel
over the windshield but it was empty, and they discovered from a timetable posted on the wall nearby that it did not leave for an hour and a half. He looked at her drawn, white face and then walked out into the middle of the station plaza in search of a taxi. The square was deserted. For a moment he did not know what to do. Then he saw a bus approaching and hailed it. The bus came to a stop in front of him, and he saw the letters
St. Servan–St. Malo
and that there were no passengers.
    â€œNous cherchons un hôtel,” he said when the driver put his head close to