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?”
“It’s just a song,” Eugène said, with his eyes on the road, and pure, glittering, personal dislike emanating from him like an aura.
The painful discovery that someone you like very much does not like you is one of the innumerable tricks the vaudeville magician has up his sleeve. Think of a card, any card: now you see it, now you don’t.…
Struggling with the downward drag of hurt feelings, as old and familiar to him as the knowledge of his name, Harold kept even with the other bicycle for a short distance, as if nothing had happened, and then, looking straight ahead of him, he pedaled faster and moved ahead slowly until he was riding beside the three girls.
THE BICYCLES WERE BROUGHT out of the kitchen entry at six o’clock, and just as they were starting off, Mme Viénot appeared with three roses from the garden. Alix pinned her rose to the shoulder of her dress, and so did Sabine, but Barbara fastened hers in her hair.
“How pretty you look!” Mme Viénot said, her satisfied glance taking in all three of them.
With Eugène leading and Harold bringing up the rear, and the girls being careful that their skirts did not brush against the greasy chain or the wire wheels, they filed out of the courtyard and then plunged directly into the woods behind it. There were a number of paths, and Eugène chose one. The others followed him, still pushing their bicycles because the path was too sandy to ride on. After a quarter of a mile they emerged from the premature twilight of the woods into the open country and full daylight. Eugène took off his sport coat, folded it, and put it in the handlebar basket. Then he got on his bicycle and rode off down a dirt road that was not directly accessible to the château. Harold disposed of his coat in the same way. At first they rode single file, because of the deep ruts in the road, but before long they came to a concrete highway, and the three girls fanned out so that they could ride together. The two men continued to ride apart. Sometimes they all had to get off and push their bicycles uphill as the road led them up over the top of a long arc. At the crest, the land fell away in a panorama—terraced vineyards, the river valley, more hills, and little roads winding off into he wondered where—and they mounted their bicycles and went sailing downhill with the wind rushing past their ears.
“Isn’t this a lovely way to go to a party?” Barbara said as Harold overtook her. “It’s so unlike anything we’re used to, I feel as if I’m dreaming it.”
“Are you getting tired?” Alix called to them, over her shoulder.
“Oh no!” Barbara said.
“How far is it?” Harold asked.
“About five miles,” Alix said.
“Such a beautiful evening,” he said.
“Coming home there will be a moon,” Alix said.
Just when the ride was beginning to seem rather long, they left the highway and took a narrow lane that was again loose sand and that forced them to dismount for a few yards. Pushing their bicycles, they crossed a small footbridge and started up a steep hill. When they got to the top, they had arrived. The Americans saw a big country house of gray stone with castellated trimming and lancet windows and a sweep of lawn in front of it. The guests—girls in long dresses, young men in dinner jackets—were standing about in clusters near a flight of stone steps that led up to the open front door.
The party from the château left their bicycles under a grape arbor at the side of the house. The two men put on their coats, and felt their ties. The girls straightened their short skirts, tucked in stray wisps of hair, looked at their faces in pocket mirrors and exclaimed, powdered their noses, put on white gloves. In front of the house, Alix and Eugène and Sabine were surrounded by people they knew, and Harold and Barbara were left stranded. It was a party of the very young, they perceived; most of the guests were not more than eighteen or nineteen. How could Mme Viénot have let them in for such an evening!
“I foresee one of the longest evenings of my entire life,” Harold said out of the corner of his mouth.
Just when he was sure that Alix had abandoned them permanently, she came back and led them from group to group. The boys, thin and coltlike, raised Barbara’s hand two thirds of the way to their lips, without enthusiasm or gallantry. The gesture was not at all like hand-kissing in the movies, but was, instead, abrupt, mechanicaclass="underline" they pretended to kiss her hand.
Alix was called away, and the Americans found themselves stranded again but inside the party this time, not outside. They struck up a conversation in French with a dark-haired girl who was studying music; then another conversation, in English, with a girl who said that she wanted to visit America. They talked about America, about New York. Alix returned, bringing a blond young man who was very tall and thin. An old and very dear friend of hers and Eugène’s, she said. He bowed, started to say something, and was called away to answer a question, and didn’t return. Then Alix too left them.