Barbara began to talk to another young man. Harold turned and gave his attention to the view—an immense sweep of marshland, the valley of the Cher, now autumn-colored with the setting sun. He looked back at the house, which was Victorian Gothic, and nothing like as handsome as Beaumesnil. It was, in fact, a perfectly awful house. And he was the oldest person he could see anywhere.
Once when he was a small child, he had had an experience like this. He must have been about six years old, and he was visiting his Aunt Mildred, who took him with her on a hay-ride party. But that time he was the youngest; he was the only child in a party of grownups; and so he opened his mouth and cried. But it didn’t change anything. The hay-ride party went on and on and on, and his aunt was provoked at him for crying in front of everybody.
There was a sudden movement into the house, and he looked around for Alix and Sabine, without being able to find them. And then he saw Barbara coming toward him, against the flow of people up the stone steps to the front door. With her was a young man whom he liked on sight.
“I am Jean Allégret,” the young man said as they shook hands. “Your wife tells me you are going to Salzburg for the Festival. I was stationed there at the end of the war. It is a beautiful city, but sad. It was a Nazi headquarters. Don’t be surprised if—You are to sit with me at dinner.” Taking Harold by the arm, he led him toward the stone steps.
As they passed into the house, Harold looked around for Barbara, who had already disappeared in the crowd. He caught a glimpse of rooms opening one out of another; of large and small paintings on the walls, in heavy gilt frames; of brocade armchairs, thick rugs, and little tables loaded with objets. The house had a rather stiff formality that he did not care for. In the dining room, the guests were reading the place cards at a huge oval table set for thirty places. Jean Allégret led him to a small table in an alcove, and then left him and returned a moment later, bringing a tall pretty blonde girl in a white tulle evening dress. She looks like a Persian kitten, Harold thought as he acknowledged the introduction. The girl also spoke English. Jean Allégret held her chair out for her and they sat down.
“In America,” Harold said as he unfolded his napkin, “this would be called ‘the children’s table.’ ”
“I saw a great deal of the Americans during the war,” Jean Allégret said. “Your humor is different from ours. It is three-quarters fantasy. Our fantasy is nearly always serious. I understand Americans very well.… ”
Harold was searching for Barbara at the big table. When he found her, he saw that she was listening attentively, with her head slightly bowed, to the very handsome young man on her right. He felt a twinge of jealousy.
“—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.”