The Street Called Straight

by Basil King

But the misgiving that beset him, as he motored out of Havre in the morning, was of another kind. It was that which attaches to the unlikely and the queer. Once having plunged into a country road, away from railways and hotels, he felt himself starting on a wild-goose chase. His assurance waned in proportion as conditions grew stranger. In vain an obliging chauffeur, accustomed to enlighten tourists as to the merits of this highway, pointed out the fact that the dusty road along which they sped had once—and not so many years ago—been the border of the bed of the Seine, that the white cliffs towering above them on the left, and edged along the top with verdure, marked the natural brink of the river, and that the church so admirably placed on a hillside was the shrine of a martyred maiden saint, whose body had come ashore here at Graville, having been flung into the water at Harfleur. Davenant was deaf to these interesting bits of information. He was blind, too. He was blind to the noble sweep of the Seine between soft green hills. He was blind to the craft on its bosom—steamers laden with the produce of orchard and the farm for England; Norwegian brigantines, weird as The Flying Dutchman in their black and white paint, carrying ice or lumber to Rouen; fishing-boats with red or umber sails. He was blind to the villages, clambering over cliffs to a casino, a plage, and a Hôtel des Bains, or nestling on the uplands round a spire. He was blind to the picturesque wooded gorges, through which little tributaries of the great river had once run violently down from the table-land of the Pays de Caux. He was blind to the charms of Harfleur, famous and somnolent, on the banks of a still more somnolent stream. He resumed the working of his faculties only when the chauffeur turned and said:

"Voilà, monsieur—voilà le château de madame la marquise."

If it was possible for Davenant's heart to leap and sink in the same instant, it did it then. It leaped at the sight of this white and rose castle, with its towers and donjon and keep; it sank at the thought that he, poor old unpretentious Peter Davenant, with no social or personal passports of any kind, must force his way over drawbridge and beneath portcullis—or whatever else might be the method of entering a feudal pile—into the presence of the châtelaine whose abode here must be that of some legendary princess, and bend her to his will. Stray memories came to him of Siegfrieds and Prince Charmings, with a natural gift for this sort of thing, but only to make his own appearance in the rôle the more absurd.

Melcourt-le-Danois had that characteristic which goes with all fine and fitting architecture of springing naturally out of the soil. It seemed as if it must always have been there. It was as difficult to imagine the plateau on which it stood without it as to see Mont Saint Michel merely as a rocky islet. The plateau crowned a white bluff running out like the prow of a Viking ship into a bend of the Seine, commanding the river in both directions. It was clear at a glance that when Roger the Dane laid here the first stone of his pirates' stronghold, to protect his port of Harfleur, the salt water must have dashed right up against the chalky cliff; but the centuries during which the silt of the Vosges had been carried down the river and piled up against the rocks at its mouth, had driven the castle inland for an eighth of a mile. Melcourt-le-Danois which had once looked down into the very waves now dominated in the first place a strip of gardens, and orchards of small fruit, through which the, road from Harfleur to the village of Melcourt, half a mile farther up the Seine, ran like a bit of white braid.

Viewed from the summit of the cliff on which Davenant's motor had stopped, the château was composed of two ancient towers guarding the long, and relatively low, relatively modern, brick mansion of the epoch of Louis Treize. The brick, once red, had toned down now to a soft old rose; the towers, once white, were splashed above the line to which the ivy climbed with rose and orange. Over the tip of the bluff and down its side of southern exposure, toward the village of Melcourt, ran a park of oak and chestnut, in all the October hues of yellow and olive-brown.

But ten minutes later, when the motor had made a detour round cliffs and little inlets and arrived at the main entrance to the château, Davenant found the aspect of things less intimidating. Through a high wrought-iron grille, surmounted by the head of an armorial beast, he had the view of a Lenôtre garden, all scrolls and arabesques. The towers, which at a distance had seemed part of a continuous whole, now detached themselves. The actual residence was no more imposing than any good-sized house in America. Davenant understood the chauffeur to say that "Madame la marquise l'avait modernisé jusqu'au bout des ongles."

Having summoned up courage to ring the bell, he found it answered by a middle-aged woman with a face worn by time and weather to the polished grooves and creases to which water wears a rock.

"On ne visite pas le château."

She made the statement with the stony, impersonal air of one who has to say the same thing a good many times a year. Davenant pressed close to the grille, murmuring something of which she caught the word "Madame."

"Madame la marquise n'est pas visible."