At eight o’clock we catch sight of a white gleam below through a rift in the clouds—the pack! This plain of ice stretches away endlessly to the Pole, and on most of it no human being has set foot. In this latitude it is still soft; many crevasses and open leads. Occasionally there is a line like a seam in a fractured and partly healed skull: a pressure ridge. For a few minutes we chatter about this, pointing out to each other features of the pack and estimating its thickness. When we stop talking an extraordinary thing happens: we can hear the ice below. A grinding, a growling in the throat, scratchy coughs, a kind of heave as though someone in the next room were trying unsuccessfully to vomit. It is the sound of a great flat animal lying stretched from one horizon to the other, too weak to rise and too strong to die. July is not a good time for the pack. It feels its mortality. Let us hope it can hang on for a few more days; we may need to walk on it.
The sun has climbed up out of the mist and glows redly again, its outline a little rubbery. It gives out a feeble warmth, not enough to thaw our faces but enough to heat the Prinzess and cause her to rise. We are drifting at an altitude of perhaps four hundred metres over a low-hanging sheet of clouds with many holes in it. Through one of the larger openings I catch sight of something and point it out to Theodor: a red stain on the ice, the remains of a bear’s dinner. He gazes at this with some interest. After it is far behind us he still looks back now and then, thinking perhaps to catch a final glimpse of it. The bear is an untidy fellow, a successful Darwinian who has no table manners because he has no enemies. If he scatters blood and entrails around, never mind, there are plenty of other seals, and nobody is likely to interrupt him at his repast. Besides, his tablecloth is self-cleaning. Presently it will melt and everything will fall through into the ocean, the bear too; he always forgets this and has to swim stupidly toward the north in search of something solid to clamber onto.
All this is mere conjecture. I really don’t have very much experience of bears and leave such things to Waldemer. He, as it happens, is too busy to concern himself with these aesthetic and metaphysical contradictions. He has lowered his cook stove down and is manipulating the cords; the familiar odors of kerosene and hot coffee drift upward into the gondola. We breakfast on coffee and pieces of bread which we thaw by holding them against our coffee cups. After breakfast a sun sight fixes our latitude at 84° north, or about two hundred and forty nautical miles from Dane Island. A little more than three hundred and sixty to go. If this wind holds—and everything indicates that it will—we have a chance of reaching our destination in another forty hours, that is sometime on the early morning of the sixteenth. Afternoon, night, morning; these are only habits we carry with us from the Green World. Here everything is oblique, the sun goes sideways, the night is made out of milk, and morning and evening are diagonal tendencies, so to speak, that converge at a point slightly out of the picture so we can’t see how it is done. What nonsense! This is a strange diary I am writing; or am I writing or only thinking it? I don’t understand it very well myself and I have the impression of another consciousness a little distance away, perhaps looking over my shoulder, for which it all makes better sense, but which does not choose to confide in me what it is all about, and it is for this watching thing that I am writing. (I am writing, damnation take it, here is the small pigskin notebook on my knee, but what I am writing is only our morning position and a few other naked facts that could interest only a positivist like Waldemer). It is possible that cold affects the wit, causing certain neurons in the cerebellum to miss their connections. A harmless aberration, no doubt. Perhaps on the other hand I have merely discovered a new literary form. The frozen diary, or network of irrelevancies, as untidy and inevitable as a polar bear’s meal.
I am recalled from these numb but interesting musings by the practical voice of Waldemer. “Major. You know …”
“Ah. It’s time to send another notice of our progress to a breathless and expectant world.”
I scrawl the morning position onto a scrap of tissue paper, and Waldemer adds a few descriptive details for readers of the New York Herald. I can’t see what he is writing in his fine precise hand, but I catch a glimpse of “…northward…progress…hopeful…” The paper is screwed into the aluminum tube and we open the wicker case, which we have covered with a quilt to keep these small flying machines warm. Still, these are Norwegian pigeons and the climate here in July is no more severe than it is in their home in Trondheim in the winter. I notice, however, that they have eaten little or none of the Indian corn we put into the case the night before. They seem nervous and evade the hand that penetrates the case from the top. Waldemer manages to grasp one—evidently one of the less agile—and removes it from the case. Bird and tube are assembled, and Waldemer places them on the instrument ring as before and touches the invisible lever between the legs. But this pigeon is not very energetic. His wing droops shabbily, his eye lacks luster.
“Come now, Jewel. It’s away to the south and home.”
The pigeon contemplates him out of a dull eye. Waldemer, insisting on his view of the pigeon as a mechanism that can be made to function once the design is grasped, scratches him encouragingly in other places, and the pigeon raises each foot in turn and puts it down. Would like to go back to sleep apparently if Waldemer would stop bothering him. Homing instinct is lacking or totally paralyzed. Finally Waldemer takes him in two hands and tosses him outward into the void. The bird comes to himself, staggering and flapping, and manages to fly in a ragged circle back to the instrument ring again. Waldemer is still cheerful but a determined set is forming on his mouth. He flings the bird out with two hands again. This time the poor creature is too weak, or the gondola no longer seems an attractive place to him. He attempts a kind of caricature of flying, mainly with one wing, but sinks constantly lower. Finally it turns into a soft fluttering ball, the single wing still beating convulsively. Waldemer declares that the pigeon was not well, that it was suffering from an illness of some kind. “It certainly was an ill-bred bird,” I agree. “Probably not a homing pigeon at all but some loafer from the public square that the dealer has palmed off on us.” But the sight of this soft ball plummeting into the cloud has depressed us all—Waldemer especially, although I too for some reason am affected by the weight of this omen—and there is no talk of trying again with another pigeon. The incident is closed. Yet by watching Waldemer covertly I can see he is still pondering over the thing. He doesn’t like maladjustments. Does the tiny machine need oiling, is there a screw that needs to be tightened? By God, he will give it oil. He will adjust its ball bearings until it sees the light and does its proper duty, by heaven, he is not going to be outwitted by a cooing thing no bigger than a glove. Well, at least the stove works. The stove is a wonderful contrivance, Waldemer. It doesn’t blink and coo at you, and when you jerk the string it cooks the coffee, every time. That is because you made it and not God. Waldemer stamps his feet to warm them and is soon cheerful again. Foolish to be put out of sorts by a clockwork bird!
A sharp crack from below, like a rifle shot. A particularly brittle piece of ice has split under the pressure from the sea. Extraordinary how something so unsubstantial as water, even in congealed form, can make so metallic a sound. The cloud layer below us is a little thinner now and the pack is visible most of the time, only hidden now and then by a veil of gossamer-like mist. But behind us, to the south, something important is preparing to happen. The white clouds are huddling together in a wall around the horizon, this wall is darkening along its lower edge, and ragged streamers are detaching themselves slowly from the wall and drifting away in fragments. The disturbance I overheard on the Spiritual Telegraph on Monday has deepened into a storm, as I expected. This is certain to be good news for us. It will produce a strong south wind, and if the laws of rotating mechanisms are still in operation, the wind will later veer into the northwest and north for our return journey. And in fact, after only half an hour or less, the Prinzess leans a little to the first puff of wind, swings gracefully and slowly for a few moments like an enormous pendulum, and begins to accelerate her pace.
Theodor and I secure all the loose gear and rig the canvas windbreakers against the snow that is sure to come now. Then we busy ourselves with the instruments. By triangulation with the theodolite we calculate our speed at eighteen knots. It is a strange sensation to have the storm come upon us and yet feel no wind, since the Prinzess is carried along in the air and moves evenly and silently with it. Only now and then, when a random gust a little stronger than the others strikes her, does she shudder slightly and sway until she has adjusted herself to the new velocity. This pendulum swinging is a pleasant novelty. The motion is dignified and very slow, requiring perhaps three or four seconds to sway to one side, pause, and swing back to the other. Now and then for some reason the Prinzess begins very gradually to rotate, as imperceptibly as the hands of a clock, so that when the next gust strikes her the result is a circular or elliptical motion, the gondola tracing slow conoidal patterns in the air. The wall of nimbus to the south moves toward us with surprising speed. Tatters and fragments of it are already overhead, and our speed over the ice has increased to twenty knots or more. This a piece of luck; we had not expected to career north so fast. But there is a disadvantageous side to this useful storm. As the clouds cut off the sun the gas in the envelope cools and contracts, and its lifting force is reduced. Furthermore, a plaguey rime begins to form on the balloon and its rigging, and this adds a further weight to the load the diminishing sphere of gas can scarcely lift anyhow. Theodor sights down at the ice to estimate our altitude, knowing that the guide ropes are a hundred metres long. “A hundred and twenty metres. A hundred and ten.” We scud along at an astonishing pace, a velocity that seems even greater because of our closeness to the ice. Now and then the guide ropes brush the surface of the pack, sending the Prinzess into more graceful swayings and circlings, until she manages to rise a few feet again.
The others glance at me.
“Lighten.”
We jettison a good deal of our ballast, more than I would really care to if I had my choice, so that the next time we are in this predicament something more useful and necessary than lead shot may have to be dropped overboard. But this does the trick; the Prinzess is reinvigorated, she strains upward against the ropes, we rise to three hundred metres again and rush along to the north. A consultation with the Spiritual Telegraph confirms that we are dealing with a large and vigorous storm that will go on blustering for some time. Lowering the hairspring carefully into the crystal, I hear cracklings emanating from all directions from southwest to southeast. With the Bell receiver held to my left ear, my right hand delicately manipulating the hairspring, I gaze at my companions, who are watching me with that peculiar idiotic and half-embarrassed silence of modern man who has given over his fate to a few scraps of metal and is now wondering what the machine is going to do with him.
I lower the receiver from my ear. “South winds. The prognosis is favorable.”
“I’ve watched you do that a dozen times, Major. I wonder what you hear in that thing.”
I let him try. I hold the Bell receiver to his ear, he listens, and an intelligent, respectful, but not very enlightened expression comes over his face.
“Odd,” he comments finally.
“Mother Nature is scratching herself.”
“Leave off with your metaphors, Gustavus. They only make Waldemer nervous.”
“Of course they don’t make me nervous.” He hands me back the receiver. “It’s just that—he’s always making jokes about these things, even though it’s he himself that’s invented them. Sometimes I wonder if he—what the devil am I talking to Theodor for, as if you weren’t here—I wonder if you really appreciate the—h’mm. Tremendous significance of—all these developments. I mean, specifically, what we’re doing here. Because, don’t you see, if we can make our way to the Pole and back, using the winds as a highway—”
“You see, he uses metaphors himself. Journalism is nothing but metaphors. Cabinets falling, the Sick Man of Europe, and so on.”
“Veils of silence drawn over questions,” Theodor joins in. “Tides of humanity. Gathering storms on the political horizon.”
But he waves aside all badinage and his intelligent expression is at its most earnest. “If we can make our way to the Pole and back, as I say, using the winds as a highway, then enormous balloons four times or ten times the size of this one might be constructed to carry goods around the world—why, as early as the Paris exhibition of 1878 they made one a hundred and seventeen feet in diameter, which had a carrying capacity of twenty-eight thousand pounds and ascended with forty passengers. Imagine!”
He is competent at his profession and he has all the facts and figures. It is also quite possible that he is right. He goes on in this vein for some time, envisioning airships laden with English woolens crossing the Atlantic with the trade winds, transported by railroad to Nova Scotia and reloaded with American horse collars, patent apple peelers, enameled or brass doorknobs, wooden nutmegs, and so on, which they will carry rapidly back to Europe under the influence of the westerlies prevailing at that latitude, firing his own imagination as he talks and beginning now to write in his head the article which he will beyond any shadow of a doubt publish when we return to the crowded warrens of skyscrapers and printing presses, an article in which the phrase “using the winds as a highway” will certainly figure. His thoughts are still on the World of Cities. In spite of his outdoorsmanship, his strong-jawed love of guns and nature, he is par excellence the civilized man and draws his strength from these ant heaps where men work so assiduously at their machines and go home each night to send their millions of identical plumes of chimney smoke into the air. Through invention and change, he sincerely believes, mankind will be transformed. A new kind of human being will be created to use and inhabit the wonders that will come from the laboratories and factories of the future. What was England two centuries ago? he demands of us. A lot of meadows and elm trees. The whole thing would scarcely support ten million people. Then came the steam engine and the spinning jenny, and the face of the land was transformed, a new landscape was created and along with it a new species of creature, modern man in his frock coat. Look at England today—instead of a lot of meadows there are factories, smokestacks belching out prosperity, villas in the suburbs. The population has trebled and quadrupled; the whole country teems with Englishmen who work happily in the factories and go home at night to replenish the population. And so on. He has found a way to keep warm, lucky fellow, through agitating his lungs and making the air hum so vigorously through his larynx. He is eloquent and convincing when he speaks of the poetry of cities, even though he would not put it in those terms.
Cities! I find to my surprise that his evocation of chimney smoke, even, produces a twinge of something like regret in me. Drifting over this unpeopled vastness gives one a malaise of emptiness. This is nature—this is the planet devoid of men! This endless-stretching expanse of white—featureless, immense, silent. After a while the soul hungers for voices and warm rooms, even for smokestacks. The very purity of this antiseptic plain stretching away from horizon to horizon makes one long for squalor. After a day or two of it one would willingly lie in a London gutter and savor its aroma, the reassuring stench that drips from life. New York in August, horse cars and frying grease. The slightly putrid fragrance of Paris, with its flavour of wines and coal smoke. Stockholm: herring, leather, sailor’s tar, boiling linen. Perhaps because the sense of odour has nothing to grip in these sterile latitudes, as soon as one closes his eyes it turns inward to the pungencies of recollection, which spring to mind with a startling vividness. The perfume from a fat cab horse’s back, jogging through the Bois in the autumn sunshine. Thin acrid sweetness of horse chestnuts. Sun-warmed leather, faintly perspiring cabman, whose back is almost as broad as that of his beast. Clop of hooves on the pavement, intermittent light through the elms, roughness of my tweed cuff against my wrist, her visage serene and confident yet with the pink spider beginning to climb on her throat again (she was still only a girl really—a child!), not quite looking at me but at the air at one side of my head, the faint smile at one side of her mouth. “And why has it taken you so long to come back? Six months! You are cruel.”
“No doubt I am. But I have work to do, you know, an existence is not only composed of sherbets and cab rides in the Bois.”
“You still think I am trivial. How can I persuade you that I am serious about these things?” (She meant magnetism and electric sparks.) “I would have thought that after Finland …”
Another of her eloquent trailings off! But I refused to follow these oblique feminine subtleties, they amused or irritated me, and I pressed her maliciously. “How, after Finland?”
This really made her blush. She had not meant that at all, she insisted, but the blush gave her the lie. She had really meant both at once, the poor thing, her deftness with the barometer and theodolite and the folly afterward in the stone cottage. And so she turned the conversation smoothly (yet still blushing) to exhibitions and recitals, compliments on a gown, the bright and fashionable surface of her Faubourg world. How, after Finland? Bother! After Finland there was blessed little, to tell the truth. I worked hard at the Institute, writing a paper on dirigibility through guide ropes and maintaining my contacts with New York and Hamburg. When after six months of violet-scented letters and even a telegram I presented myself once again at Quai d’Orléans I found myself transformed by some sort of infernal legerdemain into a kind of suitor, one whose loyalty and continuous presence in the house were taken for granted and who was expected to subsist indefinitely on expectations of some vague and idyllic future. Although I had come from Stockholm with the idea of burying myself in a dusty laboratory with my papers and emerging only now and then to consult the Bibliothèque Nationale or purchase scientific supplies, I found myself moving into not exactly elegant but by no means squalid rooms in rue de Rennes, I could hardly afford them, and even buying myself the striped morning coat of a swain. I accompanied her to fittings at Worth and Vionnet, to Boissier in Boulevard des Capucines for a kind of bonbon that could be obtained only there. On the lake in the Bois de Boulogne we drifted elegantly over the lilies in a rented skiff, I in my frock coat, she in a gown from Worth: a scene from Watteau. The devil! This was not working out as I had planned. One would have thought that after Finland (how, after Finland?) things would have been much simpler and more natural, that a major obstacle in our friendship (shall we call it) would have been surmounted so that one would not be confronted by this same obstacle again and again and our little intimacy, so necessary to man and beast, might be repeated again from time to time. But no; here on her home ground there was another Luisa, or rather there were several Luisas who merged and divided, slipped tantalizingly out of reach or dissolved in myriad forms like characters in one of Herr Strindberg’s plays. (I had read something of this lunatic now and devilish hard going it was.) She seemed to hold me to account in some way for the Finnish cottage, although God knows I had fallen into her clutches as innocently as a child. Where was that pale and moonlike back in the firelight with its curve of shadows? In Paris she seemed indifferent, even slightly ironic about these mergings of our hands and ardours that took place now and again behind doorways, as though she regarded them as a means of verification of the attachment rather than as a pleasure or end in themselves. The miracle of the restoration of virginity, disputed warmly by theologians, Luisa performed daily and without effort. Any given day’s gain was lost overnight, so that the aspirant had Sisyphus-wise to begin his task constantly anew, a discouraging prospect even for a young man, which I was no longer. In this unlikely chastity she was defended most of all by the Bayeux reticule. In order to make love to her it was first necessary to distract her attention from this portable museum; otherwise she was capable at important moments of turning to search in it for an almond dragée or a pin to catch up her hair, finding en route a letter from her Polish cousin Gela which she insisted on reading to me. Let us put the reticule over here, dear Luisa, behind the armchair or preferably outside the door in the salon, and get on with our business. I would manage finally to unfasten one snap at the top of her dress in the back. You cunning gypsy! she accused. She considered it degenerate of a man to understand the workings of female clothing, yet left to herself she would never unfasten it in a million years. (In Paris, that is; in Finland the dress had come off entirely by itself through sleight-of-hand.) Entry of the Breton footman. Mademoiselle had wished to be reminded when it was three o’clock, so she could go to see the Monets at the Luxembourg. Had Mademoiselle! The demons carry her off! In the vestibule this lout of a Breton would appear with her paletot, but she would gesture to me with a patrician motion of her head. And I, subfootman under immediate command of the Breton, would take the coat and attempt to get her into the thing. The mass of moire, silk-lined, was a feminine conundrum. While her arm waited, I searched for the place where it was to go. Where was that blasted opening? And once found, the arm was too limp and in its fumbling the passage through the silk was lost, or the sleeve hole was the wrong one and would result in a serious confusion if pursued. The Breton stood by with thumb clasped behind his back, too well trained to offer suggestions. This would provide good telling belowstairs. At last Luisa took the coat from me and slipped into it herself, with an elegant deftness. “Thank you, Gustav dear.” It was not necessary for the Breton to run after a cab; I was capable of that. Or not run after it at all; simply wave in the direction indicated with my hat, a pearl-grey homburg that went with the frock coat. To the Luxembourg! Luisa was placid, sibylline, her irony if any showing only imperceptibly in the faint shadows below her mouth.
And yet Finland! Could those sighs and urgencies, those unmistakable pyrotechnics of ardour, have come from a person who was only partly enjoying herself? (Pricked by some demon of scepticism, I remembered that in French fireworks are called feux d’artifice.) No matter, I attempted to convince myself with at least some success, the simulacrum of bliss was the same as bliss. Love is a disease according to the Viennese doctors. Take away the symptoms of a disease and what do you have? Yet she seemed cured. She seemed to have forgotten the episode, as though it had not happened or had been the unimportant lapse of a friend whose conduct she hardly approved and yet was prepared, in the end, to regard with a cosmopolitan indulgence. It was terribly hard work, this thing of embracing behind doors; it was fraught with obstacles that she surely laid deliberately in my path. Should a door be shut, the Breton would appear and open it. Were we alone in a dark and curtained cab, she would require me to light matches while she searched for something in her reticule. And my work was suffering! I had come to Paris, I was barely able to remember in my more lucid moments, to verify the work of Neumayer and Fritsche which was to be found in manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale and apply it to my own researches on atmospheric phenomena. In rue de Sèvres an instrument dealer was still waiting to demonstrate for me a bifilar magnetometer. Do you know what that is, dear Luisa, a bifilar magnetometer? It is what you swore to be so richly interested in, that day when you interposed yourself into my life at the Musée Carnavalet. Yet she did manage to read the barometer over the Gulf of Bothnia. Drat the Gulf of Bothnia! On the other side of it was Finland and the stone cottage. Well, and was I not happy in the stone cottage? In any case, half the people in the world were women and they were hardly a novelty. What precisely did I wish anyhow, and why did I not ignore her and go on exactly as I was before I met her? Because I was a blithering idiot whose glands were more powerful than his brain. Now and then I found time to glance into a book or twiddle briefly with some instrument in my rented room. Chiefly in the morning, since Luisa, as I might have guessed in spite of her stories about rides in the Bois at dawn, rose late in the morning, while my habits were thoroughly diurnal. From the Bibliothèque to Quai d’Orléans to the instrument dealer to the room in rue de Rennes I coursed or plodded wearily, wearing out quantities of shoe leather. It was impossible to do both these things well. I was like a man playing kettledrums and having constantly to turn his attention from one to the other. And now and then some perfidious angel of betrayal would whisper at my elbow, “You will never have your freedom until you effect matrimony with this remorseless creature, so that you can go off and leave her each day as all men do, busying yourself with the truly important questions of the world, while she prepares the downy nest of night. This is the way of the world.”
This I was not quite prepared to do. I was a certain kind of creature and could be no other; as soon as I felt any heart flowers growing in me I uprooted them mercilessly, or else I faced the risk of having her or some other beseech me, pale-faced and tears in eyes, not to go off and do what I wished to do and what my whole soul and being called for me to do, simply because there might be danger attached to it: “Think of me.” No, dear Luisa, my need for you is tremendous, cosmic, and fundamental, but it has its limits. Besides, the matter was more complicated than that. It was by no means certain that an honourable proposal from me would even be greeted favorably by the powers that governed in this household, even though unmistakable suggestions were applied to me in this respect, not only the questioning of the aunt about my prospects, but the behavior of Luisa herself in certain circumstances usually public, and embarrassing to myself, such as the occasion six weeks or so after my arrival in which she stood by the piano and recited Goldsmith to the assembled guests, with speaking glances in my direction at the end of the more meaningful lines:
“When lovely woman stoops to folly
And finds too late that men betray,
What charm can soothe her melancholy,
What art can wash her guilt away?”
Well, it was a question. What art indeed? If there was an art she had it; she had been very well educated by somebody or other. There were actually tears in her eyes as she embarked on the second and even more pathetic stanza.
“The only art her guilt to cover,
To hide her shame from every eye,
To give repentance to her lover.
And wring his bosom—is to die.”
There was a tinkle of applause, and from the corner the sari-clad mother sighed, “Oh, la pauvre.” Luisa soon brightened up and spoke no more of suicide, and indeed it was not necessary for her to take such radical and irreversible steps to wring my bosom; she could do it simply by reciting a poem while concealing a piece of onion in her handkerchief. Who had coached her in this playlet? I began to see that in order to grasp Luisa, in any sense in which the verb might be taken, it was first necessary to understand something of the functioning principles of this household, and it was a study almost as formidable as that of aeromagnetism. The aunt dominated all. Yet like all tyrants she herself understood only a part of what she dominated. As for my understanding of her, it consisted of a chasm in which two great mysteries yawned: primo, how she regarded me, and secundo, what it was exactly that she intended for Luisa. On my first encounter with her, when she had interrogated me about my military rank and suchlike, she had seemed only an amusing if faintly ominous doll, her head vibrating while she pronounced her thinly veiled hostilities. But as I studied her more she acquired complexity and I understood her less. I began to compile a stock of information, mostly from conversations with other guests, in the hope that this would lead me to the clue that would eventually enable me to understand the aunt and the others in the family, especially the aunt. She had been born in Goa but brought to Europe as a tiny infant, it seemed. Somehow she had inherited the family fortune, acquired the seventeenth-century hôtel particulier on the Île, and assembled this menagerie of Peruvian ambassadors, poètes manqués, and unattached young officers who rotated around her like a planetary system. One had the impression that there were invisible forces supporting this household that had not yet been detected, that the aunt lay under the protection of an eminent political figure, or that the economics of the house rested on hidden and lucrative vice that was revealed only to initiates. One thing was certain, and that was that there was a powerful sexual element in the energy that the aunt radiated to the external world. Never mind that she was a spinster! That this part of her nature had never been conventionally fulfilled was the centre and secret of her power. She was an allegorical personage, one of those virgin-goddesses from mythology who punish infractions against their will by excruciating and picturesque torments, like being trampled by stags. “How is it, Captain,” she asked me once, “that we never see you any more in the house?” (I had come only once that day.) “No doubt there are things more fascinating that keep you in your rented room.” I could not seriously convince myself she was referring to a bifilar magnetometer. “We know what men are, overgrown boys who must have their toys. Be careful, Captain, that some toy or other does not break in your hand. They are expensive, I am sure.”
What in the collected works of Aeschylus did she mean by that! Did she have a Roentgen-ray telescope, this vibrating matriarch, or did she wring confessions out of Luisa with thumbscrews? This second was not likely, since Luisa herself seemed to have forgotten about Finland almost as soon as it happened. Perhaps, in spite of all probability, she was referring to a bifilar magnetometer. And the mother! She was another study that grew more profound as one attempted to penetrate it. I also learned something of her biography, but it threw less light on the matter than one might have hoped. She had remained in Goa, it transpired, when the infant-aunt had been brought to Europe—the why of all this was an unfathomable mystery, whether the imperious father had decreed this out of whim, or whether some economic or other consideration determined the separation of the sisters—and she had spent her girlhood there in that heap of ruined churches and monasteries on the Indian coast, inhabited for the most part by priests banished from Portugal for misconduct, a town looking back with comatose nostalgia to the days of its glory in the seventeenth century—a steamy odorous backwater, cut off from India by the river Terakhul and from all civilization and hope of culture by the sea. There, eating curry and attended by ill-humoured servants, she had spent the seven thousand hot and identical days between her birth and her adulthood, and longing in her secret thoughts for heaven knows what, although hardly a cabbage could have been satisfied with the existence she led, and she must have grasped some hint of what life was like from the servants. Was she really an imbecile or was this the role that life had taught her to play? Perhaps the sun had scrambled her wits like eggs, or perhaps the aunt had been quicker from the beginning and this was why she had been taken off to Europe and the younger sister left to stew in those odorous miasmas where nothing ever happened.
For whatever reason—death of the father, total decline of the family fortunes in Goa—this deprived creature found herself at the age of twenty suddenly commanded to transfer herself to Paris by order of the aunt. And there, after only a few short weeks, she encountered the dashing and laconic American, Mr. Hickman, whose father had just died and who had chosen, rather foolishly, to spend his patrimony on a Grand Tour of Europe in the eighteenth century fashion, rather than on improving the small New Mexico cattle ranch that was already mortgaged to the hilt. Why in the name of Thomas Jefferson the slim-hipped, long-jawed cowboy ever fell in love with and married this sloe-eyed Oriental moron was beyond me to say. Something in his soul lacked and yearned for exactly that languor, perhaps; it was the attraction of opposites. What was certain was that the aunt received this news with a maenadic fury, turning from the messenger speechless and white-faced and retiring to plan her counterattack. Nothing could be done, the cowboy had galloped off with her on his pony or otherwise abstracted her, and the marriage was solemnized in Bougival. Shortly afterward they sailed on the Cymric for New York. For what was there for them to do in Paris? Both of them were out of place there, whereas on the cactus-strewn mesas of the Far West she would at least be a rare object standing out against the landscape, an exotic flower. (And indeed this was perhaps precisely why he had come to Paris, to seek out and marry a Goan of Portuguese ancestry who spoke no English and would be the only bride in New Mexico to wear a sari.) The marriage lasted only a few weeks or a few months, but here I am only guessing. Why did she come back afterward? Probably, I imagine, because the bridegroom had left her entirely penniless after he galloped off to be slain in the attack on the Apache chief Victorio near Blanco, New Mexico, an event which is referred to in footnotes in the more complete histories but which was eclipsed by the more spectacular demise of General Custer at the Little Bighorn the following year—a year in which, as it happened, I was working as a janitor in the Swedish exhibit at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and saving my money to study natural philosophy at Johns Hopkins.
At any rate the return of the young widow to Quai d’Orléans is not hard to imagine—the sloe-eyed beauty contrite but seraphic, the aunt slashing at her with little chops of her head: “Miscreant! Betrayer of your proud race! Debased plaything and slave of the five-limbed! Put on your sari, dab the vermilion of purdah on your forehead, and henceforth eat my bread in sorrow! You will leave the house only accompanied by servants. And woe to you if the pentapod has implanted a child in your womb!” Crushed by this curse, and yet perhaps with a faint demi-smile something like Luisa’s at the corner of her mouth, the sloe-eyed one retired to her room to spend the rest of her life as a kind of heirloom, a grandfather’s clock or an old family retainer. And when her abdomen swelled, the aunt’s wrath (I could imagine) turned to sarcasm, tempered only slightly by the eventual revelation that the cause and consequence of the swelling was a female child. There she stood, the aunt—in my mind’s eye—with her own sideways and merciless smile of derision, remarking with faint judders of her head to the servants or perhaps to the sloe-eyed one herself, “I know how to prevent conception with an ordinary five-franc coin. Grip it between your knees and hold it there constantly in the presence of the opposite sex.”
Yet there were dislocations of fact here, mysteries surrounding mysteries and others inside them. For instance: I learned quite by accident that there was a brother in the family whose existence I had not suspected, un nommé Theodor. Luisa referred to him quite casually one day, apropos of her plans, rather vague ones, to spend a few days on the Italian lakes, either alone or with persons unnamed. “Possibly Teddy will be there,” she remarked abstractedly. At this point I had not put things together sufficiently to realise that Theodor’s existence was inconsistent with my whole theory or web of conjecture about the marriage of the mother with the cowboy and his almost immediate massacre by the Apaches, and it merely seemed to me a wonder that she had a brother who had never been referred to before. “Why is he never around?” “Oh, he comes and goes. He is attending a military school. He is studying to be an officer.” “Like me?” I suggested, faintly jealous perhaps and also a little amused. “Oh no, not at all, he is going to be a real officer, who will fight in wars and kill people, and be decorated for bravery.” Bravo for him. Back in my lodgings, of course, it soon penetrated to me that the existence of Theodor required a much longer conjectural marriage of the mother and the cowboy, a pair of years at the minimum, it seemed to me in my male obtusity about such matters, or else a second and quite inconceivable escapade of the mother (with another person? With the ghost of the demised cowboy?) some months after the first. By the principle of economy this last was a poor story; one elopement was an adventure, two verged on the farcical. Perhaps then the two children were twins; but Luisa had implied she was the older, or had she? Once when I was talking to the aunt about something quite different, I found my attention wandering because a part of my mind, as I discovered, was still pondering over this enigma. Realizing I had lost track of what the aunt was talking about anyhow, I asked her impulsively, “And your nephew—is he older or younger than Luisa? I am sorry that it is so stupid of me to forget.”
“Who?”
“Theodor.”
Her eyes narrowed on me keenly. “And who told you of this?” Like an eagle she fixed me; nay, nay, nay quivered her chin.
“Luisa.”
“Pay no attention to her. It is only her vapours. What nonsense!”
And that was the end of it. Luisa might be vapourous, this I was willing to concede and perhaps even had evidence for it that was not at the disposal of the aunt, but surely this did not affect the fact that she was either older or younger than her brother? Or a twin; I had forgotten this alternative. The plague take these sibyls and their dithyrambs! Yet that mysterious and improbable wedlock of a generation ago still held my attention and puzzled me, for reasons I could identify only obscurely. For example: in those brief weeks, months, or pair of years of their idyll, however long it had lasted, what language did the newlyweds speak? The sloe-eyed one was reared in Portuguese, with a substratum from the servants of whatever the indigenous language is in that part of the world, Urdu, I imagine, and received no education at all. The cowboy spoke American and no doubt some twangy French. But what use was this in abducting a Goan beauty from a seraglio? Sign language goes well up to a point, but in the long evenings alone there are serious matters to be discussed. I imagined her articulating to the ardent bridegroom, timidly, “You know mifeuya?” And in a flash of insight, probably erroneous, I saw in this business of language the key to her secret existence; the mother I mean. Suppose for the purpose of argument we have a person of normal intelligence, reared by bad-tempered servants in no language at all or in baby talk, and suppose we imagine this person flung at an age of twenty into a multilingual society of bewildering complexity—a society which commonly substitutes speech for action—this person, struggling to express herself in three words of Urdu and badly pronounced French, might well be regarded by universal agreement as lacking in wit; a term which, especially in its French version esprit, is frequently confused with the ability to express oneself in well-constructed epigrams. An individual widely regarded as an imbecile will end by sharing the opinion. And so the mother, no doubt, totally withdrew herself from this world of salon intellectualism where the play of minds was rigorously verbal and the failure to recognize an allusion to Henri de Régnier a disgrace, and limited her satisfactions to the realm where language was superfluous, i.e., the world of the senses. She operated so successfully in this sphere that she was able to capture the slim-hipped and legendary if somewhat impecunious hero of the Far West—simply, no doubt, by keeping her mouth shut and directing her sloe eyes to advantage—and thus accomplished what the aunt was probably incapable of even if she had not regarded it as beneath her contempt; that is, reproducing herself in the normal female way. As for the frontiersman, we can believe he died happy, content with his own reckless courage and knowing his progeny assured, even though in an odd kind of household. The mother then retreated to the only other kind of sensualism available to her, gluttony, and who can blame her? She might have taken up drugs, or young footmen. Judgments of one’s fellow human beings are very complex. Perhaps in time I would come to understand the aunt too, and forgive her for being what God had made her.
Whether or not I was correct about all this, it was clear that the mother had found a way of life only moderately damaging to the health and not requiring complicated sentences. A certain mythology existed about her in the household, according to which she was supposed to have no opinions and was not to be told anything shocking. Her soul was supposed to be covered with a neat and shiny coat of varnish, which nothing could penetrate. Yet occasionally a spark of personality asserted itself in unexpected ways. She was never actively drawn to anything, except food; her days of passion were behind her. But her organ of repulsion was still vigorous. She “took dislikes,” as Luisa said. Sometimes a ray of sunlight striking her in the eye, or an unfortunate remark of a guest, would produce an embarrassing reaction. There was the bluff English consular official, for example, who was pleased to be amused at her caste mark. “I see you’ve got your sealing wax on,” he told her with British joviality. “Ready to be posted.” She smiled at him timidly. She was holding a teacup, and in an odd gesture, almost as though she were offering a toast, she raised it to the maximum height she could reach in the sari she was wearing, about the level of her head. Since she was short and he about six feet tall, this brought the cup to the level of his chest. He observed it with perplexity, and she told him rather anxiously, “Moment,” as a sign that he should not go away but remain exactly where he was. Going to the sideboard, she set down the teacup and bent over the ottoman from a nearby sofa. Struggling under this weight, she brought the ottoman to the Englishman and set it before him, a little to one side. Then she returned to the sideboard for the teacup, mounted with it onto the ottoman which raised her almost to the same level as the Englishman, lifted the cup with the gesture as before, and poured the contents over his head. Then, getting down from the ottoman, she turned to the spectators and remarked quite calmly and more or less apropos de rien, “I hate a fool.” It became necessary to lead her out of the room. “Mother is singular,” Luisa would say smoothly at such moments. It was an accurate Dickensian adjective and the more patient observer perceived what he ought to have seen long before, that the mother was thoroughly in command of her behavior and that very little happened to her in the world that she had not chosen to happen. This life of hers was singular, from the simple syllables she pronounced only after some thought to the systematic manner in which she ate toast, afterward moistening her ten fingers at her lips in exact order, then wiping them on the napkin one after the other in the same sequence. If it were contrary to all likelihood that her emotions were so violent, it was even more extraordinary that she controlled them with such precision. Regarded in this light her abduction or seduction by the frontiersman turned in the mind’s eye into a positive act and one that she had willed herself, and even Luisa herself became more plausible. All members of the family, I was beginning to see, shared certain traits; tempered in Luisa’s case by the laconic and graceful recklessness of the cowboy.
“The wind is veering. South-southwest now. It’s come around more than a point.”
Theodor, the scarf still bound around his head, is standing by the theodolite watching me with his dark bedouin eyes. For a fraction of a second I fail to grasp what he is talking about. Then I sight into the instrument, check the compass, and see that he is correct. Had I been asleep? No, my eyes were only closed for the five minutes or so I had allowed myself to rest them briefly from this whiteness.
“A little woolgathering, eh, Major? Looked as though you were in the Land of Nod.”
Not feeling in the mood for bluff repartee, I ignore Waldemer and address myself to the meteorological question.
“More wind now too. Must be thirty knots. A gust from the east would be helpful. We’re already off course to the right. But the wind will back as the cyclonic system passes over us. And then come around to the north, in a day or two.”
With the cold stiffening my lips this is about as long a speech as I care to make, at least on technical subjects. The temperature is steady at minus ten centigrade. The wind scours along the pack below us, sending streamers of cake flour sliding along its surface and making a sound like a dull hum. That slightly sharper grumble is the noise of the ice grinding and splitting against itself. Strange that in this cutting gale we feel no wind at all and have the impression of floating in a calm. We are even sheltered from the snow by the swelling girth of silk overhead; it is as though we were suspended under an immense umbrella. In the well-equipped gondola there is a feeling of safety, a coziness, as though in this tempest, in this most inhospitable part of the world, we are somehow immune to all the worst that nature can contrive. This immunity is an illusion; the weight of snow is accumulating on precisely that upper hemisphere of the silk we can’t see, and down here below, a thin and crystalline rime is slowly forming on everything, the ropes, the wicker of the gondola, the balloon itself. This sugar candy will eventually weigh tons and destroy us, if something isn’t done about it. Yet for some reason I am unable to feel any sense of peril, and probably my companions are the same. We are conscious only of cold, and of an immense and absolute isolation.
While I was resting, curled up in a corner of the gondola with the hood drawn over my face, Waldemer has busied himself by making lunch. It is four o’clock in Greenwich, but we pay heed to the clock only for navigation purposes and eat whenever we have the chance. The fragrance of beef stew rises from below us. If it were quiet we might hear the hiss of these large snowflakes falling into the hot pan on the stove, but it is not quiet; constantly in our ears is the vague and muffled rumble from the pack below.
Theodor is still watching me reflectively, with the same expression on his face that I saw when I opened my eyes only a few minutes before. It isn’t at all an anxious expression and there is even, it seems to me, a trace of irony in it.
“And the weight of this snow on the balloon. What will we do about it?”
“This is only a squall. It will pass quickly.”
“And the rime is forming on the rigging.”
“Knock it off with a mallet if you want something to do.”
But his mood isn’t active, only observant and reflective, with tendencies even to the metaphysical.
“Do you know, I think I used to dream of this place as a child. You’ve brought me to a strange part of the world, Gustav. This whiteness … this space with no walls, no horizon, as though we were floating in a universe without matter and only white space around us … and this kind of white thunder coming from a distance. Do you think it’s possible to dream of a place—a real place—you’ve never seen, and then later find that your dream was real?”
“When I was a child I used to dream about America.”
“And what did you dream of?”
“Buffalo, and prairies.”
“And when you came to America, did you find the buffalo and the prairies?”
“No, when I came it was to Philadelphia. All I saw were horse cars.”
Waldemer looks up curiously when I mention his native land, but returns his attention to the stew as soon as he realises our conversation is metaphysical.
“And what do you dream of here in the gondola when you sleep?”
“Paris, at times. At times, other places.”
“So much? But you’ve hardly been asleep.”
This is true; it strikes me too as a little curious. But if this whiteness continues, this sphere of milky ether that surrounds us on all sides including above and below, it won’t be necessary to sleep in order to dream; the mind itself will fix on its own images for lack of anything outside it to grasp. I open my eyes: whiteness. I close them: blood veins and sparks, symptoms of mild irritation from cold and white light. It is important to fix on something, in order for the consciousness not to be spread out, dissolved, lost in this dimensionless milk. I try to recall in my mind the exact dimensions, the plan, the furniture of my lodgings in rue de Rennes, the salon with its dusty brocade hangings and its window that looked out on a white enameled sign across the street saying BOULANGERIE PÂTISSERIE and next door to it VILLE DE PARIS SERVICE MUNICIPAL DES POMPES FUNÈBRES in gold letters on black, the little hall that led to the bedroom one way and to the W.C. the other, the parquet floor that became as familiar to me as my own hand as I pondered there, staring at it for hours, at grips with the baffling enigma of constructing a wave detector for aeromagnetic emanations which would produce an audible signal for the operator. That white waste of the unknown, filled with invisible mathematical formulae, was as formless and frustrating as a storm in the arctic. The crux of the problem, I grasped finally, was the rectification or filtering of these electrical tremblings in the air, so that what remained of them would move in only one direction and thus have the capability of activating a magnetophone. I had rejected Signor Marconi’s “coherer,” filled with metal filings, as too delicate and too easily disturbed by joggings for the use I had in mind for it. Instead, my attention was caught by several papers of Krobenius in which he described the properties of certain mineral crystals which allowed an electrical flux to pass through them in one direction but not in another. These papers—unpublished and existing only in manuscript form in the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève—I studied with some care, although they were less enlightening than I had hoped. In them Krobenius was reticent about the identity of the minerals used in his investigations, describing them only as “certains sels cohésifs de la famille plombière.” I then wrote for and obtained an appointment to visit him in his studio in Neuilly, but this interview was somewhat unproductive. Krobenius, an eccentric octogenarian in a long grey smock, denied having worked with crystals and pretended to be deaf when I referred to the manuscripts I had found in the library. As I was being ushered out of the studio with a rather perfunctory courtesy, however, I did catch a glimpse of an envelope on the table: a bill from a well-known dealer in gems and minerals in Place Saint-André-des-Arts. It was a simple matter to go to this dealer and request, “I have just come from Professor Krobenius, and would like samples of the same cohesive salts of the lead family which you sold to him, I am sorry, the name slips my mind.”
The crystal in question proved to be galena. Provided with a dozen small grey and gleaming chips of this substance, I hastened feverishly back to my lodgings. The antenna wire I had draped out the window, to the great disapproval of the concierge. The filter or wave sieve of Signor Marconi, which allowed only waves of a predetermined length to pass, I was already familiar with and had built several. It consisted of a coil of fine wire wound around a cylinder and operating in conjunction with a spark condenser of tinfoil and paper. The coil was provided with a sliding contact that enabled me to vary the wavelength at will. To one of these contrivances I now hastily connected a crystal from the dozen in the envelope. The only remaining step was to wire the Bell magnetophone to this arrangement in such a way that the rectified pulses would activate its diaphragm; I was not sure how to go about this and a good deal of trial and error would be necessary. Unrolling a length of high-quality silver solder, I had just begun to heat the soldering iron over a spirit lamp when the pest of a concièrge knocked on the door. Under ordinary circumstances this individual left me alone, having learned that I was a person of solitary habits with a tendency to ferocity, and she ventured as far as my lair on the fifth floor only when she had something of importance to communicate, like a telegram.
The door being unlocked, I called for her to enter, still preoccupied with the task of heating the iron.
“Pardon. A monsieur to see you.”
“What kind of a monsieur?”
“A foreigner.”
“Well, I am a foreigner myself. What else?”
“A military person, young, of good manners.”
“Well, show the infernal nuisance in.” I still wasn’t paying complete attention. I tried the heat of the iron with a wet forefinger.
There presently appeared in the doorway a very young man, hardly more than a youth to judge from his smooth cheek, with a long-faced and dark-eyed sort of handsomeness, improbably clad in the uniform of a German military academy. The cap seemed almost too heavy for his slight neck to support, but he did not take it off.
“Monsieur Crispin?”
I nodded, undecided whether to put the iron down or to go on with my work.
“I have the honour to present myself. I am Luisa’s brother.” Definitely, although reluctantly, I put the iron down. “Ah, you are Teddy!”
But he was cool, nodded only faintly, and evidently would have preferred a more formal mode of address. I picked up the iron again, examined it, and wondered again if I might not go on heating it as he talked. “And so—to what do I owe the honour?”
“As you know, our family is without a father. So it seems I am called upon to function in a parental locus. It is not a role I would have chosen. But my obligation in the matter is clear. In short, I am the tutelar head of a family, and one to which you stand in an ambiguous relation.”
“You seem to make a great deal of rigmarole about it. Why don’t you sit down?”
While he spoke he fixed me with an unmoving and very determined paleness, exactly like Luisa. “It isn’t customary under the circumstances. I must make it clear that my intentions in this matter are purely formal. I have no animus against you personally. But, in my function as head of family, it is necessary for me to call you formally to account for your actions.”
He spoke well, this lad. They trained him in rhetoric, perhaps, in the German military academy.
“What actions are you speaking of?”
“I am not here to relate anecdotes, which you know better than I. What are your intentions in regard to Luisa?”
Hurrah! Here we come to it! The whole business, including his nervousness and his rather amateurish hauteur, gave the impression that he was acting in a school play set in the eighteenth century, Schiller’s Don Carlos perhaps. There was something incongruous about his standing there with his hat on and making this speech in the epoch of railway trains and coulomb apparatus. He wanted to know my intentions in regard to Luisa! Thunder and consternation! What were her intentions in regard to me? From all appearances he was capable of calling me out to fire pistols at each other over a handkerchief, this fragile youth with the determined set at the corner of his mouth, simply because through sheer accident (to oversimplify very greatly) I had passed a night with his sister in a Finnish farmhouse.
He spoke in a birdlike but level, well-modulated, even slightly menacing voice. He was hardly more than an adolescent. “Might I ask how old you are?”
“That has no pertinence whatever to the matter at hand. I am eighteen.”
“You look sixteen, if you will pardon me for saying so, in any case too young to burst into rooms calling people to account for matters you can hardly understand. Have you much experience of women?”
“That is even less pertinent,” he said, stiffening. “I visit the establishments provided, as necessary for hygiene.”
“Bravo! Your hygiene seems excellent, as far as I can tell. In that case, what the devil business do you have interfering between two mature people who have contracted a friendship?”
“Do I have your word as an officer and a gentleman that your relations with Luisa may be described by the term contraction of a friendship?”
“Absolutely.”
“I have information that they are more.”
“Your information is erroneous.”
“You are aware that there is a fiancé?”
“So I have heard.”
“You don’t regard yourself in that role?”
“I hope not.”
“You are aware that, in polite society, it is improper to offer attentions to a young lady to whom one’s intentions are not serious?”
“My intentions are very serious.”
“And they are?”
“To instruct her in science.” I was not quite without malice in this. He was putting me out of sorts.
“My information is that, last Tuesday at a quarter past three, you were affectionate with her behind a doorway.”
“I will never do so again! Bother take her and her kisses!”
I was firm too now and getting quite angry. I stood facing him and holding the soldering iron. I was at my most leonine; the points of my mustache bristled, no doubt, and the short stiff hair over my temples rose as it does on such occasions. We confronted each other; he turned even paler than before if that were possible, but he did not retreat an inch.
I waited for him to say, “A friend will call upon you this evening. Please provide him with the name of your second.” And what would I do then? Pack my baggage and go back to Sweden with my tail between my legs? No, by Thunder, not for this stripling! I would meet him in the Bois and no doubt end with a bullet in my pancreas or some other uncomfortable place, since they undoubtedly taught him to shoot at his Militärische Hochschule whatever else was on the curriculum.
But instead of pronouncing this formula he hesitated for an instant, his mouth gathering faintly at the edges as he met my glance, and in that moment his chance to be a Schiller hero slipped away from him. He wanted to live too, perhaps, and for all he knew I was a real officer instead of a fraudulent engineer-cum-librarian who lived on a diet of paper and had never been near an academy. His dark eyes never flinched, however.
“And so you affirm that your intentions in regard to Luisa are honourable?”
“Absolutely,” I replied in an almost gentle voice. I might have responded that Don Juan or even Jack the Ripper, possibly, were honourable men according to their lights and you achieved very little in the world by going around asking people to their faces if they were honourable, but perhaps he would find this out for himself in time, and I decided to leave the matter with this single word.
“Then I must be satisfied. I have nothing further to demand. I am sorry to have disturbed you.”
“You haven’t disturbed me at all. It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance. And now, if you will excuse me, I will go back to my crystals.”
“You are a crystallographer?” “I am a magneto-electrical aereographer, and just now I am using this silver solder to affix these copper wires to an octahedron of galena. Stay and hold the wires in place for me, and afterward we can go to lunch.”
“That is not called for in my function,” he said, stiffly as before, but with a slight trace of regret I thought. We parted amicably. He had called upon me with a quite spurious challenge and been satisfied with a blatant lie. What nonsense, to lose one’s temper at a schoolboy! I had the impression that at a certain point in our interview—when I had managed to lower my voice and respond quite candidly to him as one human being to another, even though my candor was only partly sincere—he had in spite of himself felt an impulse of admiration or attraction to me—he was very young. In spite of his lack of prominent maleness, or perhaps because of this, he seemed to long vaguely for a friendship with me on equal and male terms, a friendship that would be the symmetrical opposite of that scene of antagonism in which we had confronted each other as officer to officer and he had called me to account for my actions. The young idiot!
I went back to my apparatus. The soldering was soon done, although the spirit lamp hardly got the iron hot enough, and I busied myself bending the hairspring of a watch into a tickler to probe on the surface of the crystal, as described by Krobenius in his paper. With growing excitement, forcing myself to slow down and verify each step as I went, I connected the magnetophone and put the receiver to my ear, then began scratching cautiously on the surface of the galena with the spring. Nothing. Some connection must be insufficiently soldered, or perhaps the arrangement of crystal and coil needed to be altered. Plague and perdition! How could I do any serious work with all these interruptions? I would do better to crate this whole bundle of rubbish and take it back to Stockholm, where I could work under excellent conditions in the laboratory of the Institute. And why didn’t I? What in the name of electromagnetism held me in Paris, this city of women and perfumed puppets in top hats? Reasons of hygiene, no doubt.
And what did Luisa want exactly? Did she want a list of apparatus? Did she want to hold the wires while I soldered them to the galena? No, she wanted me to take her to the opera. A cape with a red velvet lining rather appealed to me, but I had never worn an opera hat in my life and I did not propose to begin now.
We had it out in her boudoir, so-called, furnished with a dressing table and a certain number of armchairs, and connecting with her chamber, where I had not yet been so fortunate as to set foot. “Voyez, ma très chère amie,” I reminded her firmly but with a formal and even elaborate courtesy, “I am not here in Paris to enjoy the opera, or even cafe concerts at the Royal. I am here to do serious work of a scientific nature, work which in all modesty I believe to have some slight importance.” (It was not for her to ask why I couldn’t do it in Stockholm, and a good thing it wasn’t, because I would have been at a loss to answer.) “But at the very brink of what seems to me an important advance in knowledge, I am distracted by the necessity of escorting you to all these café concerts and other frivolities which—it seems you cannot attend alone without the danger of being violated in the streets. And if that weren’t enough, now it seems there is this plaguey young idiot of a brother who visits me to pose these quaint medieval questions of honour, which I am at a loss to respond to even if I had the time.”
She seemed not at all surprised that he had come to see me. “Ah well, Teddy,” she said negligently. “He’s a child, he likes to play at tin soldiers and imagines he’s one himself. He is quite harmless and we are all fond of him.”
“I might be fond of him myself, blast take it, but the point is that all these interruptions and botherings are distracting, it’s not the proper mental atmosphere for serious thought. Worth, the Royal, the Salle Meyer! Your existence is delightful no doubt, but what about mine? We’ve come a long way, it seems to me, from the Musée Carnavalet! It would be pleasant, I have no doubt, to be two butterflies flitting together over a sunlit meadow, but …” Well, she knew what I meant. I stopped talking.
“Ah, my existence,” she said with a little sigh. “It’s very fine no doubt. Oh, how I envy you, my friend. You’re a man, you can come and go as you please. And when you are a foreigner, no one knows you in Paris, and you can ignore what people think.”
Her manner of reasoning was helical, turning round and round a subject while rising in vehemence, but never quite getting to the point. If I could ignore what people thought, I might have responded, it was because I spent all day shut up in a rented room with a lot of wires and crystals so that no one had the slightest interest in what I did. If she meant my being affectionate behind doorways, as Theodor put it, that was at least as much her fault as mine. And what was the point about foreigners, since she was a foreigner herself?
“Evidently you can come and go as you please too,” I pointed out, “since you were able to come to Stockholm without visible damage to your reputation.”
She gave me one of her firm, searching, slightly hostile looks. But there was no irony in my manner, or none showed, and she decided it was not tactical to take umbrage.
“And even to Finland, you might have added.”
“Even to Finland.” “You were pleased to be sarcastic, once, about the Italian lakes,” she reminded me.
“But Stresa is a very pleasant place.”
“No doubt. And this is apropos of?”
“Nothing, except that my Pondicherry uncle, who never comes to Europe, owns a villa there.”
“Thank you very much for the invitation, but, as I have tried to explain in my stumbling way, I have researches that unfortunately keep me in Paris.”
“Oh, you are a thing,” she declared, her mouth tightening in vexation. “I haven’t made you an invitation.”
“And had you intended to?”
“Yes, I had, in due time, but you force a person into the most awkward situations, crudities even, through this ill-mannered habit of yours of leaping to the end of a speech before one has got there.”
“I am sorry. Please start over again and deliver the whole speech, and I will listen attentively.”
“What might have been a delightful sojourn you have now made impossible.”
“It is impossible anyhow, because my work keeps me here.”
“You can bring your wires and crystals to Italy. No one will disturb you.”
“I’m not quite sure I understand. You will not disturb me?”
“You take me for a frivolous woman, I know. How can I convince you that I am interested in serious matters? If fashionable young men were all that is needed, I can assure you, there are plenty in the offing.” (This an allusion, no doubt, to the mysterious and Peninsular fiancé.) “But if you will make only a slight effort of the memory, you will recall that our friendship began initially because of my deep interest in your scientific work. J’ai une telle envie d’être sérieuse!”
“In that case, you can come to rue de Rennes and hold the wires while I solder them.”
“Then you won’t come to Stresa?”
“What is it exactly that we can do in Stresa and cannot do here?”
“Oh, bother!” she burst, exasperated, and turned to the window.
It is impossible to shut out this marrow-piercing cold, but the whiteness at any rate can be excluded by shutting the eyes. At least one of my senses, thank God, is voluntary. The whiteness is an illusion, and so is the blackness, or rather the deep charcoal grey that replaces it when the eyes are closed. This light filtering through the lids ought to be pink; has my blood too turned pale in this penetrating milkiness, am I exsanguinated? I ought to have eaten my beef stew, and perhaps I have, I muse vaguely from my vantage point somewhere just on the verge of consciousness, since its odour is no longer apparent. Or perhaps I forgot to eat it because my mind has involuntarily rejected nourishment, although why it should do this is an enigma I am too far from an objective and rational state just now to examine. The human head, that undiscovered planet. There is a lot to be explained yet by somebody, Dr. James or perhaps Charcot, about how this fine machine works. For instance, I am almost entirely awake now but the words from the Paris boudoir still ring in my head as though they had been spoken only a moment before. “Oh, bother!” Bother indeed. It is a bother to be cold, to be hungry, to be driven by this imbecilic impulse to entangle one’s limbs ardorously with other persons with whom one may not have very much else in common. It is a bother to rush off to unlikely parts of the globe for purposes that, when regarded calmly, seem quite unnecessary. “All the trouble in the world,” I believe it was Pascal who said, “comes because men will not remain quietly in their own rooms,” or something like that. With the steely effort of will I have mastered now through long practice, I force myself back to sleep, not to sleep but to slip out of consciousness and into a realm of myself where I know a certain happiness lies, to dream true. For a while what courses through the brain filaments comes partly from the epidermis and retina, partly from more mysterious telegraph stations in another country, places we are forbidden to go when awake. I know where I want to go, but to go there I must take a journey. Since it is necessary, I abandon myself to these consecutive, vivid, and yet disconnected impressions of a tiresome trip over an entirely unnecessary number of Alps. The pictures are all in the right order but tilted to one side or the other and wavery; some small boy has scratched or bent the stereopticon. Dijon. A lake with poplars. Dôle, a square church steeple. Cinders and rushing air, rattle of carrosserie, the odour of coal-burning machinery mingled with that of some hygienic Swiss disinfectant, then via wuerstel & mustard, a humble but nourishing Teutonic smell, to the chemical odour of soap (I remember that the soap had the legend KROEBER impressed into it) and so to Milano Stazione Centrale, an enormous crystal roof full of steam and noise, with the odour of hot rolls. Libri, giornali! Portabagagli! Outside a broad piazza in the sunshine. Carrozza, signore? Subito, subito, ecco! Creak of harness and wheel grit on dusty road, and so on to the villa on the hillside. A view over the lake, with some vineyards around it, and here and there in the middle distance a peasant tying up the vines. November; the sun warm but an autumnal chill in the air as the shadows grow longer.
All this is banal and might have been expected from a perusal of tourist brochures. But abruptly, in an absolute silence broken only by the faint cries of birds, a portrait by Vermeer appears in the doorway. A composition so fixed in its outline and every nuance of colour that it can be examined months or even years later with each of its qualities intact. The frame an arched doorway of greyish stone; behind this a quantity of mimosa and a marble balustrade. The light as in all Vermeers from behind and to one side, illuminating the subject diagonally. A long gown of pink brocade falling to the floor, drawn in to a high waist under the breasts. The forearms in the full sleeves crossed lightly over the waist, ending in a pair of finely modeled hands with fingers absently twined together. Hands, shoulders, and gown turned partly away, since she had come from the courtyard still illuminated with the fading daylight into the darker salon and turned to face me so that the soft mass of hair was drawn back over the shoulder. The singular visage with its pale llama-like brow and long lip, the mouth that tightened only slightly at the corners, contemplated me with a seraphic calm. And everything, it seemed to me, lay in this expectant and mysterious apparition of pastel tapestry, lay concealed and yet eloquent, its existence promised only in the white reality of the hands and face. I didn’t move, neither did she, and our very motionlessness and failure to speak was oracular, announcing to both of us that something wordless and transcendent was about to manifest itself, perhaps something powerful and pagan concealed in the green and tepid involutions of these wine hills. In the silence I heard the unmistakable, grating, violin-like note of the evening’s first cicada.
In some way my cigar was put out, she moved about eluding me playfully down the corridor with her demi-Gioconda smile, and we were transported weightlessly into a yellow room full of angled evening shadows. High-ceilinged, painted in vivid Pompeiian ochre, shuttered windows facing the lake, which through the narrow horizontal openings could be seen below and not very far away, wrinkling in the evening breeze. When I turned from these shutters the brocade was in the act of slipping from—in contrast to its own elegance and stiffness—an astonishingly fragile shoulder. The fiendish craft of that gown became apparent—under it the eye expected a pink analogous to the brocade, but the reality was so far finer and paler that the soul received a little shock, a spasm of unbelief. She was adept at prophecies; the Vermeer glance had foretold the yellow room, the brocaded gown her complexion. It had been cold in Finland, it was warm here, so that this demonstration could be as prolonged and intricate as she liked. In such a climate she evidently did not feel that any clothing other than the gown was necessary. Standing with her feet a little apart on the marble floor, she removed a white carnation from the bouquet at the bedside and turned to me for a moment with the flower held at her throat in a kind of misdirected pudeur, then laid it with a slightly exaggerated theatricality on the linen expanse of the bed. There it lay, that plaguish virginal blossom, long like her American legs and rather self-consciously symbolic. The hypocrite! It was not in flower gardens that she had learned this thing of standing with her feet slightly apart and one foot turned out in the boyish grace of a dancer (perhaps that was it, the aunt had sent her to ballet classes), so that at the place where the legs finally came together a space of yellow wall was visible between them; nor this gesture of loosing the hair ribbon with both hands raised to the left, the hardly more than adolescent breasts inclining at an angle and causing a faint and corresponding crease to appear in the waist at the right; nor the candor of the forward-held hips, the apex of the triangle between them shaded in the exact texture of the dark mass that fell over her shoulders: in short, was this the would-be balloonist and magnetographer? Something was seriously in disparity here.
I was in no mood or state for puzzles, however; I postponed cerebration and surrendered myself to the passing moment. Our limbs fitted ingeniously; as in Finland no doubt, although there in the tumult of the occasion I had not noticed it. So nicely were these arms, legs, and so on suited to interweave that they seemed to find their way to each other by themselves without our paying very much attention to how it was done, so that these arrangements and the resultant ecstasies took place, so to speak, quite separate from ourselves and we were free to mount, soul joined to soul, to higher places than we had anticipated or thought possible, cherubim drunk on light in our spheres of grace and harmony. That yellow room! Its ochre was the colour my veins had hungered for. Did they know what they were doing, these arteries pounding in their excessive way? They would do themselves some harm. At last this pulsing that had before seemed generalized throughout my circulatory system, and hers too for all I knew, gathered to a single place, trembled for what seemed an infinitely prolonged instant on the brink of overflowing, and then sprang out arclike and keen in, I was quite certain as I examined the catalogue of my experiences, a totally unprecedented intensity. This phenomenon grew fainter, but only very gradually, like waves dying on sand after a storm.
We lay for some time like exhausted swimmers, able to reach the beach but not to rise or crawl entirely from the water that still lapped at our ankles. When at last we extricated our slackened limbs and drew apart on that canopied Empire bed, she had the air of being pleased with herself. Pushing back with one hand the mass of soft hair that had fallen over her face, she revealed once more the keen intelligence behind that serene and lofty brow. She was curious about everything. What was that extraordinary large vein here, the one she almost touched with her forefinger? I explained that a man required, at certain times, a copious supply of blood just there. Ah. Might from my point of view this miracle be repeated after a suitable interval? All things would happen in the plenitude of time, I assured her abstractedly. (If she kept pointing things out with her finger this way they surely would.) Whether they would be miracles would depend on the circumstances. She was blithe about the probability. “You know, it’s my jour de fête today, I’m twenty.”
“Incredible.”
“How? You would have expected me younger, or older?” I didn’t know what I meant exactly. Perhaps just that it was incredible she should have any age at all.
At a certain point it was (I felt) my turn to be curious. “How is it that your elders permit you, not yet having reached the age of majority, to go wandering off in this way across the map of Europe so freely?”
“Who would prevent me?”
“Your aunt for instance.”
“Ah, ma tante.” And she explained that the aunt for all her obdurate bosom (one was obdurate, the other cotton wadding) was indulgent toward female peregrinations, believing that the frailer sex should be accorded at least the same freedom of movement permitted to the male. And if a young gentleman of good family should take it into his head to travel via Wagon-Lit from Paris to Stresa, who would gainsay him?
Who indeed? “Still, I was under the impression you had certain attachments.”
“I don’t understand to what you are referring. Your way of speaking is so abstract sometimes.”
“If I am not mistaken, you possess somewhere, although you may temporarily have mislaid him, a fiancé.”
“Ah, the artillerist!” She burst into peals of laughter. He was a clumsy fellow to whom one sometimes gave sweetmeats, pour s’amuser. She would introduce us sometime and I would see for myself that he was not to be taken seriously. Except by himself; he was of the sort that took everything seriously, to the point where he was a bore. And full of vanities, over matters for which he could hardly take the credit. It was the aunt herself who had christened him the Peninsula because of—how should I say? How had Luisa herself put it?—because of the diameter and span of his young manly powers. The mother too was privy to this joke. “Mother is singular. She never liked Alberto because of his chin.” Neither had I, and now I knew why. The eyebrows too! I was not sure how I was supposed to respond to confidences of this sort. What pitiless and obscene name would these Valkyries devise for me? The Pipestem, perhaps, or the One-Round Revolver. In wiser ages they had burned old women who were too prescient. And was the Peninsular Campaign likely to continue? “Don’t be crude. I have already told you he was a nonentity.” How, crude? It was I who was crude? It was too feminine for me.
In this whole expedition through tunnels and over Alps and culminating in the villa and its yellow room, I had been aware of a vague feeling of apprehension, or restiveness, that I was gradually able to identify as a suspicion that I was on my honeymoon. Of all the roles that fate in its malice might set in my path the character of bridegroom, I felt, was the one that suited me least. Now another thought struck me, or a variation or subtlety, and an even more disquieting one: that I was on my honeymoon and she was not. She had chosen to accompany me, perhaps, to tell me amusing stories. There were invisible and probably sinister forces working here against which it was necessary to be on one’s guard. To this caution the vigorous sap of life in me responded that what had happened had made me rapturously happy. But this was just the point. On this joy, to strangle it, I leaped deftly like a wild beast. My very being and what it called me to do were in peril here. Because, if matters continued this way, I knew for a certainty that the day would come when she, the plucky adventuress who had accompanied me on the Finnish flight and pulled the wrong ballast string in the wicker car, would end by begging me with tears in her eyes not to risk myself and instead to remain by her side here, there, in the yellow room or some other place, in the bliss of domestic intimacy. And that every fibre of my being opposed; it was precisely because it tempted me, this happiness, that I struggled against it so fiercely.
It was not really she, I knew now in a kind of prescience, but those two witches in Quai d’Orléans who had spun this spell about me in their war against an enemy who was not even properly aware he was being attacked. It would be necessary to oppose them with all the power of my own being. The trouble was that such a defence required technique and skill, and my understanding of woman, I now began to see, was imperfect. My vanity of a healthy male had led me to the delusion that, from a dozen or so adventures in my native city, I was adept enough at dealing with a sex which (I believed) was either hopelessly disarmed by its innocence or rendered accessible by its very lack of this quality. But those well-bred Ingrids and Kristins whose hands one clasped in their wealthy fathers’ orangeries, those ineptly rouged wenches in dockside taverns, were mechanisms of a misleading simplicity. With sighs to one, and small sums of money to the other, one might do as he wished. What one wished to do, of course, was not the same with the one as with the other. But with the one and the other, from time to time, it passed the hours when one was not busy in the library. Then in recent years my scientific investigations had demanded more and more of my attention. For months at a time I forgot to visit the dockside, and the maidens gave up and married law students. I had reached the age when one’s illusions are at least partly behind one, and my prickly short hair, my mustache with its wiry points, and the tuft under my lip were grey at the edges. Now, in my full and ironic manhood, I had somehow fallen into the clutches of this pack of maenads who had begun by clouding my wits and would end by destroying me as they had destroyed Orpheus. I was an autumn crocus, a subject for satire. “Crispin in Love,” or better “Crispin Furioso,” mad for ardour. This belle sauvage—and I had expected to entertain her with my superior wisdom! And it was not only she, the long-lipped, pale, and faintly contemptuous focus of this delirium that periled me (it was still a mystery how on the one hand she could resemble a llama and on the other hand exert such a powerful spell of desire, when llamas were not considered beautiful and conventional beauty was arranged along quite other lines) but the aunt and mother as well, the wistful Stockholm virgins and the waterfront strumpets, the whole race of cloven tetrapods who inspired man to his most powerful and exalted dreams and then stifled him to earth when he attempted to carry them out. Beware, Crispin! It is your five limbs they envy, and they will not rest until they have made you like themselves.
And yet how cunningly this peril was made! These pale fragilities and corals, these darknesses that drew one’s being like a magnet, were the creation of gods who were powerful even though malevolent and must be sacrificed to, else they would destroy. Tomorrow I will leave; no, tomorrow and tomorrow. Wednesday, Thursday. The climate still being mild, and we better acquainted now, the brocaded gown had given way to a mauve peignoir fastened in the front only with a pair of ribbons. Luisa in the baroque doorway, the mimosa in the background, was Delphic against the marble balustrade. The knee appearing in the garment’s opening as she turned, leading the eye inevitably upward to the shadow faintly visible in its translucence, was probably only an accident. It was time for tea, the sibyl pronounced. So it was.
“On peut le prendre dans la chambre jaune. Tu veux?”
I wanted. Why tell foolish and unconvincing lies? On the ochre wall the late sun from the lake shimmered imperceptibly. In the distance a voice called in Italian, the evening’s first cicada vibrated in the vines. Dear Luisa, why does the peignoir slip from your shoulder when you have not even poured the tea? Soft darkness of hair falling; that Empire bed, with its lilac-flavored linen, is a magnet and a tomb. The tea things are scattered on the bed, the teapot overturned, her faint voice supplicates in my ear, “Oh sweetest one, my love, my cruel Viking, now.” Slightly moving my foot, I brushed the teacup to the floor and it broke with a tiny tinkle.