Herma

by MacDonald Harris

  “Dans mon coeur! C’est moi,

  C’est moi qui t’en supplie!

  Hoffmann, comble mes voeux!”

  Something has happened, something odd that distracted her. When she came to “Hoffmann” her eye caught a flash from the mirror and she saw—another face—thin, more boyish than Vladi, a shock of hair over the brow, a knowing, somehow ominous smile. A kind of chill passes over her, then she feels hot.

  She almost drops the mirror. But she goes on, through the love theme which now becomes a mocking little duet. The reflection! That is her price! It is yours, yours forever, he swears. Herma still feels odd; impulsively she flings the mirror from her and it shatters. This is not in the stage business as planned, but it is a dramatic gesture and there is a little clatter of applause. She and Vladi go on. Now the action accelerates, whipped to a frenzy by the music and by Hoffmann’s uncontrollable desire. Hoffmann, going to the large standing mirror at the corner of the stage, discovers with horror that he has in fact lost his reflection. The rival Schlemil enters, just as Giulietta has warned, and Hoffmann slays him in a duel. In the confusion Giulietta has slipped away. The chorus is heard again in the Barcarolle, now in an ironic tone:

  “Belle nuit! ô nuit d’amour,

  Souris à nos ivresses …”

  Hoffmann stares. Giulietta glides by in the gondola with the hideous dwarf Pitichinaccio, smiling mockingly. “Misérable!” cries Hoffmann.

  The gondola comes to a stop in the wings and Herma climbs out, adjusting the wig for her curtain calls. “That was a genuine Murano hand mirror! Where the devil am I going to get another one before tomorrow night?” complains Blechmann the prop man.

  3.

  The Third Act: Antonia. The costume is simple, but charming and a little pathetic: a white négligée, a russet-colored wig with a soft chignon at the back, and a white ribbon in the hair. Alone at the harpsichord, Antonia sings a soft fragment of her turtledove song: “Elle a fuit, la tourterelle.” But she must not sing; she is forbidden to sing, because a secret inward disease lurks waiting in her lungs. For her, to sing is fatal. Hardly knowing what she is doing, she goes on in mezza voce. Then, entranced and saddened by the portrait of her mother on the wall, she breaks into full voice and soars to an A natural on “Tout mon coeur est à toi!” Will she die of this? No, not yet.

  Herma gets a nice round of applause for her Tourterelle. Her father comes on stage—Councilor Crespel, an old bore. Upbraids her for singing, as he always does. It was the memory of her mother that moved her, she pleads. He cries out, “That is my torment! Your beloved mother bequeathed to you her voice!” And also the red spots in her cheeks—the fatal sign of consumption.

  The audience is attentive through all this but a little restive. They are waiting for Hoffmann to appear. Because, when Antonia sings with Hoffmann, the motif of the Third Act will emerge in the duet, and the motif is Death. Nobody but a Doll died in the first act, and only the insignificant Schlemil in the second. But now it is to be the heroine—that most melancholy and moving of all spectacles, the death of a beautiful woman.

  Antonia is sent away to her room by her father, and Hoffmann appears, admitted by the comic deaf servant Franz. Hurrying away into the darkened wings, Herma almost bumps into Madame Teyte in her Nicklausse costume. Teyte is not in a very good humor. It is true as Lloiseaux said that Nicklausse appears in all three acts, but in the Third Act it is virtually a silent part and he only has to peal out “Malheureux!” at the end. For the rest he follows Hoffmann around like a deaf and dumb spaniel. However—since even at the Opéra these little economies must be made—Teyte will also be called upon shortly to simulate the voice of the mother’s portrait on the wall. The two of them stand together, only a foot or two apart, in the semi-obscurity of the gallery. Madame Teyte stares at Herma stonily, while Herma only glances meaningfully at the crotch of the silver breeches, which are much too tight to be decent. “Don’t miss your cue, my dear,” Teyte breathes with a tight smile.

  And here it comes. Hoffmann is seated at the harpsichord, strumming the keys and recalling the love song that he and Antonia used to sing together. Herma floats out in her white négligée, and he rises to take her in his arms. Antonia! She pulls him toward the harpsichord, her hand trembling. Accompanying herself, she begins the moving and tender love song, delicate, fragile, yet with its faint suggestion of shadow under the oblique and slightly sinister harmony.

  “C’est une chanson d’amour qui s’envole triste ou folle,

  Qui s’envole triste ou folle tour à tour!”

  Triste ou folle! Is it melancholy or madness? “The new Rose smiles at the Spring. Alas, how long will it live?” A moisture blurs in her eyes a little as she thinks of Madame Modjeska’s “Last Rose of Summer,” and she smiles to herself at this, smiles at the thought of the Rose, smiles at Hoffmann. The tears are really just for the beauty of the music. They don’t go deep. She holds the long note at the end of the song, and Hoffmann joins in. “A ray of flame adorns your beauty. Will you see Summer, flower of the soul?” They finish together, Antonia on a beautiful and clear high A.

  Silence. Then a disturbing chord from the orchestra. Antonia lifts her hand to her heart and seems about to faint. What is it! Hoffmann starts. Nothing, she reassures him. Hearing her father approaching, she rises and slips offstage.

  In the darkened gallery she catches sight of Lloiseaux. He smiles at her and nods. She did the duet beautifully. The ritardando and slight pause on “… tour à tour”—exactly in the manner of Teyte. This phonographic trick probably accounts for part of his smile. As for Madame Teyte herself, she has gone around to the other side of the stage, preparing to simulate the voice of the portrait. The makeup girl appears and quickly repairs the consumptive spots on Herma’s cheeks, which are beginning to run a little from perspiration.

  Assez! She pushes the girl away to look out onto the brilliantly lighted stage. Hoffmann has hidden himself in the window recess, and Crespel is engaged in a recitative with the sinister and insinuating Dr. Miracle, the third incarnation of Hoffmann’s evil antagonist. Chaliapin is wearing the most fantastic of his three costumes: a moth-eaten fur coat, a large beaver hat, and a waistcoat hung all over with medals, watches, bangles, chains, and surgical instruments, like a walking hardware store. The pockets of his coat clank: they are full of necromantic potions. Crespel shrinks from him. Gravedigger! Assassin! He, a doctor?

  Ha! ha! ha! cries out Dr. Miracle, with an evil laugh, and a fanfare from the orchestra. I have come to cure your daughter.

  To kill my daughter, rather, as you killed her mother, rumbles Crespel. Crespel is also a basso part. The two bassos, Chaliapin and the hack from the Opéra company whose name has slipped her mind, discuss the matter in the nether region down below middle C. Her father! The basso whose name she can’t even remember. A strange half-forgotten little pain runs through her at the thought of Papa, dead years ago now of typhoid, and Mama before him, with her pale and delicate cheerfulness, her life of sickness and closed rooms. She tries to recall if Papa was a basso. But to her surprise she can’t remember; it is as though he never had a voice. He couldn’t have been a basso, though—he so mild and conciliatory, so tentative, so inept in his gentle bewilderment before the mystery of Woman, both wife and daughter comprised. And, she thinks, trying to recall, he couldn’t have been a tenor either; he was too old. All tenors are young, even when they are middle-aged like Vladi. Perhaps he was a baritone like Germont. Piangi, piangi! And Violetta wept for Germont, she now knew, and not only for herself and Alfredo. She wept because Germont—so inflexible in his rectitude and yet so tender and gallant—was someone she could never love, not even as a daughter loves a father. It was too late—she had already given herself to Alfredo, and to her doomed life as a courtesan (her art!). One always weeps for one’s father when it is too late. Now Herma feels real tears welling in her eyes and seeping down onto the red cheek spots, and this time she doesn’t smile through them. Germont, in her vision,
is transformed somehow into a large blurry shape with a mustache and a derby, who smiles vaguely and doesn’t know what to say to her. Papa at the Summer Social, after she sang The Last Rose of Summer—hanging back at the rear and chewing his mustache, too shy to come forward even though he was a newspaperman, while Madame Modjeska gave her the Double Eagle. And at the Marriage of Figaro, clapping mechanically at the rear of the theater long after everybody else had stopped—proud and yet bewildered, his heart full of clumsy male emotion for this prodigal creature he had begotten, gleaming with talent, who was now escaping from his grasp. And Mama beside him with her proud smile—Mama who was pale and not well and rested in the afternoon, making her way through life as best she could with Female Remedies. And then Herma had gone off with Madame Modjeska and her friends, to enjoy her triumph with the famous of the world, leaving Papa and Mama to go back alone to the small house on Ross Street.

  Waiting for her cue in the darkened gallery; Herma imagines an evening at Madame Modjeska’s in which Papa and Mama were there too (but would they have allowed Madame Modjeska to write the note to Mr. Larkin?), a Traviata in San Francisco in which they were present in a gilded box to hear her sing Violetta (but they might have perished in the earthquake). She imagines herself telling a reporter with his poised pencil (this might have been in New York after a performance at the Met), “I owe it all to my Papa and Mama.” Papa had paid twenty dollars for the Edison phonograph. It was perhaps a fifth of his salary for the month. And now she makes hundreds, thousands, for a single performance! In francs of course, but it is still a lot of money. The tears well in her eyes again. This is stupid. With an angry toss of her head she shakes them away. Here she is, the star of the Opéra in Paris, dissolving her makeup because she never paid Papa back for the phonograph. It was all Fred’s fault anyhow. The very first money she earned he had spent on a bicycle. And then the flying … The race in San Francisco! It was a folly. He might have broken his neck. And now Paris …

  For, just as Herma earned more and more money as she moved from provincial American companies to second-lead roles in Europe to prima-donna parts, so Fred spent more and more on aeroplanes. He quickly found out where they were in Paris—at Issy-les-Moulineaux, just outside the city beyond the Porte de Versailles. There, in a broad grassy field by the banks of the Seine, a pair of corrugated-iron hangars were erected and a half-dozen Farmans and Voisins stood about in the sunshine like lazy insects warming their wings. Fred took the Métro to the end of the line at place Balard and from there walked the short distance to the field. He now possessed a pair of tailored riding breeches from Lalande in rue St.-Honoré, Russian-leather cavalry boots, and a leather jacket, and he carried his goggles and helmet in a small kit bag. Along with a thick bundle of francs, which went in the kit bag too, because the riding breeches were too carefully cut to be spoiled with lumps in the pockets.

  Not only were the rental fees steep, but a good deal of money went for lessons. He had never really been properly trained, and if he had avoided a serious accident up to now (the pancake landing at the Presidio he didn’t consider serious) it had been mainly a matter of luck. Now he settled down to serious training, under the mentorship of Louis Castel-Jaloux, a pioneer flyer who had been a partner of Paulhan but now had a stiff knee from an accident and could no longer fly himself. The Farman trainer, however, was a two-place pusher—it had an odd kind of monocoque sticking out in front of it, like a canvas boat, and Castel-Jaloux sat behind him with his stiff leg extended along Fred’s side, shouting instructions at him in French with a Provençal accent. Fred began to acquire a new vocabulary: aviation itself (in America everybody had just called it flying), empennage, décollage, atterrissage, levier de command (also called the manche à balais or broomstick), palonnier (this was the rudder bar), and a number of maneuvers including virer, faire la boucle, piqner du nez, perte de vitesse, and vrille. This last he had only heard about, never experienced. But he was soon to become acquainted with it.

  Castel-Jaloux was a disciplinarian. He began with ground lessons, taught with the aid of a folding blackboard set up near the hangar. Fred was introduced to the mysteries of the Bernoulli effect, wing loading, angle of attack, and lift-drag ratio. The first time they got into the trainer he only allowed Fred to taxi up and down the field, to get the feel of the controls. Before they went in, he told him to give a touch to the throttle and pull back on the stick a little; the Farman rose perhaps a foot off the grass and settled down again, to roll along lurching over the potholes which were almost as bad here at Issy as they had been at the Presidio. Then the first flight. They always flew in the morning, when there was less risk from the tricky winds that sometimes blew over the field from the river. Fred got in and pulled down his goggles, and Castel-Jaloux arranged himself carefully behind, fitting his stiff leg into place. The mechanic spun the airscrew—once, twice, three times—and there was a ragged roar from behind. The unreliable Antoinette engine had been given up and the Farman now used the vastly superior Gnôme, a rotary which reeked of castor oil and imparted odd gyroscopic qualities to the machine, but was light and powerful and, best of all, always ran, as long as it was supplied with fuel. It made a lot of noise, almost as much as the Curtiss motorcycle engine. Castel-Jaloux had to shout to make himself heard.

  The Farman rose like a dream, leaving the bumpy grass behind, and all Paris suddenly sprang out and was visible from the open cockpit: the Eiffel Tower to the left, the dome of the Invalides, an excursion boat on the Seine, the two square spires of Notre-Dame, the Panthéon, and the green park of Vincennes beyond. The controls were simple. The broomstick, so-called, was really a light aluminum tubing with a handle at the top like a spade. You pushed it left or right to bank, forward or back to glide or climb. The rudder bar was simply a pivoted board with cutouts for your feet. There was an oil-pressure gauge, a tachometer, and an altimeter calibrated in meters. A piece of doweling with a mark on it at every centimeter floated in the fuel tank; this was the fuel gauge. The last mark on the dowel was red; when it disappeared you had ten minutes to get home. There was no compass. There was no need for a compass, because you only flew when the sun was shining. If the sun wasn’t shining, you didn’t fly and so you didn’t need a compass. The sun, Castel-Jaloux explained to him since he was a foreigner and perhaps didn’t understand, rose in the east and set in the west.

  “HEAD WEST.”

  They always took the same route, which carried them first around Paris to the south, skirted along the edge of the Bois de Vincennes, and turned out into the countryside near Joinville. While they went, Castel-Jaloux explained why they flew over the countryside instead of over Paris, “FIRST, IF THE GNOME SHOULD QUIT, BUT IT NEVER QUITS, THERE WILL BE SOME COUNTRY TO COME DOWN IN. SECOND, IF YOU MAKE A MISTAKE. BUT DON’T MAKE ANY MISTAKE. YOU WILL KILL AT THE MOST SOME COW INSTEAD OF A PARISIAN.”

  Fred nodded. It was impossible to turn his head around enough to see Castel-Jaloux, and in any case there was nothing to answer. Fred kept the altimeter at three hundred meters, about a thousand feet. The two rivers below split, the Seine going one way and the Marne the other. He followed along the valley of the Marne to Lagny, about twenty-five kilometers out of Paris. South of Lagny Castel-Jaloux had him bank in a wide curve, with a château under his left wing as a marker, and head back to the east. Just after crossing the Marne they turned a little to pass over the tiny hamlet of Bordeaux-sur-Marne, where Castel-Jaloux had a country house. Here he had Fred waggle his wings, and the housekeeper, a middle-aged peasant woman to judge from what you could see at three hundred meters, always ran out and flapped her apron to show that she recognized the Farman. “MADAME MANGE-PETIT,” shouted Castel-Jaloux. “THE SALT OF THE EARTH.”

  Approaching Paris, the first thing you saw of course was the Eiffel Tower sticking up in the Champs de Mars, ahead and to the right. They went over Neuilly and the Bois de Boulogne. Boulogne-Billancourt was ahead, lying in its loop of the Seine; Issy lay under the right wing. “START YOUR BAN
K HERE,” shouted Castel-Jaloux. “HALF THROTTLE, PUSH YOUR STICK DOWN A LITTLE, NOT TOO MUCH.” He had an extraordinary way of retaining a commonplace and matter-of-fact tone while shouting at the top of his voice. Of course he had a lot of practice. The Farman floated in over the hangars and the edge of the field and touched down with a waggling sway. It raced along over the grass, “PULL BACK,” shouted Castel-Jaloux. Fred saw that on the uneven grass there was danger of a ground loop unless you kept the tail firmly down.

  After he had shut off the engine, Castel-Jaloux said, “As soon as you touch the grass, pull the stick all the way back. Lay it right on your pecker.”

  After Fred was adept enough at these routine turns, banks, and landings, Castel-Jaloux began putting him through more advanced tricks and training him to deal with various kinds of emergencies: dead-engine drills, overshooting or undershooting the field, steering with the stick alone in ease the rudder broke, crosswind landings, and stalls. For the stalls they went up to five hundred meters, Fred set the throttle at eighty percent, and then pulled back gradually on the stick. The Gnôme had a lot of power. The Farman, grumbling and creaking, climbed up to five fifty and to six hundred, while the note of the engine gradually grew more labored.

  “THAT’S YOUR MAXIMUM CLIMB ANGLE” shouted Castel-Jaloux at a certain point.

  Fred held the stick firm, and the controls began to get mushy. The singing of the wind in the wires grew fainter and descended the musical scale. Then the horizon ahead fell out of sight, the wind noise died away, and the Farman seemed to hang poised by its nose for a second.

  “DON’T LET IT ROLL OFF TO THE SIDE, CONTROLS DEAD CENTER.”

  The nose plunged. There was the slightly sickening sensation of a lift dropping. The horizon appeared and shot up into the sky, and the wind began singing in the wires again. The pastures and scattered houses of the Val de Marne rushed up.