Herma

by MacDonald Harris

  “I don’t even speak French very well.”

  “I don’t know what to do, Monsieur Frédéric. I still like Monsieur Marcel very much.”

  But Fred didn’t talk to Marcel about it. It was really none of his business, and he too didn’t want to offend Marcel by mingling in something that was really a personal matter. He liked Agostinelli, but he also liked Marcel too. It was intruding between a man and his wife. And of course Anna … Fred himself didn’t care very much for Anna.

  Fred didn’t see very much of Marcel in these days. He himself was busy, and Marcel was evidently preoccupied with other things, or perhaps he had found out somehow that Fred had taken Agostinelli to Le Mans and was cool toward him on account of this. Agostinelli might even have told him about the trip himself, in his frank and open way. Well, Fred thought, they would have to settle it between themselves. His own life was complicated enough as it was.

  Agostinelli took only four or five lessons at Issy. He made progress, but he had the problem that he had so much experience with automobiles that he regarded the aeroplane as a kind of a car with wings, and tried to drive it instead of flying it. Still he was full of enthusiasm, his basic instinct for machinery was good, and he learned quickly. He never soloed at Issy. Evidently Castel-Jaloux wasn’t satisfied. Still, Fred remembered, he himself hadn’t soloed until he had had a half-dozen lessons or so with Castel-Jaloux, and he had a lot of flying experience before he came to Paris. It was difficult for Agostinelli, because he could only get away for a lesson once every couple of weeks, sometimes not even that, and sometimes he forgot in between what he had learned before.

  Once Fred was out at Issy flying himself and he was still there when Agostinelli came back with Castel-Jaloux from his lesson. The Farman wobbled around to line up with the field, but it was far too low when it straightened out. Evidently Castel-Jaloux took over, because the engine gunned up to a higher note and the Farman circled around the field again before it came in, this time at the proper altitude. He let Agostinelli land it, however, because even from across the field Fred could tell from his stance that he was gripping the stick and staring out with boyish seriousness through the windscreen.

  When he had taxied around and brought the Farman up before the hangar, not quite in line with the others, he and Castel-Jaloux got out. They came slowly in toward the office, Castel-Jaloux helping himself with his cane. Fred heard him telling Agostinelli in his mild tone, “Don’t forget. When you turn you lose altitude. It’s not like a car; there’s no road to hold you up.”

  It was a little after this that Marcel telephoned to the apartment in avenue Kléber. He seemed irritated when he heard Herma’s voice answer.

  “Put Fred on the apparatus.”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Well, where is he?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “Then have him come to me. I must speak to him,” said Marcel, and hung up the apparatus abruptly without saying good-bye. Where was his charm now? These were the manners of an Oriental despot, Herma thought, not a friend.

  Fred waited until the next day and then he went around to boulevard Haussmann about five o’clock when he was sure Marcel would be up. He started to knock on the door, but Marcel had evidently heard the lift coming up and had left the door a little ajar. He pushed it open and went in.

  Marcel was standing at the other end of the large salon. Perhaps he had left the door open because he didn’t want to be standing so close to him when he came in the room, or to be in danger of having to take his offered hand. He was dressed as though to go out, in his frock coat, rumpled trousers, and a collar with stand-up points.

  His paleness was accentuated in the gloomy shadows of the room with its closed shutters and its furniture in dust covers. He said immediately, “I don’t want Alfred to fly.”

  “Marcel. I’m sorry. It was I who took him to Le Mans and got him interested in the first place. But it’s a natural thing for him to do. He’s very much attached to it. He’s good with machinery of all kinds.”

  Marcel’s voice became shrill. “I know he’s attached to it. But I don’t want him doing it anymore. Do you understand?”

  “He can do what he likes,” said Fred, angry himself. “It’s no business of mine. How can I stop him?”

  Marcel said nothing to this, and after a moment Fred went on in a somewhat calmer voice. “It’s quite safe. The machines are well maintained and the instructors are competent.’

  Marcel was beside himself. Fred had never seen him in such a state. The face had whitened until it was corpselike. “It’s not that,” he said in his high and cracked histrionic voice. “It’s the people he associates with in such places. The scum of the aerodromes.”

  Fred said, “You don’t know what you are talking about.” After that Marcel, still pale with anger, said nothing. He went off to the other side of the room and coughed into a handkerchief. The quarrel had probably given him a slight fever. Like all hypochondriacs, Fred thought, he used his sickness to impose his will on others.

  The next day he sent Fred a bunch of dahlias from Caumartin in rue St.-Honoré, and a note saying simply, “We should not quarrel.”

  9.

  About a week after that, Agostinelli telephoned from boulevard Haussmann to ask if Fred could meet him again in the café in rue d’Astorg. He, Agostinelli, didn’t like to conduct long conversations by telephone, and besides he couldn’t say very much because Monsieur Marcel was asleep in the next room.

  Fred went to the café, which was small and dark inside, and almost empty. They sat in the rear; Fred had a coffee and Agostinelli only a mineral water.

  Agostinelli began immediately by saying that he had decided to leave the service of Monsieur Marcel. He wanted to devote himself seriously to flying lessons, because he wanted to become a professional aviator. He frowned as he explained this, because being serious was difficult for him. “A man only has one life. And I have to decide whether I want to live it being Monsieur Marcel’s chauffeur, or being someone for myself, doing something I want to do.”

  “Have you told Marcel yet?”

  He shook his head. “I’m afraid it will pain him. But what will you, Monsieur Frédéric? There are times in life when people must be hurt. Sometimes there’s no other way. As when you are tired of a woman, and you have to tell her you’re going to leave her.”

  It was only a metaphor. Evidently it didn’t occur to him that there was any greater parallel to his relations with Marcel.

  “So my mind is made up. And, even if Monsieur Marcel were to agree to the flying lessons, I want to leave Paris. Anna isn’t happy in Paris. She doesn’t know anybody here and the climate depresses her. I want to go to the south, where I can go on flying even in the winter when the weather is bad.”

  Fred considered. There was an instructor he knew from Issy who had gone to set up his own flying school in Antibes. He didn’t know what to think about the whole situation. It would be bad for Marcel in any case, but Agostinelli was determined to go, and perhaps the best thing he could do was to help him out in any way he could, otherwise there would only be two unhappy persons instead of one.

  “Do you know Antibes?”

  “Of course, Monsieur Frédéric. I am from Monaco. All my people live on the Cote d’Azur.”

  “I know a man who has a flying school at La Grimaudière, near Antibes. His name is Soldati. I could write him a letter for you.”

  “Is it a good school?”

  “I don’t know. He used to be at Issy. I think the school is rather small. But he’s a good flyer.”

  Agostinelli was thoughtful. Evidently he still had some doubts about the whole idea. But he was determined to carry through with his plan. He sipped his glass of water. Then he said, “Why don’t you come too, Monsieur Frédéric? It would be a little holiday for you. And you could fly too at Antibes.”

  It was not clear why he suggested this. Perhaps only out of friendliness. Certainly everything about him suggested the f
riendly and open candor of a large amiable puppy. One could hardly imagine deviousness in him, but it was possible too that it had occurred to him that if Fred went along, then Marcel couldn’t so easily accuse him of having run away in order to be with Anna. Probably it would be better, if only for that reason, if Fred went along with them.

  He wasn’t really deceiving himself. He knew it was a temptation, but Fred had never been very good at resisting temptation. He thought about it. Herma was just finishing Zerlina in Don Giovanni at the Opéra, and after that she was free until July when she was to sing in Parma at the annual Verdi Festival. He could go with Agostinelli in the car to Antibes, stay a week or two, and then go on by train to Nice, Genoa, Milan, and Parma.

  “For a couple of weeks perhaps.”

  “We have many friends on the Côte d’Azur. We can easily find you a place to stay.”

  “I think you ought to tell Marcel before you go.”

  “Perhaps you could tell him, Monsieur Frédéric.”

  In the end neither of them told him. Agostinelli and Anna simply showed up with the Hispano in avenue Kléber at ten o’clock in the morning. Fred knew that Marcel was asleep at that hour of the day. With the help of the concièrge, Fred brought downstairs an astounding assortment of baggage, some of it old and battered but other pieces new, in expensive bright-red leather. Agostinelli had no comment on the baggage. He was used to eccentricities in the moneyed classes. The baggage was all piled in somehow, partly in the rear against the folded-up jump seats and partly strapped on top of the car.

  They left the city by the Porte de la Chapelle and the St.-Denis road. It was still good weather, summer was coming on, and the transparent window screens were packed away in the rear. The warm air streamed pleasantly past the side of Fred’s head, ruffling his hair. Anna tucked herself away in the rear among the baggage and drowsed. After a while you forgot she was there. They stopped at Fontainebleau for lunch. They ate outdoors on the terrasse of the Aigle Noir and Fred bought a bottle of champagne, after lunch, to toast the new venture. It was turning out to be a pleasant trip. Paris and all its problems were behind. Perhaps it would work out after all.

  It was too long a trip for one day, even with the redoubtable Agostinelli at the wheel and without Marcel in the car. They stopped for the night at Lyon and had about another four hours to drive the next day. Agostinelli didn’t talk very much; he was concentrating on his driving on the narrow road lined with plane trees, where a bicycle or a peasant with a cart might always appear unexpectedly. Beyond Avignon, where the road came out into the plain and widened a little, it was easier driving.

  He looked around to be sure Anna was asleep. He said, “Monsieur Frédéric, have you ever felt an inclination for a person of the same sex?”

  Fred felt this was an odd way to put it. After a moment’s pause he said, “No.”

  “Neither have I. Although of course I’m very fond of Monsieur Marcel. But it’s not the same thing. You understand, Monsieur Frédéric.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not as one is fond of a woman.”

  “I understand,” said Fred.

  “But you have to eat. Il faut vivre. Life is like that. Still, I am very fond of Monsieur Marcel.”

  After that the conversation lapsed for a while. The Hispano raced down the road to the south, through Aix and Brignoles, hardly slowing for the villages. They came out onto the sea at St.-Raphaël. Fred stared out through the windshield at the long hood and the gleaming radiator ornament.

  “Are you sure this is your car, Alfred?”

  “Certainly, Monsieur Frédéric. It is signed in my name. Monsieur Marcel wanted me to have it.”

  This evidently reminded him again of the subject of the relations of the sexes, because after a moment he turned and asked bluntly, in his open and friendly way, “You are not romantic toward Mademoiselle Herma?”

  Fred wasn’t sure how to answer this; or rather he wasn’t sure why he felt confused after having said “No.”

  “You know,” he told Agostinelli, “you are one of the few Frenchmen” (he meant Frenchmen of the uneducated class, although he didn’t put it this way) “you are one of the few Frenchmen who can pronounce the letter H.”

  “That is because I learned to pronounce Hispano, Monsieur Frédéric,” said Agostinelli.

  With the help of their friends, Agostinelli and Anna found a small villa with flowers growing over the doorway on the road a kilometer or so out of Antibes. It was the first real home they had ever had. Always before they had lived with relatives, or with Monsieur Marcel. Fred took a room at the Beau Rivage at Port Vauban, which was near enough to the airfield at La Grimaudière that he could walk to it in a quarter of an hour. There was also a motorbus that went down the coast road every so often, but it wasn’t very reliable. The first day or two Agostinelli came by in the car to take him to the field, but after that he sold the Hispano to pay for the flying lessons.

  The first time they all went out to the field—it was really too modest to call an aerodrome—Fred found that the flying school was a somewhat shaky enterprise. Emile Soldati, the instructor he had known in Paris, was an excellent flyer whose experience went back to the pioneer days with Paulhan and Blériot. But he ran the school practically single-handed, with the help of his brother who took care of the business side of it, and didn’t even have a mechanic—he hired a mechanic by the hour when he needed one and did the minor servicing and repairs himself. He had only two aeroplanes—a Farman trainer similar to the one Fred and Agostinelli had flown at Issy, and a small Voisin monoplane for students to fly after they had soloed. The Farman appeared to be in fairly good condition. In fact, it turned out that it was one of the Farmans from the Castel-Jaloux school at Issy, and Soldati had bought it and flown it down to Antibes when he started his own school about a year ago. But the Voisin was old—a design imitated from the Blériots of five years ago—and it had the Antoinette engine that was no longer manufactured and was hard to find parts for. Fred inspected the Voisin dubiously. In spite of its age it seemed to be in good repair. The engine was clean and seemed to have been recently worked on. A small crack in the propeller was patched neatly with a piece of tin. He reached up to the stubby mast and tested the tension of the guy wires. He remembered Kinney: “No way you can brace just one wing.”

  Agostinelli could hardly wait to get into the air. Anna had never seen him fly. It was funny and a little touching to watch him; he behaved exactly like a boy of eighteen showing off for his girl. He put on his helmet and buckled it seriously, leaving his goggles up on his forehead like an old-time flyer. He clambered into the Farman and Soldati got in behind him. Agostinelli pulled his goggles down and waved to Anna. The engine started with a clatter and off they went. Anna watched entranced as the heavy biplane lumbered to the edge of the field, turned around, and roared louder as it lurched into motion. It gathered speed, the skid came up off the grass, and almost at the same moment the Farman rose up and soared past them in the air. Soldati climbed out straight for a kilometer or two, then banked and turned left over the sea.

  It was a beautiful setting. The field was almost at the edge of the Mediterranean; there was only the coast road and a narrow stretch of sand and then the sea. The broad curve of the Baie des Anges dwindled away to the north where Nice was lost in the haze. To the south was the promontory of the Cap d’Antibes with a lighthouse on it, and dotted along the cape were the luxury villas of Antibes and Juan-les-Pins.

  In the warm sunshine of the south Anna seemed a different person. She seemed to glow, her sullenness left her—or turned into a kind of heavy languor that was unexpectedly attractive—and she was like a creature who had come back to her own place at last after a life of exile. She paid no attention to Fred. She kept her eyes fixed on the dot of the Farman as it crept slowly along the coast, turned over the cape, and began coming back over the sea.

  While he waited Fred looked around at the other planes on the field. There were only four or five. T
wo of them were available for rent: a Morane-Saulnier midwing monoplane, and a Caudron B-II biplane with a 40-horsepower Anzani engine. The Caudron was the better machine, but it was expensive to rent and it burned up a lot of fuel. He looked at the Morane-Saulnier. The midwing design was a big improvement over the Blériot and the Voisin with their wing on top of the fuselage. The stub-mast was still necessary for upward bracing, but the wires had a better angle with the wing mounted lower, and the long struts that went down to the landing gear looked unbreakable. He thought he might try the Morane-Saulnier. The Caudron was probably safer but not as interesting. He climbed up and looked into the cockpit of the small monoplane. The instruments were neatly laid out: oil pressure and temperature gauges, compass, fuel gauge, rev counter, and an airspeed indicator. The instrument panel was polished aluminum and there was a padded leather coaming around the cockpit. He began to itch to fly it.

  The Farman came back in, with Agostinelli evidently at the controls. He turned into his approach a little too low, or perhaps he had failed again to allow for the aeroplane squashing down a little in a turn. But there was plenty of room on the field and he landed only a little too short. He taxied to a stop and climbed out, and he and Anna exchanged a big kiss. He was smiling all over.

  As it happened Fred didn’t fly very much at Antibes. He went up in the Morane-Saulnier once, but the next day somebody else banged it down too hard and damaged the landing gear. The Caudron, as he had expected, was not very interesting. It had been developed for the military and was heavily built to carry an observer and, perhaps, armament or bombs. It was hard to get off the ground, climbed slowly, and steered like a straw hat. Fred lost interest after a flight or two, especially since the rental agency wanted two hundred francs an hour for it.

  Besides the weather wasn’t as good after the first couple of days. Clouds with dark bottoms drifted over and there were light rain showers. Once in a while a dark line squall would come in from over the sea, leaving a tropic downpour as it passed, and afterward the wind would blow fitfully in savage little gusts for the rest of the day. Since it was a crosswind it made it impossible to fly. “This is nothing,” said Soldati. “You should see the way the mistral blows in the winter.” Because of these summer squalls, Agostinelli took his lessons early in the morning when it was calm and clear even though the grass was damp. Anna didn’t like to get up so early in the morning; she stayed in the villa and slept.