Herma

by MacDonald Harris

  The large chapel of the abbey was crammed full of wounded, some in wheelchairs, some rolled in by nurses in their beds, some able to walk. A few of them were officers. The officers were treated in a separate part of the hospital, but evidently they were allowed to come to the entertainment in the chapel with the others. In addition to Herma, who was announced as “the celebrated American prima donna from the Opéra,” there was an entertainer from a music hall who sang comic songs, a juggler, a magician, and a Hungarian czardas-violinist.

  Herma didn’t know what to sing. She began with a French art song or two, a trifle of Debussy, and the Canzonetta from The Marriage of Figaro. There was polite applause after each selection. But obviously it was not what they were accustomed to. She tried some Stephen Foster songs—which were warmly applauded, with grins—and then The Last Rose of Summer. After conferring with the pianist, she finished with Ta Ra Ra Boom-de-ay, and succeeded in getting most of them to sing it along with her, in growls and grunts, in the second chorus. There was more clapping, from those who could use their arms, and laughter.

  Herma sat down, and the Hungarian began playing his czardas. She had a good view of the audience from her position on the improvised platform. They were French of all kinds—Provençals, blond-headed Normans, dark fiery Corsicans, stolid and round-headed Auvergnats, even a few Senegalese with ebony skins and long powerful limbs. Some, the more badly wounded, could only lie propped in bed and stare out of hollow eyes. Others, in wheelchairs, were amputees, or had head wounds or limbs in casts.

  From her vantage point on the platform her eye was caught by a very young soldier in the front row who had a bandage around his head and never took his eyes from Herma’s face, then by an officer leaning negligently against a column on the left—the only man in the chapel who wasn’t seated or in bed. His left arm was in a sling. He too had watched Herma attentively while she sang, with a little smile playing on his lips. He hadn’t joined in the singing, she noticed, but his smile became broader during the Stephen Foster songs, and he began to laugh when the others roared away at Ta Ra Ba Boom-de-ay. He had a small neat mustache and his uniform was immaculate. He looked as though he had just stepped in off the boulevard to watch the entertainment, and had put his arm in a sling to be polite to the others. Next to him was another officer with a deep frown, sitting in a chair with his leg propped on another chair. The first officer—the one with the sling—caught her eye once. But this made him blush and he turned away.

  After the performance, the entertainers were to “mingle with the troops to cheer them” as the instructions had it. Nurses came around serving a kind of tea-time snack or casse-croûte. There was strong army pinard in tin cups, along with chocolates in silver wrappers and fruitcake donated by some American charitable organization or other. This combination didn’t seem to strike the French soldiers as odd. They filled their pockets with the chocolates. As for the fruitcake, it was foreign and no doubt in America people ate fruitcake with red wine. They were anxious to be agreeable, since Herma was American. They ate the chocolates and fruitcake and the performers went around, stopping to talk to one group or another.

  Herma wound her way through the chapel cluttered with its beds and wheelchairs. A number of soldiers trailed after her hoping to speak to her, but she was pitiless. She had already decided with whom she wanted to talk. She went straight to the officer with his arm in the sling standing by the column. “What do you expect?” she heard a voice behind her. “They go for the officers.”

  The officer by the column was a captain, she now saw by the stripes on his sleeve, and so was his scowling friend in the chair. The one who was standing up was well built even though he was not very tall. He had a powerful chest and his wrists were strong and supple, the wrists of a wrestler. His complexion was a pale and even bronze, the color of sherry.

  “I’m Herma.”

  “I’m called Tancrède,” he said, still smiling but coloring a little. “And this silent fellow is Blanchot.”

  The standard opening for a conversation, it seemed, was “How were you wounded?”

  He smiled a little more broadly. “You see,” he explained, “Blanchot and I are friends, so we arranged to be both hit by the same bullet so we could be in the hospital together.”

  “The same bullet?”

  The two captains exchanged a look.

  Tancrède said, “Well, Blanchot doesn’t like to talk about it, because we were shot in a retreat, and that’s damaging to his sense of honor.”

  “But the whole army was retreating.”

  “That doesn’t make any difference. If Blanchot is to be wounded, he wants to be wounded gloriously. You see, it was this way. We were at a regimental staff meeting in a farmhouse, and when we came out there were no more troops. Our companies had disappeared, because the Boches were advancing more quickly than expected. While we were in our meeting the platoon commanders made the decision to withdraw. It wasn’t their fault. It was just the result of confusion.”

  “Stop chattering about it,” growled Blanchot, frowning more deeply.

  “So Blanchot and I began setting off across the countryside trying to find our companies. We came to a stone wall, and I climbed over it and turned around waiting for him to come after. He had just climbed onto the wall when a bullet—not aimed particularly at us and coming from a long distance—went through the calf of his leg and then lodged in my chest. So we were both hit by the same bullet.”

  “Your chest?”

  “Yes. You see, my arm is in a sling so I won’t hurt the chest muscles by swinging it around and doing violent exercises with it. There’s nothing wrong with the arm.”

  “They ought to put your mouth in a sling,” said Blanchot.

  “Why is your friend so fierce?”

  “Well you see, soldiers have to be fierce to the enemy. And to do this, they have to practice being fierce all the time.”

  “But what about you?”

  “Ah, I’m not a real soldier. I’m only a chocolate soldier,” he laughed. “Have a chocolate.” He took one out of his pocket and offered it to her.

  There was something Bacchic about him, something powerful and wily. Perhaps it was only the tufts of hair at his temples, his catlike green eyes, and his constant air of amusement, as though he knew something that ordinary mortals didn’t.

  “Besides,” he said, “I’m a graduate of St.-Cyr, whereas he was promoted up through the ranks. Therefore he has to be more fierce in order to make it clear to everybody that he’s an officer.”

  “Shut your face, why don’t you,” said Blanchot.

  Herma unwrapped the chocolate and ate it. She looked around her. “It’s so somber here.” There was a depressing-looking crucifix on the wall. The blood was depicted with great realism; the Sufferer looked as though He needed some medical attention too. “Can you ever go out?”

  “Oh yes, we can go out, since we’re officers, provided some way can be found to transport us.”

  “What are you talking about?” said Blanchot angrily. “We can transport ourselves. I can limp.” He in fact had a cane by his side, an odd contrivance with a T-shaped handle at the top. “And you don’t walk on your arm. Or your chest either.”

  “Well, I was only thinking about Blanchot. I can walk well enough.”

  “Think about yourself,” growled Blanchot.

  “Well, suppose I come by tomorrow afternoon then and take you both to a café.”

  “Fine,” said Tancrède. “Even a restaurant, The things they give you to eat here are terrible.”

  Herma said good-bye to them and left. Her hearing was excellent, like her other senses. “She hasn’t got much chest,” she heard Blanchot say to his friend as she moved away through the chapel.

  Herma took them to the places she knew best: first to the Café de la Paix for an aperitif, then to LaRue’s. She ordered her usual white meat of chicken with a little asparagus, and Tancrède a broiled salmon with madeira sauce. Blanchot ordered a steak and fr
ites. The waiter wrote down the orders imperturbably.

  The fried potatoes came in a sterling-silver hot dish, the cover of which the waiter removed with a nourish. Handling the serving spoon and fork deftly with one hand, he set the neat heap of frites on Blanchot’s plate. He showed no sign that this was not one of LaRue’s most refined specialties, his famous blanquette de veau or his squab en papillote.

  Herma chose the wines, a Saint-Emilion for Blanchot and a Mersault for herself and Tancrède. The waiter poured the wine, and Tancrède began to explain in detail how a light mortar worked—its range, explosive power, and rate of fire. This was his specialty; he had been to a technical school and was qualified to lecture to troops on the subject, “I can get five shells into the air at once. At a range of two kilometers, the circle of error is only fifty meters.”

  “What happens to the people when the shells hit them?”

  “Oh, it kills them. You see,” he explained, arranging the salt and pepper and other objects on the table, and rumpling the tablecloth so as to make trenches, “a rifle or an ordinary artillery weapon has a flat trajectory. So it’s impossible to use them to dislodge troops who are properly entrenched. But a mortar has a high firing angle and comes down almost vertically, and falls directly into the trenches. The trick is to get it aimed accurately enough. At a range of two kilometers, a change in elevation of the barrel of only one degree causes a deflection of a hundred meters.”

  Herma was sure this was true. She tried to imagine Tancrède in a trench, making an adjustment of one degree in the elevation of a mortar barrel, while Blanchot looked on glowering.

  “How does it feel to be in a battle! Are you angry at the enemy?”

  “Who?”

  “The Germans.”

  He shrugged. “No, I’m not angry at the Boches. It’s my métier. For civilians, perhaps, it’s all right to be angry at the enemy. But for me it’s a métier. Getting angry will only interfere with your aim. If you are trying to shoot somebody and you are all trembling with anger, you will probably miss him. It’s like getting angry at the target in a shooting gallery. It is bad for the aim.”

  “Then the German who shot you was not angry at you?”

  He considered.

  “Probably not. The bullet came from a long way off. It was a spent bullet. But perhaps he was angry—he was trying to hit somebody else, and because he was angry he missed.” He reflected on this, as though he had grasped for the first time how it was that he had managed to get wounded.

  Blanchot had finished his steak and fries and drunk the bottle of wine. He laid down his knife and fork. “When will America come into the war?” he asked abruptly.

  Tancrède too turned to her.

  “I don’t know. Not for a while perhaps. I don’t think people are ready for it. Maybe they won’t come at all.”

  Blanchot said coldly, “Then we will win without them.”

  “Blanchot, don’t be such a pig,” said Tancrède. “The Americans will come and help us. Just give them a little time.”

  Blanchot said, “They’ll come at the very end.” He added, “Besides, a lot of Americans are Germans. Your President Roosevelt was a German.”

  “He was Dutch,” said Tancrède.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. Don’t let’s quarrel,” said Herma. “Your General Lafayette came over and helped us in some previous century or other, when we were fighting the English, so I’m sure we will come over and help you.”

  “You aren’t very strong on history.”

  “Well, wasn’t that the way it was?”

  “Pretty much.”

  “Lafayette, c’etait un aristo,” said Blanchot. “He had class, a type like that. They don’t have any aristos in America. That’s the trouble with them. Too much democracy.” It was his longest speech of the evening.

  Herma took a breath. To smooth over the argument she asked, “Does anybody like ice cream?”

  Blanchot didn’t care for any dessert. She ordered two Fraises Hermas. When the waiter brought them he wasn’t sure which of the three they were for, so he set them together in the center of the table. LaRue’s too now made them in the manner of the Ritz, with a frothy little ring of whipped cream around the edge of the goblet. The lemon-vanilla ice cream was formed into perfect hemispheres, and the glaze too was exactly the right shade of amber. Since it was winter, the strawberries were hothouse fruit and rather small. The two goblets sat together on the table about eight inches apart. Tancrède looked at them, then he caught Herma’s eye and blushed.

  They were both from the Touraine—Tancrède from Chinon and Blanchot from Amboise—and they didn’t know much about Paris. Herma, in a succession of taxis, all no doubt veterans of the Battle of the Marne, conducted touristic tours for them in the afternoons. Blanchot limped along with his T-shaped cane. They went up in the Eiffel Tower, and she showed them the city from the Butte Montmartre. What else? Would they like to see the Panthéon, the Nôtre-Dame, the Sainte-Chapelle?

  “The Opéra,” said Tancrède.

  It was closed, of course, but Herma took them around to the stage entrance in rue Gluck, where the old doorkeeper Monsieur Dupetit was on duty as usual. For some reason she had a slight pudeur about showing them her dressing room, although dozens of men had been in it before. Instead they went, the three of them, out onto the wide stage—the curtain was open and the vast auditorium out beyond it, shadowy and silent, was like an empty gulf. Tancrède looked out at the countless rows of crimson plush seats, at the five tiers of empty boxes. “Oh, I’d be afraid of so many people,” he joked.

  Stepping forward to the dead footlights, Herma clasped her hands and trilled a bit of coloratura:

  “Les ois-eaux-dans-la-char-mille,

  Dans-les-cieux-l’astre-du-jour …”

  Her voice echoed strangely in the vast emptiness out before her; it was as though she were singing in outer space—in a universe without matter—a disembodied voice. She had sung in empty theaters before, at auditions or rehearsals, but this was different. It was that no one was listening. She felt a little chill inside, just under the place where her ribs ended. “Let’s go,” she said.

  She took them up the narrow spiral staircase to show them the great mechanical skeleton of the theater above the stage. There were ropes and cables, heavy steel beams, great machines for hoisting the scenery, vast cogwheels like those in clocks but as high as a standing man. Tancrède examined all this with interest, and even Blanchot looked about at things and frowned a little less than usual.

  “And all this,” said Tancrède, “is so that you can sing your little—” he squeaked up into a falsetto—“‘Les-ois-eaux-dans-la-char-mille.’”

  His imitation of a coloratura soprano was enough, almost, to make Blanchot smile. “You had better stay with your trench mortars and leave singing to me,” Herma advised.

  They went down the iron stairs again—the two officers with perfect correctness following after her, just as they had proceeded her up the stairs, so that there was no question of anyone looking up her skirt—and led them around a circular corridor, through a door, and out onto a balcony overlooking the great entrance hall of the Opéra, itself as large as a church or a provincial theater. Everything was marble: the broad marble staircase ascended, divided into two before a pair of immense marble caryatids, and then turned and continued along a pair of matching corridors lined with marble columns. Only two of the countless crystal chandeliers were lighted; the vaulted ceiling overhead was hardly visible in the gloom. Tancrède ran his hand over the polished marble balustrade before him, yellowish with a smoky dark pattern in the surface, as though under glass. Blanchot too seemed inspired to an unusual loquacity by the Opéra and by the staircase in particular.

  “French civilization. It is for this that we are fighting,” he said sternly.

  Tancrède shrugged. “It’s for the rich.”

  “Well, you’re rich. You’re a count.”

  “Are you a count?” asked Herma in surpr
ise. “You never told me that.”

  “Well, he doesn’t like to mention it,” said Blanchot.

  Tancrède said, “Just because you’re a count, that doesn’t mean you’re rich. There are plenty of poor counts.”

  “Well, you’re a rich one.”

  “Anyhow,” said Tancrède, “we don’t have counts anymore since the Revolution. It’s an honorary title. As they say, that and a franc will get you a ride on the Métro.”

  As in all cases where you are involved with two men who are friends—or two women if it is the other way around—the difficulty was in getting Tancrède separated from Blanchot. They seemed inseparable. It was as though—even though they were soldiers and had been tested in battle—they were afraid of going about the city alone. Even with Herma as a guide. Or perhaps it was precisely being alone with Herma that they were afraid of. There was a bashful or boyish quality about both of them, especially where women were involved.

  By discreet questioning of the nurses she found that even the patient-officers in the hospital had guard nights when they had to remain on duty in the enlisted men’s wards, in order to prevent them, perhaps, from cutting their throats, or making advances to the nurses. Blanchot’s guard night was Wednesday, so she rang up Tancrède from her apartment and asked him to go to dinner on Wednesday. There was a telephone in the officers’ ward; the trouble was that you had to talk with everyone else in the ward listening. She was still saying “vous” to both of them, so her “can you come to dinner” could have been either singular or plural.

  “We can’t,” he said. “It’s Blanchot’s duty night.”

  “I didn’t mean Blanchot.”

  “Yes, but he’s my friend. I go everywhere with him.”

  “That’s nonsense,” said Herma. “I have something to tell you that I don’t necessarily want Blanchot to listen to.” She said “toi” now to make it perfectly clear.