Herma

by MacDonald Harris

  “Music?”

  “The Poulet-Quartet.”

  “Ah, they’re playing this evening?”

  “Yes.”

  It was after eleven now. “But where?”

  “Chez moi. Boulevard Haussmann.”

  “You mean they’re waiting for us there?”

  “No. We have to go to collect them.”

  They went first to get the viola player, Amable Massis, who lived far out in the Plaisance quarter beyond Montparnasse. His mother, who answered the door, was indignant. A sleepy Massis in pyjamas appeared behind her. “I have come to recall you to your awful promise,” intoned Marcel in his sepulchral voice.

  Massis reappeared after a few minutes, wrapped in his overcoat and hatless, his hair ruffled, carrying his instrument case and portfolio. They went on to collect the young Gaston Poulet, the first violinist and organizer of the quartet, and then the second violin Victor Gentil and the cellist Louis Ruyssen. Ruyssen was difficult to persuade. He was a bachelor who lived a mysterious life and perhaps he had someone with him in the apartment. At last he came out, sulking, carrying his large instrument in its canvas bag. Somehow they all crammed into the taxi, Poulet and the instruments up in front with the driver, Gentil and Ruyssen on the jump seats, and the other four jammed shoulder to shoulder in the rear. Ruyssen, who was directly opposite Marcel, sat staring at him without a word.

  “It was agreed,” said Marcel.

  Ruyssen only growled. “It isn’t good for a cello to take it out on such a damp night.”

  Arriving at the apartment in boulevard Haussmann, everyone cheered up a little. The cork-lined rooms were warmer than most apartments in Paris. Marcel had a small charcoal stove in the bedroom, which was so small that they were almost as crowded in it as they had been in the taxi. Marcel got onto the bed, still in his fur coat, and pulled the spread up over his knees. He had now found a housekeeper, a tall foxy-faced woman named Céleste who seemed thoroughly in charge of things. She brought coffee and reproached Marcel for having gone out in such unsuitable weather. He said nothing and appeared not to notice that she was there. She disappeared, not at all put out by his impoliteness.

  The program, it transpired, was to be the late Beethoven quartets. The four musicians set up their stands and began tuning their instruments, still a little sulky. Poulet, when the instruments were tuned, turned to Marcel.

  “Monsieur, we have all the quartets. Which did you wish?”

  “Shall we say the B flat. The one with the scherzo.”

  “Opus 127,” said Poulet.

  They arranged the music on the stands and lifted their instruments. Then, with a nod from Poulet, they began. The vigorous play of the two violins, the slightly heavier and resonant voice of the viola, the baritone of the cello filled the small room. The first movement was a spare and clean skeletal statement, without decoration and utterly devoid of emotion. It was rather somber, and so was the adagio movement that followed it. Marcel watched intently, his eyes burning in their dark sockets and the coffee untouched by his side. In the middle of the adagio there was a strange set of birdlike cries from the violins, accompanied by a strumming cello continuo. Then—after this outburst, as it were—the four instruments returned to their abstruse and complex development of the theme. The two violins wove in and out, sometimes one climbing over the other for a few bars and then returning to the normal harmonic stance a third below. It was a difficult music—highly intellectual—not at all like the sentimental and lachrymose Verdi that Herma was used to, or the light-hearted and elegant, harmonious Mozart. The theme was distorted, inverted, abandoned for a few bars, and then reintroduced again. It was as though the music were unwilling to give way to silence, or unable to find its way to a conclusion; then finally it came to an end in a very gentle, almost reluctant chord in the middle register.

  The scherzo movement that followed was falsely light. It was a parody of gay and light string music—as if to say with a mocking little smile, you see what goes by the name of pleasure with ordinary men. But we who know …

  It was this scherzo that Marcel had been waiting for. He listened intently, his fingers in his beard, his dark Persian eyes fixed on the musicians. The harmonies were not quite right. Yet the correct harmonies were implied, behind the notes. The music said: you see, this is the way the harmonies ought to be. But they are not. The universe is awry. Herma turned to look at Marcel. There was nothing affected or theatrical about him now. His attention was fixed on the quartet, aware of nothing in the room but the music. He was as intent and calm as though watching the execution of an enemy, or the slow wilting and decay of a flower. His eyes met hers briefly; there was no expression and he turned away again. Reynaldo, too, sitting stiffly in his uniform with his képi on his knees, was listening intently. He was facing not toward the musicians, but toward the odd figure of Marcel on the bed across the room. Now and then he smiled, as though some inward thought had struck him.

  The finale was slightly frenetic. The instruments gave the impression of trying to escape from one another—from their common fourness—and yet they were bound together in the prison of their form. They struggled, but in vain. At last they came to a resolution of sorts—a kind of truce. The chords that ended the movement were slightly dissonant.

  When it ended no one spoke. There was silence, broken only by a little goatlike cough from Marcel. Poulet waited, his face turned questioningly to Marcel. Then Marcel said, “The C sharp minor.”

  “Opus 131.”

  They arranged their music again, and began. The quartet was very long; it had seven movements. It began very slowly and gently with a single violin voice, joined after a measure or two by the second violin, then by the deeper voice of the viola. Finally the cello joined them from below, and together they worked gradually into the complex texture of the fugue. In some way the music suggested intimations of a recollected suffering, now exalted and purified. The single theme of the fugue was developed in infinite parallel progressions and variations; a strangely spare, somber statement.

  There followed two short allegros. The fourth movement, an andante, also seemed to be searching, but now it was as though the four voices were searching together, and for the same thing—like four hunters scouting over low hills, separated now and then, and then rejoining, but their eyes always forward in the same direction. What were they hunting for? None of them dared to speak its name.

  Herma, sitting in a rather stiff and uncomfortable chair with hardly room on the floor for her feet, followed the andante only with difficulty. She was not really trained to follow antiphonies with four voices—when you sang the Sextet from Lucia you just sang your own part and let the others worry about the rest—and she had to focus her attention with effort in order to follow the thread of the thematic development. She lost track of the movements. There was a presto, and then an adagio. It began with great dignity, taking its time. A lyrical note crept in, almost imperceptibly, but was soon submerged in the purely mathematical development of the theme. The four voices tested against each other warily—formed chords and dissolved—regrouped, and proceeded stealthily across the midnight landscape of the quartet. Now and then the cello broke out angrily in a strident note, but this indignation was soon lost, and the voices fell back into their contrapuntal lacework of harmony.

  Without any particular transition, led by a sudden impetus from the cello, this adagio broke rhythm and began rushing on more quickly toward the end. After that it was an odd kind of music that didn’t seem to be scored in any particular tempo. It was a kind of light ethereal fugue in which only the three smaller instruments engaged and the cello remained below, as though softly chiding or guiding, in its even baritone. Now and then the cello joined in for a bar or two, as if to show the others how fugues were done. It was clear that the cello, which had seemed so reticent and had remained below and in the background, was the master and had been all along. It was this deeper voice that had underlain the others and sustained them, otherwise t
hey would have lost their way in this dark countryside they were exploring. This Herma understood, or half understood, but there were many things she did not understand. She tried to follow, but was distracted by the abrupt shifts of tempo, by the constant dissonances in the complex harmony. It was nothing like Verdi or anything in the opera. It was music of the mind. When he wrote these last quartets, Beethoven had been burned clean by suffering and was no longer the slave of emotions. The histrionics of the Eroica were behind, the moving lyricism of the Pastoral, the bombast and exaltation of the Ninth. He was deaf and could not hear what he had written, only see the motions of the bows on the instruments. This was pure music, made not for human emotions, or for humans, but for the abstract Mind.

  The fugue resolved at last into a set of short sharp declarative statements, like the codas in the symphonies, only written in grotesque miniature for the tiny orchestra—in parody, as it were. There were three abrupt identical chords in C sharp, chords of absolute simplicity, chords that anyone might have written. Then there was silence.

  For a long moment no one spoke. Poulet sat with his instrument resting on his knees. Then Marcel said quietly, in his ordinary matter-of-fact tone, “Thank you, my friends.”

  The four put the music away in their portfolios. “It’s late,” said Ruyssen, still a little surly, already pulling the cover onto his cello.

  “It was good of you to come. We will take you home now. I am sorry if there was any inconvenience. You see, I am not well enough to go to concerts.”

  He charmed them all. In the end even Ruyssen shook his hand. Rather awkwardly Marcel opened the drawer of the bedside table, took out an envelope bulging with bank notes, and gave it to Poulet. Poulet stuck this into his coat pocket. Laden with their instruments, their folded stands, and their music, they bumped their way out of the apartment, followed by Herma, Reynaldo, and Marcel.

  Céleste had telephoned for a taxi. It was late at night now and it was some time before the taxi came. It was cold in the entryway and Marcel took shelter in the loge, wrapping his scarf around his mouth and the lower part of his face. The taxi came and they got in, according to the same crammed and uncomfortable arrangement as before.

  “Extra charge for more than four. And—baggage,” said the driver, watching as the instrument cases were passed in one by one.

  “Very good, my friend,” said Marcel, still calm.

  They delivered the quartet to their homes, Massis last to his apartment far out beyond the Montparnasse cemetery. The driver, who seemed unfriendly, tolerated all this circus with contempt, only because the fare would be very large. He turned around to the three passengers remaining.

  “And now?”

  Marcel looked at Reynaldo. He smiled faintly.

  “Should we go, do you think?”

  “Why not?”

  “And shall Herma come too?”

  Reynaldo considered. “It’s hardly suitable.”

  “No. You’re right. Seventy-eight avenue Kléber,” Marcel told the driver.

  The taxi went off down rue de la Convention in the direction of the river. There was silence for a while. Then Marcel said craftily, to no one in particular, “But perhaps Fred could come.”

  Herma looked at him. It was dark in the taxi. Now and then a street lamp went past and the pale oval of his face could be seen.

  “Come where?”

  “I know that Fred is free tonight,” he said, gazing at her fixedly.

  “That’s up to him.”

  “We’ll take you home. It was good of you to come. Sometimes one hungers for the company of a charming young woman. Simply to look upon—to be with. And music.” In the dark corner of the taxi he sighed, in his slightly affected way. “It is my only consolation now. My only diversion. Music enables us to have experiences in the soul that we are no longer able to have in the body.”

  Reynoldo smiled a little at this. They crossed the river on the Pont Mirabeau and went on up the quays past the Trocadéro. There was no traffic and in only a few minutes the taxi stopped in front of the apartment in avenue Kléber. Herma got out, and Reynaldo gallantly climbed out after her to escort her across the sidewalk to the door.

  “Send Fred down,” came Marcel’s imperious histrionic voice from inside the taxi.

  Herma went up while Marcel and Reynaldo waited in the taxi. After a quarter of an hour or so Fred appeared, in the winter costume which he now affected in order to identify himself as an American and radiate a slight aura of legend: a Stetson and a fleece-lined leather coat that came down to his knees. On the sidewalk, before the dark shape of the taxi with its invisible occupants, he stopped. It occurred to him that Marcel perhaps still bore him some resentment over the matter of Agostinelli. He was not sure what was happening or whether it was a good idea.

  Marcel’s voice from inside the taxi was friendly and intimate, almost cajoling. “Get in, Fred.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “To a certain place. Come along. You’ll find it interesting.”

  He got in, rather gingerly, and the taxi went off. He was sitting on the jump seat with Reynaldo and Marcel opposite him. No one said anything. The taxi went up the avenue, around the circle of the Étoile, and along the boulevards to a small narrow street near the Madeleine. There it drew up before an elegant eighteenth-century mansion. The shutters were tightly closed. The building was dark on the outside and there was no sign or other identifying mark on the door. From every appearance it was a private residence.

  They got out. Marcel paid the driver, after considerable negotiations of a peculiar sort: the driver kept adding on charges for extra passengers, for the musical instruments, and so on, and Marcel insisted on paying him even more. Finally it was settled. Marcel, holding the scarf over his mouth, pulled the old-fashioned bell cord under the marquée.

  The door was opened by a valet and they entered. The large vestibule was lighted only dimly, by lamps with colored glass shades. Beyond was a long and narrow salon with a bronze chandelier hanging from the ceiling. There were a dozen or so men lounging around on the divans or standing in pairs smoking cigarettes, all of them young. It was an odd assortment. Some were genteel and refined, Swinburnish, with pale languid faces and expensive, rather old-fashioned clothing. Others seemed to be genuine toughs from the Halles or the barge docks. One was a powerful young man in skin-tight trousers and a sleeveless singlet, his bare shoulders gleaming. The salon, and the rooms beyond it as well as they could be glimpsed, were furnished in ornate Louis XV style. There were screens, divans, étagères, period clocks, veneer Boulle marquetry, Sèvres figurines, a small Renaissance bronze of a naked youth extracting a thorn from his foot. Over the chimneypiece was a portrait by Nattier, and a large Fragonard occupied the opposite wall.

  All this seemed to suggest, perhaps, the town house of a Parisian aristocrat, opulent and slightly old-fashioned. But in other respects the establishment was like a hotel. There was a reception desk with a small blue-shaded lamp on it, and behind it was the owner and proprietor, Julien Lecouvreur. Marcel introduced him ceremoniously to Fred.

  Lecouvreur was a person—not precisely a young man, he appeared to be in his mid-thirties—of great elegance and suavity. He had an olive skin and a pencil-thin mustache which he touched now and then with his finger before he spoke. He was coatless, dressed in striped formal trousers, a cravat and a waistcoat. His shirt cuffs were fastened with large gold links. He took Fred’s hand politely.

  “It is a pleasure to make the acquaintance of Monsieur.”

  Marcel, his fingers playing in his beard, explained in a gentle voice, “Julien is someone I … knew … many years ago. When he decided to go into business for himself, it was I who lent him the money to set himself up here. Isn’t that so, Julien?”

  “That is exactly so.”

  Marcel smiled a ghost of his old smile. “I’m afraid that some of my grandmother’s furniture is here too,” he said with a mock sigh. “Certain pieces are priceless.”
/>   “Monsieur is very kind,” said Julien.

  “But now he is independent. He has paid me back, and the establishment is entirely his. And it’s very profitable, is it not, Julien?”

  “My clients are the cream of Paris society. For them, expense is no object.”

  Beynaldo, paying no attention to the conversation, was looking around at the young men in the room. “There’s someone new,” he said.

  “Ah?”

  With a discreet motion of his head Reynaldo indicated the youth in the sleeveless singlet.

  “Ah yes. That’s Maurice. He’s from an excellent family, but he prefers to affect that costume. It pleases—certain persons.”

  Marcel’s smile had disappeared. He evidently didn’t care for this turn in the conversation. He suggested to Julien, “Perhaps you might care to show the gentleman your library and other beautiful things.”

  Julien bowed. He came out from behind the desk and caught the eye of a young man with curly hair and a flowing Byronic collar, who took his place at the desk. Then he led the way up an ornate staircase that curved about in a half circle as it rose to the balcony above.

  “Originally,” Marcel explained as they went, “this was the town house of the Marignys. They lost it at the time of the Revolution, and then it passed into the hands of various bourgeois. More recently it belonged to the wealthy entrepreneur M. Plaghki, whom I know, so I was able to arrange for Julien to purchase it.”

  All this he delivered in his artificial affected voice, which now turned into a kind of parody of the manner of a tourist guide.

  “Very little of the furniture, however, is original. It had to be replaced at considerable cost. However, if one knows how to go about such things, favorable opportunities can be found.” It was clear that he had helped Julien also with the furnishings, in addition to his grandmother’s furniture which he had given or lent him.