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 PTISSERIE 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 conce
rts 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.”
The Balloonist Page 13
