In any case it was not, if the truth be told, an event that caused widespread reverberations in the artistic world like the premiere of Ubu Roi, and probably that was not what she or anybody else intended. There were brief advance notices in Le Temps, Le Figaro, L’Écho de Paris, Le Gaulois. I bought my ticket at an agency in rue de Rivoli and went alone in a cab, like a spy to an enemy camp. It was a rainy night, which was bad luck. In Avenue Montaigne, in front of the hall, there were only a few cabs, and a pair of gallants in evening cloaks finishing their cigars under the marquee before they threw them in the gutter and went in. Inside, at five minutes to nine—the thing was announced to begin at nine—the long oval hall was perhaps a third full. I took my seat, which was well toward the rear. High ceiling, walls hung in thick burgundy draperies with gold trim. Some boxes along the sides, partly concealed with the same red curtains. At one end was a raised dais with a concert Pleyel sitting on it like a large black insect. The place was full of that kind of hushed and yet magnified twitter common to large rooms where an event of some sort is soon to take place. I crossed my legs I and gravely examined the program as though I didn’t know what it was, still playing the imbecile.
These five-franc seats were occupied mainly by music students and other sorts of waifs from the Latin Quarter. One of them—very friendly, not to say insolent—even bent his elbow over the back of his seat to engage me in a conversation.
“Cette Hickman. Elle a du talent?”
“Parle pas francais. Suédois.”
Probably he didn’t believe me, because he went right on talking. “It’s because, you see, they gave Casimir and me the tickets free, at the Conservatory.”
“Ah, the Conservatory.” I erected a painful sentence in French. “I don’t know. If she has attended. The Conservatory.” This convinced them that I was an imbecile, or a foreigner, which is the same thing, and they left me alone. After that they discussed the matter between themselves. “After all, one has never heard …” “D’accord, but if she did have talent …” “Certainly, but still …”
Entry of the accompanist, who sat down immediately, flapping the tails of his coat over the stool with an adroit professional gesture. Not very much of the chatter in the hall subsided, even when the houselights were dimmed. The student in the seat ahead of me (Gilles, as one gathered from the dialogue) explained to Casimir in a loud voice, “Non, idiot, c’est une américaine.”
Luisa appeared from one side and advanced to the centre of the dais. Her gown was black velvet, with a band of white lace at the throat. Her hair was arranged in the same simple knot in which I had first seen it, at the Musée Carnavalet, and she carried a few violets in a long white ribbon. The audience to some extent stopped their chattering and rattling of programs, and there was a patter of polite applause. The accompanist made a few chords, almost lost in the large hall, and she embarked on the first item of the program.
It was “Queen of the Night” from The Magic Flute of Mozart, which I would describe as a coloratura aria with ha-ha’s. The voice seemed thin in so large a cubic space; the ceiling was ten metres over her head. I suspected that the aria was far too high for her in spite of the extraordinary range of her voice. Still, I was not a music critic. There was one, however, sitting ten or twelve rows ahead of me where the seats changed prices. He was from Le Gaulois and Luisa had pointed him out to me once at a concert. Probably it was obligatory for him to come once the recital had been advertised in his paper. There were also various other recognizable characters from the Parisian musical world, even if they didn’t perhaps represent its very cream: a Balkan pianist, the tenor Jean de Reszke, whom I had met once in Quai d’Orléans, and a wild-headed boy composer whose Concerto for Larynx had been the sensation, or scandal, of last winter’s musical season. Luisa finished “Queen of the Night,” there was a sound from the hall like pattering rain, and she launched into the Bell Song from Lakmé.
The audience seemed restive but not, at this point, in a violent or mutinous mood. After Schumann’s “Frühlingsnacht” there was even a “Brava!” from a single voice. It might have been from Gilles or Casimir, but I couldn’t be sure. At the intermission, however, there was a bad omen; the critic from Le Gaulois lurched up out of his seat and departed, exactly as Sarcey had done at the Théâtre de l’oeuvre, although probably for different reasons. Ahead of me Casimir yawned and stretched his arms. “Alors, Gilles. Tu penses?” ‘Je ne pense pas, je souffre.”
After the intermission Luisa appeared without the flowers, slightly paler than before. The accompanist rattled off his chords and she began with some Brahms lieder. For the first one, “Die Mainacht,” a note in the program warned, “O singer, if thou cannot dream, leave this song unsung.” In spite of this portent the lieder, in my humble and even ignorant opinion, were fairly successful. But when she returned to opera the path was not so smooth; even I could see the rocks she was tripping over. Luisa, the man from Le Gaulois has fled the scene; better follow him!
But she stuck it out. She had saved her real bravura piece, in fact, for the last. This was “Charmant Oiseau” from David’s Perle de Brésil, a confection which required the help not only of the pianist but of a flautist, a plump young man clad like his fellow accompanist in a white tie and tailcoat, who began by licking his instrument as though he were not quite sure he cared for the taste. He and the pianist signaled each other with their eyebrows. They were ready. They turned to Luisa.
The Charming Bird took wing. Luisa was pursuing it in her way and the flautist in his. The more cumbersome piano brought up the rear, like a carriage of ladies following the hunt. The main game of the thing involved Luisa making a little series of trills or la-la’s that—for instance—went up and down in the shape of a tent, whereupon the flautist would attempt as well as he could to imitate this contour. Then she would make her la-la’s in a slightly different way, perhaps going up but not down, leaving the coming down to the next match between voice and instrument.
This folly of setting herself against the precision of a metallic and finely honed instrument was her undoing. By herself she might have prevailed, or at least concluded the evening in some sort of an armistice. But this small tubular machine was remorseless. It followed her every voice-step, and when she faltered even slightly it pounced on her. Soon she was faltering more than slightly. The audience began taking an interest in the proceedings on the dais, for the first time in the evening. Husbands who were asleep were woken up, and the students grinned and nudged each other.
The flautist did his best. He was on her side; after all she was paying him. But he too was helpless against the fine precision of his instrument. There was no way out for him; he had to play the notes in tune. The audience, which before had only tittered, now permitted itself an outright ripple of laughter. Luisa made another of the tent-shaped cadenzas, and this time the flute, in spite of the best efforts of its operator to control it, said distinctly, “I went this way, but you went that.” Luisa’s voice was as it had always been: charmingly lyrical when she wished it to be lyrical, coloratura when she wished it to be coloratura, varying precisely in timbre and tone according to her will. It was only in pitch that it refused to obey her. That little force that drove it slightly up when it should have gone down, slightly down when it should have held level, was the demon of her emotions, a phenomenon I knew well from other incidents quite different in circumstances. It was the nature of her voice to rise when she was excited, to lower when she wished to convey a tone of threat. Now she was in the grip of both these forces. The flute could not have followed her even if it had been Mozart’s magic one, neither could any system of notation. The more the flute reproached her the more excited she became, and the more threatening. She ended in a debacle, three notes from the tonic, in a head-voice, stopped in midair by a catch or a sob.
The applause was immediate. I had always known that Parisian audiences were pitiless and now I saw it for myself. Some clapped their hands so hard they were unable to laugh, an
d others laughed until they were unable to clap their hands. They rose to their feet. I with them—otherwise how could I see anything? There were only a few whistles to indicate disapprobation. Drowning them out, many bravas. Luisa’s pallor was phenomenal, a medical curiosity, like a patch of brightly illuminated snow.
“A new diva!”
“Melba, it’s time to retire!”
“Brava!”
“Bis! bis!”
“Charmant Oiseau! Encore!”
“Bis! bis! bis! bis!”
This chant took over the hall. Casimir and Gilles had their due part in it. I might have rapped them over the head, but I had no weapon. I ought to have brought a riding crop. Besides, by this time they had disappeared. The porter, as was customary, was waiting at the rear of the hall with a number of elaborate bouquets, including a horseshoe of carnations and lilies of the valley. These ornaments were appropriated by Casimir and Gilles, assisted by their fellow students. The porter was pushed over backward onto a chair. Luisa, who had come to her senses by this time, attempted to escape to the right. (The flautist and pianist, who should have been her natural protectors, had long since disappeared.) But she was cut off by a volley of flowers, and turning to the left saw her escape barred that way too. The horseshoe of carnations sailed through the air and struck her on the ankles.
“Bis! bis!”
“Fly again, Charmant Oiseau!”
“Brava!”
“Diva! diva! To the Opéra!”
The more respectable of the spectators, myself included, quitted the field at this point. In a box near the dais I caught a glimpse of the aunt, formidable, stoic, her chin tremoring as usual but no more than usual. Then I slipped out through a side aisle onto the street. For all I knew, the students actually carried out their promise, or threat, to attach themselves to Luisa’s carriage and drag her to the Opéra. Why should I intervene? I knew nothing of music.
The rain had stopped; a faint breeze was rustling in the trees along the avenue and the pavements were almost dry. There were no cabs in sight and I decided to walk back to my lodgings by way of the Pont de L’Alma and the quays. It was a good distance and took me almost an hour, but it was a mild evening and the damp, faintly moving air was refreshing. When I arrived in rue de Rennes it was only a little after eleven, and the concièrge was still awake over her coffee and her copy of Le Panorama. When she was awake no one unknown to the house could ascend the stair, and when she went to bed she locked the street door with a rusty old key. I mounted the five flights, let myself in and latched the door behind me, removed my coat and hat, and put some leftover coffee on the stove to warm. Then I got out an Admiralty pilot chart of the Arctic Ocean and stretched it across the table. For some time I had been meaning to make notes on the probable winds for this region in the month of July. Now, as always when I went out to a concert or somewhere else in the evening, I was wakeful and in a mood to work for a few hours before I went to bed.
When the coffee was warm I poured it into a cup and added a little cognac to it, and set it on the table by the chart. The meteorological indications on the chart, as might be expected for so remote a part of the world, were rather meager. Still, there were a number of spidery wind symbols—circles with arrows of various length sticking out of them, to indicate average direction and velocity—in the region between Greenland and Franz Josef Land. For half an hour I happily made notes, even extrapolating the data mathematically so that I was able to draw in a few of my own symbols farther north on the blank part of the chart. Then there was a rap-rap at the door, a rather peremptory one. In the back of my mind I think I expected the concièrge with a telegram, perhaps from Waldemer in New York, otherwise I wouldn’t have been so incautious as to open.
I unlatched the door enough to see who it was and Theodor pushed his way in. Before I could say a word he took a nickel-plated revolver out of his greatcoat and fired it at me point-blank. It was no joke; the sharp bang was enough to break the eardrums and there was a stench of powder. In the space of less than half a second my heart leaped twice and every nerve jangled like a billion electric doorbells: once when he fired and once when I grasped that he had missed me. I ducked to one side with my ears ringing and he fired twice more. A second or so after this there was a sound of descending glass. Probably from a picture on the wall; I didn’t turn my head to look. There were still two shots left in the thing, perhaps three. I wasn’t an expert on firearms but the difference in practical terms was negligible. If he kept on in his present humour, in this small room with no place to hide, he might even hit me eventually. I changed my tactics abruptly and attacked. I managed to get his wrists in my hands just as the infernal contraption went off again. A little storm of dust and grit fell down on us from the ceiling. I was surprised at the steely, fierce, and cunning strength I felt between my fingers; it was like trying to hold two angry pythons by the neck. I let go one of the wrists and concentrated on the other. By coming within a hair of breaking the thumb, I managed to pry the pistol out of the hand. It fell to the floor and, still holding one python and trying to elude the other, I bent down, retrieved it, and pitched it through the open window into the courtyard. But he wasn’t satisfied; he went right on trying to tear me to pieces with his fingernails. Or let us say she now, since the weapon had become a more traditionally feminine one. This was less frightening than the part immediately previous, but even more painful. I had no more desire to be permanently disfigured than to be shot. We fell in a heap on the floor, I on top, the greatcoat and the flailing limbs underneath. For some time I tried to subdue all these arms and legs, but it was uphill work, since I myself possessed only one limb for each of his—of hers. That concièrge! Would she ever get around to sending for the police? I didn’t know whether to hope that she would or hope that she wouldn’t. I decided to hope that she wouldn’t.
She didn’t, evidently deciding that the sounds (shots, glass breaking, bumping bodies) were only from one of my experiments. And what was happening now? The nature of our struggle, it became evident after a while, had gradually metamorphosed without either of us being aware of it. It wasn’t true, I reflected as I meditated in an oddly detached way on my sensations, that I possessed only one limb for each of hers. Tarnation! I swear by Great Thor in Thunderhouse that my chief concern—my only concern—was to get her subdued and to secure my own personal safety and survival, and secondarily to try to bring some sense into her fevered brain. But the very gestures of our struggle—her writhing and trying to scratch, my attempts to immobilize her limbs and defend myself—were only those that multiplied the points of our contact. Not for nothing had the nineteenth century decreed that young ladies and gentlemen were not to engage in wrestling matches while alone in lodgings. Her greatcoat had come open and the rest of her clothing, I noted in a distant part of my mind that I had for some reason kept in reserve, was also considerably disarranged. Her defence, or attack, now chiefly took the form of clutching the lower part of my face and pulling it toward her own. Our four lower limbs had now given up clashing head-on and divided up the field of encounter: hers apart to either side, mine between them. In all honesty I believed—I still believe—that I continued the pretence of struggle longer than she did. Yet it was surely not she who removed the necessary parts of my clothing; this was hardly possible since her fingers, no longer daggers now but velvet and feverish, were playing over the face pressed against her own. Her panting, her feline snarls of menace, had changed into a sound still rhythmic but something like weeping.
“I really wanted to kill you,” she sobbed.
“Yes, and I really wanted to stop you.”
“Then why are we doing this?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why wouldn’t you. Answer when. I spoke Swedish to you?” she wrenched out between sobs.
I paid no attention to her questions, nor she to mine. “Why didn’t you shoot the flautist? Or the music teacher in Passy?”
I didn’t want. You to come. To the
recital.”
“Did you ever ask what I want?”
“It was all. It was all for you. Don’t you know that?”
“Elixir Vert-Galant. You deserve whatever—”
‘Now, oh, dearest one, now now now now!”
Only an inch or so from my eyes I saw her teeth grip her lower lip and a bright thread of blood spring out between them. The set teeth only gradually loosened their hold. A convulsive warm thing inside or between us still kicked now and then, more weakly and at widening intervals, like a fish dying. Her head, with a clocklike slowness, turned away from me to the right until I could see only the cheek. I was aware of the sound and rhythm of her breathing under me, not only with her lungs, but with her whole body. Inside, at the point where all the pyrotechnics had taken place, only a little spark crept ant-like now and then through the ashes. When at last, it seemed, the thirst for air in her was sated, the slow undulations spreading from her lungs to her throat, her limbs, gradually ceased.
I became aware of my surroundings again and collected myself to take note of them scientifically. Theodor’s officer cap was upside down against the wall across the room. The greatcoat was sprawled in one direction, essential parts of my own clothing flung in another. Some cataclysm had evidently struck here, one that snapped buttons and tore away garments. The picture with the shattered glass, as I had expected, was an engraving of The Wife of Poetus in which the Latin matron was plunging a sword into her bosom and commenting to her husband, “Non dolet.” Near it a chair had fallen over and was lying with four legs in the air, like a dead animal. A detail that surprised me was that the small nickel revolver was lying on the floor by the window. There were two possible explanations of this. One was that I was mistaken and it had not gone out the window after all. I was sure I had caught a glimpse of it curving through the open rectangle and downward into the darkness, but perhaps I had only been deluded by my boy’s vanity about throwing things. The other was even less plausible: that the concièrge had been annoyed by my throwing things down into her courtyard, which was really only a dank little well in which she kept the trash bins, had retrieved it, climbed up five flights, opened the door, clambered over our wildly convulsing bodies (oh, Major, your experiments), and set it on the floor by the window as a reproach. It was true she was a reproachful person by temperament, but she was not given to such complicated silent gestures. I picked the thing up, found out after a little fumbling how to break it open, and shook out the shiny little brass husks in the cylinder. There were five of them, all empty. Well, she had done her best. I slipped it into the desk drawer, rather furtively, with my back turned.
The Balloonist Page 26
