Phantom of the Opera (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)

by Gaston Leroux

  On another day, she wandered with him, hand in hand, along the deserted paths of a garden whose creepers had been cut out by a decorator’s skilful hands. It was as though the real sky, the real flowers, the real earth were forbidden her for all time and she condemned to breathe no other air than that of the theatre. An occasional fireman passed, watching over their melancholy idyll from afar. And she would drag him up above the clouds, in the magnificent disorder of the grid, where she loved to make him giddy by running in front of him along the frail bridges, among the thousands of ropes fastened to the pulleys, the windlasses, the rollers, in the midst of a regular forest of yards and masts. If he hesitated, she said, with an adorable pout of her lips:

  “You, a sailor!”

  And then they returned to terra firma, that is to say, to some passage that led them to the little girls’ dancing-school, where brats between six and ten were practising their steps, in the hope of becoming great dancers one day, “covered with diamonds ...” Meanwhile, Christine gave them sweets instead.

  She took him to the wardrobe and property-rooms, took him all over her empire, which was artificial, but immense, covering seventeen stories from the ground-floor to the roof and inhabited by an army of subjects. She moved among them like a popular queen, encouraging them in their labours, sitting down in the workshops, giving words of advice to the workmen whose hands hesitated to cut into the rich stuffs that were to clothe heroes. There were inhabitants of that country who practised every trade. There were cobblers, there were gold-smiths. All had learned to know her and to love her, for she always interested herself in all their troubles and all their little hobbies.

  She knew unsuspected corners that were secretly occupied by little old couples. She knocked at their door and introduced Raoul to them as a Prince Charming who had asked for her hand; and the two of them, sitting on some worm-eaten “property,” would listen to the legends of the Opera, even as, in their childhood, they had listened to the old Breton tales. Those old people remembered nothing outside the Opera. They had lived there for years without number. Past managements had forgotten them; palace revolutions had taken no notice of them; the history of France had run its course unknown to them; and nobody recollected their existence. 1

  The precious days sped in this way; and Raoul and Christine, by affecting excessive interest in outside matters, strove awkwardly to hide from each other the one thought of their hearts. One fact was certain, that Christine, who until then had shown herself the stronger of the two, became suddenly inexpressibly nervous. When on their expeditions, she would start running without reason or else suddenly stop; and her hand, turning ice-cold in a moment, would hold the young man back. Sometimes her eyes seemed to pursue imaginary shadows. She cried, “This way,” and “This way,” and “This way,” laughing a breathless laugh that often ended in tears. Then Raoul tried to speak, to question her, in spite of his promises. But, even before he had worded his question, she answered feverishly:

  “Nothing ... I swear it is nothing.”

  Once, when they were passing before an open trap-door on the stage, Raoul stopped over the dark cavity.

  “You have shown me over the upper part of your empire, Christine, but there are strange stories told of the lower part. Shall we go down?”

  She caught him in her arms, as though she feared to see him disappear down the black hole, and, in a trembling voice, whispered:

  “Never! ... I will not have you go there! ... Besides, it’s not mine ... everything that is underground belongs to him!”

  Raoul looked her in the eyes and said roughly:

  “So he lives down there, does he?”

  “I never said so ... Who told you a thing like that? Come away! I sometimes wonder if you are quite sane, Raoul ... You always take things in such an impossible way ... Come along! Come!”

  And she literally dragged him away, for he was obstinate and wanted to remain by the trap-door; that hole attracted him.

  Suddenly, the trap-door was closed and so quickly that they did not even see the hand that worked it; and they remained quite dazed.

  “Perhaps he was there,” Raoul said, at last.

  She shrugged her shoulders, but did not seem easy.

  “No, no, it was the ‘trap-door-shutters.’ They must do something, you know ... They open and shut the trap-doors without any particular reason ... It’s like the ‘door-shutters’: they must spend their time somehow.”

  “But suppose it were he, Christine?”

  “No, no! He has shut himself up, he is working.”

  “Oh, really! He’s working, is he?”

  “Yes, he can’t open and shut the trap-doors and work at the same time.” She shivered.

  “What is he working at?”

  “Oh, something terrible! ... But it’s all the better for us ... When he’s working at that, he sees nothing; he does not eat, drink, or breathe for days and nights at a time ... he becomes a living dead man and has no time to amuse himself with the trap doors.”

  She shivered again. She was still holding him in her arms. Then she sighed and said, in her turn:

  “Suppose it were he!”

  “Are you afraid of him?”

  “No, no, of course not,” she said.

  For all that, on the next day and the following days, Christine was careful to avoid the trap-doors. Her agitation only increased as the hours passed. At last, one afternoon, she arrived very late, with her face so desperately pale and her eyes so desperately red, that Raoul resolved to go to all lengths, including that which he foreshadowed when he blurted out that he would not go on the North Pole expedition unless she first told him the secret of the man’s voice.

  “Hush! Hush, in Heaven’s name! Suppose he heard you, you unfortunate Raoul!”

  And Christine’s eyes stared wildly at everything around her.

  “I will remove you from his power, Christine, I swear it. And you shall not think of him any more.”

  “Is it possible?”

  She allowed herself this doubt, which was an encouragement, while dragging the young man up to the topmost floor of the theatre, far, very far from the trap-doors.

  “I shall hide you in some unknown corner of the world, where he can not come to look for you. You will be safe; and then I shall go away ... as you have sworn never to marry.”

  Christine seized Raoul’s hands and squeezed them with incredible rapture. But, suddenly becoming alarmed again, she turned away her head.

  “Higher!” was all she said. “Higher still!”

  And she dragged him up toward the summit.

  He had a difficulty in following her. They were soon under the very roof, in the maze of timber-work. They slipped through the buttresses, the rafters, the joists; they ran from beam to beam as they might have run from tree to tree in a forest.

  And, despite the care which she took to look behind her at every moment, she failed to see a shadow which followed her like her own shadow, which stopped when she stopped, which started again when she did and which made no more noise than a well-conducted shadow should. As for Raoul, he saw nothing either; for, when he had Christine in front of him, nothing interested him that happened behind.

  12

  APOLLO’S LYRE

  In this way, they reached the roof. Christine tripped over it as lightly as a swallow. Their eyes swept the empty space between the three domes and the triangular pediment. She breathed freely over Paris, the whole valley of which was seen at work below. She called Raoul to come quite close to her and they walked side by side along the zinc streets, in the leaden avenues ; they looked at their twin shapes in the huge tanks, full of stagnant watery1 where, in the hot weather, the little boys of the ballet, a score or so, learn to swim and dive.

  The shadow had followed behind them, clinging to their steps; and the two children little suspected its presence when they at last sat down, trustingly, under the mighty protection of Apollo, who, with a great bronze gesture, lifted his huge lyre to the hea
rt of a crimson sky.

  It was a gorgeous spring evening. Clouds, which had just received their gossamer robe of gold and purple from the setting sun, drifted slowly by; and Christine said to Raoul:

  “Soon we shall go farther and faster than the clouds, to the end of the world, and then you will leave me, Raoul. But, if, when the moment comes for you to take me away, I refuse to go with you—well you must carry me off by force!”

  “Are you afraid that you will change your mind, Christine?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, shaking her head in an odd fashion. “He is a demon!” And she shivered and nestled in his arms with a moan. “I am afraid now of going back to live with him ... in the ground!”

  “What compels you to go back, Christine?”

  “If I do not go back to him, terrible misfortunes may happen ! ... But I can’t do it, I can’t do it! ... I know one ought to be sorry for people who live underground ... But he is too horrible! And yet the time is at hand; I have only a day left; and, if I do not go, he will come and fetch me with his voice. And he will drag me with him, underground, and go on his knees before me, with his death’s head. And he will tell me that he loves me! And he will cry! Oh, those tears, Raoul, those tears in the two black eye-sockets of the death’s head! I can not see those tears flow again!”

  She wrung her hands in anguish, while Raoul pressed her to his heart.

  “No, no, you shall never again hear him tell you that he loves you! You shall not see his tears! Let us fly, Christine, let us fly at once!”

  And he tried to drag her away, then and there. But she stopped him.

  “No, no,” she said, shaking her head sadly. “Not now! ... It would be too cruel ... let him hear me sing tomorrow evening ... and then we will go away. You must come and fetch me in my dressing-room at midnight exactly. He will then be waiting for me in the dining-room by the lake ... we shall be free and you shall take me away ... You must promise me that, Raoul, even if I refuse; for I feel that, if I go back this time, I shall perhaps never return.”

  And she gave a sigh to which it seemed to her that another sigh, behind her, replied.

  “Didn’t you hear?”

  Her teeth chattered.

  “No,” said Raoul, “I heard nothing.”

  “It is too terrible,” she confessed, “to be always trembling like this! ... And yet we run no danger here; we are at home, in the sky, in the open air, in the light. The sun is flaming; and night-birds can not bear to look at the sun. I have never seen him by daylight ... it must be awful! ... Oh, the first time I saw him! ... I thought that he was going to die.”

  “Why?” asked Raoul, really frightened at the aspect which this strange confidence was taking.

  “Because I had seen him!”

  This time, Raoul and Christine turned round at the same time:

  “There is some one in pain,” said Raoul. “Perhaps some one has been hurt. Did you hear?”

  “I can’t say,” Christine confessed. “Even when he is not there, my ears are full of his sighs. Still, if you heard ...”

  They stood up and looked around them. They were quite alone on the immense lead roof. They sat down again and Raoul said:

  “Tell me how you saw him first.”

  “I had heard him for three months without seeing him. The first time I heard it, I thought, as you did, that that adorable voice was singing in another room. I went out and looked everywhere; but, as you know, Raoul, my dressing-room is very much by itself; and I could not find the voice outside my room, whereas it went on steadily inside. And it not only sang, but it spoke to me and answered my questions, like a real man’s voice, with this difference, that it was as beautiful as the voice of an angel. I had never got the Angel of Music whom my poor father had promised to send me as soon as he was dead. I really think that Mamma Valérius was a little bit to blame. I told her about it; and she at once said, ”It must be the Angel; at any rate, you can do no harm by asking him.” I did so; and the man’s voice replied that, yes, it was the Angel’s voice, the voice which I was expecting and which my father had promised me. From that time onward, the voice and I became great friends. It asked leave to give me lessons every day. I agreed and never failed to keep the appointment which it gave me in my dressing-room. You have no idea, though you have heard the voice, of what those lessons were like.”

  “No, I have no idea,” said Raoul. “What was your accompaniment ?”

  “We were accompanied by a music which I do not know: it was behind the wall and wonderfully accurate. The voice seemed to understand mine exactly, to know precisely where my father had left off teaching me. In a few weeks’ time, I hardly knew myself when I sang. I was even frightened. I seemed to dread a sort of witchcraft behind it; but Mamma Valérius reassured me. She said that she knew I was much too simple a girl to give the devil a hold on me ... My progress, by the voice’s own order, was kept a secret between the voice, Mamma Valérius and myself. It was a curious thing, but, outside the dressing-room, I sang with my ordinary, everyday voice and nobody noticed anything. I did all that the voice asked. It said, ”Wait and see: we shall astonish Paris!” And I waited and lived on in a sort of ecstatic dream. It was then that I saw you for the first time one evening, in the house. I was so glad that I never thought of concealing my delight when I reached my dressing-room. Unfortunately, the voice was there before me and soon noticed, by my air, that something had happened. It asked what was the matter and I saw no reason for keeping our story secret or concealing the place which you filled in my heart. Then the voice was silent. I called to it, but it did not reply; I begged and entreated, but in vain. I was terrified lest it had gone for good. I wish to Heaven it had, dear! ... That night, I went home in a desperate condition. I told Mamma Valérius, who said, ‘Why, of course, the voice is jealous!’ And that, dear, first revealed to me that I loved you.”

  Christine stopped and laid her head on Raoul’s shoulder. They sat like that for a moment, in silence, and they did not see, did not perceive the movement, at a few steps from them, of the creeping shadow of two great black wings, a shadow that came along the roof so near, so near them that it could have stifled them by closing over them.

  “The next day,” Christine continued, with a sigh, “I went back to my dressing-room in a very pensive frame of mind. The voice was there, spoke to me with great sadness and told me plainly that, if I must bestow my heart on earth, there was nothing for the voice to do but to go back to Heaven. And it said this with such an accent of human sorrow that I ought then and there to have suspected and begun to believe that I was the victim of my deluded senses. But my faith in the voice, with which the memory of my father was so closely intermingled, remained undisturbed. I feared nothing so much as that I might never hear it again; I had thought about my love for you and realized all the useless danger of it; and I did not even know if you remembered me. Whatever happened, your position in society forbade me to contemplate the possibility of ever marrying you; and I swore to the voice that you were no more than a brother to me nor ever would be and that my heart was incapable of any earthly love. And that, dear, was why I refused to recognize or see you when I met you on the stage or in the passages. Meanwhile, the hours during which the voice taught me were spent in a divine frenzy, until, at last, the voice said to me, ‘You can now, Christine Daaé, give to men a little of the music of Heaven.’ I don’t know how it was that Carlotta did not come to the theatre that night nor why I was called upon to sing in her stead; but I sang with a rapture I had never known before and I felt for a moment as if my soul were leaving my body!”

  “Oh, Christine,” said Raoul, “my heart quivered that night at every accent of your voice. I saw the tears stream down your cheeks and I wept with you. How could you sing, sing like that while crying?”

  “I felt myself fainting,” said Christine, “I closed my eyes. When I opened them, you were by my side. But the voice was there also, Raoul! I was afraid for your sake and again I would not recognize
you and began to laugh when you reminded me that you had picked up my scarf in the sea! ... Alas, there is no deceiving the voice! ... The voice recognized you and the voice was jealous! ... It said that, if I did not love you, I would not avoid you, but treat you like any other old friend. It made me scene upon scene. At last, I said to the voice, ‘That will do! I am going to Perros tomorrow, to pray on my father’s grave, and I shall ask M. Raoul de Chagny to go with me.’ ‘Do as you please,’ replied the voice, ‘but I shall be at Perros too, for I am wherever you are, Christine; and, if you are still worthy of me, if you have not lied to me, I will play you The Resurrection of Lazarus, on the stroke of midnight, on your father’s tomb and on your father’s violin.’ That, dear, was how I came to write you the letter that brought you to Perros. How could I have been so beguiled? How was it, when I saw the personal, the selfish point of view of the voice, that I did not suspect some impostor ? Alas, I was no longer mistress of myself: I had become his thing!”

  “But, after all,” cried Raoul, “you soon came to know the truth! Why did you not at once rid yourself of that abominable nightmare?”

  “Know the truth, Raoul? Rid myself of that nightmare? But, my poor boy, I was not caught in the nightmare until the day when I learned the truth! ... Pity me, Raoul, pity me! ... You remember the terrible evening when Carlotta thought that she had been turned into a toad on the stage and when the house was suddenly plunged in darkness through the chandelier crashing to the floor? There were killed and wounded that night and the whole theatre rang with terrified screams. My first thought was for you and the voice. I was at once easy, where you were concerned, for I had seen you in your brother’s box and I knew that you were not in danger. But the voice had told me that it would be at the performance and I was really afraid for it, just as if it had been an ordinary person who was capable of dying. I thought to myself, ‘The chandelier may have come down upon the voice.’ I was then on the stage and was nearly running into the house, to look for the voice among the killed and wounded, when I thought that, if the voice was safe, it would be sure to be in my dressing-room and I rushed to my room. The voice was not there. I locked my door and, with tears in my eyes, besought it, if it were still alive, to manifest itself to me. The voice did not reply, but suddenly I heard a long, beautiful wail which I knew well. It is the plaint of Lazarus when, at the sound of the Redeemer’s voice, he begins to open his eyes and see the light of day. It was the music which you and I, Raoul, heard at Perros. And then the voice began to sing the leading phrase, ‘Come! And believe in me! Whoso believes in me shall live! Walk! Whoso hath believed in me shall never die! ...’ I can not tell you the effect which that music had upon me. It seemed to command me, personally, to come, to stand up and come to it. It retreated and I followed. ‘Come! And believe in me!’ I believed in it, I came ... I came and—this was the extraordinary thing—my dressing-room, as I moved, seemed to lengthen out ... to lengthen out ... Evidently, it must have been an effect of mirrors ... for I had the mirror in front of me ... And, suddenly, I was outside the room without knowing how!”2