Christine went back to her father.
‘Do you think Raoul isn’t as nice as he used to be? I don’t like him anymore!’
And she tried to put him out of her mind. It wasn’t easy but she managed it, taking refuge in her art which took up all her time. She made wonderful progress. Those who heard her predicted that she would be the world’s finest soprano. But meanwhile her father died and quite suddenly with his going she also seemed to have lost her voice, her soul and her genius. But enough remained for her to be admitted to the Paris Conservatoire, though with not much to spare. She did not make much of a mark, attended classes unenthusiastically and managed to win a prize just to please Mme Valerius with whom she continued to live.
The first time Raoul saw her at the Opera, he was struck by her beauty and basked in pleasant memories of their past. But he had been very surprised by a certain negative quality in her work. She seemed detached. He came back to listen to her. He followed her backstage where he lay in wait for her behind a painted flat. He tried to attract her attention. More than once he pursued her as far as the door of her dressing room, but she never saw him. Indeed she never appeared to see anyone. She was indifference itself. Raoul was hurt because she was beautiful: he was shy and didn’t even admit to himself that he was in love. And then there had been the lightning bolt of the evening of the gala concert: the heavens had opened and an angel’s voice had descended to earth, captivating men’s souls and capturing his heart…
But then there was that other voice, the man’s voice which, though there was no one there, had come through her door: ‘You must love me!’
Why had she laughed when on opening her eyes he’d said ‘I’m the little boy who once ran into the sea to rescue your scarf.’ Why hadn’t she recognized him? And why had she written that note?
The road to the coast stretched on and on, unwinding never-endingly. Here’s the cross where three roads meet! There the deserted moor, the frozen heather, the land motionless under a milky sky! The windows of the coach rattle, the panes tinkle in his ears… Such a powerful noise for so little progress! He recognizes the cottages… the fields, raised banks and trees that line the road… Here’s the last bend in the road, beyond it begins to go down and he’ll see the sea… wide-armed Perros Bay!
She’s staying at the Setting Sun Inn, must be, it’s the only one! Besides, it’s very comfortable. He remembers that, back then, they’d listened to lots of stories here! His heart beats faster. What will she say when she sees him again?
The first person he set eyes on when he walked into the inn’s old, smoke-darkened parlour was Mme Tricard, the landlady. She knew him at once. She said how well he looked. She asked what had brought him there. He blushed. He said he had business at Lannion and had decided to ‘push on and call in to say hello’. She asked if he wanted breakfast but he said: ‘Later’. He seemed to be waiting for something or someone. Then the door opened.
He leaped to his feet. He hadn’t been mistaken, there she was! He opened his mouth to speak then closed it again. She stood before him, smiling and not looking the least surprised. Her cheeks were fresh and pink, like a strawberry grown in shade. She was slightly flustered, perhaps from walking too fast. Her bosom, which concealed an honest heart, swelled gently. Her eyes, two clear pale-blue mirrors, the colour of the still lakes which dream at the northern edge of the world, were a reflection of her guileless nature. Her fur coat hung half open, revealing a slender figure and the harmonious lines of her graceful young body. Raoul and Christine looked at each other. Mme Tricard smiled and, the soul of discretion, slipped quietly away. Finally, Christine spoke:
‘You came. I’m not surprised. As I walked back from mass, I had a feeling I might find you here in the inn. Someone told me, at the church. It’s true: I was told you were here.’
‘Who was it?’ asked Raoul and he reached for her tiny hand which she did not try to draw back.
‘My poor dead father, of course!’
A silence sprang up between the two young people which was finally broken by Raoul:
‘And did your father also tell you that I love you, Christine, and that I can’t live without you?’
Christine blushed bright scarlet and looked away. Then she said in a trembling voice:
‘Love me? Have you taken leave of your senses?’
And she burst out laughing to hide her confusion.
‘Don’t laugh, Christine, I’m serious.’
Soberly she answered:
‘I didn’t make you come here so that you could say such things.’
‘But you did “make me come”, Christine. You guessed what effect your letter would have: you knew I would come to Perros. How would you have thought of writing if you didn’t think I loved you?’
‘I thought you’d remember our childish games and how my father used to join in. But I don’t really know quite what I thought… Perhaps I was wrong to write. The way you suddenly reappeared in my dressing room that night took me back, to the old days, a long time ago. It was the little girl I was then who wrote. She was feeling sad and lonely and wanted to see her little friend again.’
For a while, they said nothing. There was something in Christine’s attitude which Raoul thought wasn’t quite normal, though he could not have said what. But he had no sense that she was hostile. On the contrary, the tenderness in her unhappy eyes told him as much. But why should her tender feelings be unhappy ones?… That was what he needed to know and the question urged him on.
‘When you saw me in your dressing room, was that the first time you’d noticed me?’
Christine was incapable of lying.
‘No!’ she said. ‘I’d already seen you several times in your brother’s box. And backstage.’
‘I thought so,’ said Raoul, pursing his lips. ‘But tell me why, that night in your dressing room when you saw me kneeling at your side reminding you that I’d fished your scarf out of the sea, why on earth did you react as if you didn’t know me? And why did you laugh?’
The tone of these questions was so direct that Christine was taken aback and didn’t answer. Raoul too was stunned by this sudden quarrel which he had rashly started just when he’d vowed that he would speak to Christine only in words of kindness, love and respect. A husband or a lover who has earned the right, would have spoken no differently to a wife or mistress who had wronged him in some way. But he cursed himself for going too far and, knowing that he’d behaved foolishly, found no better way out of this ludicrous pass than by deciding to behave odiously.
‘So you won’t answer!’ he cried, now as furious as he was unhappy. ‘Well, I’ll answer for you! It was because there was someone else in your dressing room and you felt awkward because you didn’t want that someone to find out that you could care for anyone else but him!’
‘If anyone made me feel awkward, Raoul,’ Christine broke in icily… ‘if anyone that evening made me feel awkward, it was you, because you’re the one I told to leave!’
‘Yes! So you could be alone with that other man!’
‘What are you talking about?’ said Christine in a faltering voice. ‘What other man?’
‘The man you spoke to. You said: “I sing only for you! Tonight I gave you my soul and I am dead.”’
Christine clutched Raoul’s arm and held it with a fierceness no one would have dreamed possible in so delicate a creature.
‘You were listening behind the door?’
‘Yes! Because I love you… I heard everything.’
‘What exactly did you hear?’ asked Christine who had become strangely calm. She released Raoul’s arm.
‘He said: “You must love me!”’
At these words, a deathly pallor crept across her face and shadows seemed to gather around her eyes… She rocked and seemed about to fall. Raoul rushed to her, arms out ready, but already Christine was over her passing faintness and in a low, almost hushed voice she said:
‘Say it! Say it again! Say everything you heard!’
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Raoul stared at her, uncertain and not understanding what was happening.
‘Please! Say it! Can’t you see this is killing me?’
‘I also heard what he said when you told him you’d given him your soul: “You have a beautiful soul, my dear, and I thank you for it. No emperor was ever given so great a gift! Tonight the angels wept!”’
Christine put her hand to her heart. She gazed at Raoul, her eyes full of some indefinable emotion. They were piercing, so fixed and staring: a mad person’s eyes. Raoul did not know what to think. And then they grew moist and down her ivory cheeks, like two pearls, rolled two heavy tears.
‘Christine!’
‘Raoul!’
He reached out his hands to hold her, but she slipped through them and ran off in a state of considerable agitation.
While Christine remained shut up in her room, Raoul cursed himself for behaving like a callous brute. Yet at the same time, jealousy coursed hotly through his veins. Judging by the way she had reacted when she discovered that he knew her secret, it had to be a very important secret! Despite everything he’d heard, Raoul never believed for one moment that Christine was anything other than pure in every way. He knew that she had a reputation for leading a virtuous life but he was not so naive that he did not know that some performers are sometimes propositioned. She was right to say that she had given her soul, for it was patently obvious that what she was talking about was singing and music. But was it obvious? If so, why had she been so upset? Dear God, Raoul was so unhappy! If he’d been able to face the man, or the man’s voice, he’d have made sure he got proper answers.
Why had Christine run away? Why hadn’t she come back?
He refused lunch. He felt very frustrated. It was galling to see hours, which he had hoped to spend pleasantly, tick away while the beautiful young Swede was nowhere near. Why wasn’t she out with him, roaming through the countryside where they had so many memories to share? And since she seemed to have no particular reason for being at Perros and wasn’t actually doing anything there, why was she not heading straight back to Paris? He’d discovered that she had ordered a mass to be said that morning for the repose of her father’s soul and had remained praying for a considerable time both in the little church and over his gravestone outside.
Sad and dejected, Raoul walked towards the cemetery which surrounded the church. He pushed open the gate and wandered by himself among the graves, reading the inscriptions on the headstones. When he reached the area behind the choir, he knew that he had found what he was looking for by the bright colours of the flowers which lay on a granite tombstone and overflowed onto the frost-white ground. Their scent filled that frozen corner of the Breton winter. They were miraculous red roses which seemed to have opened that very morning, in the snow, a reminder of life among the dead for here, death was everywhere. It had spilled out onto the earth which had returned its overflowing surfeit of corpses. Skeletons and skulls by the hundred had been piled up against the church wall and were held in place by flimsy wire netting which left the whole macabre heap fully visible. The skulls, stacked and neatly arranged like bricks, and stabilized at intervals by bleached bones, might have been the footing on which the rest of the walls of the sacristy had been built. The sacristy door opened onto this gruesome rampart, a feature of so many old Breton churches.
Raoul said a prayer for M. Daaé, then, somewhat unnerved by the permanent leers which skulls always wear on their faces, he left the cemetery, climbed back up the hill and sat down on the edge of the moor overlooking the sea. The wind savaged the shingle and yelped at the faint, weak light of the day which surrendered and retreated until it was no more than a bright strip on the horizon. The wind dropped. It was evening. Raoul was wrapped in icy shadow but he did not feel the cold. All his thoughts, all his memories strayed freely over the empty, desolate moor. When they were children, he used to come to this very spot often at dusk with Christine to see the goblins dance at the rising of the moon. He’d never seen any, though his eyes were sharp. But Christine, who was slightly short-sighted, claimed to have seen hundreds. He smiled at the thought and then gave a sudden start. A figure, solid in form, a figure which had materialized without his knowing how, without his being warned by the slightest sound, was now standing by his side. It said:
‘Do you think there’ll be goblins tonight?’
It was Christine. He tried to speak, but she covered his lips with her gloved hand.
‘Listen to me, Raoul. I have decided to tell you something important, very important!’
Her voice trembled. He waited. She sounded strained. She went on:
‘Do you remember the legend of the Angel of Music?’
‘Of course I do!’ he cried. ‘And I do believe it was just here that your father first told it to us!’
‘It was here too that he said: “When I’m in heaven, I shall send him to you.” Listen Raoul. My father is in heaven now and I have been visited by the Angel of Music!’
‘Of course you have,’ said Raoul gravely, for he understood her to mean that she was piously grafting her father’s memory on to her triumph at the gala concert.
Christine seemed somewhat taken aback by the casual way the Viscount de Chagny took the news that she had been visited by the Angel of Music.
‘What did you think I meant, Raoul?’ she asked, and she brought her pale face so close to his that he felt sure she was about to kiss him. But all she wanted, in the growing gloom, was to read what was in his eyes.
‘I think’, he said, ‘that no human being could sing as you did that evening without some sort of miraculous intervention, without the Almighty having a hand in it. But there is no music professor alive who could ever teach anyone to sing like that. Oh yes, Christine: you’ve heard the Angel of Music.’
‘Yes I did,’ she said solemnly, ‘I heard him in my dressing room. That’s where he comes every day and gives me lessons.’
The emphasis with which she said these words was so peculiar that Raoul glanced at her anxiously, the way you might look at someone who has just said something outrageous or claimed to have seen some crazy vision which they believe in with all the might of their poor sick brain. But she had drawn away and now stood motionless, just another shadow in the night.
‘In your dressing room?’ he asked, like a foolish echo.
‘Yes, that’s where I heard him. And I was not the only one.’
‘Who else heard, Christine?’
‘You did of course.’
‘Me? I heard the Angel of Music?’
‘Yes, that evening. He was the voice you heard talking when you were listening outside the door. It was his voice saying: “You must love me!” I thought I was the only one who could hear it. So you can imagine how amazed I was when you told me this morning that you’d heard it too!’
Raoul burst out laughing. At the same moment, the night fled from the deserted moor as the first light of the rising moon picked out the two young people. Christine turned back to face Raoul. She was hostile now and her eyes, normally so gentle, flashed with anger.
‘What are you laughing at? Because you thought you were hearing a man’s voice?’
‘But that’s what I did hear!’ replied Raoul who, faced by Christine’s embattled tone, was beginning to feel uneasy.
‘How can you say that, Raoul? An old childhood friend! A friend of my father! I don’t know you anymore! What did you take me for? I’m an honest woman, Viscount, and I am not in the habit of closeting myself in my dressing room with men’s voices! If you’d opened the door, you would have seen that there was no one inside.’
‘Quite true! After you’d gone, I did open the door and I found no one there…’
‘You see!… So?’
The Viscount summoned up all his courage.
‘So, Christine, I think someone is playing tricks on you.’
She cried out, turned and fled. He ran after her but she seemed wild with anger and kept screaming: ‘Leave me alone! Let me
be!’
And then she was gone. Raoul walked back to the inn. He was exhausted, dejected and in the lowest of spirits.
He was told that Christine had gone up to her room saying that she would not be down for dinner. Raoul enquired if she was unwell. Mme Tricard answered ambiguously that if she was it couldn’t be anything very serious, and then, convinced the fuss was just a lovers’ tiff, she strode off with a shrug of her shoulders muttering that it was a shame that these young people were wasting time on silly quarrels which the good Lord had given them here below to enjoy themselves.
Raoul dined alone, by the fire, and, as you will imagine, feeling very sorry for himself. Later, in his room, he tried to read. Later still, he went to bed and tried to sleep. No sound came from the room next door. What was Christine doing? Was she asleep? And if not, what was she thinking about? And what was he thinking about? Would he have been capable of saying? The strange conversation he’d had with Christine had disturbed him deeply!… He thought less of Christine than around her, and ‘around’ was a concept so diffuse, so nebulous, so elusive, that it made him oddly and painfully uneasy.
The Phantom of the Opera (Oxford World's Classics) Page 10
