The Balloonist (11 page)

In the morning, at the station again, she appeared in the thin light of dawn in the prophesied dustproof costume, which consisted of a long linen coat of fashionable cut, black stockings, practical walking shoes, and a hat secured with a veil tied under the chin. She carried her favourite tapestry reticule, which no doubt contained the famous smelling-salt specific against altitude (our altitude of one hundred metres), and for further baggage only a small leather traveling case sufficient to hold a change of dress. It was necessary to take a local train to the small town of Bergshamra, a journey of an hour or so, where the ascent field was located on a promontory overlooking the sea. At Bergshamra all was prepared. The workmen had been at their task since the evening before and the
Prinzess, the second of her name to be financed by the generous Hamburg brewers, was almost fully inflated. The wind blew steadily from the west with a little more force than I would have wished; the ascent would be precarious, but once in the air we would make good speed. A small crowd had gathered to watch the ascension: a journalist or two, a few curious countryfolk. Our baggage was put into the by no means large basket hanging under the globe of hydrogen, we ourselves mounted, and preparations began to release the mooring ropes. Luisa appeared quite unperturbed, a little paler than usual perhaps but collected and dignified, even when managing the difficult clamber over the rim into the wicker car. She asked a minimum of intelligent questions about what she did not understand and, collecting her duster together in one hand, tried to keep out of my way as I moved about the car adjusting my instruments. So far well enough. Still, the vain creature had prevented me from visiting the weather office, and I could only trust that this west wind would not fail us completely or on the other hand turn into some sort of a gale. My consolation was that the clerks at the weather office seemed to know approximately as little about these matters as I did. The mooring ropes were cut, we lurched violently sideways, the wicker car banged into a tree stump, and we rose away from the earth, swinging like a pendulum. First crossing of the Gulf of Bothnia! The two journalists had their notebooks out and were already composing leaders.

Immediately I turned my attention to the matter of weights and ballast. In the eddies over the promontory it was impossible to tell whether the Prinzess intended to go up or down, but as soon as we were over the sea it became apparent that she was excessively light. She would sweep along horizontally for a minute or two, then, as though she had suddenly remembered something, she would ascend approximately the height of a flight of stairs, continue awhile again her level flight, and then go up another flight of stairs. The guide ropes hung down quite uselessly with their ends above the sea. I estimated our excess buoyancy at ten kilos or so, and set about releasing a corresponding amount of gas by means of the maneouvring valve. But perdition take it! I had done this fifty times and this was the first time I miscalculated. An excessive amount of hydrogen whistled out, as my senses instantly detected; we began to descend and we were probably now eight or ten kilograms heavy. Well, blast it. Luisa could hardly do worse than I. I showed her how to release the ballast, since she was so anxious to perform some useful function. It consisted of sandbags of twenty kilos each, hanging on the outside of the car, and each bag had at the bottom a releasing flap worked by a drawstring. The whole thing was perfectly simple, she easily grasped how to work the drawstring, but for some reason failed to shut off the flow, so that the whole contents of the bag fell into the sea.

This accident
was so exactly the correlative and opposite of the blunder I had just committed—its other sex, so to speak—that it exasperated me precisely for that reason. “Blazes!” I burst out. “Didn't you understand what I said?”

“I understood perfectly what you said.”

“I said to release half the bag.”

“Ah! that detail you neglected to mention. You explained how to pull the cord, and I did exactly as you told me.”

“I said half the bag.”

“You said nothing of the sort. I took particular care to pay attention to exactly what you were saying, so I would not make a mistake.”

“Nevertheless you made one.”

I was angry, she was angry, she faced me across the wicker car proudly and whitely, totally without expression, the pink blush appearing at the base of her throat and spreading slowly up the neck. It was our first quarrel. “If you are saying I am lying you are a contemptible cad. If I were a man you would not dare charge me with that, or else you would have to answer for it. If it pleases you to insult your crew, you ought to confine yourself to your own sex.”

“Very well. An interesting point. Let us discuss this. In the first place, if you were a man, you might not have botched the first very simple task you set your hand to. In the second place, if you were a man, it would not be quite so easy for you to refer to me as a contemptible cad, or else
you
would have to answer for
that.
”

“In short,” she concluded, “simply because we are of the opposite sex, we are behaving toward each other like two strange animals instead of cultivated and well-bred human beings.”

“Precisely.”

“Then I
suggest that you treat me with at least the decency you would observe if I were not a woman, and I will do the same. In the meanwhile, what practical damage,
if any
”—(she almost burst out, she was still angry)—”has been done by my alleged clumsiness?”

“We are ascending much too fast, and in a minute you will need your smelling salts.”

“What will you do about it?”

I could feel the bristles of my mustache settling slowly again; they always prickled when I was angry. After a pause of five seconds or so I told her quite calmly, “Work the maneouvring valve again.” Doing so, with great care this time (in order, perhaps, to convey to Mademoiselle by pantomime that we were getting low on ballast), I released enough gas to bring us into level flight and even to incline the course of the Prinzess slightly downward toward the sea. We still had a hundred kilos, more or less, of sand left against further blunders.

And now I had no more time for the mysterious complexities of the feminine soul, because the moment had come to test the construct of my imagination on which everything depended, the sole reason for the flight and all its elaborate preparations. The west wind was carrying us steadily in a direction which would miss the end of Finland by a few miles and bring us after two or three days to St. Petersburg, if Luisa had not lost all the ballast by that time. St. Petersburg was perhaps an interesting place, but it was not in my plans and our visas were not stamped for Russia. It was necessary, therefore, to deflect our course leftward, or slightly to the north, in order to cross up to the Finnish coast and arrive at our destination. In short, to sail
across
the wind, something that no one else had ever done before. First I worked the maneouvring valve with delicate tugs (if that contraption should stick the gas would all fly out and we were doomed) in order to release just enough gas to bring us downward toward the sea. Then the drag ropes, or guide ropes as I preferred to call them, came into play. These were three in number, long and quite thick, made of coco fiber impregnated with oil so they would float on the surface of the water. When the Prinzess rose high they hung below it in a kind of graceful Doric column. But as we descended and they began to trail in the water, a complex set of interworking reactions followed. The balloon slowed, first of all, and tilted a little in the direction of its movement like the head of a charging bull. Simultaneously a slight wind
was felt, not so strong as the real and natural wind we had felt at Bergshamra, but a wind all the same. This wind was the secret of everything! All those who had sought the dirigibility of balloons, Professor Eggert included, had despaired of sails or wind vanes, since the balloon by its nature is deprived of wind. It rides on the wind and is part of the wind, and therefore no wind impinges upon it to be put to any useful task. Anyone who has ascended in a balloon has remarked this wonderful windlessness, the absolute silence and stillness of the craft. But at last I had found a way to interfere with this sterility. An important principle lay at the bottom of it: progress when unimpeded is uncontrolled. Only by slowing down the creatures of our wit can we steer them in the direction desired. If your object is to get somewhere, anywhere, as quickly as possible, then you can simply harness nature and let her drag you along willy-nilly without worrying very much about the direction. But if you have a destination in mind, then mere progress is not enough. It is necessary to have direction, even if this results in slowing down.

The guide ropes were now trailing in the water for perhaps a third of their length, leaving three snaky wakes behind them. We slowed perceptibly. There was a stir and touch of coolness on our cheeks from this breeze I had contrived, and it was time to set the sails. These were hauled out on the bamboo poles by lines running through light blocks at the ends and controlled at the lower corners by other lines. Here Luisa could be of some help. It really required three hands, or better four or five, to handle all these sheets and outhauls.

“Now then, dear lady, that cord in your left hand—if you please—and in your other—” It was really quite complicated.

“I don't see the reason for this. What is it exactly that we are trying to do? Unless you explain the principle, it is utterly impossible for me to pull all these strings and cords in the way you want.”

She was perfectly right. It was my own fault for choosing a bluestocking and person of culture as my crew. If I had taken along a simple blockhead who was accustomed to obeying orders, I could simply have said “Pull this!” and “Slack that!” and he would have done as I said. But once having made the decision to allow in the balloon a woman who had read Dedekind's
Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen
, I was obliged to go into principle, in lack of which the cultivated mind is paralyzed and invariably pulls the
wrong string. I would have felt the same myself if someone had asked me to manipulate something complex without explaining the reason behind it. In short, I first had to explain to Luisa how sails worked in order to enable a vehicle such as a ship to proceed diagonally into the wind. Then I proceeded backward into the principle of guide ropes, the impeding of velocity, and dirigibility in general. She listened to everything with that same seraphic attention I had observed when I first caught sight of her face during my lecture at the Musée Carnavalet: motionless eyes fixed on me, mouth held firmly with the two little creases at the sides. Then, she following my directions, the two of us set the sails and trimmed them at an oblique angle to the wind; or, more precisely, we worked an iron handle attached to a pinion gear until the wicker car with its sails was turned at the requisite angle to the guide ropes. The wind now came diagonally. The three snaky trails in the water behind us began a long and mathematically precise curve to the left.

The exertion left me a little short of breath. I sat on a packing case and contemplated what we had done, not without a certain satisfaction. A glance at the compass showed me we were heading east by north, exactly toward the Finland peninsula. It was a good moment. But instead of enjoying this sense of accomplishment at my leisure, unfortunately, I was obliged to turn my attention to a peculiarity of my personal physiology that had put me to some pains before on occasion, although not in such delicate circumstances. Under conditions of particular tension or suspense, such as our precarious ascent from Bergshamra that morning, my organism accelerated the pace of its fluid-rejecting processes and, after only an hour or two, required a subtraction of moisture in unmistakable terms. The sensation had been present for some time while I ignored it, but now it had become imperative. There I was, suspended over the Baltic Sea with this femme savante, and the thing that had to be done, that nature cried out for in inexorable accents—the thing that if not done would result in physical torment and eventually in my death—was forbidden by every convention and decency of the society that produced us both. Patently it would be done; I was not going to be tortured and slain for a convention.

“Mademoiselle,” I requested (I was still calling her mademoiselle at this point, even when I spoke English, out of a no doubt slightly ironic politeness), “mademoiselle, might I ask
you to turn your head for a moment and observe, precisely out there on the horizon where I am afraid there is really nothing to see, to tell the truth, but you have an imagination,” etc., etc., and without very much formality the thing was soon done. Whew! When out of gratitude and sheer physical relief I offered to do the same for her, she simply stared at me without a word. Very well, plague take it, perhaps my suggestion was in poor taste. To cover the confusion of the moment, and also because in my new lightness I felt full of vigor, I busied myself with my instruments to verify whether the system of guide ropes and sails was still working. Mounting the theodolite on the edge of the basket and sighting backward along the wakes left by the ropes, I satisfied myself that we were still moving in a northeasterly direction. “Next stop, Finland,” I reported with some satisfaction.

“Then with this contrivance an airship might go anywhere?”

“The wind permitting.”

“How, the wind permitting?”

“It is possible to cross the wind diagonally, but not to butt directly against it.”

“Could one go, for instance, to the Italian lakes?”

I burst out laughing. “You are a hopeless sentimentalist.”

“And you are an arithmetic barbarian.”

“Why is it we always quarrel?” I asked her quite cheerfully.

“It is something in your character. What good is a balloon or anything else if one can't go to pleasant places in it?”