The Balloonist (15 page)

He is competent
at his profession and he has all the facts and figures. It is also quite possible that he is right. He goes on in this vein for some time, envisioning airships laden with English woolens crossing the Atlantic with the trade winds, transported by railroad to Nova Scotia and reloaded with American horse collars, patent apple peelers, enameled or brass doorknobs, wooden nutmegs, and so on, which they will carry rapidly back to Europe under the influence of the westerlies prevailing at that latitude, firing his own imagination as he talks and beginning now to write in his head the article which he will beyond any shadow of a doubt publish when we return to the crowded warrens of skyscrapers and printing presses, an article in which the phrase “using the winds as a highway” will certainly figure. His thoughts are still on the World of Cities. In spite of his outdoorsmanship, his strong-jawed love of guns and nature, he is par excellence the civilized man and draws his strength from these ant heaps where men work so assiduously at their machines and go home each night to send their millions of identical plumes of chimney smoke into the air. Through invention and change, he sincerely believes, mankind will be transformed. A new kind of human being will be created to use and inhabit the wonders that will come from the laboratories and factories of the future. What was England two centuries ago? he demands of us. A lot of meadows and elm trees. The whole thing would scarcely support ten million people. Then came the steam engine and the spinning jenny, and the face of the land was transformed, a new landscape was created and along with it a new species of creature, modern man in his frock coat. Look at England today—instead of a lot of meadows there are factories, smokestacks belching out prosperity, villas in the suburbs. The population has trebled and quadrupled; the whole country teems with Englishmen who work happily in the factories and go home at night to replenish the population. And so on. He has found a way to keep warm, lucky fellow, through agitating his lungs and making the air hum so vigorously through his larynx. He is eloquent and convincing when he speaks of the poetry of cities, even though he would not put it in those terms.

Cities! I find to my surprise that his evocation of chimney smoke, even, produces a twinge of something like regret in me. Drifting over this unpeopled vastness gives one a malaise of emptiness. This is nature—this is the planet devoid of men! This endless-stretching expanse of white—featureless, immense, silent. After a while
the soul hungers for voices and warm rooms, even for smokestacks. The very purity of this antiseptic plain stretching away from horizon to horizon makes one long for squalor. After a day or two of it one would willingly lie in a London gutter and savor its aroma, the reassuring stench that drips from life. New York in August, horse cars and frying grease. The slightly putrid fragrance of Paris, with its flavour of wines and coal smoke. Stockholm: herring, leather, sailor's tar, boiling linen. Perhaps because the sense of odour has nothing to grip in these sterile latitudes, as soon as one closes his eyes it turns inward to the pungencies of recollection, which spring to mind with a startling vividness. The perfume from a fat cab horse's back, jogging through the Bois in the autumn sunshine. Thin acrid sweetness of horse chestnuts. Sun-warmed leather, faintly perspiring cabman, whose back is almost as broad as that of his beast. Clop of hooves on the pavement, intermittent light through the elms, roughness of my tweed cuff against my wrist, her visage serene and confident yet with the pink spider beginning to climb on her throat again (she was still only a girl really—a child!), not quite looking at me but at the air at one side of my head, the faint smile at one side of her mouth. “And why has it taken you so long to come back? Six months! You are cruel.”

“No doubt I am. But I have work to do, you know, an existence is not only composed of sherbets and cab rides in the Bois.”

“You still think I am trivial. How can I persuade you that I am serious about these things?” (She meant magnetism and electric sparks.) “I would have thought that after Finland …”

Another of her eloquent trailings off! But I refused to follow these oblique feminine subtleties, they amused or irritated me, and I pressed her maliciously. “How, after Finland?”

This really made her blush. She had not meant that at all, she insisted, but the blush gave her the lie. She had really meant both at once, the poor thing, her deftness with the barometer and theodolite and the folly afterward in the stone cottage. And so she turned the conversation smoothly (yet still blushing) to exhibitions and recitals, compliments on a gown, the bright and fashionable surface of her Faubourg world. How, after Finland? Bother! After Finland there was blessed little, to tell the truth. I worked hard at the Institute, writing a paper on dirigibility through guide ropes and maintaining
my contacts with New York and Hamburg. When after six months of violet-scented letters and even a telegram I presented myself once again at Quai d'Orléans I found myself transformed by some sort of infernal legerdemain into a kind of suitor, one whose loyalty and continuous presence in the house were taken for granted and who was expected to subsist indefinitely on expectations of some vague and idyllic future. Although I had come from Stockholm with the idea of burying myself in a dusty laboratory with my papers and emerging only now and then to consult the Bibliothèque Nationale or purchase scientific supplies, I found myself moving into not exactly elegant but by no means squalid rooms in rue de Rennes, I could hardly afford them, and even buying myself the striped morning coat of a swain. I accompanied her to fittings at Worth and Vionnet, to Boissier in Boulevard des Capucines for a kind of bonbon that could be obtained only there. On the lake in the Bois de Boulogne we drifted elegantly over the lilies in a rented skiff, I in my frock coat, she in a gown from Worth: a scene from Watteau. The devil! This was not working out as I had planned. One would have thought that after Finland (how, after Finland?) things would have been much simpler and more natural, that a major obstacle in our friendship (shall we call it) would have been surmounted so that one would not be confronted by this same obstacle again and again and our little intimacy, so necessary to man and beast, might be repeated again from time to time. But no; here on her home ground there was another Luisa, or rather there were several Luisas who merged and divided, slipped tantalizingly out of reach or dissolved in myriad forms like characters in one of Herr Strindberg's plays. (I had read something of this lunatic now and devilish hard going it was.) She seemed to hold me to account in some way for the Finnish cottage, although God knows I had fallen into her clutches as innocently as a child. Where was that pale and moonlike back in the firelight with its curve of shadows? In Paris she seemed indifferent, even slightly ironic about these mergings of our hands and ardours that took place now and again behind doorways, as though she regarded them as a means of verification of the attachment rather than as a pleasure or end in themselves. The miracle of the restoration of virginity, disputed warmly by theologians, Luisa performed daily and without effort. Any given day's gain was lost overnight, so that the aspirant had Sisyphus-wise to begin his
task constantly anew, a discouraging prospect even for a young man, which I was no longer. In this unlikely chastity she was defended most of all by the Bayeux reticule. In order to make love to her it was first necessary to distract her attention from this portable museum; otherwise she was capable at important moments of turning to search in it for an almond dragée or a pin to catch up her hair, finding en route a letter from her Polish cousin Gela which she insisted on reading to me. Let us put the reticule over here, dear Luisa, behind the armchair or preferably outside the door in the salon, and get on with our business. I would manage finally to unfasten one snap at the top of her dress in the back. You cunning gypsy! she accused. She considered it degenerate of a man to understand the workings of female clothing, yet left to herself she would never unfasten it in a million years. (In Paris, that is; in Finland the dress had come off entirely by itself through sleight-of-hand.) Entry of the Breton footman. Mademoiselle had wished to be reminded when it was three o'clock, so she could go to see the Monets at the Luxembourg. Had Mademoiselle! The demons carry her off! In the vestibule this lout of a Breton would appear with her paletot, but she would gesture to me with a patrician motion of her head. And I, subfootman under immediate command of the Breton, would take the coat and attempt to get her into the thing. The mass of moire, silk-lined, was a feminine conundrum. While her arm waited, I searched for the place where it was to go. Where was that blasted opening? And once found, the arm was too limp and in its fumbling the passage through the silk was lost, or the sleeve hole was the wrong one and would result in a serious confusion if pursued. The Breton stood by with thumb clasped behind his back, too well trained to offer suggestions. This would provide good telling belowstairs. At last Luisa took the coat from me and slipped into it herself, with an elegant deftness. “Thank you, Gustav dear.” It was not necessary for the Breton to run after a cab; I was capable of that. Or not run after it at all; simply wave in the direction indicated with my hat, a pearl-grey homburg that went with the frock coat. To the Luxembourg! Luisa was placid, sibylline, her irony if any showing only imperceptibly in the faint shadows below her mouth.

And yet Finland! Could those sighs and urgencies, those unmistakable pyrotechnics of ardour, have come from a person who was only partly enjoying herself? (Pricked by some demon of scepticism, I remembered that in French
fireworks are called feux d'artifice.) No matter, I attempted to convince myself with at least some success, the simulacrum of bliss was the same as bliss. Love is a disease according to the Viennese doctors. Take away the symptoms of a disease and what do you have? Yet she seemed cured. She seemed to have forgotten the episode, as though it had not happened or had been the unimportant lapse of a friend whose conduct she hardly approved and yet was prepared, in the end, to regard with a cosmopolitan indulgence. It was terribly hard work, this thing of embracing behind doors; it was fraught with obstacles that she surely laid deliberately in my path. Should a door be shut, the Breton would appear and open it. Were we alone in a dark and curtained cab, she would require me to light matches while she searched for something in her reticule. And my work was suffering! I had come to Paris, I was barely able to remember in my more lucid moments, to verify the work of Neumayer and Fritsche which was to be found in manuscript in the Bibliothèque Nationale and apply it to my own researches on atmospheric phenomena. In rue de Sèvres an instrument dealer was still waiting to demonstrate for me a bifilar magnetometer. Do you know what that is, dear Luisa, a bifilar magnetometer? It is what you swore to be so richly interested in, that day when you interposed yourself into my life at the Musée Carnavalet. Yet she did manage to read the barometer over the Gulf of Bothnia. Drat the Gulf of Bothnia! On the other side of it was Finland and the stone cottage. Well, and was I not happy in the stone cottage? In any case, half the people in the world were women and they were hardly a novelty. What precisely did I wish anyhow, and why did I not ignore her and go on exactly as I was before I met her? Because I was a blithering idiot whose glands were more powerful than his brain. Now and then I found time to glance into a book or twiddle briefly with some instrument in my rented room. Chiefly in the morning, since Luisa, as I might have guessed in spite of her stories about rides in the Bois at dawn, rose late in the morning, while my habits were thoroughly diurnal. From the Bibliothèque to Quai d'Orléans to the instrument dealer to the room in rue de Rennes I coursed or plodded wearily, wearing out quantities of shoe leather. It was impossible to do both these things well. I was like a man playing kettledrums and having constantly to turn his attention from one to the other. And now and then some perfidious angel of betrayal would whisper at my elbow, “You will never have your freedom until you effect matrimony with this remorseless creature, so that you can go off and leave her each day as all men do, busying yourself with the truly important questions of the world, while she prepares the downy nest of night. This is the way of the world.”

This I was
not quite prepared to do. I was a certain kind of creature and could be no other; as soon as I felt any heart flowers growing in me I uprooted them mercilessly, or else I faced the risk of having her or some other beseech me, pale-faced and tears in eyes, not to go off and do what I wished to do and what my whole soul and being called for me to do, simply because there might be danger attached to it: “Think of me.” No, dear Luisa, my need for you is tremendous, cosmic, and fundamental, but it has its limits. Besides, the matter was more complicated than that. It was by no means certain that an honourable proposal from me would even be greeted favorably by the powers that governed in this household, even though unmistakable suggestions were applied to me in this respect, not only the questioning of the aunt about my prospects, but the behavior of Luisa herself in certain circumstances usually public, and embarrassing to myself, such as the occasion six weeks or so after my arrival in which she stood by the piano and recited Goldsmith to the assembled guests, with speaking glances in my direction at the end of the more meaningful lines: