The Balloonist (25 page)

Theodor climbs down the net, swinging the last few feet with his legs free, and drops into the gondola. He seems tired but elated; his teeth are set perhaps against the cold or perhaps against a youthful impulse to smile. Rather hastily we make preparations to ascend before the wind dies. The Ice Men, who have taken our places again in the gondola while we break camp, are thrown overboard; they live here so they won't mind, and they wouldn't last long in the World of Cities. Theodor, curiously energized in spite of his fatigue, drops down with an ax to free the ice anchor. But he is unskillful with the tool and it ricochets off the hardened ice. Waldemer moves to help him.

“Never mind. Leave the anchor there.”

“You don't think we'll be using it again?”

“It's not that. It's the weight.”

And in fact, even with the anchor and ax abandoned, the three Ice Men thrown overboard, a bag of ballast sacrificed, the Prinzess is reluctant to leave this place. She rises a half a metre or so, drifts slowly in the direction of Franz Josef Land, and soon begins to bump on the ice again. Climbing out and hanging to the side of the gondola, I stretch my leg down and shove upward with my boot. It is surprising that this immense machine, stretching over our heads as high as a church steeple, can be moved in this way with a small shove of the foot. Very slowly, with a kind of clocklike grace, the Prinzess rises and then slows as though something heavy in the air were pushing her down. Soon she is settling again and only a hand's breadth from the ice.

“Another bag
of ballast?”

“Not yet. What else is superfluous?”

I am in favor of deleting the pigeons, which with their wicker basket must weigh eight or ten kilograms, and my two companions agree. The two rifles we keep for the present. The last of the Prinzessin Brauerei bock goes overboard in its hamper, also the photographic apparatus. I expect Waldemer to object to this last but evidently the candid discussion of our predicament this morning has gone home to him; the little furrow is still there in his brow. He says nothing. Finally the shovel, the floorboards of the gondola, a kerosene tin, and a novel of Barbey d'Aurevilly which Theodor has brought along to read. This does the trick. The Prinzess, still reluctantly, continues her upward slant toward the low-hanging whitish clouds. I estimate: lateral drift four knots, ascent ten metres a minute. The last we see of our long-sought-for and finally attained mathematical point is a small diagonal line in the ice: the handle of the abandoned axe.

Waldemer has cheered up again now. “Drat it, I wanted to bring a flag. The axe will have to do. A surprise for the next fellows who get here.”

Theodor has tied the scarf under his chin again and is holding it against his ears with both hands.

“That will be Peary and his village of Eskimos, probably. Imagine their dismay. What's this? An axe made in Connecticut. They've beaten us, fellows.”

“You forget that, according to De Long, the pack is drifting at fifty metres an hour or twelve hundred metres a day. So that in a year the ax will be four hundred and thirty-eight kilometers from here.”

“Ah well, Major. You and your paradoxes.”

This rude good fun warms us a little if nothing else. But I observe a nuance in Theodor's joke about Peary that Waldemer hasn't noticed: his acceptance not only that the pigeon we sent from the Pole is dead but that in no other way will those in the World of Cities ever learn what we have done. I think this myself but have said nothing. Only Waldemer, evidently, still believes in the happy outcome we have so blithely predicted to ourselves and to others, even though it is possible that in a deep part of him a doubt may have crept in now. Theodor is perhaps aware that I have noticed what he said, perhaps not. I remain silent and let the two of them chatter.

Before the
ax handle disappears from sight we mount the theodolite and take a bearing on it to establish our course. We are moving a good deal more to the east than I would have hoped—to the east, I can say now that we are no longer at the Pole and are back in the world of directions. This wind will never take us to Spitsbergen. Never mind, there are plenty of other islands strewn along the eightieth parallel between Greenland and Siberia. And the wind is holding, we are still rising and in the cloud bank now, it is thin and we are soon through it—the sun! It is somewhat behind us and to the right, pale pink like a melon, swimming faintly at the edges in its arctic way, and it gives out a slight, barely perceptible warmth that we can feel through our clothing but not on our frozen faces. The Prinzess feels it too; after half an hour the gas has expanded enough that we have climbed to eight hundred metres. Even a little too high. I hope we won't have to use the maneouvring valve. The hydrogen is constantly seeping in tiny quantities through the seams and stitches, even through the fine rubberized web of the silk itself, and what we have left is precious.

We have a discussion about navigation. Our present course will take us to somewhere near Franz Josef Land, but we can't expect the wind to hold in this direction. The cyclonic system sucking it in toward the continent will gradually bend it leftward, pulling us into that awkward gap along the eightieth parallel where there are no islands. And I don't expect we can go all the way to Siberia with the Prinzess day by day getting flabbier as her gas seeps out.

There is the chart: first there is Spitsbergen, then leftward along the parallel Franz Josef Land, then a long space with nothing in it, then the islands of the Siberian Archipelago.

“Spitsbergen is only a little to the right. If we set the sails to steer across the wind …”

“We'd have to drop low enough for the guide ropes to drag. And to do that—”

“We'd have to vent gas.” Theodor is warming a little now from this pallid sun and no longer holds his mittens over his ears. He still seems exhilarated from his feat of knocking off the hoarfrost. He is cheerful and his dark
eyes are watchful and interested in everything. He is like a quick and confident bird, fragile in some places and strong in others, not unhappy to be looking out at the world from the cage of the gondola and its supporting ropes. Waldemer is busy overhauling his heavy Martini rifle, he has the bolt out now and is anointing it with whale oil, which does not thicken at low temperatures, and Theodor seizes the opportunity to move closer to me and to do an odd thing: watching or pretending to watch something outside the gondola, the sun or the nonexistent horizon, he brushes my thickly jacketed elbow with his own and I feel my hand grasped in a soft but firm enclosing touch. This lasts for only a few seconds and is quite formal; interdigitation is impossible because of the mittens. When I glance at him he is watching me with a placid smile that has something in it—how shall I say? encouraging, reassuring.

I permit myself to smile slightly too. Without speaking I form my lips silently to tell him: “Va-t-en. C'est fou.”

But Waldemer notices nothing. And indeed why should he notice anything when I noticed nothing myself for so many months? This face with the military cap and greatcoat, like a white dahlia in the muzzle of a gun, is an odd enough contrast itself that nobody would think anything odd of its behavior. In other clothing there is something firm and resolute about the face, virile in spite of the smooth paleness of the chin, but the uniform throws into relief its very delicacy of modeling, the grace of antique marble, a Cyprian hermaphrodite. Even on his second visit to rue de Rennes—he only dropped in for a chat, nothing like the stiff call of honour the previous fall—I was struck not so much with his youth as I had been the other time but with his mastery of the youth, his control of what for others of his age would have been perfectly spontaneous and unconscious gestures. That second time he simply knocked and came in himself without bothering to be announced. Perhaps because he preferred to visit informally and sans façons, perhaps because the concièrge had given me up for a hopeless lunatic by this time and no longer had anything to do with me.

I had just finished working, as a matter of fact, and was feeling about as sociable as I ever do. “Why don't you take off your cap?”

“We're not supposed to. It's a rule of the school.”

“And why aren't you in the school now?”

“It's a holiday.
I'm home for a few days.”

“And where exactly is this famous school anyhow?”

“Oh. Là-bas. Somewhere beyond the Rhine.”

I could get little more out of him about his mysterious Prussian education. He asked me about my work—in his thin, rather high but controlled voice—and I showed him the directional antenna basket, which was finished by this time and had enabled me to plot the course of several winter storms moving across the Île-de-France. Whatever else they taught him at the Militärische Hochschule, he had a modest but sound grasp of electrical theory. I gathered from a reference he made that he had studied Vogelweide, an excellent textbook at least for an introduction to the subject. “And what about the problem of the reciprocality of the antenna system? Have you solved that yet?”

I showed him a plot I had made the day before of a disturbance moving from Pontoise in the direction of Versailles. “The wind being from the north here in Paris, I can assume it would be almost the same only a few kilometers away. Since the bearings move in a clockwise direction—as you can see from the plot—the disturbance was necessarily to the west.”

The watchful eyes took in everything as though it were not very difficult.

“In observations from a moving platform, of course—”

“In a moving platform the problem would be different. The displacement of the geometric centre …”

And so on. Until I became aware, after a half an hour, that we were getting along famously. I did what I seldom do for visitors, I connected up the Marconi apparatus and allowed him to listen to the distant crackling of a disturbance somewhere off over the Morvan. He himself, taking the dividers and parallel rule, plotted its bearing on a large-scale map of France I kept spread out on the table.

It got to be five o'clock.

“I usually take a cup of tea about this time. Would you—”

“I would. Thank you.”

He didn't offer to help; perhaps we were not yet on such intimate terms. While I made the tea he sat watching me, slouched in the armchair with one leg over the side. I dug some English biscuits out of an old tin box and we sat for an hour or so talking about various things, among them Luisa. He no longer threatened to shoot me over her or reproached me for being affectionate behind doorways.

“You know
she's studying voice now.”

“No, I didn't know.”

“Of course she had voice lessons before as a child. But now it's serious. She practices several hours a day, and she goes for lessons to an excellent teacher in Passy. She has a range of three octaves. It's difficult at her age to take it up again. If she had professional ambitions she ought to have kept it up and not dropped it.”

“Then she has professional ambitions?”

“So I imagine.” “Do you think she has talent?”

“Undoubtedly she has talent. But at what?” He made a little smile at me—not of amusement, but to indicate that the subject was serious and at the same time not serious. “This, I think, is what she wants to find out. She is determined to be somebody and not just an ornament. To occupy a post of strenuous responsibility in the world.” (How well he expressed himself.) “And then too, you see,” he added smoothly, “the whole thing is connected with you.”

“With me?” I frankly was surprised, or had to pretend to be. After the incident of the broken bar of graphite I had imagined (for the second time, the first was Stresa) that I was banished totally from her life and thoughts and our relations had come to an end.

“Yes. You've been a great influence on her, whether you realise it or not. You've inspired her to want to make something of herself—to become better. And, you see, in the realm of science—even though she takes a great interest in the matter and is not without a certain understanding, I believe—she must leave the position of predominance to you—she can't hope to compete.”

All this was rather stiff and formal; he frowned and held my glance as he talked. “It's only lately, I think, that she has understood that. And so now she has turned to music, a realm where she has a certain talent, or so she believes. And a talent that you don't share, if I'm not mistaken.”

“You're not mistaken. I don't know the first thing about music, and I have an ear of solid twenty-gauge tin plate.”

“If determination can do it she will succeed. She's a remarkable person, don't you think?”

I began to
see the possibility of regarding this interview in another light. Was he an emissary? From the aunt—or from Luisa?

“You seem to know her wishes and plans very well.” “We're very close in some ways. In other ways, different.”

“What does the aunt think about all this?”

“The aunt? Ah, Ma Tante. She is in favor of each person fulfilling himself in the manner in which he or she is best fitted, regardless of the conventions of society.”

This muddle over genders was the first flaw in his beautiful English.

“I too am not very much interested in the conventions of society. The trouble, of course, is that it is sometimes difficult to tell what he or she is best fitted for, until he or she has tried a good many things.”

“Exactly.” He got up to go now, abruptly but still courteous and correct as always. “Apropos, why is it that we never see you in Quai d'Orléans any more?”

I might have told him that I had never seen him there in I my life and could hardly believe he ever went there, instead I left the oddity of his life untampered with (to tell you the truth I didn't believe he went to a Militärische Hochschule at all) and simply remarked that I had been very busy.