Herma

by MacDonald Harris

  Fred began to get a little bored. Perhaps, he thought, he ought to go back to Paris, or go directly on to Milan and stay there for a few days before he went on to Parma. Still, it was pleasant enough in Antibes. The Beau Rivage was an expensive hotel and the room was large and comfortable. Naturally there was a mirror in the bath. Once he turned himself into Herma and had lunch in the hotel restaurant, followed by a walk on the esplanade under the palm trees. But she was pursued by a serious gentleman in blue spectacles, who pressed her so relentlessly that she flounced her way back into the hotel and never tried the experiment again.

  At La Grimaudière, under the direction of Soldati, Agostinelli learned fast and soloed in less than two weeks. He and Anna came to the hotel to tell Fred about it. Agostinelli was full of enthusiasm and wanted Fred and Anna to go with him the next day to the field to watch him do it again.

  They went out in the afternoon, since Anna still felt herself unable to get up before ten or so in the morning. The usual squall had gone through and left a stiff wind behind it. There were whitecaps out over the Baie des Anges, and the flag at the edge of the field was flapping and shredded at the edges. But the angle of the wind wasn’t as bad as it had been after the other storms, and the field was broad enough that Agostinelli could take off at a diagonal, almost into the wind. The steel-colored clouds were still drifting in from the west; the air over the field was gray.

  The Voisin was out on the line and fueled. Agostinelli climbed in, buckled his helmet, and pulled down his goggles. He nodded to Soldati to indicate that the gas valve was open. Soldati spun the propeller a half-dozen times and then Agostinelli switched on. The Antoinette didn’t catch at first. Only at the third spin did it cough, bang out a puff or two of blue smoke, and rise to its barking roar. Agostinelli didn’t look at Anna. Very serious, his face inert, he opened the throttle and bumped away over the grass. Behind the goggles nothing showed in his expression.

  He crossed to the far corner of the field so that he could take off diagonally into the wind. It was a little bumpier this way, since this part of the field wasn’t used very much. He raced by over the grass only a short distance from the hangars, still not turning his head to look at them. Because of the stiff wind the Voisin took to the air all at once, the skid and the two wheels rising together. This sent him up in a steep climb, and he overcorrected and came down when he leveled, settling out only twenty feet or so above the grass.

  They watched the Voisin go off across the coast road and the beach and dwindle away to the south over the Baie des Anges. It still didn’t have much altitude; it slipped out to sea just above the level of the whitecaps. Evidently, after his abrupt takeoff into the stiff wind, Agostinelli was cautious about pulling back the stick. He was about two kilometers out when he decided to turn and come back in toward the land. At that distance the Voisin was only a small dot with the thin line of the wing on either side, and the landing gear dangling below. As Fred watched he saw the right wing tip lift up a little. Something clutched at his heart. Don’t bank so close to the water, Alfred! It makes the aeroplane lose altitude when you bank. Just at that moment the Voisin hesitated, and sank to merge with the horizon. The left wing tip caught the water, sending up a plume of spray. For an instant they saw the tail go up, like a pointing finger, and settle again. The Voisin sank almost immediately.

  Anna gave a stifled scream and stuffed her fist in her mouth. Soldati turned and ran toward the office to telephone for the harbor police at Antibes.

  At the hotel Fred, still feeling numb and light, as though something were missing on the inside of him, stopped at the desk and asked for a telegram form. He filled this out, and then stood for a moment looking vacantly at the words he had written, as though he had forgotten where he was or what he was doing. Finally, noticing that the clerk was looking at him curiously, he pushed the telegram across the desk along with a ten-franc note and walked away without a word.

  At the telephone in the hotel foyer he also called the station and reserved a first-class seat in the night train to Paris. He glanced at his watch. It was a couple of hours. He phoned to La Grimaudière to see if the body had been recovered yet. It hadn’t. He went upstairs to pack.

  A taxi, stopping under the white Moorish porch of the hotel just at dusk, collected him and his voluminous baggage and took him to the station. There he checked the baggage directly through to the apartment in avenue Kléber, keeping only a small handbag for the train.

  After he was in the compartment and the train had started it occurred to him that he could have taken a Wagon-Lit, but he hadn’t. He wasn’t sleepy anyhow; he had been bored and without much to do in the past few days and he had slept more than enough. He shared the compartment with a nun, who must have been a Mother Superior since she traveled in a first-class seat, a businessman who was immaculately neat if somewhat portly, and a French army major in dress uniform with a red képi. None of these people spoke to each other or to Fred. This was because it was a first-class compartment. What you were paying for was the right not to be spoken to by your fellow passengers. If it were third class, everyone would be chattering away, cutting up bread and cheese and sharing it and passing around a wine bottle. It was a good thing he had gone first class. He didn’t feel like trading bread and cheese with people and drinking wine. About ten o’clock he went to the dining car and took a table, but when he looked at the menu he realized that all he wanted was a cup of black coffee. He was nervous and edgy and still felt light and floaty.

  He went back to his compartment. The Mother Superior had fallen asleep, the businessman was reading a newspaper, and the major stared at him stonily with his hands on his knees. Fred tried to fall asleep too but it wasn’t any good. He leaned back with his head on the seat and his eyes closed. When he opened his eyes he saw the ceiling of the car, made out of an odd kind of embossed and gilded tin, and in the middle of it a squat milky-colored electric light. All at once the powerful sensation struck him that beyond the ceiling was the sky. The sky was dark and deep. It extended to infinity. It went on through the stars—past them—past the galaxies—into frightening spaces where no one had ever been and no one could even think about. If the world should turn upside down, you could fall into that and go on falling forever. That was what the sky was. It was Nothing. He didn’t care to go on pursuing this line of thought and he looked around to see if by chance the businessman had discarded his newspaper, or if there was anything else to read. There wasn’t.

  During the night the major got up from his seat and came across the compartment and tried to violate him. He was unable to speak or make any noise. He looked to the others for help, but found that the businessman and the Mother Superior were locked in a passionate embrace, kissing feverishly. He woke up. They were all in their proper places, asleep except for the major who had turned sideways in his seat and was staring out the window into the darkness.

  After that he stayed awake, watching the blackness whirl by and the lights of an occasional village or town slamming past at high speed as the express train went up the main line toward the capital. He couldn’t see his watch in the dim light of the lamp overhead but they were getting closer. He was tired and wished that he had been able to sleep. Fontainebleau, Melun, Corbeil. A trace of gray light was showing now through the window. The train went across the river and it was in Charenton with the Bois de Vincennes dimly visible to the right. The brakes gripped underneath and it slowed gradually. Then it went on slowly past an orange light, past a trainman standing by the track with an oil pot in his hand, and under the gloomy roof of the station. It came to a stop with a lurch and a hiss of steam. “Gare de Lyon!” the voice of a trainman called out, echoing under the immense glass and steel roof.

  The Mother Superior stood up and collected her belongings, and so did the two others. Fred didn’t feel like getting up from his seat. It was the way you felt when you didn’t want to get up in the morning, or you didn’t want to jump into the cold water when you were swimming. He j
ust wanted to stay where he was. He didn’t want to go out and do what he had to do.

  He sat there for perhaps two or three minutes and then realized this was stupid. He got up and looked around for his handbag. It wasn’t there. He looked on the floor of the compartment and in the woven nets over the seats. But the compartment was empty. He opened the door and stepped down onto the platform, and saw the businessman at the far end of the station making rapidly away with the handbag in his hand. Fred didn’t even bother to pursue him. There was nothing in the bag anyhow except a change of underwear and socks, his flying helmet and goggles, and his shaving gear. It had the key to the apartment in it too, but the concièrge could let him in.

  Out in front there weren’t any taxis. He waited until one drew up, pushed in front of another gentleman who was trying to catch it, and got in. He gave the driver the address in boulevard Haussmann. The trip across Paris seemed to take a long time, but he realized that he didn’t care how long it took and wanted it to be even longer; he didn’t want to get there. Place de la République, boulevard Montmartre, boulevard Haussmann. The taxi drew up in front of the apartment.

  He pushed through the polished glass door and crossed the entryway toward the lift, then changed his mind and went back to the concièrge sitting as usual at her table in the loge. She was already up, with a tiny cup of coffee in front of her, or had been up all night.

  “Is he alone?”

  “Of course he is alone. Who else would there be?” she snapped. “There’s only me to take care of him.” She added, “He hasn’t slept for two weeks.”

  Fred said nothing, turned away, and went up in the lift. When he knocked it was quite a time before the door opened. He didn’t knock again. At last it opened and he went in.

  Marcel was standing by the door in his rumpled pyjamas and sweaters. He didn’t move and Fred had to shut the door himself. He crossed the room slowly and slipped his fingers over the sofa in its dust cover, then he turned. They stood and looked at each other from across the room. The telegram and its torn blue envelope lay on the étagère by the night light. Marcel’s face had a grayish cast, almost violet, from the effects of veronal. It seemed deeply sunken in on the bones of his skull, although this was only perhaps the effect of the shadows in the room. Neither of them spoke. Fred found that his eyes were brimming with tears, and so were Marcel’s. It was a long time that they stood there. Time, in fact, was suspended, as it is in Art, or in those crucial moments in the turning of human life when mortality is stripped bare and nothing can be said or done. They were both conscious of the unseen presence between them, both in tears, unable to speak, unable to touch as their emotion called for them to do, separated by the immense dark gulf of the Taboo older than civilization, older than temples and gods, perhaps older than mankind itself.

  10.

  It was later that summer that the war began. The weather was hot, and Paris was dusty and a little stifling. On the afternoon of August first Herma had gone to a tea dance with a friend, the dancer Bella Pontsis, at Armenonville, the rendezvous of the haut monde in the Bois de Boulogne. Afterward she remembered the moment precisely: they were sitting at their table under the trees with tea and pastries in front of them, chatting and watching the dancers. The orchestra was working away at a trivial and sentimental little waltz with words in English.

  “Nights are long

  Since you went away,

  I think about you

  All through the day,

  My Buddy …”

  People hummed as they danced. English things and speaking English were fashionable that year. The waltz came to an end and the musicians rearranged the music on their stands. They were about to begin again when the manager, a small and self-important bald man with a mustache, stepped forward and stopped them. He said, “Mesdames et Messieurs, mobilization has been ordered. It begins at midnight. All those who are registered for mobilization are instructed to report to their points of assembly.”

  He ordered the orchestra to play the Marseillaise. Everybody stood up for the music, then sat down again. Some people were dazed, others were smiling. A middle-aged businessman at the next table began speaking confidentially to his companion. The men of military age were for the most part silent. A few people went back out onto the dance floor and danced around without the orchestra, still humming the waltz to themselves. Little by little people left, coming out from underneath the arbor over the dance floor into a late afternoon sunshine sparkling with tiny gold particles.

  Because of the excitement Herma and Bella couldn’t find a taxi and decided to walk back through the Bois and along the Champs-Elysées. Here and there people were standing in clusters on the sidewalk, talking animatedly about the news. Except for that nothing was changed; Paris was exactly as before, the shops were open, full of expensive merchandise, and the cafés were crowded. News vendors went by shouting “Mobilization!” in the same mechanical way they had shouted “Forty Die in Train Accident!” or “Actress Shoots Lover!” the day before. About halfway down the Champs-Elysées a taxi came along crammed with young men who were perhaps Sorbonne students. In any case they had been drinking. “To Berlin! To Berlin!” they shouted. One of them waved a pistol out of the taxi, laughing. No one paid any attention to them.

  And in fact very little changed during those first weeks. The men of mobilization age left, and soldiers in uniform appeared in the streets. The Opéra of course was closed for the summer, but the performances went on at the Châtelet, the Opéra Comique, and the music halls of Montmartre. Herma’s last engagement had been the festival at Parma in July, and now she was free until September when she was to begin rehearsing La Forza del Destino at the Opéra. She sang at a private recital or two, and went on giving her Wednesdays—she even persuaded the old Gabriel Fauré to come to one, and he seemed to enjoy himself, humming along with the Debussy as Herma sang it but refusing to go to the piano himself. He drank sherry and told some anecdotes about the Consérvatoire, where the daughter of a cabinet minister had once attempted to sing “Vissi d’arte” for an audition but failed miserably because he, Fauré, had instructed the accompanist to play it two notes high, in C natural instead of A flat. No one spoke about the war.

  The theaters and music halls were still full. There were more people in Paris than usual in the summer because many people had canceled their holidays. Yet there was a strange quality to the city. A Paris from which all the men of military age were removed—or so it seemed, although probably there were a good many of them left—was a Paris somehow altered, not only a feminine city but a city populated by women alone. The few soldiers who had been seen in the streets got their orders and left, and none of them had been on duty long enough to come back to the city on leave. The men in the theaters were schoolboys with their mothers or men over forty. At the tea dances in the Bois you saw girls dancing together. There was a sudden new informality in the theaters and at other social events. Men wore sack suits instead of evening dress, and tailored suits were fashionable for the ladies instead of gowns. Imitations of military uniforms were popular. Women’s suits had leather belts and epaulets, and horizon blue and khaki were the favorite colors. There were signs offering “Costumes en khaki” in the window of every modiste. In the restaurants there were shortages of beef and pâté, and other things that came from the war zone in eastern France, but people were good-natured about it, taking “whatever there was,” a trout in aspic or a mixed grill of steak and sausages. A new dance came in: the tango. You saw suave young men with pomaded hair, perhaps Argentines, teaching it to girls at Armenonville. It became chic in society to use soldier slang. The dinner wine, whatever the rare vintage, was referred to as pinard: “Voudriez-vous bien, cher monsieur, me verser un peu de pinard, je vous prie?” The troops were referred to as “the poilus” not “the soldiers.” And if you admired something you said, “Il n’y a rien de si coco.” The rest of August it remained hot. For some reason the water supply failed now and then, and only a trickle c
ame out of the faucets. “What will you?” people said. “It’s the war.” There was no complaining and people seemed to enjoy these small discomforts. It gave them the feeling they were sacrificing something, just like the poilus in the trenches. Perhaps this was why the government arranged for the water supply to fail.

  Herma’s friend Bella Pontsis had been the prima ballerina of the Opéra in the nineties. Now she was somewhat past her best years, but still vigorous and in good condition. She operated a dancing school in rue Godot de Mauroy, and now and then she did a choreography for the Opéra. Herma was often with her, since she didn’t care for schoolboys or middle-aged businessmen, and didn’t know any Argentines. They went to tea dances—but didn’t dance together—to the Odéon to see the aged Bernhardt do Phèdre, and for picnics in the country, to Barbizon or Rambouillet.

  Bella was Greek, dark and passionate, with exaggerated gestures and an impulsive way of speaking. She had come to France as a child but still spoke with a slight accent. She wore her hair loose, often with a jeweled band around it, and sometimes scandalized the Parisians by going barefoot to cafés in the Champs-Elysées. More commonly she wore sandals with thongs tied around the ankles. She was very beautiful in her way—a little fanée in a way that gave her an attractive kind of decadence—eyes set in shadows, a slightly beaky nose, but a beautiful complexion, a soft sensitive mouth, and a trim dancer’s figure with a narrow waist and strong wrists and ankles. She was moody and sometimes fell into silence for hours on end, at other times talked endlessly until neither she nor anybody else understood any longer what she was talking about. But in either case she was animated: constantly in motion, moving about the room, picking up this and that, impulsively embracing friends both male and female and kissing them on the cheeks in the French manner, affectionate to animals and unable to pass a poodle on the Champs-Elysées without picking it up, waving to half the girls in the cafés because they were either her students or dancers she had known in the corps de ballet of the Opéra.