The Balloonist

by MacDonald Harris

  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.

  “We are at home every afternoon to friends.” (Which I knew.) “Ma Tante has asked about you. And also Luisa.”

  He smiled, clasped my hand briefly, and left. It was six o’clock and I felt unsettled, with a sense that I had nothing to do for the rest of the evening, although I had enjoyed his visit. The fact was that this talk of Quai d’Orléans had made my life in this room surrounded by coils of wire and pencil scratches on paper seem dull. Thunder take it! And what had Ma Tante asked about me? If she wanted to know anything about me she could ask Luisa.

  18 July 1897

  A frozen white haze fills every nook and crevice of the air; the sun penetrates it only dimly. This phenomenon extends immensely high into the air and it is impossible to climb out onto the top of it. Under these circumstances our altitude is simply what we can defend, and this is not very much. We can tell from their curve that the guide ropes are dragging on the ice below, although the ice itself is invisible. The Spiritual Telegraph still reports disturbances to the southeast, and it is this region of rarefied air that is sucking us back, even though slowly, toward the World of Cities. No sights for forty-eight hours. We have only an approximate notion of where we are. The Prinzess is getting heavy with rime again. Wherever the white haze touches her a substance like fine sugar collects, hardening finally to ice. For every particle of it that forms, a particle of something else must be thrown out of the gondola. All the ballast has long since gone. Yesterday we threw over a cooking pan and an empty kerosene tin, spare clothing, our remaining books, one of our two pairs of field glasses, the provision case emptied of its content, the heavier Martini rifle. And yet we are still sinking, as I verify by periodic readings of the barometer. Waldemer seizes the hempen rigging and shakes it, and a few pieces of white crust fall on our heads. A half a kilo perhaps. But it consoles him to collect these fragments painstakingly in his mittened fingers and drop them into the whiteness below. Furthermore the exercise will keep him warm.

  I decide to try to sleep a little, but this whiteness we are suspended in penetrates even the closed eyelids. For some reason I have the impression of an immense, white, cold, frozen anger, a universe bent on destroying us not by blows but by the absolute silence of its wrath. In the sleeping sack with the hood pulled over my head, I manage to achieve something close to darkness. In this way too I am reasonably warm and in time become drowsy, although I doubt whether true sleep is possible under these conditions. In the silence I can hear my companions moving about in the gondola and, occasionally, a distant crepitation or grumble from the ice below.

  “Hello, here’s a bag of white beans. Forgot we had brought those. They’ll be first-rate boiled with a bit of bacon.”

  “Takes too much fuel.”

  “Right! Takes a lot of kerosene, and takes water too, boiling beans. Takes beans too. More weight to get rid of. Otherwise we’ll be throwing it overboard soon.”

  From ten metres below the gondola I hear the little clicking of the starting mechanism as Waldemer attempts to light the stove. He is having some difficulty; probably the burner is clogged with rime. Here in the half darkness under the hood, my body braced against the curve of th
e gondola, my head motionless, I can feel the imperceptible sinking of the Prinzess. Something in my blood is aware, quite precisely, of each centimeter of space that we pass through in our slow descent, as though a rule or scale marked with altitude were slipping silently and harmlessly through my body. No question, I have some kind of barometer in my capillary system. Voices are still discussing beans. Click, click! Drat that infernal contraption. Should he risk pulling up the stove and trying to light it in the gondola? Waldemer wonders. If he does he will surely blow us all up, but for some reason I cannot take this danger seriously. Lighting the stove anyhow, by what technique I am not sure (perhaps I have dozed off for a few moments and woken up at a later stage in the difficulties), the two of them turn to discussing the macabre ethics of jettison. For, when we shall have thrown everything out of the gondola to lighten it, what will be left to throw over but ourselves? We’ll draw lots, ha ha! No, we won’t draw lots. That’s a stale joke. Wolves pursuing the Russian bridal sleigh, lifeboat running out of water. Who is the Individual Least Useful to Humanity? A long discussion on this matter, in a jocular vein, some of which I doze through. When I become aware of the dialogue again, they have decided it would be better for each of us to cut off, say, part of one limb, so that we might return to civilization three one-legged men instead of two men hale and whole but guilt-ridden over the deletion of their companion. Beans bubble now; or perhaps that distant mutter is the ice grinding its teeth. And lower, lower, the measuring stick slips through the blood. Now I can, by leaning only slightly and encouraging her to rotate so the bustle doesn’t hamper, extend my hand to reach the ankle, that complex mechanism of convexities so supple—working in its silk that it seems, in some way, autonomous. Or do I mean anatonomous? Above this wonder the silk cylinder tapers to its narrowest point, then gracefully begins to acquire diameter again. This infernal taffeta constitutes an impediment; hurrah for long arms. I arrive at a second articulation as functional and as aesthetically satisfying in its way as the ankle. “Attendez un moment, calme!” cautions Alvarez. There is no need to rush matters in the least. The ascent can wait for a moment when the wind is just right. In the meantime, it would be well to verify the apparatus, particularly the manner in which these two tendons arise so ingeniously behind, in the articulation of the joint, and rise into the unexplored regions above. Between them they enclose a hollow where we can remain snug while waiting, the knee pit. That’s the jocular vein, running just along the femur. You can feel the pulse there, pulsing faster as the blood works faster in the heart, shall we call it, a convenient shorthand for the centre of feeling. Reluctantly I leave this harbour; perhaps unwisely as well, since how can one expect a smoother, rounder more pleasant concave place? A return to verify the perfection; it is the same—ah well, a pity! our goal lies farther north. The unknown calls with inexorable voice. Coupez! coupez tout! We rise, our companions below us dwindling like a clump of black flowers. En pleine mer, first voyage to Bothnia! This journey is possible only under favourable atmospheric conditions. Such silken weather can’t keep up, luck has lasted too long, and in fact the smoothness ends; at the eightieth parallel we reach a zone of elastic, convoluted into tiny pressure ridges, firm enough to press into the surface beneath it. We descend, cross the zone, and rise in a smooth curve on the other side of it. The mathematics of this are cunning: pressure inward plus soft resistance outward equals the grace of a conic section. Beyond the confined parabola there is the curve of an unknown planet. The white terrain, as we venture on, shows its contempt for us with an icy motionlessness. Northward of the boundary, for a surprise, the silk ends, but the gaiety of this discovery is only temporary. For, if taffeta and a petticoat of mousseline were not enough, I must now reckon with drawers! Fluted linen, ribboned, tight at the thigh and as cunning as Carcassonne; might withstand even a prolonged siege. O tempora, O dix-neuvième siècle, and when the goal seemed so near at hand! Such obstacles are not to be forced, instead taken by stealth, obliquely. An oddity of this progress is that my shoulder now rests where my hand was once so elated to be, my elbow in the concavity of the knee. Reasoning thus, by a process of primitive addition, it is easy to see that the hand is nigh unto the neighborhood of the Elysian Fields. Once under the linen it rushes even too hastily, so that, coursing past the fine ravine where limb is joined to torso, it falls in confusion onto a grassy mound somewhat beyond its aim, but never mind, it is only necessary to retrace the path a bit through this pleasant dell into the descending slope where—what in the infernal blazes is this? the Fiend carry off such jokes! whence comes this obscene Vendôme Column where touch expects concavity? is there no respect for distinction any more? ugh! blast! it even has this stupid pair of withered prunes dangling beneath it! out of this place! and as fast as possible!

  “You’re so smug about it—that’s what I mean; all of you. Little boys with your toys. As if they were really useful for anything such as bettering the lot of humanity, or discovering profound truths …”

  Who was it, exactly, that was angry here? I thought I was angry, but she froze whitely, the small creased places forming at the corners of her mouth, her eyes even darker in the pale face. Yet it was she who had bought this India-rubber joke for ten francs, no doubt, in some low shop. And she became imperious, in such moods she was superb. She stamped her foot and commanded, but grandly, without a trace of petulance. “Pentapod! meet my glance, don’t turn away. These fleeting millennia of your dominance I ignore, do you hear? I reside in the eons, I’ve forgotten nothing. My strength is of the earth, yours is words. Do you know who I am?”

  “I think so.”

  “You’re wrong. I am before arithmetic and squeaking poets. I deny cities. The earth is round and encloses us, we live in it and not on it. You’ve forgotten, but I have not.”

  “That odd aunt of yours put all this in your head, I suppose.”

  “There is no aunt! I am she! There is only one! And I offer you a challenge—divest yourself of your stiff shirt and your electricity, your Stetigkeit und irrationale Zahlen—no, you can’t do it, you’re afraid!” A touch of contempt showed on the white visage with its two compelling shadows. “There are other magnetisms, more ancient. You know about them but pretend to forget. In chess, from game to game, the players change sides from Black to White. Do you dare?”

  “Regarding it only as a game, why not?”

  “Ha! And all your coils of wire and balloons, your honours and societies, aren’t they only a game? I dare you! It’s you pentapods who are supposed to have the courage!” In her white contempt she was magnificent: tyrannical, commanding, her face vibrating faintly almost like that of the aunt. And she was relentless: “Players, change sides! I condemn you to tetrapodicity!”

  With surprising strength she pushed me sideways, into the open door of the wardrobe. I lost my balance and very nearly fell. In clouds of taffeta, of linen, of satin, wool, brocade, muslin, silk, velour, lace, cambric, poplin, alpaca, gauze, I was almost stifled; but there was an odd luxury—about sinking into this scented and pastel mass, tepid like a bath. In some manner the tubes of black serge enclosing my legs had become removed, perhaps through an adroit prestidigitation on her part, perhaps only in the friction of my falling into this soft place. More by feel than by sight, since I was virtually blinded by these flounces and ribbons pressing me from all sides, I located a particularly fine example of drawers and donned them. I had expected some difficulty in this, but they mounted neatly about me and smoothly covered the area of my bifurcation with hardly a wrinkle. There seemed to be a poker in her curse, I reflected; in truth I had become four-limbed. The contrivance of whalebone and stiff linen that came next to hand nipped my waist rigorously but not unpleasantly. These silken snakes that rolled so smoothly up over the legs were a novel sensation, a refinement of sorts after the coarse cylinders of black that had covered them before. A satin gown in somewhat severe Empire style and a pair of ball slippers with narrow heels completed the transformation.

  “
Well?”

  “Well?”

  “Are you going to come out, or hide in there all day?”

  “You know we always linger at these matters. Our tardiness is a tradition.”

  “A silly one.” She hardly glanced at me, and in fact there was nothing remarkable in the slightest about the appearance I presented. My hair was rumpled but I brushed it downward, toward my bare shoulders, with a gesture I was so familiar with from observation that I performed it almost with a sense of habit. As far as I was able to determine without feeling it, merely from the sensation inside my face so to speak, my imperial—a neat tuft that I cultivated under my lower lip—seemed to have gone the way of the fifth limb, and along with it the short-clipped and stiff mustachios. Turning in a brisk motion, I felt the satin clinging lightly as it rotated on the lower part of my person. At the rear, just over the rising of the hips, the stuff was gathered into a kind of knot or flat protuberance falling away into pleats, and although this contrivance was visible only with difficulty, I was constantly aware of it, reminded by its contact and slight weight of my own binary protrusion just under it which the bustle in its bland hypocrisy pretended to conceal and to which it only succeeded in drawing attention, my attention as well as that of the spectator. With a humorous appreciation I admired the slimness of my fingers, the neatness of the silken feet in the ball slippers. I felt suave, smooth, and clean of impediments. If the corset thrust the softer parts of my chest upward and outward into divided swellings of characteristic shape, it only brought the most sensitive parts of these shapes lightly into contact with my clothing, another curious sensation.

  “Shall we take something? Tea?”