The Balloonist

by MacDonald Harris

  But she was not interested in the revolver, it was something that belonged to Theodor and it had nothing to do with her. She got up quite calmly now, even matter-of-factly and with a kind of religious simplicity, and began readjusting her clothing, the male gestures she was obliged to fall into in order to fasten certain buttons contrasting oddly with the mass of unpinned hair that fell over her face. Then she went to the sink, dampened a towel, and removed the traces of salty moisture from around her eyes and the blood from her lip. Her manner in doing all this was even and unhurried, stately, with a touch of the austere politeness she always assumed with persons with whom she chose to be a little distant, or when she preferred not to talk. It was as though the act we had just performed was a ritual of purification (now there’s a strange idea, oh, dix-neuvième siècle!) which had restored to her not only her calm but her confidence, her assurance in herself that she was superior to the world around her, along with its vicissitudes and most of its inhabitants. Next in this even sequence of events she filled a not very clean tumbler at the tap and drank the contents, slowly but in a single long draught without taking the glass from her lips. Our eyes met over the top of the glass but she said nothing. Finally she went to the worktable, took up the old red-painted shears I kept there for dealing with things like cardboard and tinfoil, and began cutting off her hair just below the level of the earlobes. The hair had seemed profuse falling over her face, but there was even more of it when it came down handful by handful onto the table. Finally there was a heap of it in the centre of the pilot chart, shadowy, snakelike, faintly iridescent. Working without a mirror in this way she hadn’t done a very good job. It was ragged around the edges and a little lower on one side than on the other. But it sufficed; the ends of her ears appeared under it, and when she tossed her head it flung out and then came back into place again, boy-like. With the cap on she looked the same as before except for the cut on her lower lip. The shears she put in the pocket of the greatcoat.

  She came back to the table and seemed uncertain what to do with the hair; not what to do with it but what to use as a container. Finally she rolled it up in the pilot chart itself and put it in my arms, simply and modestly, with a smile, and the air of one conveying a gift. Then, still without a word (she had not spoken after she rose up off the floor), she went out the door, leaving me the hair, and taking for herself the little machine by which it had been cut off like a flower and left to die.

  Luisa was going to Stresa, short hair and all. I was not invited. The aunt would go along and the Polish cousin, perhaps the mother. I had to go to Hamburg anyhow, to talk thalers with the brewers. We agreed to meet in Switzerland, somewhere. But it wasn’t just somewhere; she knew exactly the place she had in mind. “Just by the Simplon. When I come up from Italy over the pass you’ll be there. The place is called Brig, in the Valais. There’s an inn. It’s called—I forget what the inn is called. You can find it in the Baedeker. Goodbye.”

  She always spoke English now, which avoided the awkward second person in French: tu was too intimate and vous too distant, even impolite. It (vous) would have involved an awkward backing up from where we had been before, whereas tu would have indicated that nothing had changed, everything was as before. What had changed, then? I wasn’t sure exactly. One thing that had changed, it seemed, was that an absolute rule or taboo of our relationship had been violated: the one that decreed that that couldn’t happen in Paris, only in Finland, Stresa, and other far-flung corners of the globe. But had it happened in Paris? As the days went by I meditated on this. Perhaps not. No, it hadn’t. Still, how could I reason thus, with the broken glass from the picture frame still unswept on the floor and the bundle of soft hair rolled up in the chart? I borrowed from Luisa a logic that was circular and retrograde, perhaps devious, but consoling. Since man is free, and woman also according to the aunt, we do exactly what we choose to do in this world. What we have not chosen to do does not happen. And neither of us, I persisted in believing in the face of all evidence, had willed to behave in such an irresponsible and beastly fashion, even when one of us was in danger of his life and the other defending herself against an enraged Swedish lunatic. Ergo and Q.E.D., it hadn’t happened. How to explain then that I had the half-healed scars of her claw marks on my face? They were still there, on that day three weeks later when she said goodbye to me in Quai d’Orléans for the last time. If she noticed them she gave no sign. “Goodbye.” That last English word—so final in contrast to the promise of au revoir or auf Wiedersehen—was spoken dryly, even with a touch of distance or dismissal. Against any risk that I might take her hand, she held both of them behind her. It was very correct. The aunt was present, observing from across the drawing room with faint denying vibrations of her head. Nay, nay! Nothing shall happen in Brig! I took my leave, seeing that this was the only thing in the house for the moment that they wished me to take.

  In Hamburg I spent a week with the brewers. A pleasant time, although their notions of entertainment, involving large amounts of pigs’ feet, sauerkraut and bock, tended to increase one’s girth and did no good to the liver. I showed them drawings of Prinzess III, the silk for which was even then being cut by a firm in Grenoble. About the thalers there were no difficulties. They seemed to have an unlimited supply of them, guarded as I imagined by Rhine maidens in some iron-bound old chest. (But this could hardly be, I reasoned heavily, since Hamburg was on the Elbe.) The whole business was transacted in a heady miasma of hops. Herr Oberkellner, another bock for the Major! Another week of this and no balloon would lift me, nor would I care. The efficient machinery of Prinzessin Brauerei G.m.b.H. was even able to solve one of my last problems, that of the third and final member of the crew for the polar expedition. They recommended one of their own employees, a young chemist and amateur athlete named Beispiel who had, among his other accomplishments, swum the Hellespont like Byron and also rescued a dozen women and children from a sinking Elbe ferry boat in winter. (By towing them with his teeth, as I understood.) I was introduced to young Herr Beispiel and in fact he was a fine figure of a Teuton. Strong hands, thick chestnut hair, and a chest like an ale keg. There was the value of his scientific training (he was a specialist in yeast culture) and he had made at least one balloon ascension and come down by parachute, all for sport. There was a logic to this crew: Beispiel cheerful brute strength and agility, Waldemer intelligence, and I—transcendental vision perhaps, or the moral power of spirit. (The word I was groping for was German: Emporhebung.) I told him I would consider it. He, and Prinzessin Brauerei G.m.b.H., regarded the matter as settled.

  After a week of pigs’ feet and Gemütlichkeit, the top button of my trousers unfastened for comfort under the waistcoat, I entrained at the Hauptbahnhof for Frankfurt, Basel, Zurich, Lucerne, and eventually Brig. This proved to be a pleasant hamlet on the Rhone full of steep-pointed roofs and picturesque inhabitants. The main attraction of the place was the Stockalperschloss, an improbable castle built by some robber baron in the seventeenth century and consisting mostly of bulbous domes and watchtowers. I inquired for “the inn” and was told there were three. Following the law of averages, the second one I tried was the one where Luisa had descended earlier that afternoon. She had reserved a room for me and one for her, on separate floors as it happened. (“Nay, nay.”) With her hair clipped I had half expected her to make her appearance as Theodor, but instead she was impersonating the young English lady in tweeds. The hair had been trimmed by a coiffeur in Place Vendôme, and it gave her an active-brisk-suffragist look instead of a mannish one. We had dinner according to the rustic local notions, and then she advised me to get early to bed. “I’ve left orders for them to knock on both of our doors” (significant detail) “at five. You have mountain clothing?”

  “I have what I have on.”

  This was a woolen pepper-and-salt suit with knickers, woolen stockings, and sturdy walking shoes. In my room there was a cap that went with it, of the kind with two visors made familiar by Mr. Sherlock Holmes.
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br />   She looked sceptical. “Are you in good physical condition, Gustav?”

  “We’re only going to climb an Alp. Tourists, old ladies, and other people do it every day.”

  She rose from the table. “Good night.” It was like the goodbye in Quai d’Orléans: friendly, correct, austerely polite. Her hands as before remained at her sides. If she had been with a gentleman she might have invited him to kiss her hand. But you know how some people are; if you offer them a finger they take the whole hand, then the arm and shoulder. I was as correct as she; I smiled like a Peruvian diplomat.

  In the morning we set off for the Aletsch glacier before the sun was quite up. Luisa had found a guide, a specimen of the local fauna complete with lederhosen and strong red knees. The winding road from Brig to the foot of the glacier we covered in a sort of farm wagon with benches down the middle, so that Luisa and I sat on one side and the guide on the other. When the road ended we got out and everything was unpacked from the wagon. There were light knapsacks with blankets, food, and thermos flasks, and alpenstocks for all. Each of us wound a length of rope around the waist, to tie us together when necessary. The wagon turned and went back down the road, and we set off up the glacier. To the left and above us as we climbed was the Aletschhorn, enormously high, a sword of ice cream sticking up into the cold and absolutely clear spring morning. As Luisa strode I perceived that under the tweed skirt she wore an example of that efficient garment invented by Mrs. Amelia Bloomer, woolen as it seemed, quite smartly cut around the ankles. My salt-and-pepper suit was supplemented by a cloak the innkeeper had lent me. Already my feet were slipping in the shoes designed for walking in English country lanes.

  The guide kept us entertained as we went up the glacier by yodeling in his local dialect, which involved a sound as though he were separating egg yolks in his mouth. From time to time, when he was not doing this, he made little comments. “The Herr is a little tired, yo? The Dame not. Women are strong, you know. The femelle of the sex has stronger lungs. The peasants hereabouts, you know, they drive the cows to the high pasture, but they don’t take the bulls. Their lungs would collapse. Yo, yo, the woman sex is strong. My own wife—” And so on.

  There may have been something in what he said. My own pulmonary system was already pounding and showing signs of distress. It was borne in upon me for the first time that I came from a flat country and that all these Alps were not really necessary in any rational and efficient scheme of constructing a planet. Still, it was not really fair. I was fat from the week in Hamburg, and she after all had the lungs of a singer; that is, even if she was not a singer artistically, she might be so regarded from an athletic point of view. She went on ahead like a blithe dryad, or did I mean Druid? It was hard to think while panting. The guide presently tied us together with the ropes, explaining that there were crevasses ahead. He knew what he was talking about, this fellow. All morning we toiled up the ice across these fissures large enough to engulf whole armies, some of them treacherously covered with snow. At noon we rested on the Obergletscher, and by five in the afternoon we were at the base of the mountain. Here we camped, or more precisely, rolled ourselves in our blankets in the protection of an overhanging crag and tried to get some rest sitting up all night, warming ourselves now and then with coffee from the thermos flasks. The guide (I never learned his name, and it is possible that in that part of the world they name cows but not sons) built a little fire for us and averted any danger that we would fall asleep by yodeling every hour or so. I believe I did sleep, as a matter of fact. For five minutes; until my head dropped sideways and touched the saw-like piece of granite I was leaning against.

  At dawn, after more coffee with some sausage and bread, we set off again. And by noon, rather more easily than I had expected, we were on top of the Aletschhorn. There was a considerable view, for those interested in that kind of thing. The guide pointed out the Jungfraujoch to the north, the Matterhorn and the Dent Blanche to the south. It was cold up there and we soon left the place; there was no entertainment provided and nothing much to do. There were at least two things harder than climbing a mountain, I discovered. One was coming down a mountain. And another was crossing a glacier, either coming up or going down. Especially tied together with an alpine mountain goat and a vigorous suffragist who seeks to make some point by leaping down the crags quicker than one can follow, so that one is dragged along on the rope like a calf going to market.

  “And so you” (English; the pronoun neither intimate nor unfriendly) “will be going to Spitsbergen in June.”

  “Yes.”

  “And then?”

  Half sliding, avoiding disaster frequently only through adroit use of the alpenstock, I would just as soon have postponed this interrogation until later. “Northward. With a little luck. We will see.”

  “And how many persons will be in your crew?”

  “Three.”

  “Ah. That’s an odd number.” Three was an odd number. Devil take it, this young woman was a mathematician, no denying that. “Why three, precisely?”

  “Because the balloon is designed to carry the weight of exactly three persons.”

  “I see. And why is it designed to carry three persons?”

  “Because that is the number that will be going on the expedition.”

  And she (over her back, giving me an encouraging little pull with the rope that almost upset me): “And who will these three persons be, pray tell?” “Myself. Waldemer. And a young man from Hamburg named Beispiel.”

  “H’mm. How very international. And this Herr zum Beispiel. Is he a balloonist?”

  “A chemist.”

  “Ah. One hardly sees the logic of that. I will come with you of course to see you off.”

  “To Trondheim, perhaps.”

  “Even to Spitsbergen.”

  “To what end?”

  “Some member of your crew might not be able to go after all. Such as Beispiel. Through illness or for some other reason.”

  “Not likely. He’s as healthy as a performing seal.”

  “Still, for even a small chance of going on the expedition, it would be worth taking the trouble. And I would be useful, you have to admit that. In Sweden, after all—”

  Devil take Sweden! In this system of cryptography we used for communicating with each other, “Sweden” meant the adroit way she had handled the ropes (dropping the ballast at the wrong time) and “Finland” meant—later, in the cottage. For instance, if she had said, “And I would be useful—in Finland, after all!” it would have meant quite a different thing.

  “Beispiel will be very useful. He has made a balloon ascension, and he can swim while carrying children in his teeth. Besides, Beispiel means thalers. The brewers—”

  “Ah, the brewers.” She was scornful of material considerations, especially when it suited her. “If you want to argue that way. Why not an expedition around the Eiffel Tower instead, and you can sell sausages afterward in the Champs de Mars.”

  At least after that she stopped pestering me. There was total silence for an hour or two while we came back down the glacier and picked our way precariously through the crevasses. Finally, at five o’clock in the afternoon, we were out of them and onto more or less firm ice. I was tired of being jerked along and told the guide to untie us.

  “Oh aber. Many more holes.”

  “No more holes.” I untied myself and Luisa did the same. Without disputing the matter, the guide coiled up his own rope around his waist and went on a little ahead, yodeling to himself in an undertone. At the foot of the glacier, a kilometer or so ahead, we could see horse and wagon already waiting for us. A hot bath! And afterward coffee with rum, clean clothing, and a dinner in the inn. Descending a little behind Luisa and to one side, I stepped into a slight depression filled with snow, it yielded, and I fell five metres or more in a twinkling of an instant, before I had time to realise what had happened.

  I was in a place with bluish light, hard walls pressing on my back and chest, the alpenstock
under me, one arm over my head and the other jammed at my side. Except for a knock on one ear and a wrenched hip, I seemed to be all right.

  “Gustav?”

  “Here.”

  There was no concern for my condition, I was interested to note. “What are you doing down there?”

  “Thinking.”

  “The guide has gone on ahead.”

  “I’ll bet he has. Throw me down your rope, will you?”

  I didn’t seem to be in any danger. The crevasse was a shallow one and firm at the bottom, full of old ice rubble and packed snow. It was just wide enough so that by struggling a bit and working my arms around I was able to free myself and stand more or less upright, the patch of light above me three metres or so over my head. The hip would probably work if I didn’t place too much weight on it.