The Phantom of the Opera (Oxford World's Classics)

by Gaston Leroux

  And so the precious days passed. By pretending to take an excessive interest in these peripheral matters, Raoul and Christine made clumsy attempts to hide from each other the one thought in their hearts. But this much was certain: Christine, until then the stronger of the two, suddenly became very tense and apprehensive. During their ‘outings’, she would start to run for no reason, and then stop dead and reach out to hold Raoul with a hand which had gone from warm to ice in an instant. Sometimes her eyes seemed to track imaginary shadows. She would cry: ‘This way!’ then ‘That way!’ then ‘Through here!’, all the while half laughing, half gasping and often bursting into tears. Raoul would try to say something, ask questions despite his promise not to. But before he could frame a question, she would cut him off, saying:

  ‘It’s nothing. I swear it’s nothing!’

  Once, they were on the stage and paused by an open trapdoor. Raoul looked down into the darkness and said:

  ‘You’ve shown me all round the upper part of your kingdom, Christine… but people tell strange stories about what goes on beneath it… Shall we go down?’

  He’d barely finished speaking, when she grabbed him and held him close, as if she was scared he might be swallowed up by the black hole, and said in a trembling voice:

  ‘Never!… I forbid you to go down there!… Anyway, it doesn’t belong to me!… Everything that’s under the ground is his!’

  Raoul looked her straight in the eye and said sharply:

  ‘So that’s where he lives, is it?’

  ‘I didn’t say that!… Who told you such a thing? Really! There are times, Raoul, when I wonder if you’ve got any common sense at all!… You always take things the wrong way!… Now, come on, let’s go!’

  And she had literally to drag him away because he was obstinate and wanted to stay by the open trap which seemed to fascinate him.

  Suddenly the trap shut. It happened so quickly that they never saw the hand that closed it and were left totally nonplussed.

  ‘Perhaps he was lurking there?’

  She shrugged but did not look at all happy.

  ‘No, absolutely not! That’s the trap-men’s job. They’ve got to look busy. They’re always opening and shutting the traps for no particular reason… It’s the same as doormen. It’s how they pass the time!…’

  ‘But what if it was him, Christine?’

  ‘No, it wasn’t! He’s locked himself away. He’s working.’

  ‘Really? He works?’

  ‘Yes, and he can’t be opening and shutting traps and work at the same time. We’re quite safe.’

  But as she said the words, she shuddered.

  ‘What does he work at?’

  ‘Something terrifying! Which is why we’re perfectly safe!… When he’s working on it, he has no eyes for anything else. He doesn’t eat or drink and hardly breathes for days and nights… he’s like a walking corpse… He doesn’t have time to play around with traps!’

  She gave another shudder, then leaned over the trap and listened… Raoul let her do and say whatever she liked. He said nothing. He was afraid that the sound of his voice might break the spell and interrupt the still fragile flow of revelations.

  She had not released him… she was still holding him in her arms… and then she murmured:

  ‘But what if it really was him!’

  ‘Are you frightened of him?’ Raoul asked, gently.

  ‘No, I’m not afraid!’

  Despite himself, Raoul found himself feeling sorry for her, as we do with an impressionable person who has not shaken off a bad dream. He seemed to be saying: ‘Never mind! I’m here!’ But the words somehow sounded like a threat and Christine glanced up at him in surprise, as if he were a prodigy of courage and strength; she seemed to be wondering what value might be put on his bold, chivalrous but quite futile reaction. She kissed him like a sister tenderly rewarding a younger brother for raising his puny fists to defend her against the ever-present dangers of life.

  Raoul understood and turned crimson with shame. He felt as helpless as Christine. He thought: ‘She says she’s not afraid, yet she’s shaking as she moves us away from the trap.’ It was true. On the next day and the days that followed, they relocated their strange, chaste courtship to the attics, far from the traps. Christine’s became more agitated as the days passed until one afternoon, she arrived very late, her face pale and her eyes red with such obvious despair that Raoul resolved to try every last expedient and stop at nothing. For example, the one he came out with straightaway, ‘that he would not leave for the North Pole—unless she told him the secret of the man with the voice’.

  ‘Hush, Raoul! For the love of God, be quiet! He might hear!…’

  And Christine’s hollow eyes looked all around, searching high and low.

  ‘I will free you from his power, Christine, I swear! You’ll never give him another thought! It has to happen!’

  ‘Could it?’

  She allowed herself this momentary doubt—an encouraging sign—as she dragged Raoul up to the top floor of the theatre, far, far above the traps below.

  ‘I will hide you away in some isolated place where he’ll never find you. You will be safe. Then I shall leave, for you have sworn that you will never marry.’

  Christine took Raoul by both hands and gripped them with extraordinary intensity. But then her anxiety returned and she looked around again.

  ‘Higher!!’ she said, ‘we must go further up!’ and she hauled him higher and higher.

  He had difficulty following her. Soon they were under the eaves, picking their way through the labyrinth of roof timbers. They clambered around, over and under flying buttresses, rafters, braces, sections of walls, spars and joists, scuttling from beam to beam as if they were in a forest and were running from one massive tree trunk to another.

  Yet however careful she was to keep looking over her shoulder, she failed to see a shadow which followed her as closely as her own shadow, stopping when she stopped, setting off again when she set off and made no more noise than her shadow. Raoul noticed nothing. When he could see Christine in front of him, he had no interest in anything that might be happening behind him.

  CHAPTER 13

  Apollo’s Lyre

  THEN they were outside, on the roof. Christine moved easily, with practised steps, as light as a swallow. They looked through the empty spaces between the three low domes and the triangular pediment. She breathed deeply as she gazed out over Paris which nestled in a valley grimly steeped in toil. She looked trustingly at Raoul, told him to come closer, and arm in arm they strolled along lead-paved streets and down iron avenues. They paraded their twin reflections in the great tanks of standing water where youngsters from the beginners’ class, a score of little boys, splash about and learn to swim in the summer months.

  The shadow behind them, still dogging their steps, had emerged too, flattening itself against roofs, growing longer each time it flapped its black wings where iron roads met, skirting the cisterns, silently circling the domes. The hapless couple never suspected it was there when they sat down, feeling safe at last under the high protection of Apollo who raised his mighty bronze lyre to a sky filled with crimson fire.

  They were enveloped in a blazing spring evening. Clouds which had just donned the sunset’s gift of gold and scarlet glided slowly overhead and trailed their diaphanous robes over the two young people. Christine said:

  ‘Soon, we’ll go much further and faster than clouds, to the end of the world, and then you can leave me, Raoul. But when the time comes for you to take me away and I refuse to go, swear, Raoul, that you will make me!’

  Clinging anxiously to him, she uttered the words with an insistence that was directed against herself and they struck Raoul forcefully.

  ‘Why? Afraid you might change your mind, Christine?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, shaking her head in an odd way. ‘He’s a devil!’

  She shivered, groaned and nestled in his arms.

  ‘What I’m
afraid of now is going back to live with him—under the earth!’

  ‘Why do you feel you have to go back?’

  ‘If I don’t go back to him, terrible things might happen!… But I can’t do it!… I really can’t!… I know we’re supposed to feel sorry for people unfortunate enough to have to live under ground… But he’s too horrible! Yet it will soon be time; I’ve just one day left, and if I don’t go to him he’ll come looking for me with his Voice. He’ll drag me down to his sanctuary, deep underground, and he’ll go down on his knees to me, with that skull instead of a head, and say he loves me and he’ll cry! Dear God, his tears, Raoul! His tears running from two black sockets! I couldn’t bear to see him cry again!’

  She wrung her hands in anguish while Raoul, finding her despair contagious, held her close:

  ‘No! You shan’t hear him say he loves you! You shan’t see him shed those tears! Let’s go away!… Let’s run away, Christine, tonight!’

  And he started to drag her away then and there.

  But she stopped him.

  ‘No,’ she said, shaking her head sadly, ‘it would be too cruel… Let him hear me sing once more tomorrow night, just one last time… and then we’ll go. Come for me in my dressing room tomorrow night, on the stroke of twelve. He’ll be waiting for me in the dining room by his lake… We shall be free and you shall take me away from here… even if I refuse to go, you must swear, Raoul… because I have a feeling that this time if I go back to him I may never return…’

  She added: ‘You cannot possibly understand!…’

  And she gave a sigh. He had the impression that somewhere at their backs her sigh had been answered by another.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ she asked and her teeth began to chatter.

  ‘No,’ said Raoul to reassure her, ‘I heard nothing.’

  ‘It’s awful’, she said, ‘to be always afraid like this!… even here, where we are absolutely safe… This is our place, my place, high in the sky, in the open, where all is light. Here the sun still burns bright and the night birds cannot bear to look at the sun. I have never seen him in the day time… it must be awful for him,’ she stammered to Raoul with a wild look in her eyes. ‘Oh, the first time I saw him!… I thought he would die!’

  ‘Why?’ asked Raoul, genuinely frightened by the direction her strange and alarming confession was taking, ‘why did you think he would die?’

  ‘BECAUSE I HAD SEEN HIM!!!’

  • • • • • • • • • • • •

  This time, Christine and Raoul turned round together.

  ‘Did you hear that? There’s someone there and he’s in pain!’ said Raoul, ‘maybe he’s been hurt…’

  ‘It’s no use asking me, I couldn’t say,’ admitted Christine. ‘Even when he isn’t there my ears are full of his sighs. But if you did hear something…’

  They stood up and looked all round them… But they were alone on the great lead roof. They sat down again and Raoul asked:

  ‘Where and how did you first see him?’

  ‘I heard him for three months before I saw him. The first time I “heard” him, I believed, like you, that the wonderful voice which suddenly started singing so close to me was coming from another dressing room nearby. I went out and looked everywhere. But, as you know, Raoul, my dressing room is quite isolated from the others. Anyway, I couldn’t hear the voice outside my dressing room though it went on being very distinct inside. But it didn’t just sing, it talked to me, answered my questions in a real man’s voice, except that it was beautiful, like an angel’s. I couldn’t explain it, it was so unbelievable. I’d never stopped thinking about the “Angel of Music” which poor papa promised to send to me after he died. I mention this piece of childishness, Raoul, because you knew my father and he was very fond of you. When you were little, you believed in the “Angel of Music” as much as I did, so I know you won’t laugh or poke fun at me. I still had little Lotte’s tender, trusting soul, and being with Mme Valerius was never going to change that. I held my little snow-white soul in both hands and I trustingly held it out to him, offering it to the man’s voice in the belief that I was presenting it to the Angel. My adoptive mother was certainly partly to blame, for I made no attempt to hide any part of the whole baffling business from her. She was the first to tell me: “It must be the Angel; anyway, you can always ask him.” Which is what I did. The voice said it was indeed the Angel of Music I was expecting because my father had promised on his deathbed to send him. From then on, a special closeness sprang up between the voice and me, and I trusted it completely. It said it had come down to earth to teach me the ineffable joys of Art which never dies and asked if I would let it give me singing lessons every day. I agreed with alacrity and starting on that first occasion I never missed one of our meetings which always took place early in the morning in my dressing room when there was no one about on that side of the building. What can I say happened during those lessons? You’ve heard the voice but even you could have no idea…’

  ‘Absolutely not! No idea at all!’ agreed Raoul. ‘I assume there was an accompaniment?’

  ‘There was, but I never knew what kind of instrument it was. It seemed to come from behind the wall and it was perfect, faultless. And it was as if the Voice knew exactly where my father had got to with my studies when he died and also the simple method he’d used to teach me. As a result I kept remembering, or rather my voice remembered, everything he’d taught me and this, together with the new lessons I was getting, meant that I made tremendous progress which in other circumstances would have taken me years! Bear in mind that I’m not very strong physically and that to begin with my voice had very little character. My low notes were naturally under-developed, the high notes were frankly quite harsh and my middle register cloudy. It was these deficiencies that papa had striven to correct and he had succeeded up to a point. But it was the Voice which finally overcame them. Gradually, I was able to increase the volume of my whole range to an extent I could never have hoped to achieve given that it was never strong to start with. I learned to deepen my breathing but crucially the Voice taught me the secret of developing the chest notes of the soprano voice. To round it off, it lit up its teaching with the sacred flame of inspiration and stirred me to a passionate, all-consuming, creative fervour! Simply by talking to me, the Voice had the power to raise me to its level. It made me as one with its towering epiphanies. The soul of the Voice sat in my throat and breathed its harmonies through my mouth!

  ‘Within weeks I scarcely recognized my own voice when I sang!… I was more than a little scared… For a while, I was afraid there must be some sort of witchcraft involved, but Mme Valerius was most reassuring. She said she knew I was far too sensible to let the devil get his hooks into me.

  ‘My progress had remained a secret between the Voice, Mme Valerius and me. The Voice wanted it that way. Oddly enough, away from my dressing room, I sang as before and no one noticed anything different. I did everything the Voice told me. “Wait and see: we shall take Paris by storm!” I waited, in a kind of unreal trance in which the Voice was in control. And then, Raoul, I caught sight of you one night sitting in the audience. I was so thrilled that I never thought of hiding my delight when I got back to my dressing room. Unfortunately for us, the Voice was already there and it guessed by the way I behaved that something had happened. It asked what the matter was and I saw no harm in telling it about our childhood nor in disguising the place you had in my heart. The Voice was silent. I called it, it did not reply; I begged it but it was no good. I suddenly had a terrifying thought: what if it had gone for ever?… Would to God it had!… That night I went home in a state of near-despair. I threw my arms around Mme Valerius’s neck saying: “The Voice has gone! It might never come back!” She was as frightened as I was and asked me to explain. I told her everything. She said: “I’ve got it! The Voice is jealous!” When she said that, Raoul, I realized I loved you…’

  Christine paused for a moment. She leaned her head on Raoul’s s
houlder and they sat silently for a moment in each other’s arms. Overcome by their feelings, they failed to notice, or more accurately, did not detect, only yards from them, the shadow of two great black wings which flattened itself against the roofs and crept so close that by enclosing them in its embrace it could easily have smothered them…

  ‘The next day,’ Christine went on with a deep sigh, ‘I went back to my dressing room thinking dark thoughts. The Voice was already there! Oh Raoul! It spoke with such sadness. It said bluntly that if I was going to surrender my heart to earthly love, then it had no alternative, the Voice I mean, but to return to heaven. It said this with such genuine human pain that I should have suspected something there and then and realized that I had somehow become the victim of my own feverish imagination. But my faith in that spectral Voice, which was so closely associated with the memory of my father, was still whole. There was nothing I feared more than the prospect of never hearing it again. On the other hand, I had thought about my feelings for you and saw that I was running an unnecessary risk. I didn’t know if you even remembered me and in any case your social position made any thought of marriage impossible. So I told the Voice, hand on heart, that I loved you like a brother, that you would never be anything more and that my heart was uncommitted to profane love… And that, Raoul, was the reason why I never looked at you during a performance nor when you tried to catch my eye backstage: that was why I never acknowledged your existence… never even saw you!… Meanwhile, the hours the Voice and I spent on my lessons flew by in a state of spiritual rapture. Never had the sounds of music possessed me so completely. One day the Voice said: “And now, Christine Daaé, you can bestow on mankind an echo of the harmony of the spheres!”