To the left, on a platform covered in antique carpets, to which one gained access by means of steps padded with animal skins, six Hindu musicians in strange and luxurious costumes, were playing melodious rhythms that were voluptuous and melancholy by turns, evocative of an admirable and distant land. Behind them hung a huge sheet of Japanese fabric, embroidered with sumptuous silks, in which frenetic samurai warriors were battling with winged gods.
On the opposite wall there was a gallery three meters above the floor; multicolored scarves and toreros’ cloaks were displayed on the balustrade. In a corner, under an ancient dais, the decorated flanks of chasubles, embroidered with silver and gold brocade, formed a discreet alcove into which furtive amorous couples occasionally slipped. Canvases, sketches and drawing were scattered here and there. In places there were divans, draped to serve as décor for nudes.
And in the midst of this peculiar jumble, like a museum of flotsam of all the arts and all civilizations, in the dim light that fell from the Florentine chandelier, was a crowd of between a 150 and 200 people, speaking different languages, from very different worlds, of disparate appearance—in which Henri Rozal suddenly discovered, like an orchid in a forest, a resplendent young woman, blonde and roseate, with large, dark, serious eyes that were fixed on him.
The large dark eyes came toward him.
Immediately, Henri Rozal felt an emotion that was new to him. His heart began to beat very forcefully, and he suddenly had an impression of vertigo—a man who descended 2000 or 3000 meters in a glide without his pulse accelerating!
The exceedingly pretty young woman advanced through the admiring men and other delightfully-costumed women. She walked casually and gracefully, supple and light, smoothly-contoured. She was dressed in a long white woolen dress, simple but irreproachable tailored. An immense black hat, in thick felt, with a descending rim, was posed on her golden hair. She was adorable. Rozal could not believe that it was him that she was coming to meet.
She took up a position in front of the engineer, however, quite frankly, and interrogated him, without any embarrassment, in the American fashion.
“It’s said, Monsieur, that you’re making an apparatus with which you intend to go from Paris to New York? I assume that’s an exaggeration.”
This was said with an indefinable accent, slightly hoarse but warm and soft, which made Rozal shiver. The large dark eyes, in the roseate face tinted amber by the blonde hair, completed his excitement. And the man who had reproached Turner a little while before for introducing him with a certain extravagance felt piqued by the young woman’s imperceptibly mocking doubt.
Ardently convinced, he replied: “I never exaggerate. I have, indeed, said that I will cross the Atlantic, and I shall keep my word.”
“I beg your pardon, Monsieur. I don’t know. The French are so witty, sometimes…but I can see that you’re speaking seriously.”
Rozal felt increasingly prey to a strange disturbance. He had the strange sensation that an immense good fortune had arrived, at the same time as a sharp anxiety. He looked around like a man in distress, hoping to hold on to Turner, but his friend had disappeared, captured by a thin brunette in a revealing dress.
Henri Rozal had not had much time, thus far, to think about love. Too absorbed by his research, he had only devoted his hours of boredom to women. Now, he would have liked to say to this young woman, about whom he knew nothing, words that coax, caress and conquer—but which he did not know!
“I’m not like so many others,” he replied. “I shall succeed I what I want to do, or re-enter the obscure mass of things of my own accord.”
“Have you been involved in aviation for a long time, Monsieur? That’s curious—I’ve never heard your name pronounced, and yet, I’m passionate about everything concerning this new human endeavor.”
Rozal smiled. “Indeed, Mademoiselle, I have not set any official records, nor won any prizes offered by Maecenases. I don’t have any appetite for exhibitions. Certainly, I have no scorn for the professionals who have made fortunes, and who, besides, are my best friends—but they do one thing, I another. When I fly, it’s to study as a technician the effects of the air on the apparatus I’m in—the causes of instability, the reflexes it’s necessary to amplify and those that it’s necessary to combat. All of that is in order to bring to perfection, before the others, the definitive airplane, to which I shall adapt the engine of the future. So don’t be astonished, Mademoiselle, if my modest achievements have not made much noise.”
“I’m confused, Monsieur…yes, confused, for I’m keen to be the young woman best-informed about the bird-men.”
“You like the sport a great deal, then?”
The young woman put her hands together in an instinctive gesture that betrayed her ardor, and her dark eyes filled with admiration.
“I adore it!” she said. “While I was still a child, my father took me to Dayton, where the Wright brothers, whom he knew, where carrying out their exciting flights. In that era, people were skeptical, but not me. I believed, ardently—and my child’s eyes have retained the image of the great canvas bird that I saw flying over the immense meadow. I was only twelve years old then, but when the two little bicycle-makers of Dayton explained the future of aviation to my father, in front of me, I drank in their words, and my eyes contemplated their faces as they would have gazed at gods!”
Once again, those great dark eyes, open to the mystery of discovery, fixed themselves on Henri Rozal, and he thought that they had, for him, the curious admiration of the little girl in Dayton. Then he felt a little more intimidated.
“Yes,” the young woman continued, “that love for and haunting obsession with aerial navigation has never left me. I have the same enthusiasm for everything great that humans realize—and every individual who succeeds, in our epoch, in a feat that makes him a hero, an innovator, a precursor, in, in my eyes, worthy of all glory. That’s why I loved my father so much.”
Henri Rozal would have liked to take advantage of that confession to ask a question that would have told him who the strange and beautiful unknown woman was, but he noticed that she had pronounced the last sentence with restrained emotion. He saw, too, that his admirer’s eyes were imbued with a sudden sadness, and guessed that the father was dead. For that reason, he kept quiet, fearing to be indiscreet.
As the silence extended, he had an intuition that she was about to go away, doubtless to lose herself in the elegant crowd—and at that idea, he suddenly experienced a pain in his heart.
Oh dear! he thought. Am I in love?
The unexpectedness of such an adventure stupefied him. To be sure, it was not the first time that he had attracted the attention of pretty women. He was too handsome not to have caused a few hearts to beat amorously, even before taking up aviation—but he had never been moved. Could it be that a bold stranger, because she had golden hair, large dark eyes and had told him that as a child she had preferred aircraft to her dolls, was about to turn his head?
Rozal felt furious with himself. However, at the gesture of farewell that the young woman made, he understood that it was no longer possible for him to let her leave.
“I’m glad to learn, Mademoiselle,” he ventured, “that a pretty young woman exists who is neither obsessed with nor entirely absorbed by clothes and snobbery. I never go into society, and my presence here is an exception. I rejoice wholeheartedly in the hazard that had allowed me to imprint your exquisite appearance in my memory.”
He had not completed that sentence when, already, he wanted to take it back. The unknown woman’s face had suddenly clouded over; it even seemed to Rozal that he had just disappointed her—and that could only augment and exasperate his anguish.
Now, the young woman said: “You must not regret, Monsieur, the days devoted to your science, to your efforts. You would have had all my admiration and my esteem, if I had learned from Monsieur Edmund Russell that you live outside mundane preoccupations. Why have you vexed me, almost, with a banal compliment
?”
Rozal was suffering cruelly, and his face clearly expressed the sentiments he was feeling. He stammered: “I beg your pardon, Mademoiselle...”
She raised her dark eyes and considered him momentarily, read the thought in his clear pupils, and held out her hand to him.
“Goodbye, Monsieur. I’m glad to have met you. When you’ve accomplished the magnificent feat of which I believe you to be capable, be sure that someone will be admiring you from afar and crying: Bravo!”
She smiled at Rozal and moved away. The engineer remained there, pensively, astonished at finding himself in that brilliant crowd, whose members were dancing now to the sound of an orchestra that had replaced the Hindu musicians for the time being. He did not attempt to continue the adventure.
Once, wanting to take account of the stability of an apparatus whose wings he had curved in a new fashion, he had fallen from a height of thirty meters. After the fall, he had remained stunned, with nothing broken, but empty-headed and with eyes deserted by thought. At present, what he was experiencing had the same quality of vagueness, doubt and dread that he had felt then.
And what of the American heiress with the thirty million? he thought. What shall I tell Nasenberg?
For he had just decided that he would not go ahead with that marriage.
A movement of the crowd carried him to the back of the studio, and he sat down on an old Gothic cathedral, beneath a golden canopy. In front of him, two young Englishwomen were dancing an Argentine tango, with a slightly perverse grace, amid the languid mystery of the red and violet light of the artificial dusk. Their supple bodies, molded immodestly in simple fabrics, emphasized their frenetic gestures, and the twitching of their legs made their short skirt fly up, showing the thin black silk panties that were their only undergarments.
Stimulated by this spectacle, Rozal shivered. Once, he would have pulled himself together and isolated himself in a corner to ponder his formulae. At present, he was interested in life itself; he was not insensible to sensuality.
Further away, other young women were sketching out polkas with one another. He saw an elegant blonde, draped in a blue silk mantle with an orange floral pattern, launch herself into libertine capers that immediately caused curious individuals to gather around her
Where am I? Rozal asked himself, with a sort of dolorous anxiety.
On one end of a Japanese divan, beside him, a formally-dressed middle-aged man was watching the celebration. He asked him, timidly, whether he knew the name of the lady in the blue mantle with the floral pattern.
“That’s Lady Rosenthal, Monsieur. You don’t know her, then?”
“I’ve come here for the first time.”
Obligingly, the middle-aged gentleman gave him a few explanations. “She’s the wife of a member of the English parliament. A great lady, very witty and modern. Rich. Her husband is also an important publisher in London.”
Rozal became bolder. “And the two young women dancing the tango?”
“The nieces of Admiral Stephens.”
“So we’re in the highest society here?”
The middle-aged gentleman considered Rozal with amused and indulgent amazement. The young man had doubtless just arrived from the provinces. “Do you doubt it?” he asked, mischievously.
“No, Monsieur—but I’ve heard so much talk of the rigorousness of the English and Americans.”
“That the spectacle of this celebration surprises you? Well, Monsieur, are you forgetting that we’re in Paris? If English and American women can’t amuse themselves here, where could they do it? Edmund Russell, the master of the house, knows what he’s doing in organizing these joyous afternoon gatherings, at which the American colony relaxes.”
“Then the members of Anglo-Saxon society come together here?”
“But of course, Monsieur…it’s very fashionable, this year.”
Having said that, the middle-aged gentleman moved away. Rozal would have liked to ask him whether he knew the name of the young woman who had spoken to him, and whom he had just spotted on the arm of a very elegant grey-haired lady of respectable and cordial appearance, but he did not dare.
Turner will enlighten me, he thought. He therefore set out in search of his friend. He discovered him in the buffet, with a glass of champagne.
As soon as he saw Rozal, the sportsman exclaimed: “Where have you been? You’re pulling a face! Take a glass with me.”
“Yes, with pleasure.”
A Chinaman clad in a magnificent blue silk costume ornamented with gold and red braid filled their glasses. Immediately, Rozal emptied his.
“Damn!” said Georges Turner, in a low voice. “For you to drink a glass of champagne in one go, something sensational must have happened to you.”
Rozal put down his glass. “I’m no longer getting married.”
“Ah! You’re more reasonable now! Bravo!”
“Not, at least, to the woman Nasenberg offered me.”
“What? You’ve already found another? You’re making fun of me, my lad.”
From Rozal’s grave expression, however, Georges understood that he was not joking. Besides, his friend explained.
“Just now, a young woman—an American, I think—told me, boldly, as is their wont, about all the excitement that the discoveries of aviation caused her.”
“Well, I don’t see...”
“My project of flying from Paris to New York makes me, in her eyes, a sort of future hero...”
Georges Turner burst out laughing. “But my friend, if you succeed in that exploit, you’ll have 100,000 female admirers.”
“I’ll only love that one.”
“Ah!”
Henri Rozal took Turner’s arm and whispered in his ear: “She has soft, warm, golden hair, the face of an angel, and amid those golden and rosy shades, immense dark eyes, in which mine drowned. It’s crazy! I love her, and I don’t even know who she is!”
“No? Well, since yesterday, you’ve made a specialism of paradoxical amours. Only a few hours ago you were marrying a multimillionairess you had never seen; now you’re haunted by an unknown. Is she’s here, point her out to me.”
Rozal shivered, and shook Turner’s arm forcefully. “There she is!”
With his gaze, he indicated the young woman, who was just passing by, still on the arm of the elegant lady.
“The one in white?” said Turner, looking at his friend suspiciously.
Rozal, his throat taut, sighed: “Yes.”
“Very well, that makes sense. You’re in love with Nelly Mackay, the wealthy daughter of the former machine-tool king. What’s the matter? You’ve gone frightfully pale. Pull yourself together, old chap.”
Henri Rozal turned a dolorous visage toward Georges. Weakly, he said: “It’s her that Nasenberg wanted me to marry. I said yes without knowing anything about her. And now that I love her, it’s necessary for me I renounce both my dreams on the same day...”
Turner was stupefied—but he did not understand his friend’s sentiment. “It’s all worked out for the best, then!”
“What! A woman with whom I’m in love, you’d want me to have the desperation or the shame of accepting from that trafficker Nasenberg? By virtue of a contract signed with him?”
Now Georges Turner understood. He knew the engineer too well to persist. He could only murmur: “My poor friend!”
Terribly pale, Rozal took his hand and said, in a voice that was suddenly grim: “Let’s get out of here!”
And they left, sad and anxious—while, in the hall behind them, enlaced women were twirling to the barbaric and languorous sounds of the Hindu music in the crepuscular studio, under the red and mauve lamps of the Florentine chandelier, blooming like exotic and luminous flowers of love, enervation, opium, prayer and tenderness, perhaps evil, but, at any rate, pleasurable.
VIII. The Mysterious Master
A private house in the Avenue d’Iéna, with a Louis XVI façade, at the rear of a vast garden to which very old trees added an ar
istocratic note. September is ending, in the gentle calm of a delightfully pure season. The sky is a pleasing shade of distant azure, and the sparse clouds are so light that they are reminiscent of fairies’ scarves borne away by the breeze.
The branches, already bare, of chestnut and plane-trees stand out against the sky in black, bizarrely twisted designs, like the pencil-strokes of a Japanese artist might have darted over a blue canvas. On the ground, among the autumn flowers, at the foot of proud chrysanthemums, the yellowed leaves of the great trees are finishing dying.
On the gravel of a pathway, two beautiful white dogs are playing together, chasing one another and fighting in a friendly fashion, sometimes trampling the flower-beds where the last gladioli and hollyhocks are raising up the darts of their foliage and the red turgidity of their flowers.
“Come here, Pretty-Fox! Come here, Young-Fellow! Come here!”
At the amicable call of the young woman coming down the marble steps of the perron, the two white dogs race forward. They gambol gaily around their charming mistress, yapping at her heels, for she is going to the far end of the garden, in order to read a lovely poem by Henri Bataille19 in the tranquil decor of nature, more beautiful on the eve of its hibernation.
The blonde maiden with the large dark eyes is a trifle melancholy. It seems that the same poetic sadness is floating above her golden hair that is carrying away the yellow leaves that fall, slowly and gracefully, from the tree on to the autumnal mosses. But the dream in which she is absorbed makes her more beautiful still, even more delicate of complexion, while giving her dilated pupils an anxious flame that enlivens their charm.
She sits down on a rustic bench next to a basin whose rim is covered with green slime, and, in the romantic surrounding of the season’s end, her white dress standing out trenchantly from the pastel shades of the plants and the patina of the ancient objects, she is reminiscent at a distance of a dreaming girl that Elves, passing through the air, might have abandoned there on a windy day.
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