The Balloonist (18 page)

“As you know, our family is without a father. So it seems I am called upon to function in a parental locus. It is not a role I would have chosen. But my obligation in the matter is clear. In short, I am the tutelar head of a family, and one to which you stand in an ambiguous relation.”

“You seem to make a great deal of rigmarole about it. Why don't you sit down?”

While he spoke he fixed me with an unmoving and very determined paleness, exactly like Luisa. “It isn't customary under the circumstances. I must make it clear that my intentions in this matter are purely formal. I have no animus against you personally. But, in my function as head of family, it is necessary for me to call you formally to account for your actions.”

He spoke well, this lad. They trained him in rhetoric, perhaps, in the German military academy.

“What actions are you speaking of?”

“I am not here to relate anecdotes, which you know better than I. What are your intentions in regard to Luisa?”

Hurrah! Here we come to it! The whole business, including his nervousness and his rather amateurish hauteur, gave the impression that he was acting in a school play set in the eighteenth century, Schiller's
Don Carlos
perhaps. There was something incongruous about his standing there with his hat on and making this speech in the epoch of railway trains and coulomb apparatus. He wanted to know my intentions in regard to Luisa! Thunder and consternation! What were her intentions in regard to me? From all appearances he was capable of calling me out to fire pistols at each other over a handkerchief, this fragile youth with the determined set at the corner of his mouth, simply because through sheer accident (to oversimplify very greatly) I had passed a night with his sister in a Finnish farmhouse.

He spoke in
a birdlike but level, well-modulated, even slightly menacing voice. He was hardly more than an adolescent. “Might I ask how old you are?”

“That has no pertinence whatever to the matter at hand. I am eighteen.”

“You look sixteen, if you will pardon me for saying so, in any case too young to burst into rooms calling people to account for matters you can hardly understand. Have you much experience of women?”

“That is even less pertinent,” he said, stiffening. “I visit the establishments provided, as necessary for hygiene.”

“Bravo! Your hygiene seems excellent, as far as I can tell. In that case, what the devil business do you have interfering between two mature people who have contracted a friendship?”

“Do I have your word as an officer and a gentleman that your relations with Luisa may be described by the term contraction of a friendship?”

“Absolutely.”

“I have information that they are more.”

“Your information is erroneous.”

“You are aware that there is a fiancé?”

“So I have heard.”

“You don't regard yourself in that role?”

“I hope not.”

“You are aware that, in polite society, it is improper to offer attentions to a young lady to whom one's intentions are not serious?”

“My intentions are very serious.”

“And they are?”

“To instruct her in science.” I was not quite without malice in this. He was putting me out of sorts.

“My information
is that, last Tuesday at a quarter past three, you were affectionate with her behind a doorway.”

“I will never do so again! Bother take her and her kisses!”

I was firm too now and getting quite angry. I stood facing him and holding the soldering iron. I was at my most leonine; the points of my mustache bristled, no doubt, and the short stiff hair over my temples rose as it does on such occasions. We confronted each other; he turned even paler than before if that were possible, but he did not retreat an inch.

I waited for him to say, “A friend will call upon you this evening. Please provide him with the name of your second.” And what would I do then? Pack my baggage and go back to Sweden with my tail between my legs? No, by Thunder, not for this stripling! I would meet him in the Bois and no doubt end with a bullet in my pancreas or some other uncomfortable place, since they undoubtedly taught him to shoot at his Militärische Hochschule whatever else was on the curriculum.

But instead of pronouncing this formula he hesitated for an instant, his mouth gathering faintly at the edges as he met my glance, and in that moment his chance to be a Schiller hero slipped away from him. He wanted to live too, perhaps, and for all he knew I was a real officer instead of a fraudulent engineer-cum-librarian who lived on a diet of paper and had never been near an academy. His dark eyes never flinched, however.

“And so you affirm that your intentions in regard to Luisa are honourable?”

“Absolutely,” I replied in an almost gentle voice. I might have responded that Don Juan or even Jack the Ripper, possibly, were honourable men according to their lights and you achieved very little in the world by going around asking people to their faces if they were honourable, but perhaps he would find this out for himself in time, and I decided to leave the matter with this single word.

“Then I must be satisfied. I have nothing further to demand. I am sorry to have disturbed you.”

“You haven't disturbed me at all. It was a pleasure to make your acquaintance. And now, if you will excuse me, I will go back to my crystals.”

“You are a crystallographer?” “I am a magneto-electrical aereographer, and just now I am using this silver solder to affix these copper wires to an octahedron of galena. Stay and hold the wires in place for me, and afterward we can go to lunch.”

“That is
not called for in my function,” he said, stiffly as before, but with a slight trace of regret I thought. We parted amicably. He had called upon me with a quite spurious challenge and been satisfied with a blatant lie. What nonsense, to lose one's temper at a schoolboy! I had the impression that at a certain point in our interview—when I had managed to lower my voice and respond quite candidly to him as one human being to another, even though my candor was only partly sincere—he had in spite of himself felt an impulse of admiration or attraction to me—he was very young. In spite of his lack of prominent maleness, or perhaps because of this, he seemed to long vaguely for a friendship with me on equal and male terms, a friendship that would be the symmetrical opposite of that scene of antagonism in which we had confronted each other as officer to officer and he had called me to account for my actions. The young idiot!

I went back to my apparatus. The soldering was soon done, although the spirit lamp hardly got the iron hot enough, and I busied myself bending the hairspring of a watch into a tickler to probe on the surface of the crystal, as described by Krobenius in his paper. With growing excitement, forcing myself to slow down and verify each step as I went, I connected the magnetophone and put the receiver to my ear, then began scratching cautiously on the surface of the galena with the spring. Nothing. Some connection must be insufficiently soldered, or perhaps the arrangement of crystal and coil needed to be altered. Plague and perdition! How could I do any serious work with all these interruptions? I would do better to crate this whole bundle of rubbish and take it back to Stockholm, where I could work under excellent conditions in the laboratory of the Institute. And why didn't I? What in the name of electromagnetism held me in Paris, this city of women and perfumed puppets in top hats? Reasons of hygiene, no doubt.

And what did Luisa want exactly? Did she want a list of apparatus? Did she want to hold the wires while I soldered them to the galena? No, she wanted me to take her to the opera. A cape with a red velvet lining rather appealed to me, but I had never worn an opera hat in my life and I did not propose to begin now.

We had it
out in her boudoir, so-called, furnished with a dressing table and a certain number of armchairs, and connecting with her chamber, where I had not yet been so fortunate as to set foot. “Voyez, ma très chère amie,” I reminded her firmly but with a formal and even elaborate courtesy, “I am not here in Paris to enjoy the opera, or even cafe concerts at the Royal. I am here to do serious work of a scientific nature, work which in all modesty I believe to have some slight importance.” (It was not for her to ask why I couldn't do it in Stockholm, and a good thing it wasn't, because I would have been at a loss to answer.) “But at the very brink of what seems to me an important advance in knowledge, I am distracted by the necessity of escorting you to all these café concerts and other frivolities which—it seems you cannot attend alone without the danger of being violated in the streets. And if that weren't enough, now it seems there is this plaguey young idiot of a brother who visits me to pose these quaint medieval questions of honour, which I am at a loss to respond to even if I had the time.”

She seemed not at all surprised that he had come to see me. “Ah well, Teddy,” she said negligently. “He's a child, he likes to play at tin soldiers and imagines he's one himself. He is quite harmless and we are all fond of him.”

“I might be fond of him myself, blast take it, but the point is that all these interruptions and botherings are distracting, it's not the proper mental atmosphere for serious thought. Worth, the Royal, the Salle Meyer!
Your
existence is delightful no doubt, but what about mine? We've come a long way, it seems to me, from the Musée Carnavalet! It would be pleasant, I have no doubt, to be two butterflies flitting together over a sunlit meadow, but …” Well, she knew what I meant. I stopped talking.

“Ah, my existence,” she said with a little sigh. “It's very fine no doubt. Oh, how I envy you, my friend. You're a man, you can come and go as you please. And when you are a foreigner, no one knows you in Paris, and you can ignore what people think.”

Her manner of reasoning was helical, turning round and round a subject while rising in vehemence, but never quite getting to the point. If I could ignore what people thought, I might have responded, it was because I spent all day shut up in a rented room with a lot of wires and crystals so that no one had the slightest interest in what I did. If she meant my being affectionate behind doorways, as Theodor put it, that was at least as much her fault as mine. And what was the point about foreigners, since she was a foreigner herself?

“Evidently you
can come and go as you please too,” I pointed out, “since you were able to come to Stockholm without visible damage to your reputation.”

She gave me one of her firm, searching, slightly hostile looks. But there was no irony in my manner, or none showed, and she decided it was not tactical to take umbrage.

“And even to Finland, you might have added.”

“Even to Finland.” “You were pleased to be sarcastic, once, about the Italian lakes,” she reminded me.

“But Stresa is a very pleasant place.”

“No doubt. And this is apropos of?”

“Nothing, except that my Pondicherry uncle, who never comes to Europe, owns a villa there.”

“Thank you very much for the invitation, but, as I have tried to explain in my stumbling way, I have researches that unfortunately keep me in Paris.”

“Oh, you are a
thing
,” she declared, her mouth tightening in vexation. “I haven't made you an invitation.”

“And had you intended to?”

“Yes, I had, in due time, but you force a person into the most awkward situations, crudities even, through this ill-mannered habit of yours of leaping to the end of a speech before one has got there.”

“I am sorry. Please start over again and deliver the whole speech, and I will listen attentively.”

“What might have been a delightful sojourn you have now made impossible.”

“It is impossible anyhow, because my work keeps me here.”

“You can bring your wires and crystals to Italy. No one will disturb you.”

“I'm not quite sure I understand.
You
will not disturb me?”

“You take me for a frivolous woman, I know. How can I convince you that I am interested in serious matters? If fashionable young men were all that is needed, I can assure you, there are plenty in the offing.” (This an allusion, no doubt, to the mysterious and Peninsular fiancé.) “But if you will make only a slight effort of the memory, you will recall that our friendship began initially because of my deep interest in your scientific work. J'ai une telle envie d'être sérieuse!”

“In that case,
you can come to rue de Rennes and hold the wires while I solder them.”

“Then you won't come to Stresa?”

“What is it exactly that we can do in Stresa and cannot do here?”

“Oh, bother!” she burst, exasperated, and turned to the window.