The Balloonist (10 page)

“And so it's farewell,” I told her with a conventionally regretful smile.

“Surely only au revoir. You were going to give me a list of apparatus, and …” She didn't finish, she trailed off.

And what? Oh, those three little dots at the end of her sentences.

“To begin with, all that is needed is a head, my dear lady. And a library full of books.”

“You are pleased to mock at me. It is only your male conceit. At least you might tell me the books to read.”

“I am very pressed. I leave Paris for Stockholm tomorrow.”

“And what is it that calls you back?” she inquired sweetly.

“Another affection, perhaps?” (
Another
, I noted, was a very interesting and perhaps even slightly presumptuous locution on her part.)

“Only a balloon ascension, to tell the truth.”

“I would adore a balloon ascension. You must take me with you.”

It was difficult for me to explain to her why, given the mores of our time, it was impossible for a well-bred young woman to remain for fifteen or twenty hours suspended in a basket with a man without recourse to the amenities of civilisation. “I am sorry. It is not some sort of a picnic, you know. It's a serious scientific venture, involving hard work, boring details, and so on.”

“I am not
afraid of hard work and I am not easily bored. Surely I could be useful. I could take readings of your barometer or something.”

“Goodbye, mademoiselle,” I told her, smiling and offering my hand.

“Au revoir,” she corrected me, smiling just as conventionally.

Immediately upon my return to the Royal Institute I began preparations for the flight I had projected from the Stockholm district to southern Finland, the purpose of which was to try out in practice the steering apparatus I had finally devised after a good many years of thought. The route I planned was suited to this end because it lay mainly over the sea, where the guide ropes were less likely to become entangled in the landscape or otherwise damaged. I had written to Waldemer before I left Paris to invite him to accompany me on this flight. Unfortunately, I explained, I would be unable to pay his transatlantic expenses, since the flight was supported only by a very small appropriation from the Institute, but I hoped that his newspaper would finance his voyage to Europe in return for exclusive coverage. When I came back from Paris, however, I found a letter from New York on my desk. Waldemer was unable to extract the travel money from his editor and besides, a thousand regrets, he was occupied with another assignment which would keep him busy for several months, a comprehensive series of articles on the tinned-food industry, which was on the point of bringing the highest refinements of the palate to the masses. It was clear from his letter that he genuinely regretted not to be with me, although this was not because he preferred my company to that of the soup magnates; it was because he regarded aeronavigation as a more important technical development than the preservation of food. He would have and
did
prefer my company to that of soup magnates, let it be clear; it was just that his personal pleasures were always a secondary consideration with Waldemer. He was a dedicated and consecrated professional, a hero of modern journalism. It was too bad, because to tell the truth I enjoyed
his
company (I was not quite so consecrated), and besides, he was an invaluable assistant and one I had taken a great deal of pains and effort to train.

The aeronautical side of this particular flight, however, would not be excessively demanding, and in a pinch I could always manage the newly invented guide ropes by myself. What then did I need a partner for at all? I answered my own question: the balloon was designed to elevate approximately a hundred and
fifty kilograms, and lacking this weight it would be necessary to carry along sandbags or something else to make up for it. Surely some human being could be found who was at least more useful than a sandbag, if only for reading the barometer. How had that example got into my head? Why did I telegraph Luisa? It was a folly. I think more than anything else I did it to challenge, through a definite and quite concrete proposal, her feminine whim of the kind she was always expressing without any notion of the practical entailments, declaring her readiness to be hypnotized, to go down into coal mines, to be present at a dissection, etc., simply to indicate that she was as sturdy and as reckless as any man. After a while you felt a malicious but irresistible impulse to say, Here is the corpse, dear lady, take up the scalpel yourself and find the hypogastric nerve, climb into the coal basket, and don't blame me if you soil your gown. This was a dangerous tactic with Luisa. If I had known her as well as I did later, I would not have tried it.

To cut the matter short, I telegraphed asking her to join me on the flight to Finland and received an answer almost with the speed of the electrical impulse. Her reply was precise, orderly, and substantial, detailing exactly which train she was taking in order to arrive at the Kungsholm Station on the following Monday, and adding that she was bringing along dust-proof travelling clothes and a salt reputed to be specific against altitude. Why dust-proof? Did she imagine the balloon was dusty? Probably she had noticed the clothes in a ladies' magazine. As for altitude, the steering apparatus I proposed to try out depended on the balloon remaining quite close to the earth and it was doubtful that we would rise even as high as the Vendôme column, but I didn't bother to send a counter-telegram explaining all this to her. Instead, I instructed the workmen to prepare the balloon for an ascension on Tuesday, weather permitting, and then busied myself collecting the instruments and charts I needed.

On Monday at three o'clock in the afternoon I met her at the station. She was impeccably clad in a surcoat with blue fox fur at the hem, the same fur at the tops of her boots, and a muff to match, and she was followed by a porter pushing an enormous wagon full of luggage. The portents were not good. Removing one hand gracefully from the muff, she offered it to me and then restored it to its warm place. It was an ordinary day in May, the temperature was quite mild. “Sweden!” she exulted, tossing the hair from her high forehead. “Comme c'est charmant! I love the air, it smells of something like ship's tar. And those fillettes, the little girls with the riding crops—” (I had no idea what she was talking about)-”elles sont délicieuses. Where do you live?”

Without responding
in any precise way to this question, I told her I had arranged lodgings for her for the night in a small hotel near the Institute. “Ah,” she replied, delighted with everything. “How very thoughtful of you.” Just as graciously she followed me to the end of the platform and smiled winningly at the porter while I tipped him, and allowed herself to be put into a cab. It was mean and curmudgeonly of me to reflect that if I had been meeting Waldemer it would not have been necessary for me to tip the porter for carrying
his
baggage. Contrary to my expectations, it was possible to affix all her bags in or on the cab in some way, top, sides, and rear. We went off. It was five minutes to the hotel.

What in the blazes was I to do with her? I had other things to occupy me during the evening—the final adjustment of instruments, a call at the weather office to look at the maps. She was charming, fragrant, feminine, flattering, accommodating, cheerful, and quite imperious in her need to be entertained or otherwise done something with at every moment. At the hotel, which was a modest affair without a lift, she signed the register in a fine baroque hand and then followed the ill-humoured hotel servant as he bumped and battered his way along a narrow corridor with a portmanteau in each hand. “Oh dear. I'm not sure this will do at all,” she murmured from the depths of the corridor. And I too had begun to fear that the hotel would not do for such an elegant person and wondered what I had had in mind in selecting it. In actual fact, when we arrived at the room it was not excessively squalid. There were hunting prints on the wall and a vase of roses, even a square piano. From the window it was possible to catch a glimpse of the KungsträgÃ¥rd. She sat at the piano and played a fragment of Schubert, then sprang up and pulled aside the curtains.

“And that park?”

“The Royal Gardens.”

“Ah. Everything is fascinating, it is so different from Paris.” Everything she had seen so far was exactly like Paris, unless she meant the smell of tar, or the fillettes with the whips. “But you will take something?” she suggested with a small gasp or intake of air as though she had abruptly thought of it. “Some tea, brandy, liqueur? I don't know your customs.”

Declining ceremoniously,
and thanking her, I took my departure. Outside, the afternoon was growing chill. Perhaps she had been right to bring a muff. The Fiend carry her off! I slapped my hand on my forehead and left it there, the fingers working in the hair. The flight was ruined. I went to the rented room where I lived on the square facing the Institute, found on my bureau a chronograph watch I had meant to have checked at the jeweler's that afternoon, took it in my fingers, and almost threw it at the wall. Then I checked myself; it was an expensive timepiece and it had always run perfectly with a steady rate. Instead, I seized the bell rope and ordered something from the servant; tea, liqueur, brandy, what the blazes was my custom?

I changed into a dress coat, at seven o'clock I called for her and we went to dine at StallmästaregÃ¥rden. Shellfish on ice, potage au cresson, and roast beef in the English manner. With claret and French coffee the whole came to a hundred and fifty kronor plus gratuities to waiters. Luisa, radiant from the claret, expressed a desire to go to a café concert or some equivalent entertainment. She was infected with the tourist mentality; she was entranced by the difference of the new country from her own and at the same time she wanted to do in it exactly the same things she would have done in Paris. I consulted my wits. There was a chamber-music concert and the Royal Ballet, but these were too stiff and formal. My own pleasure in the evening when I had nothing better to do was the Chess Club. Usually, however, I studied. This particular evening it was imperative that I call at the weather office, which had promised to remain open for me until nine. At length I bethought myself of a kind of café and music hall in Apelbergsgatan where, if I heard correctly, beverages could be procured and persons sang foreign songs to the accompaniment of a piano. We went there in a cab. The interior of this establishment, I found when it was too late to escape, was so triste as to inspire one immediately with the idea of suicide. In a white-painted room lit with oil lamps we listened to a portly baritone sing lieder, while a female, perhaps his wife, thumped the piano along quite other lines. Luisa inquired as to the “boisson du pays” and out of malice I ordered two tumblers of our native akvavit. She drained hers
off perhaps under the impression that it was white wine, and even drank another when I replaced it, although at a slightly lower rate. The baritone had embarked on “Röslein, Röslein auf der Heide,” insisting on the refrain as though he hoped to subdue the piano through reiteration. Luisa had changed her dress of course and was now totally ravishing in a persimmon-coloured gown that rose from her feet to her bosom, quite simply and without a wrinkle, and then dissolved in a froth of lace. Her shoulders were bare. She did not seem to be cold. Everyone in the cafe naturally could do nothing but look at her; all conversation had stopped. Luisa was enchanted with everything. The waiter provided her with a bowl of nuts, and she found this charming, cracking filberts with a silver nutcracker and delicately placing the kernels between her lips, offering me a morsel (I declined politely, with upraised palm and a smile), and sipping her akvavit. “Stockholm, c'est un délire.” She would be delirious if she drank very much more of that stuff. What on earth had I intended anyhow? With some difficulty I persuaded her it was necessary to go to bed early, and we departed, leaving the other patrons with the impression that Frenchwomen (or was she some kind of Hindoo?) drank akvavit in public and lived on cracked filberts.

At her hotel everything was dark; we had to ring and wake up the boot boy. “À demain, my brave aeronaut.” She lifted her hand and held it at shoulder level with the palm open toward me, smiling, in an oddly touching gesture. “Your crew will dream of you.” I walked home. It was a quarter to eleven, too late to go to the weather office.