12. 2
Painter and physiologist, American and Frenchwoman, the two of them are swapping tales as if they’re catching up after years apart. Marcelle pours out a long story about a pale girl in First Class, a racing-car driver’s stepdaughter, who may have a fatal blood disorder, “unless I’m mistaken, which I easily could be, in which case I’ve set off a land mine under a family’s happiness for nothing.”
“They’re probably not happy,” Henry objects, “not if the daughter’s ill, and they don’t know why, and nothing seems to help.”
Marcelle lets out a long sigh. “I dread to think that what made me speak up was my longing to be right. The thrill of knowing—as if I’m the only one in the world with the solution to the puzzle.”
Henry wonders whether every scientist, like every artist—like every person who puts in ridiculous hours at work they love—isn’t motivated in part by vanity. “You were trying to alert them to a grave danger.”
“But to what end?” she asks bitterly. “I’ve never heard of any cure for leukaemia, so what good is a diagnosis? When you can’t avert disaster, perhaps it’s better not to see it coming.”
“Ignorance is bliss? Really?”
Her mouth twists at Henry’s comment. “Well, not bliss, but… peace.”
“An illusory peace.”
Marcelle shrugs. “As all peace is.”
She can’t possibly share his faith; Henry knows that without asking, and it weighs on his heart. “You’re judging yourself too harshly. Because you’d no doubt prefer to know the truth about your own health—”
“Of course I would.”
“All you did was forget, briefly, that others may prefer not to know. People are so very unalike.”
“Yes,” she murmurs.
How unalike are Henry Tanner and the lovely Marcelle de Heredia, for instance; in so many ways they’re mismatched.
He wants, needs, to tell her another story. “My mother’s mother, a Virginian slave”—the word comes out without the usual sting of mortification—“she had eleven children. One by one, over the years, she put them into an oxcart going north so they could grow up free, without her.”
Marcelle’s face puckers with what looks like pain. Then it smoothens out. “And now her grandson rides the Paris Express.”
Disconcerted, Henry imagines his forebears in the fields straightening up to watch him rush by on a fierce, inexhaustible machine. The very puff of the engine seems to say Pourquoi pas? Why not, why the heck not?
“We are two free persons of colour riding on a train, are we not?” Marcelle asks. “And no one can stop us from riding this train.”
“No. I mean yes, we are.”
“And on the horizon, little more than four years away, is the twentieth century. What a ring that has to it.”
Henry smiles back at her. How crass would it be to ask where her father lives with a view to calling on the two of them?
In John’s carriage, Annah Lamor stands up to powder her face at the mirror as unashamedly as if she’s in her own room. She flicks a few smuts off her nose, then puts her little puff in its jar and pushes her way to the window, her orange skirt spilling over many pairs of knees. Her broad nose is pressed to the glass when a crow swoops by.
The Dubliner watches. Her plumage reminds him of Hermes, messenger of the gods, with his winged feet. Now, that would be the best way to travel—simply put your sandals on and fly…
After four o’clock today, I won’t see you again , he tells her silently. Unless he sought out her morbid Cabaret of Nothingness. Not that a fellow without a spare franc would be any use to Annah Lamor. Sometimes John thinks that women are all that make him feel alive, and he’ll never get to touch one.
The sudden darkness of a tunnel, fogged with the train’s smoke and steam.
Now at last the Express is surging into John’s own ramshackle quartier , Montparnasse. Six-floor rooming houses press close to the track. This transplanted Irishman takes an odd pride in the fact that the little tables outside the cafés are full, even on a crisp October day. An auction house is advertising a Grand Sale of Fancy Feathers . John spots, painted on a wall, the familiar coat of arms of Paris: a little boat with the motto Fluctuat nec mergitur —“Tossed but not sunk.”
Annah’s hoot startles him. She jerks her thumb at a passing street. “Rue Vercingétorix.”
It sounds like one of Julius Caesar’s campaigns.
“I keep house for that painter,” she explains. “Two rooms, top of number six.”
“You live at number six?” John’s foolishly disappointed that this chimerical creature is, well, spoken for.
A cluck of her tongue. “Not now . Years back. Gauguin.”
“Oh, yes, this painter, you said.”
“Yellow walls, axes, boomerangs.”
“Axes and boomerangs?” John echoes, bewildered.
“Two rooms, so full of stuff, no space to move! Always he puts me in his pictures with no clothes,” Annah complains.
Synge grits his teeth at the image. A Frenchman using this uprooted child as maid, nude model, and mistress.
“His friends come to drink and smoke and take photographs. I don’t mind photographs,” Annah says, “except no smiling.”
“You weren’t smiling?”
“I never smile in pictures. It’s stupid.” Her eyes are hazy with reminiscence. “In Brittany where they throw stones—”
“This Gauguin brought you to Brittany?” John asks. “The time they called you a witch?”
A nod. “He sends me back here to tidy up , so, ha! I sell it all.”
“You sold the painter’s stuff while he was out of town?”
“Axes, boomerangs, chairs, rugs, even the bed. Rooms look better. Bigger.” Annah’s lit up with pleasure at the memory. “I can’t sell his pictures, though.”
“No?”
“Nobody will pay a sou for his stupid pictures.”
And John’s laughing too at the idea of this horrible painter opening the door and finding nothing left, no little brown girl, no bed, no weapons, nothing interrupting the gleaming expanse but his own canvases staring back at him.
“That song with the railwaymen dancing,” Max Jacob says without warning, his eyes on the track that runs alongside this one, “I have it stuck in my head.”
“Hmm,” says his friend. “I’m afraid I can’t think of the one—”
“You know it, Kiouaup! That operetta of Offenbach’s set at Montparnasse Station? The foreigners burst in—” Max breaks into song in a startlingly sonorous voice:
We’re hitting Paris en masse,
Rushing into town
To have a blast—
Make room for us!
“I like that,” says John. Thinking that, yes, that’s why he and all these restless souls have fetched up in Montparnasse, out of all the villages that fit together like puzzle pieces to make up Paris. This neighbourhood harbours them, entertains them, lets them do what they like. Makes room for us.
“The head’s out!” Blonska’s kneeling in a gaudy puddle between Cécile Langlois’s thighs, considering a protruding fair-haired crown.
Most of the other passengers are gasping and groaning as if the pain is their own. This sight is impossible to credit if you’ve never seen it before—a tiny person half out of another person, on the very cusp of separation. One becomes two, the original magic trick.
Blonska turns up the hem of her skirt—no, her blouse is cleaner, so she yanks it out of her waistband and swabs the tiny, flat nose. The eyes mere slits. She can’t tell yet whether it’s alive.
Her gaze slides back to the lunch bucket on Mado’s lap as it has over and over since Dreux. The agony of this suspense. How to carry on minute by minute when you don’t know how long you’ve got.
Madame Baudin is holding Cécile up, urging her on. “One more push, ma chère .”
Nobody says a word while the blonde heaves. “Unhhhhh!”
Nothing happens except that this strange, scarlet berry with its slick of ermine rotates a little. The miniature nostrils flare. Not dead, then.
What Blonska reads on that small face is not so much innocence as a stoic disenchantment, a readiness despite everything.
Cécile lets out a wail of lamentation. She pushes again, hard, vainly.
Half-born and mother, locked together. Infant trapped in the vise of mother’s bone, mother pinned and tortured by her own infant. Miraculous creation, mutual destruction. Nature’s best idea and her worst. It comes to Blonska with a cold clarity: The shoulder’s stuck.
Just then Mado throws her a sidelong glance.
It’s enough for Blonska to look back and hook her gaze. She extemporizes crazily: “Mademoiselle Pelletier!” Barking the name. “Lend a hand, won’t you, just for a minute?”
The girl’s eyes narrow.
“It’s the shoulder, it’s jammed.”
A deafening silence.
“I know you know about these things! Won’t you have some compassion?” Blonska pleads.
Will Mado say Go to hell ? Will she burst out laughing and set off her bomb?
She gets to her feet, swaying stiffly with the motion of the train. She bends to set down the lunch bucket. As the handle peels away from her fingers, the thing nearly tips over and Blonska’s pulse stops—
But Mado snatches at it and steadies it. Shoves the lunch bucket into the corner of the carriage, under her bench.
“Oh, never mind your blasted lunch,” Madame Baudin says, incredulous.
Blonska has Cécile’s stockinged shins in her hands and she’s shoving the woman’s knees upwards and outwards. “Sorry, sorry, I’m just trying to widen—”
The next pain comes in like a bear. Cécile shrieks and strains, her soles to the sky like some parody of a whore. Are they all about to see a woman ripped in two?
“Brandy,” Mado demands.
“She’s had most of my cider already,” the oysterwoman mutters.
“Absinthe, then. Any bloody spirit at all.”
Someone passes a bottle from the back; eau-de-vie, it looks like to Blonska. Mado sloshes the brandy over her hands, rubbing them hard. Then upends the bottle over Cécile’s purplish, bulging parts—
Making her howl again.
“Hold her,” Mado orders, and Blonska and Madame Baudin tighten their grip as Mado approaches with a wet, shaking hand that’s marked with the dark line of the handle she’s been gripping all day. Remorseless, she pushes two fingers into the awful line between flesh lip and infant neck, between half-born and mother, until her fingers disappear. Mado closes her eyes. Blonska wonders how the girl can possibly find what she’s fishing around for in all that pressure and heat.
A minute rubbery arm flips out beside the tiny head as if waving.
Still full steam ahead, which is troubling Victor—when’s Guillaume going to start slowing down? Can it really be worth the risk of speeding into the city just to make up a minute or so?
It’s a straight slope down to Montparnasse Station, where they’ll draw into the leftmost platform on the upper level. Victor’s legs will be shaking by the time he gets down. He lets himself look forward to journey’s end—the finish line of this nerve-racking race. A bucket of warm water for washing himself, a hot dinner. He wonders what Joséphine will have made him tonight. She’s a good woman; he hasn’t a word to say against her. She just doesn’t know him the way his mate does.
Here’s rue de la Procession, and Guillaume finally gives the nod. With relief, Victor shoves the air brake’s brass handle all the way open.
No response.
He stares at the lever in shock. So does Guillaume. The whites of his eyes: a barked question that’s swept away by the smoky wind.
The Westinghouse system can’t fail. Victor swivels the handle back, then tries again, more violently. Nothing. Which is impossible. “Putain!”
Guillaume almost shoves Victor aside and yanks at the air brake. Then does it again. A third time.
Victor interrogates himself. Could they have depleted the air pressure in the reservoirs, not leaving enough time for a full recharge? No; since Granville they’ve barely tapped on the brake. Has the pressure cylinder cracked? Could a ball joint have popped and broken the tube’s link to the rest of the train? An angle cock left closed by accident? Even sabotage?
But the air brake’s designed to work by default, slamming into force as soon as anything cuts the connection.
Or is the answer a simpler one—has Guillaume applied it so very late at such high speed that the air brake’s just no match for the massive momentum of Engine 721? He dashes back to the tender, where the hand brake is.
“Reverse steam?” Victor roars. Not that it’s a question, really, but he’s never in all these years told his driver what to do. Not till this moment, thundering past the points at rue du Chateau with only, what, eight hundred metres to go, and his mind moving as sluggishly as honey. A plea this time: “Reverse steam!”
Has Guillaume even heard him? The driver seizes the metal cross that operates the screw of the hand brake and turns it all the way around, three times—not that those iron clamps chewing on the wheels will be able to do much except produce an awful screeching.
Victor can’t wait. He grabs the reversing wheel, opens every steam cock to push the pistons backwards. The train skids past a signal that has its arm in the horizontal position and its lamp flaring furiously behind its red lens. He can hear the operator rapidly banging his gong to sound the alarm, but still the terrible convoy moves on. Air, friction, steam— they’ve tried everything, but nothing’s working fast enough to stop this behemoth before the buffers.
Guillaume’s yanking the steam whistle now, two short, jerky blasts to tell Léon and Jean to slam on their own brakes. Victor belatedly remembers that the driver should have whistled to the guards when the air brake first failed. But you can’t do everything at once when everything needs doing and there’s no time… What else, what else? He snatches at all four levers of the sandbox to release sand down the hoses in front of the wheels to see if a bit of grit will help, though if a train’s going too fast, sand can actually make matters worse by letting the wheels grip the rails more tightly, but he has to try something, doesn’t he, he cannot just stand here pop-eyed less than five hundred metres from the hard oak buffers lying in wait at the end of the line.
Now even the ladies in the Gévelot party notice what’s been troubling Jules-Félix. “I’ve never known a train to whiz through town so,” Emma says uneasily.
“I suppose they’re trying to get us there on time”—Aimée checks her little watch on its chain—“or only five minutes late.”
Jules-Félix catches sight of a couple of railwaymen on a platform, their arms in the air as if hailing a conqueror—perhaps mockingly? No, waving in horror. Under his breath, in the comte de Lévis-Mirepoix’s direction: “I don’t believe we can stop.”
Aimée catches that. “What do you mean? How can we not stop?”
“We’re going to crash?” Emma almost whispers it, as if saying the words aloud will make it so. She’s seized her friend’s hand.
Not her husband’s; Jules-Félix notices that. Of course, he’s not sitting beside her as Aimée is. He’s on his feet, all at once ready for action, as if there were something he could do—he, one of more than a hundred helpless little ants in this speeding machine. The comte is also standing, staring furiously out the window. Jules-Félix supposes men (aristos and bourgeoisie and workingmen too) have been brought up to do this in situations of danger: to make themselves taller and mill around, however foolishly.
He’s pretty certain there’s no escape at this point. “Lift your feet,” he barks at the ladies. “When we hit, the train will shut up like a telescope, see?” Jules-Félix mashes his fists together. Matter will condense, and so will time. The ladies are not moving. “These benches will sever your legs.”
“Darling,” Emma says reproachfully.
“Get up!”
The two friends leap onto the padded banquette, on their knees, still holding hands. Should Jules-Félix try to interpose his body between them and harm? As if his stout frame could be anything but a crushing weight when the train hits. No, stay by the door. He’ll have some slim chance of being of use in the aftermath if the impact doesn’t take his own legs.
His bowels are a little loose from terror.
What hits him is the unfairness: Why me? Which is absurd, he realises, even as the train shakes and roars. Really, the odd thing is that Jules-Félix Gévelot, famed across the world (and especially on the soaked battlefields of America) for being what the plainspoken might call a dealer in death, hasn’t come within a whisker of it till now. Like the parasitical aristocrat at his side, Jules-Félix has done no military service, having been too busy as a captain of industry since the age of eighteen. He supposes he could be said to have killed untold numbers for France, albeit at several removes; does that count?
Another question: Will he prove a coward when it comes to it? A dummy, a dud, a squib, an utter blank? Faces in the window flit by. This is the final station, the end of the line.
Emma and Aimée are clinging to the baggage nets overhead so they won’t topple off the banquette; they dangle like apes. They have their faces pressed together, whispering—what? Prayers, pleas, vows?
Jules-Félix suddenly registers something: He lost his wife to this woman years ago. There are forms of betrayal so discreet that no one thinks to gossip about them: invisible adulteries.
And, really, has he any right to complain? This complicated marriage has had three people in it, and perhaps that’s been the secret of its success; he’s been allowed to immerse himself in work. So how fitting that all three of the Gévelot household are about to come to their end together.
Time, just a little more time!
But it was never his to hold, to hide from the great thief, death. It’s all borrowed, Jules-Félix realises, every second of it.
In the very front passenger carriage, Alice Guy and her boss stare out opposite windows. This seems much too fast for a train to approach the terminus; however are they going to stop in time? Alice sees a railwayman by the track, wild-eyed—then gone already. The next man flaps both hands overhead as if to tell her something. The Express is a comet shooting past.
Gaumont’s saying something, but she’s not listening. She lifts the moving-picture camera and sets it on the little table with a thump, its lens almost touching the window. Not a view of a train coming into a station, but the world as seen by someone on a train, or even the train’s own point of view. A bewildering succession of images, perhaps nothing but a blur, a waste of ten seconds of film, but worth a try, no? Everything’s worth trying once, especially if the train’s about to crash, and most especially if Alice Guy, twenty-two, has only a matter of seconds left.
She snatches the cap off the lens and starts to crank the handle as if her life depends on it.
At the very back of the train, Jean Le Goff lets out a yowl of frustration. What’s Mariette up to in his little birdcage in Front Baggage? But the senior guard’s not authorised, no more than Jean is, to do a thing unless and until the driver sounds the alarm. What the hell are the rollers playing at up there?
Jean eyes his leather-covered wooden crank. It’s as much as his job’s worth for a junior guard to slam on a rear air brake without permission. Then again, what’s the worst it could do—slow the train down? Which could only be a good thing as they skid towards the buffers.
Hang on, though. If Jean halts his end but the engine, tender, and ten carriages keep moving forward, will it break the coupling apart and derail the whole kit and caboodle in the middle of the crowded city; would it be like scissoring through a taut string? Chill sweat in the small of Jean’s back. If only he’d applied himself harder to his books during training or ever looked at them in the years since… if only he weren’t a careless connard who may be about to cause mass carnage because of his ignorance of the laws of physics…
Pellerin’s steam whistle, at last—two rapid blares, the emergency alarm.
Jean hurls himself on the air brake and shoves the handle to the right to open the valve all the way. For good measure, he seizes the metal cross of the hand brake and turns the screw twice to tighten the clamps’ grip on the wheels. A metallic scream below him, a terrible pressure and drag, but he can’t tell whether he’s doing anything to slow this runaway train…
God save us. His head jerks briefly to the left as they screech past his lodgings on rue de Vouillé. Nothing he can do now but cling to the brake to keep the pressure up and hope against hope that—
The form Léon Mariette’s filling in is getting longer; it stretches and sags. Impossibly long now, dangling and curling like a hank of wool and beginning to tangle itself into knots. He fights with the clinging fibres. He slashes with his pen. If only he can climb up to the top of the snagged vines, leap lightly, and fly free… but an elephant’s trumpet startles him. Birds scatter and scream. Which way is the danger? Louder, a short, repeated, stabbing sound; he can’t think, can’t move, can’t—
Léon wakes blinking, bewildered, to find his face glued to the crumpled ledger. He rips it away and only then realises he must have dropped off for a moment, for a minute maybe. The next thing he registers is that the awful sounds in his dream can only have been the emergency alarm.
He stumbles away from his desk; his chair drops with a clatter. The window shows Montparnasse coming up so fast, Léon grasps that the Express is about to smash. Pellerin’s alarm is an order to the guards to apply the brake, but which one, the air brake here on the floor of the van or the hand brake above? The air brake’s more powerful, unless the Westinghouse system’s somehow failed, which it must have done if the rollers haven’t managed to stop the train yet, so Léon throws himself up the ladder to his birdcage and claws at the cross of the hand brake, cranking it one full rotation before—