Yesterday Never Dies, page 21
It was all familiar to me; it all awoke resonance in my own being. It was amazing, bizarre, and absurd, but it was not alien. I had been bathing in its temporal radiation all my life. It was part of me...or I was part of it. It was part of the fabric of the world that had given me birth, and I knew that I would never be separate from it, even if I never heard the music again, and even if I could not bring its fantastic rhythm to memory.
For a brief interval, I felt comfortable there, as if I had returned to a country fondly known in my childhood, after a long absence. It lulled me....
And then it began to change.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE DANCE OF THE FAYS
As the dance of the fays was transformed, I had another, perhaps belated, flash of insight into the secret that Blaise Thibodeaux had been trying to impart to me. I caught another momentary glimpse of what the entire insanely complicated scheme had all been about, and what it had all been intended to achieve.
Echoes are only echoes; that is supposedly their tragedy. They are not supposed to be able to innovate, but only reflect, perhaps in distorted form, but nevertheless following strict rules of conservation. Such, at any rate, is the theory. But Oberon was cleverer than that. Perhaps it had taken him an exceedingly long time to learn that cleverness, but whatever he had been a thousand years ago, and whatever he was now, while still in the margins of the world, he would not always be, and would not always have been. And like me, he was not alone.
I had referred to his potential counterpart, on a passing whim, as his queen, Titania, and to the remainder of his company as his court, but as soon as the dance began to change, I realized that it was an absurdly limited analogy. I do not mean that I reconceived him as a Republican, let alone a Revolutionary, but I did catch a brief intuition of the fashion in which he was more than a prisoner of ancient convention, more than a blind follower in the leaden footsteps of tradition. He became, at the very least, a Reformer.
Marie Taglioni’s other had been released now; the thirteen years of turmoil that she had inflicted upon her carrier had come to an end; the prima ballerina had served her purpose, and taught her recalcitrant pupil a little—just a little, but enough—of the art of ballet.
I would like to be able to comment on Titania’s en pointe work, and describe her entrechats, but I could not even tell whether she was wearing some form of skirt, and it is possible—far too easy, in fact—to take any manner of speaking too far. The dance was too fast, the light to poor, for me to see anything but shadows—but what I can say, for certain, is that the company of fays, following the lead of their reeducated sister, began to dance in manner that was not merely an echo, or a mere distortion of a echo, of the dances they had performed before, in brief and sporadic moments of opportunity. Unlike the nuns in the opera’s ballet, they were no longer content to remember, to echo, to replicate, nor were they content to remember, echo, and replicate mere debauchery. They were determined to do something new, to create, to be artists.
And they could.
That was the most amazing, bizarre, and absurd thing of all.
They were, in essence, echoes; they were phenomena created and defined by the resonance of time—but they had fragmentary minds of their own, even if those minds would not be born for billions of years, and they were no longer content to follow their instincts blindly, to do nothing but repeat.
The ancient folk might have been long gone, in terms of their capacity to interact with human beings on a physical level, but they would never be absent while the waves of time carried the potential resonance forward...and they would never be entirely passive; they were still alive, still evolving, still capable of making something of themselves.
Their dance was, in one sense, the very opposite of the kind of ballet of which Marie Taglioni had been the world’s greatest exponent. The latter was highly-ordered and wholly artificial, making great demands on the athleticism of the body. The dance of the fays was wild and free, entirely natural and unbound by the restrictions of organic muscles and sinews. That contrast did not mean, however, that there was nothing that either art could learn from the other; even within the most orderly artifice, there had to be something of the free expression of the fays’ dance, to provide the raw material for the patterning of choreography; and even within the hectic exuberance of the fays’ dance, there had to be an underlying structure, an organizational framework. In either case, there was room for improvement, augmentation, and enhancement; in either case, there was progress in the art, and there was fuel for that progress in the possibility of exchange.
To describe the fays’ dance would be impossible even if I had been able to see it far more clearly, in better light; even if that flock of fluttering shadows had been laid bare by daylight, possessed of color and distinguishable form, their movement would have been too rapid, and too mercurial. It was, however, unmistakable that what they were doing was dancing. Indeed, as Marie Taglioni had said of her seemingly troubled passenger, dance was the very essence of their being. They were creatures of vibration and resonance, rhythm and reflection.
In a sense, I thought, we all are, not simply because the echoes of time course through us incessantly, but because we are products of all the other rhythms that shape and organize life: the rhythms of the day, the month, the year—and, more intimately, the rhythm of the beating heart and the blood it drives to nourish our being, the rhythm of love and sleep, music and affectionate touch. We dance through life, in our own awkward and bewildered fashion, always aware of its reverberation and its patterns; even in the midst of seeming chaos, even though we do not know the steps of our lives, the choreography of its scheme, at least we know that we do not know them, and are prepared to make our tentative attempts to learn. And while the echoes of our actions and our ideas are sustained, in one way or another, by the fabric of time, we never truly die—and, more remarkably still, never entirely lose our capacity for change, for the alteration of our effect.
While I watched the dance from the edge of the terrace, my attention was inevitably absorbed by it, but not completely. From the corner of my eye I perceived that I was not alone, and not merely in the sense that my arm was still linked with Blaise Thibodeaux’s. I was, in fact, part of a larger audience than I had been some thirty hours before, when I had watched Robert le Diable at the Opéra-Comique. My immediate neighbor, now as then, was the ghost of Blaise Thibodeaux, but the house was full. The tiny lights that had gathered so rapidly, in such profusion, had aggregated now, not to replicate the forms of human or animals, but something stranger and freer. They too were dancing, even though they too were spectators, not fays. I wondered if the individual lights would even be visible, without a microscope, and whether human eyes could resolve their collectives.
I could not. I knew they were there; I could see that they were there, after a fashion, but what they were was beyond the scope of my thoughts, let alone my technical terminology.
I spared a moment to look at Thibodeaux again, now that there was light enough to let me see him, and he responded, reflectively, by meeting my gaze momentarily—but it was merely an automatic reaction. There was no longer any active seer looking through his eyes from the utmost depths of time; he was no longer accompanied by anyone but me, and the crowd around us. He was an echo now, but because the moment was propitious, the echo had put on substance of a sort; it could see and hear and think; it could watch and listen, and appreciate artistry. The words it had spoken in the box at the theater echoed once again in my memory, as if evoked by setting, the stage and the dance.
“Yesterday never dies,” Blaise Thibodeaux had said then, expressing the dominant idea of his obsessive life, his stubborn search, “but such is the rhythm of time that one has to grasp its echoes on the wing.”
He had explained himself more fully now, because he had had the time to do so. Although it seemed a slight sacrilege to murmur now, in the course of what was, after all, a public performance, I spoke to him again, in a whisper, convinced that he might want to listen to me, even while he watched the dance.
“One can see why people, catching fleeting glimpses of such dances on the Breton Heath, or forest clearings, or in the sky beneath the stars, might mistake them for nostalgic memories of past debauchery,” I observed, “even though they are nothing of the sort. It is only in erotic experience, I suspect, that many humans ever come close to that kind of abandon—and even call it abandon, on occasion, although it is a feeble echo of this. If these spirits were ever flesh—and I beg leave to doubt it—I doubt that they are nostalgic for that limitation. I might be wrong, though, for I have long labored under a curse of sorts in that regard; and although I cannot imagine ever being nostalgic for debauchery, it appears that others can. But there are other forms of human abandonment, are there not?”
“There are,” he said. And he drew me forward again, insistently. This time, I resisted him because he was pulling me toward the dance, and I thought for a moment that he wanted me to join it—but in fact, he wanted to draw me into the shade of the tree.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “We can pass through safely, and will not disturb them.
He was right. We could and we did. And when we looked back, with the lantern now at our feet, the dance seemed brighter and clearer, but wrongly orientated, as if we were watching from the wings of a theater a performance designed to be witnessed from the auditorium.
I could no longer see the shadows of the crowd, but I knew that they were there: soldiers of Charlemagne and Hrolf the Viking, as well as countless other strays from the forest of Fontainebleau, and Anton’s other passengers, brought to complete a set of seven, and thus to facilitate, by some mysterious magic of mathematics, the advent of strange legions.
Blaise Thibodeaux reached up with his supple hand, and plucked one of the fruits from the tree. Although it was red, like an apple, it was round, with an outer tegument more reminiscent of some kind of citrus fruit.
He offered it to me, and I took it.
“Try it,” he invited. “It’s an acquired taste, I admit, but worth persistence.”
I bit into it—and had yet another flash of memory, this time of having read about the fruit that grows by the Dead Sea in the Holy Land, which is bright on the outside, but desiccated within, filled with the ashes of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil contained no such ash, but it was, as I had been warned, more than a trifle bitter. Nor was its texture inviting, for it felt like dust: the dust of the past; the dust of millions upon millions of bodies that had once lived, but had long decayed. It was like biting into the past...because it was biting into the past, but it was a past unsweetened by the sap of spring and the unalloyed desire of reproduction. It was the truth of the past, and the true taste of the past, bitter and sour and full of tragedy.
And I spat it out.
Perhaps that was a moment of destiny, when I might have changed the entire direction of my life. Perhaps it was a moment of potential metamorphosis, of transcendence, of apotheosis...and perhaps it was a mere threat of pixilation. Perhaps I was the worst fool in the world, or perhaps I was merely obeying a reflex.
Perhaps....
But there is no end to perhapses. What I did, I did. What I was, I was. If I disappointed eternity, so be it. I’m only human, after all.
The moment into which I had briefly strayed could not last for very long, and the human mind’s ability to stretch time subjectively is limited; we are imprisoned by time as we are by matter, and do indeed have to catch yesterday, today, and tomorrow on the wing, momentarily, if we are to catch them at all.
The dance did not stop abruptly, but it faded away with what seemed like undue rapidity. The fluttering shadows melted into darkness, and the galaxies of tiny lights faded too, still whirling; the music of the violin faded to a whisper, and then to inaudibility.
The magic branch contracted, before I had had a proper opportunity to study it. By the time I focused my attention on it fully, it was nothing but a walking-stick again, jammed into hole that might have been made by a woodpecker, in the bole of the tree above the master branch.
I had an overwhelming sensation of the return of substance, although I had never been aware of losing substance. It was also an overwhelming sensation of returning reality, although I had only been marginally aware of losing that. Until reality returned, in fact, I had no consciousness of how far from it I had strayed.
But I had strayed, and the returning reality fell upon me like a hammer, surged through me like a blade, gripped me like a vice. It almost knocked me down, but I contrived to remain on my feet, awake...and more alert than I had been for days, although I was not aware, at first, of exactly what it was for which I was striving to be alert.
My companions were still on the bank on the edge of the terrace, seemingly still asleep—but one of them missing. I looked around, wildly, and just managed to catch a glimpse of her as she moved between the trees, walking unhurriedly but purposefully. She was twenty meters away before I realized it, barely visible any longer between the trees as a distant glint of reflected lamplight, more ghostly and fey than any actual ghost or fay—but I knew that she must be at the water’s edge, and that she would not hesitate for long.
I began to run, having already thrown away my stick and hat, tearing off my jacket and kicking off my shoes as I ran.
I did not doubt for a moment that she really was still asleep, that she was a true somnambulist. I did not doubt for a second that she did not really want to drown, that what she wanted—or would have wanted, if she had been capable of wanting anything in her present state of mind—was to be saved. I remain utterly convinced that that was what she would have wanted, had she not been entranced, so very far from her true self....
Abandoned....
I did not see her fall; the darkness had swallowed everything up. I heard the splash, while I was still seven or eight meters short, still running but stumbling and making too little progress, impeded as I was by the undergrowth, which grew far more thickly beside the bank, although I had not noticed it at all while strolling there with my ghostly guide.
By the time I reached the water’s edge, three or four precious seconds must have gone by.
I dived in, and aimed for the point where instinct told me she had to be, only a little way downstream, not yet caught by the full surge of the midstream current. About that, at least, I was right; I managed to reach her. Three or four seconds more had passed, but I did reach her. I was able to take hold of her, to grip her solidly with my arms.
She struggled, but she wasn’t fighting me. It could only have been the stupid reflexes of her body, reacting to desperation. She wasn’t struggling with her mind, but only with her muscles. She wasn’t fighting me; she wasn’t fighting to drown.
And yet, she struggled. Her reflexes made things difficult for me, even though I was trying to save her, and needed her to cling to me, or at least to lie still.
She struggled.
I struggled.
And then....
The same newspapers that have made a cliché of the Unknown Woman of the Seine regularly carry reports of people saved from drowning. It is the most common form of heroism, now that we carry walking-sticks instead of swords, to save someone from drowning—usually a woman or a child. It is the everyday fuel of reportage and rumor.
But the newspapers only report the successes; they do not provide the true statistics. They give an entirely false impression of the ease and simplicity of the task, of its seemingly routine nature.
Can you swim? Dupin had asked me. Yes, I had replied. It had not occurred to me to think that twenty years had passed since I had actually swum, and to be anxious about it, because the ability to swim is one of those things that, once mastered, one is supposed never to forget.
What Dupin should have asked was: Can you swim in icy water, in sodden clothes, with both hands wrapped around a reflexively struggling body, fighting the clutches of eddies, undertows, and tangled weed? To that, I would have had to answer, I don’t know.
I know now.
In truth, the eddies, undertows, and weeds were trivial. Once the shock of diving into the cold water had passed, the effect was not so very bad. As for swimming while holding a reflexively struggling body, it can obviously be done—and in any case, the body had stopped struggling, and become inert, before I lost my grip. Heroes hang on to struggling bodies all the time, and when they become inert, they continue to hold on; for them, it is routine. Presumably, there is a knack to it, which I had never had the opportunity to forget. Perhaps the true odds were against me, and perhaps I was simply woefully incompetent. Perhaps the moment was against me, or perhaps I simply failed, through culpable neglect, to catch it on the wing.
At any rate, I not only failed to save Jana Valdemar from drowning, but very nearly drowned myself. By the time I lost my grip on her unconscious body, I could not keep my own head above water, let alone hers. I swallowed water, and sucked at least a little into my lungs.
Even though I was some way upriver of Paris, the water was horribly polluted. Human life has polluted all rivers by now, save for the remotest mountain streams. We are agriculturalists and livestock-keepers; we build mills and wineries; we export our own excreta recklessly, for want of efficient sewerage. River water is filthy, foul, and sometimes fatal—but it is not evil; it means no one any harm. Its pollutants are, after all, merely the dust of the past, and even their dangerous component is merely the molecules of entities that have lived before and will live again.
I tried to spit it out. I tried with all my might—but I could not.
It nearly killed me, and probably would have done, had my friends not woken up in time.
Lucien Groix was the hero. He was the one who dived in after me and pulled me out—but he might have drowned too, extending the chain of failure, had Auguste Dupin, the great logician, not done the rational thing. He it was who ran back to the carriage and got the rope, and threw one end of it to the Prefect, so that he, Chapelain, and Anton could haul both of us out.
For a brief interval, I felt comfortable there, as if I had returned to a country fondly known in my childhood, after a long absence. It lulled me....
And then it began to change.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE DANCE OF THE FAYS
As the dance of the fays was transformed, I had another, perhaps belated, flash of insight into the secret that Blaise Thibodeaux had been trying to impart to me. I caught another momentary glimpse of what the entire insanely complicated scheme had all been about, and what it had all been intended to achieve.
Echoes are only echoes; that is supposedly their tragedy. They are not supposed to be able to innovate, but only reflect, perhaps in distorted form, but nevertheless following strict rules of conservation. Such, at any rate, is the theory. But Oberon was cleverer than that. Perhaps it had taken him an exceedingly long time to learn that cleverness, but whatever he had been a thousand years ago, and whatever he was now, while still in the margins of the world, he would not always be, and would not always have been. And like me, he was not alone.
I had referred to his potential counterpart, on a passing whim, as his queen, Titania, and to the remainder of his company as his court, but as soon as the dance began to change, I realized that it was an absurdly limited analogy. I do not mean that I reconceived him as a Republican, let alone a Revolutionary, but I did catch a brief intuition of the fashion in which he was more than a prisoner of ancient convention, more than a blind follower in the leaden footsteps of tradition. He became, at the very least, a Reformer.
Marie Taglioni’s other had been released now; the thirteen years of turmoil that she had inflicted upon her carrier had come to an end; the prima ballerina had served her purpose, and taught her recalcitrant pupil a little—just a little, but enough—of the art of ballet.
I would like to be able to comment on Titania’s en pointe work, and describe her entrechats, but I could not even tell whether she was wearing some form of skirt, and it is possible—far too easy, in fact—to take any manner of speaking too far. The dance was too fast, the light to poor, for me to see anything but shadows—but what I can say, for certain, is that the company of fays, following the lead of their reeducated sister, began to dance in manner that was not merely an echo, or a mere distortion of a echo, of the dances they had performed before, in brief and sporadic moments of opportunity. Unlike the nuns in the opera’s ballet, they were no longer content to remember, to echo, to replicate, nor were they content to remember, echo, and replicate mere debauchery. They were determined to do something new, to create, to be artists.
And they could.
That was the most amazing, bizarre, and absurd thing of all.
They were, in essence, echoes; they were phenomena created and defined by the resonance of time—but they had fragmentary minds of their own, even if those minds would not be born for billions of years, and they were no longer content to follow their instincts blindly, to do nothing but repeat.
The ancient folk might have been long gone, in terms of their capacity to interact with human beings on a physical level, but they would never be absent while the waves of time carried the potential resonance forward...and they would never be entirely passive; they were still alive, still evolving, still capable of making something of themselves.
Their dance was, in one sense, the very opposite of the kind of ballet of which Marie Taglioni had been the world’s greatest exponent. The latter was highly-ordered and wholly artificial, making great demands on the athleticism of the body. The dance of the fays was wild and free, entirely natural and unbound by the restrictions of organic muscles and sinews. That contrast did not mean, however, that there was nothing that either art could learn from the other; even within the most orderly artifice, there had to be something of the free expression of the fays’ dance, to provide the raw material for the patterning of choreography; and even within the hectic exuberance of the fays’ dance, there had to be an underlying structure, an organizational framework. In either case, there was room for improvement, augmentation, and enhancement; in either case, there was progress in the art, and there was fuel for that progress in the possibility of exchange.
To describe the fays’ dance would be impossible even if I had been able to see it far more clearly, in better light; even if that flock of fluttering shadows had been laid bare by daylight, possessed of color and distinguishable form, their movement would have been too rapid, and too mercurial. It was, however, unmistakable that what they were doing was dancing. Indeed, as Marie Taglioni had said of her seemingly troubled passenger, dance was the very essence of their being. They were creatures of vibration and resonance, rhythm and reflection.
In a sense, I thought, we all are, not simply because the echoes of time course through us incessantly, but because we are products of all the other rhythms that shape and organize life: the rhythms of the day, the month, the year—and, more intimately, the rhythm of the beating heart and the blood it drives to nourish our being, the rhythm of love and sleep, music and affectionate touch. We dance through life, in our own awkward and bewildered fashion, always aware of its reverberation and its patterns; even in the midst of seeming chaos, even though we do not know the steps of our lives, the choreography of its scheme, at least we know that we do not know them, and are prepared to make our tentative attempts to learn. And while the echoes of our actions and our ideas are sustained, in one way or another, by the fabric of time, we never truly die—and, more remarkably still, never entirely lose our capacity for change, for the alteration of our effect.
While I watched the dance from the edge of the terrace, my attention was inevitably absorbed by it, but not completely. From the corner of my eye I perceived that I was not alone, and not merely in the sense that my arm was still linked with Blaise Thibodeaux’s. I was, in fact, part of a larger audience than I had been some thirty hours before, when I had watched Robert le Diable at the Opéra-Comique. My immediate neighbor, now as then, was the ghost of Blaise Thibodeaux, but the house was full. The tiny lights that had gathered so rapidly, in such profusion, had aggregated now, not to replicate the forms of human or animals, but something stranger and freer. They too were dancing, even though they too were spectators, not fays. I wondered if the individual lights would even be visible, without a microscope, and whether human eyes could resolve their collectives.
I could not. I knew they were there; I could see that they were there, after a fashion, but what they were was beyond the scope of my thoughts, let alone my technical terminology.
I spared a moment to look at Thibodeaux again, now that there was light enough to let me see him, and he responded, reflectively, by meeting my gaze momentarily—but it was merely an automatic reaction. There was no longer any active seer looking through his eyes from the utmost depths of time; he was no longer accompanied by anyone but me, and the crowd around us. He was an echo now, but because the moment was propitious, the echo had put on substance of a sort; it could see and hear and think; it could watch and listen, and appreciate artistry. The words it had spoken in the box at the theater echoed once again in my memory, as if evoked by setting, the stage and the dance.
“Yesterday never dies,” Blaise Thibodeaux had said then, expressing the dominant idea of his obsessive life, his stubborn search, “but such is the rhythm of time that one has to grasp its echoes on the wing.”
He had explained himself more fully now, because he had had the time to do so. Although it seemed a slight sacrilege to murmur now, in the course of what was, after all, a public performance, I spoke to him again, in a whisper, convinced that he might want to listen to me, even while he watched the dance.
“One can see why people, catching fleeting glimpses of such dances on the Breton Heath, or forest clearings, or in the sky beneath the stars, might mistake them for nostalgic memories of past debauchery,” I observed, “even though they are nothing of the sort. It is only in erotic experience, I suspect, that many humans ever come close to that kind of abandon—and even call it abandon, on occasion, although it is a feeble echo of this. If these spirits were ever flesh—and I beg leave to doubt it—I doubt that they are nostalgic for that limitation. I might be wrong, though, for I have long labored under a curse of sorts in that regard; and although I cannot imagine ever being nostalgic for debauchery, it appears that others can. But there are other forms of human abandonment, are there not?”
“There are,” he said. And he drew me forward again, insistently. This time, I resisted him because he was pulling me toward the dance, and I thought for a moment that he wanted me to join it—but in fact, he wanted to draw me into the shade of the tree.
“Don’t be afraid,” he said. “We can pass through safely, and will not disturb them.
He was right. We could and we did. And when we looked back, with the lantern now at our feet, the dance seemed brighter and clearer, but wrongly orientated, as if we were watching from the wings of a theater a performance designed to be witnessed from the auditorium.
I could no longer see the shadows of the crowd, but I knew that they were there: soldiers of Charlemagne and Hrolf the Viking, as well as countless other strays from the forest of Fontainebleau, and Anton’s other passengers, brought to complete a set of seven, and thus to facilitate, by some mysterious magic of mathematics, the advent of strange legions.
Blaise Thibodeaux reached up with his supple hand, and plucked one of the fruits from the tree. Although it was red, like an apple, it was round, with an outer tegument more reminiscent of some kind of citrus fruit.
He offered it to me, and I took it.
“Try it,” he invited. “It’s an acquired taste, I admit, but worth persistence.”
I bit into it—and had yet another flash of memory, this time of having read about the fruit that grows by the Dead Sea in the Holy Land, which is bright on the outside, but desiccated within, filled with the ashes of Sodom and Gomorrah.
The fruit from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil contained no such ash, but it was, as I had been warned, more than a trifle bitter. Nor was its texture inviting, for it felt like dust: the dust of the past; the dust of millions upon millions of bodies that had once lived, but had long decayed. It was like biting into the past...because it was biting into the past, but it was a past unsweetened by the sap of spring and the unalloyed desire of reproduction. It was the truth of the past, and the true taste of the past, bitter and sour and full of tragedy.
And I spat it out.
Perhaps that was a moment of destiny, when I might have changed the entire direction of my life. Perhaps it was a moment of potential metamorphosis, of transcendence, of apotheosis...and perhaps it was a mere threat of pixilation. Perhaps I was the worst fool in the world, or perhaps I was merely obeying a reflex.
Perhaps....
But there is no end to perhapses. What I did, I did. What I was, I was. If I disappointed eternity, so be it. I’m only human, after all.
The moment into which I had briefly strayed could not last for very long, and the human mind’s ability to stretch time subjectively is limited; we are imprisoned by time as we are by matter, and do indeed have to catch yesterday, today, and tomorrow on the wing, momentarily, if we are to catch them at all.
The dance did not stop abruptly, but it faded away with what seemed like undue rapidity. The fluttering shadows melted into darkness, and the galaxies of tiny lights faded too, still whirling; the music of the violin faded to a whisper, and then to inaudibility.
The magic branch contracted, before I had had a proper opportunity to study it. By the time I focused my attention on it fully, it was nothing but a walking-stick again, jammed into hole that might have been made by a woodpecker, in the bole of the tree above the master branch.
I had an overwhelming sensation of the return of substance, although I had never been aware of losing substance. It was also an overwhelming sensation of returning reality, although I had only been marginally aware of losing that. Until reality returned, in fact, I had no consciousness of how far from it I had strayed.
But I had strayed, and the returning reality fell upon me like a hammer, surged through me like a blade, gripped me like a vice. It almost knocked me down, but I contrived to remain on my feet, awake...and more alert than I had been for days, although I was not aware, at first, of exactly what it was for which I was striving to be alert.
My companions were still on the bank on the edge of the terrace, seemingly still asleep—but one of them missing. I looked around, wildly, and just managed to catch a glimpse of her as she moved between the trees, walking unhurriedly but purposefully. She was twenty meters away before I realized it, barely visible any longer between the trees as a distant glint of reflected lamplight, more ghostly and fey than any actual ghost or fay—but I knew that she must be at the water’s edge, and that she would not hesitate for long.
I began to run, having already thrown away my stick and hat, tearing off my jacket and kicking off my shoes as I ran.
I did not doubt for a moment that she really was still asleep, that she was a true somnambulist. I did not doubt for a second that she did not really want to drown, that what she wanted—or would have wanted, if she had been capable of wanting anything in her present state of mind—was to be saved. I remain utterly convinced that that was what she would have wanted, had she not been entranced, so very far from her true self....
Abandoned....
I did not see her fall; the darkness had swallowed everything up. I heard the splash, while I was still seven or eight meters short, still running but stumbling and making too little progress, impeded as I was by the undergrowth, which grew far more thickly beside the bank, although I had not noticed it at all while strolling there with my ghostly guide.
By the time I reached the water’s edge, three or four precious seconds must have gone by.
I dived in, and aimed for the point where instinct told me she had to be, only a little way downstream, not yet caught by the full surge of the midstream current. About that, at least, I was right; I managed to reach her. Three or four seconds more had passed, but I did reach her. I was able to take hold of her, to grip her solidly with my arms.
She struggled, but she wasn’t fighting me. It could only have been the stupid reflexes of her body, reacting to desperation. She wasn’t struggling with her mind, but only with her muscles. She wasn’t fighting me; she wasn’t fighting to drown.
And yet, she struggled. Her reflexes made things difficult for me, even though I was trying to save her, and needed her to cling to me, or at least to lie still.
She struggled.
I struggled.
And then....
The same newspapers that have made a cliché of the Unknown Woman of the Seine regularly carry reports of people saved from drowning. It is the most common form of heroism, now that we carry walking-sticks instead of swords, to save someone from drowning—usually a woman or a child. It is the everyday fuel of reportage and rumor.
But the newspapers only report the successes; they do not provide the true statistics. They give an entirely false impression of the ease and simplicity of the task, of its seemingly routine nature.
Can you swim? Dupin had asked me. Yes, I had replied. It had not occurred to me to think that twenty years had passed since I had actually swum, and to be anxious about it, because the ability to swim is one of those things that, once mastered, one is supposed never to forget.
What Dupin should have asked was: Can you swim in icy water, in sodden clothes, with both hands wrapped around a reflexively struggling body, fighting the clutches of eddies, undertows, and tangled weed? To that, I would have had to answer, I don’t know.
I know now.
In truth, the eddies, undertows, and weeds were trivial. Once the shock of diving into the cold water had passed, the effect was not so very bad. As for swimming while holding a reflexively struggling body, it can obviously be done—and in any case, the body had stopped struggling, and become inert, before I lost my grip. Heroes hang on to struggling bodies all the time, and when they become inert, they continue to hold on; for them, it is routine. Presumably, there is a knack to it, which I had never had the opportunity to forget. Perhaps the true odds were against me, and perhaps I was simply woefully incompetent. Perhaps the moment was against me, or perhaps I simply failed, through culpable neglect, to catch it on the wing.
At any rate, I not only failed to save Jana Valdemar from drowning, but very nearly drowned myself. By the time I lost my grip on her unconscious body, I could not keep my own head above water, let alone hers. I swallowed water, and sucked at least a little into my lungs.
Even though I was some way upriver of Paris, the water was horribly polluted. Human life has polluted all rivers by now, save for the remotest mountain streams. We are agriculturalists and livestock-keepers; we build mills and wineries; we export our own excreta recklessly, for want of efficient sewerage. River water is filthy, foul, and sometimes fatal—but it is not evil; it means no one any harm. Its pollutants are, after all, merely the dust of the past, and even their dangerous component is merely the molecules of entities that have lived before and will live again.
I tried to spit it out. I tried with all my might—but I could not.
It nearly killed me, and probably would have done, had my friends not woken up in time.
Lucien Groix was the hero. He was the one who dived in after me and pulled me out—but he might have drowned too, extending the chain of failure, had Auguste Dupin, the great logician, not done the rational thing. He it was who ran back to the carriage and got the rope, and threw one end of it to the Prefect, so that he, Chapelain, and Anton could haul both of us out.
