The Phantom of the Opera
her. She gave her soul again tonight and did not give it to you... If
she will not tell you what she has been doing the past two days ... you
must go and ask Erik!"
He ran behind the scenes and placed himself in her way. She saw him
for her eyes were looking for him. She said:
"Quick! Quick! ... Come!"
And she dragged him to her dressing-room.
Raoul at once threw himself on his knees before her. He swore to her
that he would go and he entreated her never again to withhold a single
hour of the ideal happiness which she had promised him. She let her
tears flow. They kissed like a despairing brother and sister who have
been smitten with a common loss and who meet to mourn a dead parent.
Suddenly, she snatched herself from the young man's soft and timid
embrace, seemed to listen to something, and, with a quick gesture,
pointed to the door. When he was on the threshold, she said, in so low
a voice that the viscount guessed rather than heard her words:
"To-morrow, my dear betrothed! And be happy, Raoul: I sang for you
to-night!"
He returned the next day. But those two days of absence had broken the
charm of their delightful make-believe. They looked at each other, in
the dressing-room, with their sad eyes, without exchanging a word.
Raoul had to restrain himself not to cry out:
"I am jealous! I am jealous! I am jealous!"
But she heard him all the same. Then she said:
"Come for a walk, dear. The air will do you good."
Raoul thought that she would propose a stroll in the country, far from
that building which he detested as a prison whose jailer he could feel
walking within the walls ... the jailer Erik ... But she took him to
the stage and made him sit on the wooden curb of a well, in the
doubtful peace and coolness of a first scene set for the evening's
performance.
On another day, she wandered with him, hand in, hand, along the
deserted paths of a garden whose creepers had been cut out by a
decorator's skilful hands. It was as though the real sky, the real
flowers, the real earth were forbidden her for all time and she
condemned to breathe no other air than that of the theater. An
occasional fireman passed, watching over their melancholy idyll from
afar. And she would drag him up above the clouds, in the magnificent
disorder of the grid, where she loved to make him giddy by running in
front of him along the frail bridges, among the thousands of ropes
fastened to the pulleys, the windlasses, the rollers, in the midst of a
regular forest of yards and masts. If he hesitated, she said, with an
adorable pout of her lips:
"You, a sailor!"
And then they returned to terra firma, that is to say, to some passage
that led them to the little girls' dancing-school, where brats between
six and ten were practising their steps, in the hope of becoming great
dancers one day, "covered with diamonds ..." Meanwhile, Christine gave
them sweets instead.
She took him to the wardrobe and property-rooms, took him all over her
empire, which was artificial, but immense, covering seventeen stories
from the ground-floor to the roof and inhabited by an army of subjects.
She moved among them like a popular queen, encouraging them in their
labors, sitting down in the workshops, giving words of advice to the
workmen whose hands hesitated to cut into the rich stuffs that were to
clothe heroes. There were inhabitants of that country who practised
every trade. There were cobblers, there were goldsmiths. All had
learned to know her and to love her, for she always interested herself
in all their troubles and all their little hobbies.
She knew unsuspected corners that were secretly occupied by little old
couples. She knocked at their door and introduced Raoul to them as a
Prince Charming who had asked for her hand; and the two of them,
sitting on some worm-eaten "property," would listen to the legends of
the Opera, even as, in their childhood, they had listened to the old
Breton tales. Those old people remembered nothing outside the Opera.
They had lived there for years without number. Past managements had
forgotten them; palace revolutions had taken no notice of them; the
history of France had run its course unknown to them; and nobody
recollected their existence.
The precious days sped in this way; and Raoul and Christine, by
affecting excessive interest in outside matters, strove awkwardly to
hide from each other the one thought of their hearts. One fact was
certain, that Christine, who until then had shown herself the stronger
of the two, became suddenly inexpressibly nervous. When on their
expeditions, she would start running without reason or else suddenly
stop; and her hand, turning ice-cold in a moment, would hold the young
man back. Sometimes her eyes seemed to pursue imaginary shadows. She
cried, "This way," and "This way," and "This way," laughing a
breathless laugh that often ended in tears. Then Raoul tried to speak,
to question her, in spite of his promises. But, even before he had
worded his question, she answered feverishly:
"Nothing ... I swear it is nothing."
Once, when they were passing before an open trapdoor on the stage,
Raoul stopped over the dark cavity.
"You have shown me over the upper part of your empire, Christine, but
there are strange stories told of the lower part. Shall we go down?"
She caught him in her arms, as though she feared to see him disappear
down the black hole, and, in a trembling voice, whispered:
"Never! ... I will not have you go there! ... Besides, it's not mine
... EVERYTHING THAT IS UNDERGROUND BELONGS TO HIM!"
Raoul looked her in the eyes and said roughly:
"So he lives down there, does he?"
"I never said so ... Who told you a thing like that? Come away! I
sometimes wonder if you are quite sane, Raoul ... You always take
things in such an impossible way ... Come along! Come!"
And she literally dragged him away, for he was obstinate and wanted to
remain by the trap-door; that hole attracted him.
Suddenly, the trap-door was closed and so quickly that they did not
even see the hand that worked it; and they remained quite dazed.
"Perhaps HE was there," Raoul said, at last.
She shrugged her shoulders, but did not seem easy.
"No, no, it was the 'trap-door-shutters.' They must do something, you
know ... They open and shut the trap-doors without any particular
reason ... It's like the 'door-shutters:' they must spend their time
somehow."
"But suppose it were HE, Christine?"
"No, no! He has shut himself up, he is working."
"Oh, really! He's working, is he?"
"Yes, he can't open and shut the trap-doors and work at the same time."
She shivered.
"What is he working at?"
"Oh, something terrible! ... But it's all the better for us... When
he's working at that, he sees nothing; he does not eat, drink, or
breathe for days and nights at a time ... he becomes a living dead man
and has no time to amuse himself with the trap-doors." She shivered
again. She was still holding him in her arms. Then she sighed and
said, in her turn:
"Suppose it were HE!"
"Are you afraid of him?"
"No, no, of course not," she said.
For all that, on the next day and the following days, Christine was
careful to avoid the trap-doors. Her agitation only increased as the
hours passed. At last, one afternoon, she arrived very late, with her
face so desperately pale and her eyes so desperately red, that Raoul
resolved to go to all lengths, including that which he foreshadowed
when he blurted out that he would not go on the North Pole expedition
unless she first told him the secret of the man's voice.
"Hush! Hush, in Heaven's name! Suppose HE heard you, you unfortunate
Raoul!"
And Christine's eyes stared wildly at everything around her.
"I will remove you from his power, Christine, I swear it. And you
shall not think of him any more."
"Is it possible?"
She allowed herself this doubt, which was an encouragement, while
dragging the young man up to the topmost floor of the theater, far,
very far from the trap-doors.
"I shall hide you in some unknown corner of the world, where HE can not
come to look for you. You will be safe; and then I shall go away ...
as you have sworn never to marry."
Christine seized Raoul's hands and squeezed them with incredible
rapture. But, suddenly becoming alarmed again, she turned away her
head.
"Higher!" was all she said. "Higher still!"
And she dragged him up toward the summit.
He had a difficulty in following her. They were soon under the very
roof, in the maze of timber-work. They slipped through the buttresses,
the rafters, the joists; they ran from beam to beam as they might have
run from tree to tree in a forest.
And, despite the care which she took to look behind her at every
moment, she failed to see a shadow which followed her like her own
shadow, which stopped when she stopped, which started again when she
did and which made no more noise than a well-conducted shadow should.
As for Raoul, he saw nothing either; for, when he had Christine in
front of him, nothing interested him that happened behind.
Chapter XII Apollo's Lyre
On this way, they reached the roof. Christine tripped over it as
lightly as a swallow. Their eyes swept the empty space between the
three domes and the triangular pediment. She breathed freely over
Paris, the whole valley of which was seen at work below. She called
Raoul to come quite close to her and they walked side by side along the
zinc streets, in the leaden avenues; they looked at their twin shapes
in the huge tanks, full of stagnant water, where, in the hot weather,
the little boys of the ballet, a score or so, learn to swim and dive.
The shadow had followed behind them clinging to their steps; and the
two children little suspected its presence when they at last sat down,
trustingly, under the mighty protection of Apollo, who, with a great
bronze gesture, lifted his huge lyre to the heart of a crimson sky.
It was a gorgeous spring evening. Clouds, which had just received
their gossamer robe of gold and purple from the setting sun, drifted
slowly by; and Christine said to Raoul:
"Soon we shall go farther and faster than the clouds, to the end of the
world, and then you will leave me, Raoul. But, if, when the moment
comes for you to take me away, I refuse to go with you--well you must
carry me off by force!"
"Are you afraid that you will change your mind, Christine?"
"I don't know," she said, shaking her head in an odd fashion. "He is a
demon!" And she shivered and nestled in his arms with a moan. "I am
afraid now of going back to live with him ... in the ground!"
"What compels you to go back, Christine?"
"If I do not go back to him, terrible misfortunes may happen! ... But
I can't do it, I can't do it! ... I know one ought to be sorry for
people who live underground ... But he is too horrible! And yet the
time is at hand; I have only a day left; and, if I do not go, he will
come and fetch me with his voice. And he will drag me with him,
underground, and go on his knees before me, with his death's head. And
he will tell me that he loves me! And he will cry! Oh, those tears,
Raoul, those tears in the two black eye-sockets of the death's head! I
can not see those tears flow again!"
She wrung her hands in anguish, while Raoul pressed her to his heart.
"No, no, you shall never again hear him tell you that he loves you!
You shall not see his tears! Let us fly, Christine, let us fly at
once!"
And he tried to drag her away, then and there. But she stopped him.
"No, no," she said, shaking her head sadly. "Not now! ... It would be
too cruel ... let him hear me sing to-morrow evening ... and then we
will go away. You must come and fetch me in my dressing-room at