The Wing

by Jean Richepin

  And Aunt Line, grinding the teeth that she still had, without understanding what it was a matter of not doing, had muttered: “You mustn’t do that, Thibaud. I forbid you to.”

  Then, taking her Geneviève in her arms and looking at her with the eyes of a nurse, finding the best argument to obtain Gasguin’s certain obedience, she had said: “It’s there, inside—but wait a little bit longer, for it to ripen fully.”

  And she had kissed Geneviève’s forehead: a long-sustained, avid kiss, as if she were drinking the juice of all the future fruits that were seeded in the earth of that forehead. Nothing could reach the core of Gasguin’s heart better than such a gesture; all the depths of Thiérachian peasantry that were in him, and the seeds of atavistic stinginess too, had suddenly revealed themselves and had shown him so many riches to be harvested at a later date in that orchard, and how wise the advice was, in fact, not to let anyone into it, and not to pluck the flowers himself, stupidly, in order to see whether the fruits were already in formation within.

  At that moment, under the hypnotic gaze of Aunt Line, he had an obscure but profound presentiment of the high destiny reserved for his daughter. Oh, no longer dreamed by his paternal generosity, but glimpsed, in its imminent possible realization, seen in her competence as a scientist, that high destiny in which he would be largely involved, thanks to Geneviève’s modesty and gratitude!

  Meanwhile, resigned as he was to silence—and resigned with conviction, in the certain hope of the enormous gain that would soon emerge therefrom—he would not have been sorry to be able, without saying anything precise, at least to allow his delightful secret to be divined by someone. And his happiness would have been maximized had that someone been Yvernaux.

  He had missed his Yvernaux so much during that final year in which the advance signs of the final explosion were rumbling. How he would have loved to impart this new confidence—merely by his attitude, but what a triumphant, superior, overwhelming attitude!—to his old friend, recovered and reentering his life for the second time, and this time definitively, he was sure, to Geneviève’s godfather, and above all to the confidant of his former pride, so poor in comparison to his present pride.

  “Bah!” he said, sometimes, to the two women. “To him, we might perhaps tell everything.”

  “Not to him or anyone else,” Geneviève replied, still implacably resolved to silence. Isn’t that so, Aunt Line?”

  “Amon!” said the old woman, in the fashion of amen. Her gesture was as imperious and trenchant as the thrust of a saber, and her eyes aimed two pistol-muzzles at poor Gasguin, their gaze two bullets ready to be fired.

  The rare times when Geneviève relaxed her grim determination to keep their secret slightly were when she thought about her two months in paradise and her stained-glass windows representing Kairnheûz, and when, alone with Aunt Line, she sighed: “To the people out there—yes, to them and them alone—one might be able to say things.” And immediately, it was to the Comtesse that her heart reached out. “Yes,” she went on, “to the Madonna, for example, who spoke so softly, so tenderly, like music, and who must still be speaking in music in Heaven, where the good lady of Ponthual-Plouër is now, alas!”

  For the Comtesse was, in fact, no more. In the year following the departure of her son for his first campaign as a naval officer she had departed herself for the death for which she had seemed to be preparing herself, smiling the while, during her beloved Joson’s last vacation in the grounds of the “Mourner in the Sleeping Wood.”

  “Oh, that vacation!” Geneviève moaned then. “The last vacation! My paradise; her purgatory!”

  When Geneviève was in her moments of “devotion in the Breton mode,” as Aunt Line put it, the old woman let her languish there “like a New Year’s Eve mass,” as she also said, murmuring if needed the melancholy verses of the mass, with responses in the same tone. “That does her good,” said the nursing mother, who knew it. “So many tears that she bottles up inside, which don’t flow outside.”

  Then, with the prayer said—another of her sayings—in memory of the Comtesse, Aunt Line passed on to the Abbé’s memorare. She began it herself, knowing full well where to go next, abridging the route with that extremely brief anthem, said as if thinking about something else—as priests often do during belated evening offices.

  “Poor Comtesse! Yes, up there! And the poor Abbé too, of course.” And she knew that they would not be any further delayed by the Abbé’s disappearance.

  The story of it, however, would have been interesting, not to say strange—like the entire relationship between the Comtesse and him. Oh, how pure it had been, and of such a high moral tenor—such perfect heroism, in all—at least so far as the Abbé was concerned. For the Comtesse, apparently, had never experienced in his regard what is called true love, but can one affirm that he remained insensitive toward her? In fact, yes. In thought, who can tell? At any rate, when she died, the Abbé became a missionary and departed for China, and had not survived her by more than three months.

  Exciting as the story of that passion devoid of adventures might have been, though, and even if Aunt Line had been capable of knowing it telling it, or even of speculating about it with Geneviève, she was too certain that Geneviève had never dreamed of any such thing to want to talk to her about it—hence, in the manner of an insignificant anthem, abridging the route, her brief and indifferent: “And the poor Abbé too, of course.”

  The route to what was it a matter of abridging? To a period of meditative silence that followed Aunt Line’s vague remark. Meditative, need we say, in a hypocritical vein? No. Sincerely meditative, in truth, in the pleasant memory of the Abbé teaching his catechism, and opening her soul to new, fresh breaths of piety and mysticism. Meditative in an even more profound sense, nevertheless, in the expectation of the supreme prayer, to which the evocation of the imaginary windows of Kairnheûz still tempted Geneviève, and caused her first to repeat, as if bracing herself for the leap: “To the people out there, yes, one could have said things. Yes, said things! Everything!”

  After which, a final silence having led to another, very tender sigh, she added—heard devotedly by Aunt Line, herself in an effusion of devotion—words that were often childish, along the lines of: “Yes, isn’t it so, Aunt Line? To tell things to the people out there would have been possible. To the Madonna, for sure. And the ‘poor’ Abbé, amon, of course. And to HIM too, eh?”

  She pronounced that HIM as if it were written in capital letters. Then she continued, in a distant and almost inarticulate voice:

  “To him, who could have said so many things to us, too, and who loved us a little, truly a little, I’ll answer for that, and who must think about us sometimes all the same, a few little times, sweetly, like his mama, and with a musical voice like hers, in spite of his own commanding voice, and his prominent forehead, and most of all, most of all, you know, his erne’s nose and his petrel’s eyes.”

  XXIV

  Crises of that sort, simultaneously puerile, religious, sentimental and even a little sensual—quite unconsciously and innocently—had been, in effect, the last vibrations, in fading echoes, of the unconfessed love that the thirteen-year-old girl had once conceived at Kairnheûz. They became increasingly rare. The very last had taken place on the occasion of the work in which the complete resurrection of Geneviève’s genius was revealed.

  And it had been fortunate, for that resurrection, that the chimerical objet of that love had always retained that chimerical aspect. The young Comte’s reappearance, in living reality, no longer as an image in a window, might perhaps have sufficed to transfigure the ideal and mystical love and make it, quite simply—which is to say, humanly, and, in consequence, cruelly—passion, something overwhelming for a twenty-three-year-old girl like Geneviève. For, child-like as she still was, she was at the same time, in terms of her brain, a mature, strong and intense individual. What internal storms such an amour would have released in such a nature!

  Cloistered—th
at is the right word—in the closed and severe convent of Science, and not finding it severe, since she tasted grandiose joys there at her leisure, she had ended up no longer allowing herself to be distracted by the clouds of her memories, which floated less and less frequently above the cloister. At any rate, she had accustomed herself to paying only a dreamlike attention to them, no longer that of her thoughts.

  She still took pleasure, certainly—a sweet pleasure, mingled with a melancholy almost as sweet—in seeing the mirages of her paradise and the vaporous bliss of her mystical windows pass over the sky, but it was in a vague smile of her heart, not in a reflective effort of her brain that she now completed the dream of childish love so naively sketched ten years before by the soul of the first communicant. And in completing it thus, that dream of ingenuous love, she rediscovered that former soul, still pure and still candid, in a white dress and virginal veils.

  She sometimes still said, when she remembered Joson and herself at Kairnheûz: “How we loved one another at first sight!” But the tone in which she said it, without her being aware of it, gave the sentence the meaning of: And to think that, in spite of that, it’s over, over, over.

  Aunt Line was often saddened by that all-too-manifest meaning. She rebelled against it, however. One might have thought that she had a presentiment of the return, in the darkness of a perhaps-distant future, but perhaps imminent—she did not know!—of that meteor, as a comet, and the necessity of such a return for Geneviève. For in those moments of total renunciation of the old dream, she never ceased muttering: “But no, no! That mustn’t be. No!”

  And she urged the young woman not to abdicate thus, to strive energetically not to become an old maid. She doggedly repeated: “Yes, yes, how you loved one another at first sight! Oh, at first sight!” And she added, with the most insinuating glance, the most penetrating and lightning-like: “And at first sight it will be again. Oh, at first sight!”

  And as Geneviève remain cold to these promptings, even the semi-predictions that seemed to demand at least a request for explanation, the old woman persisted, replying, even though no question had been asked: “Will it happen again, you ask? Since I know it! Since I see it!”

  And she repeated, as before, but without any intention of mockery now, and seemingly in the manner of an incantation, the litany of Joson’s names, which she terminated with this formal prophecy: “And we’ll all three tell it, that fairy tale, three, amon, three, one a man, who will not be your father.”

  But all of it, even these attempts at suggestion, had become vain—most particularly during the last of the seven years that the final incubation period of Geneviève’s genius had lasted. In an increasingly grim silence, in a mental contention that was easier to release with every day that passed, the entire cycle of her preparatory studies, henceforth completely encompassed, in possession of everything that her father could teach her, her brain—which had reflourished in that first endeavor of the pupil amazing the master—now became self-absorbed, in a sense, gathering itself and concentrating itself, before blossoming into its thunderous explosion of aloes.

  And it was then, more and more rapidly, and also more and more conclusively, as the terminus came closer, that the physical transformation had taken place, fundamentally no less integral, of the young woman into the old maid. For poor Geneviève had not waited, as she believed, until the age of 25 to coiff Saint Catherine. She had begun to do so at the beginning of her twenty-third year, at the moment when her intellectual sun had emerged from the eclipse in all its glory, which was also the time when she had ceased to feel her amorous heart beating, no longer paying any heed to anything but the scientific genius seething in her brain.

  Farewell to that appearance of a robust plant, in full development with strong sap, that air of quasi-vegetal triumph which she had presented during her slothful fallow phase! Farewell to the avid appetites excited by the excess of work, as in boys by games! Farewell to the times when Aunt Line said, with the joy of a good woman seeing her brat prosper: “Even when she weeps, she still profits!”

  Changing day by day, after having only changed month by month, Geneviève had declined, shrinking on the stem like a plant, no longer now under the pressure of copious sap, but with the vein exhausted, the stem filamentous, the juice dried up by the withering gusts of an arid wind. All the flesh of her eighteenth year, promising a woman, seemed to be “shriveling” as they say in Thiérache of fruits whose skin tightens over the “supped” flesh—another local expression. For Aunt Line perceived these changes and characterized them by means of those old, expressive terms, when she grieved over them, in private, with Gasguin.

  The latter, to tell the truth, scarcely experienced any anxiety. What did that physical deterioration matter, since the intellectual being was still growing strongly? Was the one not the price of the other? Then again, didn’t Geneviève continue to “enjoy perfect health,” never falling ill, remaining strong and showing endurance in labor, in spite of her new slenderness? Even suffering, he would have found her as he liked her, with such a admirable brain, served by such an incredible ability to work. Was not the sovereign health that of the mind?

  Not to mention that Geneviève was, after all, no uglier for having the svelte and agile thinness of a young man rather than the rounded contours of a future mother! She was destined, was she not, for something better than that paltry fate!

  On which note, casually and disdainfully, misogynistic in a more refined fashion than before, and venerating his daughter all the more as he estimated her less womanly, he laughed in Aunt Line’s face.

  In the simplicity of her feminine heart, still sublime although that of a barren old woman, she riposted: “One always needs to be beautiful.”

  And she would have loved, in consequence, the flower of the blood of the Hescheboix, while developing the “something great” that she would eventually become, not to lose, even so, any of the charms bequeathed by Idalie...

  “My Idalie, my lovely sister, my little God!”

  So she hastened to add to Gasguin’s compliments regarding his daughter’s boyish elegance more serious compliments, such as: “Fortunately, she doesn’t entirely resemble a boy, even so. Just look at her hair and her leumerottes!”

  Gasguin shrugged his shoulders and only replied with a scornful “Pfft!”

  Geneviève laughed at that, but not Aunt Line. All her womanly pride up in arms, she put on her loftiest expression to riposte to things of that sort, without any comic intent: “Provided that she keeps our hair and our eyes, all will be well. And she has them, you know!”

  Needless to say, the “our,” applied to the hair and eyes, was not Aunt Line’s own but Idalie’s, concentrating all the beauty and charm of the blood of the Hescheboix. And that hair and those eyes, in fact, you will remember, Geneviève had always had, and had them still.

  That hair, fortunately so beautiful, indeed—long, silky and thick, with various rich colors ranging from chestnut-red to ash-blonde—Genevieve, unfortunately, seemed obstinately to hide from view. It was necessary, to know its real splendor, to divine it, beneath the hat, befitting a poor schoolmistress, with which she covered it, or even the dull flatness that she inflicted upon it by her fashion of arranging it in smooth bangs and a tightly-bound chignon. Even when she was bare-headed, with her mild, modest, plain face, that sort of hair-do invited, to the point of evocation, the frontal veil of a nun, and the desire to hide it in the shadow of a cornette.

  As for her leumerottes, in which, according to Aunt Line, all the magical virtues of Idalie’s eyes lived again, Geneviève did not often consent to illuminate “l’iau vert’ dins l’or d’chès gleus solel.”

  The flash of pride, which sometimes traversed them now, must also have passed, sometimes, through those of her cattelinette grandmother when she triumphed over some masculine will, as Geneviève did today over a problem—but where and when in the scientific genius, all in the brain, was the gaze of the merligodgière to be found, also po
ssessed of genius in it fashion, anywhere but in the brain: her luminous, perverse, seductive, profound, enveloping gaze; her gaze of an amorous woman damned of her own accord; and others still, gazes in which one had the desire to drown oneself and drink fire there, prestigious gazes similar, indeed, to glaucous water running over a bed gilded by wisps of sunlight?

  And yet, Aunt Line was right! Well-hidden as they were, nothing had been lost of the treasure of her eyes and those of her hair—nothing. Geneviève still possessed them. And Aunt Line knew both of them well, amon! One for having so often combed the hair of her darling, whom she continued to care for and always coddle as an infant; the other for having seen it scintillate fully the last time when Geneviève had said: “How we loved one another at first sight!”

  And if Thibaud Gasguin had not been so myopic, opaque and impenetrable to certain lights, no doubt he too would have contemplated the gaze of the cattelinette in Geneviève’s leumerottes, on the day when he had read her famous work anticipating—as was really the case—Monsieur Lodge’s discovery. And again on the day when, using a fragment of that work as a base, she had constructed in its entirety, in a miraculous improvisation, the entire edifice of his first paper relating to ionization as the probable source of the phenomena manifest in Branly tubes.

  For at certain moments, in profound scientific action, Idalie’s granddaughter immediately recovered, without wanting to or being aware of it, the gaze her grandmother had in profound action of another sort. Now, such moments as that, Gasguin had witnessed, especially during the aforementioned improvisation, from which he had drawn all of the paper written by him but thus dictated, in reality, by her alone.