The Wing

by Jean Richepin

  His closed fingers digging their nails into his palms, he clenched both fists menacingly. His bulging forehead seemed about to explode. The ridge of his erne’s nose, with the outline of a curved blade, was enhanced by the hollows formed near the tip by the harsh breath of a profound inspiration pinching the nostrils. His masseters tightened their steel walnuts as if to break his lupine teeth, which could be heard grinding with ferocious stridency. And his eyes, finally—hard, sharp, crazed, intoxicated by peril and adventure—the ruddy eyes of a petrel, for whom a storm is a celebration, were inflamed by such a blaze of fury that the blaze in Geneviève’s eyes was eclipsed by it.

  “It seemed to us,” said Yvernaux, telling his tale, “that we were seeing the white polar star blown out by red Aldebaran.” Thus he expressed the terrible shade of those ruddy eyes in that conflagration, by a purely physical but entirely apt image—he affirmed—and which might have given a painter exactly the right tone to represent “bloodstained water traversed by a flash of lightning.”

  The gaze by which Geneviève replied to that supreme attempt at resistance was so soft, so graceful, so seductive, so pitying, so sensual, so penetrating and so all-enveloping, all at the same time, that there really was—according to Yvernaux—no means of not yielding to it. It spoke so clearly, that gaze, that not only he and Aunt Line, who were habituated to read Geneviève, but also Gasguin, more obtuse in comprehension, and Joson, the stranger absent from her presence for twenty years, were unable to tolerate the prayer without having the desire to grant it, even if it required instant death.

  It said, that gaze, that Geneviève was acting in this manner fatally, that she “needed” to conquer Joson’s will, that it was necessary, that all the forces of their two unconscious selves were in accord in that respect, and that she begged pardon for being the pole toward which the magnet was coming, and that soon the two of the would only be one, and that it was atrocious, criminal and sacrilegious to attempt anything that might delay that magnificent, that divine soon, so desirous of coming into being, so long awaited, in which they too had been so keenly avid finally to be born.

  Oh, it said all of that, that gaze! What admirable, prestigious, convincing speech Yvernaux credited to it—adding, in good faith: “And we all heard it thus. And that entire scene, moreover, which seemed to us eternal, only lasted two minutes at the most. Yes, two—no more! Scarcely that, in truth, between the first step taken by Joson toward Geneviève and the shock, the explosion, the combination of the two elements, the...”

  But letting his lyricism overflow, too verbose when it had reached the “displaced state,” would risk never reaching the end of those two minutes, so long and so full. Necessity obliges recourse once again to the modest outline, undoubtedly more expressive in any case, with which he contents himself on days when he consents to remain on the threshold of the displaced state, to complete the depiction of that extraordinary scene.

  And the fact is that to that beautiful discourse, spoken wordlessly by Geneviève’s gaze, by the cattelinette gaze knowing that the triumph of charm is the surest triumph of all, Joson no longer made any reply, save for admitting defeat in the impossible combat. The three small steps that he still had to take were covered in a single stride, as his hands opened again in order to be extended. Supplicant or caressing? Who knows? But vanquished—and, at the same time, invincible.

  Aunt Line was still some distance away, all of her poor old octogenarian flesh trembling like a handful of dead leaves. Gasguin had unclosed his mouth and his eyes, and was breathing deeply, Yvernaux weeping exquisite tears that seemed to him to be pearls raining in his beard.

  And suddenly, they all saw Geneviève, during the stride taken by Joson, take one too, and let herself fall into those two arms, at the ends of which tender and prayerful hands were extended Her head leaned upon the shoulder of the man whom her childish visions had once apotheosized. She had a blissful, ecstatic expression now, her eyes blank, with no gaze at all except to see inside herself. In a distant, angelic, elect voice she murmured, in a breath:

  “Joson!”

  Then, utterly pale, and limp and cold—like a melting snowflake, Yvernaux said—she fainted.

  XXXVI

  To what petty causes the greatest effects are often due is a shamefully banal remark, and it is presumptuous to dare to make it again after Pascal’s celebrated fillip regarding Cleopatra’s nose. All things considered, however, we cannot help noting here the tiny event by which this entire telepathic drama, with all its force, was triggered and set in motion.

  You will recall that Joson, on reading in his English newspaper the first news and then the progress of the airplane, had not been overly excited. An amusing sport, no doubt, which he might once have taken up, if he had had the opportunity—that was all that he had seen. The idea had not even passed furtively through his mind that there might perhaps therein, if not today then some day, a means of reaching the magical city, as he had said jokingly to Julot, by air, flying. In the same way, learning from his mechanically-scanned newspaper about the awarding of the Alexandra Prize to some unknown person, rewarding a work on “the intensive cultivation of arid soils,” had not opened the slightest window on the possibility of one day fertilizing the desert in which the ashes of his Eldorado lay dormant. He was very far away from such dreams now!

  Suddenly, however, one evening when he was drowsily riffling through that six-page English newspaper, at the end of the three lines summarily reporting the prize, its amount, the title of the paper and the name of the recipient, that name sparked something like a hole of light in his brain, and then a jet of fire. And within his volcanic brain there was an entire eruption, in response to the stone that had fallen into it: Gasguin.

  Abbé Denis’ brother? Evidently. He remembered a professor of physics, to whom his mother’s vague cousin, or foster-sister, the grotesque Mademoiselle Anne-Herminie-Luce de Saint-Ylan, had been married off.

  Then, with a single bound, his memory had leapt to Geneviève. Thibaud Gasguin’s daughter, yes, that little communicant, the companion of his last vacation at Kairnheûz! And he had certainly not forgotten her. Four times, in exceptionally grave circumstances in his life, he had had inexplicable remembrances of her, like signs of some sort.

  Those recurrences, like lightning-flashes at the time, immediately extinguished in profound darkness, re-emerged now, all at the same time, melting into one another, becoming a single image of Geneviève, whose silhouette he saw against the wall of the ruined chapel above the sinister sheen of Kawchmoôr, whose laughter he heard like tony silver bells, whose gesture made the hair stand up on the back of his neck, whose odor he breathed in, of gorse, sunlight, seaweed, salt-flats and unripe apricots, and finally, whose distant and singing voice, at the moment when he had almost committed suicide, had repeated to him as in some sort of celestial telephone the litany of his forenames, names, titles and soubriquets:

  “Comte Elme-Cast-Jagut-Marie-Joseph de Ponthual Plouër, Seigneur des Ebihens, des Pierres-Sonnantes, des Treize-Îles and other places, also known as Joson, also known as the Little Chouan.”

  At the same time, all the drawers of his unconscious memory offering him their secret treasures, releasing the springs of their hiding-places, a geyser erupted in his consciousness, seething with countless details that he was not aware of having known. Geneviève had been a child prodigy, according to Abbé Denis, her uncle! The Comtesse and the Abbé had often mentioned marvels on that subject. Not during the little girl’s sojourn at Kairnheûz, for she had then been taking a cure to “descientificize” her, according to the Jesuit Father’s humorous expression, but in other circumstances the Comtesse and the Abbé had talked about the matter between themselves—and Joson had heard without listening, and retained it without knowing it. And now, he was intoxicated by it!

  Thibaud Gasguin is doubtless cited in error, Joson thought. They’ve put her father’s name instead of hers. The prize has surely been won by her!

  Tha
t idea planted itself within him with the penetrative force and barbed hook of obsession. And it was her—of that he was absolutely certain—who was the will-power of that obsession, which had cried out to him:

  “Joson, abandon everything. You’re a coward, going stale here like a dirty bourgeois. Yes, an Ethiopian bourgeois, but a bourgeois all the same. Fie! You, a colonist and a trader—you, a Ponthual-Plouër! You’re forty tomorrow. Is that an age for a man to retire? No. The magical city awaits you. The desert that is its tomb is fertilizable, It’s possible to sow life there. The civilization of long ago can be reborn there, if you wish, along with the life. It’s Providence that has made that child invent this miracle. It’s your mother who has dictated it to her, to extract you from your brutalization of satisfaction. The most beautiful of your adventures, O Celt, you shall now undertake. Get up! Go! Abandon everything for that. How you’ll get to the magical city isn’t important. Flying, if necessary, by air, as you told poor Julot. But since you know where the water is to resuscitate the monstrous infusorium of the fabulous city, you have no right not to go in quest of it, that Fountain of Youth. And if Geneviève was able to invent this ‘electrical fertilization,’ she might also invent the means of sending you to carry life there. On your way, Joson!”

  And he had hastily liquidated all his Ethiopian business interests, as if he were going bankrupt, at a loss, realizing his assets in order to devote them entirely to the crusade to reconquer the African Jerusalem.

  He had then embarked, and had arrived in France, and then in Paris, without giving any advance notice, without warning Geneviève, going, as soon as he had leapt out of the railway carriage, in search of the Gasguin domicile, and arriving—as an inappropriate hour: too bad!—dressed as a “globe-trotter,” as well as a savage and a madman, but in an impulsive surge that had lasted since his departure and would only stop in front of Geneviève, nailing him to the threshold of that room with the gaze of a tyrannical and fascinating serpent.

  For he told all that—and how much better, with the natural, imaginative eloquence of a Celt in poetic and adventurous effusion—to Geneviève, recovered from her faint, in front of the stupefied Gasguin, open-mouthed Aunt Line and Yvernaux absolutely drunk with delirious joy, with Geneviève ready to swoon again in incessantly-renewed spasms of ecstatic bliss.

  To that fairy tale, what response was possible? None, except that they all believed it, even Gasguin. How could they not believe it? Fantastic and implausible as the embroidery was, the weft was there, palpably, held in their hands. And the embroidery was real too, made of facts, not dreams.

  The Alexandra Prize had been well and truly won. The theory of electrical fertilization was in hand and the practical application ready. The fabulous city, the dead civilization to resuscitate, was no less real. Did Joson not possess its exact location, as he had said in the course of his inflamed narrative? And thus, none of it was about to disappear on awakening—for they were not asleep. They were living it, that fairy tale!

  And that was what the listeners, dazed with enthusiasm, proclaimed incessantly, Gasguin and Aunt Line by their expressions of happy bewilderment, Geneviève by the gently dewy tears in which her heart—which would otherwise have choked again—gradually relaxed, and the lyrical Yvernaux, finally, in trumpeting cries or the strokes of a gong with his metaphors could not help beating time, so to speak, for the verses of the hymn.

  For it was a hymn, in truth! We have not dared to indicate here its movement, its gesture, its accent. Yvernaux himself, when he tried to reproduce it with his imagistic language and his oratorical verve, with his mimes giving body to words and his voice serving as their wing, stopped half way, lost courage and gave up, saying:

  “That has to be it. It remains ineffable, irreducible to all translation. Think of that daughter of genius, whose entire soul blossomed in the florescence of her beloved loving her thus! Think of that hero, that modern conquistador, who has dreamed of the chimerical resurrection of a dead world, who is certain to see it alive, able to offer proofs in knowing its exact location, and who possesses, thanks to the chosen one he has finally found—or, rather, found again—the shibboleth of the miracle rendering that resurrection realizable! Think of the state of exaltation in which all...”

  And merely by thinking about that state, he was carried away into his displaced state, and with the first hobbyhorse that came along serving as Pegasus bestrode—whether it was the electrical fertilization of the Sahara, to begin with (as the first move in the game) or the fabulous city, a colony, he said, of the famous sunken Atlantis of which Plato speaks in the Timaeus, or the radioactive aviation that would supplant (or, rather, according to this ironic expression, “overleap”) the airplane, or the prescience of Aunt Line, or his own, relative to that prodigious “romance of the new age” (another of his terms)—and he disappeared from sight amid the whirlwinds of sonorous words, allegories, analogies, parentheses and symbols of which he is (he claims, in the manner of Du Bartas and Ronsard67 rolled into one) the Zeus, simultaneously the “Nephelegerete” or “assembler of clouds,” with regard to ideas, and the “thunderbolt-caster” with regard to images.

  At other times, even so, that incorrigible stringer of tintinnabulatory words, was able to emerge from his clouds and explain to you, in a clear fashion, not only ideas but facts—a much more difficult task for a lyricist. It was thus that he had strongly recalled, and that we can repeat after him, the most curious and the most forceful of the proofs given by Joson in favor of the prehistoric antiquity attributable to the fabulous city.

  “You’re not unaware,” he said, summarizing Joson, “that our Zodiac, which is hold in common with all the most ancient peoples, has not been bequeathed to any of them by any known source. Even China, Egypt and Chaldea are too young to have that ancestral honor. The civilization, then very advanced, that invented the signs of that zodiac, and fixed them astronomically, thus marking the calendar, goes back much further. The thing originated in the days when the Sun, at the time of the spring equinox, was in Taurus. We are proud of the calculation the precession of the equinoxes; those ancestors knew it and calculated it before us.

  “Of the six thousand and some years necessary for the March Sun to pass from Taurus into Aries, the people of that fabulous city had taken precise account in the zodiac discovered by Joson in the inscriptions he found there.68 Conclusion: that zodiac brings us testimony of a civilization far anterior to the Chinese, Egyptian and Chaldean civilizations. It evokes for us humans in the midst of scientific observation and culture sixty centuries before the famous forty that we contemplate from the height of the Pyramids...”

  When that forced an “Oh!” Yvernaux never failed to add:

  “…and would contemplate us, I dare say, with a certain scorn, in thinking about the precession of the equinoxes.”

  With two or three intimates, furthermore, he never stops talking about that sublime night. Night indeed, for the “thinking room” had, in truth, been a “talking room” until nearly dawn—something, he affirms, approaching three o’clock in the morning. And that night, the calm provincial house in the Rue Malebranche would not have been able to believe the eyes and ears provided by the small panes and lead funnels in the windows of the unexpectedly-illuminated and noisy little courtyard!

  It was not only lyrical saliva, a froth of foamy words transformed into multicolored bubbles, that was dispensed there, the worthy Yvernaux said—and he said it not without a certain disgust, which he sometimes had for the excessive verbiage of which he was more often the torturer but sometimes also the victim. Occasionally, therefore, he was keen to savor the taste of a conversation entirely composed of facts, decisions and actions.

  Now, that night had been sublime, certainly, not only for the beautiful things said, but also for the council of war held and the plans made to realize all those dreams as soon as possible.

  Firstly, it had been resolved that the theory of electrical fertilization would be subjected to immediate
trials and put into practice.

  “Not on too large a scale!” Gasguin had timidly objected.

  “The scale it requires,” had been Geneviève’s peremptory reply.

  “Amon!” Aunt Line said, supportively, who had limited herself until then to nodding assent, with sideways glances.

  “We shall put the 65,000 francs of the prize into it,” Geneviève continued.

  “And my Ethiopian capital,” Joson added. “A hundred thousand francs, exactly.”

  “With that,” Yvernaux exclaimed, “I dare say there’ll be enough to fertilize Arabia Petraea itself!”

  “Don’t laugh, Godfather,” Geneviève said. “But know that I would first like to try it on a soil of exactly that type. At least the proof will be conclusive!”

  They sought an appropriate place—not too far away! The gateway to the Sahara did not seem close enough. It was Joson who found what was needed: Arabia Petraea in miniature, the Crau.”69

  “And if the trial goes well…?”

  It was Gasguin who insinuated that “if,” with an implication of doubt. He had none, however, with regard to electrical fertilization. On the other hand, he sensed the impending corollary—the development of radioactive aviation—of which he was fearful now, since the prize had been won. For that money would be risked on aviation with too little chance of success, he thought surreptitiously, no longer having confidence in the new chimera hat Geneviève was beginning once again to caress.”

  “The trial will surely be successful,” she affirmed. “You’re certain of that, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” he stammered. “And…then…?”

  “Then,” she replied, with a gesture of faith fit to move mountains, “then we’ll set off, as you know full well.”

  “For the city in the desert?” Joson queried, anxiously.

  “Yes, of course,” she replied, quite calmly.

  “It’s just…well…in that case...” He hesitated, seemingly about to stammer, like Gasguin.