She started and blinked, immediately suppressing the reaction and punishing herself for it by biting her lip, drawing blood. “Pardon me,” she said. “I thought, for just an instant, that you had the same fear as...” Her glance of disdainful pity was for her father; it was furtive, for Joson was speaking.
“That your father might be a little terrified by the idea of such a journey is understandable, to say the least. But as for me, no—I have no fear of it. If I don’t seem to be leaping at the idea, it’s only because…well, yes, I’ll lay it on the line. It’s that our capital is insufficient. To find the place of which I have the location, even if we don’t go astray en route, by accident or miscalculation, it will take three years and require more than 300,000 francs. That’s why I said that, in that case...”
She was listening, letting him go on without interruption. That silence seemed to Joson to be discontented. Swiftly, he pounced on the mute reproach, and exclaimed, bravely: “But I’ll find what’s lacking. I don’t know how, but it doesn’t matter. I’ll find it.” And he too, at that moment, made the gesture of the faith that moves mountains.
Geneviève smiled—a smile, Yvernaux said, that opened every paradise—and murmured, very softly, words that, again in his words, had an enormous span in those open paradises.
“The journey there won’t cost anything, and will be made, not in three years, but in three weeks, then in three days—and finally, in three hours.”
“We were all looking at her,” Yvernaux recounted, subsequently, “with eyes ready to pop out of our heads—all of us, including Joson, in spite of his petrel’s eyes, and Aunt Line, who can see into her utmost depths. It was just that Geneviève had never, however softly, proffered such prophecies—enormous, I repeat. And we thought, in listening to them and observing her absolute calmness, her paradisal smile, either that we were crazy, or that she was.”
Suddenly Joson—who told Yvernaux about it later, when they had become close friends—heard what he had said to Julot as the latter as carrying him through marsh singing inside him once again: “We’ll come back by air, then, flying.”
And he understood that Geneviève, as he had foreseen in his dream, on quitting Ethiopia, was talking about the invention by means of which she would send him to carry life out there. He seized her hands, kissed them tenderly, and said: “I’ll go, then, whenever you like.”
“That was said,” Yvernaux reported, “with a simplicity, in its grandeur, that caused our eyes to retreat into their orbits and their swelling to diminish in a flood of tears.”
“Before accepting, though,” Geneviève objected, “at least wait to find out by what means…with what engine...”
“Why do I need to know the means, the engine?” he replied. “You propose it, therefore...”
“Geneviève,” Gasguin put in, “isn’t yet entirely sure…isn’t that so, Geneviève? Come on, speak. Be sincere and honest, as you have always been. Admit that your invention is not at the point of perfect maturity in which you could...”
She was visibly in torment. She kept quiet, even so—and that was a confession that her father was right. That silence weighed upon all of them. An oppression accumulated within it, stifling them.
“Yes, everyone,” Yvernaux said. “Everyone—and Aunt Line, this time, more than the others, because she was tortured along with her ch’tiote—everyone except him, Joson. And that without the shadow of an effort, very naturally, as befit a true son of those Gauls who only fear one thing, which is the sky falling on their heads. Did he even have that fear, since he was smiling at the thought of going to confront it—the sky. For he was smiling in his turn, not a smile like hers, opening all the paradises, but a smile so brave that all the devils in all the hells would have taken flight, their tail between their legs.”
And Yvernaux also painted that smile with this little image: “That’s how an épée might smile.”
Smiling in that fashion, Joson said to Geneviève: “Don’t answer your father. Whether your invention is ready or not, since you believe in it, I believe in it.”
She gathered in her entire being and said: “Well, yes, I believe in it. I believe in the science that...”
He did not let her finish, but exclaimed: “It’s you that I believe in, in you alone—and that’s enough for me.”
She tried again to speak, with an almost-childish stammer. “This is it! The engine…that which will replace the wing…you understand...”
Again he interrupted, violently by the gesture that clenched his fists forcefully, and very tenderly by his voice, which he made very soft, as musical as his mother’s, in order to say while looking into her face: “There is only one engine; there is only one wing—and that is Faith.”
XXXVII
What remains to be narrated of this story, very real in spite of its underside of strangeness, has nothing much to do with the particular purpose that is proposed herein: a physiological and psychological study—or, at least, a preliminary sketch for such a study—of a feminine genius situated almost entirely in the unconscious. The external manifestations of that genius in the subsequent facts, interesting as those facts might be, lend themselves more henceforth to a sort of chronicle, rich in events and scenes, than to a monograph, perhaps a trifle severe, of the sort desired here.
The strict accuracy and perfect authenticity of those events and sciences, moreover, cannot—it must be confessed, in all honesty—be guaranteed. We only know them by hearsay, some by virtue of having read the accounts—very copious, but quite contradictory—reproduced in the newspapers. Those events happened, in fact, in a secret manner, by design. The scenes were not witnessed by anyone save the people who lived them, who have refused energetically, all attempts to “interview” them. One therefore has the right, and even the duty, to affirm pertinently that all depiction in their regard is contrived, imagined and, in consequence, unworthy of trust.
Only one person in the world, apart from the actors in the drama, has received and retained a few furtive clarifications that might aid in the penetration of the mystery, to the extent that is possible—but for him alone, and the few intimate acquaintances in possession of his confidence and who are worthy of it. Now Yvernaux—you will have guessed that it is him—is a faithful friend, through and through, incapable of treason. The chatterbox knows how to shut up occasionally, especially when there is a duty to fulfill with regard to his adored goddaughter. As for his confidants, the vague enlightenment that he disposes—precious, although vague—and of which he had gladly made them the few gifts permitted, have formally promised him only to use it with his authorization and under his control.
We shall therefore limit ourselves to recording, to conclude this story, the facts certified as real by him—only those, and nothing more. They can only be appreciated, scientifically or artistically, through him. We shall not even attempt to arrange them, or explain them, or add suggestions, in order to increase their “literary” value. We shall retain the bare simplicity that is appropriate to the kind of study to which we are confined.
Certainly, it would be possible to exploit all the elements that are available: material from newspaper articles, reportage, scraps of “interviews” snatched even from refusals, “imaginative” descriptions and supposed photographic snapshots, undeniably convinced of their deceptive quality, in the manner of the majority of “films.” With all that, it would not be too difficult to reconstitute the chronicle of events and scenes by virtue of which the present history, whose preoccupations are essentially serious and almost purely scientific, would conclude with a romance almost uniquely picturesque.
That is what we have deliberately not done, and we are proud of it. We do not take any more vanity than is warranted, but we claim a little honor even so, for having resisted the temptation offered by that desinit in piscem,70 evoking the seductions of sirens, perhaps too vulgar to find a place next to the austere Geveniève. We do not doubt the pleasure that some readers would have been bound to find in
that second-hand picturesqueness, but besides the fact that we have conceit enough to judge that easy and false picturesqueness slightly repugnant, we also have the pretension of believing that the minds of the new age, even—or, rather, especially—the female ones, will henceforth have an appetite for nourishment that is both more refined and more substantial.
XXXVIII
Almost a year has gone by since Joson’s arrival. It has needed no less, and no more, to put into execution the entire plan of campaign decided during one final week-long council of war. Geneviève has been able to admire the prodigious faculties of organization what he brings to the work.
“Without him,” she often proclaims, “we’d never have got it done, would we, Godfather?”
“Say right away,” Yvernaux replies, “that the wing would have remained in the egg.”
“Ha ha! Right!” she says, smiling.
Gasguin risks a bitter: “I don’t count any more, then?”
And Aunt Line, putting on a show of joking, although knowing full well, deep down, that she is expressing a little-known truth in the mask of whimsy, concludes in Thiérachian: “I’ve always said that there are men who ought to be doing the housework.”
And, in fact, the former ship’s officer, explorer, trail-blazer, expedition leader, dealer in merchandise and colonist has, almost single-handedly, put things on a practical basis, the tasks distributed, the capital activated, the preparations pressurized and the business under way. He has proved, in accordance with a remark made by Yvernaux, that, Comte as he was, and Elme-Cast-Jagut-Marie-Joseph etc. of the Treize-Îles and other places, he was a son of the Skylark, one of those Gauls of whom Cato and Caesar had said that two talents were innate in them at birth: Bellum gerere et arguté loqui.71
“Which,” he added, “if the professors had any sense, would be translated into modern argot as to be on the ball and in the know.”
While Geneviève shut herself up with her father in the Vaugirard laboratory, entirely caught up in the in the final experiments, the active, agile and eloquent Joson carried out agronomical trials of electrical fertilization in the Crau. He did that without the government, the Académie des Sciences, the press or anyone else catching wind of it. On a small scale, as Gasguin had desired, at very little expense, he had obtained results sufficient to be certain of future returns, which promised to be a magnificent remuneration. At the same time, Geneviève having talked about finding in the vicinity, by the sea shore and at a given longitude (for reasons of her own) a large area suitable or aviation, he had acquired exactly what was needed, incredibly cheap, still without letting any suspicion leak out of what he was planning. The place was situated in the Camargue, not far from one of the mouths of the Rhône, in the middle of one of the triangles formed by its ancient delta, in the vicinity of the singular little dead city of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.72
It is permissible to note in passing for what reasons Geneviève had chosen that particular spot, or one analogous to it, and with what meticulous care Joson had finalized the choice of the terrain. That is, in fact, one of the rare explanations furnished by Yernaux whose transmission is permitted. It opens, positively, a rather luminous horizon to the hypotheses that might be made regarding the as-yet-undivulged theory of radioactive aviation. This is the explanation, which we shall not hide under a bushel—anyone who cares to do so may dream at leisure!
The “right place” determined by Gasguin’s caulations in accordance with one of Geneviève’s later discoveries had to be “right” in both geometrical and physical terms, so to speak.
“It is the point of intersection of two lines,” she affirmed, “giving the direction of two absolutely certain telluric currents. One is marked underground by the fault whose perpetual shocks have for witnesses the eruptions of volcanoes and seismographic readings. The other is manifested in the atmosphere by the mistral.”
Now, a location at such a point of intersection, is propitious, not to say necessary, for the activation of the particular engine invented by Geneviève and the liberation of the new force that it employs.
That parenthesis having been closed, and with it the peep-hole that it provides into Geneviève’s idea, it is appropriate to return to Joson and his activities of a more down-to-earth variety—which does not prevent their fruits being immediate and precious. And perhaps, in fact, as Yvernaux jokingly said, perhaps, without him, the wing would have remained in the egg.
For not only did he occupy himself miraculously with all the material and financial preparations—the various purchases of metals, chemical products, rubber and silks of special fabrication, and also construction projects, on the basis of plans that were often highly idiosyncratic, disconcerting the architects and technologists, doing the work of a technologist and architect himself, as well as that of an engineer, a manufacturer and a tradesman—but also, and especially, he had the art of raising to white heat Geneviève’s enthusiasm for work, courage, hope and faith, in science and herself.
Now, that enthusiasm, that courage, that hope and that faith often had need of that drive to incandescence. In her Vaugirard laboratory, the heroic young woman had, in a manner of speaking, thrown her entire being into the devouring crucible of her research and melted it therein, her heart as well as her brain, and the reserves of her unconscious combined with her father’s hectic calculations. It happened occasionally that a tiny error, the substitution of a plus sign for a minus sign, or some almost-imperceptible accident of manipulation, obliged everything to start again-for absolute perfection as required, since it was no longer a matter of a sublime theory, with its near-blanks, but of the final hand to play in practice and reality, with Joson a living card thrown on to the green baize of risk.
At those moments when certainty escaped her, she felt herself change from metal in fusion into, first, a block of stone, and then a block of ice. It was life that escaped her along with certainty. She thought she was on the brink of extinction, going the way of water that runs, boils, evaporates and vanishes. Immediately, she needed Joson. Wherever he was, he had to telephone—sometimes, even, when the crisis of despair was too strong, to come back in haste, before she had ceased to be! For neither her father, nor her godfather, not Aunt Line herself, was capable of warming her up, of restoring the temperature, first and foremost of her existence, and then of her intelligence, both conscious and unconscious, and finally of her genius—the temperature that was indispensable to her, that which Joson alone was able to push to incandescence, that of enthusiasm and faith, red-hot and white-hot.
And Joson came, and he talked (argute loqui) and he got to grips with the discouragements of the sublime and child-like soul (bellum gerere); and in response to his ardent voice, Geneviève’s heart was reignited. And again, in her Vaugirard laboratory, the cavern of a Cyclops forging the lightning, or the summit of the imprisoned Prometheus, she resumed throwing her entire being into the crucible of her research, to melt: all her heat and all her brain, and the unconscious accumulated within her, and her dreams for Joson, and the flower of the blood of the Hescheboix watered by the dew of love in Aunt Line’s tears.
And on those days, when Joson had gone back to some distant task, leaving her confident and fervent, with her triumphant gaze, her cattelinette’s gaze, which always came back in the end, she said to Yvernaux in an intoxicated voice: “You see, Godfather, that without him, the wing would have remained in the egg.”
“I can believe that now,” he admitted, to give her pleasure.
But in his conscience, or in private conversation with Aunt Line, he groaned: “Without him! Without him! I should think so—only his name isn’t Joson. Who will give him back his true name?”
“What name?” Aunt Line asked, once.
“Why,” he declaimed, lyrically, “the great name of the One whose wing has broken the very egg of Being, the sacred name of Eros, Amour, the first-born of Chaos and Night—who remained their only son!”
“Amon,” replied the old woman, darting out
her tongue like a serpent. “Not to mention that that the only son is also the only father of the whole world, damn it!”73
Then, after a silence, and as if without comprehension, she added:
“And himself!”
XXXIX
Firm as our intention is not to allow this attempted philosophical study to turn into pure romantic fiction, there is one humble stray fact for whose omission we would reproach ourselves, even though it is only indirectly associated with it. It does so much honor to Joson and heightens the color of his character so beautifully and significantly that we do not have the heart to leave it unmentioned—without, however, extracting any artistic amusement therefrom! By way of documentation, and no more—but truly human, it can be said.
Among all his very various and absorbing occupations, Joson took it into his head—at first unknown to Geneviève, but then with her consent—to learn to fly an airplane. Not, as you shall soon see, that he had to be a pilot aboard the new apparatus, to be guided by someone other than the passenger—but he wanted to familiarize himself to some extent with the sensations of flight, of speed, of altitude and of touching down before the prodigious experience of flight of which he was about to be the extraordinary bird. As he had said since the first moment to Yvernaux, his confidant:
“I don’t intend to be surprised, up there, by anything, so that I can be entirely Geneviève’s, my entire being in her hands, without any distraction.”
Now, at the first aerodrome to which he went in search of a professor of aviation, among the names suggested to him was that of Guérinet.
He is astounded. He seeks further information. It really is his Julot! He races to Levallois-Perret, to the domicile of his lost friend. Instead of the old ruffian, the escapee from Biribi, he finds a gentleman—and yet, it really is his Julot, transfigured by a heroic profession! The Parisian is married! He has a charming wife and a daughter. Not content with going up as a pilot, he has educated himself, and, believing that he has discovered a small improvement in construction, is dreaming about obtaining a patent and becoming a constructor, in order to ensure the future of his wife and child.
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