The Wing

by Jean Richepin

  Effusion! Mutual joy! The former leader promises his moral and financial support to the brave lad who had become entirely a man. While awaiting the collaboration by which the discovery, truly worthy of a clever man, will be rewarded, Joson advances to his African savior what he needs to construct two models of a monoplane with an automatic stabilizer. It is still the Comte who seems to be obliged to the former ruffian, though, for the master of yore is now the pupil, and the new boss says, swelling to with pride, a rush of argot returning to his lips:

  “It’s a laugh, all the same! The sea-eagle taking flying-lessons from the Pantruche sparrow!”

  It seemed, though, that the sea-eagle had talent. In three lessons, no more. Joson knew, certainly not everything but how to work the controls, to brake, to fly at speed, to climb in a spiral, to descend in a glide, to command the engine and to turn—none of it thoroughly, but he had done everything once or twice, three times at the most.

  “To put it bluntly,” the professional said, merrily, “everything that an amateur has to know, and nothing that is indispensable to a professional—in sum, just enough for Julot not to be risking his skin too much in supervising him, but not enough not to be almost sure of breaking Monsieur le Comte’s head if Monsieur le Comte wanted to take a ride on his own.”

  We shall be brief, in order to avoid any artistic concern and stick to the strict recording of various facts and to allow to them to operate on sensibility by their own brutal and naïve force. Such as it was reported in the newspapers, it resembles many other tragic incidents, nowadays almost banal, in the already long martyrology of aviation. To the extent that the whole truth can be established, it is out of the ordinary, even among those exploits. We shall therefore establish it, without asking—for once, we have no scruple in doing so—anyone’s authorization.

  It was the famous day—are they not all famous, these days of aviation?—when, after proofs of altitude, then of gliding, then of landing, various kinds of apparatus presented themselves for examination—or, rather, in competition—seeking the stabilization of the monoplane. A fairly large prize—20,000 francs, plus accessory prizes for certain details—was to be awarded to the victor. The hope was also promised to him, and almost assured, of a patent that might bring in very substantial royalties: in brief, a veritable small fortune in prospect. Guérinet was counting on the prize, not for the sake of vainglory but for his wife and child.

  “If I kill myself tomorrow, with what I’d leave them, they’d be safe from hunger—and hunger, oh, if you knew! For women, especially.”

  He had said these words that very morning, to Joson, tears moistening the habitual mockery of his simian eyes—which then appeared to the poetic Celt to be flowery eyes.

  The weather, after having been passable, had become ominous, and then nasty. The wind was blowing in treacherous squalls. Taking off was becoming dangerously risky. Several competitors dropped out. When Julot’s turn came, Joson tried to hold him back; he had a kind of sinister presentiment—but the Parisian looked him in the whites of his eyes and said: “It’s you who’s telling me not to be reckless? Come on! I’ll wager that if I listened to you, you’d be scornful. Don’t you remember our follies of bravery out in Africa?”

  “We were young,” said Joson.

  “We still are,” said the other.

  “All the same, we wouldn’t do it again...”

  “You think that I wouldn’t put you on my back to cross the marsh, Boss? You think that! No, you don’t, do you?” And he leapt into the cockpit, with a screech like an angry sparrow.

  Joson could not help replying to him, making a funnel of his hands: “Bravo, lad!”

  Already, the purr of the propeller struggling against the leonine miaowing of the squall, Julot was taking off. Five minutes later, the wings, turned over and torn away, separated from the airplane, which fell, spiraling, as heavy as lead, and crashed into the ground. Julot was pulled out, not dead but condemned to death, almost in his final agony.

  “In a quarter of an hour, at the most,” the doctor said, “it’ll be over.”

  Joson leaned over Julot, and whispered something in his ear—no one knew what—at which the dying man’s face lit up. In his flowery eyes something flourished like an eternal spring—and not in imagination but in reality, for soon, he saw the second model of his monoplane, manned by the Comte, take off into the tempest, turn, rise into the sky, roll, pitch, descend again at a vertiginous angle, and land amid a storm of applause and cheers.

  The newspapers said nothing about that incident, not having known the whole truth. For the prize, according to Joson’s instructions, was awarded to Guérinet for his automatically-stabilized monoplane, flown “by his pupil and employee, Monsieur Joson.”

  XL

  And now, here is the final act—or, to put it better, the first, Yvernaux prophesied—of the drama of aviation genius that had Geneviève for a poet and Joson for a protagonist, and which will, still according to our prophet, turn the whole word upside-down.

  “Of course,” he added, “people had little chance of realizing that if they read the critics”—the reportage at the time—“who passed judgment on it. That’s the usual fate of masterpieces, to be misunderstood. This one had the destiny, worse still, of not even being understood at all.”

  And, in fact, the experiment took place last summer, between two “sensational” exhibitions of locomotion by airplane, one in Belgium and one in the Alps, and all the trumpets of renown were busy sounding fanfares to the triumphs or catastrophes. The moment for radioactive aviation had not been very well chosen!

  Too well chosen, in fact—for it was in accordance with Geneviève’s express desire that it had been thus stifled, far from possible publicity, sheltered from advertisement as if from peril, with all precautions carefully taken to put the finest sleuths of reportage off the track. The place, moreover, was just as cleverly planned, in that sense, as the moment. Could Sextius Costecalde himself, or any of his pupils from “the far south,” ever have dreamed that the wing of the new age would be deployed, without anyone alerting them to the fact, in “their” Camargue?

  So, none of them was there when the miraculous event transpired. No master of the genre was even able to make a note or take a snapshot, or anything at all permitting any kind of article to be written. Only a few petty local journalists, from sufficiently distant papers, had been vaguely aware of the construction works undertaken in the vicinity of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.

  It was in the month of May, the time the bizarre annual pilgrimage of Bohemians to the old church, to pray before the reliquary of, their patroness, Sainte-Sarah-la-Noire.74 A few young novice reporters, having not yet seen the scene, and desirous of coking up a description, had watched the ceremony—and, on the same occasion, had learned that some kind of hangar for aviation had been built three kilometers away. News of that had reached the dailies in Marseilles and Montpellier—which, uniquely along the entire press, on the day of the experiment, although it was kept secret, reported even so, as best they could (not very well) the fact that it had taken place.

  And it was thus, from that angle, that the matter came back—third-hand at least—to the Parisian aviation news; that was the manner in which the capital and miraculous event became known (?) to the public, in something like the following terms:

  An attempt to cross the Mediterranean by airplane has almost saddened, by its tragic outcome, the enchanted land of Mireille.75 A pupil of the late Guérinet, the aviator Joson, was within an inch of death—by virtue of his imprudence, it must be admitted. Firstly, he was reckless enough to set off, in spite of a terrible mistral. Secondly, he dared to confront it in a monoplane of his own creation, it appears, doubtless of an imperfect design. After an excursion of a few hours in the Golfe de Lion, he fell into the water and his life was only saved by the habitual heroic devotion of the brave matelots of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer.

  There are no matelots in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer—only a few fisher
men. The so-called pupil of the late Guérinet did not take off in a monoplane of his own creation (!!) but in Geneviève’s new apparatus. His excursion over the sea had not lasted “a few hours”, nor any more-or-less indeterminate time, but exactly the five hours and twenty minutes that Geneviève had calculated as the time necessary to fly over Mallorca and return. Joson owed his life, above all, to the insubmersible gondola with which the apparatus as furnished, expressly in view of avoiding landing, replacing it with a touchdown at sea76—so much for the apparatus being imperfect! Finally, the mistral was not blowing when Joson took off; immediately after his departure, however, a kind of brief and formidable tornado had swirled turbulently, raised by the departure itself—which Geneviève’s calculations had also foreseen.

  “Apart from these ‘slight’ errors,” Yvernaux jeered, “And the complete omission of Geneviève’s name, and various other lies and lacunae with regard to this or that, notably everything, it is a pure masterpiece and a very model of modern historiography, is it not?”

  Was that news item not also childish in its absolute ignorance of things? And did it not seem—as little folk say—to be making a fool of itself? But the same could not be said of those which, after the fact, taking a vague scrap of half-glimpsed truth as their canvas, set about embroidering it pretentiously with heir extravagant imaginations.

  We have mentioned above, in chapter XX, with regard to Yvernaux’s Treatise on the Innate Sciences, the representative of an American publishing house, a “recordman” of airplanic information, who has set out to purchase all the documents regarding the invention of the “Gasguin alerion” (as the apparatus has been definitively baptized).77 Now, swollen by his success, that agent has not been able to help blabbing a little—oh, very little, in sum, without betraying any secrets acquired for the excellent reason that he does not have sufficient scientific education to understand them.

  That does not alter the fact that he had stuck his nose in, or, on the other hand, as a fine pointer expert in seeking out and flushing out the game of reportage, he had seen something—not very much—of the experiment in the Camargue. It was from some distance away, in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, where he was staying in a hotel on the beach, that he had “seen”—even though it happened by night—the departure of the “alerion.” Of that, he had, out of professional pride, released a few trivial details, and it had needed no more to seed the fertile American press, the promised land of “puff” and “humbug.”

  Thus is explained the efflorescence of bouquets of fireworks that recently threw so much dust in our eyes from that direction, to the glory of what they called “Gasguin’s alerion.”

  To tell the truth, the revelations were so stupefying that few people took them seriously. A few bold thinkers were alone in doing so, and discussing them. The pretended photographs, in particular, encountered no credence; the trickery was manifest. Finally, the near-unanimity of the papers was achieved in the estimation that it was one of the hoaxes so dear to the compatriots of Mark Twain. They are known to have sufficiently poor taste thus to ridicule a scientist as reputable as Gasguin, but the joke lacked tact—and a sense of proportion.

  Do you recall certain “illuminations” reproduced as such in our popular illustrated papers, with such headlines as:

  THE FIERY WING

  THE FLOATING ISLAND

  A CYCLONE IN THE CAMARGUE

  THE HUMAN SHELL

  Oh, those images that would have delighted Épinal!78 One saw there, either a man riding through the clouds in some kind of racing car, like a cylinder with tailfins, or the same man in a seabird’s nest on the crest of a foaming wave, or a great expanse of black sky rent be the explosion of a star, or, finally, beneath the funnel of a whirlwind, a herd of the little bulls of the Camargue, harassed by zig-zag lightning-bolts. Brrr!

  “And to think,” Yvernaux laments, “that all that became fashionable—and yet, that beneath all that nonsense, there was a something real! Oh, if I were permitted to establish the true facts! How much crazier! And more dramatic! And...”

  And, when pressed slightly, when he is speaking confidentially, when he knows that what he allows to be deduced will not be abused, this is the light that he consents to cast, furtively, on the mystery, and of which he authorizes, also very furtively but rigorously, the publication—after having prudently revised it and, so to speak, filtered the terminology.

  On the apparatus, properly speaking, “in” which Joson took off, no information! Yvernaux affirms that he does not know anything about it, save that it includes a life-saving gondola, hence insubmersible, with a view to the marine touchdown that was to conclude the experiment.

  The apparatus was lifted up, at night, by an ordinary aerostat, to a height of 2000 meters. It was in communication with its launch-station by means of wireless telegraphy. It is also by that method that it was guided, after the fashion of certain torpedoes using a system designed by Branly. Its direction, from the launch-station, was controlled by Geneviève.

  When the departure was triggered the aerostat exploded—a phenomenon foreseen and planed. It was at that moment that the new engine came into play.

  What had also been foreseen—but in principle, not with regard to the power of the effect produced—was the atmospheric perturbation, perhaps also seismic, that the liberation of the force employed would cause. That resulted in the whirlwind mistaken for an effect of the mistral, the shock described as a tornado or a cyclone, or even as a tidal wave, by various people.

  One final, very singular, detail concerned the trajectory followed by the apparatus, which was no less original than the engine. That flight had been made in a time calculated with rigorous exactitude, according to a graphically determined curve—a sort of extremely elongated ellipse, one of whose foci was above Mallorca in the Balearics. Now, the underlying principle of that movement and trajectory was that of the famous “boomerang” of which only the Australian indigenes make use, whose theory Geneviève had discovered.

  To these exclusively scientific glimmers of light, Yvernaux adds a few others of a moral character, which no one will deem less interesting. Unfortunately, the godfather only deigns to measure these out in a very parsimonious fashion. It is virtually necessary to worm them out of him, as glimmers reminiscent of vague phosphorescence passing through a fog, when he has surpassed the “displaced state,” to the point of only being able to express himself in fragments of phrases whose syllables fade away into the moist undergrowth of his beard. By putting these fragments end-to-end to make sentences of them, it has been possible even so to reconstitute these few facts, whose summary he does not contest.

  Before the take-off, in accordance with Joson’s expressed desire, he and Geneviève were “religiously” betrothed in the old church of Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer—but in accordance with another, no less formal, desire of Aunt Line’s, after a mass celebrated at the main altar, the vows of betrothal had been pronounced, by special permission, in the crypt where the reliquary of Sainte-Sarah-la-Noire, the patron saint of the Romanies, was contained. The two fiancés had then spent an hour in private, in mutual confession, in the Bohemian fashion.

  When they came out, Joson to take his place in the “alerion,” Geneviève also to imprison herself in the insulated chair from which she was to put herself in communication with the new force, they were in tears, speaking to one another in the intimate mode.

  “They had the faces of saints then,” said Aunt Line.

  At the moment of the explosion announcing the liberation of the force, the starting of the engine and the departure, Gasguin was in the room next to the one I which Geneviève was stationed, and he heard her sigh profoundly, as if she were exhaling her last sigh: “Joson!” But he was under orders, given by her, not to enter for any reason, and he stayed where he was, continuing—as he did throughout the experiment—to repeat for the twentieth time the formidable calculations of which he was the supreme artisan.

  The five hours and twenty minutes of
the journey, once completed, had aged the voyager and the pilot by ten years; both had wisps of white hair.

  Aunt Line had spent the time in question, which had seemed eternal to her, in prayer, burning candles before the reliquary of Sainte-Sarah-la-Noire, of whom she said, afterwards: “She too was a cattelinette, amon!”

  XLI

  Professor Gasguin has taken his retirement. The most envious of his colleagues think and say that it is a shame, after the grotesque publicity with which his glory—so little merited before—has been tarnished by the story of the “human shell.” Some, to complete the ridicule heaped upon him, are spreading the rumor will present himself as a candidate for the next vacant chair in the Institut, and that he is a candidate for the Nobel Prize.

  In the meantime, with his daughter and Aunt Line, he has left the small apartment In the Rue Malebranche and the Vaugirard laboratory. All three have taken up residence, in company with Joson, at Kairnheûz, which has been repurchased. The ancient and grim “terrible heap of stones” seems more bristling than before, with its tower threatening the heavens with its fist in front of the large hangars that have been constructed on the Ocean’s edge between the heath and the strand—for it is from there, on the next voyage financed by the opulent A.A.A. (Aerian79 American Alerion) Company, that the definitive conqueror of space will depart.

  And this is why. The telluric currents whose point of intersection in the Camargue were insufficient to permit the fabulous city to be reached by the alerion electrically piloted by wireless. It requires two currents with a longer circuit. Geneviève has determined their existence by means of the Gulf Stream and the abyss in which ancient Atlantis lies, the tomb of which is marked by the Sargasso Sea. It is not the point of intersection of two lines of these currents that will be utilized as a departure-point his time, but the apex of the angle made by the two lines. That is located at sea, at one degree of longitude, facing Kairnheûz—and, by a bizarre coincidence, or, where the reference-point was established in prehistoric times of the Pierres-Sonnantes, of which Joson is the Seigneur, serving to indicate, at sea, the direction of the deepest part of Kawchmôr.