XXXII
What will certainly obtain less credit than such a tissue of adventures—almost banal nowadays, in spite of their copious diversity and curious unlikelihood—is the telepathic thread with which we have said that they were indeed linked, and which will be described in a few brief affidavits without commentary. Hardened skeptics will smile. The conscientious historian, a noter—almost a notary—of gathered facts, has only to record them. Those who have had analogous experiences in their own lives will not smile.
Indubitably, with regard to his conscious memory, Joson only had confused images relating to Genevieve. In the two circumstances in which these images might have had occasion to become more precise—the deaths of the Comtesse and Abbé Denis—they had remained vague. And yet, we have affirmed, between her and Joson a veritable chain had been forged. For the phrase “telepathic thread” employed above, is, in fact, too much of an understatement.
Chain—yes, that is a more expressive word. And a chain forged—another appropriate word—by a communion without communication. For here, as in “wireless” telegraphy, there was no contact!
And in addition, the impressions had been received without conscious perception taking account of them, or the shadow of an advertisement able to serve as a memorandum.
Nevertheless, at a given moment, those received impressions manifested their existence, the dispatched effluvia seeming to cry out: “Here I am! Don’t try to comprehend or even to perceive by means of any of your ‘usual’ senses. Vibrate and forget.”
Then, at another unexpected moment, there was the miracle—almost commonplace, in telepathy—of the vibration that reproduces itself, the effluvia that become active, the picture that develops, of the unconscious memory offering its treasures to the exploitation of the “revelator” of conscious reason.
But enough of vain, perhaps erroneous, explanations—which only proceed, moreover, by means of images and which commit the grave sin of appearing to be disguised commentaries. The facts, undeniably, are there, which want to speak, and with what eloquence, even troubling those who will not be convinced.
You will soon learn, in the shock of the final encounter, what riches of magnetism and electricity had “accumulated” over time in Joson and Geneviève. That was the irrefutable proof that it was without their knowledge and complicity that their parts had been prepared. You have seen Geneviève become gradually unaccustomed to thinking about him intensely, and that he had scarcely every thought about her with any consciousness of so doing. And yet, the tension of their occult “accumulators” was such, unconsciously, that certain effluvia had been projected and perceived, manifest harbingers of the prodigious final spark that was to amalgamate them.
Here, narrated without the slightest artifice, without any attempt at literary effect, are those few anticipatory revelations of the magnetic and electric current between the two souls, which united them: testimonies carefully checked, of guaranteed authenticity.
The first time, Joson had, unexpectedly, a vision—clear, this time—of Geneviève. It was not, as usual, the vague drifting apparition of something white passing before Abbé Denis’ black robe, which might have reminded Joson in an imprecise fashion of the forgotten communicant. It was, against the wall of the ruined chapel, above the sinister sheen of Kawchmôr, the sad silhouette of a Geneviève seemingly ready to let herself fall into the viscous and avid mire.
Now, comparing the dates, Joson was then completing his first African expedition with his near-fatal attack of cerebral fever, and for her part, Geneviève was in the middle of her famous “black hole,” struck by that epileptiform crisis of nerves of which the physicians had no understanding.
The image of Geneviève had, at that moment, been positively resuscitated in Joson’s memory. It had not lasted longer than a lightning-flash; then darkness had fallen over the image again, which had become once again the vague fleecy whiteness in front of Abbé Denis’ black robe.
Three more times, in a completely different fashion each time, there had been an abrupt establishment of current between their conscious selves, of which he, Joson, became conscious—always with lightning rapidity, after which darkness thickened more blackly, it seemed, since the memory had not been vivified.
At the moment when, after having received the insulting letter from Julot, he had suddenly and bravely resolved to set forth again, leaving Parris, amputated from his laxity, he had heard ringing within him a certain burst of laughter, as of small bells, about which he had said to himself: Damn it! Where have I heard it before, that particular burst of laughter?
And immediately, without seeing Geneviève’s face, he had had the corner of his mother’s boudoir before his eyes, where, in response to an anecdote about the Borda humorously narrated by Joson, the girl had laughed in that fashion. And he had remembered then, with delight, no longer Geneviève, nor even her laughter, but the soft and musical voice of the Comtesse, his exquisite and adored mother, saying to him that evening: “What a pretty laugh she has, that child! Like tiny silvery bells.”
Now, at the moment when Joson decided upon his great voyage to Ibn-Aoud-Gadfaia’s city, that was exactly the moment when Geneviève, at eighteen years of age, finally sensed the sun of her genius escaping from the eclipse in which it had nearly been extinguished.
The interval when Joson made his halt in the fabulous city, among the rocks covered with inscriptions affirming a civilization more ancient, more opulent and more advanced than those of Memphis, Thebes, Ecbatana, Nineveh and Babylon, that unique interval in his life, was also the interval, no less unique in Gasguin’s life, when Geneviève enabled him to enter the portal of renown on the victorious caravels of the three famous papers. Now, three times in that interval—three distinct times, but by virtue of a manifestation always parallel—Geneviève had “disturbed” Joson, in direct confrontation with those mysterious inscriptions. The third commotion, a sort of strange shock on the back of his neck, had been produced on the discovery of the characteristic zodiac. And Joson had said, each time, to Julot;
“Who is sending me that electric discharge, like the blow of a warm blade?”
And when he said that, the odor of Geneviève had passed through his nostrils: a odor that she had had one evening, after having spent all day collecting gorse on the heath and being, so to speak, clad in it. Her face, beneath the costume of flowers, he had not “seen” at all, but he had smelled it, had breathed in the strong and intoxicating scent through the flared nostrils of his erne’s beak, in which was mingled the honey of the heath, the gold of gorse and that of the sun burning it, the iodine of seaweed in the violet of salt-marshes through the fir-trees, and the girl’s unripe apricot flesh.
Finally, the supreme telepathic manifestation of Geneviève had taken place at the moment when Joson, with his finger on the trigger of his revolver, was about to put an end to his poverty in all the shameful mire, and had been deflected by the “sight” of the tears that his mother would shed over that death of the damned. Just as the tears had flowed in diamond drops, stabbing him repeatedly in the heart, a breath of fresh air had passed over those burning wounds, sealing them like a furtive kiss. And that breath and that kiss had had a voice, distant and singing, as in a sort of celestial telephone. And Joson had distinctly recognized that voice: it was the one with which he had heard Geneviève recite, in a childish murmur, the entire litany of his names and nicknames, which she repeated like a formula, and which, during that tragic moment, she repeated likewise, distinctly, in the hallucination he believed that he was experiencing.
Now, someone was with Geneviève at that tragic moment, of the crucial nature of which she was absolutely unaware; she was then utterly absorbed in a moment of intense life herself, since she was breathless in confrontation with the last manipulation revealing to her the definitive formula from which her theory of electrical fertilization as to emerge. And while her conscious reason was extended in that work, that birth-process, her unconscious self was doubtle
ss extended recklessly toward the individual in peril, whose peril it “saw.” For Aunt Line heard Geneviève then, with the absent-minded expression she often had, and without quitting her work in progress, mechanically murmuring the end of the fairy tale, the end of the fanned-out tail, which she often seemed to recite without attaching any more significance to it than to a nursery rhyme:
“Monsieur le Comte Elme-Cast-Jagut-Marie-Joseph de Ponthual-Plouër, Seigneur des Eihens, des Pierres-Sonnantes, des Treize-Îles and other places, also known as Joson, as so known as the Little Chouan!”
And if Aunt Line had been able to take note of the exact time, to the tenth of a minute, when those chanted words had quit Geneviève’s lips, and if someone with Joson had also been able to take note of the instant when he had lifted his finger from the trigger and dropped his revolver, the two notations would have been compounded into one. And similarly, it was with the measured beat of a single metronome that Joson and Geneviève had then, without pronouncing a single word, uttered a long and profound sigh, during which their two beings, without knowing it, fused in the unconscious and were only one from then on.
No one, moreover, except Aunt Line, if she had had the gift of extracting the ultimate consequences of what she “felt” with so much force, would have been capable of perceiving everything that sight would inflate, any more than anyone can divine the series of futures imprisoned in a seed that gestation will liberate.
Even if they had been conscious of their beings fusing in the unconscious, could Joson and Geneviève ever have imagined from what profound depths that sigh came, and toward what distance it was going? Even believing in their telepathic communion, they would have attributed that strange sigh, uttered in unison and toward one another, Joson to the setting aside of idea of suicide, Geneviève to the idea of the “eureka” greeting her discovery—or vice versa, which would have been better still.
And it was even better than that, in truth! And perhaps Aunt Line alone experienced the vague, obscure, unexpressed frisson of it. In sum—she would have said, had she been able to translate it—what was inflated by that long and profound sigh was the occult and absolute certainty, with regard to that tragic moment, that the unique self formed by their two unconscious selves melting into one single entity then acquired. For it sensed, itself, and even “knew”—such a sentiment being the equivalent of the most exact knowledge—that on that moment had depended, not merely the personal fate of each of them, but the fate of the entire world that was about to be born, unforeseen and nevertheless “expected,” from their imminent collaboration.
“Expected by whom?” some ironist will be sure to ask.
“Expected,” Aunt Line would have replied, “by the flower of the blood of the Hescheboix.”
XXXIII
Had there been a slowing down, a cooling, of these telepathic communications between Joson and Geneviève? Or had the established current never had any further need to manifest itself to their conscious self, because of the sufficient satisfactions it found exercising itself in the occult, unknown to conscious accumulation? Who can tell? The patent fact is that the mutual thoughts of the two beings, materially so far apart, had been as if disjointed in the course of the last seven years, during Joson’s sojourn in Ethiopia and Geneviève’s work at the Vaugirard laboratory.
It was now in a very vague voice, almost without expression, that Geneviève occasionally repeated to Aunt Line: “How we loved one another at first sight!” That, you will remember, in the tone in which she groaned: “To think that it’s over—over, alas!” And without even articulating that sad “alas” sincerely, which had become a neutral, empty word now that Geneviève put so little heart into it.
You will recall, on the other hand, with what obstinacy Aunt Line took up arms against that, trying to reignite the love that seemed extinct. She vouched for the fact that it was merely lying dormant beneath the ashes.
And for his part, Joson the commercial representative, Joson the warehouse-manager, Joson the colonist had ended up no longer even nurturing his Celtic reveries of the tale of the fabulous city. His forties turned into a precocious retreat from all action, whether in thought, in imagination, in dreams or in smoking opium, save for his current business affairs, commercial or colonial. He no longer opened the portfolio with the yellow pages containing the location of the Eldorado for years on end. Julot’s refrain was obliterated in his memory, no longer humming, even mechanically, on his lips.
Having no Aunt Line with him to watch over the fire lying dormant beneath the ashes, he seemed even more detached than Geneviève from the previous telepathic linkage, not only from her but from his own past. The few English newspapers he read for business purposes did not even cause him to prick up his ears at the announcement of the first attempts at aviation. He had only seen it as a nascent sport, amusing, which he would have liked to try once, but no longer. The whistling of those human flights in the sky had not reminded him of what he had said to Julot in the hope of returning to the magical city: “We’ll come back by air, then, flying.”
It seemed, therefore, that nothing would henceforth unite those two existences, so far apart, each so devoted to its own evolution, now fixed, closed and sealed off from the other, no longer even having that Hertzian wave which has made the sensitive to one another throughout the past, albeit in an occult and unapprehended fashion. And that was certainly the irrefutable conclusion that anyone inexpert in the subtle psychology of the reflexes and the unconscious would have drawn from their present condition, with the complacency of partiality.
Aunt Line, nevertheless, concluded differently, if not in words, at least in determination. It is true that she was no expert in any psychology, nor in telepathy, nor any science whatsoever, theoretically understood. Does Fabre’s wasp follow courses to learn anatomy and the infallible surgical procedure by which it contrives the paralysis of the living prey necessary to its larva, though? In the same way, Aunt Line “knew” that the fire of love persisted, lying dormant beneath the ashes of her dear Cinderella’s heart, and that the genius of that pretended, seemingly resigned, old maid needed that love to blossom, and that the supreme prey reserved for that adored larva was that love, and, therefore, that Joson and Geneviève would come together again—or, rather, that they had never been separated, even during that last seven years when it seemed that they had become strangers to one another.
What Aunt Line lacked in the matter of giving reasons and putting forward proofs to clarify these obscure sentiments, stating their results in current terminology instead of burying them in the clay of sibylline words, was a faculty that the women of tomorrow will surely have. Reservoirs of atavistic science, supposedly instinctive but nevertheless intellectual in essence, they can only dispense the profound intuition by means of which they “sense” life in meager measure today. Tomorrow, having doubtless renounced struggling with us in terms of pure reason, giving all that can and ought to be given of their maternal treasure of unanalyzable acquisitions, they will reveal the keys to secrets that we men have never been able to decipher.
Aunt Line was one of those who do not fear, even today, to allow that as-yet-infantile and stuttering language to speak within them and through them. At the risk of being taken for an old madwoman, a failed merlifiche, a witch without a broomstick or, at least, a spouter of ridiculous nonsense, she let out—you have seen her in action—all that had might have been severely stifled, and set up the sometimes burlesque or monstrous images of the phantoms she “saw” in the mists of the future.
And that is why, on the day when the telegram from St. Petersburg announced that the Alexandra Prize had been awarded to Monsieur Thibaud Gasguin’s paper, while the professor swelled with pride, the worthy Yvernaux clapped his hands and Geneviève started dancing like a little girl, the octogenarian contented herself with mumbling between her gums: “Now the time has finally come for me to repeat it, and for you to hear me, ch’tiote.”
She had her white eyes, dancin
g as before, and her pursed lips, whose corners were flecked with light foam—and Geneviève knew, moreover, that those, in the old lady, were the signs of her own “displaced state,” similar to the particular state into which Geneviève put herself with her fumigation of herbal philters. So, leaving her father and godfather to congratulate one another, she took Aunt Line into the next room in order to say to her, anxiously and tremulously: “What is it that you have to repeat to me, and what is so necessary for me to hear?”
“How you loved one another at first sight!” muttered the old woman, in a distant tone. Then, drilling her with her sharpest and most penetrative gaze, she added, in an increasingly indistinct murmur; “And now that will be again. Oh, soon! Yes, soon!”
After which she repeated it several times, each time more obscurely, as if, the more secure she became in the occult, the less distinct she became in the visible. Geneviève recognized in that the most profound hypnosis into which Aunt Line’s essential, unconscious soul plunged in the fullness of divinatory action. Her anxiety redoubled, oppressively, because of the words, often spoken in the distant and near past, which had lost all suggestive force for her a long time ago, but which, at that moment, recovered an extraordinary vigor, like desiccated infusoria suddenly put in contact with water.
“Will it be again, you ask?” said Aunt Line. “Since I know it! Since I see it!” And the old woman seemed to be litanizing, repeating with a monotonous insistence: “Since I know it! Since I know it! Since I see it! Since I see it!” Litanies that were punctuated by the brusque affirmation, proffered with authority by lips sinuously articulating, firmly and clearly: “Amon! You hear me, ch’tiote, you hear me.”
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