The Wing

by Jean Richepin

  The first fact is the hoarse cry uttered by Geneviève as the bell rang: “HIM!”

  That “HIM!” was proffered with a force that inscribed it in hearing in three capital letters, and inscribed in those three letters the entire litany of his names.

  The second fact is the word, again spoken by her, in a whisper, while Aunt Line went to open the door: “The wing!”

  That word, although spoken very softly, was distinctly head by Yvernaux, who was only to understand it later.

  He third fact, finally, is the scientific observation made by Gasguin himself—without any possible suspicion of amplificatory lyricism, and therefore forming palpable evidence—of the electrical and magnetic “commotion” produced in the “thinking room” on all those gathered there, and not just the two active elements, by the meeting of Geneviève and Joson.

  XXXV

  So, when the bell rang, Geneviève had leapt off Aunt Line’s knees and, standing upright, stiff and pale had uttered that stifled, hoarse, extraordinary “HIM!” in which all of her unconscious mind was concentrated, causing something like an explosion. Aunt Line had stood up in her turn, had looked deep into Geneviève’s eyes, and had read there the whole of that mind, into which her own sank. Then, with an automatic tread, while the ch’tiote pronounced the incomprehensible word that Yvernaux was to understand subsequently, the old merlifiche had marched to the door as if she were heading for an irresistibly attractive gulf.

  “Evidently,” Yvernaux had noted, “she was acting thus under hypnosis, hypnotized by Geneviève, and ‘knew’ who she ‘ought’ to find behind the door.”

  Gasguin had sketched a vague interrogative gesture in his daughter’s direction, who had not even replied instructing him to shut up, signifying that much by her statuesque immobility. The poor man’s anxious eyes had turned toward Yvernaux, as if to implore: “If you understand, enlighten me.”

  But Yvernaux did not understand any more than he did, being as completely in the dark. Nevertheless, he was not distressed by that. On the contrary! He enjoyed feeling prey to a sort of magnetic intoxication, to which he abandoned himself delightedly. That, at least, he described the state into which he entered, consisting of being intensely impressed by things, and their immediate effects, without needing to acquire any logical notion of them and trace their causes. Thus, entirely given over to the tragic interest that he scented in the air, he had harshly imposed silence on Gasguin’s untimely curiosity with a single glance, impeding the other’s in order to satisfy his own, much better adapted to the circumstances.

  “For there was,” he said, “only one things to do: extend one’s entire being to grasp it formally, opening all one’s powers of ‘receptivity’ to the phenomena, inevitably prodigious, that were about to be produced.”

  Cocking an ear toward the landing, he had then clearly perceived this brief dialogue, whose words, quite simple in themselves, fixed themselves in his memory like arrows, because of the strange character they acquired as they developed, as will soon be evident:

  “Excuse me for disturbing you at such an hour...”

  “Who, you, disturb us? You, a friend?”

  At this point, something was said in a very low voice, almost a whisper, which could not be made out, but which must have been the visitor’s name, to judge by the response, which was: “What! You recognize me?”

  The rest was clearly audible.

  “Yes, amon, since we’ve always seen you.”

  “Oh! Really?”

  “Indeed!”

  “Where?”

  “Here.”

  “Then my visit doesn’t astonish you?”

  “No, since we’ve been warned.”

  “By whom?”

  “By you.”

  “Indeed? Explain, I beg you...”

  “Come in. All will be explained.”

  At every phrase spoken by the visitor, Geneviève had been shaken by a great frisson, as if an electrical discharge were running through her. At each of Aunt Line’s replies she had given evidence with her head that she was replying internally as the old woman was. And those two manifestations, observed by Yvernaux and Gasguin, led every time to an exchange of increasingly alarmed glances. And how strange a character the words of that dialogue, simple in themselves, were indeed taking on as they developed, when suddenly, after a few rapid and decisive footsteps in the corridor, the visitor arrived on the threshold of the “thinking room” and paused there.

  For that visitor, whom Gasguin did not know at all, and nor did Yvernaux, but whom Aunt Line and Geneviève appeared, by contrast, to consider an old, intimate, almost quotidian friend—to judge by the replies of the former and the mute acquiescence of the latter—that extraordinary guest, simultaneously unexpected and more than expected, truly summoned, was the man who had disappeared twenty years before, the man whose effigy in the mystic window had itself paled among Geneviève’s conscious memories, but whose soul had never ceased to communicate with, in the unconscious, and to melt into, those of the old digger wasp, Aunt Line, and her adored larva Geneviève.

  Neither Gasguin nor even Yvernaux could know that for sure. Perhaps Yvernaux, alerted by a few confidences, had chanced to perceive it to some degree—and he was certainly not without a suspicion of it—but what both of them observed, without the slightest hesitation, Gasguin even better than Yvernaux, for he did so scientifically, out of professional habit, was the coming together of two poles, between which a spark was about to flare up, if not in electrical light, at least in a discharge of effluvia, fusing without lightning. And that the fusion in question, so long latent in the unconscious, was ready to manifest itself consciously, sensible to all those who were present, no one had the slightest doubt.

  Yvernaux was enveloped in a kind of aura of fluids, in which he bathed and with which he continued to be intoxicated, was nevertheless paying sharp and perspicacious attention to the state of the others. Even if he had not perceived anything himself, the state the others were in would have been sufficient to reveal the real existence of that special aura. In fact, he saw Gasguin shivering, his hands trembling, the skin of his face grimacing with tics, his eyes bulging, short of breath. In the corridor, behind the visitor framed in the doorway, he divined the presence of Aunt Line, without being able to make her out clearly, by the vibration of the entirety of the octogenarian’s old carcass, which seemed to him to be composed of dead leaves dancing in the breeze. And finally, here, close beside him, and there, on the threshold, he was able to examine at his leisure the two poles from which the commotion, supreme in imminence, sprang: Geneviève and the visitor; for it was exactly in the guise of two poles that they appeared to him—and in what relief, and with what unforgettable features!

  Geneviève had never confessed the visions of her mystical window to her godfather; otherwise, Yvernaux would immediately have recalled it to mind as he contemplated Joson’s head in that frame, thus lit from behind, the light in the corridor forming a kind of nimbus around it. On the other hand, she had mentioned the young Comte to him often enough, at one time, for him to imagine his portrait, and that portrait, Yvernaux had immediately remembered, Nothing had changed of that which was characteristic to it.

  Joson still had the bulging forehead of an idealist, his masseters projecting like steel walnuts to clench his carnivorous jaws, his sternly-arched mouth, his erne’s nose and petrel’s eyes. The black cowl of his hair, in flat strips like those of certain algae, was perhaps a little less thick than before, allowing a clearer view of the gulfs of his temples, and lightly denuding the top of his cranium, where the tonsure of the forties was beginning to appear. A few of those algae, once so gleaming black, had turned to grey lichen, thus announcing the whitening foam of the years. Nevertheless, far from harming the man, age had embellished him.

  To begin with, he had gained such precision that he had become an admirable paragon of manhood. The bow of his mouth, sterner than ever, gave evidence of the force that he would have, and could
have, exerted to launch words of command like an arrow. His complexion, cooked by the African sun, with the additional patina of the desert, had the warm glow of bronze, reminiscent of those lost alloys in which Corinth amalgamated precious metals like gold, electrum66 and others whose very names have been lost, with copper. That rich coloration of ardent tones evoked long voyages, adventures, the simoom, the free life, hunts, battles and blood. It made the ridge of the nose, like sea-eagle’s beak, stand out more clearly, and brightened the red flame of the petrel’s eyes: the petrel intoxicated by peril, whose crazy joy is unleashed by storms.

  It was that bird of storms, especially, more than the raptor, in sum, which imposed its vision upon Yvernaux, confronted with Joson framed in the doorway, forming a picture there in the manner of a living portrait. Dressed in an iron-gray suit tailored in the English style, with an ample, loose-hanging jacket and straight trousers slightly taped toward the bottom—a sort of colonial uniform—the man truly had the air of one of those prodigious and beautiful fliers, at rest, with the tips of its wings juxtaposed with its legs and touching the ground, and the stocks of it long curved pinions like raised shoulders, which make such birds resemble upright kites. His costume might have been plumage. His feet gripped the floor like claws. His arms seemed entirely ready to spread out like wings. And the human kite was, one might have thought, only awaiting a taut string to take off.

  That string was Geneviève’s gaze, which was about to tighten, and that gaze was the famous gaze of Idalie. Yvernaux thought so, as did Gasguin, both picking up the suggestion from a glance of Aunt Line’s—who was shouting at them from a distance by means of her mute gaze, but with such eloquence: “Look at those leumerottes, amon!”

  And in response to the silent summons of the old merlifiche, auditory images sprang from their two memories in unison, singing with the sounds that they could hear—interior sounds but exteriorized by the momentary hyperacuity of their hypnosis—the four cadenced verses in Thiérachian patois that Aunt Line had once improvised when Geneviève had been born, of whose persistence in their inner depths they had been unaware:

  Belle! Amon! Chi teu n’crès nin l’vielle,

  Woit’ à chès leum’rott’s, min chtiot fieu.

  L’iau veet’dins l’or f’chès gluer d’solel

  Qu’étot l’fond d’s yux d’min p’tit bon Dieu.

  Geneviève had, at that moment, a deathly pallor that accorded with her statuesque rigidity. But that statue, although rigid, had appeared to Yvernaux to be made of mist, so gray, vague and lacking in density was it.

  To be sure, even in normal times, the poor creature—especially since the last crises caused by her obsession, her terrors, her discipulary cure, and her two-part overwork—had not had a luxuriant complexion. Thin, frail and weak, her body almost puny, rather boyish in form, it would not have had to fad much to take on the silhouette of an apparition. Now, here—still according to Yvernaux’s impressions—she seemed suddenly to have melted, without condensing, if not vaporized, and her effigy had become truly spectral.

  But where all of her being remained gathered and concentrated, where the specter proved that it was very much alive, and with an intense, powerful, rich, imperious life, was in the gaze of her “leumerottes,” like green water running over wisps of sunlight. And Aunt Line had not been mistaken thirty-three years before, when she had “recognized” in that gaze—still enclosed by eyelids but perceptible to her alone—the famous gaze of Idalie...

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

  She had seen it often enough since, when Geneviève was in the process of intellectual conquest, the gaze of the cattelinette in the process of amorous conquest. And Yvernaux, alerted by the old woman, had also feasted upon it, when he surprised is goddaughter, as he put it, in the flagrante delicto of her genius. Personally, on the other hand—on several occasions, you will recall—mastered by those eyes intimating an order to his submissive will, he had experienced their authoritarian and seductive fascination directly. After all, he was not like Gasguin, less nervous and less susceptible to influence, who had not been subject to their spell and their power.

  At any rate, never—even in front of Aunt Line, with whom she lived as if she were alone, without hiding anything—had Geneviève had that gaze of Idalie’s to such an extent as she had it now: that luminous, perverse, profoundly seductive, all-enveloping gaze, of both reckless passion and frenetic tyranny, which “willed” you to come toward it like iron toward a magnet, and more forcefully still, since you knew that in going toward it you were going to burn, as the wisps of sunlight became a blazing fire, and to drown, in the glaucous water in the depths of which that implausible blaze phosphoresced.

  That there was all of that in Geneviève’s gaze at that moment, the three spectators of the scene, including Gasguin, had the sensation—confused and contused in him, sharp in clear in the other two. And they perceived, too, that the man, prey to the attraction of that gaze, tried at first to resist it Aunt Line held back a cry of anguish or indignation, which she stifled in a grinding of her gums. Yvernaux’s beard prickled and he had pins-and-needles in his fingertips. Gasguin, his mouth and eyes hermetically sealed and screwed up, held his breath.

  Abruptly—according to Yvernaux’s expressive image, not forged subsequently, but born of the fact itself—the string attached to the kite drew taut, and it took off.

  “Oh,” said the lyricist, his eyes tearful as he recalled it to mind, “what a magnificent tableau, materially and spiritually! For nothing could equal the physical beauty of it, nor reflect even vaguely its intimate splendor. It is necessary to limit oneself modestly to retracing, as best one can, the outline, or rather the diagram, in a line, nothing more, without the shadow of a commentary, leaving everyone the care of reconstituting that visible beauty and that intimate splendor, according to his means, by reference to those he has within himself.”

  And here, such as it is, from memory, is the approximate tracing of that sketch—or, rather, that diagram—a trifle disordered but sincere.

  Joson, after a moment of profound silence and absolute immobility, which appeared to everyone to last an eternity, started walking, taking steps that were both short and heavy.

  At the first step he dropped his soft felt hat, which fell limply, like a dead bird into muddy clay. That analogy, suggested to the other two witnesses by Yvernaux, was recognized as accurate. The effect had been lugubrious.

  Joson’s gait was singular and typical. Holding both hands in front of him, palms open, without any gestures, except to grope the air, he was reminiscent of a somnambulist, and also a bird of the penguin variety, firstly by the heaviness and brevity of his stride, and then—a characteristic detail—by the lack of swaying in his shoulders. They retained a strict horizontal line, his torso progressing in through a series of successive planes instead of following the jerky rhythm, with vertical displacements, of the sideways pressure of his alternately extended limbs.

  And it was the opposition between the two rhythms of his gait, by virtue of its anomaly, that gave the impression of the internal struggle resulting from obedience to the tension of the string, everything within him still resisting it. Except that, henceforth, that resistance was the very condition of the tension, and thus of the advancement toward the victorious pole.

  These various observations and remarks, due to Gasguin’s loyal and severe control of Yvernaux’s notations, give them the slightly rebarbative appearance of scientific observations. The strangeness of the subject-matter renders that aspect excusable.

  There was, moreover, a veritable torture on both sides. The magnet, it seemed, took no more delight in enslaving the iron than the iron in being enslaved to the magnet. The fixed gleam of the petrel’s eyes, with flashes of ruddy fire, was suddenly obscured by a kind of mist of tears, moistening them with imploring pity. The voluptuously imperious gaze of the seductive cattelinette sometimes softened into a tenderness that would have consented by asking f
or forgiveness. And both were suffering, as if they would rather the roles had been the other way around.

  That was, in fact, the exact conclusion—momentarily, at least. For, as what followed will make clear, after the unexpected reversal produced at the moment of final combination, there was a complete return to the initial situation, and then a series of oscillations ending in the foreseen and normal fusion. At the exact moment of the discharge when the two electricities and magnetisms in latent communion came into manifest communication, however, it was suddenly Joson, the attracted element, who became the source of attraction, while Geneviève, ceasing to be the pole, behaved as if she were the magnetized needle.

  By what seemingly-bizarre phenomenon of induction? By what obscure dynamic mechanism as yet unreduced into laws? Perhaps Geneviève, with her genius, aided by her father’s method, will discover that one day. The observed fact, without seeking to know the cause, remains, in what Yvernaux calls so modestly and accurately its “diagrammatic” form—to which we shall return, the last stroke of the pen completing the promised picture.

  Only three of the brief steps that Joson was slowly taking still separated him from Geneviève. Once again there was, on his part, a supreme effort of revolt, after a last attempt at supplication.

  To his tear-veiled gaze, imbued with humble sadness, expressly meek, dulled by the shame of the imminent and ultimately certain defeat, Geneviève had replied with a gaze more heavily charged than ever with domineering insolence, demanding absolute submission. Under that injunction, as insulting as a whiplash, Joson came to a halt. All of his pride baulked. He stood firm. He was splendid.