WHERE LIPS UNITE
We have but to read the newspapers of the period, to realize that the
excitement caused by the Meudon pictures reached its culminating point
as the result of Benjamin Prevotelle's essay. I have four of those
newspapers, dated the following day, on my table as I write. Not one
of them contains throughout its eight pages a single line that does
not refer to what at once became known as the Splendid Theory.
For the rest, the chorus of approval and enthusiasm was general, or
very nearly so. There were barely a few cries of vehement protest
uttered by experts who felt exasperated by the boldness of the essay
even more than by the gaps occurring in it. The great mass of the
public saw in all this not a theory but a fact and accepted it as such
with the faith of true believers confronted with the divine truth.
Every one contributed his own proof as yet one more stone added to the
edifice. The objections, however strong they might be--and they were
set forth without compromise--seemed temporary and capable of being
removed by closer study and a more careful confirmation of the
phenomena.
And it is with this conclusion, Benjamin Prevotelle's own conclusion,
that all the articles, all the interviews and all the letters that
appeared end. The measures recommended by Benjamin Prevotelle were
loudly called for. Action must be taken without delay and a series of
experiments must be made in the Meudon amphitheatre.
Amid this effervescence, the kidnapping of Massignac went for little.
The man Massignac had disappeared? There was nothing to enable one to
tell who had carried him off or where he was confined? Very well. It
made very little difference. As Benjamin Prevotelle said, the
opportunity was too good to miss. The doors of the Yard had been
sealed on the first morning. What were we waiting for? Why not begin
the experiments at once?
As for me, I did not breathe a word of my Bougival adventure, in the
constant fear of implicating Berangere, who was directly involved in
it. All the same, I returned to the banks of the Seine. My rough and
ready enquiries showed that Massignac and Velmot had lived on the
island during a part of the winter in the company of a small boy who,
when they were away, looked after the house which one of them had
hired under a false name. I explored the island and the house. No one
was living there now. I found a few pieces of furniture, a few
household implements, nothing more.
On the fourth day, a provisional committee, appointed _ad hoc_, met in
the Yard about the middle of the afternoon. As the sky was cloudy,
they contented themselves with examining the carboys discovered in the
basement of the walls and, after lowering the curtain, with cutting
off strips of the dark-grey substance at different points of the
screen along the edges.
The analysis revealed absolutely nothing out of the way. They found an
amalgam of organic materials and acids which it would be tedious to
enumerate and which, however employed, supplied not the smallest
explanation of the very tiniest phenomena. But, on the sixth day, the
sky became clear and the committee returned, together with a number of
official persons and mere sightseers who had succeeded in joining
them.
The wait in front of the screen was fruitless and just a little
ridiculous. All those people looking out for something that did not
happen, standing with wide-open eyes and distorted faces, in front of
a wall that had nothing on it, wore an air of solemnity which was
delightfully comical.
An hour was spent in anxious expectation. The wall remained impassive.
The disappointment was all the greater inasmuch as the public had been
waiting for this test as the expected climax of this most sensational
tragedy. Were we to give up all hope of knowing the truth and to admit
that Noel Dorgeroux's formula alone was capable of producing the
pictures? I, for one, was convinced of it. In addition to the
substances removed, there was a solution, compounded by Massignac from
Noel Dorgeroux's formula, which solution he kept carefully, as my
uncle used to do, in blue phials or bottles and which was spread over
the screen before each exhibition in order to give it the mysterious
power of evoking the images.
A thorough search was instituted, but no phials, no blue bottles came
to light.
There was no doubt about it: people were beginning to regret the
disappearance, perhaps the death of the man Massignac. Was the great
secret to be lost at the very moment when Benjamin Prevotelle's theory
had proved its incomparable importance?
Well, on the morning of the eleventh day after the date of Benjamin
Prevotelle's essay, that is to say, the 27th of May, the newspapers
printed a note signed by Theodore Massignac in which he announced
that, in the late afternoon of that same day, the third exhibition in
the Yard would take place under his own direction.
He actually appeared at about twelve o'clock in the morning. The doors
were closed and guarded by four detectives and he was unable to obtain
admission. But at three o'clock an official from the Prefecture of
Police arrived, armed with full powers of negotiation.
Massignac laid down his conditions. He was once more to become the
absolute master of the Yard, which was to be surrounded by detectives
and closed between the performances to everybody except himself. None
of the spectators was to carry a camera or any other instrument.
Everything was conceded; everything was overlooked, in order to
continue the interrupted series of miraculous exhibitions and to
resume the communications with Venus. This capitulation on the part of
the authorities before the audacity of a man whose crime was known to
them showed that Benjamin Prevotelle's theory was adopted in
government circles.
The fact is--and there was no one who failed to see it--that those in
power were giving way in the hope of presently turning the tables
and, by some subterfuge, laying hands on the screen at the moment
when it was in working-order. Massignac felt this so clearly that,
when the doors opened, he had the effrontery to distribute a circular
couched in the following terms:
WARNING
"_The audience is hereby warned that any attack on the
management will have as its immediate consequence the
destruction of the screen and the irreparable loss of
Noel Dorgeroux's secret._"
For my part, as I had had no proof of Massignac's death, I was not
surprised at his return. But the alteration in his features and
attitude astounded me. He looked ten years older; his figure was bent;
and the everlasting smile, which used to be his natural expression, no
longer lit up his face, which had become emaciated, yellow and
anxious.
He caught sight of me and drew me to one side:
"I say, that scoundrel has played the very devil with me! First he
beat me black and blue, down in a cellar. Next he lowered me into the
water to make me talk. I was ten days in bed before I got over it!
. . . By Jingo, it's not his fault if I'm not there now, the villain!
. . . However, he's had his share too . . . and he caught it worse
than I did, at least I hope so. The hand that struck him was steady
enough and showed no sign of trembling."
I did not ask him what hand he meant or how the tragedy had ended in
the darkness. There was only one thing that mattered:
"Massignac, have you read Benjamin Prevotelle's report?"
"Yes."
"Does it agree with the facts? Does it agree with my uncle's account,
the one which you've read?"
He shrugged his shoulders:
"What business is that of yours? What business is it of anybody's? Do
I keep the pictures to myself? You know I don't. On the contrary, I'm
trying to show them to everybody and honestly to earn the money which
they pay me. What more do they want?"
"They want to protect a discovery . . ."
"Never! Never!" he exclaimed, angrily. "Tell them to shut up and stop
all that nonsense! I've bought Noel Dorgeroux's secret, yes, bought
and paid for it. Very well, I mean to keep it for myself, for myself
alone, against everybody and in spite of any threat. I shan't talk
now any more than I did when Velmot had me in his grip and I was on
the point of croaking. I tell you, Victorien Beaugrand, Noel
Dorgeroux's secret will perish at my death. If I die, it dies: I've
taken my oath on it."
* * * * *
When Theodore Massignac, a few minutes later, moved towards his seat,
he no longer wore his former air of a lion-tamer entering a cage, but
rather the aspect of a hunted animal which is startled by the least
sound and trembles at the approach of the man with the whip. But the
chuckers-out were there, wearing their ushers' chains and looking as
fierce and aggressive as ever. Their wages had been doubled, I was
told.
There was no need for the precaution. The danger that threatened
Massignac did not come from the crowd, which preserved a religious
silence, as though it were preparing to celebrate some solemn ritual.
Massignac was received with neither applause nor invective. The
spectators waited gravely for what was about to happen, though no one
guessed that _that_ was on the point of happening. Those seated on the
upper tiers, of whom I was one, often turned their heads upwards. In
the clear sky, shimmering with gold, shone Venus, the Evening Star.
What a moment! For the first time in the world's history men felt
certain that they were being contemplated by eyes which were not human
eyes and watched by minds which differed from their own minds. For the
first time they were connected in a tangible fashion with that beyond,
formerly peopled by their dreams and their hopes alone, from which the
friendly gaze of their new brothers now fell upon them. These were not
legends and phantoms projected into the empty heavens by our thirsting
souls, but living beings who were addressing us in the living and
natural language of the pictures, until the hour, now near at hand,
when we should talk together like friends who had lost and found one
another.
Their eyes, their Three Eyes, were infinitely gentle that day, filled
with a tenderness which seemed born of love and which thrilled us with
an equal tenderness, with the same love. What were they presaging,
those women's eyes, those eyes of many women that quivered before us
so attractively and with such smiles and such delightful promise? Of
what happy and charming scenes of our past were we to be the
astonished witnesses?
I watched my neighbours. All, like myself, were leaning towards the
screen. The sight affected their faces before it occurred. I noticed
the pallor of two young men beside me. A woman whose face was hidden
from my eyes by a thick mourning-veil sat with her handkerchief in her
hand, ready to shed tears.
The first scene represented a landscape, full of glaring light, which
appeared to be an Italian landscape, with a dusty road along which
cavalry-men, wearing the uniform of the revolutionary armies, were
galloping around a travelling-carriage drawn by four horses. Then,
immediately afterwards, we saw in a shady garden, at the end of an
avenue of dark cypresses, a house with closed shutters standing on a
flower-decked terrace.
The carriage stopped at the foot of the terrace and drove off again
after setting down an officer who ran up to the door and knocked at it
with the pommel of his sword.
The door was opened almost at once. A tall young woman rushed out of
the house, with her arms outstretched towards the officer. But, at the
moment when they were about to embrace, they both took a few steps
backwards, as though to delay their happiness and in so doing to taste
its delights more fully.
Then the screen showed us the woman's face; and words cannot depict
the expression of joy and headlong love that turned this face, which
was neither very beautiful nor very young, into something more alive
with youth and beauty than anything in this world.
After that, the lovers flung themselves into each others' arms, as
though their lives, too long separated, were striving to make but one.
Their lips united.
We saw nothing more of the French officer and his Italian lover. A new
picture followed, less bright but equally clear, the picture of a
long, battlemented rampart, marked with a series of round,
machicolated towers. Below and in the centre, among the ruins of a
bastion, were trees growing in a semicircle around an ancient
oak-tree.
Gradually, from the shade of the trees, there stepped into the
sunlight a quite young girl, clad in the pointed head-dress of the
fifteenth century and a full-skirted gown trailing along the ground.
She stopped with her hands open and raised on high. She saw something
that we were unable to see. She wore a bewitching smile. Her eyes were
half-closed; and her slender figure seemed to sway as she waited.
What she was awaiting was the arrival of a young page, who came to
her and kissed her lips while she flung herself on his shoulder.
This enamoured couple certainly moved us, as the first couple had
done, by reason of the passion and the languor that possessed them,
but even more by reason of the thought that they were an actual
couple, living, before our eyes and at the present day, their real
life of long ago. Our sensations were no longer such as we experienced
at the earlier exhibitions. They had then been full of hesitation and
ignorance. We now knew. In this late period of the world's existence,
we were beholding the life of human beings of the fifteenth century.
They were not repeating for our entertainment actions which had been
performed before. They were performing them for the first occasion in
time and space. It was their first kiss of love.
This, the feeling that one is seeing _this_, is a feeling which
surpasses everything that can be imagined! To see a fifteenth-century
page and damsel kissing each other on the lips!
To see, as we saw immediately afterwards, a Greek hill! To see the
Acropolis standing against its sky of two thousand years ago, with its
houses and gardens, its palm-trees, its lanes, its vestibules and
temples, the Parthenon, not in ruins, but in all its splendour and
perfection! A host of statues surround it. Men and women climb its
stairways. And these men and women are Athenians of the time of
Pericles or Demosthenes!
They come and go in all directions. They talk together. Then they
drift away. A little empty street runs down between two white walls. A
group passes and moves away, leaving behind it a man and woman who
stop suddenly, glance around them and kiss each other fervently. And
we see, underneath the veil in which the woman's forehead is shrouded,
two great, black eyes whose lids flutter like wings, eyes which open,
close, laugh and weep.
Thus we go back through the ages and we understand that those who,
gazing down upon the earth, have taken these successive pictures wish,
in displaying them to us, to show us the act, for-ever youthful and
eternally renewed, of that universal love of which they proclaim
themselves, like us, to be the slaves and the zealous worshippers.
They too are governed and exalted by the same law, though perhaps not
expressed in them by the intoxication of a like caress. The same
impulse sweeps them along. But do they know the adorable union of the
lips?
Other couples passed. Other periods were reviewed. Other civilizations
appeared to us. We saw the kiss of an Egyptian peasant and a young
girl; and that exchanged high up in a hanging garden of Babylon
between a princess and a priest; and that which transfigured to such a
degree as to make them almost human two unspeakable beings squatting
at the door of a prehistoric cave; and more kisses and yet more.
They were brief visions, some of which were indistinct and faded, like
the colours of an ancient fresco, but yet searching and potent,
because of the meaning which they assumed, full at the same time of
poetry and brutal reality, of violence and serene loveliness.
And always the woman's eyes were the centre, the purpose, as it were
the justification of the pictures. Oh, the smiles and the tears, the
gladness and the despair and the exquisite rapture of all those eyes!
How our friends up aloft must also have felt all the charm of them,
thus to dedicate them to us! How they must have felt and perhaps
regretted all the difference between those eyes of ecstasy and
enchantment and their own eyes, so gloomy and void of all expression!
There was such sweetness in those women's eyes, such grace, such
ingenuousness, such adorable perfidy, such distress and such
seductiveness, such triumphant joy, such grateful humility . . . and
such love, when they offered their submissive lips to the man!
* * * * *
I was unable to see the end of those pictures. There was a movement
round about me in the midst of the crowd, which was beside itself with
painful excitement; and I found myself next to a woman in mourning,
whose face was hidden beneath her veils.
She thrust these aside. I recognized Berangere. She raised her
passionate eyes to mine, flung her arms round my neck and gave me her
lips, while she stammered words of love. And in this way I learnt,
without any need of explanation, that Massignac's insinuations against
his daughter were false, that she was the terror-stricken victim of
the two scoundrels and that she had never ceased to love me.