The Life of Xavier Lavalle
(Reviewed by Rene Talland. École Aëronautique, Paris)
Ten years ago Lavalle, “that imperturbable dreamer of the heavens,”
as Lazareff hailed him, gathered together the fruits of a lifetime's
labour, and gave it, with well-justified contempt, to a world bound
hand and foot to Barald's Theory of Vertices and “compensating electric
nodes.” “They shall see,” he wrote--in that immortal postscript to The
Heart of the Cyclone--“the Laws whose existence they derided written in
fire beneath them.”
“But even here,” he continues, “there is no finality. Better a thousand
times my conclusions should be discredited than that my dead name should
lie across the threshold of the temple of Science--a bar to further
inquiry.”
So died Lavalle--a prince of the Powers of the Air, and even at his
funeral Cellier jested at “him who had gone to discover the secrets of
the Aurora Borealis.”
If I choose thus to be banal, it is only to remind you that Céllier's
theories are today as exploded as the ludicrous deductions of the
Spanish school. In the place of their fugitive and warring dreams we
have, definitely, Lavalle's Law of the Cyclone which he surprised in
darkness and cold at the foot of the overarching throne of the Aurora
Borealis. It is there that I, intent on my own investigations, have
passed and re-passed a hundred times the worn leonine face, white as the
snow beneath him, furrowed with wrinkles like the seams and gashes upon
the North Cape; the nervous hand, integrally a part of the mechanism of
his flighter; and above all, the wonderful lambent eyes turned to the
zenith.
“Master,” I would cry as I moved respectfully beneath him, “what is it
you seek today?” and always the answer, clear and without doubt, from
above: “The old secret, my son!”
The immense egotism of youth forced me on my own path, but (cry of the
human always!) had I known--if I had known--I would many times have
bartered my poor laurels for the privilege, such as Tinsley and Herrera
possess, of having aided him in his monumental researches.
It is to the filial piety of Victor Lavalle that we owe the two volumes
consecrated to the ground-life of his father, so full of the holy
intimacies of the domestic hearth. Once returned from the abysms of the
utter North to that little house upon the outskirts of Meudon, it was
not the philosopher, the daring observer, the man of iron energy that
imposed himself on his family, but a fat and even plaintive jester, a
farceur incarnate and kindly, the co-equal of his children, and, it must
be written, not seldom the comic despair of Madame Lavalle, who, as she
writes five years after the marriage, to her venerable mother, found “in
this unequalled intellect whose name I bear the abandon of a large and
very untidy boy.” Here is her letter:
“Xavier returned from I do not know where at midnight, absorbed in
calculations on the eternal question of his Aurora--la belle Aurore,
whom I begin to hate. Instead of anchoring,--I had set out the
guide-light above our roof, so he had but to descend and fasten the
plane--he wandered, profoundly distracted, above the town with his
anchor down! Figure to yourself, dear mother, it is the roof of the
mayor's house that the grapnel first engages! That I do not regret, for
the mayor's wife and I are not sympathetic; but when Xavier uproots my
pet araucaria and bears it across the garden into the conservatory I
protest at the top of my voice. Little Victor in his night-clothes runs
to the window, enormously amused at the parabolic flight without reason,
for it is too dark to see the grapnel, of my prized tree. The Mayor
of Meudon, thunders at our door in the name of the Law, demanding,
I suppose, my husband's head. Here is the conversation through the
megaphone--Xavier is two hundred feet above us:
“'Mons. Lavalle, descend and make reparation for outrage of domicile.
Descend, Mons. Lavalle!'
“No one answers.
“'Xavier Lavalle, in the name of the Law, descend and submit to process
for outrage of domicile.'
“Xavier, roused from his calculations, comprehending only the last
words: 'Outrage of domicile? My dear mayor, who is the man that has
corrupted thy Julie?'
“The mayor, furious, 'Xavier Lavalle--'
“Xavier, interrupting: 'I have not that felicity. I am only a dealer in
cyclones!'
“My faith, he raised one then! All Meudon attended in the streets, and
my Xavier, after a long time comprehending what he had done, excused
himself in a thousand apologies. At last the reconciliation was effected
in our house over a supper at two in the morning--Julie in a wonderful
costume of compromises, and I have her and the mayor pacified in bed in
the blue room.”
And on the next day, while the mayor rebuilds his roof, her Xavier
departs anew for the Aurora Borealis, there to commence his life's work.
M. Victor Lavalle tells us of that historic collision (en plane) on the
flank of Hecla between Herrera, then a pillar of the Spanish school,
and the man destined to confute his theories and lead him intellectually
captive. Even through the years, the immense laugh of Lavalle as he
sustains the Spaniard's wrecked plane, and cries: “Courage! I shall not
fall till I have found Truth, and I hold you fast!” rings like the
call of trumpets. This is that Lavalle whom the world, immersed in
speculations of immediate gain, did not know nor suspect--the Lavalle
whom they adjudged to the last a pedant and a theorist.
The human, as apart from the scientific, side (developed in his own
volumes) of his epoch-making discoveries is marked with a simplicity,
clarity, and good sense beyond praise. I would specially refer such as
doubt the sustaining influence of ancestral faith upon character and
will to the eleventh and nineteenth chapters, in which are contained
the opening and consummation of the Tellurionical Records extending over
nine years. Of their tremendous significance be sure that the modest
house at Meudon knew as little as that the Records would one day be the
planet's standard in all official meteorology. It was enough for
them that their Xavier--this son, this father, this husband--ascended
periodically to commune with powers, it might be angelic, beyond their
comprehension, and that they united daily in prayers for his safety.
“Pray for me,” he says upon the eve of each of his excursions, and
returning, with an equal simplicity, he renders thanks “after supper in
the little room where he kept his barometers.”
To the last Lavalle was a Catholic of the old school, accepting--he who
had looked into the very heart of the lightnings--the dogmas of papal
infallibility, of absolution, of confession--of relics great and small.
Marvellous--enviable contradiction!
The completion of the Tellurionical Records closed what Lavalle himself
was pleased to call the theoretical side of his labours--labours from
which the youngest and least impressionable planeur might well have
shrunk. He had traced through cold and heat, across the deeps of the
oceans, with instruments of his own invention, over the inhospitable
heart of the polar ice and the sterile visage of the deserts, league by
league, patiently, unweariedly, remorselessly, from their ever-shifting
cradle under the magnetic pole to their exalted death-bed in the utmost
ether of the upper atmosphere each one of the Isoconical
Tellurions--Lavalle's Curves, as we call them today. He had
disentangled the nodes of their intersections, assigning to each its
regulated period of flux and reflux. Thus equipped, he summons Herrera
and Tinsley, his pupils, to the final demonstration as calmly as though
he were ordering his flighter for some mid-day journey to Marseilles.
“I have proved my thesis,” he writes. “It remains now only that you
should witness the proof. We go to Manila to-morrow. A cyclone will form
off the Pescadores S. 17 E. in four days, and will reach its maximum
intensity twenty-seven hours after inception. It is there I will show
you the Truth.”
A letter heretofore unpublished from Herrera to Madame Lavalle tells us
how the Master's prophecy was verified.
I will not destroy its simplicity or its significance by any attempt to
quote. Note well, though, that Herrera's preoccupation throughout that
day and night of superhuman strain is always for the Master's bodily
health and comfort.
“At such a time,” he writes, “I forced the Master to take the broth”; or
“I made him put on the fur coat as you told me.” Nor is Tinsley (see
pp. 184, 85) less concerned. He prepares the nourishment. He cooks
eternally, imperturbably, suspended in the chaos of which the Master
interprets the meaning. Tinsley, bowed down with the laurels of both
hemispheres, raises himself to yet nobler heights in his capacity of a
devoted chef. It is almost unbelievable! And yet men write of the Master
as cold, aloof, self-contained. Such characters do not elicit the joyous
and unswerving devotion which Lavalle commanded throughout life. Truly,
we have changed very little in the course of the ages! The secrets of
earth and sky and the links that bind them, we felicitate ourselves
we are on the road to discover; but our neighbours' heart and mind we
misread, we misjudge, we condemn now as ever. Let all, then, who love a
man read these most human, tender, and wise volumes.
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Transcriber's note: These “advertisements” appeared in the format
that would have been used in a newspaper or magazine ad
section--that is in two columns for the smaller ads, and in
quarter, half, full and double page layouts for the others. Also
L is used as the symbol for pounds.
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MISCELLANEOUS
[ WANTS ]
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MOSSAMEDES TRANSPORT ASSOC.
84 Palestine Buildings, E. C.
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MAN WANTED-DIG DRIVER for Southern Alps with Saharan summer
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M. R.
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COMMERCIAL DIG, CENTRAL and Southern Europe. A smart, active man
for a L. M. T. Dig. Night work only. Headquarters London and
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BAGMAN
Charing Cross Hotel, W. C. (urgent.)
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FOR SALE--A BARGAIN--Single Plane, narrow-gauge vans, Pinke
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N. 2650 This office.
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