Urien's Voyage (6 page)

“We are indeed miserable,” I cried out. “So far our voyage has been a failure. What does our cheerless plain mean at this moment in our history? Or what is the significance of our being on the plain? Any suspicion of futility will torment our hearts and allow their virtue to be diffused. Lord! In the face of futility, we shall no longer have either faith or courage. Now we are going to weaken—or must we embrace piety? We have cherished our pride, and our nobility has suffered from the asperity of our victories. Our virtue derives solely from resistance; but around us now everything gives way, everything crumbles, and we are no longer aware of our courage. Our tranquil past resurges in us like a regret. Majestic and profound night of wild ecstasy! Texts of truth where often there flickered a metaphysical flame! Algebras and theodicies, studies! We had left you for something else. Oh, for something else indeed! We set out one morning because we had learned through study that we must manifest our essence; we went off into the world in search of revealing actions, knowing nothing of the tenebrous valley that connected the lofty room where we dreamed to the world where men lived—the valley so terrible and so mysterious that I expected death there, so tenebrous that my eyes mistook the waves for lights when finally I stood before the long-sought sea. Afterwards we saw beaches, profuse vegetation, gardens traversed by warm streams, palaces, imposing terraces whose memory causes despair; we saw every smile, heard every plea, and still we resisted; not even Queen Haïatalnefus, deceitful and perfumed, could overcome our resistance. We were preserving ourselves for something else. Through a calculated—indeed, I ought to say esthetic—progression, our courage and desire grew with our resistance; and we were anticipating a climactic event. Now our boat is going to founder in the mire. Oh! Ours is truly a history of failure, abject failure. What can happen next? Nothing matters to us, such is the pall cast on the future by our boredom; our noble souls will succumb to disinterest in their task. No matter what happens, it will always be unimportant. Logical sequences are broken; we have left the salutary paths. Let us remember the detached islands; they floated like abandoned ships, no longer linked to the world. That is the saddest thing that can happen. One can not start all over when futility lies ahead. We are completely lost. We are more miserable by far than my inept words can suggest to you; more miserable by far than we are aware, for the apathy that engulfs us is beginning to dull our souls. I have spoken too long and said too much. Disordered things require incoherent statements; I shall conclude with a few alliterations.” Letting my voice fall suddenly until it was only a murmur, I whispered this cadence:

“… The grasshopper of the sands will sing.”

All those sitting on the bank had heard me out; but my peroration seemed to them incongruous and they shook with undissimulated laughter; I had hoped that it would awaken us from our torpor.
*
Ellis had understood nothing; I felt suddenly irritated but showed no sign of it. She opened wide her inquisitive eyes; she was waiting for me to continue.

“I have finished, dear Ellis,” I said. “Let's walk through the grass. You are sweet and delightful today. The air will be good for you.”
* *

I think it would be wearisome to recount our stroll; I prefer to speak of a cave which we entered but could not explore to any great extent because it was partially filled with stagnant water; we could nevertheless see high vaults shrouded in darkness; galleries that seemed endless; places where the walls of the caverns arched to form a ceiling, lethargic bats hung like fruit. I plucked one for Ellis, who had not yet seen any of them. The best part about the cave was that, after we left its oppressive gloom, the light outside seemed somewhat less sad. It was in the cave that Ellis contracted marsh-fever and I first had terrifying doubts about her identity.

While the others were getting back into the boat that evening, Ydier, Nathanaël and I, feeling vaguely once more a desire to live, started inland. Then we had a strange adventure whose mysteriousness still torments us, for it was unique and unrelated to anything else that occurred during our voyage.

Night had fallen; the wind swept across the rushes in the moors; fires hovered over the peat-bogs; afraid of the quagmires, we walked slowly. A tinkling sound broke the silence and caused us to stop, surprised. Like a vaporous form, a white woman emerged, floated ethereally, rose above the marsh; she shook a chalice-like bell which she held in her hand. Our first impulse was to flee; then, somewhat reassured by her ethereality, we were about to call out to her when she began to disintegrate into shapeless mist, either higher or more distant, and the tinkling sound began to fade away; but it lingered still, and we were beginning to think that fatigue had made us the victims of some illusion when, walking onward, we heard it nearer, again clear, skimming the ground, at times uncertain, alternately blatant and hesitant, then plaintive, imploring; bending down in the darkness for a better view, we found a poor lamb lost on the moor, bewildered, its wool dampened by the dark. Around its neck was the little bell. We lifted up the lamb that had gone astray and removed its bell.

But once again a noise broke the stillness and slowly there emerged from the slough a woman who wore a veil resembling a mortuary shroud, her gray veil clung like mist to the rush-bed. The drooping lily inclined its chalice earthward; its sounds spilled out like seeds. And, as she fled, I saw her stoop down near a recess in the darkness and hang her lily like a bell from the neck of a waiting lamb. We found the lamb on the plain.

A third form appeared; sweat covered her face; behind her floated her train, like a tattered cloth, over the leaves of the rushes. And I saw her hold out the lily as she disintegrated and leave the disconsolate lamb with the bell which her dissolving hand had tied to its wool.

In the same way twelve women appeared; we found the lambs afterwards and, like shepherds without crooks, used our hands to guide the flock through the night along unknown paths, between clumps of rushes and off-shoots of ranunculuses.

When we returned to the boat, dawn was beginning to glow. Ellis was in some pain and slightly delirious. I noticed that day, for the first time I think, that her hair was completely blond; blond, nothing more.

The felucca began once more to move up the fluvial waters; long days passed in this way, but they were too monotonous to relate. The banks were always so alike that we seemed not to be making any headway. The stream slowed imperceptibly, stopped, and we rowed through stagnant water, deep and dark. On each bank stood a row of cypresses; from each branch there fell a somber shadow that weighed heavily on our souls. We heard our oars fall into the stream with a muffled rhythm, then the water lifted up by the oars fall back like heavy tears; we heard nothing else. Leaning over the water, each saw his face enlarged and enveloped by darkness for, because of the cypresses which had become gigantic, the water no longer reflected the sky. We looked often at the black water and often at our faces in the water. Ellis babbled incoherently in the bottom of the boat and uttered prophecies. We understand that we had come to the climactic point of our history. And soon, in fact, the gigantic cypresses grew smaller. But we were too overcome by silence and by darkness to be very astounded by a disconcerting phenomenon: the water was beginning to flow, but to flow in the opposite direction. Now we were going back down the mysterious stream. And as in a story read backwards, or as in a flashback, we were retracing our voyage; we came back to the familiar steep banks and again lived through all our boredom. The stolid storks were again fishing for mud-worms… I shall not relate the monotonous scene again; it was too trying to relate the first time. I shall not bewail the lack of proportions in the history; however for if it took as long to retrace the lethargic stream as to ascend it the first time, I was not aware of this fact; I no longer watched the cheerless banks and dour water glide by; only the thought of Ellis made me oblivious to the passage of the hours; or, leaning over the reflection of my unknown self in the water, I sought in my sad eyes to gain a better understanding of my thoughts, and I read in my tight lips the bitterness of regret that tightens them. Ellis! do not read these lines! I am not writing them for you! You would never understand the despair that grips my soul.

But the stream of boredom came to an end; the waters again became clearer; the low banks disappeared, and again we were at sea. Ellis was slightly delirious in the enlarged boat. The seawater gradually became so limpid that we could see the rocks on the bottom. Reflecting on all the boredom of the previous day, on the perfumed baths of the past, I studied the underwater plain; I recalled that Morgain, in the gardens of Haïatalnefus, had gone beneath the waves and walked in the algae. I was about to speak when I glimpsed among the algae on the sand, like an ethereal vision, a sunken city. Still uncertain, I kept looking, not daring to utter a word; the boat was advancing slowly. The walls of the city were visible; sand had filled most of the streets; some, however, still looked green like deep valleys between the raised walls. The whole town was green and blue. Algae reached from balconies down to the fucus-lined squares. One could see the shadow of the church. The shadow of the boat glided over the tombs of the cemetery; green mosses slept on, undisturbed. The sea was silent; fish played in the waves.

“Morgain! Morgain! Look!” I shouted.

He was already looking.

“Will you be sorry?” he inquired. As was my custom, I did not reply; but giving way suddenly to a burst of lyricism occasioned by the boredom we had experienced and the joy of seeing once more a town, a silent town, I exclaimed:

“We should be, oh! so comfortable under the cool water on the porch of the sunken church! The taste of the shadows and the humidity. The sound of bells under the waves. And the calm, Morgain!…Morgain, you can not know what torments me. She was waiting, but I was mistaken; Ellis is not like that. No Ellis is not a blond; I was sadly mistaken; I remember now that her hair was black and that her eyes sparkled as bright as her soul. Her soul was vivacious and violent, and yet her voice was very calm for she was contemplative. And the waif that I found on the bank was frail and forlorn. Why? First her parasol displeased me; then her shawl; then all her books irritated me. Yet one does not travel to recover one's old thoughts; and then she cried when I brought these things to her attention. First I said to myself: ‘Oh! How she has changed!' but I see clearly now that she is not the same person. And this is still the most absurd episode of the voyage. As soon as I saw her on the bank, I felt that she was misplaced. But what shall I do now? This is all very distracting, Morgain, and I dislike sentimental states of dejection.”

But Morgain seemed not to understand; then I started over in a milder manner.…

It was on the same day, a little after this serious conversation, that thin sheets of ice first appeared on the horizon. A current was carrying them toward temperate waters; they came from frozen seas. They were not melting, I suppose, but dissolving into the blue air, imperceptibly more fluid; They subtilized like fog. And the first sheets encountered, because the water was still almost warm, had become so thin, so diaphanous and diluted that the boat had moved along without our noticing them until alerted by the sudden coolness.

Toward evening their numbers kept increasing, as did their size. We moved through them; as they became even more dense, the boat would strike them and scarcely cut through them. Night fell, and we would have lost sight of them completely had not the light from the stars shone through them pale, purified and magnified. Thus through an imperceptible transition that defies narration, after the splendid shores and sunlit gardens, we were finally to pass through a morose climate and frozen seas and come to arid polar shores.

And imperceptibly also, languishing from her sickness, each day Ellis grew paler, giddier and more blond; she was becoming less and less real, and seemed to be fading away.

“Ellis,” I said to her finally, by way of preparing her for what was to come, “you are an obstacle to my union with God, and I can love you only if you too are fused in God himself.”
*

And when the felucca reached a boreal region where wisps of smoke rose from the huts of the Eskimos, when we left her on the shore and immediately set sail for the Pole, she had already lost almost every vestige of reality.

And we also left there Yvon, Hélain, Aguisel and Lambègue—who were sick with boredom and seemed about to die from drowsiness—and sailed calmly on toward the Pole.

*
The grotesque figure of Ellis recalls Gide's inability to fuse in a normal manner the physical and the spiritual. Ellis appears in his Journals as Em, and elsewhere as Alissa, Emmanuèle or Madeleine. “All purity, love, and tenderness” in his other works, she is really his cousin (later his wife) Madeleine Rondeaux.

*
We learn from his Journals that Gide frequently suffered embarrassment over his inability to say the right words at the right time.

* *
Up to this point the narrator has used the familiar pronoun
tu
in addressing Ellis. Here he uses the polite form
vous.

*
Urien continues to use the polite form
vous
in addressing Ellis. Gide revealed the ambivalent nature of his love for Madeleine, and her patient suffering because of it, in
Et nunc manet in te,
written in 1947 and issued publicly in 1951.

VOYAGE TO A FROZEN SEA

A rather dilatory auroral sky; purple flashes on the sea where pale blue sheets of ice became iridescent. A rather chilling awakening because the limpid air was no longer pursued by warm breezes. The boreal region where we had left wan Ellis and our four sick companions the day before, though still visible in the distance, was on the verge of disappearing; a delicate buoy far out on the horizon linked the sky to the last waves and seemed to lift and lull the vanishing land. All eight of us assembled on the deck for a morning prayer, serious but not sad; then we raised our solemn voices and felt once more the tide of seraphic joy that had surged through us on the day when we drank crystalline spring water. Then aware of our joyous wills and wishing to seize them and sense them rather than to allow them to vanish, I said to them: