Part 7

“My compliments,” said the captain, as I picked up my shako. “You are safe now for the day.” I knew that military superstition which believes that the axiom, _non his in idem_[12], finds its application on a field of battle as in a court of justice. I jauntily replaced my shako.

“That is making a man salute, without ceremony,” I said, as gaily as I could. That bad joke, in the circumstances, seemed excellent.

“I felicitate you,” responded the captain. “You will get nothing worse, and to-night you will command a company; for well I know that the oven is being heated for me. Every time that I have been wounded the officer nearest me[13] has been touched by a spent ball, and,” he added, in a lower tone, and almost as though ashamed, “their names always commenced with a P.”

I pretended to feel brave; many persons would have done as I did; many persons too would have been as deeply impressed by those prophetic words. Conscript as I was, I realized that I could not confide my sentiments to any one, and that I must always appear coolly intrepid.

After about a half-hour, the Russian fire diminished perceptibly; whereupon we sallied from our cover to march upon the redoubt.

Our regiment was composed of three battalions. The second was ordered to turn the redoubt on the side of the entrance; the two others were to make the assault. I was in the third battalion.

In coming out from behind the species of ridge which had protected us, we were received by several discharges of musketry which did but little damage in our ranks. The whistling of the balls surprised me: often I turned my head, and so drew upon myself divers pleasantries on the part of my comrades who were more familiar with that sound.

“Take it all in all,” I said to myself, “a battle is not such a terrible matter.”

We advanced in double-time, preceded by skirmishers: all at once the Russians gave three hurrahs--three distinct hurrahs--then remained silent, and without firing.

“I don’t like this silence,” said my captain. “It bodes no good for us.”

I thought that our men were a trifle too noisy, and I could not help mentally comparing their tumultuous clamor with the imposing silence of the enemy.

We quickly attained the foot of the redoubt; the palisades had been shattered, and the earth ploughed up by our balls. The soldiers rushed upon these new ruins with cries of “_Vive l’Empereur!_” with more vigor than one would have expected to hear from men who had already cheered so much.

I raised my eyes, and never shall I forget the spectacle that I saw. Most of the smoke had lifted and remained suspended like a canopy about twenty feet above the redoubt. Through a bluish vapor, behind their half-ruined parapet, one could descry the Russian grenadiers, firearms raised, immobile as statues. I think I can see each soldier yet, the left eye fastened upon us, the right hidden behind his levelled musket. In an embrasure, a few feet from us, a man holding a lighted fuse stood beside a cannon.

I shuddered, and I believed that my last hour had come.

“The dance is about to commence,” cried out my captain. “Good-night!”

These were the last words that I heard him utter.

A roll of drums resounded within the redoubt. I saw every musket lowered. I closed my eyes, and I heard an appalling crash, followed by cries and groans. I opened my eyes, surprised to find myself still living. The redoubt was anew enveloped in smoke. I was surrounded with the bleeding and the dead. My captain was stretched out at my feet: his head had been crushed by a bullet, and I was covered with his brains and his blood. Of all my company none remained but six men and me.

To this carnage succeeded a moment of stupor. The colonel, putting his hat on the point of his sword, was the first to scale the parapet, crying: “_Vive l’Empereur!_” He was followed instantly by all the survivors. I do not remember clearly just what followed. We entered within the redoubt, how I do not know. We fought body to body amid a smoke so dense that we could not see one another. I believe that I smote, for I found my sabre was all bloody. At last I heard the cry, “Victory!” and, the smoke diminishing, I saw blood and dead bodies completely covering the earthworks of the redoubt. The cannons especially were buried beneath piles of corpses. About two hundred men, in the French uniform, were grouped without order, some loading their muskets, others wiping their bayonets. Eleven hundred Russian prisoners were with them.

The colonel was lying all covered with blood upon a broken caisson near the entrance. Several soldiers bestirred themselves around him: I approached.

“Where is the senior captain?” he inquired of a sergeant.

The sergeant shrugged his shoulders in a manner most expressive.

“And the senior lieutenant?”

“This gentleman here, who arrived yesterday,” said the sergeant, in a perfectly calm tone.

The colonel smiled bitterly.

“Come, sir,” he said to me, “you are now in chief command; promptly fortify the entrance of the redoubt with these wagons, for the enemy is in force; but General C---- will see that you are sustained.”

“Colonel,” I said to him, “you are severely wounded?”

“Pish, my dear fellow, but the redoubt is taken!”

FOOTNOTES:

[12] Latin: not twice in the same (place).

[13] In rank.

PIERRE LOTI, COLORIST

Pierre Loti is a cosmopolitan. Halévy was a Parisian, Maupassant was a Norman acclimated to the habitudes of Paris, and Daudet carried with him throughout all his experiences in the French capital the dreamy soul of Provence; but Loti is essentially a modern. Man of the world, not alone by temperament but by reason of wide journeyings afield and minglings with men and women of all lands, he typifies the spirit of to-day in French literature as few other writers have done. He is a poetic idealist, or, perhaps more precisely, an idealistic realist, writing at a time when realism was most potent in France.

The externals of Loti’s life are soon recounted. Louis Marie Julien Viaud was born in Rochefort, January 14, 1850, the same year that gave Maupassant to the world of art. The name “Loti” is an invented derivative of that seductive tropical flower, the lotus, and therefore was not his by inheritance, but the affectionate gift of his South Sea enchantress, Queen Pomaré, of Tahiti, when the young naval officer visited the island in 1872.

The frail, prim, sensitive child described with so much self-insight in his autobiographic _Le Roman d’un enfant_ not only inbreathed his love for the sea in salt-scented Rochefort, but dreamed incessantly of the far-off lands he was destined to visit. These visions were stimulated, if not inspired, by early reading, and by the letters of an older brother who had long been in the navy. So at seventeen we naturally find him a midshipman, and in due course ensign and lieutenant, serving with distinguished bravery--as his Cross of the Legion of Honor testifies--in the Tonquin campaign, when France must needs re-subdue her protectorates in Asia.

M. Loti’s later life has been spent mostly ashore, serving in the Admiralty, yet the cravings of boyhood have been indulged so often as might be, and foreign lands, by preference oriental, visited year by year.

In 1891 M. Loti was elected to that all-coveted distinction, membership in the Academy, where he occupies the chair once honored by Racine and Scribe.

Loti’s portraits show us a Gallic face, a short, pointed beard, tired, melancholy eyes, and a general air of earnestness not quite substantiated by his pleasure-loving life. In stature somewhat below medium height, in form slender, he early gave himself to those bodily exercises which once caused a professional acrobat to wonder why our author had not begun his gymnastics early enough to turn his steel-like muscles to spectacular account!

So much for the more patent facts of his life. But how to make just presentment of his mental and spiritual traits I do not know, for the task gave pause even to Loti himself.

He never learned to write; his gift was native. With reading he had at first small commerce, preferring to turn page after page in human hearts, and to read deep in the tome of his own nature of bewildering variety. A composite is Loti--almost a chameleon, not only entering into the multi-life of lands and peoples where he chances to sojourn, but taking on their colors, and even their garbs and customs. But of this somewhat more in due order.

Here is a character inextricable from his work, much of which is autobiographical, since in most of his twenty-seven volumes the author himself appears either thinly disguised under some sobriquet, or frankly named in _propria persona_. So while we are at no time at a loss for material wherewith to make up an estimate, this material is both embarrassingly rich and--contradictory. Still, no one can mistake the main-travelled roads in this life, they are bold and distinct.

Loti wrote little verse, but he was a poet. He moved in the upper layers of feeling--feeling for nature, for animals, for man, for woman--and always he was the idealistic, though not the ideal lover. His sympathies were positively unquenchable, and each new passion found him fresh, tender, elemental--and as sincere as the temporary lover can be. In elemental, primitive folk he found his personal loves and his fictive characters; in the death of a little bird or in the lives of two cats he centred a genuine interest; in the moods of the uncompassed sea he felt a vast concern.

Inevitably, the religious life of such a temperament would not be constant: Protestantism the Huguenot youth found to be cold; his test of the ceremonial worship of Romanism satisfied him only for a little; at last his faith was doubt.

Loti’s direct disregard of the interests of conventional life, in favor of nature-children, constitutes one of his greatest literary charms. Freshness, simplicity of viewpoint, naïve boyishness of spirit--these excel all the accomplishments of the stylist’s art in an author whose style is as subtle as gossamer, as varicolored as the evening sea he painted with supernal beauty.

In all his work Loti greatly prefers description above dialogue. “Long and quiet stretches of writing” abound, but their minuteness leaves us unwearied, and though he repeats and re-repeats we are conjured into accepting his pictures as ever new.

In style, in delicacy of nature-feeling, where in all literature will you find aught to excel this passage from _Mon frère Yves_?

“Even the nights were luminous. When all was slumbering in heavy immobility, in dead silence, the stars shone out above, more dazzling than in any other region of earth, and the sea also was illumined from beneath. There was a sort of immense gleam diffused over the waters; the lightest motion, such as the slow gliding of the boat, or a shark darting after it, brought out upon the warm eddies flashes like the color of a fire-fly. Then, over the great phosphorescent mirror of the deep, there were millions of wild flames--they were like little lamps lighting themselves everywhere, burning mysteriously for a second or two, then dying out. These nights were swooning with heat, full of phosphorescence; and in all this dim immensity light was brooding, and all these seas held latent life, in a rudimentary state, as did formerly the gloomy waters of the primeval world.”

As in the foregoing, so in the following, see how this necromancer of words accomplishes the impossible--“the planks of the ship” are the only solid, palpable substances in this atmospheric delicacy from _Pecheur d’Islande_ (An Iceland Fisherman):

“Outside it was daylight, perpetual daylight. But it was a pale, pale light, resembling nothing else; it threw dim reflections over everything, as of a dead sun, and beyond these, all was an immense void without color; everything outside the planks of the ship seeming diaphanous, impalpable, unreal.

“The eye could scarcely distinguish the sea. First it took on the aspect of a sort of trembling mirror, with no image reflected in it; as it spread further it seemed to become a vaporous plain, and beyond this there was nothing--no outline nor horizon.

“The damp freshness of the air was more intense, more penetrating, than actual cold; and in breathing it one was conscious of a taste of brine. All was calm, and it was no longer raining; above, formless, colorless clouds seemed to hold that latent, unexplained light; one could see plainly, while conscious all the time that it was night, and all these pallors were of no shade that can be named.”

This is not description--it is miracle; it is, in the fine phrase of M. Doumic, “evocation;” it is music, color, subtlety, spirit, all thrown upon the soul’s retina and sensed in some magic manner that refuses to be classified. No one but a pantheist, sensitive to all the moods of nature--and especially those of that abysmal enigma, the sea--could have evoked such visions, such realities, where other eyes see--water.

In form our author’s books are varied, following rarely any preconceived plan, we may well suppose--only this, that the literary wanderer with his new book every year takes us by the hand and shows us the intimacies of his own life-experiences, discloses the little-known beauties and sadnesses he has uncovered everywhere, and turns into simple yet exquisitely wrought fictions the poignant truths that have entered his own heart. Not one novel, technically considered, did he write, but sketches strung like pearls upon a thread: vivid impressions of home and foreign life, longer or shorter stories of simple folk whose days dawned to labor and were twilit with weariness, colorful pictures of men and women living under eastern skies--and beneath and about all, the many-spirited sea.

It would require a volume to deal adequately with Loti’s many books; but one point invites mention: each new annual volume for a score of years discloses his life in some new land, or in the Brittany of his affection.

His first volume, _Aziyadé_ (1879), is the record of his love for a beautiful Circassian slave while he sojourned in Turkey--the record, too, of how she died of grief after his departure. _Rarahu_--later issued as _Le Mariage de Loti_--recounts his loves in Tahiti, and much of charm and beauty besides. _Le Roman d’un Spahi_ transports us to the Sahara and Senegal, _Fleurs d’ennui_ to Montenegro, _Madame Chrysanthème_ to Japan, _Au Maroc_ to Fez and Tangier, and _Le désert_, and _Jérusalem_, and _La Galilée_, to Palestine.

I name these volumes not to attempt a catalogue of Loti’s works, but to show how world-broad were the scenes he chose for his impressionistic brush. Naturally, all of the foregoing works are more or less oriental in tone, and the moral code revealed is not that of “the most approved families.” But three masterpieces there are which breathe a more wholesome air--though heavy, each one, with the tragedy of life.

_Mon frère Yves_ is the plotless account of “a splendid Breton sailor and the author, his officer.” They enjoy “a sort of companionship which finds its analogy--in a way--in the friendly relations formerly [held] between young master and slave in our Southern States.” No picture of the robust rollicking sailor--superstitious, drink-loving, adventurous, warm-hearted--could be more real, none more pathetic, and none more rich in fragments of narrative.

In _Le livre de la pitié et de la mort_ eleven stories are brought together to harmonize with the saddening title--“The Book of Pity and of Death!” One of these, “The Sorrow of an Old Convict” is an impressionistic tale of an old highwayman who is being shipped away to exile. His only solace is a caged bird with a broken wing, and when one day the door is opened the little bird falls into the sea. That is all--but to read it is to feel with Yves the heart-break of that bereft old man.

“The Wall Opposite” is a study of human tendencies. A mother, a daughter, and an aged aunt are compelled by reverses to let out those rooms of their apartments that faced out upon the street, but their own little back suite had a cozy and intimate air. Its windows overlooked a court whose walls were covered with honeysuckle and roses. One day they were told that in the court a high wall was to be built which would steal away the air and hide the sun. They had no money wherewith to buy off the project, so in one short month a grayish-white wall--almost like a twilight sky of November--shut them in.

Long they had looked for an inheritance which would some day come to them. Then they would buy the house and tear down that wall--and always the old aunt used to pray that she might live to see that day. But the bequest was long in coming.

One day a young man came, introduced by friends, and for a while he sat at the table of these “three ladies without fortune.” He was handsome and high-spirited, and the young girl loved him, but she was poor, and for lack of sunlight the color had begun to fade from her cheeks. So he went away and never returned.

Twenty years passed--the aunt had died, the mother had grown gray, and the daughter was now past forty. Then at last the inheritance came. They sent away their lodgers, but somehow the two women remained in the little back _salon_. They had come to love it. At last the wall which for twenty years they had endured would be torn down. At twilight of the second day the wall was razed, but the mother and daughter sitting at their table were bewildered at seeing so clearly. The wall was gone--they had the light, the roses and vines! For twenty years they had hoped for this happiness, yet now--they were uneasy, something seemed to have gone wrong. A sort of melancholy had come over them.

The mother, looking into her daughter’s eyes, saw tears. “It can be built up again,” she says. “It seems to me they can try, can they not, to make it the same again?”

“I, too, thought of that,” replied the daughter. “But no, don’t you see? _It would never be the same!_”

And this was the secret: more than the power of custom in her Life was the fact that the wall had been the background of a picture--the face of a young man which she had watched through one short spring-time.

This is one of Loti’s few technically perfect short-stories. His sketchy, rambling, loosely-plotted “novels” and travel-reflections differ greatly in manner from the compact story of plot, but his writings do abound in easily separable fragments, or episodes--as to which a word must now be set down, before we take up the plot and the final scenes of Loti’s greatest work, _Pecheur d’Islande_.

Fortunately for the spontaneity of the novel, many authors are more concerned for the vividness of their narration than for mere technical form. Hence they feel free to introduce incidents which are related more or less loosely to the plot, and serve rather as auxiliaries than as vital parts of the action. The purpose may be to develop a tone, suggest an atmosphere, illustrate certain traits of character, or, it may be, to amplify an organic part of the plot. This narrative by-path, this illuminating side-light, we technically call an episode. It was most in vogue among the early English novelists; Defoe, Richardson, Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith followed it so habitually that all of their novels are episodic in form. But even in the more highly organized French romances of plot--_Les Miserables_ and _Les Mystères de Paris_, for example--we find frequent episodes. This tendency is naturally more marked in the tale and in the prolonged sketch than in the closely plotted novel. Indeed, it is only in the very _long_ plot-novel that the episode can find room, since the prosperity of the short plot-novel lies largely in the close and rapid sequence of its incidents.

Even though “The Marriage to the Sea”--as I have ventured to entitle this climacteric close of _An Iceland Fisherman_--is an essential plot incident, and therefore an organic part of the whole, still, considered solely for its own sake, it is easily detachable. So we may regard it as _almost_ a typical specimen of the episode; that is to say, we need only have some slight prior knowledge of the setting and the relation of the characters to invest it with the completeness and unity of a perfect short-story. True, the crisis has occurred--unknown to the fisherman’s wife--before this episode begins, but that could scarcely have been arranged more artistically, with regard to suspense, had Loti purposed to use the episode as a separate story. Here we have the carefully laid groundwork of tone, environment, and characters. Here, too, are the breathless expectancy, the increasing suspense (which constitutes the complication), two false anticipations of a happy dénouement, and then the actual dénouement, with the artistic close.

_An Iceland Fisherman_ is Pierre Loti’s most perfect work, and it is gratifying to note that it is also his most popular, as witness some three hundred and fifty French editions, and an unknown number of translations. In form, it is less a typical novel than a brilliant impressionistic tale. A major episode is the story of Sylvestre, which, woven closely in its earlier part with the life of Yann and his sweetheart Gaud, at length diverges, when the fisherboy passes into the navy, fights a good fight in Cochin-China, and dies amid pathetic circumstances in far-off Singapore.

The plot is very simple. It is laid in Paimpol, in Brittany, whose dwellers rely solely upon the Iceland fisheries. Every year these hardy Vikings of Northern France fare away to the Iceland waters and return only after a long season there. The chief characters are Yann Gaos, a great splendid young fisherman with handsome brown curls, and Gaud, the daughter of “the great man” of the town. The two are in love, and Yann ventures some hesitating advances; but her father’s wealth deters the fisherman from making a full avowal. However, when Gaud’s father dies she is found to be penniless; still Yann unaccountably holds back, much to Gaud’s secret sorrow. Homeless, she goes to live with Granny Moan, the grandmother of the ill-fated young Sylvestre, who had been betrothed to Yann’s sister. At length, in the little hut where Gaud lives as the bereft old woman’s foster-grandchild, she and Yann are married.

Only a few days after their wedding, the bridegroom sails away on the fine new _Léopoldine_ for the Iceland fisheries. When autumn comes the boat does not return with the others. All that is heard of her is from the crew of the _Marie-Jeanne_, who report a mystic meeting with the _Léopoldine_ in a dense fog, when each vessel loomed up to the other out of the mist and then passed spectre-like away, with time for only a few quick cries of recognition from fellow-townsmen. The final scene opens with all the town awaiting the return of the fishers. One vessel has already come in, and then opens this closing episode.

THE MARRIAGE TO THE SEA AN EPISODE FROM “AN ICELAND FISHERMAN”

(_PECHEUR D’ISLANDE_)

By Pierre Loti

_Done into English by the Editor_

The Iceland ships were returning--two the second day, four the next, and twelve during the week following. And throughout the country joy returned with them--there was happiness for the wives and mothers; happiness too in the taverns where the pretty Paimpol girls served drink to the fishermen.