Translated from the French by Bill Bowers
I HAD RENTED, LAST SUMMER, A LITTLE COUNTRY HOUSE ON THE BANKS of the Seine several leagues from Paris, and I went there to sleep every night. After a few days I made the acquaintance of one of my neighbors, a man between thirty and forty, who was certainly the most curious fellow I had ever met. He was an old hand at boating, passionate about boating, always near the water, always on the water, always in the water. He must have been born in a boat, and he would certainly die in a boat.
One night, while we were walking together on the bank of the Seine, I asked him to tell me some stories about his life on the water; and at that the good man suddenly became animated, transfigured, eloquent, almost poetical. He had in his heart one great passion, devouring and irresistible: the river.
“Ah!” said he to me, “how many memories I have of that river you see flowing there near us. You people who live on streets, you don’t know what the river is. But just listen to a fisherman simply pronouncing that word. For him it is the thing mysterious, profound, unknown, the place of mirage and of phantasmagoria, where one sees, at night, things that do not exist, where one hears unfamiliar noises, where one trembles without knowing why, as though crossing a cemetery. And it is, indeed, the most sinister of cemeteries—a cemetery where there are no tombs.
“To the fisherman the land seems limited, but in the dark, when there is no moon, the river seems limitless. A sailor has no such feeling for the sea. She is often hard and wicked, it’s true; but she cries, she screams, she is loyal, the great sea, while the river is silent and treacherous. She never even mutters, she flows always noiselessly, and this eternal movement of flowing water is far more terrifying for me than high seas on the ocean.
“Dreamers claim that the sea hides in her bosom great blue regions where the drowned roll among the great fish, in the midst of strange forests and in crystal grottos. The river has only black depths where one rots in the slime. For all that, she is beautiful when she gleams in the rising sun or washes softly along between her banks covered with murmuring reeds.
“The poet says of the ocean:
Oh seas, you know sad stories!
Deep seas, feared by kneeling mothers,
You tell the stories to one another at flood tides!
And that is why you have such despairing voices
When at night you come towards us nearer and nearer.
“Well, I think that the stories whispered by the slender reeds with their soft little voices must be still more sinister than the gloomy dramas told by the howling of the high seas.
“But, since you ask me for some of my memories, I will tell you a singular adventure which I had here about ten years ago:”
I lived then, as I still do, in the house of the old lady Lafon, and one of my best friends, Louis Bernet, who has now given up his oars to join the civil service, along with his low shoes and his sleeveless jersey, lived in the village of C——, two leagues farther down. We dined together every day—sometimes at his place, sometimes at mine.
One evening as I was returning home alone and rather tired, painfully pulling my heavy boat, a twelve-footer that I always used at night, I stopped for a few seconds to catch my breath near the point where so many reeds grow, down there about two hundred meters before you come to the railroad bridge. The weather was magnificent; the moon was resplendent, the river gleamed, the air was calm and soft. The tranquility of it all tempted me; I told myself that it would be extremely nice to smoke a pipe just here. Action followed the thought; I seized my anchor and threw it into the river.
The boat, which floated down again with the current, pulled the chain out to its full length, then stopped; and I seated myself in the stern on my sheepskin, as comfortable as possible. I heard nothing—nothing; only sometimes I thought I caught a low, almost insensible lapping of water along the bank, and I made out a few clumps of reeds which, taller than most, took on surprising shapes, and seemed from time to time to stir.
The river was perfectly still, but I felt myself moved by the extraordinary silence which surrounded me. All the animals—the frogs and toads, those nocturnal singers of the marshes—were silent. Suddenly on my right, near me, a frog croaked; I started; it fell silent; I heard nothing more, and I resolved to smoke a little by way of distraction. But though I am a regular blackener of pipes, I could not smoke that night; after the second puff I sickened of it and I stopped. I began to hum; the sound of my voice was painful to me; so I stretched myself out in the bottom of the boat and I looked at the sky. For some time I remained quiet, but soon the slight movements of the boat made me uneasy. It seemed to me that it was yawing tremendously, striking now this riverbank, and now the other; then I thought that a being or invisible force was dragging it down gently to the bottom, and then was lifting it up simply to let it fall again. I was tossed about as if in the middle of a storm; I heard noises around me; I sat up with a sudden start; the water gleamed, everything was calm.
I understood that my nerves were unsettled, and I resolved to get out of there. I pulled on my chain; the boat started moving, then I felt resistance; I pulled harder. The anchor did not come up; it had caught on something at the bottom of the river and I could not lift it. I started pulling again—in vain.
So, with my oars I turned the boat upstream to change the position of the anchor. It was no use; it still held. I got angry, and I shook the chain in a rage. Nothing moved. I sat down discouraged and thought about my position. There was no hope of breaking that chain, or of getting it loose from my craft, because it was very heavy, and riveted at the bow into a piece of wood thicker than my arm; but since the weather remained quite nice, I thought that I should doubtless not have to wait long before meeting some fisherman who would come to my rescue. My misadventure had calmed me; I sat down and was finally able to smoke my pipe. I had a flask of brandy with me; I drank two or three glasses, and my situation made me laugh. It was very hot, so that, if need be, I could spend the night under the stars without great inconvenience.
Suddenly a little knock sounded against the side. I shivered, and a cold sweat froze me from head to toe. The noise came, no doubt, from some piece of wood drawn along by the current, but that was enough, and I felt myself again overcome by a strange nervous agitation. I seized my chain, and I stiffened myself in a desperate effort. The anchor held solidly. I sat down, exhausted.
But, little by little, the river had become covered with a very thick white mist, which crept very low over the water, so that, standing up, I could no longer see the stream or my feet or my boat, and saw only the tips of the reeds, and then, beyond them, the plain, all pale in the moonlight, and with great black stains that rose into the sky, and which were made by clumps of Italian poplars. I was as though wrapped to the waist in a cotton sheet of strange whiteness, and there began to come to me fantastic imaginings.
I imagined that someone was trying to climb into my boat, since I could no longer make it out, and that the river, hidden by this opaque mist, must be full of strange beings swimming around me. I experienced a horrible uneasiness, my jaws clenched, my heart beat to the point of suffocation; and, losing my head, I thought of saving myself by swimming; then in an instant the very idea made me shiver with fear. I saw myself, lost, drifting aimlessly in this impenetrable mist, struggling among the grasses and the reeds that I would not be able to avoid, with a rattle in my throat from fear, not seeing the shore, never finding my boat again. And it seemed to me as though I felt myself being drawn by the feet down to the bottom of that black water.
In fact, since I should have had to swim upstream at least five hundred meters before finding a point clear of rushes and reeds, where I could regain my footing, there were nine chances in ten that I should lose my bearings in the fog and drown, however good a swimmer I might be. I tried to reason with myself. I realized that my will was firmly enough resolved to be fearless; but there was something in me besides my will, and this other thing was afraid. I asked myself what it could be that I dreaded; that part of me that was courageous railed at that part of me that was cowardly; and I had never understood so well before the opposition between those two beings which exist within us, the one willing, the other resisting, and each in turn the master.
This stupid and inexplicable fear kept growing until it became terror. I remained motionless, eyes wide open, with a straining and expectant ear. Expecting—what? I did not know, but only that it had to be terrible. I’m sure that if a fish, as often happens, had felt like jumping out of the water, it would have taken only that to make me faint and fall flat on my back.
Finally, by a violent effort, I very nearly recovered the reason which had been escaping me. I again took my brandy flask, and I drank from it in great gulps. Then an idea came to me, and I began to shout with all my might, turning in succession towards all four points of the horizon. When my throat was at last completely paralyzed, I listened. A dog was howling, a long way off.
I drank again; and I stretched out on my back in the bottom of the boat. I stayed that way for an hour, perhaps for two, without sleeping, my eyes wide open, with nightmares all around me. I did not dare to sit up, and yet I had a wild desire to do so; so I kept putting it off from minute to minute. I would say to myself: “Come on! Get up!” and I was afraid to make a move. At last I raised myself with infinite precaution, as if life depended on the slightest sound I might make, and I peered over the edge of the boat.
I was dazzled by the most marvelous, the most astonishing spectacle that it is possible to see. It was one of those phantasmagorias from fairyland, one of those visions told by travelers returning from far away, and which we hear without believing them.
The mist, which two hours before was floating over the water, had little by little withdrawn and piled itself upon the banks. Leaving the river absolutely clear, it had formed, along each shore, long low hills about six or seven meters high, which gleamed beneath the moon with the brilliance of snow, so that one saw nothing except this river of fire between those two white mountains; and up there, high above my head, a great, luminous moon, full and large, glowed in a blue and milky sky.
All the animals of the water had awakened; the bullfrogs croaked furiously, while, from instant to instant, sometimes on my right, sometimes on my left, I heard those short, mournful, sad notes that the brassy voices of the marsh frogs direct at the sky. Strangely enough, I was no longer afraid; I was in the midst of such an extraordinary landscape that the most unusual things could not have astonished me. How long this sight lasted I do not know, because at last I had grown drowsy. When I again opened my eyes the moon had set, the sky was full of clouds. The water lashed mournfully, the wind whispered, it grew cold; the darkness was profound.
I drank all the brandy I had left; then I listened, shivering, to the rustling of the reeds and to the sinister noise of the river. I tried to see, but I could not make out my boat or even my own hands, though I brought them close to my eyes.
Little by little, however, the density of the blackness diminished. Suddenly I thought I felt a shadow slipping along near me; I cried out; a voice replied—it was a fisherman. I hailed him; he approached, and I told him of my misadventure. He pulled his boat alongside, and both of us heaved on the chain. The anchor did not budge. The day was coming on—somber, gray, rainy, cold—one of those days that always bring sorrow and misfortune. I made out another craft; we hailed it. The man aboard joined his efforts to ours, then, little by little, the anchor yielded. It came up, slowly, slowly, and weighted down by something very heavy. At last we made out a black mass, and we pulled it alongside.
It was the corpse of an old woman with a great stone around her neck.