Fear
The train rushed through the shadows.
I was alone, facing an old gentleman who was looking out of the window. There was a strong smell of disinfectant in this P.L.M. carriage, which must have come from Marseilles.
It was a moonless, airless, burning night. There were no stars to be seen, and the wind of the leaping train blew in our faces, warm, soft, oppressive and stifling.
We had left Paris three hours before, and we were approaching the heart of France, without catching a glimpse of the country we were crossing.
All at once a fantastic apparition rushed into sight. There was a wood, and a big fire lit there, and two men standing round it.
We saw it for an instant: they looked like two tramps, in rags, reddened by the glare from the fire, with their bearded faces turned towards us, and all round them, like the setting of a play, rose the green trees; they were a bright and shining green, the vivid light reflected from the flames struck across the trunks, and the thick leafage was barred and stabbed and splashed by the light spreading through it.
Then the darkness swept back again.
It certainly was the strangest of visions. What were those two wanderers doing in that forest? Why a fire on this suffocating night?
My neighbour took out his watch and said:
“It is exactly midnight, sir: we have just seen a strange thing.”
I agreed; we fell into conversation and tried to imagine what these persons could be: criminals burning evidence or sorcerers preparing a philtre? You don’t light a fire in a forest at midnight, and in the height of summer, to boil soup. So what were they doing? We could not reach any likely explanation.
And my neighbour began to talk. He was an old man, whose profession I found it impossible to guess. He was certainly an eccentric, highly cultured, and he seemed perhaps a little mad.
But is it always possible to say who are the wise and who are the fools in this life where reason is often called stupidity and folly genius?
He said:
“I am glad to have seen that. For a brief space of time I experienced a forgotten sensation.
“How disturbing the world must have been in the old days when it was full of mystery!
“With each veil lifted from the unknown world, the human imagination is laid waste a little farther. You, sir, don’t feel that the night is very empty and filled with a tiresomely commonplace darkness, since it was robbed of its apparitions.
“ ‘No more fantasy,’ they say, ‘no more strange beliefs, all the inexplicable is explicable. The supernatural sinks like a lake emptied by a canal; day by day science narrows the boundaries of the marvellous.’
“I, sir, I belong to the old race, to those who love to believe. I belong to the old simple race that is used to being baffled, used to not investigating and to not knowing. That delights in being surrounded by mysteries and shrinks from the simple and brutal truth.
“Yes, sir, we have laid waste the imagination by suppressing the invisible. I see our earth today as a forsaken world, empty and bare. The beliefs that flung a veil of poetry over it are gone.
“How I should like—when I go out at night—to shiver with the mortal terror that makes old women cross themselves when they pass the graveyard wall and the last few superstitious folk run before the weird wandering lights and the strange mists from the marshes! How I should like to believe in some vague terrifying thing that I thought I felt slipping past me in the darkness!
“How sombre and terrible the shadows of evening must have been in the old days, when they were full of unknown fabulous beings, evil wandering spirits who took unforeseen shapes and froze the heart with dread! Their occult power was quite beyond the grasp of our minds and they drew near with inevitable feet.
“When the supernatural disappeared, true fear disappeared from the earth too, for we are truly afraid only of what we do not understand. Visible dangers can move, disturb, terrify. But what is that compared with the overwhelming terror that fills your mind when you expect to meet a wandering ghost, or suffer the clinging arms of a dead man, or see running on you one of those frightful beasts invented by man’s fear? The dark seems light to me, now that it is no longer haunted.
“And the proof of all this is that if we suddenly found ourselves alone in that wood, we should be pursued by the vision of the two strange beings who have just appeared to us in the glare of their fire, rather than by dread of any real danger at all.
“We are truly afraid,” he repeated, “only of what we do not understand.”
A sudden memory woke in my mind, the memory of a story told us one Sunday by Tourgeniev, in Gustave Flaubert’s house.
I don’t know whether he had written it in any of his books.
No one was more subtly able to thrill us with a suggestion of the veiled unknown world than the great Russian storyteller, or to reveal—in the half-light of a strange tale—uncertain, uncertain, disturbing, threatening things.
In his books we are sharply aware of that vague fear of the Invisible, the fear of the unknown thing behind the wall, behind the door, behind the external world. Perilous gleams of light break on us, as we read, revealing just enough to add to our mortal fear.
He seems sometimes to be showing us the inner meaning of strange coincidences, the unexpected connection between circumstances that were apparently fortuitous and really guided by a hidden malicious will. In his books we can imagine we feel an imperceptible hand guiding us through life in a mysterious way, as through a shifting dream whose meaning we never grasp.
He does not rush boldly into the supernatural world like Edgar Poe or Hoffmann, he tells simple stories and a sense of something a little uncertain and a little uneasy creeps somehow into them.
That day he used those very words: “We are truly afraid only of what we do not understand.”
Arms hanging down, legs stretched out and relaxed, hair quite white, he was sitting or rather lounging in a large armchair, drowned in that flowing tide of beard and silvery hair that gave him the air of an Eternal Father or a River God from Ovid.
He spoke slowly, with a certain indolence which lent a charm to his phrases, and a rather hesitating and awkward manner of speaking which emphasised the vivid rightness of his words. His wide pale eyes, like the eyes of a child, reflected all the changing fancies of his mind. This is what he told us:
He was hunting, as a young man, in a Russian forest. He had tramped all day, and towards the end of the afternoon he reached the edge of a quiet river.
It ran under the trees, and among the trees, filled with floating grasses, deep, cold and clear.
An overmastering desire seized the hunter to fling himself into this transparent water. He stripped and dived into the stream. He was a very tall and a very strong youth, active, and a splendid swimmer.
He let himself float gently in great content of mind, grasses and roots brushed past him and tendrils of creeping plants trailed lightly over his skin, thrilling him.
Suddenly a hand touched his shoulder.
He turned round in startled wonder and saw a frightful creature staring hungrily at him.
It was like a woman or a monkey. Its vast wrinkled grimacing face smiled at him. Two nameless things, which must have been two breasts, floated in front of it, and its mass of tangled hair, burnt by the sun, hung round its face and fell down its back.
Tourgeniev felt a piercing and appalling fear, the icy fear of the supernatural.
Without pausing to reflect, without thinking or understanding, he began to swim frantically towards the bank. But the monster swam quicker still, and touched his neck, his back and his legs with little cacklings of delight. Mad with terror, the young man reached the bank at last, and tore at full speed through the wood, with never a thought of recovering his clothes and his gun.
The frightful creature followed him, running as quickly as he did and growling all the time.
Spent and sick with fear, the fugitive was ready to drop to the ground when a boy who was watching his goats ran up, armed with a whip; he laid it about the fearsome human beast who ran away howling with grief. And Tourgeniev saw her disappear among the leaves of the trees, like a female gorilla.
It was a madwoman, who had lived in this wood for thirty years, on the charity of the shepherds, and who spent half her days swimming in the river.
The great Russian writer added: “I have never felt such fear in my life, because I could not imagine what this monster could be.”
I related this adventure to my companion, and he replied:
“Yes, we are afraid only of what we do not understand. We only truly experience that frightful spiritual convulsion which we call dread when our fear is touched with the superstitious terror of past ages. I myself have suffered this dread in all its horror, and that over something so simple and so stupid that I hardly dare tell you about it.
“I was travelling in Brittany, alone and on foot. I had walked across Finistère, desolate moors, bare earth where nothing will grow but the gorse that grows beside great sacred stone pillars. The evening before, I had seen the menacing headland of Raz, the end of the old world, where two oceans, the Atlantic and the Channel, forever surge and break; my mind was full of legends, stories read or told in this country of credulous and superstitious folk.
“I was walking at night from Penmarch to Pontl’Abbé. Do you know Penmarch? A flat shore, utterly flat, very low-lying, seeming lower than the sea. Wherever you look you see the grey threatening sea, full of rocks slavered with foam, like raging beasts.
“I had dined in a fisherman’s inn, and I had taken the road to the right, between two moors. It was growing very dark.
“Now and then a Druid stone, standing like a phantom, seemed to look at me as I passed, and a vague fear slowly took hold of me: fear of what? I had not the least idea. It was one of the evenings when the wind of passing spirits blows on your face, and your soul shudders and knows not why, and your heart beats in bewildered terror of some invisible thing, that terror whose passing I regret.
“The road seemed very long to me, interminably long and empty.
“There was no sound but the thunder of the waves down below, at my back; and sometimes the monotonous sinister sound seemed quite close, so close that I imagined the waves were at my heels, racing over the plain, and foaming as they came, and I felt a wild impulse to save myself from them, to run for my life before their onrush.
“The wind, a little wind that blew in gusts, whistled through the gorse all round me. And quickly as I went, my arms and legs were cold with the horrid cold of mortal fear.
“Oh, how I longed to meet someone!
“It was so black that now I could hardly make out the road.
“And suddenly I heard a rolling sound, a long way in front of me. ‘That’s a carriage,’ I thought. Then I heard nothing more.
“A moment later I distinctly heard the same noise again, nearer now.
“I saw no light, however, and I said to myself: ‘They have no lantern. There’s nothing to be surprised at in that, in this wild district.’
“The noise stopped once more, then began again. It was too shrill to be made by a wagon; and besides I did not hear the sound of a horse trotting, which surprised me, for the night was very still.
“ ‘What can it be?’ I wondered.
“It was approaching swiftly, very swiftly! I was sure now that I could hear only one wheel—no clatter of hoofs or feet—nothing. What could it be?
“It was close now, quite close; prompted by a quite instinctive fear, I flung myself down in a ditch and I saw pass right by me a wheelbarrow running all by itself—no one was pushing it—yes, a wheelbarrow—all by itself.
“My heart began such a violent leaping that I lay helpless on the grass, listening to the rolling of the wheel, which drew farther and farther away, going down to the sea. And I dared neither get up nor walk nor stir hand or foot; for if it had come back, if it had followed me, I should have died of terror.
“I was a long time before I recovered myself, a very long time. And I covered the rest of the road in such agony of mind that the least noise stopped the breath in my throat.
“You think it idiotic? But how terrifying! Thinking it over afterwards, I understood what it was; a barefooted child must have been pushing the wheelbarrow, and I had been expecting to see the head of a man of ordinary height.
“You can understand it … fear of some supernatural happening has crept into one’s mind—a wheelbarrow running—all by itself. How terrifying!”
He was silent for a moment, then added:
“Believe me, sir, we are watching a strange and terrible spectacle—this invasion of cholera.
“You can smell the disinfectant poisoning the whole air in these carriages; it means that somewhere it is lurking.
“You should see Toulouse now. Go there, and you can feel that He is there. And it is no mere fear of disease that distracts the townspeople. The cholera is something more than that, it is the Unseen, it is one of the ancient plagues, a sort of malevolent spirit that has come back to the world, and astounds us as much as it terrifies us because it seems to belong to a lost age.
“The doctors make me laugh with their microbe. It is no insect that drives men to such a pitch of terror that they will jump out of the windows; it is cholera, the inexplicable and terrible being come from the recesses of the East.
“Walk through Toulouse and see them dancing in the streets.
“Why do men dance in days when death is abroad? They let off fireworks in the fields round the town; they light bonfires, orchestras play gay music on all the public promenades.
“Why this madness?
“It is because He is present: they are defying now, not the Microbe, but Cholera; they want to swagger past Him, as they might swagger past an ambushed enemy spy. It is for Him that they dance, and laugh and shout and light fires and play waltzes, for Him, the Angel of Destruction, lurking in every place, unseen, threatening, like one of those old evil jinns conjured up by barbaric priests. …”