by André Gide
After which the being who believes himself freest is nothing but a tool at his service. The demon will never rest now till Vincent has sold his brother to that creature of perdition—Passavant.
And yet Vincent is not bad. All this, do what he will, leaves him unsatisfied, uncomfortable. Let us add a few words more:
The name “exoticism” is, I believe, given to those of Maia’s iridescent folds which make the soul feel itself a stranger, which deprive it of points of contact. There are some whose virtue would resist, but that the devil, before attacking it, transplants them. No doubt, if Vincent and Laura had not been under other skies, far from their parents, from their past memories, from all that maintained them in consistency with themselves, she would not have yielded to him, nor he attempted to seduce her. No doubt it seemed to them out there that their act did not enter into the reckoning.… A great deal more might be said; but the above is enough as it is to explain Vincent to us better.
With Lilian too he felt himself in a foreign land.
“Don’t laugh at me, Lilian,” he said to her that same evening. “I know that you won’t understand, and yet I have to speak to you as if you would, for I’m unable now to get you out of my mind.”
Lilian was lying on the low divan, and he, half reclining at her feet, let his head rest, lover-like, on his mistress’s knees, while she, lover-like, caressed it.
“The thing that was on my mind this morning was … yes, I think it was fear. Can you keep serious for a moment? Can you try to understand me so far as to forget for a moment—not what you believe, for you believe in nothing—but just that very fact that you believe in nothing? I didn’t believe in anything either; I believed that I didn’t believe in anything—not in anything but ourselves, in you, in me, in what I am when I am with you, in what, thanks to you, I am going to become.… ”
“Robert will be here at seven,” interrupted Lilian. “I don’t want to hurry you; but if you don’t get on a little quicker, he’ll interrupt you just at the very moment you are beginning to get interesting. I don’t suppose you’ll want to go on when he’s here. It’s odd that you should think it necessary to take so many precautions to-day. You remind me of a blind man, who has first to feel every spot with his stick, before he puts his foot on it. And yet you can see I’m keeping quite serious. Why haven’t you more confidence?”
“Ever since I’ve known you, my confidence has become extraordinary,” went on Vincent. “I’m capable of great things, I feel it; and you see that everything I do turns out successful. But that’s exactly what terrifies me. No; be quiet.… All day long I’ve kept thinking of what you told me this morning about the wreck of the Bourgogne, and of the people who wanted to get into the boat having their hands cut off. It seems to me that something wants to get into my boat—I’m using your image, so that you may understand me—something that I want to prevent getting in.… ”
“And you want me to help you drown it.… You old coward!”
He went on without looking at her:
“Something I keep off, but whose voice I hear … a voice you have never heard, that I listened to in my childhood.… ”
“And what does your voice say? You don’t dare tell me. I’m not surprised. I bet there’s a dash of the catechism in it, isn’t there?”
“Oh, Lilian, try to understand; the only way for me to get rid of these thoughts is to tell them to you. If you laugh at them, I shall keep them to myself and they’ll poison me.”
“Tell away then,” said she with an air of resignation. Then, as he kept silent and hid his face like a child in Lilian’s skirts: “Well, what are you waiting for?”
She seized him by the hair and forced him to raise his head:
“Upon my word, he’s really taking it seriously! Just look at him! He’s quite pale. Now, listen to me, my dear boy; if you mean to behave like a child, it’s not my affair at all. One must have the strength of one’s convictions. And, besides, you know I don’t like people who cheat. When you try on the sly to pull things into your boat which oughtn’t to be there, you’re cheating. I’m willing to play the game with you, but it must be above board; and I warn you my object is to make you succeed. I think you’re capable of becoming somebody important—really important; I feel great intelligence in you, and great strength. I want to help you. There are quite enough women who spoil the careers of the men they fall in love with; I want to do the contrary. You’ve already told me you wanted to give up doctoring in order to work at science and that you were sorry you hadn’t enough money.… Now you have just won fifty thousand francs, which isn’t bad to begin with. But you must promise me not to play any more. I’ll put as much money as is necessary at your disposition, on condition that if people say you are being kept, you’ll be strong-minded enough to shrug your shoulders.”
Vincent had risen. He went up to the window. Lilian went on:
“To begin with, I think one might as well finish up with Laura and send her the five thousand francs you promised her. Now that you’ve got the money, why don’t you keep your word? I don’t like it at all. I detest caddishness. You don’t know how to cut hands off decently. When that’s done, we’ll go and spend the summer where it’ll be most profitable for your work.… You mentioned Roskoff; personally, I should prefer Monaco, because I know the Prince, and he might take us for a cruise and perhaps give you a job in his laboratory.”
Vincent kept silent. He felt disinclined to say to Lilian (he only told her later) that before coming to see her, he had gone to the hotel, where Laura had waited for him in such despair. Anxious to be at last quit of his debt, he had slipped the notes, on which she no longer counted, into an envelope. He had entrusted the envelope to a waiter, and then waited in the hall until he should hear it had been delivered to her personally. A few moments later the waiter had come downstairs bringing with him the envelope, across which Laura had written:
“Too late.”
Lilian rang and asked for her cloak. When the maid had left the room:
“Oh, I wanted to say to you, before Robert arrives, that if he proposes an investment for your fifty thousand francs—be careful. He is very rich, but he is always in want of money. There! look and see. I think I hear his horn. He’s half an hour before the time; but so much the better.… For all we were saying! …”
“I’m early,” said Robert as he came into the room, “because I thought it would be amusing to go and dine at Versailles. Do you agree?”
“No,” said Lady Griffith; “the fountains bore me. I had rather go to Rambouillet; there’s time. We shan’t have such a good dinner, but we shall be able to talk more easily. I want Vincent to tell you his fish stories. He knows some marvellous ones. I don’t know if what he says is true, but it’s more amusing than the best novel in the world.”
“That’s not perhaps what a novelist will think,” said Vincent.
Robert de Passavant held an evening paper in his hand:
“D’you know that Brugnard has just been made assistant-secretary at the Ministry of Justice? Now’s the moment to get your father decorated,” said he, turning to Vincent. Vincent shrugged his shoulders.
“My dear Vincent,” went on Passavant, “allow me to say that you’ll very much offend him by not asking this little favour—which he’ll be so delighted to refuse.”
“Suppose you were to start by asking it for yourself,” Vincent replied.
Robert made an affected little grimace:
“No; for my part, my vanity consists in never blushing—not even in my buttonhole.” Then, turning to Lilian:
“Do you know it’s rare nowadays to find a man who has reached forty without either the syph or the legion of honour?”
Lilian smiled and shrugged her shoulders:
“For the sake of a bon-mot he actually consents to make himself out older than he is! I say, is it a quotation from your next book? It’ll be tasty.… Go on downstairs. I’ll get my cloak and follow you.”
“I thought you had given up seeing him,�
�� said Vincent to Robert on the staircase.
“Who? Brugnard?”
“You said he was so stupid.… ”
“My dear friend,” replied Passavant, pausing on a step and holding up Molinier, for he saw Lady Griffith coming and wanted her to hear: “you must know there’s not a single one of my friends whom I’ve known a certain time, that hasn’t given me unmistakable proofs of imbecility. I assure you that Brugnard resisted the test longer than a great many others.”
“Than I, perhaps?” asked Vincent.
“Which doesn’t prevent me from being your best friend … as you see.”
“And that’s what’s called wit in Paris,” said Lilian, who had joined them. “Take care, Robert; there’s nothing fades quicker.”
“Don’t be alarmed, dear lady; words only fade when they’re printed.”
They took their places in the car and drove off. As their conversation continued to be very witty, it is useless to record it here. They sat down to table on the terrace of a hotel overlooking a garden where the shades of night were gathering. Under cover of the evening, their talk grew slower and graver; urged on by Lilian and Robert, Vincent found himself at last the only speaker.
XVII : The Evening at Rambouillet
“I should take more interest in animals if I were less interested in men,” Robert had said. And Vincent had replied:
“Perhaps you think them too different. Every single one of the great discoveries in zoology has left its mark upon the study of man. The whole subject is interlinked and interdependent, and I believe that a novelist who also prides himself upon being a psychologist can never turn aside his eyes from the spectacle of nature and remain ignorant of her laws without paying for it. In the Goncourts’ Journal, which you gave me to read, I fell upon an account of a visit they paid to the Zoological houses in the Jardin des Plantes, in which your charming authors deplore Nature’s—or the Lord’s—lack of imagination. This paltry blasphemy merely serves to show up the stupidity and incomprehension of their small minds. On the contrary, what astonishing diversity! It seems as if Nature had essayed one after the other every possible manner of living and moving, as if she had taken adventage of every permission granted by matter and its laws. What a lesson can be read in the progressive abandonment of certain palæontological experiments which proved irrational and inelegant; the economy which has enabled some forms to survive explains why the others were abandoned. Botany is instructive, too. When I examine a plant, I observe that at the place where each leaf springs from the stem, a bud lies sheltered, which is capable in its turn of shooting into life the following year. When I remark that out of all these buds, two at most are destined to come to anything, and that by the very fact of their growth they condemn all the others to atrophy, I cannot help thinking that the case is the same with men. The buds which develop naturally are always the terminal buds—that is to say, those that are farthest away from the parent trunk. It is only by pruning or layering that the sap is driven back and so forced to give life to those germs which are nearest the trunk and which would otherwise have lain dormant. And in this manner, the most recalcitrant plants, which, if left to themselves, would no doubt have produced nothing but leaves, are induced to bear fruit. Oh! an orchard or a garden is an excellent school! and a horticulturist would often make the best of pedagogues! There is more to be learnt, if one can use one’s eyes, in a poultry-yard, or a kennel, or an aquarium, or a rabbit warren, or a stable, than in all your books, or even, believe me, in the society of men, where everything is more or less sophisticated.”
Then Vincent spoke of selection. He explained how in order to obtain the finest seedlings, the ordinary plan is to choose the most robust specimens; and then he told them of the fantastic experiment of one audacious horticulturist, who, out of a horror of routine—it really seemed almost like a challenge—took it into his head, on the contrary, to select the most weakly—with the result that he obtained blooms of incomparable beauty.
Robert, who had at first listened with only half an ear, like a person who merely expects to be bored, now made no attempt to interrupt. His attention delighted Lilian, who took it as a compliment to her lover.
“You ought to tell us,” said she, “of what you were saying the other day about fish and their power of accommodation to the different amounts of salt in the sea.… That was it, wasn’t it?”
“Except for certain regions,” went on Vincent, “the sea’s degree of saltness is pretty constant; and marine fauna as a rule tolerates only very slight variations of density. But the regions I was telling you about are nevertheless not uninhabited; the regions I mean are those which are subject to intense evaporation and in which, therefore, the proportion of water to salt is greatly reduced—or, on the contrary, those where the constant inflow of fresh water dilutes the salt and, so to speak, un-salts the sea—those that are near the mouths of great rivers, or such enormous currents as the Gulf Stream. In such regions the animals called stenohaline grow enfeebled to the point of perishing; and as they become incapable of defending themselves, they inevitably fall a prey to the animals called euryhaline, so that the euryhalines live by choice on the confines of the great currents, where the density of the water varies and where the stenohalines meet their death. You understand, don’t you, that the stenos are those which can exist only in water whose degree of saltness is unvarying; whilst the eurys …”
“Are the pickles,” interrupted Robert,1 who always referred everything back to himself, and only took an interest in that part of a theory which he could turn to account.
“Most of them are ferocious,” added Vincent gravely.
“I told you it was better than any novel!” cried Lilian, ecstatically.
Vincent seemed transfigured—indifferent to the impression he was making. He was extraordinarily grave and went on in a lower tone as if he were talking to himself:
“The most astonishing discovery of recent times—at any rate the one that has taught me most—is the discovery of the photogenic apparatus of deep-sea creatures.”
“Oh, tell us about it!” cried Lilian, letting her cigarette go out and her ice melt on her plate.
“You know, no doubt, that the light of day does not reach very far down into the sea. Its depths are dark … huge gulfs, which for a long time were thought to be uninhabited; then people began dragging them, and quantities of strange animals were brought up from these infernal regions—animals that were blind, it was thought. What use would the sense of sight be in the dark? Evidently they had no eyes; they wouldn’t, they couldn’t have eyes. Nevertheless, on examination it was found to people’s amazement that some of them had eyes; that they almost all had eyes, and sometimes antennæ of extraordinary sensibility into the bargain. Still people doubted and wondered: why eyes with no means of seeing? Eyes that are sensitive—but sensitive to what?… And at last it was discovered that each of these animals which people at first insisted were creatures of darkness, gives forth and projects before and around it its own light. Each of them shines, illuminates, irradiates. When they were brought up from the depths at night and turned out on to the ship’s deck, the darkness blazed. Moving, many-coloured fires, glowing, vibrating, changing—revolving beacon-lamps—sparkling of stars and jewels—a spectacle, say those who saw it, of unparalleled splendour.”
Vincent stopped. No one spoke for a long time.
“Let’s go home,” said Lilian suddenly; “I’m cold.”
Lady Lilian took her seat beside the chauffeur, so as to be sheltered by the glass screen. The two men at the back of the open carriage carried on their own conversation. Robert had hardly spoken during the whole of the dinner; he had listened to Vincent talking; now it was his turn.
“Fish like us, my dear boy, perish in calm waters,” said he to begin with, giving his friend a thump on the shoulder. He allowed himself a few familiarities with Vincent, but would not have suffered him to reciprocate them; for that matter, Vincent was not disposed to. “Do you know,
I think you’re simply splendid! What a lecturer you’d make! Upon my word, you ought to quit doctoring. I really can’t see you prescribing laxatives and having no company but the sick. A chair of comparative biology, or something of that sort is what you want.”
“Yes,” said Vincent, “I have sometimes thought so.”
“Lilian ought to be able to manage it. She could get her friend the Prince of Monaco to interest himself in your researches. It’s his line, I believe. I must speak to her about it.”
“She has suggested it already.”
“Oh, so I see there’s no possibility of doing you a service,” said he, pretending to be vexed. “Just as I wanted to ask you one for myself, too.”
“It’s your turn to be in my debt. You think I’ve got a very short memory.”
“What? You’re still thinking of that five thousand francs? But you’ve paid it back, my dear fellow. You owe me nothing at all now—except a little friendship, perhaps.” He added these words in a voice that was almost tender, and with one hand on Vincent’s arm. “I want to appeal to it now.”
“I am listening,” said Vincent.
But at that, Passavant immediately protested, as if the impatience were Vincent’s, and not his own:
“Goodness me! What a hurry you’re in! Between this and Paris there’s time enough surely.”
Passavant was particularly skilful in the art of fathering his own words—and anything else he preferred to disown—on other people. He made a feint of dropping his subject, like an angler who, for fear of startling his trout, makes a long cast with his bait and then draws it in again by imperceptible degrees.
“A propos, thank you for sending me your brother. I was afraid you had forgotten.”
Vincent made a gesture and Robert went on:
“Have you seen him since?… Not had time, eh?… Then it’s odd you shouldn’t have asked me yet how the interview went off. At bottom, you don’t in the least care. You don’t take the faintest interest in your brother. What Olivier thinks and feels, what he is, what he wants to be, never concerns you in the least.… ”
