The Toilers of the Sea (32 page)

IV

SUB RE
¹⁷⁷

The man who was doing all this was now in a fearful state.

In this immense and varied labor Gilliatt was using up all his strength, and had little means of restoring it. Suffering from privations on one hand and weariness on the other, he had grown thin. His hair and beard had grown. He had only one shirt left that was not in tatters. He went about barefoot, for the wind had carried off one of his shoes and the sea the other. Splinters of rock from his rudimentary and dangerous anvil had covered his hands and arms with cuts and scratches: grazes rather than open wounds, they were superficial but were rendered painful by the sharp air and salt water.

He was hungry, he was thirsty, he was cold. His can of fresh water was empty. His rye flour had been eaten or used for other purposes. He was left with only a small amount of biscuit, which he broke with his teeth, having no water to soak it in. Gradually, day by day, his strength was declining. This redoubtable rock was consuming his life.

Drinking was a problem; eating was a problem; sleeping was a problem. He ate when he caught a sea slater or a crab. He drank when he saw a seabird alighting on a rock; then he would clamber up to the spot and find a crevice containing a little fresh water. He drank after the bird, and sometimes along with the bird; for the gulls had grown used to him and did not fly away at his approach. However hungry he felt, Gilliatt did not harm them. It will be remembered that he was superstitious about birds. The birds, for their part, were not afraid of this man with shaggy, unkempt hair and a long beard. The change in his appearance had given them confidence: they now regarded him not as a man but as a wild animal.

The birds and Gilliatt were now good friends. Suffering poverty and hardship together, they helped one another. While Gilliatt's rye flour lasted he had given the birds crumbs from his baking; and now they in their turn were showing him where to find water.

He ate the shellfish he collected raw; and shellfish help to quench thirst. He cooked the crabs: having no pot, he roasted them between two stones brought to red heat in his fire, as the wild people of the Faroes do.

Meanwhile, the weather had taken an equinoctial turn. Rain had come; but it was a hostile rain. There were no showers, either light or heavy, but long, thin, icy, penetrating, sharp needles that cut through Gilliatt's clothing to the skin and through the skin to the very bone. The rain brought him little water for drinking, but more than enough to drench him. Niggardly in providing assistance but prodigal in adding to his woes, the rain was unworthy of the sky. For more than a week Gilliatt endured it all day and all night. This rain was a malicious act on the part of the powers above.

At night, in his recess in the rock, he could sleep only because he was utterly exhausted by his work. He was stung by the large gnats that live by the sea and awoke covered with blisters.

He suffered from fever, which kept him going; but while fever can be a help, it is a help that can kill. Instinctively he chewed lichens or sucked leaves of wild cochlearia, the meager growths inhabiting dry crevices in the rock. He thought but little, however, of his own sufferings. He had no time to be distracted from his task by concern for himself. The engines of the Durande were in good shape, and that was enough for him.

In carrying on his work he was constantly in and out of the sea. He went into the water and came out again as a man goes from one room to another in his house.

His clothes were now never dry. He was soaked with rainwater, which continued to pour down ceaselessly, and with seawater, which never dries out. Gilliatt lived constantly drenched.

This is a condition you can get used to. Those groups of poor Irish people—old men, mothers, young girls who are almost naked, children—who spend the winter in the open air, in rain and snow, huddling together at street corners in London, live and die soaked to the skin.

It was a bizarre form of torture that Gilliatt endured: drenched to the skin and yet always thirsty. Every now and then he sucked the sleeve of his pea jacket. The fires that he lit did little to warm him. A fire in the open air is of limited help: you are scorched on one side and frozen on the other. Even when he was sweating, Gilliatt shivered.

On all sides he was faced by forces resisting all his efforts in a fearful kind of silence. He felt himself to be the enemy they were attacking.

Material things declare a somber
Non possumus.
Their very inertia is a melancholy warning.

Gilliatt was surrounded by an immense cloud of hostility. He suffered from burns and shivered with cold. The fire bit into his flesh; the water froze him; thirst threw him into a fever; the wind tore at his clothes; hunger gnawed at his stomach. He was oppressed by an exhausting combination of forces ranged against him. A vast silent complex of obstacles, with all the irresponsibility of fate but with a kind of terrible unanimity, was converging on Gilliatt from all sides. He felt it bearing inexorably down on him. There was no way of escaping it. It was almost like a personal enemy. Gilliatt was conscious of a mysterious force rejecting him, a hatred seeking to diminish him. He could escape from it by flight, but since he had resolved to remain he must face up to this impenetrable hostility. Since these forces were unable to expel him, they were seeking to defeat him. Who were they? The Unknown. He was in the grip of the Unknown, which pressed down on him, hemmed him in, took his breath away. He was being crushed by the invisible. Each day the mysterious screw was given another turn.

Gilliatt's situation in these disquieting circumstances was like an unfair duel with a treacherous opponent.

He was surrounded by a coalition of obscure forces. He sensed a determination to get rid of him, as a glacier expels an erratic boulder. Almost without seeming to touch him, this hidden coalition was reducing his clothes to tatters, scarifying his flesh, holding him at bay, and, as it were, putting him
hors de combat
before the fight. In spite of it all he kept on working without remission, but as the work was being done the worker was being undone. It seemed that these wild forces of nature, fearing the man's spirit, were seeking to exhaust his body. Gilliatt held firm, and waited. The abyss had begun by wearing him down. What would it do next? The double Douvre—that granite dragon lying in wait in midocean—had admitted Gilliatt to its lair. It had allowed him in and let him get on with his work. This acceptance was the hospitality of a gaping maw.

The empty waste, the boundless expanse, the space in which there are so many forms of rejection for man, the mute inclemency of natural phenomena pursuing their regular courses, the great general law of things, implacable and passive, the ebb and flow of the tides, the reef, this black constellation of stars in whirling movement, the focal point of an irradiation of currents, the mysterious conspiracy of things against the temerity of a living being, the winter, the clouds, the besieging sea—all this enveloped Gilliatt, surrounded him, seemed to be closing in on him, separating him from living beings in the manner of a dungeon building up around a man. Everything was against him, nothing was for him; he was isolated, abandoned, enfeebled, broken down, forgotten. His stores gone, his tools broken and defective, he suffered thirst and hunger by day and cold at night; covered with rags, his clothes threadbare—rags over festering sores; holes in his clothing and in his flesh, his hands torn, his feet bloody, his limbs emaciated, his face pallid; but there was a flame in his eyes. A proud flame; a man's will made visible. A man's eye reveals his quality. It shows how much of a man there is within us. We declare ourselves by the light that gleams under our eyebrows. Petty spirits merely wink; great spirits emit a flash of lightning. If there is no brilliance under the eyelid, there is no thought in the brain, no love in the heart. A man who loves exerts his will, and a man who exerts his will radiates light and brilliance. Resolution puts fire in the glance: a noble fire that results from the combustion of timid thoughts.

Sublime characters are stubborn. A man who is merely brave has only one method of action, a man who is merely valiant has only one temperament, a man who is merely courageous has only one virtue; greatness is reserved for the man who is stubborn in pursuing the right course. Almost the whole secret of men of great heart is contained in one word:
Perseverando.

Perseverance is to courage what the wheel is to the lever; it is a perpetual renewal of the fulcrum. Whether the objective be on earth or in heaven, the only thing that matters is to make for that objective; the former case is for Columbus, the latter for Jesus. The cross is mad: hence its glory. To achieve suffering and triumph, it is necessary to leave no room for argument with one's conscience and to allow no relaxation of one's will. In the sphere of morality a fall does not exclude the possibility of soaring. A fall is the starting point of a rise. The second-rate allow themselves to be put off by apparent obstacles; the strong do not. For them the prospect of perishing is merely a possibility; the prospect of conquering is a certitude. You can offer Stephen all sorts of good reasons for not allowing himself to be stoned. Disdain for reasonable objections engenders that sublime victory in defeat that is called martyrdom.

All Gilliatt's efforts seemed to be concentrated on the impossible. Success was meager or slow in coming, and much effort was required to obtain very little result. This was what showed his greatness of spirit; this was what was so poignant about his situation.

That so much preparation, so much work, so much fumbling effort, so many nights of uncomfortable sleep, so many days of labor had been necessary to rig up four beams over the wreck of a ship, to cut up and set aside all that was worth saving in the ship, and to suspend this wreck within a wreck from four hoists with their cables: this was the terrible thing about his solitary labor. Fatality in the cause; necessity in the effect. Gilliatt had not only accepted this: he had wanted it. Fearful of a competitor, since a competitor might have been a rival, he had not sought any assistant. The whole crushing enterprise, the risk, the danger, the toil that was daily increasing, the possibility that the salvager might be engulfed in his salvage, the hunger, the fever, the nakedness, the distress—in his egotism he had chosen all these things for himself.

It was as if he were in a terrifying bell-glass from which the air was being withdrawn. His vitality was gradually leaving him, though he was barely aware of this.

The exhaustion of a man's strength does not exhaust his will. To believe in something is only the second power; to will something is the first. The proverbial mountains that can be moved by faith are nothing compared with what can be achieved by will. The ground that Gilliatt was losing in vigor he was regaining in tenacity. The diminution of the physical man under the attack of these wild natural forces strengthened his moral force.

Gilliatt was not aware of his tiredness, or rather he refused to recognize it. The refusal of the soul to yield to the weakness of the body is a source of immense power.

He saw the progress he was making in his work, and saw nothing else. He was wretched, but he did not know it. He was hallucinated by his objective, which he was within reach of achieving. He put up with all his sufferings, thinking only of one thing: forward! His work was going to his head. The human will is intoxicating. A man's soul can make him drunk. Drunkenness of this kind is known as heroism.

Gilliatt was a kind of Job of the ocean. But he was a Job who struggled, a Job who fought and faced up to his trials, a Job who conquered, and—if such terms are not too grandiose for a poor seaman who fished for crabs and crayfish—a Job who was also a Prometheus.

V

SUB UMBRA
¹⁷⁸

Sometimes Gilliatt opened his eyes at night and looked at the darkness. He felt a strange sensation.

The eye opened on blackness. A dismal situation; anxiety.

The pressure of darkness can be felt. An unspeakable ceiling of shadows; a depth of obscurity that no diver can fathom; light mingled with the obscurity, a strange somber vanquished light; brightness reduced to powder; seeds or ashes? millions of torches that give no light; a vast ignition that keeps its secret hidden; a diffusion of light into dust, like a shower of sparks halted in midflight; the turbulence of the whirlpool and the immobility of the tomb; the problem that opens up a precipitous gulf; an enigma that both shows and conceals its face; the infinite masked in blackness: such is the night. All this weighs heavily on man.

This amalgam of all mysteries in one, the cosmic mystery as well as the mystery of fate, overwhelms the human mind.

The pressure of darkness acts in inverse proportion on different kinds of souls. Man confronting night recognizes his incompleteness. He sees the darkness and feels his frailty. The black sky is a blind man. Man, face-to-face with night, bows down, kneels, prostrates himself, grovels, crawls toward a hole, or seeks for wings. Almost always he tries to flee from this formless presence of the Unknown. He wonders what it is; he trembles, he bows his head, he acknowledges his ignorance. Sometimes, too, he wishes to go there.

Go where?

There.

There? What is that? What is there out there?

This curiosity is evidently a curiosity about forbidden things, for in this direction all the bridges around man are broken. The arch leading to infinity is missing. But what is forbidden has a drawing power; it is a gulf. Where man's feet cannot take him his eyes can reach, and when the eyes can go no farther, the mind can reach beyond. There is no man who will not make the effort, however weak and inadequate he may be. Depending on his nature, man is always either drawn or repelled by the night. Some minds are repressed by it; others are enlarged. It is a somber spectacle. It contains an element of the undefinable.

When the night is serene it is a depth of shadow; when it is stormy it is a depth of smoke. This limitless expanse withholds itself from man, and at the same time offers itself to him; closed to experimentation, but open to conjecture. Innumerable points of light make the bottomless darkness blacker still. Gemstones, scintillations, stars. Presences identified in the Unknown; fearful challenges to those who would approach these lights. They are landmarks of creation in the Absolute; marks of distance in an expanse where there are no distances; a numbering system, impossible but nevertheless real, for measuring the depths of space. First one shining microscopic point, then another, then another, then another; an imperceptible presence, but vast. The light we see is a spark; the spark is a star; the star is a sun; the sun is a universe; the universe is nothing. Any number is zero when compared with infinity.

These universes, which are nothing, nevertheless exist. In observing them we feel the difference between being nothing and not being at all.

The inaccessible added to the inexplicable: that is the sky.

This contemplation gives rise to a sublime phenomenon: the enlargement of the soul by wonder.

Sacred awe is peculiar to man; animals have no such fears. The human mind finds in this august terror its eclipse and its proof.

Darkness is one and indivisible: hence the horror we feel. At the same time it is complex: hence the awe we feel. Its unity is a mass weighing on our spirit, which destroys any urge to resist it. Its complexity leads us to look all around ourselves, as if we feared some unexpected arrival. We submit, but remain on our guard. We are in the presence of a single Whole—hence our submission—and of diversity: hence our wariness. The unity of darkness contains something that is multiple: a mysterious multiplicity that can be seen in matter and sensed in thought. This creates silence: one reason the more for being on the watch.

Night—as the author of these lines has written elsewhere—is the proper and normal state of the particular creation of which we are part. Day, brief in duration and in space, is only a period of proximity to a star.

This universal prodigy of night is not accomplished without some friction, and the frictions of such a mechanism are contusions on our life. The frictions of the mechanism are what we call Evil. In this darkness we sense evil, a latent denial of the divine order, an implicit blasphemy by things hostile to the ideal. The vast cosmic whole is complicated by a mysterious thousand-headed teratology. Evil is present in everything as a protest against things as they are. It is a hurricane that harries a ship at sea; it is chaos, which hinders the emergence of a world. Good has unity; Evil has ubiquity. Evil upsets the pattern of life, which is a logical system. It causes a fly to be devoured by a bird and a planet by a comet. Evil is an erasure on the page of creation.

The darkness of night is vertiginous. Those who plunge into it become submerged in it and struggle to survive. No fatigue is comparable to this study of the shadows. It is the study of an obliteration.

There is no firm ground on which the spirit can find a footing. Points of departure with no arrival point. The intersection of contradictory solutions, all the ramifications of doubt presenting themselves at the same time, the embranchment of phenomena flaking off endlessly under some undefined pressure, all laws running into one another; an unfathomable promiscuity in which minerals grow like plants, in which vegetation lives, in which thought has weight, in which love radiates, in which gravitation has the power of love; the immense battlefront attacking all the questions that develop in boundless obscurity; things barely glimpsed suggesting things unknown; the simultaneity of the cosmos in full view, not for the eye but for the intelligence, in this great indistinguishable space; the invisible as a vision. This is Darkness. Man lies under it.

He knows nothing of the detail, but he bears within him, in a quantity proportionate to his mind, the monstrous weight of the Whole. This obsession led the shepherds of Chaldea to discover astronomy. The pores of creation secrete involuntary revelations; there is a kind of automatic exudation of knowledge that is conveyed to the ignorant. Every solitary, exposed to this mysterious impregnation, becomes a natural philosopher unawares.

Darkness is invisible. It is inhabited; inhabited by the Absolute, which takes up no space, and inhabited also by things that do take up space. Disquietingly, there is movement in it. In it some sacred formation is passing through its phases. In it, premeditated plans, powers, deliberately selected destinations carry out in common some immense scheme. It contains life—a terrible and horrible life. There are vast movements of heavenly bodies, the family of the stars, the family of the planets, the pollen of the zodiac, the
quid divinum
of currents, emanations, polarizations, and attractions; there are embraces and antagonisms, the magnificent flow and ebb of a universal antithesis, the imponderable at liberty amid the centers; there is sap in the globes, light outside the globes, there are wandering atoms, scattered seeds, fertilization curves, meetings for coupling and for combat, unimagined profusions, distances that are like dreams, dizzying movements, worlds plunging into the incalculable, prodigies pursuing one another in the shadows, a mechanism in permanent operation, the breathing of spheres in flight, wheels that can be felt turning; scholars make conjectures, the ignorant believe and tremble; things are there, and then withdraw; they are unassailable, they are out of reach, they cannot be approached. We are convinced to the point of oppression. We are faced with some mysterious dark reality. We can grasp nothing. We are crushed by the impalpable.

Everywhere there is the incomprehensible. Nowhere is there the unintelligible.

And to all this is added the redoubtable question: Is this immanent universe a Being?

We are in the shadows. We look. We listen.

Meanwhile, the somber earth continues on its course. Flowers are aware of this gigantic movement: the catchfly opens at eleven o'clock at night, the daylily at five in the morning. Striking regularities!

At other depths the drop of water becomes a world, infusoria pullulate, a giant fecundity emerges from the animalcule, the imperceptible displays its grandeur, the opposite extreme from immensity is seen: within a single hour a diatom will produce 1,300 million diatoms.

What a presentation of all the enigmas at once! Here we are faced with the irreducible.

We are constrained to have faith. The result is that we believe by compulsion. Faith has a strange need for form: hence man's various religions. Nothing is more distressing than a belief without shape.

Whatever we think, whether we will or no, whatever resistance we may have within us, we cannot merely look at darkness: looking inevitably leads to contemplation.

What are we to make of these phenomena? Exposed to their converging forces, in what direction are we to move? To break down this pressure is impossible. How can we adjust our thoughts to all these mysterious influences? How many revelations—abstruse, simultaneous, faltering, obscuring one another by their very mass: like stammerings of the Word! Darkness is a form of silence; but that silence says everything. There is one conclusion that emerges majestically from all this: God. God is an incompressible idea, which is immanent in man. All the syllogisms, the disputes, the negations, the systems, the religions pass over it without diminishing it. This idea is affirmed by all darkness. But everything else is unclear. A formidable immanence! The inexpressible agreement of all these forces is made manifest by the maintenance of all this darkness in equilibrium. The universe is suspended; but nothing falls. The whole incessant and enormous movement is performed without hitch and without interruption. Man participates in this movement, and the degree of oscillation he suffers is known to him as destiny. Where does destiny begin? Where does nature end? What difference is there between an event and a season, between a sorrow and a fall of rain, between a virtue and a star? Is not an hour the same as a wave? The interlocking gears, in constant motion, continue their impassive revolutions without responding to man. The star-spangled sky is a vision of wheels, pendulums, and counterweights. It is the supreme contemplation, and at the same time the supreme meditation. It is the whole of reality, as well as the whole of abstraction. There is nothing beyond. We feel trapped. We are at the discretion of this darkness. There is no escape. We see ourselves caught up in this mechanism; we are an integral part of a Whole that is unknown to us; we feel the unknown that is within us fraternizing mysteriously with an unknown that is outside of us. This is the sublime annunciation of death. What anguish, and at the same time what delight! To adhere to the infinite, to be led by this adherence to attribute to oneself a necessary immortality— or, who knows?, a possible eternity—to feel, within the prodigious swell of this deluge of universal life, the insubmersible persistency of the Self! to look at the stars and say, I am a soul like you! to look at the darkness and say, I am an abyss like you!

These vastnesses are Night.

All this, magnified by solitude, weighed on Gilliatt.

Did he understand it? No.

Did he feel it? Yes.

Gilliatt was a great spirit, unclear about himself, and a great, unsubdued heart.