The Ark

by André Arnyvelde

  “What! What’s that?” they said to her. “Hark at Fanoche! Does she think that there aren’t well-built, handsome and gentle fellows among us who couldn’t see some great lady and their knees?”

  “Sixty years old and toothless, the great lady who’d choose you!”

  “Beautiful and fresh, and full of attractions!

  “Not for any of you to have!”

  She had among her gallants a strapping fellow named Mysil, who was then working in the orchards of an estate belonging to the noble Lady Koraine, who, having taken a walk in her gardens and kitchen-gardens in the company of her chief steward, noticed Mysil, whose gilded arms were glistening in the sunlight.

  The latter, remembering Fanoche’s words, had wanted to try the experiment, and, as cleverly as possible, had done everything he could to be noticed—among other stratagems, that of making it appear that one does not fervently desire to be noticed. Lady Koraine was suffering from considerable ennui at that moment, and could not find, in the inspection of her apple trees, gooseberry bushes and strawberry bushes, a distraction adequate to compensate her for the absence of her husband, who had been sent by the Gyzir Academy of Sciences on a geological mission to the far side of Galade. The strapping Mysil was not effaced rapidly enough from her memory, to the extent that, having returned home, she was unable to think about her apple trees, strawberry bushes and gooseberry bushes without seeing the sun-bronzed face of Mysil appearing insidiously between their branches, leaves and stems.

  Some time afterwards, Fanoche’s adorers said to her: “Well, stubborn girl, do you still claim that we’re courting you as a matter of making do? Look at Mysil, who’s loved by a great lady!”

  “What fine lie are you telling me?”

  “It’s no secret for anyone, although it’s only spoken in whispers, that Mysil has touched the heart of the noble Lady Koraine.”

  “Mysil?”

  “Mysil.”

  They added: “You see, Fanoche, that it’s no longer necessary to reject us.”

  Full of chagrin, however, she said: “Isn’t it shameful that these ladies of the court come to take our gallants!”

  And as her chagrin was augmented by the thought that, if she had wanted, Mysil would presently be with her and not with Lady Koraine, she spoke very audaciously to her courtiers: “These great ladies and princesses, who are great ladies and princesses by the privilege of heaven, hide beneath their brilliant attire vices of which we cannot even think. And there are those among them who preach, or set us an example!”

  She also said: “Are the noble lords no longer sufficient, then, to content the great ladies, they have to go as far as lowering themselves to the gallants of the women of the people?”

  And: “They can lower themselves to our level, but we cannot raise ourselves at all!”

  And then: “If ever Monseigneur Gasp pinches my chin as he passes along the road, I shall say to him, forthrightly: ‘Monseigneur Gasp, go pinch the chins of the great ladies, your equals!’”

  And again: “Equals! In knavery and dissimulation!”

  And besides: “Those who know that they can do whatever they want without peril, protected by their rank, their wealth and the privilege of the good Lord are much worse than us, whom they criticize for the slightest peccadilloes!”

  And furthermore: “Save for being born the sons and daughters of princes, how are they different from us, in the visage? Do they not have arms, legs and maladies like ours? And if they have vices worse than ours, which of us are the least noble, the nobles or the people?”

  And even: “Look at Seigneur Mingrelis going by. Is he not ugly, meager and paltry, and could not one of you, market gardeners and lime-burners, put him in the pocket of your blouse? And yet, there he goes, idle while you toil, under the sun and in the snow. And he profits without effort from all the pleasures of the court, by your efforts, and all the good things of the earth, and he is well seated at tournaments while you carne your necks to see and remain standing, crowded together...”

  Now, it happened that some among those before whom she talked in that fashion, after she had calmed down, went home and thought: She’s not wrong...

  If one adds to that the ennui that was hanging over the country, in the early days following the king’s vow; and then the abrupt disappearance of the king, followed by that of Mnektes; and Gasp’s excesses; and the great difficulty the government had in explaining the king’s retreat to the Galadians, given that even the government did not know in which abbey he had gone to enclose himself; and that, when the year had expired—for it had been a long time, more than a year, that the king had spent traveling the world and finding himself a prisoner in Paris—one can understand the facility with which the people credited the opinion that Gasp had made the king and Mnektes disappear (no one dared say worse) in order to take power...

  And in the meantime, gradually influenced by the words of Fanoche, repeated and deformed, a great many men and women of the people asked monks, clerics and deacons, then priests, and eventually the archbishop himself, troubling questions about the divine reason for differences in caste; and demanded certainty from the archbishop, priests, deacons, clerics, monks, that justice would be rendered in heaven, where God would make princes and common people equal, and proofs in support of that certainty...

  In sum, if you consent to have a glance at all the history books of all lands that narrate the multiple origins and the ordinary phases of all revolutions, you will have no difficulty in imagining in what state the king found his peaceful Galade on his return with Mnektes.

  Various Facts

  The government was in chaos. Gasp had fled. The nobles were barricaded in their homes. Monseigneur Gohain and the priests, after having preached in increasingly empty churches, no longer dared preach, nor even go out in the streets, for they were treated as liars and stoned, and some of them thought, as at the commencement of a vocation, about adding their names to Christian martyrology. The people, about to overthrow the government, were determined to enjoy in their turn everything that the princes had enjoyed, and to proclaim itself sovereign, owner of the land, tools and edifice, legislator and great pontiff.

  The king secretly summoned his ministers, who were amazed by his reappearance, forbade them to reveal it, and had the state of things explained to him accurately. But Monseigneur Gohain, from whom it had been impossible to conceal the providential return, came running, and, seeing him, raised his arms to the heavens, as high as his deltoids permitted.

  The deltoids are the muscles articulating the shoulder, which the Monseigneur had exhausted by the exercise to which he had submitted them in raising his arms to the heavens so many times since the revolution began, so that he now only had languid arms, which dangled by his sides, scarcely capable of allowing the hands to be interlinked over the abdomen—but such a surprising events suddenly reanimated those exhausted deltoids. He exclaimed “Alas, my son!” and then added: “If I had known what abominable consequences the vow I made you make—the vow I let you make—might have, it would not have been a year but a day to which I would have limited you!”

  “Want vow, Father?” the king asked.

  The archbishop opened his eyes wide.

  “In fact, I do remember the vow of which you speak, Father,” said the king. “To tell the truth, I had completely forgotten it. Since my disappearance, I’ve scarcely had time to think about it, I was so entirely absorbed by other objects, and all my living forces were expended to such an extent in contemplations, and then in suffering...”

  Mnektes looked at the prelate, and made a sign to him that a calmer hour would sound when he would have the leisure to give him a few explanations.

  In spite of the precautions, the news ran throughout Galade that the king was safe and sound, and was about to be seen again.

  And he reappeared one morning among all the people, assembled in great agitation in the public square of Gyzir.

  In spite of their anger, the members of the
audience were glad to see the son of Georgis again, the amorous king with the harmonious features. And when he had spoken, saying that great power resides within every human being, preaching the virtue of pride, which impels everyone to want to draw his own help from within himself, painting in symbolic terms a being that he and Mnektes had seen, whose existence they affirmed, and which everyone could know, which played with material objects, extended itself as far as the stars in heaven and could shrink so far as to penetrate the ultimate retreat of all form, bearing in its intelligence inexhaustible reserves of joy, and for which there was only voluntary suffering, that each Galadian there present could approach, whether noble or of the people, if they sought it first within themselves…and a thousand other things that cannot be the object of this story...the crowd flowed away, reserving the possibility of resuming the revolution after having seen the king at work for a while.

  In the meantime, the king went back into his palace, and then perceived a woman who was waiting for him, and whose face lit up as soon as he appeared.

  It was Melidine.

  The King and Melidine

  “Sire,” she said, “I was waiting for you. Until today, I have not ceased to suffer, and now it seems to me that I have never been unhappy, and that I am before you for the first time. Have you not forgotten me? Am I not a stranger to you?”

  The king took her hand, and went, squeezing it gently, into the path in the park where they had once separated so unfortunately. He contemplated Melidine, and saw that she was different. Her features had been hollowed out, modeled by chagrin, suffering and uncertainty. Her eyes were larger. She was more beautiful, and less pretty.

  And the king felt his heart beating with a fever that he had not experienced for a long time.

  But as Melidine waited mutely for him to speak, he was in great perplexity and he wondered whether, now, with all that he had seen, suffered and loved, he would be able to find in Melidine a vast and comprehensive soul, something other than a mere lover...

  Softly, with precaution, he began to confess to her that he had lied to all of Galade, and then he explained, vaguely, that he had been beyond the mountains, and he gradually became excited, and he told Melidine about the masterpieces and great prodigies, and when he had finished, as the shadows of nonchalant leaves danced at their feet, he saw that Melidine’s gaze was fixed, as if lost in a distant dream, and he could not help thinking: Doubtless the sound of my voice is not disagreeable to her, but she must soon have wearied of following my descriptions. The expectation of the kiss, the concern for the act of love, absorbs her entirely, and it’s purely out of politeness that she isn’t yawning...

  And he said to himself, again: Alas!

  Then he resumed, aloud: “I see from your immobile eyes, Melidine, that you are in some reverie, and that I must have bored you with these unknown things...” And he would have liked to have dared to express what he was thinking, by which he was very annoyed and full of pain: She has not understood.

  Now, a fairy—the fairy that every fantastic tale has, and which this one does not lack—emerged from the anguish of his soul, invisible to Melidine, and said this to him:

  “What do you expect? Those immobile eyes are her beautiful response. Through all the marvels you describe, her eyes have pursued their indescribable dream. And beyond all those prodigies, that immutable dream, the flower of all female gazes, is like the perpetual expectation of even greater prodigies. Whatever you see and do, that mute dream will gaze further, and higher...

  “And as her heart, agitated by all that you say, which is like the stage of a journey between what she knows and what she senses at the extremity of her dream, which is infinite, can no longer beat as present for any hero inferior to the one that you have come to be, here you are before the impossibility of forfeiture, if you want to keep her love, and before greater prodigies to accomplish, if you want to make it greater...”

  Around the king and Melidine the light was vaporous, and over their heads, the songs of the birds in the trees were like a crystal cupola. Melidine’s eyes closed slowly, for she felt that she was dying of knowing that the king had come back to her, after such a long time...

  And he gently tilted Melidine’s head toward him, feeling himself enveloped by the same suave warmth—as if his blood were changing into honey—that he had felt before, on that same bench, in the dusk.

  And Melidine’s forehead brushed the king’s face.

  And then, for the first time, their lips met.

  THE ARK

  1

  Aux Armées, 1914

  Since it is necessary for us, my love, to submit along with the entire world to the cruel moment of the world’s destiny, in the universal enslavement of people and things to martial force, would you like us to attempt the madness of declaring ourselves to be free—and saying it so forcefully that we succeed in believing it?

  For myself, I will dispense in that victory of pride all my resources on conviction; and I sense in myself such vigor in that endeavor, my love, and such faith, that I am almost ready, in spite if my pain, to consider it with joy. I shall enumerate our still-vivacious capabilities and accumulate the reasons that we have, thanks to them, to declare ourselves happy in spite of the harshness of circumstances. I shall retrace with the eloquence that will give me the most tender and most moving of memories, the pleasures and beauties of the amorous hours that we lived before the war. I shall evoke the sumptuous garden of dreams that we formulated and the hopes that it was permissible to raise.

  Doubtless you have experienced and know as well as I do everything that I shall have to say about that, but when we savored those pleasures and hose hopes, their warmth was so soft and so evident that we had no need to give them a name. They were the elements of our happiness, and we respired them naturally with the air and the daylight. We did not stand them up before us to estimate their size. No more would it have come to our minds to scrutinize and measure the quantity that each of us was taking from our enjoyment, nor whether the quality was exactly the same in the balances of our sensations. That is why there might be a new value, a more resplendent appearance for each of us, if I express them as generally as they merit.

  And I intend that, far from aggravating your sadness with the spectacle of forbidden felicities, the sparkle and the music of those felicities will excite in you the sentiment of the happiness that we possessed. And before you weep for that happiness, the least that can happen is that you will first savor them again, that you will live them for a second time. That feast of the imagination, shall I suppose, shall I say that it will last long enough for the war to be over before you find yourself confronted by the bare table? If it is not, I believe that it will leave you so much light that a consciousness of it will burst forth within you, a consciousness that you doubtless possess, but which is wandering vagabond along interior paths, and that you have not yet grasped—grasped as it seems to us that a cloudless sky grasps the midday sun in summer.

  Yes, I think that you will then discover such a richness that sadness will appear to you to be a weakness that ought to be left to those who have nothing.

  And this will be the Ark that I shall construct, and which will protect us through the second deluge, unleashed by the entire earth. Already, many houses, and the bodies of their residents, entire cities and the pride of their scattered stones, have gone, submerged by the great red tide. Thus, we have both thought until now that our dreams and our desires, the fiefs, cities and souls of our happiness, would be smashed and crushed by the tempest...no, no. Standing, my love! I shall reassemble our goods, adapt the timbers of our Ark. And if powder and iron do not interrupt my labor, oh, I affirm that after the work is done, Noah running aground on the dry summit of Ararat did not extend his hands toward Adonai with a greater gratitude and a more ardent intoxication, and the branch did not gleam with a fresher green in the beak of the dove, than the joy, youth and voluptuousness we shall have, my beloved, in obtaining consciousness of our liberty.<
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  2

  But your confidence which always accompanies me, is holding back, anxiously. Ah, I understand! Whether delightful illusion, or even conviction, what charm could ever replace the inexhaustible delights of veritable presence? Do I not grasp sufficiently that the sadness I need to vanquish is that of our separation? When we are together, what adversity do we fear? Whatever they were, the proofs that once afflicted us were still joys. Each of them brought to one of us a pretext to seek in the other’s eyes for courage, security or the certainty of victory...

  Well, let your confidence be serene. Follow me. Whatever might be the apparent disorder and discontinuity of this endeavor, it is the certitude of our liberty, I tell you; it is our inviolate happiness that ought to be resuscitated therein. Follow me my beloved. Wherever I go, whatever detours the vicissitudes of the war, the gusts of my memory and the train of my thoughts might impose upon us, it is toward you, with no relapse, that all my effusions will go. In spite of time, distance and circumstances, how can the fervor and force with which I sense you close to me not communicate the vivid impression of my thought to you too? For me, whose distress will have no other refuge, whose pride will have no other throne, than this message, I say, I know, that my will and my passion will attract, bring and fix here, real, your distant substance, your eyes, your soul and your passion.

  What dear images shall I commence by evoking. First of all, I want to cause to reflourish on these leaves that you are holding a few of the ornaments of our hours, the pleasures of our household, pleasures such that a perpetual spring blossoms around us.

  As soon as our threshold was crossed, everything foggy or irritating that either one of us dragged outside was suddenly chased away, dissipated like the dust that, as soon as our door was open, would have been caught and, in a sense, set away by a current of joyful air. At home! Here I am. Here is the cheerful garden, the banal staircase, our door...