The windows of our carriage rattle with it. This air, which never changes and is repeated over and over again for some six miles of our journey, is a very ancient air of France, so old and so young, of so frank a gaiety and so good a quality, that in a very few minutes we too are singing it with the rest.
How beautiful Brittany looks, beautiful and rejuvenated and green, in the June sunshine!
We poor followers of the sea, when we find spring in our path, rejoice in it more than other people, on account of the sequestered life we lead in the wooden monasteries. It was eight years since Yves had seen a Breton spring, and we both had long grown weary of the winter, and of that eternal summer which in other parts reigns resplendent over the great blue sea; and these green fields, these soft perfumes, all this charm of June which words cannot describe held us entranced.
Life still holds hours that are worth the living, hours of youth and forgetfulness. Away with all melancholy dreams, all the morbid fancies of long-faced poets! It is good to sail, in the face of the wind, in the company of the most lighthearted among the children of the earth. Health and youth comprise all there is of truth in the world, with simple and boisterous merriment and the songs of sailors!
And we continued to travel very quickly and very erratically, zigzagging over the road among these crowds of people, between very tall hawthorns forming green hedges, and under the tufted vault of the trees.
And presently Brest appeared, with its great solemn air, its great granite ramparts, its great grey walls, on which also grass and pink foxgloves were growing. It was as it were intoxicated, this mournful town, at having by chance a real summer's day, an evening clear and warm; it was full of noise and movement and people, of white head-dresses and sailors singing.
[CHAPTER LXXII]
5th July, 1881.
At Sea.—We are returning from the Channel. The Sèvre is proceeding very slowly in a thick fog, blowing every now and then its whistle which sounds like a cry of distress in this damp shroud which envelops us. The grey solitudes of the sea are all about us and we feel them without seeing them. It seems as if we were dragging with us long veils of darkness; we long to break through them; we are oppressed as it were to feel that we have been so long enclosed within them, and the impression grows that this curtain is immense, infinite, that it stretches for league on league without end, in the same dull greyness, in the same watery atmosphere. And then there is the endless roll of the waters, slow, smooth, regular, patient, exasperating. It is as if great polished and shining backs heaved and pushed us with their shoulders, raising us up and letting us fall.
Suddenly in the evening the fog lifts and there appears before us a dark thing, surprising, unexpected, like a tall phantom emerging from the sea: