The mother, looking into her daughter’s eyes, saw tears. “It can be built up again,” she says. “It seems to me they can try, can they not, to make it the same again?”
“I, too, thought of that,” replied the daughter. “But no, don’t you see? It would never be the same!”
And this was the secret: more than the power of custom in her Life was the fact that the wall had been the background of a picture—the face of a young man which she had watched through one short spring-time.
This is one of Loti’s few technically perfect short-stories. His sketchy, rambling, loosely-plotted “novels” and travel-reflections differ greatly in manner from the compact story of plot, but his writings do abound in easily separable fragments, or episodes—as to which a word must now be set down, before we take up the plot and the final scenes of Loti’s greatest work, Pecheur d’Islande.
Fortunately for the spontaneity of the novel, many authors are more concerned for the vividness of their narration than for mere technical form. Hence they feel free to introduce incidents which are related more or less loosely to the plot, and serve rather as auxiliaries than as vital parts of the action. The purpose may be to develop a tone, suggest an atmosphere, illustrate certain traits of character, or, it may be, to amplify an organic part of the plot. This narrative by-path, this illuminating side-light, we technically call an episode. It was most in vogue among the early English novelists; Defoe, Richardson, Smollett, Fielding, and Goldsmith followed it so habitually that all of their novels are episodic in form. But even in the more highly organized French romances of plot—Les Miserables and Les Mystères de Paris, for example—we find frequent episodes. This tendency is naturally more marked in the tale and in the prolonged sketch than in the closely plotted novel. Indeed, it is only in the very long plot-novel that the episode can find room, since the prosperity of the short plot-novel lies largely in the close and rapid sequence of its incidents.
Even though “The Marriage to the Sea”—as I have ventured to entitle this climacteric close of An Iceland Fisherman—is an essential plot incident, and therefore an organic part of the whole, still, considered solely for its own sake, it is easily detachable. So we may regard it as almost a typical specimen of the episode; that is to say, we need only have some slight prior knowledge of the setting and the relation of the characters to invest it with the completeness and unity of a perfect short-story. True, the crisis has occurred—unknown to the fisherman’s wife—before this episode begins, but that could scarcely have been arranged more artistically, with regard to suspense, had Loti purposed to use the episode as a separate story. Here we have the carefully laid groundwork of tone, environment, and characters. Here, too, are the breathless expectancy, the increasing suspense (which constitutes the complication), two false anticipations of a happy dénouement, and then the actual dénouement, with the artistic close.
An Iceland Fisherman is Pierre Loti’s most perfect work, and it is gratifying to note that it is also his most popular, as witness some three hundred and fifty French editions, and an unknown number of translations. In form, it is less a typical novel than a brilliant impressionistic tale. A major episode is the story of Sylvestre, which, woven closely in its earlier part with the life of Yann and his sweetheart Gaud, at length diverges, when the fisherboy passes into the navy, fights a good fight in Cochin-China, and dies amid pathetic circumstances in far-off Singapore.
The plot is very simple. It is laid in Paimpol, in Brittany, whose dwellers rely solely upon the Iceland fisheries. Every year these hardy Vikings of Northern France fare away to the Iceland waters and return only after a long season there. The chief characters are Yann Gaos, a great splendid young fisherman with handsome brown curls, and Gaud, the daughter of “the great man” of the town. The two are in love, and Yann ventures some hesitating advances; but her father’s wealth deters the fisherman from making a full avowal. However, when Gaud’s father dies she is found to be penniless; still Yann unaccountably holds back, much to Gaud’s secret sorrow. Homeless, she goes to live with Granny Moan, the grandmother of the ill-fated young Sylvestre, who had been betrothed to Yann’s sister. At length, in the little hut where Gaud lives as the bereft old woman’s foster-grandchild, she and Yann are married.
Only a few days after their wedding, the bridegroom sails away on the fine new Léopoldine for the Iceland fisheries. When autumn comes the boat does not return with the others. All that is heard of her is from the crew of the Marie-Jeanne, who report a mystic meeting with the Léopoldine in a dense fog, when each vessel loomed up to the other out of the mist and then passed spectre-like away, with time for only a few quick cries of recognition from fellow-townsmen. The final scene opens with all the town awaiting the return of the fishers. One vessel has already come in, and then opens this closing episode.