“How sombre and terrible the shadows of evening must have been in the old days, when they were full of unknown fabulous beings, evil wandering spirits who took unforeseen shapes and froze the heart with dread! Their occult power was quite beyond the grasp of our minds and they drew near with inevitable feet.
“When the supernatural disappeared, true fear disappeared from the earth too, for we are truly afraid only of what we do not understand. Visible dangers can move, disturb, terrify. But what is that compared with the overwhelming terror that fills your mind when you expect to meet a wandering ghost, or suffer the clinging arms of a dead man, or see running on you one of those frightful beasts invented by man’s fear? The dark seems light to me, now that it is no longer haunted.
“And the proof of all this is that if we suddenly found ourselves alone in that wood, we should be pursued by the vision of the two strange beings who have just appeared to us in the glare of their fire, rather than by dread of any real danger at all.
“We are truly afraid,” he repeated, “only of what we do not understand.”
A sudden memory woke in my mind, the memory of a story told us one Sunday by Tourgeniev, in Gustave Flaubert’s house.
I don’t know whether he had written it in any of his books.
No one was more subtly able to thrill us with a suggestion of the veiled unknown world than the great Russian storyteller, or to reveal—in the half-light of a strange tale—uncertain, uncertain, disturbing, threatening things.
In his books we are sharply aware of that vague fear of the Invisible, the fear of the unknown thing behind the wall, behind the door, behind the external world. Perilous gleams of light break on us, as we read, revealing just enough to add to our mortal fear.
He seems sometimes to be showing us the inner meaning of strange coincidences, the unexpected connection between circumstances that were apparently fortuitous and really guided by a hidden malicious will. In his books we can imagine we feel an imperceptible hand guiding us through life in a mysterious way, as through a shifting dream whose meaning we never grasp.
He does not rush boldly into the supernatural world like Edgar Poe or Hoffmann, he tells simple stories and a sense of something a little uncertain and a little uneasy creeps somehow into them.
That day he used those very words: “We are truly afraid only of what we do not understand.”
Arms hanging down, legs stretched out and relaxed, hair quite white, he was sitting or rather lounging in a large armchair, drowned in that flowing tide of beard and silvery hair that gave him the air of an Eternal Father or a River God from Ovid.
He spoke slowly, with a certain indolence which lent a charm to his phrases, and a rather hesitating and awkward manner of speaking which emphasised the vivid rightness of his words. His wide pale eyes, like the eyes of a child, reflected all the changing fancies of his mind. This is what he told us:
He was hunting, as a young man, in a Russian forest. He had tramped all day, and towards the end of the afternoon he reached the edge of a quiet river.
It ran under the trees, and among the trees, filled with floating grasses, deep, cold and clear.
An overmastering desire seized the hunter to fling himself into this transparent water. He stripped and dived into the stream. He was a very tall and a very strong youth, active, and a splendid swimmer.
He let himself float gently in great content of mind, grasses and roots brushed past him and tendrils of creeping plants trailed lightly over his skin, thrilling him.
Suddenly a hand touched his shoulder.
He turned round in startled wonder and saw a frightful creature staring hungrily at him.
It was like a woman or a monkey. Its vast wrinkled grimacing face smiled at him. Two nameless things, which must have been two breasts, floated in front of it, and its mass of tangled hair, burnt by the sun, hung round its face and fell down its back.
Tourgeniev felt a piercing and appalling fear, the icy fear of the supernatural.
Without pausing to reflect, without thinking or understanding, he began to swim frantically towards the bank. But the monster swam quicker still, and touched his neck, his back and his legs with little cacklings of delight. Mad with terror, the young man reached the bank at last, and tore at full speed through the wood, with never a thought of recovering his clothes and his gun.
The frightful creature followed him, running as quickly as he did and growling all the time.
Spent and sick with fear, the fugitive was ready to drop to the ground when a boy who was watching his goats ran up, armed with a whip; he laid it about the fearsome human beast who ran away howling with grief. And Tourgeniev saw her disappear among the leaves of the trees, like a female gorilla.
It was a madwoman, who had lived in this wood for thirty years, on the charity of the shepherds, and who spent half her days swimming in the river.
The great Russian writer added: “I have never felt such fear in my life, because I could not imagine what this monster could be.”
I related this adventure to my companion, and he replied:
“Yes, we are afraid only of what we do not understand. We only truly experience that frightful spiritual convulsion which we call dread when our fear is touched with the superstitious terror of past ages. I myself have suffered this dread in all its horror, and that over something so simple and so stupid that I hardly dare tell you about it.
“I was travelling in Brittany, alone and on foot. I had walked
