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Jean Christophe, Vol. I

R >> Romain Rolland >> Jean Christophe, Vol. I




He went home, pale and storming, though he said never a word. He declared
frigidly that he would not go to school again. They paid no attention to
what he said. Next morning, when his mother reminded him that it was time
to go, he replied quietly that he had said that he was not going any more.
In rain Louisa begged and screamed and threatened; it was no use. He stayed
sitting in his corner, obstinate. Melchior thrashed him. He howled, but
every time they bade him go after the thrashing was over he replied
angrily, "No!" They asked him at least to say why. He clenched his teeth,
and would not. Melchior took hold of him, carried him to school, and gave
him into the master's charge. They set him on his form, and he began
methodically to break everything within reach--his inkstand, his pen. He
tore up his copy-book and lesson-book, all quite openly, with his eye on
the schoolmaster, provocative. They shut him up in a dark room. A few
moments later the schoolmaster found him with his handkerchief tied round
his neck, tugging with all his strength at the two ends of it. He was
trying to strangle himself.

They had to send him back.

* * * * *

Jean-Christophe was impervious to sickness. He had inherited from
his father and grandfather their robust constitutions. They were not
mollycoddles in that family; well or ill, they never worried, and nothing
could bring about any change in the habits of the two Kraffts, father and
son. They went out winter and summer, in all weathers, and stayed for hours
together out in rain or sun, sometimes bareheaded and with their coats
open, from carelessness or bravado, and walked for miles without being
tired, and they looked with pity and disdain upon poor Louisa, who never
said anything, but had to stop. She would go pale, and her legs would
swell, and her heart would thump. Jean-Christophe was not far from sharing
the scorn of his mother; he did not understand people being ill. When he
fell, or knocked himself, or cut himself, or burned himself, he did not
cry; but he was angry with the thing that had injured him. His father's
brutalities and the roughness of his little playmates, the urchins of the
street, with whom he used to fight, hardened him. He was not afraid of
blows, and more than once he returned home with bleeding nose and bruised
forehead. One day he had to be wrenched away, almost suffocated, from one
of these fierce tussles in which he had bowled over his adversary, who was
savagely banging his head on the ground. That seemed natural enough to him,
for he was prepared to do unto others as they did unto himself.

And yet he was afraid of all sorts of things, and although no one knew
it--for he was very proud--nothing brought him go much suffering during
a part of his childhood as these same terrors. For two or three years
especially they gnawed at him like a disease.

He was afraid of the mysterious something that lurks in darkness--evil
powers that seemed to lie in wait for his life, the roaring of monsters
which fearfully haunt the mind of every child and appear in everything that
he sees, the relic perhaps of a form long dead, hallucinations of the first
days after emerging from chaos, from the fearful slumber in his mother's
womb, from the awakening of the larva from the depths of matter.

He was afraid of the garret door. It opened on to the stairs, and was
almost always ajar. When he had to pass it he felt his heart heating; he
would spring forward and jump by it without looking. It seemed to him that
there was some one or something behind it. When it was closed he heard
distinctly something moving behind it. That was not surprising, for there
were large rats; but he imagined a monster, with rattling bones, and flesh
hanging in rags, a horse's head, horrible and terrifying eyes, shapeless.
He did not want to think of it, but did so in spite of himself. With
trembling hand he would make sure that the door was locked; but that did
not keep him from turning round ten times as he went downstairs.

He was afraid of the night outside. Sometimes he used to stay late with
his grandfather, or was sent out in the evening on some errand. Old Krafft
lived a little outside the town in the last house on the Cologne road.
Between the house and the first lighted windows of the town there was a
distance of two or three hundred yards, which seemed three times as long
to Jean-Christophe. There were places where the road twisted and it was
impossible to see anything. The country was deserted in the evening, the
earth grew black, and the sky was awfully pale. When he came out from
the hedges that lined the road, and climbed up the slope, he could still
see a yellowish gleam on the horizon, but it gave no light, and was more
oppressive than the night; it made the darkness only darker; it was a
deathly light. The clouds came down almost to earth. The hedges grew
enormous and moved. The gaunt trees were like grotesque old men. The sides
of the wood were stark white. The darkness moved. There were dwarfs sitting
in the ditches, lights in the grass, fearful flying things in the air,
shrill cries of insects coming from nowhere. Jean-Christophe was always in
anguish, expecting some fearsome or strange putting forth of Nature. He
would run, with his heart leaping in his bosom.

When he saw the light in his grandfather's room he would gain confidence.
But worst of all was when old Krafft was not at home. That was most
terrifying. The old house, lost in the country, frightened the boy even in
daylight. He forgot his fears when his grandfather was there, but sometimes
the old man would leave him alone, and go out without warning him.
Jean-Christophe did not mind that. The room was quiet. Everything in it
was familiar and kindly. There was a great white wooden bedstead, by
the bedside was a great Bible on a shelf, artificial flowers were on
the mantelpiece, with photographs of the old man's two wives and eleven
children--and at the bottom of each photograph he had written the date of
birth and death--on the walls were framed texts and vile chromolithographs
of Mozart and Beethoven. A little piano stood in one corner, a great
violoncello in another; rows of books higgledy-piggledy, pipes, and in
the window pots of geraniums. It was like being surrounded with friends.
The old man could be heard moving about in the next room, and planing or
hammering, and talking to himself, calling himself an idiot, or singing in
a loud voice, improvising a _potpourri_ of scraps of chants and sentimental
_Lieder_, warlike marches, and drinking songs. Here was shelter and refuge.
Jean-Christophe would sit in the great armchair by the window, with a book
on his knees, bending over the pictures and losing himself in them. The day
would die down, his eyes would grow weary, and then he would look no more,
and fall into vague dreaming. The wheels of a cart would rumble by along
the road, a cow would moo in the fields; the bells of the town, weary and
sleepy, would ring the evening Angelus. Vague desires, happy presentiments,
would awake in the heart of the dreaming child.

Suddenly Jean-Christophe would awake, filled with dull uneasiness. He would
raise his eyes--night! He would listen--silence! His grandfather had just
gone out. He shuddered. He leaned out of the window to try to see him. The
road was deserted; things began to take on a threatening aspect. Oh God!
If _that_ should be coming! What? He could not tell. The fearful thing.
The doors were not properly shut. The wooden stairs creaked as under a
footstep. The boy leaped up, dragged the armchair, the two chairs and the
table, to the most remote corner of the room; he made a barrier of them;
the armchair against the wall, a chair to the right, a chair to the left,
and the table in front of him. In the middle he planted a pair of steps,
and, perched on top with his book and other books, like provisions against
a siege, he breathed again, having decided in his childish imagination that
the enemy could not pass the barrier--that was not to be allowed.

But the enemy would creep forth, even from his book. Among the old books
which the old man had picked up were some with pictures which made a
profound impression on the child: they attracted and yet terrified him.
There were fantastic visions--temptations of St. Anthony--in which
skeletons of birds hung in bottles, and thousands of eggs writhe like worms
in disemboweled frogs, and heads walk on feet, and asses play trumpets, and
household utensils and corpses of animals walk gravely, wrapped in great
cloths, bowing like old ladies. Jean-Christophe was horrified by them, but
always returned to them, drawn on by disgust. He would look at them for a
long time, and every now and then look furtively about him to see what was
stirring in the folds of the curtains. A picture of a flayed man in an
anatomy book was still more horrible to him. He trembled as he turned the
page when he came to the place where it was in the book. This shapeless
medley was grimly etched for him. The creative power inherent in every
child's mind filled out the meagerness of the setting of them. He saw no
difference between the daubs and the reality. At night they had an even
more powerful influence over his dreams than the living things that he saw
during the day.

He was afraid to sleep. For several years nightmares poisoned his rest. He
wandered in cellars, and through the manhole saw the grinning flayed man
entering. He was alone in a room, and he heard a stealthy footstep in the
corridor; he hurled himself against the door to close it, and was just in
time to hold the handle; but it was turned from the outside; he could not
turn the key, his strength left him, and he cried for help. He was with his
family, and suddenly their faces changed; they did crazy things. He was
reading quietly, and he felt that an invisible being was all _round_ him.
He tried to fly, but felt himself bound. He tried to cry out, but he was
gagged. A loathsome grip was about his neck. He awoke, suffocating, and
with his teeth chattering; and he went on trembling long after he was
awake; he could not be rid of his agony.

The roam in which he slept was a hole without door or windows; an old
curtain hung up by a curtain-rod over the entrance was all that separated
it from the room of his father and mother. The thick air stifled him. His
brother, who slept in the same bed, used to kick him. His head burned, and
he was a prey to a sort of hallucination in which all the little troubles
of the day reappeared infinitely magnified. In this state of nervous
tension, bordering on delirium, the least shock was an agony to him. The
creaking of a plank terrified him. His father's breathing took on fantastic
proportions. It seemed to be no longer a human breathing, and the monstrous
sound was horrible to him; it seemed to him that there must be a beast
sleeping there. The night crushed him; it would never end; it must always
be so; he was lying there for months and months. He gasped for breath; he
half raised himself on his bed, sat up, dried his sweating face with his
shirt-sleeve. Sometimes he nudged his brother Rodolphe to wake him up; but
Rodolphe moaned, drew away from him the rest of the bedclothes, and went on
sleeping.

So he stayed in feverish agony until a pale beam of light appeared on
the floor below the curtain. This timorous paleness of the distant dawn
suddenly brought him peace. He felt the light gliding into the room, when
it was still impossible to distinguish it from darkness. Then his fever
would die down, his blood would grow calm, like a flooded river returning
to its bed; an even warmth would flow through all his body, and his eyes,
burning from sleeplessness, would close in spite of himself.

In the evening it was terrible to him to see the approach of the hour of
sleep. He vowed that he would not give way to it, to watch the whole night
through, fearing his nightmares, But in the end weariness always overcame
him, and it was always when he was least on his guard that the monsters
returned.

Fearful night! So sweet to most children, so terrible to some!... He was
afraid to sleep. He was afraid of not sleeping. Waking or sleeping, he
was surrounded by monstrous shapes, the phantoms of his own brain, the
larvæ floating in the half-day and twilight of childhood, as in the dark
chiaroscuro of sickness.

But these fancied terrors were soon to be blotted out in the great
Fear--that which is in the hearts of all men; that Fear which Wisdom does
in vain preen itself on forgetting or denying--Death.

* * * * *

One day when he was rummaging in a cupboard, he came upon several things
that he did not know--a child's frock and a striped bonnet. He took them in
triumph to his mother, who, instead of smiling at him, looked vexed, and
bade him, take them back to the place where he had found them. When he
hesitated to obey, and asked her why, she snatched them from him without
reply, and put them on a shelf where he could not reach them. Roused to
curiosity, he plied her with questions. At last she told him that there had
been a little brother who had died before Jean-Christophe came into the
world. He was taken aback--he had never heard tell of him. He was silent
for a moment, and then tried to find out more. His mother seemed to be lost
in thought; but she told him that the little brother was called
Jean-Christophe like himself, but was more sensible. He put more questions
to her, but she would not reply readily. She told him only that his brother
was in Heaven, and was praying for them all. Jean-Christophe could get no
more out of her; she bade him be quiet, and to let her go on with her work.
She seemed to be absorbed in her sewing; she looked anxious, and did not
raise her eyes. But after some time she looked at him where he was in the
corner, whither he had retired to sulk, began to smile, and told him to go
and play outside.

These scraps of conversation profoundly agitated Jean-Christophe. There had
been a child, a little boy, belonging to his mother, like himself, bearing
the same name, almost exactly the same, and he was dead! Dead! He did not
exactly know what that was, but it was something terrible. And they never
talked of this other Jean-Christophe; he was quite forgotten. It would be
the same with him if he were to die? This thought was with him still in the
evening at table with his family, when he saw them all laughing and talking
of trifles. So, then, it was possible that they would be gay after he was
dead! Oh! he never would have believed that his mother could be selfish
enough to laugh after the death of her little boy! He hated them all. He
wanted to weep for himself, for his own death, in advance. At the same time
he wanted to ask a whole heap of questions, but he dared not; he remembered
the voice in which his mother had bid him be quiet. At last he could
contain himself no longer, and one night when he had gone to bed, and
Louisa came to kiss him, he asked:

"Mother, did he sleep in my bed?"

The poor woman trembled, and, trying to take on an indifferent tone of
voice, she asked:

"Who?"

"The little boy who is dead," said Jean-Christophe in a whisper.

His mother clutched him with her hands.

"Be quiet--quiet," she said.

Her voice trembled. Jean-Christophe, whose head was leaning against her
bosom, heard her heart beating. There was a moment of silence, then she
said:

"You must never talk of that, my dear.... Go to sleep.... No, it was not
his bed."

She kissed him. He thought he felt her cheek wet against his. He wished he
could have been sure of it. He was a little comforted. There was grief in
her then! Then he doubted it again the next moment, when he heard her in
the next room talking in a quiet, ordinary voice. Which was true--that or
what had just been? He turned about for long in his bed without finding any
answer. He wanted his mother to suffer; not that he also did not suffer in
the knowledge that she was sad, but it would have done him so much good, in
spite of everything! He would have felt himself less alone. He slept, and
next day thought no more of it.

Some weeks afterwards one of the urchins with whom he played in the street
did not come at the usual time. One of them said that he was ill, and they
got used to not seeing him in their games. It was explained, it was quite
simple. One evening Jean-Christophe had gone to bed; it was early, and from
the recess in which his bed was, he saw the light in the room. There was a
knock at the door. A neighbor had come to have a chat. He listened
absently, telling himself stories as usual. The words of their talk did not
reach him. Suddenly he heard the neighbor say: "He is dead." His blood
stopped, for he had understood who was dead. He listened and held his
breath. His parents cried out. Melchior's booming voice said:

"Jean-Christophe, do you hear? Poor Fritz is dead."

Jean-Christophe made an effort, and replied quietly:

"Yes, papa."

His bosom was drawn tight as in a vise.

Melchior went on:

"'Yes, papa.' Is that all you say? You are not grieved by it."

Louisa, who understood the child, said:

"'Ssh! Let him sleep!"

And they talked in whispers. But Jean-Christophe, pricking his ears,
gathered all the details of illness--typhoid fever, cold baths, delirium,
the parents' grief. He could not breathe, a lump in his throat choked him.
He shuddered. All these horrible things took shape in his mind. Above all,
he gleaned that the disease was contagious--that is, that he also might die
in the same way--and terror froze him, for he remembered that he had shaken
hands with Fritz the last time he had seen him, and that very day had gone
past the house. But he made no sound, so as to avoid having to talk, and
when his father, after the neighbor had gone, asked him: "Jean-Christophe,
are you asleep?" he did not reply. He heard Melchior saying to Louisa:

"The boy has no heart."

Louisa did not reply, but a moment later she came and gently raised the
curtain and looked at the little bed. Jean-Christophe only just had time to
close his eyes and imitate the regular breathing which his brothers made
when they were asleep. Louisa went away on tip-toe. And yet how he wanted
to keep her! How he wanted to tell her that he was afraid, and to ask her
to save him, or at least to comfort him! But he was afraid of their
laughing at him, and treating him as a coward; and besides, he knew only
too well that nothing that they might say would be any good. And for hours
he lay there in agony, thinking that he felt the disease creeping over him,
and pains in his head, a stricture of the heart, and thinking in terror:
"It is the end. I am ill. I am going to die. I am going to die!"... Once he
sat up in his bed and called to his mother in a low voice; but they were
asleep, and he dared not wake them.

From that time on his childhood was poisoned by the idea of death. His
nerves delivered him up to all sorts of little baseless sicknesses, to
depression, to sudden transports, and fits of choking. His imagination ran
riot with these troubles, and thought it saw in all of them the murderous
beast which was to rob him of his life. How many times he suffered agonies,
with his mother sitting only a few yards away from him, and she guessing
nothing! For in his cowardice he was brave enough to conceal all his terror
in a strange jumble of feeling--pride in not turning to others, shame of
being afraid, and the scrupulousness of a tenderness which forbade him to
trouble his mother. But he never ceased to think: "This time I am ill. I am
seriously ill. It is diphtheria...." He had chanced on the word
"diphtheria."... "Dear God! not this time!..."

He had religious ideas: he loved to believe what his mother had told, him,
that after death the soul ascended to the Lord, and if it were pious
entered into the garden of paradise. But the idea of this journey rather
frightened than attracted him. He was not at all envious of the children
whom God, as a recompense, according to his mother, took in their sleep and
called to Him without having made them suffer. He trembled, as he went to
sleep, for fear that God should indulge this whimsy at his expense. It must
be terrible to be taken suddenly from the warmth of one's bed and dragged
through the void into the presence of God. He imagined God as an enormous
sun, with a voice of thunder. How it must hurt! It must barn the eyes,
ears--all one's soul! Then, God could punish--you never know.... And
besides, that did not prevent all the other horrors which he did not know
very well, though he could guess them from what he had heard--your body in
a box, all alone at the bottom of a hole, lost in the crowd of those
revolting cemeteries to which he was taken to pray.... God! God! How sad!
how sad!...

And yet it was not exactly joyous to live, and be hungry, and see your
father drunk, and to be beaten, to suffer in so many ways from the
wickedness of other children, from the insulting pity of grown-up persons,
and to be understood by no one, not even by your mother. Everybody
humiliates you, no one loves you. You are alone--alone, and matter so
little! Yes; but it was just this that made him want to live. He felt in
himself a surging power of wrath. A strange thing, that power! It could do
nothing yet; it was as though it were afar off and gagged, swaddled,
paralyzed; he had no idea what it wanted, what, later on, it would be. But
it was in him; he was sure of it; he felt it stirring and crying out.
To-morrow--to-morrow, what a voyage he would take! He had a savage desire
to live, to punish the wicked, to do great things. "Oh! but how I will live
when I am ..." he pondered a little--"when I am eighteen!" Sometimes he put
it at twenty-one; that was the extreme limit. He thought that was enough
for the domination of the world. He thought of the heroes dearest to
him--of Napoleon, and of that other more remote hero, whom he preferred,
Alexander the Great. Surely he would be like them if only he lived for
another twelve--ten years. He never thought of pitying those who died at
thirty. They were old; they had lived their lives; it was their fault if
they hat failed. But to die now ... despair! Too terrible to pass while yet
a little child, and forever to be in the minds of men a little boy whom
everybody thinks he has the right to scold! He wept with rage at the
thought, as though he were already dead.

This agony of death tortured his childish years--corrected only by disgust
with all life and the sadness of his own.

* * * * *

It was in the midst of these gloomy shadows, in the stifling night that
every moment seemed to intensify about him, that there began to shine, like
a star lost in the dark abysm of space, the light which was to illuminate
his life: divine music....

His grandfather gave the children an old piano, which one of his clients,
anxious to be rid of it, had asked him to take. His patient ingenuity had
almost put it in order. The present had not been very well received. Louisa
thought her room already too small, without filling it up any more; and
Melchior said that Jean Michel had not ruined himself over it: just
firewood. Only Jean-Christophe was glad of it without exactly knowing why.
It seemed to him a magic box, full of marvelous stories, just like the ones
in the fairy-book--a volume of the "Thousand and One Nights"--which his
grandfather read to him sometimes to their mutual delight. He had heard his
father try the piano on the day of its arrival, and draw from it a little
rain of arpeggios like the drops that a puff of wind shakes from the wet
branches of a tree after a shower. He clapped his hands, and cried
"Encore!" but Melchior scornfully closed the piano, saying that it was
worthless. Jean-Christophe did not insist, but after that he was always
hovering about the instrument. As soon as no one was near he would raise
the lid, and softly press down a key, just as if he were moving with his
finger the living shell of some great insect; he wanted to push out the
creature that was locked up in it. Sometimes in his haste he would strike
too hard, and then his mother would cry out, "Will you not be quiet? Don't
go touching everything!" or else he would pinch himself cruelly in closing
the piano, and make piteous faces as he sucked his bruised fingers....

Now his greatest joy is when his mother is gone out for a day's service, or
to pay some visit in the town. He listens as she goes down the stairs, and
into the street, and away. He is alone. He opens the piano, and brings up a
chair, and perches on it. His shoulders just about reach the keyboard; it
is enough for what he wants. Why does he wait until he is alone? No one
would prevent his playing so long as he did not make too much noise. But he
is ashamed before the others, and dare not. And then they talk and move
about: that spoils his pleasure. It is so much more beautiful when he is
alone! Jean-Christophe holds his breath so that the silence may be even
greater, and also because he is a little excited, as though he were going
to let off a gun. His heart beats as he lays his finger on the key;
sometimes he lifts his finger after he has the key half pressed down, and
lays it on another. Does he know what will come out of it, more than what
will come out of the other? Suddenly a sound issues from it; there are deep
sounds and high sounds, some tinkling, some roaring. The child listens to
them one by one as they die away and finally cease to be; they hover in the
air like bells heard far off, coming near in the wind, and then going away
again; then when you listen you hear in the distance other voices,
different, joining in and droning like flying insects; they seem to call to
you, to draw you away farther--farther and farther into the mysterious
regions, where they dive down and are lost.... They are gone!... No; still
they murmur.... A little beating of wings.... How strange it all is! They
are like spirits. How is it that they are so obedient? how is it that they
are held captive in this old box? But best of all is when you lay two
fingers on two keys at once. Then you never know exactly what will happen.
Sometimes the two spirits are hostile; they are angry with each other, and
fight; and hate each other, and buzz testily. Then voices are raised; they
cry out, angrily, now sorrowfully. Jean-Christophe adores that; it is as
though there were monsters chained up, biting at their fetters, beating
against the bars of their prison; they are like to break them, and burst
out like the monsters in the fairy-book--the genii imprisoned in the Arab
bottles under the seal of Solomon. Others flatter you; they try to cajole
you, but you feel that they only want to bite, that they are hot and
fevered. Jean-Christophe does not know what they want, but they lure him
and disturb him; they make him almost blush. And sometimes there are notes
that love each other; sounds embrace, as people do with their arms when
they kiss: they are gracious and sweet. These are the good spirits; their
faces are smiling, and there are no lines in them; they love little
Jean-Christophe, and little Jean-Christophe loves them. Tears come to his
eyes as he hears them, and he is never weary of calling them up. They are
his friends, his dear, tender friends....

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