Jean-Christophe, vol 1, Romain Rolland [book club recommendations .txt] 📗

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his father to get out, and Jean-Christophe shuddered, at the idea of seeing

those eyes again; it seemed to him that he must die if he did. He tried to

creep on hands and knees to the door of the room. He could not breathe; he

would not look; he stopped at the least movement from Melchior, whose feet

he could see under the table. One of the drunken man’s legs trembled.

Jean-Christophe reached the door. With one trembling hand he pushed the

handle, but in his terror he let go. It shut to again. Melchior turned to

look. The chair on which he was balanced toppled over; he fell down with a

crash. Jean-Christophe in his terror had no strength left for flight. He

remained glued to the wall, looking at his father stretched there at his

feet, and he cried for help.

 

His fall sobered Melchior a little. He cursed and swore, and thumped on

the chair that had played him such a trick. He tried vainly to get up, and

then did manage to sit up with his back resting against the table, and he

recognized his surroundings. He saw Jean-Christophe crying; he called him.

Jean-Christophe wanted to run away; he could not stir. Melchior called him

again, and as the child did not come, he swore angrily. Jean-Christophe

went near him, trembling in every limb. Melchior drew the boy near him, and

made him sit on his knees. He began by pulling his ears, and in a thick,

stuttering voice delivered a homily on the respect due from a son to

his father. Then he went off suddenly on a new train of thought, and

made him jump in his arms while he rattled off silly jokes. He wriggled

with laughter. From that he passed immediately to melancholy ideas. He

commiserated the boy and himself; he hugged him so that he was like to

choke, covered him with kisses and tears, and finally rocked him in his

arms, intoning the De Profundis. Jean-Christophe made no effort to break

loose; he was frozen with horror. Stifled against his father’s bosom,

feeling his breath hiccoughing and smelling of wine upon his face, wet with

his kisses and repulsive tears, he was in an agony of fear and disgust. He

would have screamed, but no sound would come from his lips. He remained in

this horrible condition for an age, as it seemed to him, until the door

opened, and Louisa came in with a basket of linen on her arm. She gave a

cry, let the basket fall, rushed at Jean-Christophe, and with a violence

which seemed incredible in her she wrenched Melchior’s arm, crying:

 

“Drunken, drunken wretch!”

 

Her eyes flashed with anger.

 

Jean-Christophe thought his father was going to kill her. But Melchior

was so startled by the threatening appearance of his wife that he made no

reply, and began to weep. He rolled on the floor; he beat his head against

the furniture, and said that she was right, that he was a drunkard, that

he brought misery upon his family, and was ruining his poor children, and

wished he were dead. Louisa had contemptuously turned her back on him. She

carried Jean-Christophe into the next room, and caressed him and tried to

comfort him. The boy went on trembling, and did not answer his mother’s

questions; then he burst out sobbing. Louisa bathed his face with water.

She kissed him, and used tender words, and wept with him. In the end they

were both comforted. She knelt, and made him kneel by her side. They prayed

to God to cure father of his disgusting habit, and make him the kind, good

man that he used to be. Louisa put the child to bed. He wanted her to stay

by his bedside and hold his hand. Louisa spent part of the night sitting

on Jean-Christophe’s bed. He was feverish. The drunken man snored on the

floor.

 

Some time after that, one day at school, when Jean-Christophe was spending

his time watching the flies on the ceiling, and thumping his neighbors,

to make them fall off the form, the schoolmaster, who had taken a dislike

to him, because he was always fidgeting and laughing, and would never

learn anything, made an unhappy allusion. Jean-Christophe had fallen

down himself, and the schoolmaster said he seemed to be like to follow

brilliantly in the footsteps of a certain well-known person. All the boys

burst out laughing, and some of them took upon themselves to point the

allusion with comment both lucid and vigorous. Jean-Christophe got up,

livid with shame, seized his ink-pot, and hurled it with all his strength

at the nearest boy whom he saw laughing. The schoolmaster fell on him and

beat him. He was thrashed, made to kneel, and set to do an enormous

imposition.

 

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