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

to feel

his brother’s force, and to be afraid that others would feel it, too),

Rodolphe was only too happy to crush Christophe beneath the weight of his

superiority. He had never worried much about his mother, though he knew her

straitened circumstances: although he was well able to afford to help her,

he left it all to Christophe. But when he heard of Christophe’s intention

he discovered at once hidden treasures of affection. He was furious at

his proposing to leave his mother and called it monstrous egoism. He was

impudent enough to tell Christophe so. He lectured him loftily like a child

who deserves smacking: he told him stiffly of his duty towards his mother

and of all that she had sacrificed for him. Christophe almost burst with

rage. He kicked Rodolphe out and called him a rascal and a hypocrite.

Rodolphe avenged himself by feeding his mother’s indignation. Excited by

him, Louisa began to persuade herself that Christophe was behaving like a

bad son. She tried to declare that he had mo right to go, and she was only

too willing to believe it. Instead of using only her tears, which were her

strongest weapon, she reproached Christophe bitterly and unjustly, and

disgusted him. They said cruel things to each other: the result was that

Christophe, who, till then, had been hesitating, only thought of hastening

his preparations for his departure. He knew that the charitable neighbors

were commiserating his mother and that in the opinion of the neighborhood

she was regarded as a victim and himself as a monster. He set his teeth and

would not go back on his resolve.

 

The days passed. Christophe and Louisa hardly spoke to each other. Instead

of enjoying to the last drop their last days together, these two who loved

each other wasted the time that was left—as too often happens—in one of

those sterile fits of sullenness in which so many affections are swallowed

up. They only met at meals, when they sat opposite each other, not looking

at each other, never speaking, forcing themselves to eat a few mouthfuls,

not so much for the sake of eating as for the sake of appearances.

Christophe would contrive to mumble a few words, but Louisa would not

reply; and when she tried to talk he would be silent. This state of things

was intolerable to both of them, and the longer it went on the more

difficult it became to break it. Were they going to part like that? Louisa

admitted that she had been unjust and awkward, but she was suffering too

much to know how to win back her son’s love, which she thought she had

lost, and at all costs to prevent his departure, the idea of which she

refused to face. Christophe stole glances at his mother’s pale, swollen

face and he was torn by remorse; but he had made up his mind to go, and

knowing that he was going forever out of her life, he wished cowardly to be

gone to escape his remorse.

 

His departure was fixed for the next day but one. One of their sad meals

had just come to an end. When they finished their supper, during which they

had not spoken a word, Christophe withdrew to his room; and sitting at his

desk, with his head in his hands—he was incapable of working—he became

lost in thought. The night was drawing late: it was nearly one o’clock in

the morning. Suddenly he heard a noise, a chair upset in the next room. The

door opened and his mother appeared in her nightgown, barefooted, and threw

her arms round his neck and sobbed. She was feverish. She kissed her son

and moaned through her despairing sobs:

 

“Don’t go! Don’t go! I implore you! I implore you! My dear, don’t go!… I

shall die…. I can’t, I can’t bear it!…”

 

He was alarmed and upset. He kissed her and said: “Dear mother, calm

yourself, please, please!”

 

But she went on:

 

“I can’t bear it … I have only you. If you go, what will become of me? I

shall die if you go. I don’t want to die away from you. I don’t want to die

alone. Wait until I am dead!…”

 

Her words rent his heart. He did not know what to say to console her. What

arguments could hold good against such an outpouring of love and sorrow!

He took her on his knees and tried to calm her with kisses and little

affectionate words. The old woman gradually became silent and wept softly.

When she was a little comforted, he said:

 

“Go to bed. You will catch cold.”

 

She repeated: “Don’t go!”

 

He said in a low voice: “I will not go.”

 

She trembled and took his hand. “Truly?” she said. “Truly?”

 

He turned his head away sadly. “To-morrow,” he answered, “I will tell you

to-morrow…. Leave me now, please!…”

 

She got up meekly and went back to her room. Next morning she was ashamed

of her despairing outburst which had come upon her like a madness in the

middle of the night, and she was fearful of what her son would say to her.

She waited for him, sitting in a corner of the room. She had taken up some

knitting for occupation, but her hands refused to hold it. She let it fall.

Christophe entered. They greeted each other in a whisper, without looking

at each other. He was gloomy, and went and stood by the window, with his

back to his mother, and he stayed without speaking. There was a great

struggle in him. He knew the result of it already, and was trying to delay

the issue. Louisa dared not speak a word to him and provoke the answer

which she expected and feared. She forced herself to take up her knitting

again, but she could not see what she was doing, and she dropped her

stitches. Outside it was raining. After a long silence Christophe came to

her. She did not stir, but her heart was beating. Christophe stood still

and looked at her, then, suddenly, he went down on his knees and hid his

face in his mother’s dress, and without saying a word, he wept. Then she

understood that he was going to stay, and her heart was filled with a

mortal agony of joy—but at once she was seized by remorse, for she felt

all that her son was sacrificing for her, and she began to suffer all that

Christophe had suffered when it was she whom he sacrificed. She bent over

him and covered his brow and his hair with kisses. In silence their tears

and their sorrow mingled. At last he raised his head, and Louisa took his

face in her hands and looked into his eyes. She would have liked to say to

him:

 

“Go!”

 

But she could not.

 

He would have liked to say to her:

 

“I am glad to stay.”

 

But he could not.

 

The situation was hopeless; neither of them could alter it. She sighed in

her sorrow and love:

 

“Ah! if we could all be born and all die together!” Her simple way filled

him with tenderness; he dried his tears and tried to smile and said:

 

“We shall all die together.”

 

She insisted:

 

“Truly you will not go?”

 

He got up:

 

“I have said so. Don’t let us talk about it. There is nothing more to be

said.”

 

Christophe kept his word; he never talked of going again, but he could not

help thinking of it. He stayed, but he made his mother pay dearly for his

sacrifice by his sadness and bad temper. And Louisa tactlessly—much more

tactlessly than she knew, never failing to do what she ought not to have

done—Louisa, who knew only too well the reason of his grief, insisted on

his telling her what it was. She worried him with her affection, uneasy,

vexing, argumentative, reminding him every moment that they were very

different from each other—and that he was trying to forget. How often

he had tried to open his heart to her! But just as he was about to speak

the Great Wall of China would rise between them, and he would keep his

secrets buried in himself. She would guess, but she never dared invite his

confidence, or else she could not. When she tried she would succeed only in

flinging back in him those secrets which weighed so sorely on him and which

he was so longing to tell.

 

A thousand little things, harmless tricks, cut her off from him and

irritated Christophe. The good old creature was doting. She had to talk

about the local gossip, and she had that nurse’s tenderness which will

recall all the silly little things of the earliest years, and everything

that is associated with the cradle. We have such difficulty in issuing

from it and growing into men and women! And Juliet’s nurse must forever

be laying before us our duty-swaddling clothes, commonplace thoughts,

the whole unhappy period in which the growing soul struggles against the

oppression of vile matter or stifling surroundings!

 

And with it all she had little outbursts of touching tenderness—as though

to a little child—which used to move him greatly and he would surrender to

them—like a little child.

 

The worst of all to bear was living from morning to night as they did,

together, always together, isolated from the rest of the world. When two

people suffer and cannot help each other’s suffering, exasperation is

fatal; each in the end holds the other responsible for the suffering; and

each in the end believes it. It were better to be alone; alone in

suffering.

 

It was a daily torment for both of them. They would never have broken free

if chance had not come to break the cruel indecision, against which they

were struggling, in a way that seemed unfortunate—but it was really

fortunate.

 

It was a Sunday in October. Four o’clock in the afternoon. The weather was

brilliant. Christophe had stayed in his room all day, chewing the cud of

melancholy.

 

He could bear it no longer; he wanted desperately to go out, to walk, to

expend his energy, to tire himself out, so as to stop thinking.

 

Relations with his mother had been strained since the day before. He was

just going out without saying good-bye to her; but on the stairs he thought

how it would hurt her the whole evening when she was left alone. He went

back, making an excuse of having left something in his room. The door of

his mother’s room was ajar. He put his head in through the aperture. He

watched his mother for a, few moments…. (What a place those two seconds

were to fill in his life ever after!)…

 

Louisa had just come in from vespers. She was sitting in her favorite

place, the recess of the window. The wall of the house opposite, dirty

white and cracked, obstructed the view, but from the corner where she sat

she could see to the right through the yards of the next houses a little

patch of lawn the size of a pocket-handkerchief. On the window-sill a

pot of convolvulus climbed along its threads and over this frail ladder

stretched its tendrils which were caressed by a ray of sunlight. Louisa was

sitting in a low chair bending over her great Bible which was open on her

lap, but she was not reading. Her hands were laid flat on the book—her

hands with their swollen veins, worker’s nails, square and a little

bent—and she was devouring with loving eyes the little plant and the patch

of sky she could see through it. A sunbeam, basking on the green