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

>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….

 

So the child journeys through the forest of sounds, and round him he is

conscious of thousands of forces lying in wait for him, and calling to him

to caress or devour him….

 

One day Melchior came upon him thus. He made him jump with fear at the

sound of his great voice. Jean-Christophe, thinking he was doing wrong,

quickly put his hands up to his ears to ward off the blows he feared. But

Melchior did not scold him, strange to say; he was in