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

of a mind as

yet hardly detached from chaos, the stifling, roaring night in which it is

enveloped, the illimitable gloom from which, like blinding shafts of light,

there emerge acute sensations, sorrows, phantoms—those enormous faces

leaning over him, those eyes that pierce through him, penetrating, are

beyond his comprehension!… He has not the strength to cry out; terror

holds him motionless, with eyes and mouth wide open and he rattles in his

throat. His large head, that seems to have swollen up, is wrinkled with the

grotesque and lamentable grimaces that he makes; the skin of his face and

hands is brown and purple, and spotted with yellow….

 

“Dear God!” said the old man with conviction: “How ugly he is!”

 

He put the lamp down on the table.

 

Louisa pouted like a scolded child. Jean Michel looked at her out of the

corner of his eye and laughed.

 

“You don’t want me to say that he is beautiful? You would not believe it.

Come, it is not your fault. They are all like that.”

 

The child came out of the stupor and immobility into which he had been

thrown by the light of the lamp and the eyes of the old man. He began to

cry. Perhaps he instinctively felt in his mother’s eyes a caress which made

it possible for him to complain. She held out her arms for him and said:

 

“Give him to me.”

 

The old man began, as usual, to air his theories:

 

“You ought not to give way to children when they cry. You must just let

them cry.”

 

But he came and took the child and grumbled:

 

“I never saw one quite so ugly.”

 

Louisa took the child feverishly and pressed it to her bosom. She looked at

it with a bashful and delighted smile.

 

“Oh, my poor child!” she said shamefacedly. “How ugly you are—how ugly!

and how I love you!”

 

Jean Michel went back to the fireside. He began to poke the fire in

protest, but a smile gave the lie to the moroseness and solemnity of his

expression.

 

“Good girl!” he said. “Don’t worry about it. He has plenty of time to

alter. And even so, what does it matter? Only one thing is asked of him:

that he should grow into an honest man.”

 

The child was comforted by contact with his mother’s warm body. He could be

heard sucking her milk and gurgling and snorting. Jean Michel turned in his

chair, and said once more, with some emphasis:

 

“There’s nothing finer than an honest man.”

 

He was silent for a moment, pondering whether it would not be proper to

elaborate this thought; but he found nothing more to say, and after a

silence he said irritably:

 

“Why isn’t your husband here?”

 

“I think he is at the theater,” said Louisa timidly. “There is a

rehearsal.”

 

“The theater is closed. I passed it just now. One of his lies.”

 

“No. Don’t be always blaming him. I must have misunderstood. He must have

been kept for one of his lessons.”

 

“He ought to have come back,” said the old man, not satisfied. He stopped

for a moment, and then asked, in a rather lower voice and with some shame:

 

“Has he been … again?”

 

“No, father—no, father,” said Louisa hurriedly.

 

The old man looked at her; she avoided his eyes.

 

“It’s not true. You’re lying.”

 

She wept in silence.

 

“Dear God!” said the old man, kicking at the fire with his foot. The poker

fell with a clatter. The mother and the child trembled.

 

“Father, please—please!” said Louisa. “You will make him cry.”

 

The child hesitated for a second or two whether to cry or to go on with his

meal; but not being able to do both at once, he went on with the meal.

 

Jean Michel continued in a lower tone, though with outbursts of anger:

 

“What have I done to the good God to have this drunkard for my son? What

is the use of my having lived as I have lived, and of having denied myself

everything all my life! But you—you—can’t you do anything to stop it?

Heavens! That’s what you ought to do…. You should keep him at home!…”

 

Louisa wept still more.

 

“Don’t scold me!… I am unhappy enough as it is! I have done everything

I could. If you knew how terrified I am when I am alone! Always I seem to

hear his step on the stairs. Then I wait for the door to open, or I ask

myself: ‘O God! what will he look like?’ … It makes me ill to think of

it!”

 

She was shaken by her sobs. The old man grew anxious. He went to her and

laid the disheveled bedclothes about her trembling shoulders and caressed

her head with his hands.

 

“Come, come, don’t be afraid. I am here.”

 

She calmed herself for the child’s sake, and tried to smile.

 

“I was wrong to tell you that.”

 

The old man shook his head as he looked at her.

 

“My poor child, it was not much of a present that I gave you.”

 

“It’s my own fault,” she said. “He ought not to have married me. He is

sorry for what he did.”

 

“What, do you mean that he regrets?…”

 

“You know. You were angry yourself because I became his wife.”

 

“We won’t talk about that. It is true I was vexed. A young man like that—I

can say so without hurting you—a young man whom I had carefully brought

up, a distinguished musician, a real artist—might have looked higher than

you, who had nothing and were of a lower class, and not even of the same

trade. For more than a hundred years no Krafft has ever married a woman who

was not a musician! But, you know, I bear you no grudge, and am fond of

you, and have been ever since I learned to know you. Besides, there’s no

going back on a choice once it’s made; there’s nothing left but to do one’s

duty honestly.”

 

He went and sat down again, thought for a little, and then said, with the

solemnity in which he invested all his aphorisms:

 

“The first thing in life is to do one’s duty.”

 

He waited for contradiction, and spat on the fire. Then, as neither mother

nor child raised any objection, he was for going on, but relapsed into

silence.

 

*

 

They said no more. Both Jean Michel, sitting by the fireside, and Louisa,

in her bed, dreamed sadly. The old man, in spite of what he had said, had

bitter thoughts about his son’s marriage, and Louisa was thinking of it

also, and blaming herself, although she had nothing wherewith to reproach

herself.

 

She had been a servant when, to everybody’s surprise, and her own

especially, she married Melchior Krafft, Jean Michel’s son. The Kraffts

were without fortune, but were considerable people in the little Rhine

town in which the old man had settled down more than fifty years before.

Both father and son were musicians, and known to all the musicians of

the country from Cologne to Mannheim. Melchior played the violin at the

Hof-Theater, and Jean Michel had formerly been director of the grand-ducal

concerts. The old man had been profoundly humiliated by his son’s marriage,

for he had built great hopes upon Melchior; he had wished to make him the

distinguished man which he had failed to become himself. This mad freak

destroyed all his ambitions. He had stormed at first, and showered curses

upon Melchior and Louisa. But, being a good-hearted creature, he forgave

his daughter-in-law when he learned to know her better; and he even came

by a paternal affection for her, which showed itself for the most part in

snubs.

 

No one ever understood what it was that drove Melchior to such a

marriage—least of all Melchior. It was certainly not Louisa’s beauty. She

had no seductive quality: she was small, rather pale, and delicate, and

she was a striking contrast to Melchior and Jean Michel, who were both big

and broad, red-faced giants, heavy-handed, hearty eaters and drinkers,

laughter-loving and noisy. She seemed to be crushed by them; no one

noticed her, and she seemed to wish to escape even what little notice she

attracted. If Melchior had been a kind-hearted man, it would have been

credible that he should prefer Louisa’s simple goodness to every other

advantage; but a vainer man never was. It seemed incredible that a young

man of his kidney, fairly good-looking, and quite conscious of it, very

foolish, but not without talent, and in a position to look for some

well-dowered match, and capable even—who knows?—of turning the head of

one of his pupils among the people of the town, should suddenly have chosen

a girl of the people—poor, uneducated, without beauty, a girl who could in

no way advance his career.

 

But Melchior was one of those men who always do the opposite of what is

expected of them and of what they expect of themselves. It is not that they

are not warned—a man who is warned is worth two men, says the proverb.

They profess never to be the dupe of anything, and that they steer their

ship with unerring hand towards a definite point. But they reckon without

themselves, for they do not know themselves. In one of those moments of

forgetfulness which are habitual with them they let go the tiller, and, as

is natural when things are left to themselves, they take a naughty pleasure

in rounding on their masters. The ship which is released from its course at

once strikes a rock, and Melchior, bent upon intrigue, married a cook. And

yet he was neither drunk nor in a stupor on the day when he bound himself

to her for life, and he was not under any passionate impulse; far from it.

But perhaps there are in us forces other than mind and heart, other even

than the senses—mysterious forces which take hold of us in the moments

when the others are asleep; and perhaps it was such forces that Melchior

had found in the depths of those pale eyes which had looked at him so

timidly one evening when he had accosted the girl on the bank of the river,

and had sat down beside her in the reeds—without knowing why—and had

given her his hand.

 

Hardly was he married than he was appalled by what he had done, and he did

not hide what he felt from poor Louisa, who humbly asked his pardon. He

was not a bad fellow, and he willingly granted her that; but immediately

remorse would seize him again when he was with his friends or in the houses

of his rich pupils, who were disdainful in their treatment of him, and no

longer trembled at the touch of his hand when he corrected the position of

their fingers on the keyboard. Then he would return gloomy of countenance,

and Louisa, with a catch at her heart, would read in it with the first

glance the customary reproach; or he would stay out late at one inn or

another, there to seek self-respect or kindliness from others. On such

evenings he would return shouting with laughter, and this was more doleful

for Louisa than the hidden reproach and gloomy rancor that prevailed on

other days. She felt that she was to a certain extent responsible for the

fits of madness in which the small remnant of her husband’s sense would

disappear, together with the household money. Melchior sank lower and

lower. At an