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

age when he should have been engaged in unceasing toil to

develop his mediocre talent, he just let things slide, and others took his

place.

 

But what did that matter to the unknown force which had thrown him in with

the little flaxen-haired servant? He had played his part, and little

Jean-Christophe had just set foot on this earth whither his destiny had

thrust him.

 

*

 

Night was fully come. Louisa’s voice roused old Jean Michel from the torpor

into which he had sunk by the fireside as he thought of the sorrows of the

past and present.

 

“It must be late, father,” said the young woman affectionately. “You ought

to go home; you have far to go.”

 

“I am waiting for Melchior,” replied the old man.

 

“Please, no. I would rather you did not stay.”

 

“Why?”

 

The old man raised his head and looked fiercely at her.

 

She did not reply.

 

He resumed.

 

“You are afraid. You do not want me to meet him?”

 

“Yes, yes; it would only make things worse. You would make each other

angry, and I don’t want that. Please, please go!”

 

The old man sighed, rose, and said:

 

“Well … I’ll go.”

 

He went to her and brushed her forehead with his stiff beard. He asked

if she wanted anything, put out the lamp, and went stumbling against the

chairs in the darkness of the room. But he had no sooner reached the

staircase than he thought of his son returning drunk, and he stopped at

each step, imagining a thousand dangers that might arise if Melchior were

allowed to return alone….

 

In the bed by his mother’s side the child was stirring again. An unknown

sorrow had arisen from the depths of his being. He stiffened himself

against her. He twisted his body, clenched his fists, and knitted

his brows. His suffering increased steadily, quietly, certain of its

strength. He knew not what it was, nor whence it came. It appeared

immense,—infinite, and he began to cry lamentably. His mother caressed him

with her gentle hands. Already his suffering was less acute. But he went on

weeping, for he felt it still near, still inside himself. A man who suffers

can lessen his anguish by knowing whence it comes. By thought he can locate

it in a certain portion of his body which can be cured, or, if necessary,

torn away. He fixes the bounds of it, and separates it from himself. A

child has no such illusive resource. His first encounter with suffering is

more tragic and more true. Like his own being, it seems infinite. He feels

that it is seated in his bosom, housed in his heart, and is mistress of his

flesh. And it is so. It will not leave his body until it has eaten it away.

 

His mother hugs him to her, murmuring: “It is done—it is done! Don’t

cry, my little Jesus, my little goldfish….” But his intermittent outcry

continues. It is as though this wretched, unformed, and unconscious mass

had a presentiment of a whole life of sorrow awaiting, him, and nothing can

appease him….

 

The bells of St. Martin rang out in the night. Their voices are solemn and

slow. In the damp air they come like footsteps on moss. The child became

silent in the middle of a sob. The marvelous music, like a flood of milk,

surged sweetly through him. The night was lit up; the air was moist and

tender. His sorrow disappeared, his heart began to laugh, and he slid, into

his dreams with a sigh of abandonment.

 

The three bells went on softly ringing in the morrow’s festival. Louisa

also dreamed, as she listened to them, of her own past misery and of what

would become in the future of the dear little child sleeping by her side.

She had been for hours lying in her bed, weary and suffering. Her hands and

her body were burning; the heavy eiderdown crushed her; she felt crushed

and oppressed by the darkness; but she dared not move. She looked at the

child, and the night did not prevent her reading his features, that looked

so old. Sleep overcame her; fevered images passed through her brain. She

thought she heard Melchior open the door, and her heart leaped.

Occasionally the murmuring of the stream rose more loudly through the

silence, like the roaring of some beast. The window once or twice gave a

sound under the beating of the rain. The bells rang out more slowly, and

then died down, and Louisa slept by the side of her child.

 

All this time Jean Michel was waiting outside the house, dripping with

rain, his beard wet with the mist. He was waiting for the return of his

wretched son: for his mind, never ceasing, had insisted on telling him all

sorts of tragedies brought about by drunkenness; and although he did not

believe them, he could not hate slept a wink if he had gone away without

having seen his son return. The sound of the bells made him: melancholy,

for he remembered all his shattered hopes. He thought of what he was doing

at such an hour in the street, and for very shame he wept.

 

*

 

The vast tide of the days moves slowly. Day and night come up and go down

with unfailing regularity, like the ebb and low of an infinite ocean. Weeks

and months go by, and then begin again, and the succession of days is like

one day.

 

The day is immense, inscrutable, marking the even beat of light and

darkness, and the beat of the life of the torpid creature dreaming in the

depths of his cradle—his imperious needs, sorrowful or glad—so regular

that the night and the day which bring them seem by them to be brought

about.

 

The pendulum of life moves heavily, and in its slow beat the whole creature

seems to be absorbed. The rest is no more than dreams, snatches of dreams,

formless and swarming, and dust of atoms dancing aimlessly, a dizzy whirl

passing, and bringing laughter or horror. Outcry, moving shadows, grinning

shapes, sorrows, terrors, laughter, dreams, dreams…. All is a dream, both

day and night…. And in such chaos the light of friendly eyes that smile

upon him, the flood of joy that surges through his body from his mother’s

body, from her breasts filled with milk—the force that is in him, the

immense, unconscious force gathering in him, the turbulent ocean roaring

in the narrow prison of the child’s body. For eyes that could see into it

there would be revealed whole worlds half buried in the darkness, nebulæ

taking shape, a universe in the making. His being is limitless. He is all

that there is….

 

Months pass…. Islands of memory begin to rise above the river of his

life. At first they are little uncharted islands, rocks just peeping above

the surface of the waters. Round about them and behind in the twilight of

the dawn stretches the great untroubled sheet of water; then new islands,

touched to gold by the sun.

 

So from the abyss of the soul there emerge shapes definite, and scenes of a

strange clarity. In the boundless day which dawns once more, ever the same,

with its great monotonous beat, there begins to show forth the round of

days, hand in hand, and some of their forms are smiling, others sad. But

ever the links of the chain are broken, and memories are linked together

above weeks and months….

 

The River … the Bells … as long as he can remember—far back in the

abysses of time, at every hour of his life—always their voices, familiar

and resonant, have rung out….

 

Night—half asleep—a pale light made white the window…. The river

murmurs. Through the silence its voice rises omnipotent; it reigns over

all creatures. Sometimes it caresses their sleep, and seems almost itself

to die away in the roaring of its torrent. Sometimes it grows angry, and

howls like a furious beast about to bite. The clamor ceases. Now there is a

murmuring of infinite tenderness, silvery sounds like clear little bells,

like the laughter of children, or soft singing voices, or dancing music—a

great mother voice that never, never goes to sleep! It rocks the child, as

it has rocked through the ages, from birth to death, the generations that

were before him; it fills all his thoughts, and lives in all his dreams,

wraps him round with the cloak of its fluid harmonies, which still will be

about him when he lies in the little cemetery that sleeps by the water’s

edge, washed by the Rhine….

 

The bells…. It is dawn! They answer each other’s call, sad, melancholy,

friendly, gentle. At the sound of their slow voices there rise in him hosts

of dreams—dreams of the past, desires, hopes, regrets for creatures who

are gone, unknown to the child, although he had his being in them, and they

live again in him. Ages of memory ring out in that music. So much mourning,

so many festivals! And from the depths of the room it is as though, when

they are heard, there passed lovely waves of sound through the soft air,

free winging birds, and the moist soughing of the wind. Through the window

smiles a patch of blue sky; a sunbeam slips through the curtains to the

bed. The little world known to the eyes of the child, all that he can see

from his bed every morning as he awakes, all that with so much effort he is

beginning to recognize and classify, so that he may be master of it—his

kingdom is lit up. There is the table where people eat, the cupboard where

he hides to play, the tiled floor along which he crawls, and the wall-paper

which in its antic shapes holds for him so many humorous or terrifying

stories, and the clock which chatters and stammers so many words which he

alone can understand. How many things there are in this room! He does not

know them all. Every day he sets out on a voyage of exploration in this

universe which is his. Everything is his. Nothing is immaterial; everything

has its worth, man or fly, Everything lives—the cat, the fire, the table,

the grains of dust which dance in a sunbeam. The room is a country, a day

is a lifetime. How is a creature to know himself in the midst of these vast

spaces? The world is so large! A creature is lost in it. And the faces, the

actions, the movement, the noise, which make round about him an unending

turmoil!… He is weary; his eyes close; he goes to sleep. That sweet deep

sleep that overcomes him suddenly at any time, and wherever he may be—on

his mother’s lap, or under the table, where he loves to hide!… It is

good. All is good….

 

These first days come buzzing up in his mind like a field of corn or a wood

stirred by the wind, and cast in shadow by the great fleeting clouds….

 

*

 

The shadows pass; the sun penetrates the forest. Jean-Christophe begins to

find his way through the labyrinth of the day.

 

It is morning. His parents are asleep. He is in his little bed, lying on

his back. He looks at the rays of light dancing on the ceiling. There is

infinite amusement in it. Now he laughs out loud with one of those jolly

children’s laughs which stir the hearts of those that hear them. His mother

leans out of her bed towards him, and says: “What is it, then, little mad