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

But they

reappeared more and more often: and in the end they surrounded Christophe

with a halo of perpetual misty dreams, in which his spirit melted.

Everything that distracted him in his state of semi-hallucination was an

irritation to him. It was impossible to work; he gave up thinking about it.

Society was odious to him; and more than any, that of his intimates, even

that of his mother, because they arrogated to themselves more rights over

his soul.

 

He left the house: he took to spending his days abroad, and never returned

until nightfall. He sought the solitude of the fields, and delivered

himself up to it, drank his fill of it, like a maniac who wishes not to be

disturbed by anything in the obsession of his fixed ideas.—But in the

great sweet air, in contact with the earth, his obsession relaxed, his

ideas ceased to appear like specters. His exaltation was no less: rather it

was heightened, but it was no longer a dangerous delirium of the mind but a

healthy intoxication of his whole being: body; and soul crazy in their

strength.

 

He rediscovered the world, as though he had never seen it. It was a new

childhood. It was as though a magic word had been uttered. An “Open

Sesame!”—Nature flamed with gladness. The sun boiled. The liquid sky ran

like a clear river. The earth steamed and cried aloud in delight. The

plants, the trees, the insects, all the innumerable creatures were like

dazzling tongues of flame in the fire of life writhing upwards. Everything

sang aloud in joy.

 

And that joy was his own. That strength was his own. He was no longer cut

off from the rest of the world. Till then, even in the happy days of

childhood, when he saw nature with ardent and delightful curiosity, all

creatures had seemed to him to be little worlds shut up, terrifying and

grotesque, unrelated to himself, and incomprehensible. He was not even sure

that they had feeling and life. They were strange machines. And sometimes

Christophe had even, with the unconscious cruelty of a child, dismembered

wretched insects without dreaming that they might suffer—for the pleasure

of watching their queer contortions. His uncle Gottfried, usually so calm,

had one day indignantly to snatch from his hands an unhappy fly that he was

torturing. The boy had tried to laugh at first: then he had burst into

tears, moved by his uncle’s emotion: he began to understand that his victim

did really exist, as well as himself, and that he had committed a crime.

But if thereafter nothing would have induced him to do harm to the beasts,

he never felt any sympathy for them: he used to pass them by without ever

trying to feel what it was that worked their machinery: rather he was

afraid to think of it: it was something like a bad dream.—And now

everything was made plaint These humble, obscure creatures became in their

turn centers of light.

 

Lying on his belly in the grass where creatures swarmed, in the shade of

the trees that buzzed with insects, Christophe would watch the fevered

movements of the ants, the long-legged spiders, that seemed to dance as

they walked, the bounding grasshoppers, that leap aside, the heavy,

bustling beetles, and the naked worms, pink and glabrous, mottled with

white, or with his hands under his head and his eyes dosed he would listen

to the invisible orchestra, the roundelay of the frenzied insects circling

in a sunbeam about the scented pines, the trumpeting of the mosquitoes, the

organ, notes of the wasps, the brass of the wild bees humming like bells in

the tops of the trees, and the godlike whispering of the swaying trees, the

sweet moaning of the wind in the branches, the soft whispering of the

waving grass, like a breath of wind rippling the limpid surface of a lake,

like the rustling of a light dress and lovers footsteps coming near, and

passing, then lost upon the air.

 

He heard all these sounds and cries within himself. Through all these

creatures from the smallest to the greatest flowed the same river of life:

and in it he too swam. So, he was one of them, he was of their blood, and,

brotherly, he heard the echo of their sorrows and their joys: their

strength was merged is his like a river fed with thousands of streams. He

sank into them. His lungs were like to burst with the wind, too freely

blowing, too strong, that burst the windows and forced its way, into the

closed house of his suffocating heart. The change was too abrupt: after

finding everywhere a void, when he had been buried only in his own

existence, and had felt it slipping from him and dissolving like rain, now

everywhere he found infinite and unmeasured Being, now that he longed to

forget himself, to find rebirth in the universe. He seemed to have issued

from the grave. He swam voluptuously in life flowing free and full: and

borne on by its current he thought that he was free. He did not know that

he was less free than ever, that no creature is ever free, that even the

law that governs the universe is not free, that only death—perhaps—can

bring deliverance.

 

But the chrysalis issuing from its stifling sheath, joyously, stretched its

limbs in its new shape, and had no time as yet to mark the bounds of its

new prison.

 

*

 

There began a new cycle of days. Days of gold and fever, mysterious,

enchanted, like those of his childhood, when by one he discovered things

for the first time. From dawn to set of sun he lived in one long mirage. He

deserted all his business. The conscientious boy, who for years had never

missed a lesson, or an orchestra rehearsal, even when he was ill, was

forever finding paltry excuses for neglecting his work. He was not afraid

to lie. He had no remorse about it. The stoic principles of life, to which

he had hitherto delighted to bend his will, morality, duty, now seemed to

him to have no truth, nor reason. Their jealous despotism was smashed

against Nature. Human nature, healthy, strong, free, that alone was virtue:

to hell with all the rest! It provoked pitying laughter to see the little

peddling rules of prudence and policy which the world adorns with the name

of morality, while it pretends to inclose all life within them. A

preposterous mole-hill, an ant-like people! Life sees to it that they are

brought to reason. Life does but pass, and all is swept away….

 

Bursting with energy Christophe had moments when he was consumed with a

desire to destroy, to burn, to smash, to glut with actions blind and

uncontrolled the force which choked him. These outbursts usually ended in a

sharp reaction: he would weep, and fling himself down on the ground, and

kiss the earth, and try to dig into it with his teeth and hands, to feed

himself with it, to merge into it: he trembled then with fever and desire.

 

One evening he was walking in the outskirts of a wood. His eyes were

swimming with the light, his head was whirling: he was in that state of

exaltation when all creatures and things were transfigured. To that was

added the magic of the soft warm light of evening. Bays of purple and gold

hovered in the trees. From the meadows seemed to come a phosphorescent

glimmer. In a field near by a girl was making hay. In her blouse and short

skirt, with her arms and neck bare, she was raking the hay and heaping it

up. She had a short nose, wide cheeks, a round face, a handkerchief thrown

over her hair. The setting sun touched with red her sunburned skin, which,

like a piece of pottery, seemed to absorb the last beams of the day.

 

She fascinated Christophe. Leaning against a beech-tree he watched her come

towards the verge of the woods, eagerly, passionately. Everything else had

disappeared. She took no notice of him. For a moment she looked at him

cautiously: he saw her eyes blue and hard in her brown face. She passed so

near to him that, when she leaned down to gather up the hay, through her

open blouse he saw a soft down on her shoulders and back. Suddenly the

vague desire which was in him leaped forth. He hurled himself at her from

behind, seized her neck and waist, threw back her head and fastened his

lips upon hers. He kissed her dry, cracked lips until he came against her

teeth that bit him angrily. His hands ran over her rough arms, over her

blouse wet with her sweat. She struggled. He held her tighter, he wished to

strangle her. She broke loose, cried out, spat, wiped her lips with her

hand, and hurled insults at him. He let her go and fled across the fields.

She threw stones at him and went on discharging after him a litany of

filthy epithets. He blushed, less for anything that she might say or think,

but for what he was thinking himself. The sudden unconscious act filled him

with terror. What had he done? What should he do? What he was able to

understand of it all only filled him with disgust. And he was tempted by

his disgust. He fought against himself and knew not on which side was the

real Christophe. A blind force beset him: in vain did he fly from it: it

was only to fly from himself. What would she do about him? What should he

do to-morrow … in an hour … the time it took to cross the plowed field

to reach the road?… Would he ever reach it? Should he not stop, and go

back, and run back to the girl? And then?… He remembered that delirious

moment when he had held her by the throat. Everything was possible. All

things were worth while. A crime even…. Yes, even a crime…. The turmoil

in his heart made him breathless. When he reached the road he stopped to

breathe. Over there the girl was talking to another girl who had been

attracted by her cries: and with arms akimbo, they were looking at each

other and shouting with laughter.

II SABINE

He went home. He shut himself up in his room and never stirred for several

days. He only went out even into the town, when he was compelled. He was

fearful of ever going out beyond the gates and venturing forth into the

fields: he was afraid of once more falling in with the soft, maddening

breath that had blown upon him like a rushing wind during a calm in a

storm. He thought that the walls of the town might preserve him from it. He

never dreamed that for the enemy to slip within there needed be only the

smallest crack in the closed shutters, no more than is needed for a peep

out.

 

In a wing of the house, on the other side of the yard, there lodged on the

ground floor a young woman of twenty, some months a widow, with a little

girl. Frau Sabine Froehlich was also a tenant of old Euler’s. She occupied

the shop which opened on to the street, and she had as well two rooms

looking on to the yard, together with a little patch of garden, marked off

from the Eulers’ by a wire fence up which ivy climbed. They did not often

see her: the child used to play down in the garden from morning to night

making mud pies: and the garden was left to itself, to the great distress

of old Justus, who loved tidy paths and neatness in the