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

he was torn with impatience, a sort of

agony…. Faster! Faster! Oh! To think that in an hour he would see her

again!…

 

*

 

It was half-past six in the morning when he reached home. Nobody was up

yet. Sabine’s windows were closed. He went into the yard on tiptoe so

that she should not hear him. He chuckled at the thought of taking her by

surprise. He went up to his room. His mother was asleep. He washed and

brushed his hair without making any noise. He was hungry: but he was

afraid of waking Louisa by rummaging in the pantry. He heard footsteps in

the yard: he opened his window softly and saw Rosa, first up as usual,

beginning to sweep. He called her gently. She started in glad surprise when

she saw him: then she looked solemn. He thought she was still offended with

him: but for the moment he was in a very good temper. He went down to her.

 

“Rosa, Rosa,” he said gaily, “give me something to eat or I shall eat you!

I am dying of hunger!”

 

Rosa smiled and took him to the kitchen on the ground floor. She poured him

out a bowl of milk and then could not refrain from plying him with a string

of questions about his travels and his concerts. But although he was quite

ready to answer them,—(in the happiness of his return he was almost glad

to hear Rosa’s chatter once more)—Rosa stopped suddenly in the middle of

her cross-examination, her face fell, her eyes turned away, and she became

sorrowful. Then her chatter broke out again: but soon it seemed that she

thought it out of place and once more she stopped short. And he noticed it

then and said:

 

“What is the matter, Rosa? Are you cross with me?”

 

She shook her head violently in denial, and turning towards him with her

usual suddenness took his arm with both hands:

 

“Oh! Christophe!…” she said.

 

He was alarmed. He let his piece of bread fall from his hands.

 

“What! What is the matter?” he stammered.

 

She said again:

 

“Oh! Christophe!… Such an awful thing has happened!”

 

He thrust away from the table. He stuttered:

 

“H—here?”

 

She pointed to the house on the other side of the yard.

 

He cried:

 

“Sabine!”

 

She wept:

 

“She is dead.”

 

Christophe saw nothing. He got up: he almost fell: he clung to the table,

upset the things on it: he wished to cry out. He suffered fearful agony. He

turned sick.

 

Rosa hastened to his side: she was frightened: she held his head and wept.

 

As soon as he could speak he said;

 

“It is not true!”

 

He knew that it was true. But he wanted to deny it, he wanted to pretend

that it could not be. When he saw Rosa’s face wet with tears he could doubt

no more and he sobbed aloud.

 

Rosa raised her head:

 

“Christophe!” she said.

 

He hid his face in his hands. She leaned towards him.

 

“Christophe!… Mamma is coming!…”

 

Christophe got up.

 

“No, no,” he said. “She must not see me.”

 

She took his hand and led him, stumbling and blinded by his tears, to a

little woodshed which opened on to the yard. She closed the door. They were

in darkness. He sat on a block of wood used for chopping sticks. She sat on

the fagots. Sounds from without were deadened and distant. There he could

weep without fear of being heard. He let himself go and sobbed furiously.

Rosa had never seen him weep: she had even thought that he could not weep:

she knew only her own girlish tears and such despair in a man filled her

with terror and pity. She was filled with a passionate love for Christophe.

It was an absolutely unselfish love: an immense need of sacrifice, a

maternal self-denial, a hunger to suffer for him, to take his sorrow upon

herself. She put her arm round his shoulders.

 

“Dear Christophe,” she said, “do not cry!”

 

Christophe turned from her.

 

“I wish to die!”

 

Rosa clasped her hands.

 

“Don’t say that, Christophe!”

 

“I wish to die. I cannot … cannot live now…. What is the good of

living?”

 

“Christophe, dear Christophe! You are not alone. You are loved….”

 

“What is that to me? I love nothing now. It is nothing to me whether

everything else live or die. I love nothing: I loved only her. I loved only

her!”

 

He sobbed louder than ever with his face buried in his hands. Rosa could

find nothing to say. The egoism of Christophe’s passion stabbed her to

the heart. Now when she thought herself most near to him, she felt more

isolated and more miserable than ever. Grief instead of bringing them

together thrust them only the more widely apart. She wept bitterly.

 

After some time, Christophe stopped weeping and asked:

 

“How?… How?…”

 

Rosa understood.

 

“She fell ill of influenza on the evening you left. And she was taken

suddenly….”

 

He groaned.

 

“Dear God!… Why did you not write to me?”

 

She said:

 

“I did write. I did not know your address: you did not give us any. I went

and asked at the theater. Nobody knew it.”

 

He knew how timid she was, and how much it must have cost her. He asked:

 

“Did she … did she tell you to do that?”

 

She shook her head:

 

“No. But I thought …”

 

He thanked her with a look. Rosa’s heart melted.

 

“My poor … poor Christophe!” she said.

 

She flung her arms round his neck and wept. Christophe felt the worth of

such pure tenderness. He had so much need of consolation! He kissed her:

 

“How kind you are,” he said. “You loved her too?”

 

She broke away from him, she threw him a passionate look, did not reply,

and began to weep again.

 

That look was a revelation to him. It meant:

 

“It was not she whom I loved….”

 

Christophe saw at last what he had not known—what for months he had not

wished to see. He saw that she loved him.

 

“‘Ssh,” she said. “They are calling me.” They heard Amalia’s voice.

 

Rosa asked:

 

“Do you want to go back to your room?”

 

He said:

 

“No. I could not yet: I could not bear to talk to my mother…. Later

on….”

 

She said:

 

“Stay here. I will come back soon.”

 

He stayed in the dark woodshed to which only a thread of light penetrated

through a small airhole filled with cobwebs. From the street there came up

the cry of a hawker, against the wall a horse in a stable next door was

snorting and kicking. The revelation that had just come to Christophe gave

him no pleasure; but it held his attention for a moment. It made plain many

things that he had not understood. A multitude of little things that he

had disregarded occurred to him and were explained. He was surprised to

find himself thinking of it; he was ashamed to be turned aside even for a

moment from his misery. But that misery was so frightful, so irrepressible

that the mistrust of self-preservation, stronger than his will, than his

courage, than his love, forced him to turn away from it, seized on this

new idea, as the suicide drowning seizes in spite of himself on the first

object which can help him, not to save himself, but to keep himself for a

moment longer above the water. And it was because he was suffering that

he was able to feel what another was suffering—suffering through him. He

understood the tears that he had brought to her eyes. He was filled with

pity for Rosa. He thought how cruel he had been to her—how cruel he must

still be. For he did not love her. What good was it for her to love him?

Poor girl!… In vain did he tell himself that she was good (she had just

proved it). What was her goodness to him? What was her life to him?…

 

He thought:

 

“Why is it not she who is dead, and the other who is alive?”

 

He thought:

 

“She is alive: she loves me: she can tell me that to-day, to-morrow, all my

life: and the other, the woman I love, she is dead and never told me that

she loved me: I never have told her that I loved her: I shall never hear

her say it: she will never know it….”

 

And suddenly he remembered that last evening: he remembered that they were

just going to talk when Rosa came and prevented it. And he hated Rosa….

 

The door of the woodshed was opened. Rosa called Christophe softly, and

groped towards him. She took his hand. He felt an aversion in her near

presence: in vain did he reproach himself for it: it was stronger than

himself.

 

Rosa was silent: her great pity had taught her silence. Christophe was

grateful to her for not breaking in upon his grief with useless words. And

yet he wished to know … she was the only creature who could talk to him

of her. He asked in a whisper:

 

“When did she…”

 

(He dared not say: die.)

 

She replied:

 

“Last Saturday week.”

 

Dimly he remembered. He said:

 

“At night?”

 

Rosa looked at him in astonishment and said:

 

“Yes. At night. Between two and three.”

 

The sorrowful melody came back to him. He asked, trembling:

 

“Did she suffer much?”

 

“No, no. God be thanked, dear Christophe: she hardly suffered at all. She

was so weak. She did not struggle against it. Suddenly they saw that she

was lost….”

 

“And she … did she know it?”

 

“I don’t know. I think …”

 

“Did she say anything?”

 

“No. Nothing. She was sorry for herself like a child.”

 

“You were there?”

 

“Yes. For the first two days I was there alone, before her brother came.”

 

He pressed her hand in gratitude.

 

“Thank you.”

 

She felt the blood rush to her heart.

 

After a silence he said, he murmured the question which was choking him:

 

“Did she say anything … for me?”

 

Rosa shook her head sadly. She would have given much to be able to let him

have the answer he expected: she was almost sorry that she could not lie

about it. She tried to console him:

 

“She was not conscious.”

 

“But she did speak?”

 

“One could not make out what she said. It was in a very low voice.”

 

“Where is the child?”

 

“Her brother took her away with him to the country.”

 

“And she?”

 

“She is there too. She was taken away last Monday week.”

 

They began to weep again.

 

Frau Vogel’s voice called Rosa once more. Christophe, left alone again,

lived through those days of death. A week, already a week ago…. O God!

What had become of her? How it had rained that week!… And all that time

he was laughing, he was happy!

 

In his pocket he felt a little parcel wrapped up in soft paper: they were

silver buckles that he had brought her for her shoes. He remembered the

evening when he had placed his hand on the little stockinged foot. Her

little feet: where were they now? How cold they must be!… He thought the

memory of