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

“As usual.” Christophe

had taken the game seriously: and as he never liked to lose, he walked

quickly, too quickly for Myrrha’s liking, for she was in much less of a

hurry than he.

 

“Don’t be in a hurry, my friend,” she said, in her quiet, ironic voice, “we

shall get there first.”

 

He was a little sorry.

 

“True,” he said, “I am going a little too fast: there is no need.”

 

He slackened his pace.

 

“But I know them,” he went on. “I am sure they will run so as to be there

before us.”

 

Myrrha burst out laughing.

 

“Oh! no,” she said. “Oh! no: don’t you worry about that.”

 

She hung on his arm and pressed close to him. She was a little shorter

than Christophe, and as they walked she raised her soft eyes to his. She

was really pretty and alluring. He hardly recognized her: the change was

extraordinary. Usually her face was rather pale and puffy: but the smallest

excitement, a merry thought, or the desire to please, was enough to make

her worn expression vanish, and her cheeks go pink, and the little wrinkles

in her eyelids round and below her eyes disappear, and her eyes flash, and

her whole face take on a youth, a life, a spiritual quality that never was

in Ada’s. Christophe was surprised by this metamorphosis, and turned his

eyes away from hers: he was a little uneasy at being alone with her. She

embarrassed him and prevented him from dreaming as he pleased: he did not

listen to what she said, he did not answer her, or if he did it was only at

random: he was thinking—he wished to think only of Ada. He thought of the

kindness in her eyes, her smile, her kiss: and his heart was filled with

love. Myrrha wanted to make him admire the beauty of the trees with their

little branches against the clear sky…. Yes: it was all beautiful: the

clouds were gone, Ada had returned to him, he had succeeded in breaking the

ice that lay between them: they loved once more: near or far, they were

one. He sighed with relief: how light the air was! Ada had come back to him

… Everything brought her to mind…. It was a little damp: would she not

be cold?… The lovely trees were powdered with hoar-frost: what a pity she

should not see them!… But he remembered the wager, and hurried on: he was

concerned only with not losing the way. He shouted joyfully as they reached

the goal:

 

“We are first!”

 

He waved his hat gleefully. Myrrha watched him and smiled.

 

The place where they stood was a high, steep rock in the middle of the

woods. From this flat summit with its fringe of nut-trees and little

stunted oaks they could see, over the wooded slopes, the tops of the pines

bathed in a purple mist, and the long ribbon of the Rhine in the blue

valley. Not a bird called. Not a voice. Not a breath of air. A still, calm

winter’s day, its chilliness faintly warmed by the pale beams of a misty

sun. Now and then in the distance there came the sharp whistle of a train

in the valley. Christophe stood at the edge of the rock and looked down at

the countryside. Myrrha watched Christophe.

 

He turned to her amiably:

 

“Well! The lazy things. I told them so!… Well: we must wait for them….”

 

He lay stretched out in the sun on the cracked earth.

 

“Yes. Let us wait….” said Myrrha, taking off her hat.

 

In her voice there was something so quizzical that he raised his head and

looked at her.

 

“What is it?” she asked quietly.

 

“What did you say?”

 

“I said: Let us wait. It was no use making me run so fast.”

 

“True.”

 

They waited lying on the rough ground. Myrrha hummed a tune. Christophe

took it up for a few phrases. But he stopped every now and then to listen.

 

“I think I can hear them.”

 

Myrrha went on singing.

 

“Do stop for a moment.”

 

Myrrha stopped.

 

“No. It is nothing.”

 

She went on with her song.

 

Christophe could not stay still.

 

“Perhaps they have lost their way.”

 

“Lost? They could not. Ernest knows all the paths.”

 

A fantastic idea passed through Christophe’s mind.

 

“Perhaps they arrived first, and went away before we came!”

 

Myrrha was lying on her back and looking at the sun. She was seized with

a wild burst of laughter in the middle of her song and all but choked.

Christophe insisted. He wanted to go down to the station, saying that their

friends would be there already. Myrrha at last made up her mind to move.

 

“You would be certain to lose them!… There was never any talk about the

station. We were to meet here.”

 

He sat down by her side. She was amused by his eagerness. He was conscious

of the irony in her gaze as she looked at him. He began to be seriously

troubled—to be anxious about them: he did not suspect them. He got up once

more. He spoke of going down into the woods again and looking for them,

calling to them. Myrrha gave a little chuckle: she took from her pocket a

needle, scissors, and thread: and she calmly undid and sewed in again the

feathers in her hat: she seemed to have established herself for the day.

 

“No, no, silly,” she said. “If they wanted to come do you think they would

not come of their own accord?”

 

There was a catch at his heart. He turned towards her: she did not look at

him: she was busy with her work. He went up to her.

 

“Myrrha!” he said.

 

“Eh?” she replied without stopping. He knelt now to look more nearly at

her.

 

“Myrrha!” he repeated.

 

“Well?” she asked, raising her eyes from her work and looking at him with a

smile. “What is it?”

 

She had a mocking expression as she saw his downcast face.

 

“Myrrha!” he asked, choking, “tell me what you think….”

 

She shrugged her shoulders, smiled, and went on working.

 

He caught her hands and took away the hat at which she was sewing.

 

“Leave off, leave off, and tell me….”

 

She looked squarely at him and waited. She saw that Christophe’s lips were

trembling.

 

“You think,” he said in a low voice, “that Ernest and Ada …?”

 

She smiled.

 

“Oh! well!”

 

He started back angrily.

 

“No! No! It is impossible! You don’t think that!… No! No!”

 

She put her hands on his shoulders and rocked with laughter.

 

“How dense you are, how dense, my dear!”

 

He shook her violently.

 

“Don’t laugh! Why do you laugh? You would not laugh if it were true. You

love Ernest….”

 

She went on laughing and drew him to her and kissed him. In spite of

himself he returned her kiss. But when he felt her lips on his, her lips,

still warm with his brother’s kisses, he flung her away from him and held

her face away from his own: he asked:

 

“You knew it? It was arranged between you?”

 

She said “Yes,” and laughed.

 

Christophe did not cry out, he made no movement of anger. He opened his

mouth as though he could not breathe: he closed his eyes and clutched at

his breast with his hands: his heart was bursting. Then he lay down on the

ground with his face buried in his hands and he was shaken by a crisis of

disgust and despair like a child.

 

Myrrha, who was not very soft-hearted, was sorry for him: involuntarily

she was filled with motherly compassion, and leaned over him, and spoke

affectionately to him, and tried to make him sniff at her smelling-bottle.

But he thrust her away in horror and got up so sharply that she was afraid.

He had neither strength nor desire for revenge. He looked at her with his

face twisted with grief.

 

“You drab,” he said in despair. “You do not know the harm you have

done….”

 

She tried to hold him back. He fled through the woods, spitting out his

disgust with such ignominy, with such muddy hearts, with such incestuous

sharing as that to which they had tried to bring him. He wept, he trembled:

he sobbed with disgust. He was filled with horror, of them all, of himself,

of his body and soul. A storm of contempt broke loose in him: it had long

been brewing: sooner or later there had to come the reaction against the

base thoughts, the degrading compromises, the stale and pestilential

atmosphere in which he had been living for months: but the need of loving,

of deceiving himself about the woman he loved, had postponed the crisis as

long as possible. Suddenly it burst upon him: and it was better so. There

was a great gust of wind of a biting purity, an icy breeze which swept away

the miasma. Disgust in one swoop had killed his love for Ada.

 

If Ada thought more firmly to establish her domination over Christophe by

such an act, that proved once more her gross inappreciation of her lover.

Jealousy which binds souls that are besmirched could only revolt a nature

like Christophe’s, young, proud, and pure. But what he could not forgive,

what he never would forgive, was that the betrayal was not the outcome of

passion in Ada, hardly even of one of those absurd and degrading though

often irresistible caprices to which the reason of a woman is sometimes

hard put to it not to surrender. No—he understood now,—it was in her a

secret desire to degrade him, to humiliate him, to punish him for his moral

resistance, for his inimical faith, to lower him to the common level, to

bring him to her feet, to prove to herself her own power for evil. And he

asked himself with horror: what is this impulse towards dirtiness, which

is in the majority of human beings—this desire to besmirch the purity of

themselves and others,—these swinish souls, who take a delight in rolling

in filth, and are happy when not one inch of their skins is left clean!…

 

Ada waited two days for Christophe to return to her. Then she began to be

anxious, and sent him a tender note in which she made no allusion to what

had happened. Christophe did not even reply. He hated Ada so profoundly

that no words could express his hatred. He had cut her out of his life. She

no longer existed for him.

 

*

 

Christophe was free of Ada, but he was not free of himself. In vain did

he try to return into illusion and to take up again the calm and chaste

strength of the past. We cannot return to the past. We have to go onward:

it is useless to turn back, save only to see the places by which we have

passed, the distant smoke from the roofs under which we have slept, dying

away on the horizon in the mists of memory. But nothing so distances us

from the soul that we had as a few months of passion. The road takes

a sudden turn: the country is changed: it is as though we were saying

good-bye for the last time to all that we are leaving behind.

 

Christophe could not yield to it. He held out his arms to the past: he

strove desperately to bring to life again the soul that had