She did not answer. She gave a sort of stifled sob. He took her hands, and
knelt down by her side, the better to see her in the dusky room.
"Mother!" he said anxiously.
Louisa laid her head on his shoulder and burst into tears.
"My boy, my boy," she cried, holding close to him. "My boy!... You will not
leave me? Promise me that you will not leave me?"
His heart was torn with pity.
"No, mother, no. I will not leave you. What made you think of such a
thing?"
"I am so unhappy! They have all left me, all...."
She pointed to the things all about her, and he did not know whether she
was speaking of them or of her sons and the dead.
"You will stay with me? You will not leave me?... What should I do, if you
went too?"
"I will not go, I tell you; we will stay together. Don't cry. I promise."
She went on weeping. She could not stop herself. He dried her eyes with his
handkerchief.
"What is it, mother dear? Are you in pain?"
"I don't know; I don't know what it is." She tried to calm herself and to
smile.
"I do try to be sensible. I do. But just nothing at all makes me cry....
You see, I'm doing it again.... Forgive me. I am so stupid. I am old. I
have no strength left. I have no taste for anything any more. I am no good
for anything. I wish I were buried with all the rest...."
He held her to him, close, like a child.
"Don't worry, mother; be calm; don't think about it...."
Gradually she grew quiet.
"It is foolish. I am ashamed.... But what is it? What is it?"
She who had always worked so hard could not understand why her strength had
suddenly snapped, and she was humiliated to the very depths of her being.
He pretended not to see it.
"A little weariness, mother," he said, trying to speak carelessly. "It is
nothing; you will see; it is nothing."
But he too was anxious. From his childhood he had been accustomed to see
her brave, resigned, in silence withstanding every test. And he was
astonished to see her suddenly broken: he was afraid.
He helped her to sort the things scattered on the floor. Every now and then
she would linger over something, but he would gently take it from her
hands, and she suffered him.
From that time on he took pains to be more with her. As soon as he had
finished his work, instead of shutting himself up in his room, as he loved
to do, he would return to her. He felt her loneliness and that she was not
strong enough to be left alone: there was danger in leaving her alone.
He would sit by her side in the evening near the open window looking on to
the road. The view would slowly disappear. The people were returning home.
Little lights appeared in the houses far off. They had seen it all a
thousand times. But soon they would see it no more. They would talk
disjointedly. They would point out to each other the smallest of the
familiar incidents and expectations of the evening, always with fresh
interest. They would have long intimate silences, or Louisa, for no
apparent reason, would tell some reminiscence, some disconnected story that
passed through her mind. Her tongue was loosed a little now that she felt
that she was with one who loved her. She tried hard to talk. It was
difficult for her, for she had grown used to living apart from her family;
she looked upon her sons and her husband as too clever to talk to her, and
she had never dared to join in their conversation. Christophe's tender care
was a new thing to her and infinitely sweet, though it made her afraid. She
deliberated over her words; she found it difficult to express herself; her
sentences were left unfinished and obscure. Sometimes she was ashamed of
what she was saying; she would look at her son, and stop in the middle of
her narrative. But he would press her hand, and she would be reassured. He
was filled with love and pity for the childish, motherly creature, to whom
he had turned when he was a child, and now she turned to him for support.
And he took a melancholy pleasure in her prattle, that had no interest for
anybody but himself, in her trivial memories of a life that had always been
joyless and mediocre, though it seemed to Louisa to be of infinite worth.
Sometimes he would try to interrupt her; he was afraid that her memories
would make her sadder than ever, and he would urge her to sleep. She would
understand what he was at, and would say with gratitude in her eyes:
"No. I assure you, it does one good; let us stay a little longer."
They would stay until the night was far gone and the neighbors were abed.
Then they would say good-night, she a little comforted by being rid of some
of her trouble, he with a heavy heart under this new burden added to that
which already he had to bear.
The day came for their departure. On the night before they stayed longer
than usual in the unlighted room. They did not speak. Every now and then
Louisa moaned: "Fear God! Fear God!" Christophe tried to keep her attention
fixed on the thousand details of the morrow's removal. She would not go to
bed until he gently compelled her. But he went up to his room and did not
go to bed for a long time. When leaning out of the window he tried to gaze
through the darkness to see for the last time the moving shadows of the
river beneath the house. He heard the wind in the tall trees in Minna's
garden. The sky was black. There was no one in the street. A cold rain was
just falling. The weathercocks creaked. In a house near by a child was
crying. The night weighed with an overwhelming heaviness upon the earth and
upon his soul. The dull chiming of the hours, the cracked note of the
halves and quarters, dropped one after another into the grim silence,
broken only by the sound of the rain on the roofs and the cobbles.
When Christophe at last made up his mind to go to bed, chilled in body and
soul, he heard the window below him shut. And, as he lay, he thought sadly
that it is cruel for the poor to dwell on the past, for they have no right
to have a past, like the rich: they have no home, no corner of the earth
wherein to house their memories: their joys, their sorrows, all their days,
are scattered in the wind.
Next day in beating rain they moved their scanty furniture to their new
dwelling. Fischer, the old furniture dealer, lent them a cart and a pony;
he came and helped them himself. But they could not take everything, for
the rooms to which they were going were much smaller than the old.
Christophe had to make his mother leave the oldest and most useless of
their belongings. It was not altogether easy; the least thing had its worth
for her: a shaky table, a broken chair, she wished to leave nothing behind.
Fischer, fortified by the authority of his old friendship with Jean Michel,
had to join Christophe in complaining, and, good-fellow that he was and
understanding her grief, had even to promise to keep some of her precious
rubbish for her against the day when she should want it again. Then she
agreed to tear herself away.
The two brothers had been told of the removal, but Ernest came on the night
before to say that he could not be there, and Rodolphe appeared for a
moment about noon; he watched them load the furniture, gave some advice,
and went away again looking mightily busy.
The procession set out through the muddy streets. Christophe led the horse,
which slipped on the greasy cobbles. Louisa walked by her son's side, and
tried to shelter him from the rain. And so they had a melancholy homecoming
in the damp rooms, that were made darker than ever by the dull light coming
from the lowering sky. They could not have fought against the depression
that was upon them had it not been for the attentions of their landlord and
his family. But, when the cart had driven away, as night fell, leaving the
furniture heaped up in the room; and Christophe and Louisa were sitting,
worn out, one on a box, the other on a sack; they heard a little dry cough
on the staircase; there was a knock at the door. Old Euler came in. He
begged pardon elaborately for disturbing his guests, and said that by way
of celebrating their first evening he hoped that they would be kind enough
to sup with himself and his family. Louisa, stunned by her sorrow, wished
to refuse. Christophe was not much more tempted than she by this friendly
gathering, but the old man insisted and Christophe, thinking that it would
be better for his mother not to spend their first evening in their new home
alone with her thoughts, made her accept.
They went down to the floor below, where they found the whole family
collected: the old man, his daughter, his son-in-law, Vogel, and his
grandchildren, a boy and a girl, both a little younger than Christophe.
They clustered around their guests, bade them welcome, asked if they were
tired, if they were pleased with their rooms, if they needed anything;
putting so many questions that Christophe in bewilderment could make
nothing of them, for everybody spoke at once. The soup was placed on the
table; they sat down. But the noise went on. Amalia, Euler's daughter, had
set herself at once to acquaint Louisa with local details: with the
topography of the district, the habits and advantages of the house, the
time when the milkman called, the time when she got up, the various
tradespeople and the prices that she paid. She did not stop until she had
explained everything. Louisa, half-asleep, tried hard to take an interest
in the information, but the remarks which she ventured showed that she had
understood not a word, and provoked Amalia to indignant exclamations and
repetition of every detail. Old Euler, a clerk, tried to explain to
Christophe the difficulties of a musical career. Christophe's other
neighbor, Rosa, Amalia's daughter, never stopped talking from the moment
when they sat down,--so volubly that she had no time to breathe; she lost
her breath in the middle of a sentence, but at once she was off again.
Vogel was gloomy and complained of the food, and there were embittered
arguments on the subject. Amalia, Euler, the girl, left off talking to take
part in the discussion; and there were endless controversies as to whether
there was too much salt in the stew or not enough; they called each other
to witness, and, naturally, no two opinions were the same. Each despised
his neighbor's taste, and thought only his own healthy and reasonable. They
might have gone on arguing until the Last Judgment.
But, in the end, they all joined in crying out upon the bad weather. They
all commiserated Louisa and Christophe upon their troubles, and in terms
which moved him greatly they praised him for his courageous conduct. They
took great pleasure in recalling not only the misfortunes of their guests,
but also their own, and those of their friends and all their acquaintance,
and they all agreed that the good are always unhappy, and that there is joy
only for the selfish and dishonest. They decided that life is sad, that it
is quite useless, and that they were all better dead, were it not the
indubitable will of God that they should go on living so as to suffer. All
these ideas came very near to Christophe's actual pessimism, he thought the
better of his landlord, and closed his eyes to their little oddities.
When he went upstairs again with his mother to the disordered rooms, they
were weary and sad, but they felt a little less lonely; and while
Christophe lay awake through the night, for he could not sleep because of
his weariness and the noise of the neighborhood, and listened to the heavy
carts shaking the walls, and the breathing of the family sleeping below, he
tried to persuade himself that he would be, if not happy, at least less
unhappy here, with these good people--a little tiresome, if the truth be
told--who suffered from like misfortunes, who seemed to understand him, and
whom, he thought, he understood.
But when at last he did fall asleep, he was roused unpleasantly at dawn by
the voices of his neighbors arguing, and the creaking of a pump worked
furiously by some one who was in a hurry to swill the yard and the stairs.
* * * * *
Justus Euler was a little bent old man, with uneasy, gloomy eyes, a red
face, all lines and pimples, gap-toothed, with an unkempt beard, with which
he was forever fidgeting with his hands. Very honest, quite able,
profoundly moral, he had been on quite good terms with Christophe's
grandfather. He was said to be like him. And, in truth, he was of the same
generation and brought up with the same principles; but he lacked Jean
Michel's strong physique, that is, while he was of the same opinion on many
points, fundamentally he was hardly at all like him, for it is temperament
far more than ideas that makes a man, and whatever the divisions,
fictitious or real, marked between men by intellect, the great divisions
between men and men are into those who are healthy and those who are not.
Old Euler was not a healthy man. He talked morality, like Jean Michel, but
his morals were not the same as Jean Michel's; he had not his sound
stomach, his lungs, or his jovial strength. Everything in Euler and his
family was built on a more parsimonious and niggardly plan. He had been an
official for forty years, was now retired, and suffered from that
melancholy that comes from inactivity and weighs so heavily upon old men,
who have not made provision in their inner life for their last years. All
his habits, natural and acquired, all the habits of his trade had given him
a meticulous and peevish quality, which was reproduced to a certain extent
in each of his children.
His son-in-law, Vogel, a clerk at the Chancery Court, was fifty years old.
Tall, strong, almost bald, with gold spectacles, fairly good-looking, he
considered himself ill, and no doubt was so, although obviously he did not
have the diseases which he thought he had, but only a mind soured by the
stupidity of his calling and a body ruined to a certain extent by his
sedentary life. Very industrious, not without merit, even cultured up to a
point; he was a victim of our ridiculous modern life, or like so many
clerks, locked up in their offices, he had succumbed to the demon of
hypochondria. One of those unfortunates whom Goethe called "_ein trauriger,
ungriechischer Hypochondrist_"--"a gloomy and un-Greek hypochondriac,"--and
pitied, though he took good care to avoid them.
Amalia was neither the one nor the other. Strong, loud, and active, she
wasted no sympathy on her husband's jeremiads; she used to shake him
roughly. But no human strength can bear up against living together, and
when in a household one or other is neurasthenic, the chances are that in
time they will both be so. In vain did Amalia cry out upon Vogel, in vain
did she go on protesting either from habit or because it was necessary;
next moment she herself was lamenting her condition more loudly even than
he, and, passing imperceptibly from scolding to lamentation, she did him no
good; she increased his ills tenfold by loudly singing chorus to his
follies. In the end not only did she crush the unhappy Vogel, terrified by
the proportions assumed by his own outcries sent sounding back by this
echo, but she crushed everybody, even herself. In her turn she caught the
trick of unwarrantably bemoaning her health, and her father's, and her
daughter's, and her son's. It became a mania; by constant repetition she
came to believe what she said. She took the least chill tragically; she was
uneasy and worried about everybody. More than that, when they were well,
she still worried, because of the sickness that was bound to come. So life
was passed in perpetual fear. Outside that they were all in fairly good
health, and it seemed as though their state of continual moaning and
groaning did serve to keep them well. They all ate and slept and worked as
usual, and the life of this household was not relaxed for it all. Amalia's
activity was not satisfied with working from morning to night up and down
the house; they all had to toil with her, and there was forever a moving of
furniture, a washing of floors, a polishing of wood, a sound of voices,
footsteps, quivering, movement.
The two children, crushed by such loud authority, leaving nobody alone,
seemed to find it natural enough to submit to it. The boy, Leonard, was
good looking, though insignificant of feature, and stiff in manner. The
girl, Rosa, fair-haired, with pretty blue eyes, gentle and affectionate,
would have been pleasing especially with the freshness of her delicate
complexion, and her kind manner, had her nose not been quite so large or so
awkwardly placed; it made her face heavy and gave her a foolish expression.
She was like a girl of Holbein, in the gallery at Basle--the daughter of
burgomaster Meier--sitting, with eyes cast down, her hands on her knees,
her fair hair falling down to her shoulders, looking embarrassed and
ashamed of her uncomely nose. But so far Rosa had not been troubled by it,
and it never had broken in upon her inexhaustible chatter. Always her
shrill voice was heard in the house telling stories, always breathless, as
though she had no time to say everything, always excited and animated, in
spite of the protests which she drew from her mother, her father, and even
her grandfather, exasperated, not so much because she was forever talking
as because she prevented them talking themselves. For these good people,
kind, loyal, devoted--the very cream of good people--had almost all the
virtues, but they lacked one virtue which is capital, and is the charm of
life: the virtue of silence.
Christophe was in tolerant mood. His sorrow had softened his intolerant and
emphatic temper. His experience of the cruel indifference of the elegant
made him more conscious of the worth of these honest folk, graceless and
devilish tiresome, who had yet an austere conception of life, and because
they lived joylessly, seemed to him to live without weakness. Having
decided that they were excellent, and that he ought to like them, like the
German that he was, he tried to persuade himself that he did in fact like
them. But he did not succeed; he lacked that easy Germanic idealism, which
does not wish to see, and does not see, what would be displeasing to its
sight, for fear of disturbing the very proper tranquillity of its judgment
and the pleasantness of its existence. On the contrary, he never was so
conscious of the defects of these people as when he loved them, when he
wanted to love them absolutely without reservation; it was a sort of
unconscious loyalty, and an inexorable demand for truth, which, in spite of
himself, made him more clear-sighted, and more exacting, with what was
dearest to him. And it was not long before he began to be irritated by the
oddities of the family. They made no attempt to conceal them. Contrary to
the usual habit they displayed every intolerable quality they possessed,
and all the good in them was hidden. So Christophe told himself, for he
judged himself to have been unjust, and tried to surmount his first
impressions, and to discover in them the excellent qualities which they so
carefully concealed.
He tried to converse with old Justus Euler, who asked nothing better. He
had a secret sympathy with him, remembering that his grandfather had liked
to praise him. But good old Jean Michel had more of the pleasant faculty of
deceiving himself about his friends than Christophe, and Christophe soon
saw that. In vain did he try to accept Euler's memories of his grandfather.
He could only get from him a discolored caricature of Jean Michel, and
scraps of talk that were utterly uninteresting. Euler's stories used
invariably to begin with: "As I used to say to your poor grandfather..." He
could remember nothing else. He had heard only what he had said himself.
Perhaps Jean Michel used only to listen in the same way. Most friendships
are little more than arrangements for mutual satisfaction, so that each
party may talk about himself to the other. But at least Jean Michel,
however naïvely he used to give himself up to the delight of talking, had
sympathy which he was always ready to lavish on all sides. He was
interested in everything; he always regretted that he was no longer
fifteen, so as to be able to see the marvelous inventions of the new
generations, and to share their thoughts. He had the quality, perhaps the
most precious in life, a curiosity always fresh, sever changing with the
years, born anew every morning. He had not the talent to turn this gift to
account; but how many men of talent might envy him! Most men die at twenty
or thirty; thereafter they are only reflections of themselves: for the rest
of their lives they are aping themselves, repeating from day to day more
and more mechanically and affectedly what they said and did and thought and
loved when they were alive.
It was so long since old Euler had been alive, and he had been such a small
thing then, that what was left of him now was very poor and rather
ridiculous. Outside his former trade and his family life he knew nothing,
and wished to know nothing. On every subject he had ideas ready-made,
dating from his youth. He pretended to some knowledge of the arts, but he
clung to certain hallowed names of men, about whom he was forever
reiterating his emphatic formulæ: everything else was naught and had never
been. When modern interests were mentioned he would not listen, and talked
of something else. He declared that he loved music passionately, and he
would ask Christophe to play. But as soon as Christophe, who had been
caught once or twice, began to play, the old fellow would begin to talk
loudly to his daughter, as though the music only increased his interest in
everything but music. Christophe would get up exasperated in the middle of
his piece, so one would notice it. There were only a few old airs--three or
four--some very beautiful, others very ugly, but all equally sacred, which
were privileged to gain comparative silence and absolute approval. With the
very first notes the old man would go into ecstasies, tears would come to
his eyes, not so much for the pleasure he was enjoying as for the pleasure
which once he had enjoyed. In the end Christophe had a horror of these
airs, though some of them, like the _Adelaïde_ of Beethoven, were very dear
to him; the old man was always humming the first bars of them, and never
failed to declare, "There, that is music," contemptuously comparing it with
"all the blessed modern music, in which there is no melody." Truth to tell,
he knew nothing whatever about it.
His son-in-law was better educated and kept in touch with artistic
movements; but that was even worse, for in his judgment there was always a
disparaging tinge. He was lacking neither in taste nor intelligence; but he
could not bring himself to admire anything modern. He would have disparaged
Mozart and Beethoven, if they had been contemporary, just as he would have
acknowledged the merits of Wagner and Richard Strauss had they been dead
for a century. His discontented temper refused to allow that there might be
great men living during his own lifetime; the idea was distasteful to him.
He was so embittered by his wasted life that he insisted on pretending that
every life was wasted, that it could not be otherwise, and that those who
thought the opposite, or pretended to think so, were one of two things:
fools or humbugs.
And so he never spoke of any new celebrity except in a tone of bitter
irony, and as he was not stupid he never failed to discover at the first
glance the weak or ridiculous sides of them. Any new name roused him to
distrust; before he knew anything about the man he was inclined to
criticise him--because he knew nothing about him. If he was sympathetic
towards Christophe it was because he thought that the misanthropic boy
found life as evil as he did himself, and that he was not a genius. Nothing
so unites the small of soul in their suffering and discontent as the
statement of their common impotence. Nothing so much restores the desire
for health or life to those who are healthy and made for the joy of life as
contact with the stupid pessimism of the mediocre and the sick, who,
because they are not happy, deny the happiness of others. Christophe felt
this. And yet these gloomy thoughts were familiar to him; but he was
surprised to find them on Vogel's lips, where they were unrecognizable;
more than that, they were repugnant to him; they offended him.