splendid and full of life: but they were too different. They were both
strong-willed, and then often clashed. But their differences were never
of a vulgar character: for Christophe had won Françoise's respect. And
Françoise, who could sometimes be so cruel, was kind to those who were
kind to her; no power on earth could have made her do anything to hurt
them. And besides, both of them had a fund of gay humor. She was always
the first to laugh at herself. She was still eating her heart out: for
the old passion still had its grip on her: she still thought of the
blackguard she loved: and she could not bear to be in so humiliating a
position or, above all, to have Christophe suspecting what she was
feeling.
Christophe would sometimes find her for days together silent and
restless and given up to melancholy, and could not understand how she
could be unhappy. She had achieved her end: she was a great artist,
admired, flattered....
"Yes," she would say; "that would be all very well if I were one of
those famous actresses, with, no soul above shopkeeping, who run the
theater just as they would run any other business. They are quite happy
when they have 'realized' a good position, a commonplace, wealthy
marriage, and--the _ne plus ultra_--been decorated. I wanted more
than that. Unless one is a fool, success is even more empty than
failure. You must know that!"
"I know," said Christophe. "Ah! Dear God, that is not what I imagined
fame to be when I was a child. How I longed for it, and what a shining
thing it seemed to be! It was almost a religion to me then.... No
matter! There is one divine virtue in success: the good it gives one the
power to do."
"What good? One has conquered. But what's the good of it? Nothing is
altered. Theaters, concerts, everything is just the same. A new fashion
succeeds the old: that is all. They do not understand one, or only
superficially: and they begin to think of something else at once.... Do
you yourself understand other artists? In any case, they don't
understand you. The people you love best are so far away from you! Look
at your Tolstoy...."
Christophe had written to him: he had been filled with enthusiasm for
him, and had wept over his books: he wanted to set one of the peasant
tales to music, and had asked for his authority, and had sent him his
_lieder_. Tolstoy did not reply, any more than Goethe replied to
Schubert or Berlioz when they sent him their masterpieces. He had had
Christophe's music played to him, and it had irritated him: he could
make nothing of it. He regarded Beethoven as a decadent, and Shakespeare
as a charlatan. On the other hand, he was infatuated with various little
pretty-pretty masters, and the harpsichord music which used to charm the
_Roi-Perruque_: and he regarded _La Confession d'une Femme de
Chambre_ as a Christian book....
"Great men have no need of us," said Christophe. "We must think of the
others."
"Who? The dull public, the shadows who hide life from us? Act, write for
such people? Give your life for them? That would be bitter indeed!"
"Bah!" said Christophe. "I see them as they are just as you do: but I
don't let it make me despondent. They are not as bad as you say."
"Dear old German optimist!"
"They are men, like myself. Why should they not understand me?...--And
suppose they don't understand me, why should I despair? Among all the
thousands of people there will surely be one or two who will be with me:
that is enough for me, and gives me window enough to breathe the outer
air.... Think of all the simple playgoers, the young people, the old
honest souls, who are lifted out of their tedious everyday life by your
appearance, your voice, your revelation of tragic beauty. Think of what
you were yourself when you were a child! Isn't it a fine thing to give
to others--perhaps even only to one other--the happiness that others
gave you, and to do to them the good that others did to you?"
"Do you really believe that there is one such in the world? I have come
to doubt it.... Besides, what sort of love do we get from the best of
those who love us? How do they see us? They see so badly! They admire
you while they degrade you: they get just as much pleasure out of
watching any old stager act: they drag you down to the level of the
idiots you despise. In their eyes all successful people are exactly the
same."
"And yet, when all is told, it is the greatest of all who go down to
posterity with the greatest."
"It is only the backward movement of time. Mountains grow taller the
farther you go away from them. You see their height better: but you are
farther away from them.... And besides, who is to tell us who are the
greatest? What do you know of the men who have disappeared?"
"Nonsense!" said Christophe. "Even if nobody were to feel what I think
and what I am, I think my thoughts and I am what I am just the same. I
have my music, I love it, I believe in it: it is the truest thing in my
life."
"You are free in your art,--you can do what you like. But what can I do?
I am forced to act in the plays they give me, and go on acting until I
am sick of it. We are not yet, in France, such beasts of burden as those
American actors who play _Rip_ or _Robert Macaire_ ten thousand times, and
for twenty-five years of their lives go on grinding out and grinding out
an idiotic part. But we are on the road to it. Our theaters are so
poverty-stricken! The public will only stand genius in infinitesimal
doses, sprinkled with mannerisms and fashionable literature.... A
'fashionable genius'! Doesn't that make you laugh?... What waste of power!
Look at what they have made of a Mounet. What has he had to play the whole
of his life? Two or three parts that are worth the struggle for life: the
_Oedipus_ and _Polyeucte_. The rest has been rot! Isn't that enough to
disgust one? And just think of all the great and glorious things he might
have had to do!... Things are no better outside France? What have they
made of a Duse? What has her life been given up to? Think of the futile
parts she has played?"
"Your real task," said Christophe, "is to force great works of art on
the world."
"We should exhaust ourselves in a vain endeavor. It isn't worth it. As
soon as a great work of art is brought into the theater it loses its
great poetic quality. It becomes a hollow sham. The breath of the public
sullies it. The public consists of people living in stifling towns and
they have lost all knowledge of the open air, and Nature, and healthy
poetry: they must have their poetry theatrical, glittering, painted,
reeking.--Ah! And besides ... besides, even suppose one did succeed ...
no, that would not fill one's life, it would not fill my life...."
"You are still thinking of him."
"Who?"
"You know. That man."
"Yes."
"Even if you could have him and he loved you, confess that you would not
be happy even then: you would still find some means of tormenting
yourself."
"True.... Ah! What is the matter with me?... I think I have had too hard
a fight. I have fretted too much: I can't ever be calm again: there is
always an uneasiness in me, a sort of fever...."
"It must have been in you even before your struggles."
"Possibly. Yes. It was in me when I was a little girl, as far back as I
can remember.... It was devouring me then."
"What do you want?"
"How do I know? More than I can have."
"I know that," said Christophe. "I was like that when I was a boy."
"Yes, but you have become a man. I shall never be grown-up as long as I
live. I am an incomplete creature."
"No one is complete. Happiness lies in knowing one's limitations and
loving them."
"I can't do that. I've lost it. Life has cheated me, tricked me,
crippled me. And yet I fancy that I could never have been a normal and
healthy and beautiful woman without being like the rest of the gang."
"There's no reason why you shouldn't be all these things. I can see you
being like that!"
"Tell me how you can see me."
He described her, in conditions under which she might have developed
naturally and harmoniously, and been happy, loved, and loving. And it
did her good to hear it. But when he had done, she said:
"No. It is impossible now."
"Well," he said, "in that case you must say to yourself, like dear old
Handel when he went blind:
[Illustration: Musical notation with caption: _What ever is, is right."_]
He went to the piano and sang it for her. She kissed him and called him
her dear, crazy optimist. He did her good. But she did him harm: or at
least, she was afraid of him. She had violent fits of despair, and could
not conceal them from him: her love made her weak. At night she would
try to choke down her agony, he would guess, and beg the beloved
creature who was so near and yet so far, to share with him the burden
which lay so heavy on her: then she could not hold out any longer, and
she would turn weeping to his arms; and he would spend hours in
comforting her, kindly, without a spark of anger: but in the long-run
her perpetual restlessness was bound to tell on him. Françoise trembled
lest the fever that was in her should infect him. She loved him too much
to be able to bear the idea that he should suffer because of her. She
was offered an engagement in America, and she accepted it, so as to tear
herself away from him. She left him a little humiliated. She was as
humiliated as he, in the knowledge that they could not make each other
happy!
"My poor dear," she said to him, smiling sadly and tenderly. "Aren't we
stupid? We shall never have such a friendship again, never such a
glorious opportunity. But it can't be helped, it can't be helped. We are
too stupid!"
They looked at each other mournfully and shamefacedly. They laughed to
keep themselves from weeping, kissed, and parted with tears in their
eyes. Never had they loved so well as when they parted.
And after she was gone he returned to art, his old companion.... Oh, the
peace of the starry sky!
It was not long before Christophe received a letter from Jacqueline. It
was only the third time she had written to him, and her tone was very
different from that to which she had accustomed him. She told him how
sorry she was not to have seen him for so long, and very nicely invited
him to come and see her, unless he wished to hurt two friends who loved
him. Christophe was delighted, but not greatly surprised. He had been
inclined to think that Jacqueline's unjust disposition towards him would
not last. He was fond of quoting a jest of his old grandfather's:
"Sooner or later women have their good moments: one only needs the
patience to wait for them."
He went to see Olivier, and was welcomed with delight. Jacqueline was
most attentive to him: she avoided the ironical manner which was natural
to her, took care not to say anything that might hurt Christophe, showed
great interest in what he was doing, and talked intelligently about
serious subjects. Christophe thought her transformed. But she was only
so to please him. Jacqueline had heard of Christophe's affair with the
popular actress, the tale of which had gone the rounds of Parisian
gossip: and Christophe had appeared to her in an altogether new light:
she was filled with curiosity about him. When she met him again she
found him much more sympathetic. Even his faults seemed to her to be not
without attraction. She realized that Christophe had genius, and that it
would be worth while to make him love her.
The position between the young couple was no better, but rather worse.
Jacqueline was bored, bored, bored: she was bored to death.... How
utterly lonely a woman is! Except children, nothing can hold her: and
children are not enough to hold her forever: for when she is really a
woman, and not merely a female, when she has a rich soul and an
abounding vitality, she is made for so many things which she cannot
accomplish alone and with none to help her!... A man is much less
lonely, even when he is most alone: he can people the desert with his
own thoughts: and when he is lonely in married life he can more easily
put up with it, for he notices it less, and can always live in the
soliloquy of his own thoughts. And it never occurs to him that the sound
of his voice going on imperturbably babbling in the desert, makes the
silence more terrible and the desert more frightful for the woman by his
side, for whom all words are dead that are not kindled by love. He does
not see it: he has not, like the woman, staked his whole life on love:
his life has other occupations.... What man is there can fill the life
of a woman and satisfy her immense desire, the millions of ardent and
generous forces that, through the forty thousand years of the life of
humanity, have burned to no purpose, as a holocaust offered up to two
idols: passing love and motherhood, that sublime fraud, which is refused
to thousands of women and never fills more than a few years in the lives
of the rest?
Jacqueline was in despair. She had moments of terror that cut through
her like swords. She thought:
"Why am I alive? Why was I ever born?" And her heart would ache and
throb in agony.
"My God, I am going to die! My God, I am going to die!"
That idea haunted her, obsessed her through the night. She used to dream
that she was saying:
"It is 1889."
"No," the answer would come. "It is 1909." And the thought that she was
twenty years older than she imagined would make her wretched.
"It will all be over, and I have never lived! What have I done with
these twenty years? What have I made of my life?"
She would dream that she was _four_ little girls, all four lying in
the same room in different beds. They were all of the same figure and
the same face: but one was eight, one was fifteen, one was twenty, and
the fourth was thirty. There was an epidemic. Three of them had died.
The fourth looked at herself in the mirror, and she was filled with
terror: she saw herself with the skin drawn tight over her nose, and her
features pinched and withered... she was going to die too--and then it
would be all over....
"... What have I done with my life?..." She would wake up in tears; and
the nightmare would not vanish with the day: the nightmare was real.
What had she done with her life? Who had robbed her of it?... She would
begin to hate Olivier, the innocent accomplice--(innocent! What did it
matter if the harm done was the same!)--of the blind law which was
crushing her. She would be sorry for it at once, for she was kind of
heart: but she was suffering too much: and she could not help wreaking
her vengeance on the man who was bound to her and was stifling her life,
by making him suffer more than he was indeed suffering. Then she would
be more sorry than ever: she would loathe herself and feel that if she
did not find some way of escape she would do things even more evil. She
groped blindly about to find some way of escape: she clutched at
everything like a drowning woman: she tried to take an interest in
something, work, or another human being, that might be in some sort her
own, her work, a creature belonging to herself. She tried to take up
some intellectual work, and learned foreign languages: she began an
article, a story: she began to paint, to compose.... In vain: she grew
tired of everything, and lost heart the very first day. They were too
difficult. And then, "books, works of art! What are they? I don't know
whether I love them, I don't even know whether they
exist...."--Sometimes she would talk excitedly and laugh with Olivier,
and seem to be keenly interested in the things they talked about, or in
what he was doing: she would try to bemuse and benumb herself.... In
vain: suddenly her excitement would collapse, her heart would go icy
cold, she would hide away, with never a tear, hardly a breath, utterly
prostrate.--She had in some measure succeeded in destroying Olivier. He
was growing skeptical and worldly. She did not mind: she found him as
weak as herself. Almost every evening they used to go out: and she would
go in an agony of suffering and boredom from one fine house to another,
and no one would ever guess the feeling that lay behind the irony of her
unchanging smile. She was seeking for some one to love her and keep her
back from the edge of the abyss.... In vain, in vain, in vain. There was
nothing but silence in answer to her cry of despair.
She did not love Christophe: she could not bear his rough manner, his
painful frankness, and, above all, his indifference. She did not love
him: but she had a feeling that he at least was strong,--a rock towering
above death. And she tried to clutch hold of the rock, to cling to the
swimmer whose head rose above the waves, to cling to him or to drown
with him....
Besides, it was not enough for her to have cut her husband off from his
friends: now she was driven on to take them from him. Even the best of
women sometimes have an instinct which impels them to try and see how
far their power goes, and to go beyond it. In that abuse of their power
their weakness proves its strength. And when the woman is selfish and
vain she finds a malign pleasure in robbing her husband of the
friendship of his friends. It is easily done: she has but to use her
eyes a little. There is hardly a single man, honorable or otherwise, who
is not weak enough to nibble at the bait. Though the friend be never so
true and loyal, he may avoid the act, but he will almost always betray
his friend in thought. And if the other man sees it, there is an end of
their friendship: they no longer see each other with the same eyes.--The
woman who plays such a dangerous game generally stops at that and asks
no more: she has them both, disunited, at her mercy.
Christophe observed Jacqueline's new graces and charming treatment of
himself, but he was not surprised. When he had an affection for any one
he had a naïve way of taking it as a matter of course that the affection
should be returned without any ulterior thought. He responded gladly to
Jacqueline's advances; he thought her charming, and amused himself
thoroughly with her: and he thought so well of her that he was not far
from thinking Olivier rather a bungler not to be able to be happy with
her and to make her happy.
He went with them for a few days' tour in a motor-car: and he was their
guest at the Langeais' country house in Burgundy--an old family mansion
which was kept because of its associations, though they hardly ever went
there. It was in a lovely situation, in the midst of vineyards and
woods: it was very shabby inside, and the windows were loose in their
frames: there was a moldy smell in it, a smell of ripe fruit, of cold
shadow, and resinous trees warmed by the sun. Living constantly in
Jacqueline's company for days together, a sweet insidious feeling crept
into Christophe's veins, without in the least disturbing his peace of
mind: he took an innocent, though by no means immaterial, delight in
seeing her, hearing her, feeling the contact of her beautiful body, and
sipping the breath of her mouth. Olivier was a little anxious and
uneasy, but said nothing. He suspected nothing: but he was oppressed by
a vague uneasiness which he would have been ashamed to admit to himself:
by way of punishing himself for it he frequently left them alone
together. Jacqueline saw what he was thinking, and was touched by it:
she longed to say to him:
"Come, don't be anxious, my dear. I still love you the best."
But she did not say it: and they all three went on drifting: Christophe
entirely unconscious, Jacqueline not knowing what she really wanted, and
leaving it to chance to tell her, and Olivier alone seeing and feeling
what was in the wind, but in the delicacy of vanity and love, refusing
to think of it. When the will is silent, instinct speaks: in the absence
of the soul, the body goes its own way.
One evening, after dinner, the night seemed to them so lovely--a
moonless, starry night,--that they proposed to go for a walk in the
garden. Olivier and Christophe left the house. Jacqueline went up to her
room to fetch a shawl. She did not come down. Christophe went to look
for her, fuming at the eternal dilatoriness of woman.--(For some time
without knowing it he had slipped into playing the part of the
husband.)--He heard her coming. The shutters of her room were closed and
he could not see.
"Come along, you dilly-dallying madam," cried Christophe gaily. "You'll
wear your mirror out if you look at yourself so much."
She did not reply. She had stopped still. Christophe felt that she was
in the room: but she did not stir.
"Where are you?" he said.
She did not reply. Christophe said nothing either, and began groping in
the dark, and suddenly his heart grew big and began to thump, and he
stood still. Near him he could hear Jacqueline breathing lightly. He
moved again and stopped once more. She was near him: he knew it, but he
could not move. There was silence for a second or two. Suddenly he felt
her hands on his, her lips on his. He held her close. They stood still
and spoke no word.--Their lips parted; they wrenched away from each
other. Jacqueline left the room. Christophe followed her, trembling. His
legs shook beneath him. He stopped for a moment to lean against the wall
until the tumult in his blood died down. At last he joined them again.
Jacqueline was calmly talking to Olivier. They walked on a few yards in
front. Christophe followed them in a state of collapse. Olivier stopped
to wait for him. Christophe stopped too. Olivier, knowing his friend's
temper and the capricious silence in which he would sometimes bar
himself, did not persist, and went on walking with Jacqueline. And
Christophe followed them mechanically, lagging ten yards behind them
like a dog. When they stopped, he stopped. When they walked on, he
walked on. And so they went round the garden and back into the house.
Christophe went up to his room and shut himself in. He did not light the
lamp. He did not go to bed. He could not think. About the middle of the
night he fell asleep, sitting, with his head resting in his arms on the
table. He woke up an hour later. He lit a candle, feverishly flung
together his papers and belongings, packed his bag, and then flung
himself on the bed and slept until dawn. Then he went down with his
luggage and left the house. They waited for him all morning, and spent
the day looking for him. Jacqueline hid her furious anger beneath a mask
of indifference, and sarcastically pretended to go over her plate. It
was not until the following evening that Olivier received a letter from
Christophe:
"_My dear Old Fellow_,
"_Don't lie angry with me for having gone away like a madman.
I am mad, you know. But what can I do? I am what I am. Thanks
for your dear hospitality. I enjoyed it much. But, you know, I
am not fit to live with other people. I'm not so sure either
that I am fit to live. I am only fit to stay in my corner and
love people--at a distance: it is wiser so. When I see them at
too close quarters, I become misanthropic. And I don't want to
be that. I want to love men and women, I want to love you all.
Oh! How I long to help you all! If I could only help you to
be--to be happy! How gladly would I give all the happiness I may
have in exchange!... But that is forbidden. One can only show
others the way. One cannot go their way in their stead. Each of
us must save himself. Save yourself! Save yourselves! I love
you._
"CHRISTOPHE.
"_My respects to Madame Jeannin_."
"Madame Jeannin" read the letter with a smile of contempt and her lips
tightly pressed together, and said dryly:
"Well. Follow his advice. Save yourself."
But when Olivier held out his hand for the letter, Jacqueline crumpled
it up and flung it down, and two great tears welled up into her eyes.
Olivier took her hands.
"What's the matter?" he asked, with some emotion.
"Let me be!" she cried angrily.
She went out. As she reached the door she cried:
"Egoists!"
Christophe had contrived to make enemies of his patrons of the _Grand
Journal_, as was only likely. Christophe had been endowed by Heaven
with the virtue extolled by Goethe: _non-gratitude_.
_"The horror of showing gratitude,"_ wrote Goethe ironically, _"is rare,
and only appears in remarkable men who have risen from the poorest class,
and at every turn have been forced to accept assistance, which is almost
invariably poisoned by the churlishness of the benefactor...."_