also full of patrician pride, self-contained, and self-satisfied. There
was a bourgeois aristocracy with a taste for work and the higher
culture, but narrow and pietistic, who were calmly convinced of their
own superiority and the superiority of their city, and quite content to
live in family isolation. There were enormous families with vast
ramifications. Each family had its day for a general gathering of the
clan. They were hardly at all open to the outside world. All these great
houses, with fortunes generations old, felt no need of showing their
wealth. They knew each other, and that was enough: the opinion of others
was a thing of no consequence. There were millionaires dressed like
humble shopkeepers, talking their raucous dialect with its pungent
expressions, going conscientiously to their offices, every day of their
lives, even at an age when the most industrious of men will grant
themselves the right to rest. Their wives prided themselves on their
domestic skill. No dowry was given to the daughters. Rich men let their
sons in their turn go through the same hard apprenticeship that they
themselves had served. They practised strict economy in their daily
lives. But they made a noble use of their fortune in collecting works of
art, picture galleries, and in social work: they were forever giving
enormous sums, nearly always anonymously, to found charities and to
enrich the museums. They were a mixture of greatness and absurdity, both
of another age. This little world, for which the rest of the world
seemed not to exist--(although its members knew it thoroughly through
their business, and their distant relationships, and the long and
extended voyages which they forced their sons to take,)--this little
world, for which fame and celebrity in another land only were esteemed
from the moment when they were welcomed and recognized by
itself,--practised the severest discipline upon itself. Every member of
it kept a watch upon himself and upon the rest. The result of all this
was a collective conscience which masked all individual differences
(more marked than elsewhere among the robust personalities of the place)
under the veil of religious and moral uniformity. Everybody practised
it, everybody believed in it. Not a single soul doubted it or would
admit of doubt. It were impossible to know what took place in the depths
of souls which were the more hermetically sealed against prying eyes
inasmuch as they knew that they were surrounded by a narrow scrutiny,
and that every man took upon himself the right to examine into the
conscience of other men. It was said that even those who had left the
country and thought themselves emancipated--as soon as they set foot in
it again were dominated by the traditions, the habits, the atmosphere of
the town: even the most skeptical were at once forced to practise and to
believe. Not to believe would have seemed to them an offense against
Nature. Not to believe was the mark of an inferior caste, a sign of bad
breeding. It was never admitted that a man of their world could possibly
be absolved of his religious duties. If a man did not practise their
religion, he was at once unclassed, and all doors were closed to him.
Even the weight of such discipline was apparently not enough for them.
The men of this little world were not closely bound enough within their
caste. Within the great _Verein_ they had formed a number of smaller
_Verein_ by way of binding their fetters fast. There were several hundred
of them: and they were increasing every year. There were _Verein_ for
everything: for philanthropy, charitable work, commercial work, work that
was both charitable and commercial, for the arts, for the sciences, for
singing, music, spiritual exercises, physical exercises, merely to provide
excuses for meeting and taking their amusement collectively: there were
_Verein_ for the various districts and the various corporations: there
were _Verein_ for men of the same position in the world, the same degree
of wealth, men of the same social weight, who wore the same handle to
their names. It was even said that an attempt had been made to form a
_Verein_ for the _Vereinlosen_ (those who did not belong to any _Verein_):
though not twelve such people had been forthcoming.
Within this triple bandage of town, caste, and union, the soul was
cramped and bound. Character was suppressed by a secret constraint. The
majority were brought up to it from childhood--had been for centuries:
and they found it good: they would have thought it improper and
unhealthy to go without these bandages. Their satisfied smiles gave no
indication of the discomfort they might be feeling. But Nature always
took her revenge. Every now and then there would arise some individual
in revolt, some vigorous artist or unbridled thinker who would brutally
break his bonds and set the city fathers by the ears. They were so
clever that, if the rebel had not been stifled in the embryo, and became
the stronger, they never troubled to fight him--(a fight might have
produced all sorts of scandalous outbreaks):--they bought him up. If he
were a painter, they sent him to the museum: if he were a thinker, to
the libraries. It was quite useless for him to roar out all sorts of
outrageous things: they pretended not to hear him. It was in vain for
him to protest his independence: they incorporated him as one of
themselves. So the effect of the poison was neutralized: it was the
homeopathic treatment.--But such cases were rare, most of the rebellions
never reached the light of day. Their peaceful houses concealed
unsuspected tragedies. The master of a great house would go quietly and
throw himself into the river, and leave no explanation. Sometimes a man
would go into retirement for six months, sometimes he would send his
wife to an asylum to restore her mind. Such things were spoken of quite
openly, as though they were quite natural, with that placidity which is
one of the great features of the town, the inhabitants of which are able
to maintain it in the face of suffering and death.
These solid burgesses, who were hard upon themselves because they knew
their own worth, were much less hard on others because they esteemed
them less. They were quite liberal towards the foreigners dwelling in
the town like Christophe, German professors, and political refugees,
because they had no sort of feeling about them. And, besides, they loved
intelligence. Advanced ideas had no terrors for them: they knew that
their sons were impervious to their influence. They were coldly cordial
to their guests, and kept them at a distance.
Christophe did not need to have these things underlined. He was in a
state of raw sensitiveness which left his feelings absolutely
unprotected: he was only too ready to see egoism and indifference
everywhere, and to withdraw into himself.
To make matters worse, Braun's patients, and the very limited circle to
which his wife belonged, all moved in a little Protestant society which
was particularly strict. Christophe was ill-regarded by them both as a
Papist by origin and a heretic in fact. For his part, he found many
things which shocked him. Although he no longer believed, yet he bore
the marks of his inherited Catholicism, which was more poetic than a
matter of reason, more indulgent towards Nature, and never suffered the
self-torment of trying to explain and understand what to love and what
not to love: and also he had the habits of intellectual and moral
freedom which he had unwittingly come by in Paris. It was inevitable
that he should come into collision with the little pious groups of
people in whom all the defects of the Calvinistic spirit were marked and
exaggerated: a rationalistic religion, which clipped the wings of faith
and left it dangling over the abyss: for it started with an _a
priori_ reason which was open to discussion like all mysticism: it
was no longer poetry, nor was it prose, it was poetry translated into
prose. They had pride of intellect, an absolute, dangerous faith in
reason--in _their_ reason. They could not believe in God or in
immortality: but they believed in reason as a Catholic believes in the
Pope, or as a fetish-worshiper believes in his idol. They never even
dreamed of discussing the matter. In vain did life contradict it; they
would rather have denied life. They had no psychology, no understanding
of Nature, or of the hidden forces, the roots of humanity, the "Spirit
of the Earth." They fashioned a scheme of life and nature that were
childish, silly, arbitrary figments. Some of them were cultured and
practical people who had seen and read much. But they never saw or read
anything as it actually was: they always reduced it to an abstraction.
They were poor-blooded: they had high moral qualities: but they were not
human enough: and that is the cardinal sin. Their purity of heart, which
was often very real, noble, and naive, sometimes comic, unfortunately,
in certain cases, became tragic: it made them hard in their dealings
with others, and produced in them a tranquil inhumanity, self-confident
and free from anger, which was quite appalling. How should they
hesitate? Had they not truth, right, virtue, on their side? Did they not
receive revelation direct from their hallowed reason? Reason is a hard
sun: it gives light, but it blinds. In that withering light, without
shade or mist, human beings grow pallid, the blood is sucked up from
their hearts.
Now, if there was one thing in the world that was utterly meaningless to
Christophe at that time it was reason. To his eyes its sun only lit up
the walls of the abyss, and neither showed him the means of escape nor
even enabled him to sound its depths.
As for the artistic world, Christophe had little opportunity and less
desire to mix with it. The musicians were for the most part worthy
conservatives of the neo-Schumann period and "Brahmins" of the type
against which Christophe had formerly broken many a lance. There were
two exceptions: Krebs, the organist, who kept a famous confectioner's
shop, an honest man and a good musician, who would have been an even
better one if, to adapt the quip of one of his fellow-countrymen, "he
had not been seated on a Pegasus which he overfed with hay,"--and a
young Jewish composer of an original talent, a man full of a vigorous
and turbid sap, who had a business in the Swiss trade: wood carvings,
chalets, and Berne bears. They were more independent than the others, no
doubt because they did not make a trade of their art, and they would
have been very glad to come in touch with Christophe: and at any other
time Christophe would have been interested to know them: but at this
period of his life, all artistic and human curiosity was blunted in him:
he was more conscious of the division between himself and other men than
of the bond of union.
His only friend, the confidant of his thoughts, was the river that ran
through the city--the same mighty fatherly river that washed the walls
of his native town up north. In the river Christophe could recover the
memory of his childish dreams.... But in his sorrow they took on, like
the Rhine itself, a darkling hue. In the dying day he would lean against
the parapet of the embankment and look down at the rushing river, the
fused and fusing, heavy, opaque, and hurrying mass, which was always
like a dream of the past, wherein nothing could be clearly seen but
great moving veils, thousands of streams, currents, eddies twisting into
form, then fading away: it was like the blurred procession of mental
images in a fevered mind: forever taking shape, forever melting away.
Over this twilight dream there skimmed phantom ferry-boats, like
coffins, with never a human form in them. Darker grew the night. The
river became bronze. The lights upon its banks made its armor shine with
an inky blackness, casting dim reflections, the coppery reflections of
the gas lamps, the moon-like reflections of the electric lights, the
blood-red reflections of the candles in the windows of the houses. The
river's murmur filled the darkness with its eternal muttering that was
far more sad than the monotony of the sea....
For hours together Christophe would stand drinking in the song of death
and weariness of life. Only with difficulty could he tear himself away:
then he would climb up to the house again, up the steep alleys with
their red steps, which were worn away in the middle: broken in soul and
body he would cling to the iron hand-rail fastened to the walls, which
gleamed under the light thrown down from the empty square on the hilltop
in front of the church that was shrouded in darkness....
He could not understand why men went on living. When he remembered the
struggles he had seen, he felt a bitter admiration for the undying faith
of humanity. Ideas succeeded the ideas most directly opposed to them,
reaction followed action:--democracy, aristocracy: socialism,
individualism: romanticism, classicism: progress, tradition:--and so on
to the end of time. Each new generation, consumed in its own heat in
less than ten years, believed steadfastly that it alone had reached the
zenith, and hurled its predecessors down and stoned them: each new
generation bestirred itself, and shouted, and took to itself the power
and the glory, only to be hurled down and stoned in turn by its
successors and so to disappear. Whose turn next?...
The composition of music was no longer a refuge for Christophe: it was
intermittent, irregular, aimless. Write? For whom? For men? He was
passing through an acute phase of misanthropy. For himself? He was only
too conscious of the vanity of art with its impotence to top the void of
death. Only now and then the blind force that was in him would raise him
on its mighty beating wing and then fall back, worn out by the effort.
He was like a storm cloud rumbling in the darkness. With Olivier gone,
he had nothing left. He hurled himself against everything that had
filled his life, against the feelings that he had thought to share with
others, against the thoughts which he had in imagination had in common
with the rest of humanity. It seemed to him now that he had been the
plaything of an illusion: the whole life of society was based upon a
colossal misunderstanding originating in speech. We imagine that one
man's thought can communicate with the thought of other men. In reality
the connection lies only in words. We say and hear words: not one word
has the same meaning in the mouths of two different men. Words outrun
the reality of life. We speak of love and hatred. There is neither love
nor hatred, friends nor enemies, no faith, no passion, neither good nor
evil. There are only cold reflections of the lights falling from
vanished suns, stars that have been dead for ages.... Friends? There is
no lack of people to claim that name. But what a stale reality is
represented by their friendship! What is friendship in the sense of the
everyday world? How many minutes of his life does he who thinks himself
a friend give to the pale memory of his friend? What would he sacrifice
to him, not of the things that are necessary, but of his superfluity,
his leisure, his waste time? What had Christophe sacrificed for
Olivier?--(For he made no exception in his own case: he excepted only
Olivier from the state of nothingness into which he cast all human
beings).--Art is no more true than love. What room does it really occupy
in life? With what sort of love do they love it, they who declare their
devotion to it?... The poverty of human feeling is inconceivable.
Outside the instincts of species, the cosmic force which is the lever of
the world, nothing exists save a scattered dust of emotion. The majority
of men have not vitality enough to give themselves wholly to any
passion. They spare themselves and save their force with cowardly
prudence. They are a little of everything and nothing absolutely. A man
who gives himself without counting the cost, to everything that he does,
everything that he suffers, everything that he loves, everything that he
hates, is a prodigy, the greatest that is granted to us here on earth.
Passion is like genius: a miracle, which is as much as to say that it
does not exist.
So thought Christophe: and life was on the verge of giving him the lie
in a terrible fashion. The miracle is everywhere, like fire in stone:
friction brings it forth. We have little notion of the demons who lie
slumbering within ourselves....
... _Pero non mi destar, deh! parla basso!_...
One evening when he was improvising at the piano, Anna got up and went
out, as she often did when Christophe was playing. Apparently his music
bored her. Christophe had ceased to notice it: he was indifferent to
anything she might think. He went on playing: then he had an idea which
he wished to write down, and stopped short and hurried up to his room
for the necessary paper. As he opened the door into the next room and,
with head down, rushed into the darkness, he bumped violently against a
figure standing motionless just inside. Anna.... The shock and the
surprise made her cry out. Christophe was anxious to know if he had hurt
her, and took her hands in his. Her hands were frozen. She seemed to
shiver,--no doubt from the shock. She muttered a vague explanation of
her presence there:
"I was looking in the dining-room...."
He did not hear what she was looking for: and perhaps she did not say
what it was. It seemed to him odd that she should go about looking for
something without a light. But he was used to Anna's singular ways and
paid no attention to it. An hour later he returned to the little parlor
where he used to spend the evening with Braun and Anna. He sat at the
table near the lamp, writing. Anna was on his right at the table,
sewing, with her head bent over her work. Behind them, in an armchair,
near the fire, Braun was reading a magazine. They were all three silent.
At intervals they could hear the pattering of the rain on the gravel in
the garden. To get away from her Christophe sat with his back turned to
Anna. Opposite him on the wall was a mirror which reflected the table,
the lamp, the two faces bending over their work. It seemed to Christophe
that Anna was looking at him. At first he did not pay much attention to
it; then, as he could not shake off the idea, he began to feel uneasy
and he looked up at the mirror and saw.... She was looking at him. And
in such a way! He was petrified with amazement, held his breath, watched
her. She did not know that he was watching her. The light of the lamp
was cast upon her pale face, the silent solemnity of which seemed now to
be fiercely concentrated. Her eyes--those strange eyes that he had never
been able squarely to see--were fixed upon him: they were dark blue,
with large pupils, and the expression in them was burning and hard: they
were fastened upon him, searching through him with dumb insistent ardor.
Her eyes? Could they be her eyes? He saw them and could not believe it.
Did he really see them? He turned suddenly.... Her eyes were lowered. He
tried to talk to her, to force her to look up at him. Impassively she
replied without raising her eyes from her work or from their refuge
behind the impenetrable shadow of her bluish eyelids with their short
thick lashes. If Christophe had not been quite positive of what he had
seen, he would have believed that he had been the victim of an illusion.
But he knew what he had seen, and he could not explain it away.
However, as his mind was engrossed in his work and he found Anna very
uninteresting, the strange impression made on him did not occupy him for
long.
A week later Christophe was trying over a song he had just composed, on
the piano. Braun, who had a mania, due partly to marital vanity and
partly to love of teasing, for worrying his wife to sing and play, had
been particularly insistent that evening. As a rule Anna only replied
with a curt "No"; after which she would not even trouble to reply to his
requests, entreaties, and pleasantries: she would press her lips
together and seem not to hear. On this occasion, to Braun's and
Christophe's astonishment, she folded up her work, got up, and went to
the piano. She sang the song which she had never even read. It was a
sort of miracle:--_the_ miracle. The deep tones of her voice bore
not the faintest resemblance to the rather raucous and husky voice in
which she spoke. With absolute sureness from the very first note,
without a shade of difficulty, without the smallest effort, she endued
the melody with a grandeur that was both moving and pure: and she rose
to an intensity of passion which made Christophe shiver: for it seemed
to him to be the very voice of his own heart. He looked at her in
amazement while she was singing, and at last, for the first time, he saw
her as she was. He saw her dark eyes in which there was kindled a light
of wildness, he saw her wide, passionate mouth with its clear-cut lips,
the voluptuous, rather heavy and cruel smile, her strong white teeth,
her beautiful strong hands, one of which was laid on the rack of the
piano, and the sturdy frame of her body cramped by her clothes,
emaciated by a life of economy and poverty, though it was easy to divine
the youth, the vigor, and the harmony, that were concealed by her gown.
She stopped singing, and went and sat down with her hands folded in her
lap. Braun complimented her: but to his way of thinking there had been a
lack of softness in her singing. Christophe said nothing. He sat
watching her. She smiled vaguely, knowing that he was looking at her.
All the evening there was a complete silence between them. She knew
quite well that she had risen above herself, or rather, that she had
been "herself," for the first time. And she could not understand why.
* * * * *
From that day on Christophe began to observe Anna closely. She had
relapsed into her sullenness, her cold indifference, and her mania for
work, which exasperated even her husband, while beneath it all she
lulled the obscure thoughts of her troubled nature. It was in vain that
Christophe watched her, he never found her anything but the stiff
ordinary woman of their first acquaintance. Sometimes she would sit lost
in thought, doing nothing, with her eyes staring straight in front of
her. They would leave her so, and come back a quarter of an hour later
and find her just the same: she would never stir. When her husband asked
her what she was thinking of, she would rouse herself from her torpor
and smile and say that she was thinking of nothing. And she spoke the
truth.
There was nothing capable of upsetting her equanimity. One day when she
was dressing, her spirit-lamp burst. In an instant Anna was a mass of
flames. The maid rushed away screaming for help. Braun lost his head,
flung himself about, shouted and yelled, and almost fell ill. Anna tore
away the hooks of her dressing-gown, slipped off her skirt just as it
was beginning to burn, and stamped on it. When Christophe ran in
excitedly with a water-bottle which he had blindly seized, he found Anna
standing on a chair, in her petticoat with her arms bare, calmly putting
out the burning curtains with her hands. She got burnt, said nothing
about it, and only seemed to be put out at being seen in such a costume.
She blushed, awkwardly covered her shoulders with her arms, and with an
air of offended dignity ran away into the next room. Christophe admired
her calmness: but he could not tell whether it proved her courage or her
insensibility. He was inclined to the latter explanation. Indeed, Anna
seemed to take no interest in anything, or in other people, or in
herself. Christophe doubted even whether she had a heart.
He had no doubt at all after a little scene which he happened to
witness. Anna had a little black dog, with intelligent soft eyes, which
was the spoiled darling of the household. Braun adored it. Christophe
used to take it to his room when he shut himself up to work; and often,
when the door was closed, instead of working, he would play with it.
When he went out, the dog was always waiting for him at the door,
looking out for him, to follow at his heels: for he always wanted a
companion in his walks. She would run in front of him, pattering along
with her little paws moving so fast that they seemed to fly. Every now
and then she would stop in pride at walking faster than he: and she
would look at him and draw herself up archly. She used to beg, and bark
furiously at a piece of wood: but directly she saw another dog in the
distance she would tear away as fast as she could and tremblingly take
refuge between Christophe's legs. Christophe loved her and used to laugh
at her. Since he had held aloof from men he had come nearer to the
brutes: he found them pitiful and touching. The poor beasts surrender
with such absolute confidence to those who are kind to them! Man is so
much the master of their life and death that those who are cruel to the
weak creatures delivered into their hands are guilty of an abominable
abuse of power.