took his hat and cloak, and went out. In the passage, near the door of
Anna's room, he hurried forward in a spasm of fear. Downstairs he
glanced for the last time into the empty garden. He crept away like a
thief in the night. An icy mist pricked his face and hands. Christophe
skirted the walls of the houses, dreading a meeting with any one he
knew. He went to the station, and got into a train which was just
starting for Lucerne. At the first stopping-place he wrote to Braun. He
said that he had been called away from the town on urgent business for a
few days, and that he was very sorry to have to leave him at such a
time: he begged him to send him news, and gave him an address. At
Lucerne he took the St. Gothard train. Late at night he got out at a
little station between Altorf and Goeschenen. He did not know the name,
never knew it. He went into the nearest inn by the station. The road was
filled with pools of water. It was raining in torrents: it rained all
night and all next day. The water was rushing and roaring like a
cataract from a broken gutter. Sky and earth were drowned, seemingly
dissolved and melted like his own mind. He went to bed between damp
sheets which smelt of railway smoke. He could not lie still. The idea of
the danger hanging over Anna was too much in his mind for him to feel
his own suffering as yet. Somehow he must avert public malignity from
her, somehow turn it aside upon another track. In his feverish condition
a queer idea came to him: he decided to write to one of the few
musicians with whom he had been acquainted in the little town, Krebs,
the confectioner-organist. He gave him to understand that he was off to
Italy upon an affair of the heart, that he had been possessed by the
passion when he first took up his abode with the Brauns, and that he had
tried to shake free of it, but it had been too strong for him. He put
the whole thing clearly enough for Krebs to understand, and yet so
veiled as to enable him to improve on it as he liked. Christophe
implored Krebs to keep his secret. He knew that the good little man
simply could not keep anything to himself, and--quite rightly--he
reckoned on Krebs hastening to spread the news as soon as it came into
his hands. To make sure of hoodwinking the gossips of the town
Christophe closed his letter with a few cold remarks about Braun and
about Anna's illness.
He spent the rest of the night and the next day absorbed by his fixed
Idea.... Anna.... Anna.... He lived through the last few months with
her, day by day: he did not see her as she was, but enveloped her with a
passionate atmosphere of illusion. From the very beginning he had
created her in the image of his own desire, and given her a moral
grandeur, a tragic consciousness which he needed to heighten his love
for her. These lies of passion gained in intensity of conviction now
that they were beyond the control of Anna's presence. He saw in her a
healthy free nature, oppressed, struggling to shake off its fetters,
reaching upwards to a wider life of liberty in the open air of the soul,
and then, fearful of it, struggling against her dreams, wrestling with
them, because they could not be brought into line with her destiny, and
made it only the more sorrowful and wretched. She cried to him: "Help
me." He saw once more her beautiful body, clasped it to him. His
memories tortured him: he took a savage delight in mortifying the wounds
they dealt him. As the day crept on, the feeling of all that he had lost
became so frightful that he could not breathe.
Without knowing what he was doing, he got up, went out, paid his bill,
and took the first train back to the town in which Anna lived. He
arrived in the middle of the night: he went straight to the house. There
was a wall between the alley and the garden next to Braun's. Christophe
climbed the wall, jumped down into the next-door garden, and then into
Braun's. He stood outside the house. It was in darkness save for a
night-light which cast a yellow glow upon a window--the window of Anna's
room. Anna was there. She was suffering. He had only to make one stride
to enter. He laid his hand on the handle of the door. Then he looked at
his hand, the door, the garden: suddenly he realized what he was doing:
and, breaking free of the hallucination which had been upon him for the
last seven or eight hours, he groaned, wrenched free of the inertia
which held him riveted to the ground whereon he stood, ran to the wall,
scaled it, and fled.
That same night he left the town for the second time: and next day he
went and buried himself in a mountain village, hidden from the world by
driving blizzards.--There he would bury his heart, stupefy his thoughts,
and forget, and forget!...
--"_Éperò leva su, vinci l'ambascia
Con l'animo che vinea ogni battaglia,
Se col suo grave corpo non s'accascia.
"Leva'mi allor, mostrandomi fornito
Meglio di lena ch'io non mi sentía;
E dissi: 'Va, ch'io son forte edardito._'"
INF. XXIV.
Oh! God, what have I done to Thee? Why dost Thou overwhelm me? Since I
was a little child Thou hast appointed misery and conflict to be my lot.
I have struggled without complaint. I have loved my misery. I have tried
to preserve the purity of the soul Thou gavest me, to defend the fire
which Thou hast kindled in me.... Lord, it is Thou, it is Thou who art
so furious to destroy what Thou hast created. Thou hast put out the
fire, Thou hast besmirched my soul. Thou hast despoiled me of all that
gave me life. I had but two treasurable things in the world: my friend
and my soul. Now I have nothing, for Thou hast taken everything from me.
One only creature was mine in the wilderness of the world: Thou hast
taken him from me. Our hearts were one. Thou hast torn them asunder:
Thou hast made us know the sweetness of being together only to make us
know the horror of being lost to each other. Thou hast created emptiness
all about me. Thou hast created emptiness within me. I was broken and
sick, unarmed and robbed of my will. Thou hast chosen that hour to
strike me down. Thou hast come stealthily with silent feet from behind
treacherously, and Thou hast stabbed me: Thou hast let loose upon me Thy
fierce dogs of passion; I was weak, and Thou knewest it, and I could not
struggle: passion has laid me low, and thrown me into confusion, and
befouled me, and destroyed all that I had.... I am left only in
self-disgust. If I could only cry aloud my grief and my shame! or forget
them in the rushing stream of creative force! But my strength is broken,
and my creative power is withered up. I am like a dead tree.... Would I
were dead! O God, deliver me, break my body and my soul, tear me from
this earth, leave me not to struggle blindly in the pit, leave me not in
this endless agony! I cry for mercy.... Lord, make an end!
* * * * *
So in his sorrow Christophe cried upon a God in whom his reason did not
believe.
* * * * *
He had taken refuge in a lonely farm in the Swiss Jura Mountains. The
house was built in the woods tucked away in the folds of a high humpy
plateau. It was protected from the north winds by crags and boulders. In
front of it lay a wide stretch of fields, and long wooded slopes: the
rock suddenly came to an end in a sheer precipice: twisted pines hung on
the edge of it; behind were wide-spreading beeches. The sky was blotted
out. There was no sign of life. A wide stretch of country with all its
lines erased. The whole place lay sleeping under the snow. Only at night
in the forest foxes barked. It was the end of the winter. Slow dragging
winter. Interminable winter. When it seemed like to break up, snow would
fall once more, and it would begin again.
However, for a week now the old slumbering earth had felt its heart slow
beating to new birth. The first deceptive breath of spring crept into
the air and beneath the frozen crust. From the branches of the
beech-trees, stretched out like soaring wings, the snow melted. Already
through the white cloak of the fields there peered a few thin blades of
grass of tender green: around their sharp needles, through the gaps in
the snow, like so many little mouths, the dank black earth was
breathing. For a few hours every day the voice of the waters, sleeping
beneath their robe of ice, murmured. In the skeleton woods a few birds
piped their shrill clear song.
Christophe noticed nothing. All things were the same to him. He paced up
and down, up and down his room. Or be would walk outside. He could not
keep still. His soul was torn in pieces by inward demons. They fell upon
and rent each other. His suppressed passion never left off beating
furiously against the walls of the house of its captivity. His disgust
with passion was no less furiously in revolt: passion and disgust flew
at each other's throats, and, in their conflict, they lacerated his
heart. And at the same time he was delivered up to the memory of
Olivier, despair at his death, the hunger to create which nothing could
satisfy, and pride rearing on the edge of the abyss of nothingness. He
was a prey to all devils. He had no moment of respite. Or, if there came
a seeming calm, if the rushing waves did fall back for a moment, it was
only that he might find himself alone, and nothing in himself: thought,
love, will, all had been done to death.
To create! That was the only loophole. To abandon the wreck of his life
to the mercy of the waves! To save himself by swimming in the dreams of
art!... To create! He tried.... He could not.
Christophe had never had any method of working. When he was strong and
well he had always rather suffered from his superabundance than been
disturbed at seeing it diminish: he followed his whim: he used to work
first as the fancy took him, as circumstances chanced, with no fixed
rule. As a matter of fact, he was always working everywhere: his brain
was always busy. Often and often Olivier, who was less richly endowed
and more reflective, had warned him:
"Take care. You are trusting too much to your force. It is a mountain
torrent. Full to-day, perhaps dry to-morrow. An artist must coax his
genius: he must not let it scatter itself at random. Turn your force
into a channel. Train yourself in habits of mind and a healthy system of
daily work, at fixed hours. They are as necessary to the artist as the
practice of military movements and steps to a man who is to go into
battle. When moments of crisis come--(and they always do come)--the
bracing of steel prevents the soul from destruction. I know. It is just
that that has saved me from death."
But Christophe used to laugh and say:
"That's all right for you, my boy I There's no danger of my losing my
taste for life. My appetite's too good."
Olivier would shrug his shoulders:
"Too much ends in too little. There are no worse invalids than the men
who have always had too much health."
And now Olivier's words had come true. After the death of his friend the
source of his inward life had not all at once dried up: but it had
become strangely intermittent: it flowed in sudden gushes, then stopped,
then disappeared under the earth. Christophe had paid no heed to it:
what did it matter to him? His grief and his budding passion had
absorbed his mind.--But after the storm had passed, when once more he,
turned to the fountain to drink, he could find no trace of it. All was
barren. Not a trickle of water. His soul was dried up. In vain did he
try to dig down into the sand, and force the water up from the
subterranean wells, and create at all costs: the machine of his mind
refused to obey. He could not invoke the aid of habit, the faithful
ally, which, when we have lost every reason for living, alone, constant
and firmly loyal, stays with us, and speaks no word, and makes no sign,
but with eyes fixed, and silent lips, with its sure unwavering hand
leads us by the hand through the dangerous chasm until the light of day
and the joy of life return. Christophe was helpless: and his hand could
find no guiding hand in the darkness. He could not find his way back to
the light of day.
It was the supreme test. Then he felt that he was on the verge of
madness. Sometimes he would wage an absurd and crazy battle with his own
brain, maniacal obsessions, a nightmare of numbers: he would count the
boards on the floor, the trees in the forest: figures and chords, the
choice of which was beyond his reason. Sometimes he would lie in a state
of prostration, like one dead.
Nobody worried about him. He lived apart in one wing of the house. He
tidied his own room--or left it undone, every day. His meals were laid
for him downstairs: he never saw a human face. His host, an old peasant,
a taciturn, selfish creature, took no interest in him. Whether
Christophe ate or did not eat was his affair. He hardly ever noticed
whether Christophe came in at night. Once he was lost in the forest,
buried up to his hips in the snow: he was very near never returning. He
tried to wear himself out to keep himself from thinking. He could not
succeed. Only now and then could he snatch a few hours of troubled
sleep.
Only one living creature seemed to take any notice of his existence:
this was an old St. Bernard, who used to come and lay his big head with
its mournful eyes on Christophe's knees when Christophe was sitting on
the seat in front of the house. They would look long at each other.
Christophe would not drive him away. Unlike the sick Goethe, the dog's
eyes had no uneasiness for him. Unlike him, he had no desire to cry:
"Go away!... Thou goblin, thou shalt not catch me, whatever thou doest!"
He asked nothing better than to be engrossed by the dog's suppliant
sleepy eyes and to help the beast: he felt that there must be behind
them an imprisoned soul imploring his aid.
In those hours when he was weak with suffering, torn alive away from
life, devoid of human egoism, he saw the victims of men, the field of
battle in which man triumphed in the bloody slaughter of all other
creatures: and his heart was filled with pity and horror. Even in the
days when he had been happy he had always loved the beasts: he had never
been able to bear cruelty towards them: he had always had a detestation
of sport, which he had never dared to express for fear of ridicule:
perhaps even he had never dared to admit it to himself: but his feeling
of repulsion had been the secret cause of the apparently inexplicable
feeling of dislike he had had for certain men: he had never been able to
admit to his friendship a man who could kill an animal for pleasure. It
was not sentimentality: no one knew better than he that life is based on
suffering and infinite cruelty: no man can live without making others
suffer. It is no use closing our eyes and fobbing ourselves off with
words. It is no use either coming to the conclusion that we must
renounce life and sniveling like children. No. We must kill to live, if,
at the time, there is no other means of living. But the man who kills
for the sake of killing is a miscreant. An unconscious miscreant, I
know. But, all the same, a miscreant. The continual endeavor of man
should be to lessen the sum of suffering and cruelty: that is the first
duty of humanity.
In ordinary life those ideas remained buried in Christophe's inmost heart.
He refused to think of them. What was the good? What could he do?
He had to be Christophe, he had to accomplish his work, live at all
costs, live at the cost of the weak.... It was not he who had made the
universe.... Better not think of it, better not think of it.... But when
unhappiness had dragged him down, him, too, to the level of the
vanquished, he had to think of these things Only a little while ago he
had blamed Olivier for plunging into futile remorse and vain compassion
for all the wretchedness that men suffer and inflict. Now he went even
farther: with all the vehemence of his mighty nature he probed to the
depths of the tragedy of the universe: he suffered all the sufferings of
the world, and was left raw and bleeding. He could not think of the
animals without shuddering in anguish. He looked into the eyes of the
beasts and saw there a soul like his own, a soul which could not speak;
but the eyes cried for it:
"What have I done to you? Why do you hurt me?"
He could not bear to see the most ordinary sights that he had seen
hundreds of times--a calf crying in a wicker pen, with its big,
protruding eyes, with their bluish whites and pink lids, and white
lashes, its curly white tufts on its forehead, its purple snout, its
knock-kneed legs:--a lamb being carried by a peasant with its four legs
tied together, hanging head down, trying to hold its head up, moaning
like a child, bleating and lolling its gray tongue:--fowls huddled
together in a basket:--the distant squeals of a pig being bled to
death:--a fish being cleaned on the kitchen-table.... The nameless
tortures which men inflict on such innocent creatures made his heart
ache. Grant animals a ray of reason, imagine what a frightful nightmare
the world is to them: a dream of cold-blooded men, blind and deaf,
cutting their throats, slitting them open, gutting them, cutting them
into pieces, cooking them alive, sometimes laughing at them and their
contortions as they writhe in agony. Is there anything more atrocious
among the cannibals of Africa? To a man whose mind is free there is
something even more intolerable in the sufferings of animals than in the
sufferings of men. For with the latter it is at least admitted that
suffering is evil and that the man who causes it is a criminal. But
thousands of animals are uselessly butchered every day without a shadow
of remorse. If any man were to refer to it, he would be thought
ridiculous.--And that is the unpardonable crime. That alone is the
justification of all that men may suffer. It cries vengeance upon all
the human race. If God exists and tolerates it, it cries vengeance upon
God. If there exists a good God, then even the most humble of living
things must be saved. If God is good only to the strong, if there is no
justice for the weak and lowly, for the poor creatures who are offered
up as a sacrifice to humanity, then there is no such thing as goodness,
no such thing as justice....
Alas! The slaughter accomplished by man is so small a thing of itself in
the carnage of the universe! The animals devour each other. The peaceful
plants, the silent trees, are ferocious beasts one to another. The
serenity of the forests is only a commonplace of easy rhetoric for the
literary men who only know Nature through their books!... In the forest
hard by, a few yards away from the house, there were frightful struggles
always toward. The murderous beeches flung themselves upon the pines
with their lovely pinkish stems, hemmed in their slenderness with
antique columns, and stifled them. They rushed down upon the oaks and
smashed them, and made themselves crutches of them. The beeches were
like Briareus with his hundred arms, ten trees in one tree! They dealt
death all about them. And when, failing foes, they came together, they
became entangled, piercing, cleaving, twining round each other like
antediluvian monsters. Lower down, in the forest, the acacias had left
the outskirts and plunged into the thick of it and attacked the
pinewoods, strangling and tearing up the roots of their foes, poisoning
them with their secretions. It was a struggle to the death in which the
victors at once took possession of the room and the spoils of the
vanquished. Then the smaller monsters would finish the work of the
great. Fungi, growing between the roots, would suck at the sick tree,
and gradually empty it of its vitality. Black ants would grind exceeding
small the rotting wood. Millions of invisible insects were gnawing,
boring, reducing to dust what had once been life.... And the silence of
the struggle!... Oh! the peace of Nature, the tragic mask that covers
the sorrowful and cruel face of Life! Christophe was going down and
down. But he was not the kind of man to let himself drown without a
struggle, with his arms held close to his sides. In vain did he wish to
die: he did everything in his power to remain alive. He was one of those
men of whom Mozart said: _"They must act until at last they have no
means of action."_ He felt that he was sinking, and in his fall he
cast about, striking out with his arms to right and left, for some
support to which to cling. It seemed to him that he had found it. He had
just remembered Olivier's little boy. At once he turned on him all his
desire for life: he clung to him desperately. Yes: he must go and find
him, claim him, bring him up, love him, take the place of his father,
bring Olivier to life again in his son. Why had he not thought of it in
the selfishness of his sorrow? He wrote to Cécile, who had charge of the
boy. He waited feverishly for her reply. His whole being was bent upon
the one thought. He forced himself to be calm: he still had reason for
hope. He was quite confident about it: he knew how kind Cécile was.
Her answer came. Cécile said that three months after Olivier's death, a
lady in black had come to her house and said:
"Give me back my child!"
It was Jacqueline, who had deserted her child and Olivier,--Jacqueline,
but so changed that she had hardly recognized her. Her mad love affair
had not lasted. She had wearied of her lover more quickly than her lover
had done of her. She had come back broken, disgusted, aged. The too
flagrant scandal of her adventure had closed many doors to her. The
least scrupulous had not been the least severe. Even her mother had been
so offensive and so contemptuous that Jacqueline had found it impossible
to stay with her. She had seen through and through the world's
hypocrisy. Olivier's death had been the last blow. She seemed so utterly
sorrowful that Cécile had not thought it right to refuse to let her have
her boy. It was hard for her to have to give up the little creature,
whom she had grown so used to regarding as her own. But how could she
make things even harder for a woman who had more right than herself, a
woman who was further more unhappy? She had wanted to write to
Christophe to ask his advice. But Christophe had never answered the
letters she had written him, she did not know his address, she did not
even know whether he was alive or dead.... Joy comes and goes. What
could she do? Only resign herself to the inevitable. The main thing was
for the child to be happy and to be loved....
The letter reached him in the evening. A belated gust of winter brought
back the snow. It fell all night. In the forest, where already the young
leaves had appeared, the trees cracked and split beneath the weight of
it. They went off like a battery of artillery. Alone in his room,
without a light, surrounded only by the phosphorescent darkness,
Christophe sat listening to the tragic sounds of the forest, and started
at every crack: and he was like one of the trees bending beneath its
load and snapping. He said to himself:
"Now the end has come."
Night passed. Day came. The tree was not broken. All through the new day
and the following night the tree went on bending and cracking: but it
did not break. Christophe had no reason for living left: and he went on
living. He had no motive for struggling; and he struggled, body to body,
foot to foot, with the invisible enemy who was bending his back. He was
like Jacob with the angel. He expected nothing from the fight, he
expected nothing now but the end, rest; and he went on fighting. And he
cried aloud:
"Break me and have done! Why dost thou not throw me down?"
* * * * *
Days passed. Christophe issued from the fight, utterly lifeless. Yet he
would not lie down, and insisted on going out and walking. Happy are
those men who are sustained by the fortitude of their race in the hours
of eclipse of their lives! Though the body of the son was near
breaking-point, the strength of the father and the grandfather held him
up: the energy and impetus of his robust ancestors sustained his broken
soul, like a dead knight being carried along by his horse.
* * * * *