Jean-Christophe In Paris — ANTOINETTE, I, part 7
* * * * * Olivier had reached the end of his schooldays.
The examinations for the _École Normale_ were over.
It was quite time.
Antoinette was very tired.
She was counting on his success: her brother had everything in his favor.
At school he was regarded as one of the best pupils: and all his masters were agreed in praising his industry and intelligence, except for a certain want of mental discipline which made it difficult for him to bend to any sort of plan.
But the responsibility of it weighed on Olivier so heavily that he lost his head as the examination came near.
He was worn out, and paralyzed by the fear of failure, and a morbid shyness that crept over him.
He trembled at the thought of appearing before the examiners in public.
He had always suffered from shyness: in class he would blush and choke when he had to speak: at first he could hardly do more than answer his name.
And it was much more easy for him to reply impromptu than when he knew that he was going to be questioned: the thought of it made him ill: his mind rushed ahead picturing every detail of the ordeal as it would happen: and the longer he had to wait, the more he was obsessed by it.
It might be said that he passed every examination at least twice: for he passed it in his dreams on the night before and expended all his energy, so that he had none left for the real examination.
But he did not even reach the _viva voce_, the very thought of which had sent him into a cold sweat the night before.
In the written examination on a philosophical subject, which at any ordinary time would have sent him flying off, he could not even manage to squeeze out a couple of pages in six hours.
For the first few hours his brain was empty; he could think of nothing, nothing.
It was like a blank wall against which he hurled himself in vain.
Then, an hour before the end, the wall was rent and a few rays of light shone through the crevices.
He wrote an excellent short essay, but it was not enough to place him.
When Antoinette saw the despair on his face as he came out, she foresaw the inevitable blow, and she was as despairing as he: but she did not show it.
Even in the most desperate situations she had always an inexhaustible capacity for hope.
Olivier was rejected.
He was crushed by it.
Antoinette pretended to smile as though it were nothing of any importance: but her lips trembled.
She consoled her brother, and told him that it was an easily remedied misfortune, and that he would be certain to pass next year, and win a better place.
She did not tell him how vital it was to her that he should have passed, that year, or how utterly worn out she felt in soul and body, or how uneasy she felt about fighting through another year like that.
But she had to go on.
If she were to go away before Olivier had passed he would never have the courage to go on fighting alone: he would succumb.
She concealed her weariness from him, and even redoubled her efforts.
She wore herself to skin and bone to let him have amusement and change during the holidays so that he might resume work with greater energy and confidence.
But at the very outset her small savings had to be broken into, and, to make matters worse, she lost some of her most profitable pupils.
Another year!...
Within sight of the final ordeal they were almost at breaking-point.
Above all, they had to live, and discover some other means of scraping along.
Antoinette accepted a situation as a governess in Germany which had been offered her through the Nathans.
It was the very last thing she would have thought of, but nothing else offered at the time, and she could not wait.
She had never left her brother for a single day during the last six years: and she could not imagine what life would be like without seeing and hearing him from day to day.
Olivier was terrified when he thought of it: but he dared not say anything: it was he who had brought it about: if he had passed Antoinette would not have been reduced to such an extremity: he had no right to say anything, or to take into account his own grief at the parting: it was for her to decide.
They spent the last days together in dumb anguish, as though one of them were about to die: they hid away from each other when their sorrow was too much for them.
Antoinette gazed into Olivier's eyes for counsel.
If he had said to her: "Don't go!"
she would have stayed, although she had to go.
Up to the very last moment, in the cab in which they drove to the station, she was prepared to break her resolution: she felt that she could never go through with it.
At a word from him one word!...
But he said nothing.
Like her, he set his teeth and would not budge.
--She made him promise to write to her every day, and to conceal nothing from her, and to send for her if he were ever in the least danger.
* * * * * They parted.
While Olivier returned with a heavy heart to his school, where it had been agreed that he should board, the train carried Antoinette, crushed and sorrowful, towards Germany.
Lying awake and staring through the night they felt the minutes dragging them farther and farther apart, and they called to each other in whispering voices.
Antoinette was fearful of the new world to which she was going.
She had changed much in six years.
She who had once been so bold and afraid of nothing had grown so used to silence and isolation that it hurt her to go out into the world again.
The laughing, gay, chattering Antoinette of the old happy times had passed away with them.
Unhappiness had made her sensitive and shy.
No doubt living with Olivier had infected her with his timidity.
She had had hardly anybody to talk to except her brother.
She was scared by the least little thing, and was really in a panic when she had to pay a call.
And so it was a nervous torture to her to think that she was now going to live among strangers, to have to talk to them, to be always with them.
The poor girl had no more real vocation for teaching than her brother: she did her work conscientiously, but her heart was not in it, and she had not the support of feeling that there was any use in it.
She was made to love and not to teach.
And no one cared for her love.
* * * * * Nowhere was her capacity for love less in demand than in her new situation in Germany.
The Grünebaums, whose children she was engaged to teach French, took not the slightest interest in her.
They were haughty and familiar, indifferent and indiscreet: they paid fairly well: and, as a result, they regarded everybody in their payment as being under an obligation to them, and thought they could do just as they liked.
They treated Antoinette as a superior sort of servant and allowed her hardly any liberty.
She did not even have a room to herself: she slept in a room adjoining that of the children and had to leave the door open all night.
She was never alone.
They had no respect for her need of taking refuge every now and then within herself--the sacred right of every human being to preserve an inner sanctuary of solitude.
The only happiness she had lay in correspondence and communion with her brother: she made use of every moment of liberty she could snatch.
But even that was encroached upon.
As soon as she began to write they would prowl about in her room and ask her what she was writing.
When she was reading a letter they would ask her what was in it: by their persistent impertinent curiosity they found out about her "little brother."
She had to hide from them.
Too shameful sometimes were the expedients to which she had to resort, and the holes and crannies in which she had to hide, in order to be able to read Olivier's letters unobserved.
If she left a letter lying in her room she was sure it would be read: and as she had nothing she could lock except her box, she had to carry any papers she did not want to have read about with her: they were always prying into her business and her intimate affairs, and they were always fishing for her secret thoughts.
It was not that the Grünebaums were really interested in her, only they thought that, as they paid her, she was their property.
They were not malicious about it: indiscretion was with them an incurable habit: they were never offended with each other.
Nothing could have been more intolerable to Antoinette than such espionage, such a lack of moral modesty, which made it impossible for her to escape even for an hour a day from their curiosity.
The Grünebaums were hurt by the haughty reserve with which she treated them.
Naturally they found highly moral reasons to justify their vulgar curiosity, and to condemn Antoinette's desire to be immune from it.
"It was their duty," they thought, "to know the private life of a girl living under their roof, as a member of their household, to whom they had intrusted the education of their children: they were responsible for her."
--(That is the sort of thing that so many mistresses say of their servants, mistresses whose "responsibility" does not go so far as to spare the unhappy girls any fatigue or work that must revolt them, but is entirely limited to denying them every sort of pleasure.
)--"And that Antoinette should refuse to acknowledge that duty, imposed on them by conscience, could only show," they concluded, "that she was conscious of being not altogether beyond reproach: an honest girl has nothing to conceal."
So Antoinette lived under a perpetual persecution, against which she was always on her guard, so that it made her seem even more cold and reserved than she was.
Every day her brother wrote her a twelve-page letter: and she contrived to write to him every day even if it were only a few lines.
Olivier tried hard to be brave and not to show his grief too clearly.
But he was bored and dull.
His life had always been so bound up with his sister's that, now that she was torn from him, he seemed to have lost part of himself: he could not use his arms, or his legs, or his brains, he could not walk, or play the piano, or work, or do anything, not even dream--except through her.
He slaved away at his books from morning to night: but it was no good: his thoughts were elsewhere: he would be suffering, or thinking of her, or of the morrow's letter: he would sit staring at the clock, waiting for the day's letter: and when it arrived his fingers would tremble with joy--with fear, too--as he tore open the envelope.
Never did lover tremble with more tenderness and anxiety at a letter from his mistress.
He would hide away, like Antoinette, to read his letters: he would carry them about with him: and at night he always had the last letter under his pillow, and he would touch it from time to time to make sure that it was still there, during the long, sleepless nights when he lay awake dreaming of his dear sister.
How far removed from her he felt!
He felt that most dreadfully when Antoinette's letters were delayed by the post and came a day late.
Two days, two nights, between them!...
He exaggerated the time and the distance because he had never traveled.
His imagination would take fire: "Heavens!
If she were to fall ill!
There would be time for her to die before he could see her ...
Why had she not written to him, just a line or two, the day before?...
Was she ill?...
Yes.
She was surely ill ..."
He would choke.
--More often still he would be terrified of dying away from her, dying alone, among people who did not care, in the horrible school, in grim, gray Paris.
He would make himself ill with the thought of it....
"Should he write and tell her to come back?"
--But then he would be ashamed of his cowardice.
Besides, as soon as he began to write to her it gave him such joy to be in communion with her that for a moment he would forget his suffering.
It seemed to him that he could see her, hear her voice: he would tell her everything: never had he spoken to her so intimately, so passionately, when they had been together: he would call her "my true, brave, dear, kind, beloved, little sister," and say, "I love you so."
Indeed they were real love-letters.
Their tenderness was sweet and comforting to Antoinette: they were all the air she had to breathe.
If they did not come in the morning at the usual time she would be miserable.
Once or twice it happened that the Grünebaums, from carelessness, or--who knows?
--from a wicked desire to tease, forgot to give them to her until the evening, and once even until the next morning: and she worked herself into a fever.
--On New Year's Day they had the same idea, without telling each other: they planned a surprise, and each sent a long telegram--(at vast expense)--and their messages arrived at the same time.
--Olivier always consulted Antoinette about his work and his troubles: Antoinette gave him advice, and encouragement, and fortified him with her strength, though indeed she had not really enough for herself.
She was stifled in the foreign country, where she knew nobody, and nobody was interested in her, except the wife of a professor, lately come to the town, who also felt out of her element.
The good creature was kind and motherly, and sympathetic with the brother and sister who loved each other so and had to live apart--(for she had dragged part of her story out of Antoinette):--but she was so noisy, so commonplace, she was so lacking--though quite innocently--in tact and discretion that aristocratic little Antoinette was irritated and drew back.
She had no one in whom she could confide and so all her troubles were pent up, and weighed heavily upon her: sometimes she thought she must give way under them: but she set her teeth and struggled on.
Her health suffered: she grew very thin.
Her brother's letters became more and more downhearted.
In a fit of depression he wrote: "Come back, come back, come back!..."
But he had hardly sent the letter off than he was ashamed of it and wrote another begging Antoinette to tear up the first and give no further thought to it.
He even pretended to be in good spirits and not to be wanting his sister.
It hurt his umbrageous vanity to think that he might seem incapable of doing without her.
Antoinette was not deceived: she read his every thought: but she did not know what to do.
One day she almost went to him: she went to the station to find out what time the train left for Paris.
And then she said to herself that it was madness: the money she was earning was enough to pay for Olivier's board: they must hold on as long as they could.
She was not strong enough to make up her mind: in the morning her courage would spring forth again: but as the day dragged towards evening her strength would fail her and she would think of flying to him.
She was homesick,--longing for the country that had treated her so hardly, the country that enshrined all the relics of her past life,--and she was aching to hear the language that her brother spoke, the language in which she told her love for him.
Then it was that a company of French actors passed through the little German town.
Antoinette, who rarely visited the theater--(she had neither time nor taste for it)--was seized with an irresistible longing to hear her own language spoken, to take refuge in France.
The rest is known.
[Footnote: See _Jean-Christophe_--I, "Revolt."
] There were no seats left in the theater: she met the young musician, Jean-Christophe, whom she did not know, and he, seeing her disappointment, offered to share with her a box which he had to give away: in her confusion she accepted.
Her presence with Christophe set tongues wagging in the little town: and the malicious rumors came at once to the ears of the Grünebaums, who, being already inclined to believe anything ill of the young Frenchwoman, and furious with Christophe as a result of certain events which have been narrated elsewhere, dismissed Antoinette without more ado.
She, who was so chaste and modest, she, whose whole life had been absorbed by her love for her brother and never yet had been besmirched with one thought of evil, nearly died of shame, when she understood the nature of the charge against her.
Not for one moment was she resentful against Christophe.
She knew that he was as innocent as she, and that, if he had injured her, he had meant only to be kind: she was grateful to him.
She knew nothing of him, save that he was a musician, and that he was much maligned: but, in her ignorance of life and men, she had a natural intuition about people, which unhappiness had sharpened, and in her queer, boorish companion she had recognized a quality of candor equal to her own, and a sturdy kindness, the mere memory of which was comforting and good to think on.
The evil she had heard of him did not at all affect the confidence which Christophe had inspired in her.
Being herself a victim she had no doubt that he was in the same plight, suffering, as she did, though for a longer time, from the malevolence of the townspeople who insulted him.
And as she always forgot herself in the thought of others the idea of what Christophe must have suffered distracted her mind a little from her own torment.
Nothing in the world could have induced her to try to see him again, or to write to him: her modesty and pride forbade it.
She told herself that he did not know the harm he had done, and, in her gentleness, she hoped that he would never know it.
She left Germany.
An hour away from the town it chanced that the train in which she was traveling passed the train by which Christophe was returning from a neighboring town where he had been spending the day.
For a few minutes their carriages stopped opposite each other, and in the silence of the night they saw each other, but did not speak.
What could they have said save a few trivial words?
That would have been a profanation of the indefinable feeling of common pity and mysterious sympathy which had sprung up in them, and was based on nothing save the sureness of their inward vision.
During those last moments, when, still strangers, they gazed into each other's eyes, they saw in each other things which never had appeared to any other soul among the people with whom they lived.
Everything must pass: the memory of words, kisses, passionate embraces: but the contact of souls, which have once met and hailed each other and the throng of passing shapes, that never can be blotted out.
Antoinette bore it with her in the innermost recesses of her heart--that poor heart, so swathed about with sorrow and sad thoughts, from out the midst of which there smiled a misty light, which seemed to steal sweetly from the earth, a pale and tender light like that which floods the Elysian Shades of Gluck.
