Jean-Christophe In Paris — THE HOUSE, I, part 4

* * * * * Gradually Christophe grew accustomed to the air of boundless liberty.

From the lofty heights of French thought, where those minds dream that are all light, he looked down upon the slopes of the mountain at his feet, where the heroic elect, fighting for a living faith, whatever faith it be, struggle eternally to reach the summit:--those who wage the holy war against ignorance, disease, and poverty: the fever of invention, the mental delirium of the modern Prometheus and Icarus conquering the light and marking out roads in the air: the Titanic struggle between Science and Nature, being tamed;--lower down, the little silent band, the men and women of good faith, those brave and humble hearts, who, after a thousand efforts, have climbed half-way, and can climb no farther, being held bound in a dull and difficult existence, while in secret they burn away in obscure devotion:--lower still, at the foot of the mountain, in a narrow gorge between rocky crags, the endless battle, the fanatics of abstract ideas and blind instincts, fiercely wrestling, with never a suspicion that there may be something beyond, above the wall of rocks which hems them in:--still lower, swamps and brutish beasts wallowing in the mire.

--And everywhere, scattered about the sides of the mountain, the fresh flowers of art, the scented strawberry-plants of music, the song of the streams and the poet birds.

And Christophe asked Olivier: "Where are your people?

I see only the elect, all sorts, good and bad."

Olivier replied: "The people?

They are tending their gardens.

They never bother about us.

Every group and faction among the elect strives to engage their attention.

They pay no heed to any one.

There was a time when it amused them to listen to the humbug of the political mountebanks.

But now they never worry about it.

There are several millions who do not even make use of their rights as electors.

The parties may break each other's heads as much as they like, and the people don't care one way or another so long as they don't trample the crops in their wrangling: if that happens then they lose their tempers, and smash the parties indiscriminately.

They do not act: they react in one way or another against all the exaggerations which disturb their work and their rest.

Kings, Emperors, republics, priests, Freemasons, Socialists, whatever their leaders may be, all that they ask of them is to be protected against the great common dangers: war, riots, epidemics,--and, for the rest, to be allowed to go on tending their gardens.

When all is said and done they think: "'Why won't these people leave us in peace?'

"But the politicians are so stupid that they worry the people, and won't leave off until they are pitched out with a fork,--as will happen some day to our members of Parliament.

There was a time when the people were embarked upon great enterprises.

Perhaps that will happen again, although they sowed their wild oats long ago: in any case their embarkations are never for long: very soon they return to their age-old companion: the earth.

It is the soil which binds the French to France, much more than the French.

There are so many different races who for centuries have been tilling that brave soil side by side, that it is the soil which unites them, the soil which is their love.

Through good times and bad they cultivate it unceasingly: and it is all good to them, even the smallest scrap of ground."

Christophe looked down.

As far as he could see, along the road, around the swamps, on the slopes of rocky hills, over the battlefields and ruins of action, over the mountains and plains of France, all was cultivated and richly bearing: it was the great garden of European civilization.

Its incomparable charm lay no less in the good fruitful soil than in the blind labors of an indefatigable people, who for centuries have never ceased to till and sow and make the land ever more beautiful.

A strange people!

They are always called inconstant: but nothing in them changes.

Olivier, looking backward, saw in Gothic statuary all the types of the provinces of to-day: and so in the drawings of a Clouet and a Dumoustier, the weary ironical faces of worldly men and intellectuals: or in the work of a Lenain the clear eyes of the laborers and peasants of Île-de-France or Picardy.

And the thoughts of the men of old days lived in the minds of the present day.

The mind of Pascal was alive, not only in the elect of reason and religion, but in the brains of obscure citizens or revolutionary Syndicalists.

The art of Corneille and Racine was living for the people even more than for the elect, for they were less attainted by foreign influences: a humble clerk in Paris would feel more sympathy with a tragedy of the time of Louis XIV than with a novel of Tolstoi or a drama of Ibsen.

The chants of the Middle Ages, the old French _Tristan_, would be more akin to the modern French than the _Tristan_ of Wagner.

The flowers of thought, which since the twelfth century have never ceased to blossom in French soil, however different they may be, were yet kin one to another, though utterly different from all the flowers about them.

Christophe knew too little of France to be able to grasp how these characteristics had endured.

What struck him most of all in all the wide expanse of country was the extremely small divisions of the earth.

As Olivier said, every man had his garden: and each garden, each plot of land, was separated from the rest by walls, and quickset hedges, and inclosures of all sorts.

At most there were only a few woods and fields in common, and sometimes the dwellers on one side of a river were forced to live nearer to each other than to the dwellers on the other.

Every man shut himself up in his own house: and it seemed that this jealous individualism, instead of growing weaker after centuries of neighborhood, was stronger than ever.

Christophe thought: "How lonely they all are!"

* * * * * In that sense nothing could have been more characteristic than the house in which Christophe and Olivier lodged.

It was a world in miniature, a little France, honest and industrious, without any bond which could unite its divers elements.

A five-storied house, a shaky house, leaning over to one side, with creaking floors and crumbling ceilings.

The rain came through into the rooms under the roof in which Christophe and Olivier lived: they had had to have the workmen in to botch up the roof as best they could: Christophe could hear them working and talking overhead.

There was one man in particular who amused and exasperated him: he never stopped talking to himself, and laughing, and singing, and babbling nonsense, and whistling inane tunes, and holding long conversations with himself all the time he was working: he was incapable of doing anything without proclaiming exactly what it was: "I'm going to put in another nail.

Where's my hammer?

I'm putting in a nail, two nails.

One more blow with the hammer!

There, old lady, that's it...."

When Christophe was playing he would stop for a moment and listen, and then go on whistling louder than ever: during a stirring passage he would beat time with his hammer on the roof.

At last Christophe was so exasperated that he climbed on a chair, and poked his head through the skylight of the attic to rate the man.

But when he saw him sitting astride the roof, with his jolly face and his cheek stuffed out with nails, he burst out laughing, and the man joined in.

And not until they had done laughing did he remember why he had come to the window: "By the way," he said, "I wanted to ask you: my playing doesn't interfere with your work?"

The man said it did not: but he asked Christophe to play something faster, because, as he worked in time to the music, slow tunes kept him back.

They parted very good friends.

In a quarter of an hour they had exchanged more words than in six months Christophe had spoken to the other inhabitants of the house.

There were two flats on each floor, one of three rooms, the other of only two.

There were no servants' rooms: each household did its own housework, except for the tenants of the ground floor and the first floor, who occupied the two flats thrown into one.

On the fifth floor Christophe and Olivier's next-door neighbor was the Abbé Corneille, a priest of some forty years old, a learned man, an independent thinker, broad-minded, formerly a professor of exegesis in a great seminary, who had recently been censured by Rome for his modernist tendency.

He had accepted the censure without submitting to it, in silence: he made no attempt to dispute it and refused every opportunity offered to him of publishing his doctrine: he shrank from a noisy publicity and would rather put up with the ruin of his ideas than figure in a scandal.

Christophe could not understand that sort of revolt in resignation.

He had tried to talk to the priest, who, however, was coldly polite and would not speak of the things which most interested him, and seemed to prefer as a matter of dignity to remain buried alive.

* * * * * On the floor below in the flat corresponding to that of the two friends there lived a family of the name of Elie Elsberger: an engineer, his wife, and their two little girls, seven and ten years old: superior and sympathetic people who kept themselves very much to themselves, chiefly from a sort of false shame of their straitened means.

The young woman who kept her house most pluckily was humiliated by it: she would have put up with twice the amount of worry and exhaustion if she could have prevented anybody knowing their condition: and that too was a feeling which Christophe could not understand.

They belonged to a Protestant family and came from the East of France.

Both man and wife, a few years before, had been bowled over by the storm of the Dreyfus affair: both of them had taken the affair passionately to heart, and, like thousands of French people, they had suffered from the frenzy brought on by the turbulent wind of that exalted fit of hysteria which lasted for seven years.

They had sacrificed everything to it, rest, position, relations: they had broken off many dear friendships through it: they had almost ruined their health.

For months at a time they did not sleep nor act, but went on bringing forward the same arguments over and over again with the monotonous insistence of the insane: they screwed each other up to a pitch of excitement: in spite of their timidity and their dread of ridicule, they had taken part in demonstrations and spoken at meetings, from which they returned with minds bewildered and aching hearts, and they would weep together through the night.

In the struggle they had expended so much enthusiasm and passion that when at last victory was theirs they had not enough of either to rejoice: it left them dry of energy and broken for life.

Their hopes had been so high, their eagerness for sacrifice had been so pure, that triumph when it came had seemed a mockery compared with what they had dreamed.

To such single-minded creatures for whom there could exist but one truth, the bargaining of politics, the compromises of their heroes had been a bitter disappointment.

They had seen their comrades in arms, men whom they had thought inspired with the same single passion for justice,--once the enemy was overcome, swarming about the loot, catching at power, carrying off honors and positions, and, in their turn, trampling justice underfoot.

Only a mere handful of men held steadfast to their faith, and, in poverty and isolation, rejected by every party, rejecting every party, they remained in obscurity, cut off one from the other, a prey to sorrow and neurasthenia, left hopeless and disgusted with men and utterly weary of life.

The engineer and his wife were among these wretched victims.

They made no noise in the house: they were morbidly afraid of disturbing their neighbors, the more so as they suffered from their neighbors' noises, and they were too proud to complain.

Christophe was sorry for the two little girls, whose outbursts of merriment, and natural need of shouting, jumping about and laughing, were continually being suppressed.

He adored children, and he made friendly advances to his little neighbors when he met them on the stairs.

The little girls were shy at first, but were soon on good terms with Christophe, who always had some funny story to tell them or sweetmeats in his pockets: they told their parents about him: and, though at first they had been inclined to look askance at his advances, they were won over by the frank open manners of their noisy neighbor, whose piano-playing and terrific disturbance overhead had often made them curse:--(for Christophe used to feel stifled in his room and take to pacing up and down like a caged bear).

--They did not find it easy to talk to him.

Christophe's rather boorish and abrupt manners sometimes made Elie Elsberger shudder.

But it was all in vain for the engineer to try to keep up the wall of reserve, behind which he had taken shelter, between himself and the German: it was impossible to resist the impetuous good humor of the man whose eyes were so honest and affectionate and so free from any ulterior motive.

Every now and then Christophe managed to squeeze a little confidence out of his neighbor.

Elsberger was a queer man, full of courage, yet apathetic, sorrowful, and yet resigned.

He had energy enough to bear a life of difficulty with dignity, but not enough to change it.

It was as though he took a delight in justifying his own pessimism.

Just at that time he had been offered a post in Brazil as manager of an undertaking: but he had refused as he was afraid of the climate and fearful of the health of his wife and children.

"Well, leave them," said Christophe.

"Go alone and make their fortune."

"Leave them!"

cried the engineer.

"It's easy to see that you have no children."

"I assure you that, if I had, I should be of the same opinion."

"Never!

Never!...

Leave the country!...

No. I would rather suffer here."

To Christophe it seemed an odd way of loving one's country and one's wife and children to sit down and vegetate with them.

Olivier understood.

"Just think," he said, "of the risk of dying out there, in a strange unknown country, far away from those you love!

Anything is better than the horror of that.

Besides, it isn't worth while taking so much trouble for the few remaining years of life!..."

"As though one had always to be thinking of death!"

said Christophe with a shrug.

"And even if that does happen, isn't it better to die fighting for the happiness of those one loves than to flicker out in apathy?"