Jean-Christophe Part 64

He reckoned without the malevolence of small towns. They are tenacious in their spite--all the more tenacious because their spite is aimless. A healthy hatred which knows what it wants is appeased when it has achieved its end. But men who are mischievous from boredom never lay down their arms, for they are always bored. Christophe was a natural prey for their want of occupation. He was beaten without a doubt; but he was bold enough not to seem crushed. He did not bother anybody, but then he did not bother about anybody. He asked nothing. They were impotent against him. He was happy with his new friends and indifferent to anything that was said or thought of him. That was intolerable.--Frau Reinhart roused even more irritation. Her open friends.h.i.+p with Christophe in the face of the whole town seemed, like his att.i.tude, to be a defiance of public opinion. But the good Lili Reinhart defied nothing and n.o.body. She had no thought to provoke others; she did what she thought fit without asking anybody else's advice.

That was the worst provocation.

All their doings were watched. They had no idea of it. He was extravagant, she scatter-brained, and both even wanting in prudence when they went out together, or even at home in the evening, when they leaned over the balcony talking and laughing. They drifted innocently into a familiarity of speech and manner which could easily supply food for calumny.

One morning Christophe received an anonymous letter. He was accused in basely insulting terms of being Frau Reinhart's lover. His arms fell by his sides. He had never had the least thought of love or even of flirtation with her. He was too honest. He had a Puritanical horror of adultery. The very idea of such a dirty sharing gave him a physical and moral feeling of nausea. To take the wife of a friend would have been a crime in his eyes, and Lili Reinhart would have been the last person in the world with whom he could have been tempted to commit such an offense. The poor woman was not beautiful, and he would not have had even the excuse of pa.s.sion.

He went to his friends ashamed and embarra.s.sed. They also were embarra.s.sed.

Each of them had received a similar letter, but they had not dared to tell each other, and all three of them were on their guard and watched each other and dared not move or speak, and they just talked nonsense. If Lili Reinhart's natural carelessness took the ascendant for a moment, or if she began to laugh and talk wildly, suddenly a look from her husband or Christophe would stop her dead; the letter would cross her mind; she would stop in the middle of a familiar gesture and grow uneasy. Christophe and Reinhart were in the same plight. And each of them was thinking: "Do the others know?"

However, they said nothing to each other and tried to go on as though nothing had happened.

But the anonymous letters went on, growing more and mores insulting and dirty. They were plunged into a condition of depression and intolerable shame. They hid themselves when they received the letters, and had not the strength to burn them unopened. They opened them with trembling hands, and as they unfolded the letters their hearts would sink; and when they read what they feared to read, with some new variation on the same theme--the injurious and ign.o.ble inventions of a mind bent on causing a hurt--they wept in silence. They racked their brains to discover who the wretch might be who so persistently persecuted them..

One day Frau Reinhart, at the end of her letter, confessed the persecution of which she was the victim to her husband, and with tears in his eyes he confessed that he was suffering in the same way. Should they mention it to Christophe? They dared not. But they had to warn him to make him be cautious.--At the first words that Frau Reinhart said to him, with a blush, she saw to her horror that Christophe had also received letters. Such utter malignance appalled them. Frau Reinhart had no doubt that the whole town was in the secret. Instead of helping each other, they only undermined each other's fort.i.tude. They did not know what to do. Christophe talked of breaking somebody's head. But whose? And besides, that would be to justify the calumny!... Inform the police of the letters?--That would make their insinuations public...--Pretend to ignore them? It was no longer possible.

Their friendly relations were now disturbed. It was useless for Reinhart to have absolute faith in the honesty of his wife and Christophe. He suspected them in spite of himself. He felt that his suspicions were shameful and absurd, and tried hard not to pay any heed to them, and to leave Christophe and his wife alone together. But he suffered, and his wife saw that he was suffering.

It was even worse for her. She had never thought of flirting with Christophe, any more than he had thought of it with her. The calumnious letters brought her imperceptibly to the ridiculous idea that after all Christophe was perhaps in love with her; and although he was never anywhere near showing any such feeling for her, she thought she must defend herself, not by referring directly to it, but by clumsy precautions, which Christophe did not understand at first, though, when he did understand, he was beside himself. It was so stupid that it made him laugh and cry at the same time! He in love with the honest little woman, kind enough as she was, but plain and common!... And to think that she should believe it!... And that he could not deny it, and tell her and her husband:

"Come! There is no danger! Be calm!..." But no; he could not offend these good people. And besides, he was beginning to think that if she held out against being loved by him it was because she was secretly on the point of loving him. The anonymous letters had had the fine result of having given him so foolish and fantastic an idea.

The situation had become at once so painful and so silly that it was impossible for this to go on. Besides, Lili Reinhart, who, in spite of her brave words, had no strength of character, lost her head in the face of the dumb hostility of the little town. They made shamefaced excuses for not meeting:

"Frau Reinhart was unwell.... Reinhart was busy.... They were going away for a few days...."

Clumsy lies which were always unmasked by chance, which seemed to take a malicious pleasure in doing so.

Christophe was more frank, and said:

"Let us part, my friends. We are not strong enough."

The Reinharts wept.--But they were happier when the breach was made.

The town had its triumph. This time Christophe was quite alone. It had robbed him of his last breath of air:--the affection, however humble, without which no heart can live.

III

DELIVERANCE

He had no one. All his friends had disappeared. His dear Gottfried, who had come to his aid in times of difficulty, and whom now he so sorely needed, had gone some months before. This time forever. One evening in the summer of the last year a letter in large handwriting, bearing the address of a distant village, had informed Louisa that her brother had died upon one of his vagabond journeys which the little peddler had insisted on making, in spite of his ill health. He was buried there in the cemetery of the place.

The last manly and serene friends.h.i.+p which could have supported Christophe had been swallowed up. He was left alone with his old mother, who cared nothing for his ideas--could only love him and not understand him. About him was the immense plain of Germany, the green ocean. At every attempt to climb out of it he only slipped back deeper than ever. The hostile town watched him drown....

And as he was struggling a light flashed upon him in the middle of the night, the image of Ha.s.sler, the great musician whom he had loved so much when he was a child. His fame shone over all Germany now. He remembered the promises that Ha.s.sler had made him then. And he clung to this piece of wreckage in desperation. Ha.s.sler could save him! Ha.s.sler must save him!

What was he asking? Not help, nor money, nor material a.s.sistance of any kind. Nothing but understanding. Ha.s.sler had been persecuted like him.

Ha.s.sler was a free man. He would understand a free man, whom German mediocrity was pursuing with its spite and trying to crush. They were fighting the same battle.

He carried the idea into execution as soon as it occurred to him. He told his mother that he would be away for a week, and that very evening he took the train for the great town in the north of Germany where Ha.s.sler was _Kapellmeister_, He could not wait. It was a last effort to breathe.

Ha.s.sler was famous. His enemies had not disarmed, but his friends cried that he was the greatest musician, present, past and future. He was surrounded by partisans and detractors who were equally absurd. As he was not of a very firm character, he had been embittered by the last, and mollified by the first. He devoted his energy to writing things to annoy his critics and make them cry out. He was like an urchin playing pranks.

These pranks were often in the most detestable taste. Not only did he devote his prodigious talent to musical eccentricities which made the hair of the pontiffs stand on end, but he showed a perverse predilection for queer themes, bizarre subjects, and often for equivocal and scabrous situations; in a word, for everything which could offend ordinary good sense and decency. He was quite happy when the people howled, and the people did not fail him. Even the Emperor, who dabbled in art, as every one knows, with the insolent presumption of upstarts and princes, regarded Ha.s.sler's fame as a public scandal, and let no opportunity slip of showing his contemptuous indifference to his impudent works. Ha.s.sler was enraged and delighted by such august opposition, which had almost become a consecration for the advanced paths in German art, and went on smas.h.i.+ng windows. At every new folly his friends went into ecstasies and cried that he was a genius.

Ha.s.sler's coterie was chiefly composed of writers, painters, and decadent critics who certainly had the merit of representing the party of revolt against the reaction--always a menace in North Germany--of the pietistic spirit and State morality; but in the struggle the independence had been carried to a pitch of absurdity of which they were unconscious. For, if many of them were not lacking in a rude sort of talent, they had little intelligence and less taste. They could not rise above the fastidious atmosphere which they had created, and like all cliques, they had ended by losing all sense of real life. They legislated for themselves and hundreds of fools who read their reviews and gulped down everything they were pleased to promulgate. Their adulation had been fatal to Ha.s.sler, for it had made him too pleased with himself. He accepted without examination every musical idea that came into his head, and he had a private conviction, however he might fall below his own level, he was still superior to that of all other musicians. And though that idea was only too true in the majority of cases, it did not follow that it was a very fit state of mind for the creation of great works. At heart Ha.s.sler had a supreme contempt for everybody, friends and enemies alike; and this bitter jeering contempt was extended to himself and life in general. He was all the more driven back into his ironic skepticism because he had once believed in a number of generous and simple things. As he had not been strong enough to ward off the slow destruction of the pa.s.sing of the days, nor hypocritical enough to pretend to believe in the faith he had lost, he was forever gibing at the memory of it. He was of a Southern German nature, soft and indolent, not made to resist excess of fortune or misfortune, of heat or cold, needing a moderate temperature to preserve its balance. He had drifted insensibly into a lazy enjoyment of life. He loved good food, heavy drinking, idle lounging, and sensuous thoughts. His whole art smacked of these things, although he was too gifted for the flashes of his genius not still to s.h.i.+ne forth from his lax music which drifted with the fas.h.i.+on.

No one was more conscious than himself of his decay. In truth, he was the only one to be conscious of it--at rare moments which, naturally, he avoided. Besides, he was misanthropic, absorbed by his fearful moods, his egoistic preoccupations, his concern about his health--he was indifferent to everything which had formerly excited his enthusiasm or hatred.

Such was the man to whom Christophe came for a.s.sistance, With what joy and hope he arrived, one cold, wet morning, in the town wherein then lived the man who symbolized for him the spirit of independence in his art! He expected words of friends.h.i.+p and encouragement from him--words that he needed to help him to go on with the ungrateful, inevitable battle which every true artist has to wage against the world until he breathes his last, without even for one day laying down his arms; for, as Schiller has said, "_the only relation with the public of which a man never repents--is war_."

Christophe was so impatient that he just left his bag at the first hotel he came to near the station, and then ran to the theater to find out Ha.s.sler's address. Ha.s.sler lived some way from the center of the town, in one of the suburbs. Christophe took an electric train, and hungrily ate a roll. His heart thumped as he approached his goal.

The district in which Ha.s.sler had chosen his house was almost entirely built in that strange new architecture into which young Germany has thrown an erudite and deliberate barbarism struggling laboriously to have genius.

In the middle of the commonplace town, with its straight, characterless streets, there suddenly appeared Egyptian hypogea, Norwegian chalets, cloisters, bastions, exhibition pavilions, pot-bellied houses, fakirs, buried in the ground, with expressionless faces, with only one enormous eye; dungeon gates, ponderous gates, iron hoops, golden cryptograms on the panes of grated windows, belching monsters over the front door, blue porcelain tiles plastered on in most unexpected places; variegated mosaics representing Adam and Eve; roofs covered with tiles of jarring colors; houses like citadels with castellated walls, deformed animals on the roofs, no windows on one side, and then suddenly, close to each other, gaping holes, square, red, angular, triangular, like wounds; great stretches of empty wall from which suddenly there would spring a ma.s.sive balcony with one window--a balcony supported by Nibelungesque Caryatides, balconies from which there peered through the stone bal.u.s.trade two pointed heads of old men, bearded and long-haired, mermen of Boecklin. On the front of one of these prisons--a Pharaohesque mansion, low and one-storied, with two naked giants at the gate--the architect had written:

Let the artist show his universe, Which never was and yet will ever be.

_Seine Welt zeige der Kunstler, Die niemals war noch jemals sein wird._

Christophe was absorbed by the idea of seeing Ha.s.sler, and looked with the eyes of amazement and under no attempt to understand. He reached the house he sought, one of the simplest--in a Carolingian style. Inside was rich luxury, commonplace enough. On the staircase was the heavy atmosphere of hot air. There was a small lift which Christophe did not use, as he wanted to gain time to prepare himself for his call by going up the four flights of stairs slowly, with his legs giving and his heart thumping with his excitement. During that short ascent his former interview with Ha.s.sler, his childish enthusiasm, the image of his grandfather were as clearly in his mind as though it had all been yesterday.

It was nearly eleven when he rang the bell. He was received by a sharp maid, with a _serva padrona_ manner, who looked at him impertinently and began to say that "Herr Ha.s.sler could not see him, as Herr Ha.s.sler was tired." Then the nave disappointment expressed in Christophe's face amused her; for after making an unabashed scrutiny of him from head to foot, she softened suddenly and introduced him to Ha.s.sler's study, and said she would go and see if Herr Ha.s.sler would receive him. Thereupon she gave him a little wink and closed the door.

On the walls were a few impressionist paintings and some gallant French engravings of the eighteenth century: for Ha.s.sler pretended to some knowledge of all the arts, and Manet and Watteau were joined together in his taste in accordance with the prescription of his coterie. The same mixture of styles appeared in the furniture, and a very fine Louis XV bureau was surrounded by new art armchairs and an oriental divan with a mountain of multi-colored cus.h.i.+ons. The doors were ornamented with mirrors, and j.a.panese bric-a-brac covered the shelves and the mantelpiece, on which stood a bust of Ha.s.sler. In a bowl on a round table was a profusion of photographs of singers, female admirers and friends, with witty remarks and enthusiastic interjections. The bureau was incredibly untidy. The piano was open. The shelves were dusty, and half-smoked cigars were lying about everywhere.

In the next room Christophe heard a cross voice grumbling, It was answered by the shrill tones of the little maid. It was dear that Ha.s.sler was not very pleased at having to appear. It was clear, also, that the young woman had decided that Ha.s.sler should appear; and she answered him with extreme familiarity and her shrill voice penetrated the walls. Christophe was rather upset at hearing some of the remarks she made to her master. But Ha.s.sler did not seem to mind. On the contrary, it rather seemed as though her impertinence amused him; and while he went on growling, he chaffed the girl and took a delight in exciting her. At last Christophe heard a door open, and, still growling and chaffing, Ha.s.sler came shuffling.

He entered. Christophe's heart sank. He recognized him. Would to G.o.d he had not! It was Ha.s.sler, and yet it was not he. He still had his great smooth brow, his face as unwrinkled as that of a babe; but he was bald, stout, yellowish, sleepy-looking; his lower lip drooped a little, his mouth looked bored and sulky. He hunched his shoulders, buried his hands in the pockets of his open waistcoat; old shoes flopped on his feet; his s.h.i.+rt was bagged above his trousers, which he had not finished b.u.t.toning. He looked at Christophe with his sleepy eyes, in which there was no light as the young man murmured his name. He bowed automatically, said nothing, nodded towards a chair, and with a sigh, sank down on the divan and piled the cus.h.i.+ons about himself. Christophe repeated:

"I have already had the honor.... You were kind enough.... My name is Christophe Krafft...."

Ha.s.sler lay back on the divan, with his legs crossed, his lands clasped together on his right knee, which he held up to his chin as he replied:

"I don't remember."

Christophe's throat went dry, and he tried to remind him of their former meeting. Under any circ.u.mstances it would have been difficult for him to talk of memories so intimate; now it was torture for him. He bungled his sentences, could not find words, said absurd things which made him blush.

Ha.s.sler let him flounder on and never ceased to look at him with his vague, indifferent eyes. When Christophe had reached the end of his story, Ha.s.sler went on rocking his knee in silence for a moment, as though he were waiting for Christophe to go on. Then he said:

"Yes.... That does not make us young again...." and stretched his legs.

After a yawn he added:

"... I beg pardon.... Did not sleep.... Supper at the theater last night...." and yawned again.