Jean-Christophe Journey's End Part 46

"How can I be anything else?"

"You have no reason to be sad, I a.s.sure you."

"Why?"

"Because you have a friend who loves you."

"Truly?"

"If I tell you so, won't you believe me?"

"Tell me, then."

"You won't be sad any longer? You won't be insatiable? You will be content with our dear friendship?"

"I must."

"Oh! Ungrateful! And you say you love me? Really, I think I love you better than you love me."

"Ah! If it were possible."

He said that with such an outburst of lover's egoism that she laughed.

He too. He insisted:

"Tell me!..."

For a moment she was silent, looking at him, then suddenly she brought her face close to Christophe's and kissed him. It was so unexpected! His heart leaped within him. He tried to take her in his arms. But she had escaped. At the door of the little room she laid her finger on her lips.--"Hush!"--and disappeared.

From that moment on he did not again speak to her of his love, and he was less awkward in his relation with her. Their alternations of strained silence and ill-suppressed violence were succeeded by a simple restful intimacy. That is the advantage of frankness in friendship. No more hidden meanings, no more illusions, no more fears. Each knew the other's innermost thoughts. Now when Christophe was with Grazia in the company of strangers who irritated him and he lost patience at hearing her exchange with them the empty remarks usual in polite society, she would notice it and look at him and smile. It was enough to let him know that they were together, and he would find his peace restored.

The presence of the beloved robs the imagination of its poisoned dart: the fever of desire is cooled: the soul becomes absorbed in the chaste possession of the loved presence.--Besides, Grazia shed on all about her the silent charm of her harmonious nature. Any exaggeration of voice or gesture, even if it were involuntary, wounded her, as a thing that was not simple and beautiful. In this way she influenced Christophe little by little. Though at first he tugged at the bridle put upon his eagerness, he slowly gained the mastery of himself, and he was all the stronger since his force was not wasted in useless violence.

Their souls met and mingled. Grazia, who had smilingly surrendered to the sweetness of living, was awaked from her slumber by contact with Christophe's moral energy. She took a more direct and less pa.s.sive interest in the things of the mind. She used to read very little, preferring to browse indolently over the same old books, but now she began to be curious about new ideas, and soon came to feel their attraction. The wealth of the world of modern ideas, which was not unknown to her though she had never cared to adventure in it alone, no longer frightened her now that she had a companion and guide. Insensibly she suffered herself, while she protested against it, to be drawn on to an understanding of the young Italians, whose ardent iconoclasm had always been distasteful to her.

But Christophe profited the more by this mutual perception. It has often been observed in love that the weaker of the two gives the most: it is not that the other loves less, but, being stronger, must take more. So Christophe had already been enriched by Olivier's mind. But this new mystic marriage was far more fruitful; for Grazia brought him for her dowry the rarest treasure, that Olivier had never possessed--joy. The joy of the soul and of the eyes. Light. The smile of the Latin sky, that loves the ugliness of the humblest things, and sets the stones of the old walls flowering, and endows even sadness with its calm radiance.

The budding spring entered into alliance with her. The dream of new life was teeming in the warmth of the slumbering air. The young green was wedding with the silver-gray of the olive-trees. Beneath the dark red arches of the ruined aqueducts flowered the white almond-trees. In the awakening Campagna waved the seas of gra.s.s and the triumphant flames of the poppies. Down the lawns of the villas flowed streams of purple anemones and sheets of violets. The glycine clambered up the umbrella-shaped pines, and the wind blowing over the city brought the scent of the roses of the Palatine.

They went for walks together. When she was able to shake off the almost Oriental torpor, in which for hours together she would muse, she became another creature: she loved walking; she was tall, with a fine length of leg, and a strong, supple figure, and she looked like a Diana of Primatice.--Most often they would go to one of the villas, left like flotsam from the shipwreck of the Splendid Rome of the _setticento_ under the a.s.sault of the flood of the Piedmontese barbarians. They preferred, above all, the Villa Mattei, that promontory of ancient Rome, beneath which the last waves of the deserted Campagna sink and die. They used to go down the avenue of oaks that, with its deep vault, frames the blue, the pleasant chains of the Alban hills, softly swelling like a beating heart. Along the path through the leaves they could see the tombs of Roman husbands and wives, lying sadly there, with hands clasped in fidelity. They used to sit down at the end of the avenue, under an arbor of roses against a white sarcophagus. Behind them the desert.

Profound peace. The murmuring of a slow-dropping fountain, trickling languidly, so languidly that it seemed on the point of dying. They would talk in whispers. Grazia's eyes would trustfully gaze into the eyes of her friend. Christophe would tell her of his life, his struggles, his past sorrows; and there was no more sadness in them. In her presence, with her eyes upon him, everything was simple, everything seemed inevitable.... She, in her turn, would tell of her life. He hardly heard what she said, but none of her thoughts were lost upon him. His soul and hers were wedded. He saw with her eyes. Everywhere he saw her eyes, her tranquil eyes, in the depths of which there burned an ardent fire; he saw them in the fair, mutilated faces of the antique statues and in the riddle of their silent gaze: he saw them in the sky of Rome, lovely laughing around the matted crests of the cypress-trees and through the fingers of the _lecci,_ black, shining, riddled with the sun's arrows.

Through Grazia's eyes the meaning of Latin art reached his heart. Till then Christophe had been entirely indifferent to the work of the Italians. The barbarian idealist, the great bear from the German forests, had not yet learned to taste the delicious savor of the lovely gilded marbles, golden as honey. The antiques of the Vatican were frankly repulsive to him. He was disgusted by their stupid faces, their effeminate or ma.s.sive proportions, their ba.n.a.l, rounded modeling, all the Gitons and gladiators. Hardly more than a few portrait-statues found favor in his sight, and the originals had absolutely no interest for him. He was no more kindly towards the pale, grimacing Florentines and their sick Madonnas and pre-Raphaelite Venuses, anaemic, consumptive, affected, and tormented. And the b.e.s.t.i.a.l stupidity of the red, sweating bullies and athletes let loose upon the world by the example of the Sistine Chapel made him think of cast-iron. Only for Michael Angelo did he have a secret feeling of pious sympathy with his tragic sufferings, his divine contempt, and the loftiness of his chaste pa.s.sions. With a pure barbaric love, like that of the master, he loved the religious nudity of his youths, his shy, wild virgins, like wild creatures caught in a trap, the sorrowful Aurora, the wild-eyed Madonna, with her Child biting at her breast, and the lovely Lia, whom he would fain have had to wife. But in the soul of the tormented hero he found nothing more than the echo of his own.

Grazia opened the gates of a new world of art for him. He entered into the sovereign serenity of Raphael and t.i.tian. He saw the imperial splendor of the cla.s.sic genius, which, like a lion, reigns over the universe of form conquered and mastered. The flashing vision of the great Venetian which goes straight to the heart of life, and with its lightning cleaves the hovering mists that veil it, the masterful might of these Latin minds that cannot only conquer, but also conquer themselves, and in victory impose upon themselves the straitest discipline, and, on the field of battle, have the art exactly to choose their rightful booty from among the spoils of the enemy overthrown--the Olympian portraits and the _stanze_ of Raphael filled Christophe's heart with music richer than Wagner's, the music of serene lives, n.o.ble architecture, harmonious grouping, the music which shines forth from the perfect beauty of face, hands, feet, draperies, and gestures.

Intelligence. Love. The stream of love which springs from those youthful souls and bodies. The might of the spirit and delight. Young tenderness, ironic wisdom, the warm obsessing odor of amorous bodies, the luminous smile in which the shadows are blotted out and pa.s.sion slumbers. The quivering force of life rearing and reined in, like the horses of the Sun, by the st.u.r.dy hand of the master....

And Christophe wondered:

"Is it impossible to unite, as they have done, the force and the peace of the Romans? Nowadays the best men aspire only to force or peace, one to the detriment of the other. Of all men the Italians seem most utterly to have lost the sense of harmony which Poussin, Lorraine, and Goethe understood. Must a stranger once more reveal to them its work?... And what man shall teach it to our musicians? Music has not yet had its Raphael. Mozart is only a child, a little German bourgeois, with feverish hands and sentimental soul, who uses too many words, too many gestures, and chatters and weeps and laughs over nothing. And neither the Gothic Bach nor the Prometheus of Bonn, struggling with the vulture, nor his offspring of t.i.tans piling Pelion on Ossa, and hurling imprecations at the Heavens, hare ever seen the smile of G.o.d...."

After he had seen it, Christophe was ashamed of his own music; his vain agitation, his turgid pa.s.sions, his indiscreet exclamations, his parade of himself, his lack of moderation, seemed to him both pitiable and shameful. A flock of sheep without a shepherd, a kingdom without a king.--A man must be the king of his tumultuous soul....

During these months Christophe seemed to have forgotten music. He hardly wrote at all, feeling no need for it. His mind, fertilized by Rome, was in a period of gestation. He spent days together in a dreamy state of semi-intoxication. Nature, like himself, was in the early spring-time, when the languor of the awakening is mixed with a voluptuous dizziness.

Nature and he lay dreaming, locked in each other's arms, like lovers embracing in their sleep. The feverish enigma of the Campagna was no longer hostile and disturbing to him; he had made himself master of its tragic beauty; in his arms he held Demeter, sleeping.

During April he received an invitation from Paris to go there and conduct a series of concerts. Without troubling to think it over, he decided to refuse, but thought it better to mention it to Grazia. It was very sweet to him to consult her about his life, for it gave him the illusion that she shared it.

This time she gave him a shock of disillusion. She made him explain the whole matter to her, and advised him to accept. He was very hurt, and saw in her advice the proof of her indifference.

Probably Grazia was sorry to give him such advice. But why did Christophe ask her for it? The more he turned to her and asked her to decide for him, the more she thought herself responsible for her friend's actions. As a result of their interchange of ideas she had gained from Christophe a little of his will-power: he had revealed to her duty and the beauty of action. At least she had recognized duty as far as her friend was concerned, and she would not have him fail in it.

Better than he, she knew the power of languor given off by the Italian soil, which, like the insidious poison of its warm _scirocco_, creeps into the veins and sends the will to sleep. How often had she not felt its maleficent charm, and had no power to resist it! All her friends were more or less tainted by this malaria of the soul. Stronger men than they had in old days fallen victim to it: it had rusted away the bra.s.s of the Roman she-wolf. Rome breathes forth death: it is too full of graves. It is healthier to stay there for a little time than to live there. Too easily does one slip out of one's own time, a dangerous taste for the still young forces that have a vast duty to accomplish.

Grazia saw clearly that the society about her had not a life-giving air for an artist. And although she had more friendship for Christophe than for any other ... (dared she confess it?) ... she was not, at heart, sorry for him to go. Alas! He wearied her with the very qualities that she most loved in him, his overflowing intelligence, his abundance of vitality, acc.u.mulated for years, and now br.i.m.m.i.n.g over: her tranquillity was disturbed by it. And he wearied her, too, perhaps, because she was always conscious of the menace of his love, beautiful and touching, but ever-present: so that she had always to be on her guard against it; it was more prudent to keep him at a distance. She did not admit it to herself, and thought she had no consideration for anything but Christophe's interests.

There was no lack of sound reasons at hand. In Italy just then it was difficult for a musician to live: the air was circ.u.mscribed. The musical life of the country was suppressed and deformed. The factory of the theater scattered its heavy ashes and its burning smoke upon the soil, whose flowers in old days had perfumed all Europe. If a man refused to enroll himself in the train of the brawlers, and could not, or would not, enter the factory, he was condemned to exile or a stifled existence. Genius was by no means dried up. But it was left to stagnate unprofitably and to go to ruin. Christophe had met more than one young musician in whom there lived again the soul of the melodious masters of the race and the instinct of beauty which filled the wise and simple art of the past. But who gave a thought to them? They could neither get their work played nor published. No interest was taken in the symphony.

There were no ears for music except it were presented with a painted face!... So discouraged, they sang for themselves, and soon sang no more. What was the good of it? Sleep....--Christophe would have asked nothing better than to help them. While they admitted that he could do so, their umbrageous pride would not consent to it. Whatever he did, he was a foreigner to them; and for Italians of long descent, in spite of the warm welcome they will give him, every foreigner is really a barbarian. They thought that the wretched condition of their art was a question to be threshed out among themselves, and while, they extended all kind of friendly tributes to Christophe, they could not admit him as one of themselves.--What could he do? He could not compete with them and dispute with them their meager place in the sun, where they were by no means secure!...

Besides, genius cannot do without its food. The musician must have music--music to hear, music to make heard. A temporary withdrawal is valuable to the mind by forcing it to recuperate. But this can only be on condition that it will return. Solitude is n.o.ble, but fatal to an artist who has not the strength to break out of it. An artist must live the life of his own time, even if it be clamorous and impure: he must forever be giving and receiving, and giving, and giving, and again receiving.--Italy, at the time of Christophe's sojourn, was no longer the great market of the arts that once it was, and perhaps will be again. Nowadays the meeting-place of ideas, the exchange of the thought and spirit of the nations, are in the North. He who has the will to live must live in the North.

Left to himself, Christophe would have shuddered away from the rout. But Grazia felt his duty more clearly than he could see it. And she demanded more of him than of herself: no doubt because she valued him more highly, but also because it suited her. She delegated her energy upon him, and so maintained her tranquillity.--He had not the heart to be angry with her for it. Like Mary, hers was the better part. Each of us has his part to play in life. Christophe's was action. For her it was enough to be. He asked no more of her.

He asked nothing but to love her, if it were possible, a little less for himself, and a little more for her. For he did not altogether like her having so little egoism in her friendship as to think only of the interests of her friend--who asked only to be allowed to give no thought to them.

He went away from her. And yet he did not leave her. As an old trouvere says: "_The lover does not leave his beloved but with the sanction of his soul._"

II

He was sick at heart as he reached Paris. It was the first time he had been there since the death of Olivier. He had wished never to see the city again. In the cab which took him from the station to his hotel he hardly dared look out of the window; for the first few days he stayed in his room and could not bring himself to go out. He was fearful of the memories lying in wait for him outside. But what exactly did he dread?

Did he really know? Was it, as he tried to believe, the terror of seeing the dead spring to life again exactly as they had been? Or was it--the greater sorrow of being forced to know that they were dead?... Against this renewal of grief all the half-unconscious ruses of instinct had taken up arms. It was for this reason--(though perhaps he knew it not)--that he had chosen a hotel in a district far removed from that in which he had lived. And when for the first time he went out into the streets, having to conduct rehearsals at the concert-hall, when once more he came in contact with the life of Paris, he walked for a long time with his eyes closed, refusing to see what he did see, insisting on seeing only what he had seen in old days. He kept on saying to himself:

"I know that. I know that...."

In art as in politics there was the same intolerant anarchy. The same Fair in the market-place. Only the actors had changed their parts. The revolutionaries of his day had become bourgeois, and the supermen had become men of fashion. The old independents were trying to stifle the new independents. The young men of twenty years ago were now more conservative than the old conservatives whom they had fought, and their critics refused the newcomers the right to live. Apparently nothing was different.

But everything had changed....

"My dear, forgive me. It is good of you not to be angry with me for my silence. Your letter has helped me greatly. I have been through several weeks of terrible distress. I had nothing. I had lost you. Here I was feeling terribly the absence of those whom I have lost. All my old friends of whom I used to tell you have disappeared--Philomela--(you remember the singing voice that dear, sad night when, as I wandered through a gay crowd, I saw your eyes in a mirror gazing at me)--Philomela has realized her very reasonable dream: she inherited a little money, and has a farm in Normandy. M. Arnaud has retired and gone back to the provinces with his wife, to a little town near Angers. Of the famous men of my day many are dead or gone under; none are left save the same old puppets who twenty years ago were playing the juvenile lead in art and politics, and with the same false faces are still playing it.

Outside these masks there are none whom I recognize. They seem to me to be grimacing over a grave. It is a terrible feeling.--More than this: during the first few days after my arrival I suffered physically from the ugliness of things, from the gray light of the North after your golden sun: the ma.s.ses of dull houses, the vulgar lines of certain domes and monuments, which had never struck me before, hurt me cruelly. Nor was the moral atmosphere any more to my taste.