Читать книгу The Quest - Frederik van Eeden - Страница 12

He had sunk into a deep sleep – to depths where no dreams come.

In slowly rising from those shades to the cool grey morning light, he passed through dreams, varied and gentle, of former times. He awoke, and they glided from his spirit like dew-drops from a flower. The expression of his eyes was calm and mild while they still rested upon the throngs of lovely images.

Yet, as if shunning the glare of day, he closed his eyes to the light. He saw again what he had seen the morning before. It seemed to him far away, and long ago; yet hour by hour there came back the remembrance of everything – from the dreary dawn to the awful night. He could not believe that all those horrible things had occurred in a single day; the beginning of his misery seemed so remote – lost in grey mists.

The sweet dreams faded away, leaving no trace behind. Pluizer shook him, and the gloomy day began – dull and colorless – the forerunner of many, many others.

Yet what he had seen the night before on that fearful journey stayed in his mind. Had it been only a frightful vision?

When he asked Pluizer about it, shyly, the latter looked at him queerly and scoffingly.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

Johannes did not see the leer in his eye, and asked if it had really happened – he still saw it all so sharp and clear.

"How silly you are, Johannes! Indeed, such things as that can never happen."

Johannes did not know what to think.

"We will soon put you to work; and then you will ask no more such foolish questions."

So they went to Doctor Cijfer, who was to help Johannes find what he was seeking.

While in the crowded street, Pluizer suddenly stood still, and pointed out to Johannes a man in the throng.

"Do you remember him?" asked Pluizer, bursting into a laugh when Johannes grew pale and stared at the man in horror.

He had seen him the night before – deep under the ground.

The doctor received them kindly, and imparted his wisdom to Johannes who listened for hours that day, and for many days thereafter.

The doctor had not yet found what Johannes was seeking; but was very near it, he said. He would take Johannes as far as he himself had gone, and then together they would surely find it.

Johannes listened and learned, diligently and patiently, day after day and month after month. He felt little hope, yet he comprehended that he must go on, now, as far as possible. He thought it strange that, seeking the light, the farther he went the darker it grew. Of all he learned, the beginning was the best; but the deeper he penetrated the duller and darker it became. He began with plants and animals – with everything about him – and if he looked a long while at them, they turned to figures. Everything resolved itself into figures – pages full of them. Doctor Cijfer thought that fine, and he said the figures brought light to him; – but it was darkness to Johannes.

Pluizer never left him, and pressed and urged him on, if he grew disheartened and weary. He spoiled for him every moment of enjoyment or admiration.

Johannes was amazed and delighted as he studied and saw how exquisitely the flowers were constructed; how they formed the fruit, and how the insects unwittingly aided the work.

"That is wonderful," said he. "How exactly everything is calculated, and deftly, delicately formed!"

"Yes, amazingly formed," said Pluizer. "It is a pity that the greater part of that deftness and fineness comes to naught. How many flowers bring forth fruit, and how many seeds grow to be trees?"

"But yet everything seems to be made according to a great plan," said Johannes. "Look! the bees seek honey for their own use, and do not know that they are aiding the flowers; and the flowers allure the bees by their color. It is a plan, and they both unfold it, without knowing it."

"That is fine in sound, but it fails in fact. When the bees get a chance they bite a hole deep down in the flower, and upset the whole intricate arrangement. A cunning craftsman that, to let a bee make sport of him!"

And when he came to the study of men and animals – their wonderful construction – matters went still worse.

In all that looked beautiful to Johannes, or ingenious, Pluizer pointed out the incompleteness and defects. He showed him the great army of ills and sorrows that can assail mankind and animals, with preference for the most loathe-some and most hideous.

"That designer, Johannes, was very cunning, but in everything he made he forgot something, and man has a busy time trying as far as possible to patch up those defects. Just look about you! An umbrella, a pair of spectacles – even clothing and houses – everything is human patchwork. The design is by no means adhered to. But the designer never considered that people could have colds, and read books, and do a thousand other things for which his plan was worthless. He has given his children swaddling-clothes without reflecting that they would outgrow them. By this time nearly all men have outgrown their natural outfits. Now they do everything for themselves, and have absolutely no further concern with the designer and his scheme. Whatever he has not given them they saucily and selfishly take; and when it is obviously his will that they should die, they sometimes, by various devices, evade the end."

"But it is their own fault!" cried Johannes. "Why do they wilfully withdraw from nature?"

"Oh, stupid Johannes! If a nursemaid lets an innocent child play with fire, and the child is burned, who is to blame? The ignorant child, or the maid who knew that the child would burn itself? And who is at fault if men go astray from nature, in pain and misery? Themselves, or the All-wise Designer, to whom they are as ignorant children?"

"But they are not ignorant. They know…"

"Johannes, if you say to a child, 'Do not touch that fire; it will hurt,' and then the child does touch it, because it knows not what pain is, can you claim freedom from blame, and say, 'The child was not ignorant?' You knew when you spoke, that it would not heed your warning. Men are as foolish and stupid as children. Glass is fragile and clay is soft; yet He who made man, and considered not his folly, is like him who makes weapons of glass, careless lest they break – or bolts of clay, not expecting them to bend."

These words fell upon Johannes' soul like drops of liquid fire, and his heart swelled with a great grief that supplanted the former sorrow, and often caused him to weep in the still, sleepless hours of the night.

Ah, sleep! sleep! There came a time after long days when sleep was to him the dearest thing of all. In sleep there was no thinking – no sorrow; and his dreams always carried him back to the old life. It seemed delightful to him, as he dreamed of it; yet, by day he could not remember how things had been. He only knew that the sadness and longing of earlier times were better than the dull, listless feeling of the present. Once he had grievously longed for Windekind – once he had waited, hour after hour, on Robinetta. How delightful that had been!

Robinetta! Was he still longing? The more he learned, the less he longed – because that feeling, also, was dissected, and Pluizer explained to him what love really was. Then he was ashamed, and Doctor Cijfer said that he could not yet reduce it to figures, but that very soon he would be able to. And thus it grew darker and darker about Little Johannes.

He had a faint feeling of gratitude that he had not recognized Robinetta on his awful journey with Pluizer.

When he spoke of it, Pluizer said nothing, but laughed slyly; and Johannes knew that he had not been spared this out of pity.

When Johannes was neither learning nor working, Pluizer made use of the hours in showing him the people. He took him everywhere; into the hospitals where lay the sick – long rows of pale, wasted faces, with dull or suffering expressions. In those great wards a frightful silence reigned, broken only by coughs and groans. And Pluizer pointed out to him those who never again would leave those halls. And when, at a fixed hour, streams of people poured into the place to visit their sick relations, Pluizer said: "Look! These all know that they too will sometime enter this gloomy house, to be borne away from it in a black box."

"How can they ever be cheerful?" thought Johannes.

And Pluizer took him to a tiny upper room, pervaded with a melancholy twilight, where the distant tones of a piano in a neighboring house came, dreamily and ceaselessly. There, among the other patients, Pluizer showed him one who was staring in a stupid way at a narrow sunbeam that slowly crept along the wall.

"Already he has lain there seven long years," said Pluizer. "He was a sailor, and has seen the palms of India, the blue seas of Japan, and the forests of Brazil. During all the long days of those seven long years he has amused himself with that little sunbeam and the piano-playing. He cannot ever go away, and may still be here for seven more years."

After this, Johannes' most dreadful dream was of waking in that little room – in the melancholy twilight – with those far-away sounds, and nothing ever more to see than the waning and waxing light.

Pluizer took him also into the great cathedrals, and let him listen to what was being said there. He took him to festivals, to great ceremonies, and into the heart of many homes. Johannes learned to know men, and sometimes it happened that he was led to think of his former life; of the fairy-tales that Windekind had told him, and of his own adventures. There were men who reminded him of the glow-worm who fancied he saw his deceased companions in the stars – or of the May-bug who was one day older than the other, and who had said so much about a calling. And he heard tales which made him think of Kribblegauw, the hero of the spiders; or of the eel who did nothing, and yet was fed because a fat king was most desired. He likened himself to the young May-bug who did not know what a calling was, and who flew into the light. He felt as if he also were creeping over the carpet, helpless and maimed, with a string around his body – a cutting string that Pluizer was pulling and twitching.

Ah! he would never again find the garden! When would the heavy foot come and crush him?

Pluizer ridiculed him whenever he spoke of Windekind, and, gradually, he began to believe that Windekind had never existed.

"But, Pluizer, is there then no little key? Is there nothing at all?"

"Nothing, nothing. Men and figures. They are all real – they exist – no end of figures!"

"Then you have deceived me, Pluizer! Let me leave off – do not make me seek any more – let me alone!"

"Have you forgotten what Death said? You were to become a man – a complete man."

"I will not – it is dreadful!"

"You must – you have made your choice. Just look at Doctor Cijfer. Does he find it dreadful? Grow to be like him."

It was quite true. Doctor Cijfer always seemed calm and happy. Untiring and imperturbable, he went his way – studying and instructing, contented and even-tempered.

"Look at him," said Pluizer. "He sees all, and yet sees nothing. He looks at men as if he himself were another kind of being who had no concern about them. He goes amid disease and misery like one invulnerable, and consorts with Death like one immortal. He longs only to understand what he sees, and he thinks everything equally good that comes to him in the way of knowledge. He is satisfied with everything, as soon as he understands it. You ought to become so, too."

"But I never can."

"That is true, but it is not my fault."

In this hopeless way their discussions always ended. Johannes grew dull and indifferent, seeking and seeking – what for or why, he no longer knew. He had become like the many to whom Wistik had spoken.

The winter came, but he scarcely observed it.

One chilly, misty morning, when the snow lay wet and dirty in the streets, and dripped from trees and roofs, he went with Pluizer to take his daily walk.

In a city square he met a group of young girls carrying school-books. They stopped to throw snow at one another – and they laughed and romped. Their voices rang clearly over the snowy square. Not a footstep was to be heard, nor the sound of a vehicle – only the tinkling bells of the horses, or the rattling of a shop door; and the joyful laughing rang loudly through the stillness.

Johannes saw that one of the girls glanced at him, and then kept looking back. She had on a black hat, and wore a gay little cloak. He knew her face very well, but could not think who she was. She nodded to him – and then again.

"Who is that? I know her."

"That is possible. Her name is Maria. Some call her Robinetta."

"No, that cannot be. She is not like Windekind. She is like any other girl."

"Ha, ha, ha! She cannot be like nobody. But she is what she is. You have been longing to see her, and now I will take you to her."

"No! I do not want to go. I would rather have seen her dead, like the others."

And Johannes did not look round again, but hurried on, muttering:

"This is the last! There is nothing – nothing!"