Jean-Christophe

the crows who were ransacking the fields. The sun was burning, the wind was biting. He held Anna’s arm. She had on a rather thin dress: through the stuff he could feel the moisture and the tingling warmth of her body. He wanted her to put on her cloak once more: she refused, and in bravado undid the hooks at her neck. They lunched at an inn, the sign of which bore the figure of a “wild man” (Zum wilden Mann). A little pine-tree grew in front of the door. The dining-room was decorated with German quatrains, and two chromolithographs, one of which was sentimental: In the Spring (Im Frühling), and the other patriotic: The Battle of Saint Jacques, and a crucifix with a skull at the foot of the cross. Anna had a voracious appetite, such as Christophe had never known her to have. They drank freely of the ordinary white wine. After their meal they set out once more across the fields, in a blithe spirit of companionship. In neither was there any equivocal thought. They were thinking only of the pleasure of their walk, the singing in their blood, and the whipping, nipping air. Anna’s tongue was loosed. She was no longer on her guard: she said just whatever came into her mind.

She talked about her childhood, and how her grandmother used to take her to the house of an old friend who lived near the cathedral: and while the old ladies talked they sent her into the garden over which there hung the shadow of the Münster. She used to sit in a corner and never stir: she used to listen to the shivering of the leaves, and watch the busy swarming insects: and she used to be both pleased and afraid.⁠—(She made no mention of her fear of devils: her imagination was obsessed by it: she had been told that they prowled round churches but never dared enter: and she used to believe that they appeared in the shape of animals: spiders, lizards, ants, all the hideous creatures that swarmed about her, under the leaves, over the earth, or in the crannies of the walls).⁠—Then she told him about the house she used to live in, and her sunless room: she remembered it with pleasure: she used to spend many sleepless nights there, telling herself things.⁠ ⁠…

“What things?”

“Silly things.”

“Tell me.”

She shook her head in refusal.

“Why not?”

She blushed, then laughed, and added:

“In the daytime too, while I was at work.”

She thought for a moment, laughed once more, and then said:

“They were silly things, bad things.”

He said, jokingly: “Weren’t you afraid?”

“Of what?”

“Of being damned?”

The expression in her eyes froze.

“You mustn’t talk of that,” she said.

He turned the conversation. He marveled at the strength she had shown a short while before in their scuffle. She resumed her confiding expression and told him of her girlish achievements⁠—(she said “boyish,” for, when she was a child she had always longed to join in the games and rights of the boys).⁠—On one occasion when she was with a little boy who was a head taller than herself she had suddenly struck him with her fist, hoping that he would strike her back. But he ran away yelling that she was beating him. Once, again, in the country she had climbed on to the back of a black cow as she was grazing: the terrified beast flung her against a tree, and she had narrowly escaped being killed. Once she took it into her head to jump out of a first-floor window because she had dared herself to do it: she was lucky enough to get off with a sprain. She used to invent strange, dangerous gymnastics when she was left alone in the house: she used to subject her body to all sorts of queer experiments.

“Who would think it of you now, to see you looking so solemn?⁠ ⁠…”

“Oh!” she said, “if you were to see me sometimes when I am alone in my room!”

“What! Even now?”

She laughed. She asked him⁠—jumping from one subject to another⁠—if he were a shot.

He told her that he never shot. She said that she had once shot at a blackbird with a gun and had wounded it. He waxed indignant.

“Oh!” she said. “What does it matter?”

“Have you no heart?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t you ever think the beasts are living creatures like ourselves?”

“Yes,” she said. “Certainly. I wanted to ask you: do you think the beasts have souls?”

“Yes. I think so.”

“The minister says not. But I think they have souls.⁠ ⁠… Sometimes,” she added, “I think I must have been an animal in a previous existence.”

He began to laugh.

“There’s nothing to laugh at,” she said (she laughed too). “That is one of the stories I used to tell myself when I was little. I used to pretend to be a cat, a dog, a bird, a foal, a heifer. I was conscious of all their desires. I wanted to be in their skins or their feathers for a little while: and it used to be as though I really was. You can’t understand that?”

“You are a strange creature. But if you feel such kinship with the beasts how can you bear to hurt them?”

“One is always hurting someone. Some people hurt me. I hurt other people. That’s the way of the world. I don’t complain. We can’t afford to be squeamish in life! I often hurt myself for the pleasure of it.”

“Hurt yourself?”

“Myself. One day I hammered a nail into my hand, here.”

“Why?”

“There wasn’t any reason.”

(She did not tell him that she had been trying to crucify herself.)

“Give me your hand,” she said.

“What do you want it for?”

“Give it me.”

He gave her his hand. She took it and crushed it until he cried out. They played, like peasants, at seeing how much they could hurt each other. They were happy and had no ulterior thought. The rest of the world, the fetters of their ordinary life, the sorrows of the past, fear