John Christopher - (Complete Two Volumes)

Author: (French) Roman Rolland / Country: Mainland China
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-07-01
Features: They no longer speak. John Mischel sat by the fireplace, Luiza sat on the bed, both lost in thought. The old man said so with his mouth, but his heart was still filled with regret over his son's marriage. Luiza was also thinking about this matter, blaming herself, though she had nothing to blame herself for. She used to be a maid, marrying John Mischel's son, Manchoff Krafte, which everyone found strange, and she herself could hardly believe it. The Krafte family had no great wealth, but in the small town in the Rhine Valley where the old man had lived for over fifty years, they were highly respected. They were musicians passed down through generations, known to all musicians from Cologne to Mannheim. Manchoff played the violin in the court theater; John Mischel was once the conductor of the Grand Duke's orchestra. The old man was greatly distressed by Manchoff's marriage. He had held great hopes for his son, wanting him to become a celebrity, something he himself had failed to achieve. But the son was momentarily foolish, destroying his father's ambitions. At first, he raged, cursing Manchoff and Luiza. But inwardly, he was a good man, so after realizing her character, he forgave her and even showed her some paternal tenderness, though this tenderness was often expressed through murmurs. No one understood how Manchoff could marry into such a family—even Manchoff himself was baffled. It was certainly not because Luiza was beautiful. She had nothing charming about her: short, pale, and delicate, standing in stark contrast to Manchoff and John Mischel, who were both tall, red-faced giants, strong, hearty, and fond of loud laughter and shouts. She seemed overshadowed by them; people paid little attention to her, and she did her best to hide. If Manchoff had been a kind-hearted person, one might say he valued Luiza's simplicity more than any other virtue. But he was excessively vain. Men like him, quite handsome and aware of it, who liked to show off, were not without talent and could have married into a wealthy family, even—who knows?—seduced a few female students in the middle-class families where he taught. Instead, he suddenly chose a woman from a poor, uneducated family, one who was neither beautiful nor had ever pursued him. It seemed as if he had married her out of spite! But some people in the world always do the unexpected, even things beyond their own expectations—Manchoff was one such person. They often had foresight: as the saying goes, one with foresight is worth two—they believed themselves immune to deception, steered their lives with great certainty toward a set goal. But their calculations excluded themselves, for they fundamentally did not know themselves. Their minds often became empty, and at such times, they would abandon the helm; once the reins were loosened, they would play tricks and cause trouble for their masters. An uncontrolled ship would crash straight into the rocks, and the clever Manchoff ended up marrying a cook. On the day he decided to marry her, he was neither drunk nor mad, nor was he filled with passion: far from it. But perhaps, apart from our minds, hearts, and senses, there are other mysterious forces that take over when the others sleep, ruling us; that night, when Manchoff met Luiza by the river, sitting beside her in the reeds, and foolishly proposed to her, he might have encountered those mysterious forces in her pale, timid eyes as she looked at him. P10-11