Little Johannes

'Why, Johannes, how silly you are! Such a thing could never happen at all.'

And Johannes did not know what to think.

'We must set you to work at once, and then you will ask no more such foolish questions.'

So they went to Doctor Cypher, who was to help Johannes to find what he sought.

But as they went along the crowded street, Pluizer suddenly stood still, and pointed out a man in the throng.

'Do you remember him?' asked Pluizer, and he laughed aloud when Johannes turned pale and stared at the man in terror. He had seen him last night, deep under ground.

The doctor received them kindly and imparted his learning to Johannes, who listened to him for hours that day – and for many days after. The doctor had not found what they sought; but was very near it, he said. He would lead Johannes as far as he himself had gone, and then, together, they would be sure to achieve to it.

Johannes learned and listened, diligently and patiently – day after day, and month after month. He had very little hope, but he understood that he must go on now, as far as possible. He thought it strange that the longer he sought the light the darker it grew around him. The beginning of everything, he learned, was the best part of it, but the deeper he got the duller and more obscure it became. He began with the study of plants and animals, of everything about him, and when he had studied these a long time they all turned to numbers. Everything resolved itself into numbers – pages of figures. This Doctor Cypher thought quite splendid; he said that light would come to them as the numbers came, but to Johannes it was darkness.

Pluizer never left him, and drove and urged him on when he was disheartened or weary. His presence marred every moment of enjoyment and admiration. Johannes was amazed and delighted when he learnt and saw how exquisitely flowers were constructed, how the fruit was formed, and how insects unconsciously helped in the process.

'That is beautiful!' he exclaimed. 'How exactly it is all arranged, and how delicately and accurately contrived!'

'Yes, amazingly contrived,' said Pluizer. 'The pity is that the greater part of this ingenuity and accuracy comes to nothing. How many flowers produce fruit, and how many seeds become trees?'

'But still, it seems to be all wrought by some grand plan,' said Johannes. 'Look, the bees seek honey for their own ends and do not know that they are serving the flowers, and the flowers attract the bees by their colours. That is a scheme, and they both work it out without knowing it.'

'That all looks very pretty, but it fails in many ways. When the bees have a chance, they bite a hole through the flower and make the whole internal structure useless. He is a clever Contriver indeed who can be laughed to scorn by a bee!'

And when he came to study the organism of men and beasts, matters were even worse. Whenever Johannes thought anything beautiful or well adapted, Pluizer would demonstrate its imperfections and inefficiency. He expatiated on the host of ills and woes to which every living creature is liable, selecting by preference the most disgusting and terrible.

'The Contriver, Johannes, was very shrewd, but in everything he made he forgot something, and men have as much as they can do to patch up these defects as best they may. You have only to look about you. An umbrella, a pair of spectacles – for shelter and better sight – these are specimens of man's patching. They are no part of the original plan. But the Contriver never considered that men would have colds, and read books, and do a thousand other things for which his plan was inadequate. He gave his children clothes without reflecting that they would outgrow them. Almost all men have by this time long outgrown their natural outfit. Now they do everything for themselves, and never trouble themselves at all about the Contriver and his schemes. What he failed to give them, they simply take by brute force; and when the obvious result is that they must die, they evade death, sometimes for a long period, by a variety of devices.'

'But it is men's own fault,' said Johannes. 'Why do they wilfully deviate from the laws of nature?'

'Oh, silly Johannes! If a nursemaid lets an innocent child play with fire and it is burned, whose fault is it? The child's, who knew nothing about fire; or the nurse's, who knew that it would burn itself? And who is to blame if men pine in misery and disobedience to nature – they or the all-wise Contriver, compared with whom we are ignorant children?'

'But they are not ignorant, they know – '

'Johannes, if you say to a child: Do not touch that fire, it will hurt you – and if the child touches it all the same because it does not know what pain is, can you then plead your own innocence and say: The child was not ignorant? Did you not know that it would not heed your advice? Men are as foolish as children. Glass is brittle and clay is soft. And He who made men and did not take their folly into account, is like a man who should make weapons of glass and not expect them to break, or arrows of clay and not expect them to bend.'

His words fell like drops of liquid fire on Johannes's soul, and his heart swelled with a great grief to which his former woes were as nothing, and which often made him weep in the silent, sleepless hours of the night.

Oh, for sleep! sleep! There came a time after long days, when nothing was so dear to him as sleep. Then he neither thought nor suffered; in his dreams he was always carried back to his old life. It seemed to him beautiful as he dreamed of it, but day by day he could never remember exactly how things had then been. He only knew that the vexations and cravings of that former time were better than the vacant, stagnant feeling of the present. He once had longed bitterly for Windekind; he once had waited hour after hour on Robinetta. How delightful that had been!

Robinetta! Did he still long for her? The more he learnt the feebler that craving became. For that too was dissected, and Pluizer showed him what love really was. Then he felt ashamed, and Doctor Cypher said that he could not as yet express it in numbers, but that he should soon accomplish this. Then things grew darker and darker round little Johannes. He had an obscure feeling of thankfulness that he had not seen Robinetta in the course of that fearful expedition with Pluizer.

When he spoke of it to Pluizer he made no reply but a sly laugh; but Johannes understood that this was from no desire to spare him.

Those hours which Johannes did not spend in study or work Pluizer took advantage of to show him the life of men. He managed to take him everywhere – into the hospitals where sick people lay in great numbers – long ranks of pale, haggard faces with a dull, suffering expression – and where unearthly silence reigned, broken only by coughing and groaning. And Pluizer showed him how many of them could never leave the place. And when at a fixed hour streams of men and women came pouring into the place to visit their sick relations, Pluizer said: 'You see, they all know that they too must some day find their way into this house and these gloomy rooms, only to be carried out in a black chest.'

'Then how can they ever be so light-hearted?' thought Johannes.

And Pluizer took him up to a little attic-room where a dismal twilight reigned, and where the distant tinkle of a piano in a neighbouring house made an incessant dreamy noise. Here they found, among others, one man who lay staring helplessly before him at a narrow sunbeam which slowly crept up the wall.

'He has lain there for seven years,' said Pluizer. 'He was a sailor, and has seen the palms of India, the blue seas of Japan, the forests of Brazil; and now, for seven long years, he has amused himself all day and every day with the sunbeams and the sound of the piano. He will never leave this room again; but it cannot last much longer now.'

After this day Johannes had his worst dream; he fancied himself in that little room, listening to the feeble music, in the melancholy half-light, with nothing to look at but the rising and waning sunbeams – never more till the end.

Pluizer took him, too, to the great churches to listen to what was said there. He took him to festivals and grand ceremonies, and made him intimate in many houses. Johannes learnt to study men, and it sometimes happened that he could not help thinking of his past life, of the tales Windekind had told him and of his own disappointments. There were men who reminded him of the glow-worm, who fancied that the stars were his departed friends; or of the cockchafer who was one day older than his comrade, and who had said so much about a vocation; and he heard tales which made him think of Kribbelgauw, the Spider-Hero, and of the eel who did nothing, but was fed because it was a grand thing to have a fat king. Himself, he could only compare to the younger cockchafer, who did not know what a vocation was, and flew to the light. He felt that he in the same way was creeping, helpless and crippled, over the carpet with a string round his body, a cruel string which Pluizer tugged and twitched.

Ah! he should never see the garden again! When would the heavy foot come and crush him to death?

Pluizer laughed at him if he ever spoke of Windekind; and by degrees he began to think that Windekind had never existed.

'But, Pluizer, then the little key does not exist – nothing is real!'

'Nothing, nothing. Men and numbers – those are real and exist, endless numbers!'

'Then you deceived me, Pluizer. Let me go away – let me seek no more – leave me alone.'

'Have you forgotten what Death told you? That you are to become a man, a complete man?'

'I will not! it is horrible!'

'You must. You wished it once. Look at Doctor Cypher, does he think it horrible? Become like him – '

It was very true. Doctor Cypher seemed always content and happy. Unwearied and imperturbable, he pursued his way, studying and teaching, satisfied and equable.

'Look at him,' Pluizer went on, 'he sees everything, and yet sees nothing. He looks on men as though he himself were a being apart, having nothing to do with their sufferings. He moves among griefs and wretchedness as though he were invulnerable, and meets Death face to face as though he were immortal. All he aims at is to understand what he sees, and everything is good in his eyes that comes in the way of knowledge. He is satisfied with everything so long as he understands it. That is what you must be.'

'But that I can never be.'

'Well, I cannot help that.'

This was the hopeless conclusion of all their discussions. Johannes grew dull and indifferent, and searched and searched, knowing no longer why, or for what. He had become like the multitudes of whom Wistik had spoken.

It was now winter, but he scarcely observed it.

One chill and misty morning, when the snow lay wet and dirty on the roads, and fell from the trees and roofs, he went with Pluizer for his daily walk. In a public garden he met a party of young girls, in a row, and carrying school-books. They pelted each other with snow, and laughed and gambolled; their voices rang out clearly over the snowy plain. There was no sound of feet or wheels to be heard; nothing but the tinkling bells of the horses, or the latch of a shop door. Their merry laughter sounded distinctly through the silence.

Johannes noted that one of these damsels looked at him and stared back after him. She wore a coloured cloak and a black hat. He knew her face very well, but he could not think who she was. She nodded to him once and again.

'Who is that? I know her.'

'Yes, very likely. Her name is Maria, some persons call her Robinetta.'

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

'Ha, ha, hah! She cannot be like Nobody. But she is what she is. You have longed to see her so much; now I will take you to see her!'

'No, I do not want to see her. I would rather see her dead like the others.'