Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther

LIX

Dear Mr. Anstruther,—We are still in sunshine and frost up here, and are all very happy, we three Schmidts—Johanna is the third—because Joey arrives to-morrow and we shall once more roll in money. I hasten to tell you this, for there were signs in your last two letters that you were taking our position to heart. It is wonderfully kind, I think, the way you are interested in our different little pains and pleasures. I am often more touched than I care to tell you by the sincerity of your sympathy with all we do, and feel very grateful for so true a friend. I was so glad you gave up coming to Jena on your way to Berlin, for it showed that you try to be reasonable, and then you know Professor Martens goes to Berlin himself every now and then to take sweet counsel with men like Harnack, so you will be sure to see him sooner or later, and see him comfortably, without a rush to catch a train. You say you did not come because I urged you not to, and that in all things you want to please me. Well, I would prefer to suppose you a follower of that plain-faced but excellent guide Common Sense. Still, being human, the less lofty and conscientious side of me does like to know there is some one who wishes to please me. I feel deliciously flattered—when I let myself think of it; nearly always I take care to think of something else—that a young man of your undoubted temporal and spiritual advantages should be desirous of pleasing an obscure person like me. What would Frau von Lindeberg say? Do you remember Shelley's wife's sister, the Miss Westbrook who brushed her hair so much, with her constant 'Gracious Heavens, what would Miss Warne say?' I feel inclined to exclaim the same thing about Frau von Lindeberg, but with an opposite meaning. And it is really very surprising that you should be so kind, for I have been a shrew to you often, and have been absorbed in my own affairs, and have not erred on the side of over-sympathy about yours. Some day, when we are both very old, perhaps you will get a few hours' leave from the dowager duchess you'll marry when you are forty, and will come and look at my pigs and my garden and sit with me before the fire and talk over our long friendship and all the long days of our life. And I, when I hear you are coming, shall be in a flutter, and will get out my best dress, and will fuss over things like asparagus and a salad, and tell the heated and awe-stricken maid that His Britannic Majesty's Ambassador at the Best Place to be an Ambassador in in the World is coming to supper; and we shall feel how sweet it is to be old dear friends.

Meanwhile we are both very busy with the days we have got to now. Today, for instance, has been so violently active that every bone I possess is aching. I'll tell you what happened, since you so earnestly assure me that all we do interests you. The snow is frozen so hard that far from being cut off as I had feared from shops and food there is the most glorious sledding road down to Jena; and at once on hearing of Joey's imminence Vicki and I coasted down on the sled and I bought the book Papa has been wanting and a gigantic piece of beef. Then we persuaded a small but strong boy, a boy of open countenance and superior manners whom we met in the market-place, to drag the sled with the beef and the book up the hill again for us; and so we set out homeward, walking gayly one on each side of him, encouraging him with loud admiration of his prowess. 'See,' said I, when I knew a specially steep bit was coming, 'see what a great thing it is to be able to draw so much so easily.'

A smirk and renewed efforts were the result of this speech at first; but the smirk grew smaller as the hill grew steeper, and the efforts dwindled to vanishing point with the higher windings of the road. At last there was no smirk at all, and at my sixth repetition of the encouragement he stopped dead. 'If it is such a great thing,' he said, wiping his youthful forehead with a patched sleeve, and looking at me with a precociousness I had not till then observed in his eyes, 'why do you not do it yourself?'

Vicki and I stared at each other in silent wonder.

'Because,' I said, turning a reproachful gaze on him, 'because, my dear little boy, I desire you to have the chance of earning the fifty pfennings we have promised to give you when we get to the top.'

He began to pull again, but no longer with any pride in his performance. Vicki and I walked in silence behind, and at the next steep bit, instead of repeating a form of words I felt had grown vain, I skilfully unhooked the parcel of meat hanging on the right-hand runner and carried it, and Vicki, always quick to follow my example, unhooked the biography of Goethe from the left-hand runner and carried that. The sled leaped forward, and for a space the boy climbed with greater vigor. Then came another long steep bit, and he flagged again.

'Come, come,' said I, 'it is quite easy.'

He at once stopped and wiped his forehead. 'If it is easy,' he asked, 'why do you not do it yourself?'

'Because, my dear little boy,' said I, trying to be patient, but meat is heavy, and I knew it to be raw, and I feared every moment to feel a dreadful dampness oozing through the paper, and I was out of breath, and no longer completely calm, 'you engaged to pull it up for us, and having engaged to do it it is your duty to do it. I will not come between a boy and his duty.'

The boy looked at Vicki. 'How she talks,' he said.

Vicki and I again stared at each other in silent wonder, and while we were staring he pulled the sled sideways across the road and sat down.

'Come, come,' said I, striving after a brisk severity.

'I am tired,' he said, leaning his chin on his hand and studying first my face and then Vicki's with a detached, impartial scrutiny.

'We too are tired,' said I, 'and see, yet we carry the heavy parcels for you. The sled, empty, is quite light.'

'Then why do you not pull it yourself?' he asked again.

'Anyhow,' said Vicki, 'while he sits there we needn't hold these great things.' And she put the volumes on the sled, and I let the meat drop on it, which it did with a horrible, soft, heavy thud.

The boy sat motionless.

'Let him get his wind,' said Vicki, turning away to look over the edge of the road at the view.

'I'm afraid he's a bad little boy,' said I, following her and gazing too at the sparkling hills across the valley. 'A bad little boy, encased in an outer semblance of innocence.'

'He only wants his wind,' said Vicki.

'He shows no symptoms of not having got it,' said I; for the boy was very calm, and his mouth was shut sweetly in a placid curve.

We waited, looking at the view, humanely patient as became two highly civilized persons. The boy got up after a few minutes and shook himself. 'I am rested,' he announced with a sudden return to the politeness that had charmed us in Jena.

'It certainly was rather a long pull up,' said I kindly, softened by his manner.

'Yes,' said he, 'but I will not keep the ladies waiting longer.'

And he did not, for he whisked the sled round, sat himself upon it, and before we had in the least understood what was happening he and it and the books for Papa and the beef for Joey were darting down the hill, skimming along the track with the delicious swiftness none knew and appreciated better than we did. At the bend of the road he gave a joyful whoop and waved his cap. Then he disappeared.

Vicki and I stared at each other once more in silent wonder. 'What an abandoned little boy,' she gasped at last—he must have been almost in Jena by the time we were able to speak.

'The poor beef,' said I very ruefully, for it was a big piece and had cost vast sums.

'Yes, and the books,' said Vicki.

'Yes, and the Assessor's sled,' said I.

There was nothing for it but to hurry down after him and seek out the authorities and set them in pursuit; and so we hurried as much as can be hurried over such a road, tired, silent, and hungry, and both secretly nettled to the point of madness at having been so easily circumvented by one small boy.

'Little boys are more pestilential than almost anything I know,' said Vicki, after a period of speechless crunching over the snow.

'Far more than anything I know,' said I.

'I'm thankful I did not marry,' said she.

'So am I,' said I.

'The world's much too full of them as it is,' said she.

'Much,' said I.

'Oh,' she cried suddenly, stamping her foot, 'if I could only get hold of him—wicked, wicked little wretch!'

'What would you do?' I asked, curious to see if her plans were at all like mine.

'Gr—r—r—r—r,' said Vicki, clenching all those parts of her, such as teeth and fists, that would clench.

'Oh so would I!' I cried.

We were almost at the bottom; the road was making its final bend; and, as we turned the corner, behold the boy, his cap off, his head bent, his shoulders straining at the rope, pulling the sled laboriously up again. And there was the beef hung on one runner, and there were the books hung on the other. We both stopped dead, arrested by this spectacle. He was almost upon us before he saw us, so intent was he on his business, his eyes on the ground, the sun shining on his yellow hair, the drops of labor rolling down his crimson cheeks.

'What?' he panted, pausing when he saw our four boots in a row in his path, and had looked up and recognized the rest of us, 'what, am I there already?'

'No,' I cried in the voice of justified anger, 'you are not there—you are here, at the very beginning of the mountain. Now what have you to say for yourself?'

'Nothing,' said he, grinning and wiping his face with his sleeve. 'But it was a good ride.'

'You have only just escaped the police and prison,' I said, still louder. 'We were on our way to hand you over to them.'

'If I had been there to hand,' said he, winking at Vicki, to whom he had apparently taken a fancy that was in no way encouraged.

'You had stolen our sled and our parcels,' I continued, glaring down on him.

'Here they are. They are all here. What more do you want?' said he. 'How she talks,' he added, turning to Vicki and thrusting out his underlip with an expression that could only mean disgust.

'You are a very naughty little boy,' said Vicki. 'Give me the rope and be off.'

'Give me my fifty pfennings.'

'Your fifty pfennings?' we exclaimed with one voice.

'You promised me fifty pfennings.'

'To pull the sled up to the top.'

'I am ready to do it.'

'Thank you. We have had enough. Let the rope go—'

'And get home to your mother—'

'And ask her to give you a thorough—'

'A bargain is a bargain,' said the boy, planting himself squarely in front of me, while I adjusted the rope over my shoulders and prepared to pull.

'Now run away, you very naughty little boy,' said I, pulling sideways to pass him by.

He stepped aside too, and faced me again. 'You promised me fifty pfennings,' he said.

'To pull the sled up.'

'I am willing to do it.'

'Yes, and coast down again as soon as you have got to the top. Be off with you. We are not playing games.'

'A promise is a promise,' said the boy.

'Vicki, remove him from my path,' said I.

Vicki took him by the arm and gingerly drew him on one side, and I started up the hill, surprised to find what hard work it was.

'I am coming too,' said the boy.

'Are you?' said Vicki.

'Yes. To fetch my fifty pfennings.'

We said no more. I couldn't, because I was so breathlessly pulling, and Vicki marched by my side in indignant silence, with a jealous eye divided between the parcels and the boy. He, unencumbered, thrust his hands into his pockets and beguiled the way by shrilly whistling.

At each winding of the road when Vicki and I changed places he renewed his offer to fulfil his first bargain; but we, more and more angry as we grew hotter and hotter, refused with an ever increasing wrath.

'Come, come,' said he, when a very steep bit had forced me to pause and struggle for breath.

'Come, come—' and he imitated my earlier manner—'it is quite easy.'

I looked at him with what of majesty I could, and answered not a word.

At Vicki's gate he was still with us. 'I will see you safely home,' Vicki said to me when we got there.

'This where you live?' inquired the boy, peeping through the bars of the gate with cheerful interest. 'Nice little house.'

We were silent.

'I will see her home,' he said to Vicki, 'if you don't want to. But she can surely take care of herself, a great girl like that?'

We were silent.

At my gate he was still with us. 'This where she lives?' he asked Vicki, again peeping through the bars with cheerful interest. 'Funny little house.'

We were silent. In silence we opened the gate and dragged the sled in. He came too.

'You cannot come in here,' said Vicki. 'This is private property.'

'I only wish to fetch my fifty pfennings,' said he. 'It will save you trouble if I come to the door.'

We went in in silence, and together carried the sled inside, a thing we had not yet done, and took it with immense exertions into the parlor, and put it under the table, and tied it by each of its four corners to each of the table's four legs.

'There,' said Vicki, scrambling to her feet again and looking at her knots with satisfaction, 'that's safe if anything is.'

I went with her to the door. The boy was still there, cap in hand, very polite, very patient. 'And my fifty pfennings?' he asked pleasantly.

I cannot explain what we did next. I pulled out my purse and paid him, which was surprising enough, but Vicki, to whom fifty pfennings are also precious, pulled out hers too and gave him fifty on her own account. I am quite unable to explain either her action or mine. The boy made us each the politest bow, his cap sweeping the snow. 'She,' he said to Vicki, jerking his head my way, 'may think she is the prettiest, but you are certainly the best.'

And he left us to settle it between us, and walked away shrilly whistling.

And I am so tired that my very pen has begun to ache, so good-by.

ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

Oh, I must tell you that Papa refused to have Joey sleep in his room with a flatness that put a stop to my arguments before they were even begun. 'Nay,' he cried, 'I will not.' And when I opened my mouth to produce the arguments—' 'Nay,' he cried again, 'I will not.' He drowned my speech. He would not listen. He would not reason. Parrot-like through the house resounded his cry—'Nay, I will not.' I was in despair. But everything has arranged itself. Joey is to have the Assessor's room on the ground floor of our neighbor's house, and will come up here for lessons and meals. He is only to sleep down there, and will be all day here. We telegraphed to Weimar to ask about it, and the ever kind owner immediately agreed. Frau von Lindeberg is displeased, for she says no Dammerlitz has ever yet been known to live in a house where there was a lodger,—a common lodger she said first, but corrected herself, and covered up the common with a cough.

LX

Dear Mr. Anstruther,—I must write to-night, though it is late, to tell you of my speechless surprise when I came in an hour ago and found you had been here. I knew you had the moment I came in. At once I recognized the smell of the cigarettes you smoke. I went upstairs and called Johanna, for I was not sure that you were not still here, in the parlor, and frankly I was not going down if you were, for I do not choose to have my fastnesses stormed. She told me of your visit; how you had come up on foot soon after Vicki and Joey and I had started off for an afternoon's tobogganing on the hills, how you had stayed talking to Papa, and talking and talking, till you had to hurry down to catch the last train. 'And he bade me greet you for him,' finished Johanna. 'Indeed?' said I.

Do you like winter excursions into the country? Is Berlin boring you already? I shook my head in grave disapproval as Johanna proceeded with her tale. I am all for a young man's attending to his business and not making sudden wild journeys that take him away for a whole day and most of a night. Papa was delighted, I must say, to have had at last, as he told me with disconcerting warmth, at last after all these months an intelligent conversation, but with his delight the success of your visit ends, for when I heard of it I was not delighted at all. Why did you go into the kitchen? Johanna says you would go, and then that you went out hatless at the back door and down to the bottom of the garden and that you stood there leaning against the fence as though it were summer. 'Still without a hat,' said Johanna, in her turn shaking her head, 'bei dieser Kälte.'

Bei dieser Kälte, indeed. Yes; what made you do it? I am glad I was out, for I do not care to look on while the usually reasonable behave unaccountably. I don't think I can be friends with you for a little after this. I think I really must quarrel, for it isn't very decent to drop unexpectedly upon a person who from time to time has told you with the frankness that is her most marked feature that she doesn't want to be dropped upon. No doubt you wished to see Papa as well, and, on your way through Jena, Professor Martens; but I will not pretend to suppose your call was not chiefly intended for me, for it is to me and not to either of those wiser ones that you have written every day for months past. You are a strange young man. Heaven knows what you have accustomed yourself to imagining me to be. I almost wish now that you had seen me when I came in from our violent exercise, a touzled, short-skirted, heated person. It might have cured you. I forgot to look in the glass, but of course my hair and eyelashes were as white with hoar-frost as Vicki's and Joey's, and from beneath them and from above my turned-up collar must have emerged just such another glowing nose. Even Papa was struck by my appearance—after having gazed, I suppose, for hours on your composed correctness—and remarked that living in the country did not necessarily mean a complete return to savage nature.

The house feels very odd to-night. So do I. It feels haunted. So do I. I want to scold you, and yet I cannot. I have the strangest desire to cry. It is the thought that you came this long way, toiled up this long hill, waited those long hours, all to see some one who is glad to have missed you, that makes me want to. The night is so black outside my window, and somewhere through that blackness you are travelling at this moment, disappointed, across the endless frozen fields and forests that you must go through inch by inch before you reach Berlin. Why did you do a thing so comfortless? And here have I actually begun to cry,—I think because it is so dark, and you are not yet home.

ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

LXI

Dear Mr. Anstruther,—I don't quite understand. Purely motherly, I should say. Perhaps our notions of the exact meaning of the word friend are different. I include in it a motherly and sisterly interest in bodily well-being, in dry socks, warm feet, regular meals. I do not like my friend to be out on a bitter night, to take a tiring journey, to be disappointed. My friend's mother would have, I imagine, precisely the same feeling. My friend should not, then, mistake mere motherliness for other and less comfortable sentiments. But I am busy today, and have no time to puzzle out your letter. It must have been the outcome of a rather strange mood.

Yours sincerely,

ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

Tell me more about your daily life in Berlin, the people you see, the houses you go to, the attitude, kind or otherwise, of your chief. Tell me these things, instead of swamping me with subtleties of sentiment. I don't understand subtleties, and I fear and despise sentiment as a certain spoiler of plain bread-and-butter happiness. There should be no sentiment between friends. The moment there is they leave off being just friends; and is not that what we both most want to be?

LXII

Oh, I can do nothing with you. You are bent, I'm afraid, on losing your friend. Don't write me such letters—don't, don't, don't! My heart sinks when I see you deliberately setting about strangling our friendship. Am I to lose it then, that too? Your last letters are like bad dreams, so strange and unreasonable, so without the least order or self-control. I read them with my fingers in my ears,—an instinctive foolish movement of protection against words I do not want to hear. Dear friend, do not take your friendship from me. Give yourself a shake; come out from those vain imaginings your soul has gone to dwell among. What shall I talk to you about this bright winter's morning? Yes, I will write you longer letters; you needn't beg so hard, as though the stars couldn't get along in their courses if I didn't. See, I am willing to do anything to keep my friend. You are my only one, the only person in the world to whom I tell the silly thoughts that come into my head and so get rid of them. You listen, and you are the only person in the world who does. You help me, and I in my turn want to be allowed to go on helping you. Do not put an end to what is precious,—believe me it will grow more and more precious with years. Do not, in the heat and impatience of youth, kill the poor goose who, if left alone, will lay the most beautiful golden eggs. What shall I talk to you about to turn your attention somewhere else, somewhere far removed from that unhappy bird? Shall I tell you about Papa's book, finally refused by every single publisher, come back battered and draggled to be galvanized by me into fresh life in an English translation? Shall I tell you how I sit for three hours daily doing it, pen in hand, ink on fingers, hair pushed back from an anxious brow, Papa hovering behind with a dictionary in which, full of distrust, he searches as I write to see if it contains the words I have used? Shall I tell you about Joey, whose first disgust at finding himself once more with us has given place by degrees that grow visibly wider to a rollicking enjoyment. Less and less does he come up here. More and more does he stay down there. He hurries through his lessons with a speed that leaves Papa speechless, and is off and hauling the sled up past our gate with Vicki walking demurely beside him and is whizzing down again past our gate with Vicki sitting demurely in front of him before Papa is well through the list of adjectives he applies to him once at least every day. I never see the sled now nearer than in the distance. Vicki wears her stiff shirts again, and her neat ties again, and the sporting belt that makes her waist look so very trim and tiny. If anything she is more aggressively starched and boyish than before. Her collars seem to grow higher and cleaner each time I see her. Her hat is tilted further forward. Her short skirts show the neatest little boots. She is extraordinarily demure. She never cries. Joey reads Samson Agonistes with us, and points out the jokes to Vicki. Vicki says why did I never tell her it was so funny? I stare first at one and then at the other, and feel a hundred years old.

'I say,' said Joey, coming into the kitchen just now.

'Well, what?' said I.

'I'm going to Berlin for a day.'

'Are you indeed?'

'Tell the old man, will you?'

'Tell the who?'

'The old man. I shan't be here for the lesson to-morrow, thank the Lord. I'm off by the first train.'

'Indeed,' said I.

There was a silence, during which Joey fidgeted about among the culinary objects scattered around him. I went on peeling apples. When he had fidgeted as much as he wanted to be lit a cigarette.

'No,' said I. 'Not in kitchens. A highly improper thing to do.'

He threw it into the dustbin. 'I say,' he said again.

'Well, what?' said I again.

'What do you think—what do you think—' He paused. I waited. As he didn't go on I thought he had done. 'What do I think?' I said. 'You'd be staggered if I told you, it's such a lot, and it's so terrific.'

'What do you think,' repeated Joey, taking no heed of me, but, with his hands in his pockets, kicking a fallen apple aimlessly about on the floor, 'what do you think the little girl'd like for Christmas and that, don't you know?'