Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther

LXV

Dear Mr. Anstruther,—My heartiest good wishes for the New Year. May it be fruitful to you in every pleasant way; bring you interesting work, agreeable companions, bright days; and may it, above all things confirm and strengthen our friendship. There now; was ever young man more thoroughly fitted out with invoked blessings? And each one wished from the inmost sincerity of my heart.

But we can't come to Berlin as you suggest we should, and allow ourselves to be shown round by you. Must I say thank you? No, I don't think I will. I will not pretend conventionality with you, and I do not thank you, for I don't like to have to believe that you really thought I would come. And then your threat, though it amused me, vexed me too. You say if I don't come you will be forced to suppose that I'm afraid of meeting you. Kindly suppose anything you like. After that of course I will not come. What a boy you are. And what an odd, spoilt boy. Why should I be afraid of meeting you? Is it, you think, because once—see, I am at least not afraid of speaking of it—you passed across my life convulsively? I don't know that any man could stir me up now to even the semblance of an earthquake. My quaking days are done; and after that one thunderous upheaval I am fascinated by the charm of quiet weather, and of a placid basking in a sunshine I have made with my very own hands. It is useless for you to tell me, as I know you will, that it is only an imitation of the real thing and has no heat in it. I don't want to be any hotter. In this tempestuous world where everybody is so eager, here is at least one woman who likes to be cool and slow. How strange it is the way you try to alter me, to make me quite different. There seems to be a perpetual battering going on at the bulwarks of my character. You want to pull them down and erect new fabrics in their place, fabrics so frothy and unreal that they are hardly more than fancies and would have to be built up afresh every day. Yet I know you like me, and want to be my friend. You make me think of those quite numerous husbands who fall in love with their wives because they are just what they are, and after marriage expend their energies training them into something absolutely different. There was one in Jena while we were there who fell desperately in love with a little girl of eighteen, when he was about your age, and he adored her utterly because she was so divinely silly, ignorant, soft and babyish. She knew nothing undesirable, and he adored her for that. She knew nothing desirable either, and he adored her for that too. He adored her to such an extent that all Jena, not given overmuch to merriment, was distorted with mirth at the spectacle. He was a clever man, a very promising professor, yet he found nothing more profitable than to spend every moment he could spare adoring. And his manner of adoring was to sit earnestly discovering, by means of repeated experiment, which of his fingers fitted best into her dimples when she laughed, and twisting the tendrils of her hair round his thumbs in an endless enjoyment of the way, when he suddenly let them go, they beautifully curled. He did this quite openly, before us all, seeing I suppose no reason why he should dissemble his interest in his future wife's dimples and curls. But alas for the dimples and curls once she was married! Oh weh, how quickly he grew blind to them. And as for the divine silliness, ignorance, softness and babyishness that had so deeply fascinated him, just those were what got most on to his nerves. He tried to do away with them, to replace them by wit and learning combined with brilliant achievements among saucepans and shirts, and the result was disastrous. His little wife was scared. Her dimples disappeared from want of practice. Her pretty colors seemed suddenly wiped out, as though some one had passed over them roughly with a damp cloth. Her very hair left off curling, and was as limp and depressed as the rest of her. Let this, Mr. Anstruther, be an awful warning to you, not only when you marry but now at once in regard to your friends. Do not attempt to alter those long-suffering persons. It is true you would have some difficulty in altering a person like myself, long ago petrified into her present horrid condition, but even the petrified can and do get tired of hearing the unceasing knocking of the reforming mallet on their skulls. Leave me alone, dear young man. Like me for anything you find that can be liked, express proper indignation at the rest of me, and go your way praising God Who made us all. Really it would be a refreshment if you left off for a space imploring me to change into something else. There is a ring about your imploring as if you thought it was mere wilfulness holding me back from being and doing all you wish. Believe me I am not wilful; I am only petrified. I can't change. I have settled down, very comfortably I must say, to the preliminary petrifaction of middle age, and middle age, I begin to perceive, is a blessed period in which we walk along mellowly, down pleasant slopes, with nothing gusty and fierce able to pierce our incrustation, no inward volcanoes able to upset the surrounding rockiness, nothing to distract our attention from the mild serenity of the landscape, the little flowers by the way, the beauty of the reddening leaves, the calm and sunlit sky. You will say it is absurd at twenty-six to talk of middle age, but I feel it in my bones, Mr. Anstruther, I feel it in my bones. It is after all simply a question of bones. Yours are twenty years younger than mine; and did I not always tell you I was old?

I am so busy that you must be extra pleased, please, to get a letter today. The translation of Papa's book has ended by interesting me to such an extent that I can't leave off working at it. I do it officially in his presence for an hour daily, he as full of mistrust of my English as ever, trying to check it with a dictionary, and using picturesque language to convey his disgust to me that he should be so imperfectly acquainted with a tongue so useful. He has forgotten the little he learned from my mother in the long years since her death, and he has the natural conviction of authors in the presence of their translators that the translator is a grossly uncultured person who will leave out all the nuances. For an hour I plod along obediently, then I pretend I must go and cook. What I really do is to run up to my bedroom, lock myself in, and work away feverishly for the rest of the morning at my version of the book. It is, I suppose, what would be called a free translation, but I protest I never met anything quite so free. Papa's book is charming, and the charm can only be reproduced by going repeatedly wholly off the lines. Accordingly I go, and find the process exhilarating and amusing. The thing amuses and interests me; I wonder if it would amuse and interest other people? I fear it would not, for when I try to imagine it being read by my various acquaintances my heart sinks with the weight of the certainty that it couldn't possibly. I imagine it in the hands of Joey, of Frau von Lindeberg, of different people in Jena, and the expression my inner eye sees on their faces makes me unable for a long while to go on with it. Then I get over that and begin working again at my salad. It really is a salad, with Papa as the groundwork of lettuce, very crisp and fresh, and myself as the dressing and bits of garnishing beetroot and hard-boiled egg. I work at it half the night sometimes, so eager am I to get it done and sent off. Yes, my young friend, I have inherited Papa's boldness in the matter of sending off, and the most impressive of London publishers is shortly to hold it in his sacred hands. And if his sacred hands forget themselves so far as to hurl it rudely back at me they yet can never take away the fun I have had writing it.

Yours sincerely,

ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

Joey's father is expected to-morrow, and the whole Galgenberg is foggy with the fumes of cooking. Once his consent is given the engagement will be put in the papers and life will grow busy and brilliant for Frau von Lindeberg. She talks of removing immediately to Berlin, there to give a series of crushingly well-done parties to those of her friends who are supposed to have laughed when Vicki was thrown over by her first lover. I don't believe they did laugh; I refuse to believe in such barbarians; but Frau von Lindeberg, grown frank about that disastrous story now that it has been so handsomely wiped off Vicki's little slate, assures me that they did. She doesn't seem angry any longer about it, being much too happy to have room in her heart for wrath, but she is bent on this one form of revenge. Well, it is a form that will gratify everybody, revenger and revengee equally I should think.

LXVI

Dear Mr. Anstruther,—I couldn't write before, I've been too busy. The manuscript went this morning after real hard work day and night, and now I feel like a squeezed lemon that yet is cheerful, if you can conceive such a thing. Joey's father has been and gone. He arrived late one night, inspected the Lindebergs, gave his consent, and was off twenty-four hours later. The Lindebergs were much disconcerted by these quick methods, they who like to move slowly, think slowly, and sit hours over each meal; and they had not said half they wanted to say and he had not eaten half he was intended to eat before he was gone. Also he disconcerted them,—indeed it was more than that, he upset them utterly, by not looking like what they had made up their minds he would look like. The Galgenbergs expected to see some one who should be blatantly rich, and blatant riches, it dimly felt, would be expressed by much flesh and a thick watch chain. Instead the man had a head like Julius Cæsar, lean, thoughtful, shrewd, and a spare body that made Papa Lindeberg's seem strangely pulpy and as if it were held together only by the buttons of his clothes. We were staggered. Frau von Lindeberg couldn't understand why a man so rich should also be so thin,—' He is in a position to have the costliest cooking,' she said several times, looking at me with amazed eyebrows; nor could she understand why a man without ancestors should yet make her husband, whose past bristles with them, be the one to look as if he hadn't got any. She mused much, and aloud. While Vicki was being run breathlessly over the mountains by her nimble future father-in-law, with Joey, devoured by pride in them both, in attendance, I went down to ask if I could help in the cooking, and found her going about her kitchen like one in a dream. She let me tuck up my sleeves and help her, and while I did it she gave vent to many musings about England and its curious children. 'Strange, strange people,' she kept on saying helplessly.

But she is the happiest woman in Germany at this moment, happier far than Vicki, for she sees with her older eyes the immense advantages that are to be Vicki's who sees at present nothing at all but Joey. And then the deliciousness of being able to write to all those relations grown of late so supercilious, to Cousin Mienchen who came and played the rich, and tell them the glorious news. Vicki basks in the sunshine of a mother's love again, and never hears a cross word. Good things are showered down on her, presents, pettings, admiration, all those charming things that every girl should enjoy once before her pretty girlhood has gone. It is the most delightful experience to see a family in the very act of receiving a stroke of luck. Strokes of luck, especially of these dimensions, are so very rare. It is like being present at a pantomime that doesn't leave off, and watching the good fairy touching one gray dull unhappy thing after another into radiance and smiles. But I lose my friends, for they go to Berlin almost immediately, and from there to Manchester on a visit to Mr. Collins, a visit during which the business part of the marriage is to be settled. Also, and naturally, we lose Joey. This is rather a blow, just as we had begun so pleasantly to roll in his money, but where Vicki goes he goes too, and so Papa and I will soon be left again alone on our mountain, face to face with vegetarian economies.

Well, it has been a pleasant interlude, and I who first saw Vicki steeped in despair, red-eyed, piteous, slighted, talked about, shall see her at last departing down the hill arrayed in glory as with a garment. Then I shall turn back, when the last whisk of her shining skirts has gleamed round the bend of the road, to my own business, to the sober trudging along the row of days allotted me, to the making of economies, the reading of good books, the practice of abstract excellences, the pruning of my soul. My soul, I must say, has had some vigorous prunings. It ought by now to be of an admirable sturdiness. You yourself once lopped off a most luxuriant growth that was, I agree, best away, and now these buds of friendship, of easier circumstances, are going to be nipped off too, and when they are gone what will be left, I wonder, but the uncompromising and the rugged? Is it possible I am so base as to be envious? In spite of my real pleasure I can't shut out a certain wistfulness, a certain little pang, and exactly what kind of wistfulness it is and exactly what kind of pang I don't well know unless it is envy. Vicki's lot is the last one I would choose, yet it makes me wistful. It includes Joey, yet I feel a little pang. This is very odd; for Joey as a husband, a person from whom you cannot get away, would be rather more than I could suffer with any show of gladness. How then can I be envious? Of course if Joey knew what I am writing he would thrust an incredulous tongue in his cheek, wink a sceptical eye, and mutter some eternal truth about grapes; but I, on the other hand, would watch him doing it with the perfect calm of him who sticks unshakably to his point. What would his cheek, his tongue, and his winking eye be to me? They would leave me wholly unmoved, not a hair's breadth moved from my original point, which is that Joey is not a person you can marry. But certainly it is a good and delightful thing that Vicki thinks he is and thinks it with such conviction. I tell you the top of our mountain is in a perpetual rosy glow nowadays, as though the sun never left it; and the entire phenomenon is due solely to these two joyful young persons.

Yours sincerely,

ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

LXVII

Dear Mr. Anstruther,—I did a silly thing today: I went and mourned in an empty house. I don't think I'm generally morbid, but today I indulged in a perfect orgy of morbidness. Write and scold me. It is your turn to scold, and by doing it thoroughly you will bring me back to my ordinary cheerful state. The Lindebergs are gone, and I am feeling it absurdly. I didn't realize how much I loved that little dear Vicki, nor in the least the interest Frau von Lindeberg's presence and doings gave life. The last three weeks have been so thrilling, there was so much warmth and brightness going about that it reached even onlookers like myself and warmed and lighted them; and now in the twinkling of an eye it is gone,—gone, wiped out, snuffed out, and Papa and I are alone again, and there is a northeast wind. These are the times when philosophy is so useful; but do explain why it is that one is only a philosopher so long as one is happy. When I am contented, and everything is just as I like it, I can philosophize beautifully, and do it with a hearty sincerity that convinces both myself and the person listening to me; but when the bad days come, the empty days, the disappointing, chilly days, behold Philosophy, that serene and dignified companion so long as the weather was fine, clutching her academic skirts hastily together and indulging in the form of rapid retreat known to the vulgar and the graphic as skedaddling. 'Do not all charms fly,' your Keats inquires, 'at the mere touch of cold Philosophy?' But I have found that nothing flies quite so fast as cold Philosophy herself; she would win in any race when the race is who shall run away quickest; she is of no use whatever—it is my deliberate conclusion—except to sit with in the sun on the south side of a sheltering wall on those calm afternoons of life when you've only got to open your mouth and ripe peaches drop into it. I used to think if I could love her enough she would, in her gratitude, chloroform me safely over all the less pleasant portions of life, see to it that I was unconscious during the passage, never let me be aware of anything but the beautiful and the good; but either she has no gratitude or I have little love, and the years have brought me the one conviction that she is an artist at leaving you in the lurch. The world is strewn with persons she has left in it, and out of the three inhabitants of a mountain to leave one there is surely an enormous percentage. Now what is your opinion of a woman with a healthy body, a warm room, and a sufficient dinner, who feels as though the soul within her were an echoing cavern, empty, cold, and dark? It is what I feel at this moment, and it is shameful. Isn't it shameful that the sight of leaden clouds—but they really are dreadful clouds, inky, ragged, harassed—scudding across the sky, and of furious brown beech-leaves on the little trees in front of the Lindebergs' deserted house being lashed and maddened by the wind, should make me suddenly catch my breath for pain? It is pain, quite sharp, unmistakable pain, and it is because I am alone, and my friends gone, and the dusk is falling. This afternoon I leaned against their gate and really suffered. Regret for the past, fear for the future,—vague, rather terrifying fears, not wholly unconnected with you—hurt so much that they positively succeeded in wringing a tear out of me. It was a very reluctant tear, and only came out after a world of wringing, and I had stood there a most morbid long time before it appeared; but it did appear, and the vicious wind screamed round the Lindebergs' blank house, rattled its staring naked windows, banged in wild gusts about the road where the puddles of half melted snow reflected the blackness of the sky, tore at my hair and dress, stung my cheeks, shook the gate I held on to, thundered over the hills. Dear young man, I don't want to afflict you with these tales of woe and weakness, but I must tell you what I did next. I went up and got the key from Johanna, in whose keeping Frau von Lindeberg had left it, and came down again, and unlocked the door of the house lately so full of light and life, and crept fearfully about the echoing rooms and up the dismal stairs, and let myself go, as I tell you, to a very orgy of morbidness. It was like a nightmare. Memories took the form of ghosts, and clutched at me through the balusters and from behind doors with thin cold fingers; and the happiest memories were those that clutched the coldest. I fled at last in a sudden panic, flying out of reach of them, slamming the door to, running for my life up the road and in at our gate. Johanna did not let me in at once, and I banged with my fists in a frenzy to get away from the black sky and the threatening thunder of the storm-stricken pines. 'Herr Gott' said Johanna when she saw me; so that I must have looked rather wild.

Well, I am weak, you see, just as weak and silly as the very weakest and silliest in spite of my big words and brave face. I am writing now as near the stove as possible in Papa's room, glad to be with him, glad to be warm, grateful to sit with somebody alive after that hour with the ghosts; and the result of deep considering has been to force me to face the fact that there is much meanness in my nature. There is. Don't bother to contradict; there is. All my forlornness since yesterday is simply the outcome of a mixture of envy and self-pity. I do miss dear Vicki whom I greatly loved, I do miss the cheery Joey, I miss Papa Lindeberg who likened me to Hebe, I miss his wife who kept me in my proper place—it is quite true that I miss these people, but that would never of itself be a feeling strong enough to sweep me off my feet into black pools of misery as I was swept this afternoon, and never, never would make me, who have so fine a contempt for easy tears, cry. No, Mr. Anstruther, bitter truths once seen have to be stared at squarely, and I am simply comparing my lot with Vicki's and being sorry for myself. It is amazing that it should be so, for have I not everything a reasonable being needs, and am I not, then, a reasonable being? And the meanness of it; for it does imply a grudging, an uneasiness in the presence of somebody else's happiness. Well, I'm thoroughly ashamed, and that at least is a good thing; and now that you know how badly I too need lecturing and how I am torn by particularly ungenerous emotions perhaps you'll see what a worthless person I am and will take me down from the absurd high pinnacle on which you persist in keeping me and on which I have felt so desperately uncomfortable for months past. It is infinitely humiliating, I do assure you, to be—shall we say venerated? for excellences one would like to possess but is most keenly aware one does not. Persons with any tendency to be honest about themselves and with even the smallest grain of a sense of humor should never be chosen as idols and set up aloft in giddy places. They make shockingly bad idols. They are divided by a desire to laugh and an immense pity for the venerator.

I add these observations, dear friend, to the description of my real nature that has gone before because your letters are turning more and more into the sort of letters that ends a placid friendship. I want to be placid. I love being placid. I insist on being placid. And the thought of your letters with so little placidness about them, was with me this afternoon in that terrible house, and it added to the fear of the future that seized me by the throat and would not let me go. Is it, then, so impossible to be friends, just friends with a man, in the same dear frank way one is with another woman, or a man is with a man? I hoped you and I were going to prove the possibility triumphantly. I even, so keenly do I desire it, prayed that we were. But perhaps there is little use in such praying.

Yours sincerely,

ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

You may scold me as much as you like, but you are not to comfort me. Do not make the mistake, I earnestly beg you, of supposing that I want to be comforted.

LXVIII

Dear Mr. Anstruther,—Just a line to tell you that I have recovered, and you are not to take my letter yesterday too seriously. I woke up this morning perfectly normal, and able to look out on the day before me with the usual interest. Then something very nice happened: my translation of Papa's book didn't come back, but instead arrived an urbane letter expressing a kind of reluctant willingness, if you can imagine the mixture, to publish it. What do you think of that? The letter, it is true, goes on to suggest, still with urbanity, that no doubt no one will ever buy it, but promises if ever any one does to send us a certain just portion of what was paid for it. 'Observe, Rose-Marie,' said Papa when his first delight had calmed, 'the unerring instinct with which the English, very properly called a nation of shopkeepers, instantly recognize the value of a good thing when they see it. Consider the long years during which I have vainly beaten at the doors of the German public, and compare its deafness with the quick response of our alert and admirable cousins across the Channel. Well do I know which was the part that specially appealed to this man's business instinct—'