Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther

VI

That sponge had no effect yesterday. I stared and stared at it, and it only remained a sponge, far too small for the really cleanly, instead of what it has up to now been, the starting-point for a train of thrilling, enthusiastic thoughts. I'm an unbalanced creature. Do you divide your time too, I wonder, between knocking your head against the stars and, in some freezing depth of blackness, listening to your heart, how it will hardly beat for fear? Of course you don't. You are much too clever. And then you have been educated, trained, taught to keep your thoughts within bounds, and not let them start off every minute on fresh and aimless wanderings. Yet the star-knocking is so wonderful that I believe I would rather freeze the whole year round for one hour of it than go back again to the changeless calm, the winter-afternoon sunshine, in which I used to sit before I knew you. All this only means that you have not written. See how variously one can state a fact.

I have run away from the sitting-room and the round table and the lamp, because Papa and my step-mother had begun to discuss you again, your prospects, your probable hideous fate if you were not prudent, your glorious career if you were. I felt guilty, wounded, triumphant, vain, all at once. Papa, of course, was chiefly the listener. He agreed; or at most he temporized. I tell you, Roger, I am amazed at the power a woman has over her husband if she is in every way inferior to him. It is not only that, as we say, der Klügere giebt nach, it is the daily complete victory of the coarser over the finer, the rough over the gentle, the ignorant over the wise. My step-mother is an uneducated person, shrewd about all the things that do not matter, unaware of the very existence of the things that do, ready to be charitable, helpful, where the calamity is big enough, wholly unsympathetic, even antagonistic, toward all those many small calamities that make up one's years; the sort of woman parsons praise, and who get tombstones put over them at last peppered with frigid adjectives like virtuous and just. Did you ever chance to live with a just person? They are very chilling, and not so rare as one might suppose. And Papa, laxest, most tolerant of men, so lax that nothing seems to him altogether bad, so tolerant that nobody, however hard he tries, can pass, he thinks, beyond the reach of forgiveness and love, so humorous that he has to fight continually to suppress it, for humor lands one in odd morasses of dislike and misconception here, married her a year after my mother died, and did it wholly for my sake. Imagine it. She was to make me happy. Imagine that too. I was not any longer to be a solitary Backfisch, with holes in her stockings and riotous hair. There came a painful time when Papa began to suspect that the roughness of my hair might conceivably be a symbol of the dishevelment of my soul. Neighboring matrons pointed out the possibility to him. He took to peering anxiously at unimportant parts of me such as my nails, and was startled to see them often black. He caught me once or twice red-eyed in corners, when it had happened that the dear ways and pretty looks of my darling mother had come back for a moment with extra vividness. He decided that I was both dirty and wretched, and argued, I am sure during sleepless nights, that I would probably go on being dirty and wretched for ever. And so he put on his best clothes one day, and set out doggedly in search of a wife.

He found her quite easily, in a house in the next street. She was making doughnuts, for it was the afternoon of New Year's Eve. She had just taken them out of the oven, and they were obviously successful. Papa loves doughnuts. His dinner had been uneatable. The weather was cold. She took off her apron, and piled them on a dish, and carried them, scattering fragrance as they went, into the sitting-room; and the smell of them was grateful; and they were very hot.

Papa came home engaged. 'I am not as a rule in favor of second marriages, Rose-Marie,' he began, breaking the news to me with elaborate art.

'Oh, horrid things,' I remarked, my arm round his neck, my face against his, for even then I was as tall as he. You know how he begins abruptly about anything that happens to cross his mind, so I was not surprised.

He rubbed his nose violently. 'I never knew anybody with such hair as yours for tickling a person,' he said, trying to push it back behind my ears. Of course it would not go. 'Would it do that,' he added suspiciously, 'if it were properly brushed?'

'I don't know. Well, Papachen?'

'Well what?'

'About second marriages.'

He had forgotten, and he started. In an instant I knew. I took my arm away quickly, but put it back again just as quickly and pressed my face still closer: it was better we should not see each other's eyes while he told me.

'I am not, as a rule, in favor of them,' he repeated, when he had coughed and tried a second time to induce my hair to go behind my ears, 'but there are cases where they are—imperative.'

'Which ones?'

'Why, if a man is left with little children, for instance.'

'Then he engages a good nurse.'

'Or his children run wild.'

'Then he gets a severe aunt to live with him.'

'Or they grow up.'

'Then they take care of themselves.'

'Or he is an old man left with, say, one daughter.'

'Then she would take care of him.'

'And who would take care of her, Rose-Marie?'

'He would.'

'And if he is an incapable? An old person totally unable to notice lapses from convention, from social customs? If no one is there to tell her how to dress and how to behave? And she is growing up, and yet remains a barbarian, and the day is not far distant when she must go out, and he knows that when she does go out Jena will be astounded.'

'Does the barbarian live in Jena?'

'My dear, she is universal. Wherever there is a widower with an only female child, there she is.'

'But if she had been happy?'

'But she had not been happy. She used to cry.'

'Oh, of course she used to cry sometimes, when she thought more than usual of her sweet—of her sweet—But for all that she had been happy, and so had he. Why, you know he had. Didn't she look after him, and keep house for him? Didn't she cook for him? Not very beautifully, perhaps, but still she did cook, and there was dinner every day. Didn't she go to market three times a week, and taste all the butter? Didn't she help to do the rooms? And in the evenings weren't they happy together, with nobody to worry them? And then, when he missed his darling wife, didn't the barbarian always know he was doing it, and come and sit on his knee, and kiss him, and make up for it? Didn't she? Now didn't she?'

Papa unwound himself, and walked up and down with a desperate face.

'Girls of sixteen must learn how to dress and to behave. A father cannot show them that,' he said.

'But they do dress and behave.'

'Rose-Marie, unmended stockings are not dressing. And to talk to a learned stranger well advanced in years with the freedom of his equal in age and knowledge, as I saw one doing lately, is not behaving.'

'Oh, Papa, she wouldn't do that again, I'm certain.'

'She wouldn't have done it that once if she had had a mother.'

'But the poor wretch hadn't got a mother.'

'Exactly. A mother, therefore, must be provided.'

Here, I remember, there was a long pause. Papa walked, and I watched him in despair. Despair, too, was in his own face. He had had time to forget the doughnuts, and how cold he had been, and how hungry. So shaken was I that I actually suggested the engagement of a finishing governess to finish that which had never been begun, pointing out that she, at least, having finished would go; and he said he could not afford one; and he added the amazing statement that a wife was cheaper.

Well, I suppose she has been cheap: that is she has made one of Papa's marks go as far as two of other people's; but oh how expensive she has been in other ways! She has ruined us in such things as freedom, and sweetness, and light. You know the sort of talk here at meals. I wish you could have heard it before her time. She has such a strong personality that somehow we have always followed her lead; and Papa, who used to bubble out streams of gayety when he and I sat untidily on either side of a tureen of horrible bad soup, who talked of all things under heaven, and with undaunted audacity of many things in it, and who somehow put a snap and a sparkle into whatever he said, sits like a schoolboy invited to a meal at his master's, eager to agree, anxious to give satisfaction. The wax cloth on the table is clean and shiny; the spoons are bright; a cruet with clear oil and nice-looking vinegar stands in the midst; the food, though simple, is hot and decent; we are quite comfortable; and any of the other Jena Hausfraus coming in during a meal would certainly cry out Wie gemüthlich. But of what use is it to be whitewashed and trim outside, to have pleasant creepers and tidy shutters, when inside one's soul wanders through empty rooms, mournfully shivers in damp and darkness, is hungry and no one brings it food, is cold and no one lights a fire, is miserable and tired and there's not a chair to sit on?

Why I write all this I can't think; except that I feel as if I were talking to you. You must tell me if I bore you. When I begin a letter to you the great difficulty is to leave off again. Oh how warm it makes one feel to know that there is one person in the world to whom one is everything. A lover is the most precious, the most marvellous possession. No wonder people like having them. And I used to think that so silly. Heavens, what an absurd person I have been. Why, love is the one thing worth having. Everything else, talents, work, arts, religion, learning, the whole tremblement, are so many drugs with which the starved, the loverless, try to dull their pangs, to put themselves to sleep. Good-night, and God bless you a thousand times. R.-M.

VII

Dearest,—Your letter came this afternoon. How glad I was to get it. And I do think it a good idea to go down into the country to those Americans before your exam. Who knows but they may, by giving you peace at the right moment, be the means of making you pass extra brilliantly? That you should not pass at all is absolutely out of the question. Why have the gods showered gifts on you if not for the proper passing of exams? For I suppose in this as in everything else there are different ways, ways of excellence and mediocrity. I know which way yours will be. If only the presence of my spirit by your side on Saturday could be of use. But that's the worst of spirits: they never seem to be the least good unless they take their bodies with them. Yet mine burns so hotly when I am thinking of you—and when am I not thinking of you?—that I feel as if you actually must feel the glow of it as it follows you about. How strange and dreadful love is. Till you know it, you are so sure the world is very good and pleasant up in those serene, frost-bitten regions where you stand alone, breathing the thin air of family affection, shone upon gently by the mild and misty sun of general esteem. Then comes love, and pulls you down. For isn't it a descent? Isn't it? Somehow, though it is so great a glory, it's a coming-down as well—down from the pride of absolute independence of body and soul, down from the high-mightiness of indifference, to something fierce, and hot, and consuming. Oh, I daren't tell you how little of serenity I have left. At first, just at first, I didn't feel like this. I think I was stunned. My soul seemed to stand still. Surely it was extraordinary, that tempestuous crossing from the calm of careless friendship to the place where love dashes madly against the rocks? Don't laugh at my images. I'm in deadly earnest to-night. I do feel that love hurts. I do feel as if I'd been thrown on to rocks, left by myself on them to come slowly to my senses and find I am lying alone in a new and burning sun. It's an exquisite sort of pain, but it's very nearly unbearable. You see, you are so far away. And I, I'm learning for the first time in my life what it means, that saying about eating out one's heart.

R.-M.

VIII

Really, my dear Roger, nicest of all Bräutigams, pleasantest, best, and certainly most charming, I don't think I'll write to you again in the evenings. One of those hard clear hours that lie round breakfast-time will be the most seemly for consecration to you. Moods are such queer things, each one so distinct and real, so seemingly eternal, and I am influenced by them to an extraordinary degree. The weather, the time of day, the light in the room—yes, actually the light in the room, sunlight, cloudlight, lamplight—the scent of certain flowers, the sound of certain voices—the instant my senses become aware of either of these things I find myself flung into the middle of a fresh mood. And the worst part of it is the blind enthusiasm with which I am sure that as I think and feel at that moment so will I think and feel for ever. Nothing cures me. No taking of myself aside, no weight of private admonishment, no bringing of my spirit within the white glare of pure reason. Oh, women are fools; and of all fools the most complete is myself. But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to say that I had to go to a Kaffee-Klatsch yesterday at four, which is why I put off answering your letter of the 13th till the evening. My dear Roger, you must take no notice of that letter. Pray think of me as a young person of sobriety; collected, discreet, cold to frostiness. Think of me like that, my dear, and in return I'll undertake to write to you only in my after-breakfast mood, quite the most respectable I possess. It is nine now. Papa, in the slippers you can't have forgotten, is in his corner by the stove, loudly disagreeing with the morning paper; he keeps on shouting Schafskopf. Johanna is carrying coals about and dropping them with a great noise. My step-mother is busy telling her how wrong it is to drop dirty coals in clean places. I am writing on a bit of the breakfast-table, surrounded by crumbs and coffee-cups. I will not clear them away till I've finished my letter, because then I am sure you'll get nothing either morbid or lovesick. Who, I'd like to know, could flame into love-talk or sink into the mud of morbidness from a starting-point of anything so sprightly as crumbs and coffee-cups?

It was too sweet of you to compare me to Nausicaa in your letter yesterday. Nobody ever did that before. Various aunts, among whom a few years ago there was a great mortality, so that they are all now aunts in heaven, told me in divers tones that I was much too long for my width, that I was like the handle of a broom, like the steeple of the Stadtkirche, like a tree walking; but none of them ever said anything about Nausicaa. I doubt if they had ever heard of her. I'm afraid if they had they wouldn't have seen that I am like her. You know the blindness of aunts. Jena is full of them (not mine, Gott sei Dank, but other people's) and they are all stone-blind. I don't mean, of course, that the Jena streets are thick with aunts being led by dogs on strings, but that they have that tragic blindness of the spirit that misses seeing things that are hopeful and generous and lovely; things alight with young enthusiasms, or beautiful with a patience that has had time to grow gray. They also have that odd, unfurnished sort of mind that can never forget and never forgive. Yesterday at the Kaffee-Klatsch I met them all again, the Jena aunts I know so well and who are yet for ever strange, for ever of a ghastly freshness. It was the first this season, and now I suppose I shall waste many a good afternoon klatsching. How I wish I had not to go. My step-mother says that if I do not show myself I shall be put down as eccentric. 'You are not very popular,' says she, 'as it is. Do not, therefore, make matters worse.' Then she appeals, should a more than usual stubbornness cloud my open countenance, to Papa. 'Ferdinand,' she says, 'shall she not, then, do as others of her age?' And of course Papa says, bless him, that girls must see life occasionally, and is quite unhappy if I won't. Life? God bless him for a dear, innocent Papa. And how they talked yesterday. Papa would have writhed. He never will talk or listen to talk about women unless they've been dead some time, so uninteresting, so unworthy of discussion does he consider all live females except Johanna to be. And if I hadn't had my love-letter (I took it with me tucked inside my dress, where my heart could beat against it), I don't think I would have survived that Klatsch. You've no idea how proudly I set out. Hadn't I just been reading the sweetest things about myself in your letter? Of course I was proud. And I felt so important, and so impressive, and simply gloriously good-tempered. The pavement of Jena, I decided as I walked over it, was quite unworthy to be touched by my feet; and if the passers-by only knew it, an extremely valuable person was in their midst. In fact, my dear Roger, I fancied myself yesterday. Didn't Odysseus think Nausicaa was Artemis when first he met her among the washing, so god-like did she appear? Well, I felt god-like yesterday, made god-like by your love. I actually fancied people would see something wonderful had happened to me, that I was transfigured, verklärt. Positively, I had a momentary feeling that my coming in, the coming in of anything so happy, must blind the Kaffee-Klatsch, that anything so burning with love must scorch it. Well, it didn't. Never did torch plunged into wetness go out with a drearier fizzle than did my little shining. Nobody noticed anything different. Nobody seemed even to look at me. A few careless hands were stretched out, and the hostess told me to ask the servant to bring more milk.

They were talking about sin. We don't sin much in Jena, so generally they talk about sick people, or their neighbor's income and what he does with it. But yesterday they talked sin. You know because we are poor and Papa has no official position and I have come to be twenty-five without having found a husband, I am a quantité négligeable in our set, a being in whose presence everything can be said, and who is expected to sit in a draught if there is one. Too old to join the young girls in the corner set apart for them, where they whisper and giggle and eat amazing quantities of whipped cream, I hover uneasily on the outskirts of the group of the married, and try to ingratiate myself by keeping on handing them cakes. It generally ends in my being sent out every few minutes by the hostess to the kitchen to fetch more food and things. 'Rose-Marie is so useful,' she will explain to the others when I have been extra quick and cheerful; but I don't suppose Nausicaa's female acquaintances said more. The man Ulysses might take her for a goddess, but the most the women would do would be to commend the way she did the washing. Sometimes I have great trouble not to laugh when I see their heads, often quite venerable, gathered together in an eager bunch, and hear them expressing horror, sympathy, pity, in every sort of appropriate tone, while their eyes, their tell-tale eyes, betrayers of the soul, look pleased. Why they should be pleased when somebody has had an operation or doesn't pay his debts I can't make out. But they do. And after a course of Klatsches throughout the winter, you are left toward April with one firm conviction in a world where everything else is shaky, that there's not a single person who isn't either extraordinarily ill, or, if he's not, who does not misuse his health and strength by not paying his servants' wages.

Yesterday the Klatsch was in a fearful flutter. It had got hold of a tale of sin, real or suspected. It was a tale of two people who, after leading exemplary lives for years, had suddenly been clutched by the throat by Nature; and Nature, we know, cares nothing at all for the claims of husbands and wives or any other lawfulnesses, and is a most unmoral and one-idea'd person. They have, says Jena, begun to love each other in defiance of the law. Nature has been too many for them, I suppose. All Jena is a-twitter. Nothing can be proved, but everything is being feared, said the hostess; from her eyes I'm afraid she wanted to say hoped. Isn't it ugly?—pfui, as we say. And so stale, if it's true. Why can't people defy Nature and be good? The only thing that is always fresh and beautiful is goodness. It is also the only thing that can make you go on being happy indefinitely.

I know her well. My heart failed me when I heard her being talked about so hideously. She is the nicest woman in Jena. She has been kind to me often. She is very clever. Perhaps if she had been more dull she would have found no temptation to do anything but jog along respectably—sometimes I think that to be without imagination is to be so very safe. He has only come to these parts lately. He used to be in Berlin, and has been appointed to a very good position in Weimar. I have not met him, but Papa says he is brilliant. He has a wife, and she has a husband, and they each have a lot of children; so you see if it's true it really is very pfui.

Just as the Kaffee-Klatsch was on the wane, and crumbs were being brushed off laps, and bonnet-strings tied, in she walked. There was a moment's dead silence. Then you should have heard the effusion of welcoming speeches. The hostess ran up and hugged her. The others were covered with pleasant smiles. Perhaps they were grateful to her for having provided such thrilling talk. When I had to go and kiss her hand I never in my life felt baser. You should have seen her looking round cheerfully at all the Judases, and saying she was sorry to be late, and asking if they hadn't missed her; and you should have heard the eager chorus of assurances.