Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther

XXXVII

Dear Mr. Anstruther,—This is a most sweet evening, dripping, quiet, after a rainy day, with a strip of clear yellow sky behind the pine trees on the crest of the hill. I gathered up my skirts and went down through the soaked grass to where against the fence there is a divine straggly bush of pink China roses. I wanted to see how they were getting on after their drenching; and as I stood looking at them in the calm light, the fence at the back of them sodden into dark greens and blacks that showed up every leaf and lovely loose wet flower, a robin came and sat on the fence near me and began to sing. You will say: Well, what next? And there isn't any next; at least, not a next that I am likely to make understandable. It was only that I felt extraordinarily happy. You will say: But why? And if I were to explain, at the end you would still be saying Why? Well, you cannot see my face while I am writing to you, so that I have been able often to keep what I was really thinking safely covered up, but you mustn't suppose that my letters have always exactly represented my state of mind, and that my soul has made no pilgrimages during this half year. I think it has wandered thousands of miles. And often while I wrote scolding you, or was being wise and complacent, or sprightly and offensive, often just then the tired feet of it were bleeding most as they stumbled among the bitter stones. And this evening I felt that the stones were at an end, that my soul has come home to me again, securely into my keeping, glad to be back, and that there will be no more effort needed when I look life serenely in the face. Till now there was always effort. That I talk to you about it is the surest sign that it is over. The robin's singing, the clear light behind the pines, the dripping trees and bushes, the fragrance of the wet roses, the little white house, so modest and hidden, where Papa and I are going to be happy, the perfect quiet after a stormy day, the perfect peace after discordant months,—oh, I wanted to say thank you for each of these beautiful things. Do you remember you gave me a book of Ernest Dowson's poems on the birthday I had while you were with us? And do you remember his

It is what I feel I have done.

But I will not bore you with these sentiments. See, I am always anxious to get back quickly to the surface of things, anxious to skim lightly over the places where tears, happy or miserable, lie, and not to touch with so much as the brush of a wing the secret tendernesses of the soul. Let us, sir, get back to vegetables. They are so safe as subjects for polite letter-writing. And I have had three letters from you this week condemning their use with all the fervor the English language places at your disposal—really it is generous to you in this respect—as a substitute for the mixed diet of the ordinary Philistine. Yes, sir, I regard you as an ordinary Philistine; and if you want to know what that in my opinion is, it is one who walks along in the ruts he found ready instead of, after sitting on a milestone and taking due thought, making his own ruts for himself. You are one of a flock; and you disapprove of sheep like myself that choose to wander off and browse alone. You condemn all my practices. Nothing that I think or do seems good in your eyes. You tell me roundly that I am selfish, and accuse me, not roundly because you are afraid it might be indecorous, but obliquely, in a mask of words that does not for an instant hide your meaning, of wearing Jaeger garments beneath my outer apparel. Soon, I gather you expect, I shall become a spiritualist and a social democrat; and quite soon after that I suppose you are sure I shall cut off my hair and go about in sandals. Well, I'll tell you something that may keep you quiet: I'm tired of vegetarianism. It isn't that I crave for fleshpots, for I shall continue as before to turn my back on them, on 'the boiled and roast, The heated nose in face of ghost,' but I grudge the time it takes and the thought it takes. For the fortnight I have followed its precepts I have lived more entirely for my body than in any one fortnight of my life. It was all body. I could think of nothing else. I was tending it the whole day. Instead of growing, as I had fondly hoped, so free in spirit that I would be able to draw quite close to the liebe Gott, I was sunk in a pit of indifference to everything needing effort or enthusiasm. And it is not simple after all. Shelley's meal of roots sounds easy and elementary, but think of the exertion of going out, strengthened only by other roots, to find more for your next meal. Nuts and fruits, things that require no cooking, really were elaborate nuisances, the nuts having to be cracked and the fruit freed from what Papa called its pedestrian portions. And they were so useless even then to a person who wanted to go out and dig in the garden. All they could do for me was to make me appreciate sofas. I am tired of it, tired of wasting precious time thinking about and planning my wretched diet. Yesterday I had an egg for breakfast—it gave me one of Pater's 'exquisite moments'—and a heavenly bowl of coffee with milk in it, and the effect was to send me out singing into the garden and to start me mending the fence. The neighbor came up to see what the vigorous hammer-strokes and snatches of Siegfried could mean, and when he saw it was I immediately called out, 'You have been eating meat!'

'I have not,' I said, swinging my hammer to show what eggs and milk can do.

'In some form or other you have this day joined yourself to the animal kingdom,' he persisted; and when I told him about my breakfast he wiped his hands (he had been picking fruit) and shook mine and congratulated me. 'I have watched with concern,' he said, 'your eyes becoming daily bigger. It is not good when eyes do that. Now they will shrink to their normal size, and you will at last set your disgraceful garden in order. Are you aware that the grass ought to have been made into hay a month ago?'

He is a haggard man, thin of cheek, round of shoulder, short of sight, who teaches little boys Latin and Greek in Weimar. For thirty years has he taught them, eking out his income in the way we all do in these parts by taking in foreigners wanting to learn German. In July he shakes Eis foreigners off and comes up here for six weeks' vacant pottering in his orchard. He bought the house as a speculation, and lets the upper part to any one who will take it, living himself, with his wife and son, on the ground floor. He is extremely kind to me, and has given me to understand that he considers me intelligent, so of course I like him. Only those persons who love intelligence in others and have doubts about their own know the deliciousness of being told a thing like that. I adore being praised. I am athirst for it. Dreadfully vain down in my heart, I go about pretending a fine aloofness from such weakness, so that when nobody sees anything in me—and nobody ever does—I may at least make a show of not having expected them to. Thus does a girl in a ball-room with whom no one will dance pretend she does not want to. Thus did the familiar fox conduct himself toward the grapes of tradition. Very well do I know there is nothing to praise; but because I am just clever enough to know that I am not clever, to be told that I am clever—do you follow me?—sets me tingling.

Now that's enough about me. Let us talk about you. You must not come to Jena. What could have put such an idea into your head? It is a blazing, deserted place just now, looking from the top of the hills like a basin of hot bouillon down there in the hollow, wrapped in its steam. The University is shut up. The professors scattered. Martens is in Switzerland, and won't be back till September. Even the Schmidts, those interesting people, have flapped up with screams of satisfaction into a nest on the side of a precipice. I urge you with all my elder-sisterly authority to stay where you are. Plainly, if you were to come I would not see you. Oh, I will leave off pretending I cannot imagine what you want here: I know you want to see me. Well, you shall not. Why you should want to is altogether beyond my comprehension. I believe you have come to regard me as a sort of medicine, medicine of the tonic order, and wish to bring your sick soul to the very place where it is dispensed. But I, you see, will have nothing to do with sick souls, and I wholly repudiate the idea of being somebody's physic. I will not be your physic. What medicinal properties you can extract from my letters you are welcome to, but pray are you mad that you should think of coming here? When you do come you are to come with your wife, and when you have a wife you are not to come at all. How simple.

Really, I feel inclined to laugh when I try to picture you, after the life you have been leading in London, after the days you are living now at Clinches, attempting to arrange yourself on this perch of ours up here. I cannot picture you. We have reduced our existence to the crudest elements, to the raw material; and you, I know, have grown a very exquisite young man. The fact is you have had time to forget what we are really like, my father and I and Johanna, and since my step-mother's time we have advanced far in the casual scrappiness of housekeeping that we love. You would be like some strange and splendid bird in the midst of three extremely shabby sparrows. That is the physical point of view: a thing to be laughed at. From the moral it is for ever impossible.

Yours sincerely,

ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

XXXVIII

Dear Mr. Anstruther,—It is pleasant of you to take the trouble to emulate our neighbor and tell me that you too think me intelligent. You put it, it is true, more elaborately than he does, with a greater embroidery of fine words, but I will try to believe you equally sincere. I make you a profound Knix,—it's a more expressive word than curtsey—of polite gratitude. But it is less excellent of you to add on the top of these praises that I am adorable. With words like that, inappropriate, and to me eternally unconvincing, this correspondence will come to an abrupt end. I shall not write again if that is how you are going to play the game. I would not write now if I were less indifferent. As it is, I can look on with perfect calm, most serenely unmoved by anything in that direction you may say to me; but if you care to have letters do not say them again. I shall never choose to allow you to suppose me vile.

Yours sincerely,

ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

XXXIX

Dear Mr. Anstruther,—You need not have sent me so many pages of protestations. Nothing you can say will persuade me that I am adorable, and I did exactly mean the world vile. Do not quarrel with Miss Cheriton; but if you must, do not tell me about it. Why should you always want to tell one of us about the other? Have you no sense of what is fit? I am nothing to you, and I will not hear these things.

Yours sincerely,

ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

XL

Dear Mr. Anstruther,—You must really write a book. Write a very long one, with plenty of room for all your words. What is your bill for postage now? Johanna, I am sure, thinks you are sending me instalments of manuscript, and marvels at the extravagance that shuts it up in envelopes instead of leaving its ends open and tying it up with string. Once more I must beg you not to write about Miss Cheriton. It is useless to remind me that I have posed as your sister, and that to your sister you may confide anything, because I am not your sister. Sometimes I have written of an elder-sisterly attitude toward you, but that, of course, was only talk. I am not irascible enough for the position. I do think, though, you ought to be surrounded by women who are cross. Six cross and determined elder sisters would do wonders for you. And so would a mother with an iron will. And perhaps an aunt living in the house might be a good thing; one of those aunts—I believe sufficiently abundant—who pierce your soul with their eyes and then describe it minutely at meal-times in the presence of the family, expatiating particularly on what those corners of it look like, those corners you thought so secret, in which are huddled your dearest faults.

Yours sincerely,

ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

XLI

Dear Mr. Anstruther,—Very well; I won't quarrel; I will be friends,—friends, that is, so long as you allow me to be so in the only right and possible way. Don't murder too many grouse. Think of my disapproving scowl when you are beginning to do it, and then perhaps your day of slaughter will resolve itself into an innocent picnic on the moors, alone with sky and heather and a bored, astonished dog. Are you not glad now that you went to Scotland instead of coming to Jena to find the Schmidts not at home? Surely long days in the heather by yourself will do much toward making you friends with life. I think those moors must be so beautiful. Really very nearly as good as my Galgenberg. My Galgenberg, by the bye, has left off being quite so admirably solitary as it was at first. The neighbor is, as I told you, extremely friendly, so is his wife, though I do not set such store by her friendliness as I do by his, for, frankly, I find men are best; and they have a son who is an Assessor in Berlin. You know what an Assessor is, don't you?—it is a person who will presently be a Landrath. And you know what a Landrath is? It's what you are before you turn into a Regierungsrath. And a Regierungsrath is what you are before you are a Geheimrath. And a Geheimrath, if he lives long enough and doesn't irritate anybody in authority, becomes ultimately that impressive and glorious being a Wirklicher Geheimrath—implying that before he was only in fun—mit dem Prädikat Excellenz. And don't say I don't explain nicely, because I do. Well, where was I? Oh, yes; at the son. Well, he appeared a fortnight ago, brown and hot and with a knapsack, having walked all the way from Berlin, and is spending his holiday with his people. For a day or two I thought him quite ordinary. He made rather silly jokes, and wore a red tie. Then one evening I heard lovely sounds, lovely, floating, mellow sounds coming up in floods through the orchard into my garden where I was propped against a tree-trunk watching a huge yellow moon disentangling itself slowly from the mists of Jena,—oh, but exquisite sounds, sounds that throbbed into your soul and told it all it wanted to hear, showed it the way to all it was looking for, talked to it wonderfully of the possibilities of life. First they drew me on to my feet, then they drew me down the garden, then through the orchard, nearer and nearer, till at last I stood beneath the open window they were coming from, listening with all my ears. Against the wall I leaned, holding my breath, spell-bound, forced to ponder great themes, themes of life and death, the music falling like drops of liquid light in dark and thirsty places. I don't know how long it lasted or how long I stood there after it was finished, but some one came to the window and put his head out into the freshness, and what do you think he said? He said, 'Donnerwetter, wie man im Zimmer schwitzt.' And it was the son, brown and hot, and with a red tie.

'Ach, Fräulein Schmidt,' said he, suddenly perceiving me. 'Good evening. A fine evening. I did not know I had an audience.'

'Yes,' said I, unable at once to adjust myself to politenesses.

'Do you like music?'

'Yes,' said I, still vibrating.

'It is a good violin. I picked it up—' and he told me a great many things that I did not hear, for how can you hear when your spirit refuses to come back from its journeyings among the stars?

'Will you not enter?' he said at last. 'My mother is fetching up some beer and will be here in a moment. It makes one warm playing.'

But I would not enter. I walked back slowly through the long orchard grass between the apple-trees trees. The moon gleamed along the branches. The branches were weighed down with apples. The place was full of the smell of fruit, of the smell of fruit fallen into the grass, that had lain there bruised all day in the sun. I think the beauty of the world is crushing. Often it seems almost unbearable, calling out such an acuteness of sensation, such a vivid, leaping sensitiveness of feeling, that indeed it is like pain.

But what I want to talk about is the strange way good things come out of evil. It really almost makes you respect and esteem the bad things, doing it with an intelligent eye fixed on the future. Here is our young friend down the hill, a young man most ordinary in every way but one, so ordinary that I think we must put him under the heading bad, taking bad in the sense of negation, of want of good, here he is, robust of speech, fond of beer, red of tie, chosen as her temple by that delicate lady the Muse of melody. Apparently she is not very particular about her temples. It is true while he is playing at her dictation she transforms him wholly, and I suppose she does not care what he is like in between. But I do. I care because in between he thinks it pleasant to entertain me with facetiousness, his mother hanging fondly on every word in the amazing way mothers, often otherwise quite intelligent persons, do. Since that first evening he has played every evening, and his taste in music is as perfect as it is bad in everything else. It is severe, exquisite, exclusive. It is the taste that plays Mozart and Bach and Beethoven, and wastes no moments with the Mendelssohn sugar or the lesser inspiration of Brahms. I tried to strike illumination out of him on these points, wanted to hear his reasons for a greater exclusiveness than I have yet met, went through a string of impressive names beginning with Schumann and ending with Wagner and Tchaikowsky, but he showed no interest, and no intelligence either, unless a shrug of the shoulder is intelligent. It is true he remarked one day that he found life too short for anything but the best—'That is why,' he added, unable to forbear from wit, 'I only drink Pilsner.'

'What?' I cried, ignoring the Pilsner, 'and do not these great men'—again I ran through a string of them—'do not they also belong to the very best?'

'No,' he said; and would say no more. So you see he is obstinate as well as narrow-minded.

Of course such exclusiveness in art is narrow-minded, isn't it? Besides, it is very possible he is wrong. You, I know, used to perch Brahms on one of the highest peaks of Parnassus (I never thought there was quite room enough for him on it), and did you not go three times all the way to Munich while you were with us to hear Mottl conduct the Ring? Surely it is probable a person of your all-round good taste is a better judge than a person of his very nearly all-round bad taste? Whatever your faults may be, you never made a fault in ties, never clamored almost ceaselessly for drink, never talked about schwitzen, nor entertained young women from next door with the tricks and facetiousness of a mountebank. I wonder if his system were carried into literature, and life were wholly concentrated on the half dozen absolutely best writers, so that we who spread our attention out thin over areas I am certain are much too wide knew them as we never can know them, became part of them, lived with them and in them, saw through their eyes and thought with their thoughts, whether there would be gain or loss? I don't know. Tell me what you think. If I might only have the six mightiest books to go with me through life I would certainly have to learn Greek because of Homer. But when it comes to the very mightiest, I cannot even get my six; I can only get four. Of course when I loosely say six books I mean the works of six writers. But beyond my four I cannot get; there must be a slight drop for the other two,—very slight, hardly a drop, rather a slight downward quiver into a radiance the faintest degree less blazing, but still a degree less. These two would be Milton and Virgil. The other four—but you know the other four without my telling you. I am not sure that the Assessor is not right, and that one cannot, in matters of the spirit, be too exclusive. Exclusiveness means concentration, deeper study, minuter knowledge; for we only have a handful of years to do anything in, and they are quite surely not enough to go round when going round means taking in the whole world.

On the other hand, wouldn't my speech become archaic? I'm afraid I would have a tendency that would grow to address Papa in blank verse. My language, even when praying him at breakfast to give me butter, would be incorrigibly noble. I don't think Papa would like it. And what would he say to a daughter who was forced by stress of concentration on six works to go through life without Goethe? Goethe, you observe, was not one of the two less glorious and he certainly was not one of the four completely glorious. I begin to fear I should miss a great deal by my exclusions. It would be sad to die without ever having been thrilled by Werther, exalted by Faust, amazed by the Wahlverwandtschaften, sent to sleep by Wilhelm Meister. To die innocent of any knowledge of Schiller's Glocke, with no memory of strenuous hours spent getting it by heart at school, might be quite pleasant. But I think it would end by being tiring to be screwed up perpetually to the pitch of the greatest men's greatest moments. Such heights are not for insects like myself. I would hang very dismally, with drooping head and wings, on those exalted hooks. And has not the soul too its longings at times for a dressing-gown and slippers? And do you see how you could do without Boswell?