XIII
Jena, Nov. 23 d.
I have waited all day, and there has been no telegram. Well, on Monday I shall get a letter about it, and how much more satisfactory that is. Today after all is nearly over, and there is only Sunday to be got through first, and I shall be helped to endure that by the looking forward. Isn't it a mercy that we never get cured of being expectant? It makes life so bearable. However regularly we are disappointed and nothing whatever happens, after the first blow has fallen, after the first catch of the breath, the first gulp of misery, we turn our eyes with all their old eagerness to a point a little further along the road. I suppose in time the regular repetition of shocks does wear out hope, and then I imagine one's youth collapses like a house of cards. Real old age begins then, inward as well as outward; and one's soul, that kept so bravely young for years after one's face got its first wrinkles, suddenly shrivels up. Its light goes out. It is suddenly and irrecoverably old, blank, dark, indifferent.
Sunday Night.
I didn't finish my letter last night because, observing the strain I had got into, I thought it better for your comfort that I should go to bed. So I did. And while I went there I asked myself why I should burden you with the dull weight of my elementary reflections. You who are so clever and who think so much and so clearly, must laugh at their elementariness. They are green and immature, the acid juice of an imperfect fruit that has always hung in the shadow. And yet I don't think you must laugh, Roger. It would, after all, be as cruel as the laughter of a child watching a blind man ridiculously stumbling among the difficulties of the way.
The one Sunday post brought nothing from you. The day has been very long. I cannot tell you how glad I am night has come, and only sleep separates me now from Monday morning's letter. These Sundays now that you are gone are intolerable. Before you came they rather amused me,—the furious raging of Saturday, with its extra cleaning and feverish preparations till far into the night; Johanna more than usually slipshod all day, red of elbow, wispy of hair, shuffling about in her felt slippers, her skirt girded up very high, a moist mop and an overflowing pail dribbling soapy tracks behind her in her progress; my step-mother baking and not lightly to be approached; Papa fled from early morning till supper-time; and then the dead calm of Sunday, day of food and sleep. Cake for breakfast—such a bad beginning. Church in the University chapel, with my step-mother in her best hat with the black feathers and the pink rose—it sounds frivolous, but you must have noticed the awe-inspiring effect of it coming so unexpectedly on the top of her long respectable face and oiled-down hair. A fluffy person in that hat would have all the students offering to take her for a walk or share their umbrella with her. My step-mother stalks along panoplied in her excellences, and the feather waves and nods gayly at the passing student as he slinks away down by-streets. Once last spring a silly bee thought the rose must be something alive and honeyful, and went and smelt it. I think it must have been a very young bee; anyhow nobody else up to now has misjudged my step-mother like that. She sits near the door in church, and has never yet heard the last half of the sermon because she has to go out in time to put the goose or other Sunday succulence safely into the oven. I wish she would let me do that, for I don't care for sermons. When you were here and condescended to come with us at least we could criticize them comfortably on our way home; but alone with my step-mother I may do nothing but praise. It is the most tiring, tiresome of all attitudes, the one of undiscriminating admiration. To hear you pull the person who had preached to pieces, and laugh at the things he had said that would not bear examination, used to be like having a window thrown open in a stuffy room on a clear winter's morning. Shall you ever forget the elaborateness of the Sunday dinner? For that, chiefly, is Saturday sacrificed, a whole day that might be filled with lovely leisure. I do hope you never thought that I too looked upon it as a nice way of celebrating Sunday. How amazing it is, the way women waste life. Men waste enough of it, heaven knows, but never anything like so much as women. Papa and I both hate that Sunday dinner, both dread the upheavals of Saturday made necessary by it, and you, I know, disliked them just as much, and so has every other young man we have had here; yet my step-mother inflicts these things on us with an iron determination that nothing will ever alter. And why? Only because she was brought up in the belief that it was proper, and because, if she omitted to do the proper, female Jena would be aghast. Well, I think it's a bad thing to be what is known as brought up, don't you? Why should we poor helpless little children, all soft and resistless, be squeezed and jammed into the rusty iron bands of parental points of view? Why should we have to have points of view at all? Why not, for those few divine years when we are still so near God, leave us just to guess and wonder? We are not given a chance. On our pulpy little minds our parents carve their opinions, and the mass slowly hardens, and all those deep, narrow, up and down strokes harden with it, and the first thing the best of us have to do on growing up is to waste precious time rubbing and beating at the things to try to get them out. Surely the child of the most admirable, wise parent is richer with his own faulty but original point of view than he would be fitted out with the choicest selection of maxims and conclusions that he did not have to think out for himself? I could never be a schoolmistress. I should be afraid to teach the children. They know more than I do. They know how to be happy, how to live from day to day in god-like indifference to what may come next. And is not how to be happy the secret we spend our lives trying to guess? Why then should I, by forcing them to look through my stale eyes, show them as through a dreadful magnifying glass the terrific possibilities, the cruel explosiveness of what they had been lightly tossing to each other across the daisies and thinking were only toys?
Today at dinner, when Papa had got to the stage immediately following the first course at which, his hunger satisfied, he begins to fidget and grow more and more unhappy, and my step-mother was conversing blandly but firmly with the tried and ancient friend she invites to bear witness that we too have a goose on Sundays, and I had begun to droop, I hope poetically, like a thirsty flower let us say, or a broken lily, over my plate, I thought—oh, how longingly I thought—of the happy past meals, made happy because you were here sitting opposite me and I could watch you. How short they seemed in those days. You didn't know I was watching you, did you? But I was. And I learned to do it so artfully, so cautiously. When you turned your head and talked to Papa I could do it openly; when you talked to me I could look straight in your dear eyes while I answered; but when I wasn't answering I still looked at you, by devious routes carefully concealed, routes that grew so familiar by practice that at last I never missed a single expression, while you, I suppose, imagined you had nothing before you but a young woman with a vacant face. What talks and laughs we will have about that odd, foolish year we spent here together in our blindness when next we meet! We've had no time to say anything at all yet. There are thousands of things I want to ask you about, thousands of little things we said and did that seem so strange now in the light of our acknowledged love. My heart stands still at the thought of when next we meet. These letters have been so intimate, and we were not intimate. I shall be deadly shy when in your presence I remember what I have written and what you have written. We are still such strangers, bodily, personally; strangers with the overwhelming memory of that last hour together to make us turn hot and tremble.
Now I am going to bed,—to dream of you, I suppose, considering that all day long I am thinking of you; and perhaps I shall have a little luck, and dream that I hear you speaking. You know, Roger, I love you for all sorts of queer and apparently inadequate reasons—I won't tell you what they are, for they are quite absurd; things that have to do with eyebrows, and the shape of hands, so you see quite foolish things—but most of all I love you for your voice. A beautiful speaking voice is one of the best of the gifts of the gods. It is so rare; and it is so irresistible. Papa says heaps of nice poetic things, but then the darling pipes. The most eloquent lecturer we have here does all his eloquence, which is really very great read afterward in print, in a voice of beer, loose, throaty, reminiscent of barrels. Not one of the preachers who come to the University chapel has a voice that does not spoil the merit there may be in what he says. Sometimes I think that if a man with the right voice were to get up in that pulpit and just say, 'Children, Christ died for you,'—oh, then I think that all I have and am, body, mind, soul, would be struck into one great passion of gratefulness and love, and that I would fall conquered on my face before the Cross on the altar, and cry and cry....
XIV
Jena, Nov. 25th. Monday Night.
The last post has been. No letter. If you had posted it in London on Saturday after the examination I ought to have had it by now. I am tortured by the fear that something has happened to you. Such dreadful things do happen. Those great, blundering, blind fists of Fate, laying about in mechanical cruelty, crushing the most precious lives as indifferently as we crush an ant in an afternoon walk, how they terrify me. All day I have been seeing foolish, horrible pictures—your train to London smashing up, your cab coming to grief—the thousand things that might so easily happen really doing it at last. I sent my two letters to Jermyn Street, supposing you would have left Clinches, but now somehow I don't think you did leave it, but went up from there for the exam. Do you know it is three days since I heard from you? That wouldn't matter so much—for I am determined never to bother you to write, I am determined I will never be an exacting woman—if it were not for the all-important examination. You said that if you passed it well and got a good place in the Foreign Office you would feel justified in telling your father about us. That means that we would be openly engaged. Not that I care for that, or want it except as the next step to our meeting again. It is clear that we cannot meet again till our engagement is known. Even if you could get away and come over for a few days I would not see you. I will not be kissed behind doors. These things are too wonderful to be handled after the manner of kitchen-maids. I am willing to be as silent as the grave for as long as you choose, but so long as I am silent we shall not meet. I tell you I am incurably honest. I cannot bear to lie. And even these letters, this perpetual writing when no one is likely to look, this perpetual watching for the postman so that no one will be likely to see, does not make me love myself any better. It is true I need not have watched quite so carefully lately, need I? Oh Roger, why don't you write? What has happened? Think of my wretched plight if you are ill. Just left to wonder at the silence, to gnaw away at my miserable heart. Or, if some one took pity on me and sent me word,—your servant, or the doctor, or the kind Nancy—what could I do even then but still sit here and wait? How could I, a person of whom nobody has heard, go to you? It seems to me that the whole world has a right to be with you, to know about you, except myself. I cannot wait for the next post. The waiting for these posts makes me feel physically sick. If the man is a little late, what torments I suffer lest he should not be coming at all. Then I hear him trudging up the stairs. I fly to the door, absolutely vainly trying to choke down hope. 'There will be no letter, no letter, no letter,' I keep on crying to my thumping heart so that the disappointment shall not be quite so bitter; and it takes no notice, but thumps back wildly, 'Oh, there will, there will.' And what the man gives me is a circular for Papa.
It is quite absurd, madly absurd, the anguish I feel when that happens. My one wish, my only wish, as I creep back again down the passage to my work, is that I could go to sleep, and sleep and sleep and forget that I have ever hoped for anything; sleep for years, and wake up quiet and old, with all these passionate, tearing feelings gone from me for ever.
XV
Jena, Nov. 28th.
Last night I got your letter written on Sunday at Clinches, a place from which letters do not seem to depart easily. My knowledge of England's geography is limited, so how could I guess that it was so easy to go up to London from there for the exam, and back again the same day? As you had no time, you say, to go to Jermyn Street, I suppose the two letters I sent there will be forwarded to you. If they are not it does not matter. They were only a string of little trivial things that would look really quite too little and trivial to be worth reading in the magnificence of Clinches. I am glad you are well; glad you are happy; glad you feel you did not do badly on Saturday. It is a good thing to be well and happy and satisfied, and a pleasant thing to have found a friend who takes so much interest in you, and to whom you can tell your most sacred thoughts: doubly pleasant, of course, when the friend chances to be a woman, and she is pretty, and young, and rich, and everything else that is suitable and desirable. The world is an amusing place. My step-mother talked of you this morning at breakfast. She was, it seems, in a prophetic mood. She shook her head after the manner of the more gloomy of the prophets, and hoped you would steer clear of entanglements.
'And why should he not, meine Liebste?' inquired Papa.
'Not for nothing has he got that mouth, Ferdinand,' answered she.
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XVI
Jena, Nov. 29th.
My darling, forgive me. If I could only get it back! I who hate unreasonableness, who hate bitterness, who hate exacting women, petty women, jealous women, to write a thing so angry. How horrible this letter-writing is. If I had said all that to you in a sudden flare of wrath I would have been sorry so immediately, and at once have made everything fair and sweet again with a kiss. And I never would have got beyond the first words, never have reached my step-mother's silly and rude remarks, never have dreamed of repeating the unkind, unjust things. Now, Roger, listen to me: my faith in you is perfect, my love for you is perfect, but I am so undisciplined, so new to love, that you must be patient, you must be ready to forgive easily for a little while, till I have had time to grow wise. Just think, when you feel irritated, of the circumstances of my life. Everything has come so easily, so naturally to you. But I have been always poor, always second-rate—oh, it's true—shut out from the best things and people, lonely because the society I could have was too little worth having, and the society I would have liked didn't want me. How could it? It never came our way, never even knew we were there. I have had a shabby, restricted, incomplete life; I mean the last ten years of it, since my father married again. Before that, if the shabbiness was there I did not see it; there seemed to be sunshine every day, and room to breathe, and laughter enough; but then I was a child, and saw sunshine everywhere. Is there not much excuse for some one who has found a treasure, some one till then very needy, if his anxiety lest he should be robbed makes him—irritable? You see, I put it mildly. I know very well that irritable isn't the right word. I know very well what are the right words, and how horrid they are, and how much ashamed I am of their bitter truth. Pity me. A person so unbalanced, so stripped of all self-control that she writes things she knows must hurt to the being she loves so utterly, does deserve pity from better, serener natures. I do not understand you yet. I do not understand the ways yet of people who live as you do. I am socially inferior, and therefore sensitive and suspicious. I am groping about, and am so blind that only sometimes can I dimly feel how dark it really is. I have built up a set of ideals about love and lovers, absurd crude things, clumsy fabrics suited to the conditions of Rauchgasse, and the first time you do not exactly fit them I am desperately certain that the world is coming to an end. But how hopeless it is, this trying to explain, this trying to undo. How shall I live till you write that you do still love me?
Your wretched
ROSE-MARIE.
XVII
Jena, Nov. 30th.
I counted up my money this morning to see if there would be enough to take me to England, supposing some day I should wake up and find myself no longer able to bear the silence. I know I should be mad if I went, but sometimes one is mad. There was not nearly enough. The cheapest route would cost more than comes in my way during a year. I have a ring of my mother's with a diamond in it, my only treasure, that I might sell. I never wear it; my red hands are not pretty enough for rings, so it is only sentiment that makes it precious. And if it would take me to you and give me just one half-hour's talk with you and sweep away the icy fog that seems to be settling down on my soul and shutting out everything that is wholesome and sweet, I am sure my darling mother, whose one thought was always to make me happy, would say, 'Child, go and sell it, and buy peace.'
XVIII
Jena, Dec. 1st.
Last night I dreamed I did go to England, and I found you in a room with a crowd of people, and you nodded not unkindly, and went on talking to the others, and I waited in my corner till they should have gone, waited for the moment when we would run into each other's arms; and with the last group you too went out talking and laughing, and did not come back again. It was not that you wanted to avoid me; you had simply forgotten that I was there. And I crept out into the street, and it was raining, and through the rain I made my way back across Europe to my home, to the one place where they would not shut me out, and when I opened the door all the empty future years were waiting for me there, gray, vacant, listless.
XIX
Jena, Dec. 2d.
These scraps of letters are not worth the postman's trouble, are not worth the stamps; but if I did not talk to you a little every day I do not think I could live. Yesterday you got my angry letter. If you were not at Clinches I could have had an answer to-morrow; as it is, I must wait till Wednesday. Roger, I am really a cheerful person. You mustn't suppose that it is my habit to be so dreary. I don't know what has come over me. Every day I send you another shred of gloom, and deepen the wrong impression you must be getting of me. I know very well that nobody likes to listen to sighs, and that no man can possibly go on for long loving a dreary woman. Yet I cannot stop. A dreary man is bad enough, but he would be endured because we endure every variety of man with so amazing a patience; but a dreary woman is unforgivable, hideous. Now am I not luminously reasonable? But only in theory. My practice lies right down on the ground, wet through by that icy fog that is freezing me into something I do not recognize. You do remember I was cheerful once? During the whole of your year with us I defy you to recollect a single day, a single hour of gloom. Well, that is really how I always am, and I can only suppose that I am going to be ill. There is no other way of accounting for the cold terror of life that sits crouching on my heart.
XX
Dec. 3d.
Dearest,—You will be pleased to hear that I feel gayer to-night, so that I cannot, after all, be sickening for anything horrid. It is an ungrateful practice, letting oneself go to vague fears of the future when there is nothing wrong with the present. All these days during which I have been steeped in gloom and have been taking pains to put some of it into envelopes and send it to you were good days in themselves. Life went on here quite placidly. The weather was sweet with that touching, forlorn sweetness of beautiful worn-out things, of late autumn when winter is waiting round the corner, of leaves dropping slowly down through clear light, of the smell of oozy earth sending up faint whiffs of corruption. From my window I saw the hills every day at sunset, how wonderfully they dressed themselves in pink; and in the afternoons, in the free hour when dinner was done and coffee not yet thought of, I went down into the Paradies valley and sat on the coarse gray grass by the river, and watched the water slipping by beneath the osiers, the one hurried thing in an infinite tranquillity. I ought to have had a volume of Goethe under my arm and been happy. I ought to have read nice bits out of Faust, or about those extraordinary people in the Elective Affinities, and rejoiced in Goethe, and in the fine days, and in my good fortune in being alive, and in having you to love. Well, it is over now, I hope,—I mean the gloom. These things must take their course, I suppose, and while they are doing it one must grope about as best one can by the flickering lantern-light of one's own affrighted spirit. My step-mother looked at me at least once on each of these miserable days, and said: 'Rose-Marie, you look very odd. I hope you are not going to have anything expensive. Measles are in Jena, and also the whooping-cough.'
'Which of them is the cheapest?' I inquired.
'Both are beyond our means,' said my step-mother severely.
And today at dinner she was quite relieved because I ate some dicker Reis after having turned from it with abhorrence for at least a week. Good-by, dearest.
Your almost cured
ROSE-MARIE.
XXI
Jena, Dec. 4th.
Your letter has come. You must do what you know is best. I agree to everything. You must do what your father has set his heart on, since quite clearly your heart is set on the same thing. All the careful words in the world cannot hide that from me. And they shall not. Do you think I dare not look death in the face? I am just a girl you kissed once behind a door, giving way before a passing gust of temptation. You cannot, shall not marry me as the price of that slight episode. You say you will if I insist. Insist? My dear Roger, with both hands I give you back any part of your freedom I may have had in my keeping. Reason, expediency, all the prudences are on your side. You depend entirely on your father; you cannot marry against his wishes; he has told you to marry Miss Cheriton; she is the daughter of his oldest friend; she is extremely rich; every good gift is hers; and I cannot compete. Compete? Do you suppose I would put out a finger to compete? I give it up. I bow myself out.
But let us be honest. Apart from anything to do with your father's commands, you have fallen into her toils as completely as you did into mine. My step-mother was right about your softness. Any woman who chose and had enough opportunity could make you think you loved her, make you kiss her. Luckily this one is absolutely suitable. You say, in the course of the longest letter you have written me—it must have been a tiresome letter to have to write—that father or no father you will not be hurried, you will not marry for a long time, that the wound is too fresh, &c., &c. What is this talk of wounds? Nobody knows about me. I shall not be in your way. You need observe no period of mourning for a corpse people don't know is there. True, Miss Cheriton herself knows. Well, she will not tell; and if she does not mind, why should you? I am so sorry I have written you so many letters full of so many follies. Will you burn them? I would rather not have them back. But I enclose yours, as you may prefer to burn them yourself. I am so very sorry about everything. At least it has been short, and not dragged on growing thinner and thinner till it died of starvation. Once I wrote and begged you to tell me if you thought you had made a mistake about me, because I felt I could bear to know better then than later. And you wrote back and swore all sorts of things by heaven and earth, all sorts of convictions and unshakable things. Well, now you have another set of convictions, that's all. I am not going to beat the big drum of sentiment and make a wailful noise. Nothing is so dead as a dead infatuation. The more a person was infatuated the more he resents an attempt to galvanize the dull dead thing into life. I am wise, you see, to the end. And reasonable too, I hope. And brave. And brave, I tell you. Do you think I will be a coward, and cry out? I make you a present of everything; of the love and happy thoughts, of the pleasant dreams and plans, of the little prayers sent up, and the blessings called down—there were a great many every day—of the kisses, and all the dear sweetness. Take it all. I want nothing from you in return. Remember it as a pleasant interlude, or fling it into a corner of your mind where used-up things grow dim with cobwebs. But do you suppose that having given you all this I am going to give you my soul as well? To moan my life away, my beautiful life? You are not worth it. You are not worth anything, hardly. You are quite invertebrate. My life shall be splendid in spite of you. You shall not cheat me of one single chance of heaven. Now good-by. Please burn this last one, too. I suppose no one who heard it would quite believe this story, would quite believe it possible for a man to go such lengths of—shall we call it unkindness? to a girl in a single month; but you and I know it is true.
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXII
Jena, March 5th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—It was extremely kind of you to remember my birthday and to find time in the middle of all your work to send me your good wishes. I hope you are getting on well, and that you like what you are doing. Professor Martens seems to tell you all the Jena news. Yes, I was ill; but we had such a long winter that it was rather lucky to be out of it, tucked away comfortably in bed. There is still snow in the ditches and on the shady side of things. I escaped the bad weather as thoroughly as those persons do who go with infinite trouble during these months to Egypt.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
My father and step-mother beg to be remembered to you.
XXIII
Jena, March 18th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—It is very kind indeed of you to want to know how I am and what was the matter with me. It wasn't anything very pleasant, but quite inoffensive æsthetically. I don't care to think about it much. I caught cold, and it got on to my lungs and stayed on them. Now it is over, and I may walk up and down the sunny side of the street for half an hour on fine days.
We all hope you are well, and that you like your work.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXIV
Jena, March 25th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—You ask me to tell you more about my illness, but I am afraid I must refuse. I see no use in thinking of painful past things. They ought always to be forgotten as quickly as possible; if they are not, they have a trick of turning the present sour, and I cling to the present, to the one thing one really has, and like to make it as cheerful as possible—like to get, by industrious squeezing, every drop of honey out of it. Just now I cannot tell you how thankful I am simply to be alive with nothing in my body hurting. To be alive with a great many things in one's body hurting is a poor sort of amusement. It is not at all a game worth playing. People talk of sick persons clinging to life however sick they are, say they invariably do it, that they prefer it on any terms to dying; well, I was a sick person who did not cling at all. I did not want it. I was most willing to be done with it. But Death, though he used often to come up and look at me, and once at least sat beside me for quite a long while, went away again, and after a time left off bothering about me altogether; and here I am walking out in the sun every day, and listening with immense pleasure to the chaffinches.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXV.
Jena, March 31st.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—Yes, of course I will be friends. And if I can be of any use in the way of admonishment, which seems to be my strong point, pray, as people say in books, command me. Naturally we are all much interested in you, and shall watch your career, I hope, with pleasure. I am sorry the Foreign Office bores you so much. Do you really have to spend your days gumming up envelopes? Not for that did you win all those scholarships and things at Eton and Oxford, and study Goethe and the minor German prophets so diligently here. You say it will go on for a year. Well, if that is your fate and you cannot escape it, gum away gayly, since gum you must. Later on when you are an ambassador and everybody is talking to you at once, you will look back on the envelope time as a blessed period when at least you were left alone. But I hope you have a nice wet sponge to do it with, and are not so lost to what is expedient as to be like a little girl I sat next to yesterday at a coffee party, who had smudged most of the cream that ought to have gone inside her outside her, and when I suggested a handkerchief said she didn't hold with handkerchiefs and never had one. 'But what does one do, then,' I asked, looking at her disgraceful little mouth, 'in a case like this? You can't borrow somebody else's—it wouldn't be being select.' 'Oh,' she said airily, 'don't you know? You take your tongue.' And in a twinkling the thing was done. But please do not you do that with the envelopes. My father and step-mother send you many kind messages. Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXVI
Jena, April 9th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—No, I do not in the least mind your writing to me. Do, whenever you feel you want to talk to a friend. It is pleasant to be told that my letters remind you of so many nice things. I expect your year in Jena seems much more agreeable, now that you have had time to forget the uncomfortable parts of it, than it really was. But I don't think you would have been able to endure it if you had not been working so hard. I am sorry you do not like your father. You say so straight out, so I see no reason for round-aboutness. I expect he will be calmer when you are married. Why do you not gratify him, and have a short engagement? Yes, I do understand what you feel about the mercifulness of being often left alone, though I have never been worried in quite the same way as you seem to be; when I am driven it is to places like the kitchen, and your complaint is that you are driven to what most people would call enjoying yourself. Really I think my sort of driving is best. There is so much satisfaction about work, about any work. But just to amuse oneself, and to be, besides, in a perpetual hurry over it because there is so much of it and the day can't be made to stretch, must be a sorry business. I wonder why you do it. You say your father insists on your going everywhere with the Cheritons, and the Cheritons will not miss a thing; but, after all isn't it rather weak to let yourself be led round by the nose if your nose doesn't like it? It is as though instead of a dog wagging its tail the tail should wag the dog. And all Nature surely would stand aghast before such an improper spectacle.
The wind is icy, and the snow patches are actually still here, but in the nearest garden I can get to I saw violets yesterday in flower, and crocuses and scillas, and one yellow pansy staring up at the sun astonished and reproachful because it had bits of frozen snow stuck to its little cheeks. Dear me, it is a wonderful feeling, this resurrection every year. Does one ever grow too old, I wonder, to thrill over it? I know the blackbirds are whistling in the orchards if I could only get to them, and my father says the larks have been out in the bare places for these last four weeks. On days like this, when one's immortality is racing along one's blood, how impossible it is to think of death as the end of everything. And as for being grudging and disagreeable, the thing's not to be done. Peevishness and an April morning? Why, even my step-mother opened her window today and stood for a long time in the sun watching how
proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim,
Hath put a spirit of youth in everything.
The first part of the month with us is generally bustling and busy, a great clatter and hustling while the shrieking winter is got away out of sight over the hills, a sweeping of the world clear for the marsh-marigolds and daffodils, a diligent making of room for the divine calms of May. I always loved this first wild frolic of cold winds and catkins and hurriedly crimsoning pollards, of bleakness and promise, of roughness and sweetness—a blow on one cheek and a kiss on the other—before the spring has learned good manners, before it has left off being anything but a boisterous, naughty, charming Backfisch; but this year after having been ill so long it is more than love, it is passion. Only people who have been buried in beds for weeks getting used to listening for Death's step on the stairs, know what it is to go out into the stinging freshness of the young year and meet the first scilla, and hear a chaffinch calling out, and feel the sun burn red patches of life on their silly, sick white faces.
My parents send you kind remembrances. They were extremely interested to hear, through Professor Martens, of your engagement to Miss Cheriton. They both think it a most excellent thing.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXVII
Jena, April 20th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—You tell me I do not answer your letters, but really I think I do quite often enough. I want to make the most of these weeks of idle getting strong again, and it is a sad waste of time writing. My step-mother has had such a dose of me sick and incapable, of doctor's bills and physic and beef-tea and night-lights, that she is prolonging the convalescent period quite beyond its just limits and will have me do nothing lest I should do too much. So I spend strange, glorious days, days strange and glorious to me, with nothing to do for anybody but myself and a clear conscience to do it with. The single sanction of my step-mother's approval has been enough to clear my conscience, from which you will see how illogically consciences can be cleared; for have I not always been sure she has no idea whatever of what is really good? Yet just her approval, a thing I know to be faulty and for ever in the wrong place, is sufficient to prop up my conscience and make it feel secure. How then, while I am busy reading Jane Austen and Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth—books foreordained from all time for the delight of persons getting well—shall I find time to write to you? And you must forgive me for a certain surprise that you should have time to write so much to me. What have I done to deserve these long letters? How many Foreign Office envelopes do you leave ungummed to write them? Es ist zu viel Ehre. It is very good of you. No, I will not make phrases like that, for I know you do not do it for any reason whatever but because you happen to want to.
You are going through one of those tiresome soul-sicknesses that periodically overtake the too comfortable, and you must, apparently, tell somebody about it. Well, it is a form of Weltschmerz, and only afflicts the well-fed. Pray do not suppose that I am insinuating that food is of undue interest to you; but it is true that if you did not have several meals a day and all of them too nice, if there were doubts about their regular recurrence, if, briefly, you were a washerwoman or a plough-boy, you would not have things the matter with your soul. Washerwomen and ploughboys do not have sick souls. Probably you will say they have no souls to be sick; but they have, you know. I imagine their souls thin and threadbare, stunted by cold and hunger, poor and pitiful, but certainly there. And I don't know that it is not a nicer sort of soul to have inside one's plodding body than an unwieldy, overgrown thing, chiefly water and air and lightly changeable stuff, so unsubstantial that it flops—forgive the word, but it does flop—on to other souls in search of sympathy and support and comfort and all the rest of the things washer-women waste no time looking for, because they know they wouldn't find them.
You are a poet, and I do not take a youthful poet seriously; but if you were not I would laugh derisively at your comparing the entrance of my letters into your room at the Foreign Office to the bringing in of a bunch of cottage flowers still fresh with dew. I don't know that my pride does not rather demand a comparison to a bunch of hot-house flowers—a bouquet it would become then, wouldn't it?—or my romantic sense to a bunch of field flowers, wild, graceful, easily wearied things, that would not care at all for Foreign Offices. But I expect cottage is really the word. My letters conjure up homely visions, and I am sure the bunch you see is a tight posy of
Sweet-Williams, with their homely cottage smell.
It was charming of Matthew Arnold to let Sweet-Williams have such a nice line, but I don't think they quite deserve it. They have a dear little name and a dear little smell, but the things themselves might have been manufactured in a Berlin furniture shop where upholstery in plush prevails, instead of made in that sweetest corner of heaven from whence all good flowers come.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXVIII
Jena, April 26th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—You seem to be incurably doleful. You talk about how nice it must be to have a sister, a mother, some woman very closely related to whom you could talk. You astonish me; for have you not Miss Cheriton? Still, on reflection I think I do see that what you feel you want is more a solid bread-and-butter sort of relationship; no sentiment, genial good advice, a helping hand if not a guiding one—really a good thick slice of bread-and-butter as a set-off to a diet of constant cake. I can read between your lines with sufficient clearness; and as I always had a certain talent for stodginess I will waste no words but offer myself as the bread-and-butter. Somehow I think it might work out my soul's release from self-reproach and doubts if I can help you, as far as one creature can help another, over some of the more tiresome places of life. Exhortation, admonishment, encouragement, you shall have them all, if you like, by letter. In these my days of dignified leisure I have had room to think, and so have learned to look at things differently from the way I used to. Life is so short that there is hardly time for anything except to be, as St. Paul says—wasn't it St. Paul?—kind to one another. You are, I think, a most weak person. Anything more easily delighted in the first place or more quickly tired in the second I never in my life saw. Does nothing satisfy you for more than a day or two? And the enthusiasm of you at the beginnings of things. And the depression, the despair of you once you have got used to them. I know you are clever, full of brains, intellectually all that can be desired, but what's the good of that when the rest of you is so weak? You are of a diseased fastidiousness. There's not a person you have praised to me whom you have not later on disliked. When you were here I used to wonder as I listened, but I did believe you. Now I know that the world cannot possibly contain so many offensive people, and that it is always so with you—violent heat, freezing cold. I cannot see you drown without holding out a hand. For you are young; you are, in the parts outside your strange, ill-disciplined emotions, most full of promise; and circumstances have knitted me into an unalterable friend. Perhaps I can help you to a greater stead-fastness, a greater compactness of soul. But do not tell me too much. Do not put me in an inextricably difficult position. It would not of course be really inextricable, for I would extricate myself by the simple process of relapsing into silence. I say this because your letters have a growing tendency to pour out everything you happen to be feeling. That in itself is not a bad thing, but you must rightly choose your listener. Not every one should be allowed to listen. Certain things cannot be shouted out from the housetops. You forget that we hardly know each other, and that the well-mannered do not thrust their deeper feelings on a person who shrinks from them. I hope you understand that I am willing to hear you talk about most things, and that you will need no further warning to keep off the few swampy places. And just think of all the things you can write to me about, all the masses of breathlessly interesting things in this breathlessly interesting world, without talking about people at all. Look round you this fine spring weather and tell me, for instance, what April is doing up your way, and whether as you go to your work through the park you too have not seen heavy Saturn laughing and leaping—how that sonnet has got into my head—and do not every day thank God for having bothered to make you at all.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXIX
Jena, April 30th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—You know the little strip of balcony outside our sitting-room window, with its view over the trees of the Paradies valley to the beautiful hills across the river? Well, this morning is so fine, the sun is shining so warmly, that I had my coffee and roll there, and, now, wrapped up in rugs, am still there writing to you. I can't tell you how wonderful it is. The birds are drunk with joy. There are blackbirds, and thrushes, and chaffinches, and yellow-hammers, all shouting at once; and every now and then when the clamor has a gap in it I hear the whistle of the great tit, the dear small bird who is the very first to sing, bringing its pipe of hope to those early days in February when the world is at its blackest. Have you noticed how different one's morning coffee tastes out of doors from what it does in a room? And the roll and butter—oh, the roll and butter! So must rolls and butter have tasted in the youth of the world, when gods and mortals were gloriously mixed up together, and you went for walks on exquisite things like parsley and violets. If Thoreau—I know you don't like him, but that's only because you have read and believed Stevenson about him—could have seen the eager interest with which I ate my roll just now, he would, I am afraid, have been disgusted; for he severely says that it is not what you eat but the spirit in which you eat it,—you are not, that is, to like it too much—that turns you into a glutton. It is, he says, neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual savors that makes your eating horrid. A puritan, he says, may go to his brown bread crust with as gross an appetite as ever an alderman to his turtle. Thus did I go, as grossly as the grossest alderman, this morning to my crust, and rejoiced in the sensual savor of it and was very glad. How nice it is, how pleasant, not to be with people you admire. Admiration, veneration, the best form of love—they are all more comfortably indulged in from a distance. There is too much whalebone about them at close quarters with their object, too much whalebone and not nearly enough slippers. I am glad Thoreau is dead. I love him far too much ever to want to see him; and how thankful I am he cannot see me.
It is my step-mother's birthday, and trusted friends have been streaming up our three flights of stairs since quite early to bring her hyacinths in pots and unhappy roses spiked on wires and make her congratulatory speeches. I hear them talking through the open window, and what they say, wafted out to me here in the sun, sounds like the pleasant droning of bees when one is only half awake. First there is the distant electric bell and the tempestuous whirl of Johanna down the passage. Then my step-mother emerges from the kitchen and meets the arriving friend with vociferous welcoming. Then the friend is led into the room here, talking in gasps as we all do on getting to the top of this house, and flinging cascades of good wishes for her liebe Emilie on to the liebe Emilie's head. Then the hyacinths or the roses are presented:—'I have brought thee a small thing,' says the friend, presenting; and my step-mother, who has been aware of their presence the whole time, but, with careful decency, has avoided looking at them, starts, protests, and launches forth on to heaving billows of enthusiasm. She does not care for flowers, either in pots or on wires or in any other condition, so her gratitude is really most creditably done. Then they settle down in the corners of the sofa and talk about the things they really want to talk about—neighbors, food, servants, pastors, illnesses, Providence; beginning, since I was ill, with a perfunctory inquiry from the visitor as to the health of die gute Rose-Marie.
'Danke, danke,' says my step-mother. You know in Germany whenever anybody asks after anybody you have to begin your answer with danke. Sometimes the results are odd; for instance: 'How is your poor husband today?' 'Oh, danke, he is dead.'
So my step-mother, too, says danke, and then I hear a murmur of further information, and catch the word zart. Then they talk, still in murmurs not supposed to be able to get through the open window and into my ears, about the quantity of beef-tea I have consumed, the length of the chemist's bill, the unfortunate circumstance that I am so overgrown—'Weedy,' says my step-mother.
'Would you call her weedy?' says the friend, with a show of polite hesitation.
'Weedy,' repeats my step-mother emphatically; and the friend remarks quite seriously that when a person is so very long there is always some part of her bound to be in a draught and catching cold. 'It is such a pity,' concludes the friend, 'that she did not marry.' (Notice the tense. Half a dozen birthdays back it used to be 'does not.')
'Gentlemen,' says my step-mother, 'do not care for her.'
'Armes Mädchen' murmurs the friend.
'Herr Gott, ja,' says my step-mother, 'but what is to be done? I have invited gentlemen in past days. I have invited them to coffees, to beer evenings, to music on Sunday afternoons, to the reading aloud of Schiller's dramas, each with his part and Rose-Marie with the heroine's; and though they came they also went away again. Nothing was changed, except the size of my beer bill. No, no, gentlemen do not care for her. In society she does not please.'
'Armes Mädchen' says the friend again; and the armes Mädchen out in the sun laughs profanely into her furs.
The fact is it is quite extraordinary the effect my illness has had on me. I thought it was bad, and I see it was good. Beyond words ghastly at the time, terrible, hopeless, the aches of my body as nothing compared with the amazing anguish of my soul, the world turned into one vast pit of pain, impossible to think of the future, impossible to think of the past, impossible to bear the present—after all that behold me awake again, and so wide awake, with eyes grown so quick to see the wonder and importance of the little things of life, the beauty of them, the joy of them, that I can laugh aloud with glee at the delicious notion of calling me an armes Mädchen. Three months ago with what miserable groanings, what infinite self-pityings, I would have agreed. Now, clear of vision, I see how many precious gifts I have—life, and freedom from pain, and time to be used and enjoyed—gifts no one can take from me except God. Do you know any George Herbert? He was one of the many English poets my mother's love of poetry made me read. Do you remember
I once more smell the dew, the rain,
And relish versing.
O, my only Light!
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night?
Well, that is how I feel: full of wonder, and an unspeakable relief. It is so strange how bad things—things we call bad—bring forth good things, from the manure that brings forth roses lovely in proportion to its manuriness to the worst experiences that can overtake the soul. And as far as I have been able to see (which is not very far, for I know I am not a clever woman) it is also true that good things bring forth bad ones. I cannot tell you how much life surprises me. I never get used to it. I never tire of pondering, and watching, and wondering. The way in which eternal truths lurk along one's path, lie among the potatoes in cellars (did you ever observe the conduct of potatoes in cellars? their desperate determination to reach up to the light? their absolute concentration on that one distant glimmer?), peep out at one from every apparently dull corner, sit among the stones, hang upon the bushes, come into one's room in the morning with the hot water, come out at night in heaven with the stars, never leave us, touch us, press upon us, if we choose to open our eyes and look, and our ears and listen—how extraordinary it is. Can one be bored in a world so wonderful? And then the keen interest there is to be got out of people, the keen joy to be got out of common affections, the delight of having a fresh day every morning before you, a fresh, long day, bare and empty, to be filled as you pass along it with nothing but clean and noble hours. You must forgive this exuberance. The sun has got into my veins and has turned everything golden. Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXX
Jena, May 6th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—How can I help it if things look golden to me? You almost reproach me for it. You seem to think it selfish, and talk of the beauty of sympathy with persons less fortunately constituted. That's a gray sort of beauty; the beauty of mists, and rains, and tears. I wish you could have been in the meadows across the river this morning and seen the dandelions. There was not much grayness about them. From the bridge to the tennis-courts—you know that is a long way, at least twenty minutes' walk—they are one sheet of gold. If you had been there before breakfast, with your feet on that divine carpet, and your head in the nickering slight shadows of the first willow leaves, and your eyes on the shining masses of slow white clouds, and your ears filled with the fresh sound of the river, and your nose filled with the smell of young wet things, you wouldn't have wanted to think much about such gray negations as sympathizing with the gloomy. Bother the gloomy. They are an ungrateful set. If they can they will turn the whole world sour, and sap up all the happiness of the children of light without giving out any shining in return. I am all for sun and heat and color and scent—for all things radiant and positive. If, crushing down my own nature, I set out deliberately to console those you call the less fortunately constituted, do you know what would happen? They would wring me quite dry of cheerfulness, and not be one whit more cheerful for all the wringing themselves. They can't. They were not made that way. People are born in one of three classes: children of light, children of twilight, children of night. And how can they help into which class they are born? But I do think the twilight children can by diligence, by, if you like, prayer and fasting, come out of the dusk into a greater brightness. Only they must come out by themselves. There must be no pulling. I don't at all agree with your notion of the efficacy of being pulled. Don't you then know—of course you do, but you have not yet realized—that you are to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you? And don't you know—oh, have you forgotten?—that the Kingdom of God is within you? So what is the use of looking to anything outside of you and separated from you for help? There is no help, except what you dig out of your own self; and if I could make you see that I would have shown you all the secrets of life.
How wisely I talk. It is the wisdom of the ever-recurring grass, the good green grass, the grass starred with living beauty, that has got into me; the wisdom of a May morning filled with present joy, of the joy of the moment, without any weakening waste of looking beyond. So don't mock. I can't help it.
Do you, then, want to be pitied? I will pity you if you like, in so many carefully chosen words; but they will not be words from the heart but only, as the charming little child in the flat below us, the child with the flaunting yellow hair and audacious eyes, said of some speech that didn't ring true to her quick ears, 'from the tip of the nose.' I cannot really pity you, you know. You are too healthy, too young, too fortunate for that. You ought to be quite jubilant with cheerfullest gratitude; and, since you are not, you very perfectly illustrate the truth of le trop being l'ennemi du bien, or, if you prefer your clumsier mother tongue, of the half being better than the whole. How is it that I, bereft of everything you think worth having, am so offensively cheerful? Your friends would call it a sordid existence, if they considered it with anything more lengthy than just a sniff. No excitements, no clothes, acquaintances so shabby that they seem almost moth-eaten, the days filled with the same dull round, a home in a little town where we all get into one groove and having got into it stay in it, to which only faint echoes come of what is going on in the world outside, a place where one is amused and entertained by second-rate things, second-rate concerts, second-rate plays, and feels oneself grow cultured by attendance at second-rate debating-society meetings. Would you not think I must starve in such a place? But I don't. My soul doesn't dream of starving; in fact I am quite anxious about it, it has lately grown so fat. There is so little outside it—for the concerts, plays, debates, social gatherings, are dust and ashes near which I do not go—that it eagerly turns to what is inside it, and finds itself full of magic forces of heat and light, forces hot and burning enough to set every common bush afire with God. That is Elizabeth Barrett Browning; I mean about the common bushes. A slightly mutilated Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but still a quotation; and if you do not happen to know it I won't have you go about thinking it pure Schmidt. Ought I if I quote to warn you of the fact by the pointing fingers of inverted commas? I don't care to, somehow. They make such a show of importance. I prefer to suppose you cultured. Oh, I can see you shiver at that impertinence, for I know down in your heart, though you always take pains to explain how ignorant you are, you consider yourself an extremely cultured young man. And so you are; cultured, I should say, out of all reason; so much cultured that there's hardly anything left that you are able to like. Indeed, it is surprising that you should care to write to a rough, unscraped sort of person like myself. Do not my crudities set your teeth on edge as acutely as the juice of a very green apple? You who love half tones, subtleties, suggestions, who, lifting the merest fringe of things, approach them nearer only by infinite implications, what have you to do with the downrightness of an east wind or a green apple? Why, I wonder that just the recollection of my red hands, knobbly and spread with work, does not make you wince into aloofness. And my clothes? What about my clothes? Do you not like exquisite women? Perfectly got-up women? Fresh and dainty, constantly renewed women? It is two years since I had a new hat; and as for the dress that sees me through my days I really cannot count the time since it started in my company a Sunday and a fête-day garment. If you were once, only once, to see me in the middle of your friends over there, you would be cured for ever of wanting to write to me. I belong to your Jena days; days of hard living, and working, and thinking; days when, by dint of being forced to do without certain bodily comforts, the accommodating spirit made up for it by its own increased comfort and warmth. Probably your spirit will never again attain to quite so bright a shining as it did that year. How can it, unless it is amazingly strong—and I know it well not to be that—shine through the suffocating masses of upholstery your present life piles about it? Poor spirit. At least see to it that its flicker doesn't quite go out. To urge you to strip your life of all this embroidery and let it get the draught of air it needs would be, I know, mere waste of ink.
My people send you every good wish.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXXI
Jena, May 14th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—Of course I am full of contradictions. Did you expect me to be full of anything else? And I have no doubt whatever that in every letter I say exactly the opposite from what I said in the last one. But you must not mind this and make it an occasion for reproof. I do not pretend to think quite the same even two days running; if I did I would be stagnant, and the very essence of life is to be fluid, to pass perpetually on. So please do not hold me responsible for convictions that I have changed by the time they get to you, and above all things don't bring them up against me and ask me to prove them. I don't want to prove them. I don't want to prove anything. My attitude toward life is one of open-mouthed wonder and delight, and the open-mouthed cannot talk. You write, too, plaintively, that some of the things I say hurt you. I am sorry. Sorry, I mean, that you should be so soft. Can you not, then, bear anything? But I will smooth my tongue if you prefer it smooth, and send you envelopes filled with only sugar; talk to you about the parks, the London season, the Foreign Office—all things of which I know nothing—and, patting you at short intervals on the back, tell you you are admirable. You say there is a bitter flavor about some of my remarks. I have not felt bitter. Perhaps a little shrewish; a little like, not a mild exhorting elder sister, but an irritated aunt. You see I am interested enough in you to be fidgety when I hear you groan. What, I ask myself uneasily, can be the matter with this apparently healthy, well-cared-for young man? And then, forced to the conclusion by unmistakable symptoms that there is nothing the matter except a surfeit of good things, I have perhaps pounced upon you with something of the zeal of an aunt moved to anger, and given you a spiritual slapping. You sighed for a sister—you are always sighing for something—and asked me to be one; well, I have apparently gone beyond the sister in decision and authority, and developed something of the acerbity of an aunt.
So you are down at Clinches. How beautiful it must be there this month. I think of it as a harmony in gray and amethyst, remembering your description of it the first time you went there; a harmony in a minor key, that captured you wholly by its tender subtleties. When I think of you inheriting such a place later on through your wife I do from my heart feel that your engagement is an excellent thing. She must indeed be happy in the knowledge that she can give you so much that is absolutely worth having. It is beautiful, beautiful to give; one of the very most beautiful things in life. I quarrel with my poverty only because I can give so little, so seldom, and then never more than ridiculous small trumperies. To make up for them I try to give as much of myself as possible, gifts of sympathy, helpfulness, kindness. Don't laugh, but I am practicing on my step-mother. It is easy to pour out love on Papa; so easy, so effortless, that I do not feel as if it could be worth much; but I have made up my mind, not without something of a grim determination that seems to have little enough to do with love, to give my step-mother as much of me, my affections, my services, as she can do with. Perhaps she won't be able to do with much. Anyhow all she wants she shall have. You know I have often wished I had been a man, able to pull on my boots and go out into the wide world without let or hindrance; but for one thing I am glad to be a woman, and that one thing is that the woman gives. It is so far less wonderful to take. The man is always taking, the woman always giving; and giving so wonderfully, in the face sometimes of dreadful disaster, of shipwreck, of death—which explains perhaps her longer persistence in clinging to the skirts of a worn-out passion; for is not the tenderer feeling on the side of the one who gave and blessed? Always, always on that side? Mixing into what was sensual some of the dear divineness of the mother-love? I think I could never grow wholly indifferent to a person to whom I had given much. He or she would not, could not, be the same to me as other people. Time would pass, and the growing number of the days blunt the first sharp edge of feeling; but the memory of what I had given would bind us together in a friendship for ever unlike any other.
I have not thanked you for the book you sent me. It was very kind indeed of you to wish me to share the pleasure you have had in reading it. But see how unfortunately contrary I am: I don't care about it. And just the passages you marked are the ones I care about least. I do not hold with markings in books. Whenever I have come across mine after a lapse of years I have marvelled at the distance travelled since I marked, and shut up the book and murmured, 'Little fool.' I can't imagine why you thought I should like this book. It has given me rather a surprised shock that you should know me so little, and that I should know you so little as to think you knew me better. Really all the explanations and pointings in the world will not show a person the exact position of his neighbor's soul. It is astonishing enough that the book was printed, but how infinitely more astonishing that people like you should admire it. What is the matter with me that I cannot admire it? Why am I missing things that ought to give me pleasure? You do not, then, see that it is dull? I do. I see it and feel it in every bone, and it makes them ache. It is dull and bad because it is so dreary, so hopelessly dreary. Life is not like that. Life is only like that to cowards who are temporarily indisposed. I do not care to look at it through a sick creature's jaundiced eyes and shudder with him at what he sees. If he cannot see better why not keep quiet, and let us braver folk march along with our heads in the air, held so high that we cannot bother to look at every slimy creepiness that crawls across our path? And did you not notice how he keeps on telling his friends in his letters not to mind when he is dead? Unnecessary advice, one would suppose; I can more easily imagine the friends gasping with an infinite relief. Persons who are everlastingly claiming pity, sympathy, condolences, are very wearing. Surely all talk about one's death is selfish and bad? That is why, though there is so much that is lovely in them, the faint breath of corruption hanging about Christina Rossetti's poetry makes me turn my head the other way. What a constant cry it is that she wants to die, that she hopes to die, that she's going to die, shall die, can die, must die, and that nobody is to weep for her but that there are to be elaborate and moving arrangements of lilies and roses and winding-sheets. And at least in one place she gives directions as to the proper use of green grass and wet dewdrops upon her grave—implying that dewdrops are sometimes dry. I think the only decent attitude toward one's death is to be silent. Talk about it puts other people in such an awkward position. What is one to say to persons who sigh and tell us that they will no doubt soon be in heaven? One's instinct is politely to murmur, 'Oh no,' and then they are angry. 'Surely not,' also has its pitfalls. Cheery words, of the order in speech that a slap on the shoulder is in the sphere of physical expression, only seem to deepen the determined gloom. And if it is some one you love who thinks he will soon be dead and tells you so, the cruelty is very great. When death really comes, is not what the ordinary decent dier wants quiet, that he may leave himself utterly in the hands of God? There should be no massing of temporarily broken-hearted onlookers about his bed, no leave-takings and eager gatherings-up of last words, no revellings of relatives in the voluptuousness of woe, no futile exhortations, using up the last poor breaths, not to weep to persons who would consider it highly improper to leave off doing it, and no administration of tardy blessings. Any blessings the dier has to invoke should have been invoked and done with long ago. In this last hour, at least, can one not be left alone? Do you remember Pater's strange feeling about death? Perhaps you do not, for you told me once you did not care about him. Well, it runs through his books, through all their serenity and sunlight, through exquisite descriptions of summer, of beautiful places, of heat and life and youth and all things lovely, like a musty black riband, very poor, very mean, very rotten, that yet must bind these gracious flowers of light at last together, bruising them into one piteous mass of corruption. It is all very morbid: the fair outward surface of daily life, the gay, flower-starred crust of earth, and just underneath horrible tainted things, things forlorn and pitiful, things which we who still walk on the wholesome grass must soon join, changing our life in the roomy sunshine into something infinitely dependent and helpless, something that can only dimly live if those strong friends of ours in the bright world will spare us a thought, a remembrance, a few minutes from their plenty for sitting beside us, room in their hearts for yet a little love and sorrow. 'Dead cheek by dead cheek, and the rain soaking down upon one from above....' Does not that sound hopeless? After reading these things, sweet with the tainted sweetness of decay, of, ruin, of the past, the gone, it is like having fresh spring water dashed over one on a languid afternoon to remember Walt Whitman's brave attitude toward 'delicate death,' 'the sacred knowledge of death,' 'lovely, soothing death,' 'cool, enfolding death,' 'strong deliveress,' 'vast and well-veiled death,' 'the body gratefully nestling close to death,' 'sane and sacred death.' That is the spirit that makes one brave and fearless, that makes one live beautifully and well, that sends one marching straight ahead with limbs that do not tremble and head held high. Is it not natural to love such writers best? Writers who fill one with glad courage and make one proud of the path one has chosen to walk in?
And yet you do not like Walt Whitman. I remember quite well my chill of disappointment when you told me so. At first, hearing it, I thought I must be wrong to like him, but thank heaven I soon got my balance again, and presently was solaced by the reflection that it was at least as likely you were wrong not to. You told me it was not poetry. That upset me for a few days, and then I found I didn't care. I couldn't argue with you on the spot and prove anything, because the only esprit I have is that tiresome esprit d'escalier, so brilliant when it is too late, so constant in its habit of leaving its possessor in the dreadful condition—or is it a place?—called the lurch; but, poetry or not, I knew I must always love him. You, I suppose, have cultivated your taste in regard to things of secondary importance to such a pitch of sensitiveness that unless the outer shell is flawless you cannot, for sheer intellectual discomfort, look at the wonders that often lie within. I, who have not been educated, am so filled with elementary joy when some one shows me the light in this world of many shadows that I do not stop to consider what were the words he used while my eyes followed his pointing finger. You see, I try to console myself for having an unpruned intelligence. I know I am unpruned, and that at the most you pruned people, all trim and trained from the first, do but bear with me indulgently. But I must think with the apparatus I possess, and I think at this moment that perhaps what you really most want is a prolonged dose of Walt Whitman, a close study of him for several hours every day, shut up with no other book, quite alone with him in an empty country place. Listen to this—you shall listen:
O we can wait no longer,
We too take ship, O soul;
Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas,
Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail,
Amid the wafting winds (thou pressing me to thee, I thee
to me, O soul).
Carolling free, singing our song of God,
Chanting our chant of pleasant exploration,
O my brave soul!
O farther, farther sail!
O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?
O farther, farther sail I
Well, how do you feel now? Can any one, can you, can even you read that without such a tingling in all your limbs, such a fresh rush of life and energy through your whole body that you simply must jump up and, shaking off the dreary nonsense that has been fooling you, turn your back on diseased self-questionings and run straight out to work at your salvation in the sun?
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.