XXXII
Jena, May 20th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—I am sorry you think me unsympathetic. Hard, I think, was the word; but unsympathetic sounds prettier. Is it unsympathetic not to like fruitless, profitless, barren things? Not to like fogs and blights and other deadening, decaying things? From my heart I pity all the people who are so made that they cannot get on with their living for fear of their dying; but I do not admire them. Is that being unsympathetic? Apparently you think so. How odd. There is a little man here who hardly ever can talk to anybody without beginning about his death. He is perfectly healthy, and I suppose forty or fifty, so that there is every reasonable hope of his going on being a little man for years and years more; but he will have it that as he has never married or, as he puts it, done anything else useful, he might just as well be dead, and then at the word Dead his eyes get just the look of absolute scaredness in them that a hare's eyes do when a dog is after it. 'If only one knew what came next,' he said last time he was here, looking at me with those foolish frightened hare's eyes.
'Nice things I should think,' said I, trying to be encouraging.
'But to those who have deserved punishment?'
'If they have deserved it they will probably get it,' said I cheerfully.
He shuddered.
'You don't look very wicked,' I went on amiably. He leads a life of sheerest bread-and-milk, so simple, so innocent, so full of little hearth-rug virtues.
'But I am,' he declared angrily.
'I shouldn't think half so bad as a great many people,' said I, bent, being the hostess, on a perfect urbanity.
'Worse,' said he, more angrily.
'Oh, come now,' said I, very politely as I thought.
Then he really got into a rage, and asked me what I could possibly know about it, and I said I didn't know anything; and still he stormed and grew more and more like a terrified hare, frightening himself by his own words; and at last, dropping his voice, he confessed that he had one particularly deadly fear, a fear that haunted him and gave him no rest, that the wicked would not burn eternally but would freeze.
'Oh,' said I shrinking; for it was a bitter day, and the northeast wind was thundering among the hills.
'Great cold,' he said, fixing me with his hare's eyes, 'seems to me incomparably more terrible than great heat.'
'Oh, incomparably,' I agreed, edging nearer to the stove. 'Only listen to that wind.'
'So will it howl about us through eternity,' said he.
'Oh,' I shivered.
'Piercing one's unprotected—everything about us will be unprotected then—one's unprotected marrow, and turning it to ice within us.'
'But we won't have any marrows,' said I.
'No marrows? Fräulein Rose-Marie, we shall have everything that will hurt.'
'Oh weh' cried I, stopping up my ears.
'The thought frightens you?' said he.
'Terrifies me,' said I.
'How much more fearful, then, will be the reality.'
'Well, I'd like to—I'd like to give you some good advice,' said I, hesitating.
'Certainly; if one of your sex may with any efficacy advise one of ours.'
'Oh—efficacy,' murmured I with proper deprecation. 'But I'd like to suggest—I daren't advise, I'll just suggest—'
'Fear nothing. I am all ears and willingness to be guided,' said he, smiling with an indescribable graciousness.
'Well—don't go there.'
'Not go there?'
'And while you are here—still here, and alive, and in nice warm woolly clothes, do you know what you want?'
'What I want?'
'Very badly do you want a wife. Why not go and get one?'
His eyes at that grew more hare-like than at the thought of eternal ice. He seized his hat and scrambled to the door. He went through it hissing scorching things about moderne Mädchen, and from the safety of the passage I heard him call me unverschämt.
He hasn't been here since. I would like to go and shake him; shake him till his brains settle into their proper place, and say while I shake, 'Oh, little man, little man, come out of the fog! Why do you choose to die a thousand deaths rather than only one?'
Is that being unsympathetic? I think it is being quite kind.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
What I really meant to write to you about today was to tell you that I read your learned and technical and I am sure admirable denouncements of Walt Whitman with a respectful attention due to so much earnestness; and when I had done, and wondered awhile pleasantly at the amount of time for letter-writing the Foreign Office allows its young men, I stretched myself, and got my hat, and went down to the river; and I sat at the water's edge in the middle of a great many buttercups; and there was a little wind; and the little wind knocked the heads of the buttercups together; and it seemed to amuse them, or else something else did, for I do assure you I thought I heard them laugh.
XXXIII
Jena, May 27th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—You asked me about your successor in our house, and inquire why I have never mentioned him. Why should I mention him? Must I mention everything? I suppose I forgot him. His name is Collins, and some days he wears a pink shirt, and other days a blue shirt, and in his right cuff there is a pink silk handkerchief on the pink days, and a blue silk handkerchief on the blue days; and he has stuck up the pictures he likes to have about him on the walls of his room, and where your Luini used to be there is a young lady in a voluminous hat and short skirts, and where your Bellini Madonna sat and looked at you with austere, beautiful eyes there is the winner, complete with jockey, of last year's Derby.
'I made a pot of money over that,' said Mr. Collins to me the day he pinned it up and came to ask me for the pin.
'Did you?' said I.
But I think I am tired just now of Luinis and Bellinis and of the sort of spirit in a young man that clothes the walls of his room with them, each in some elaborately simple frame, and am not at all sure that the frank fleshliness of a Collins does not please me best. You see, one longs so much sometimes to get down to the soil, down to plain instincts, to rude nature, to, if you like, elemental savagery.
But I'll go on with Mr. Collins; you shall have a dose of him while I am about it. He has bought a canoe, and has won the cup for swimming, wresting it from the reluctant hands of the discomfited Jena young men. He paddles up to the weir, gets out, picks up his canoe, carries it round to the other side, gets in, and vanishes in the windings of the water and the folds of the hills, leaving the girls in the tennis-courts—you remember the courts are opposite the weir—uncertain whether to titter or to blush, for he wears I suppose the fewest clothes that it is possible to wear and still be called dressed, and no stockings at all.
'Nein, dieser Engländer!' gasp the girls, turning down decent eyes.
'Höllish practisch,' declare the young men, got up in as near an imitation of the flannels you used to wear that they can reach, even their hats bound about with a ribbon startlingly like your Oxford half blue; and before the summer is over I dare say they will all be playing tennis in the Collins canoe costume, stockingless, sleeveless, supposing it to be the latest cri in get-ups for each and every form of sport.
Professor Martens didn't care about teaching Mr. Collins, and insisted on handing him over to Papa. Papa doesn't care about teaching him, either, and says he is a dummer Bengel who pronounces Goethe as though it rhymed with dirty, and who the first time our great poet was mentioned vacantly asked, with every indication of a wandering mind, if he wasn't the joker who wrote the play for Irving with all the devils in it. Papa was so angry that be began a letter to Collins père telling him to remove his son to a city where there are fewer muses; but Collins père is a person who makes nails in Manchester with immense skill and application and is terrifyingly rich, and my step-mother's attitude toward the terrifyingly rich is one of large forgiveness; so she tore up Papa's letter just where it had got to the words erbärmlicher Esel, said he was a very decent boy, that he should stay as long as he wanted to, but that, since he seemed to be troublesome about learning, Papa must write and demand a higher scale of payment. Papa wouldn't; my step-mother did; and behold Joey—his Christian name is Joey—more lucrative to us by, I believe, just double than any one we have had yet.
'I say,' said Joey to me this morning, 'come over to England some day, and I'll romp you down to Epsom.'
'Divine,' said I, turning up my eyes.
'We'd have a rippin' time.'
'Rather.'
'I'd romp you down in the old man's motor.'
'Not really?'
'We'd be there before you could flutter an eyelash.'
'Are you serious?'
'Ain't I, though. It's a thirty-horse—'
'Can't you get them in London?'
'Get 'em in London? Get what in London?'
'Must one go every time all the way to Epsom?'
Joey ceased from speech and began to stare.
'Are we not talking about salts?' I inquired hastily, feeling that one of us was off the track.
'Salts?' echoed Joey, his mouth hanging open.
'You mentioned Epsom, surely?'
'Salts?'
'You did say Epsom, didn't you?'
'Salts?'
'Salts,' said I, becoming very distinct in the presence of what looked like deliberate wilfulness.
'What's it got to do with salts?' asked Joey, his underlip of a measureless vacancy.
'Hasn't it got everything?'
'Look here, what are you drivin' at? Is it goin' to be a game?'
'Certainly not. It's Sunday. Did you ever hear of Epsom salts?'
'Oh—ah—I see—Eno, and all that. Castor oil. Rhubarb and magnesia. Well, I'll forgive you as you're only German. Pretty weird, what bits of information you get hold of. Never the right bits, somehow. I'll tell you what, Miss Schmidt—'
'Oh, do.'
'Do what?'
'Tell me what.'
'Well, ain't I goin' to? You all seem to know everything in this house that's not worth knowin', and not a blessed thing that is.'
'Do you include Goethe?'
'Confound Gerty,' said Joey.
Such are my conversations with Joey. Is there anything more you want to know?
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXXIV
Jena, July 3d.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—I am sorry not to have been able to answer your letters for so many weeks, and sorry that you should have been, as you say, uneasy, but my telegram in reply to yours will have explained what has been happening to us. My step-mother died a fortnight ago. Almost immediately after I wrote last to you she began to be very ill. My feelings toward her have undergone a complete upheaval. I cannot speak of her. She is revenging herself, as only the dead in their utter unresentfulness can revenge themselves, for every hard and scoffing thought I had of her in life. I think I told you once about her annuity. Now it is gone Papa and I must see to it that we live on my mother's money alone. It is a hundred pounds a year, so the living will have to be prudent; not so prudent, I hope, but that we shall have everything to enjoy that is worth enjoying, but quite prudent enough to force us to take thought. So we are leaving the flat, grown far too expensive for us, as soon as we can find some other home. We have almost decided on one already. Mr. Collins went to England when the illness grew evidently hopeless, and we shall not take him back again, for my father does not care, at least at present, to have strangers with us, and I myself do not feel as though I could cook for and look after a young man in the way my step-mother did. Not having one will make us poor, but I think we shall be able to manage quite well, for we do not want much.
Thank you for your kind letters since the telegram. The ones before that, coming into this serious house filled with the nearness of Death, and of Death in his sternest mood, his hands cruel with scourges, seemed to me so inexpressibly—well, I will not say it; it is not fair to blame you, who could not know in whose shadow we were sitting, for being preoccupied with the trivialities of living. But letters sent to friends a long way off do sometimes fall into their midst with a rather ghastly clang of discord. It is what yours did. I read them sometimes in the night, watching by my step-mother in the half-dark room during the moments when she had a little peace and was allowed to slip away from torture into sleep. By the side of that racked figure and all it meant and the tremendous sermons it was preaching me, wordless, voiceless sermons, more eloquent than any I shall hear again, how strange, how far-away your echoes from life and the world seemed! Distant tinklings of artificialness; not quite genuine writhings beneath not quite genuine burdens; idle questionings and self-criticisms; plaints, doubts, and complicated half-veiled reproaches of myself that I should be able to be pleased with a world so worm-eaten that I should still be able to chant my song of life in a major key in a world so manifestly minor and chromatic. These things fell oddly across the gravity of that room. Shadows in a place where everything was clear, cobwebs of unreality where everything was real. They made me sigh, and they made me smile, they were so very black and yet so very little. I used to wonder what that usually excellent housemaid Experience is about, that she has not yet been after you with her broom. You know her specialty is the pulling up of blinds and the letting in of the morning sun. But it is unfair to judge you. Your letters since you knew have been kindness itself. Thank you for them.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
It seemed so strange for any one to die in June; so strange to be lifeless in the midst of the wanton profusion of life, to grow cold in that quivering radiance of heat. The people below us have got boxes of calla-lilies on their balcony this year. Their hot, heavy scent used to come in at the open window in the afternoons when the sun was on them, the honey-sweet smell of life, intense, penetrating, filling every corner of the room with splendid, pagan summer. And on the bed tossed my step-mother, muttering ceaselessly to herself of Christ.
XXXV
Jena, July 15th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—Our new address is Galgenberg, Jena,—rather grim, but what's in a name? The thing itself is perfect. It is a tiny house, white, with green shutters, on the south slope of the hill among apple-trees. The garden is so steep that you can't sit down in it except on the north side of the house, where you can because the house is there to stop you from sliding farther. It is a strip of rough grass out of which I shall make haycocks, with three apple-trees in it. There is also a red currant bush, out of which I shall make jelly. At the bottom, below the fence—rotten in places, but I'm going to mend that—begins a real apple orchard, and through its leaves we can look down on the roof of another house, white like ours, but a little bigger, and with blue shutters instead of green. People take it for the summer, and once an Englishman came and made a beanfield there—but I think I told you about the beanfield. Behind us, right away up the slope, are pine trees that brush restlessly backward and forward all day long across the clouds, trying to sweep bits of clear blue in the sky, and at night spread themselves out stiff and motionless against the stars. I saw them last night from my window. We moved in yesterday. The moving in was not very easy, because of what Papa calls the precipitous nature of the district. He sat with his back propped against the wall of the house on the only side on which, as I have explained, you can sit, and worked with a pencil at his book about Goethe in Jena with perfect placidity while Johanna and I and the man who urged the furniture cart up the hill kept on stepping over his legs as we went in and out furnishing the house. There was not much to furnish, which was lucky, there not being much to furnish with. We have got rid of all superfluities, including the canary, which I presented, its cage beautifully tied up with the blue ribbons I wore at my first party, to the little girl with the flame-colored hair on the second floor. As much of the other things as any one could be induced to buy we sold, and we burnt what nobody would buy or endure having given them. And so, pared down, we fit in here quite nicely, and after a day or two conceded to the suavities of life, such as the tacking up in appropriate places of muslin curtains and the tying of them with bows, I intend to buy a spade and a watering-pot and see what I can do with the garden.
I wish it were not quite so steep. If I'm not on the upper side of one of the apple-trees with my back firmly pressed against its trunk I don't yet see how I am to garden. It must be disturbing, and a great waste of time, to have to hold on to something with one hand while you garden with the other. And suppose the thing gives way, and you roll down on to the broken fence? And if that, too, gave way, there would be nothing but a few probably inadequate apple trunks between me and the roof of the house with the blue shutters. I should think it extremely likely that until I've got the mountain-side equivalent for what are known as one's sea-legs I shall very often be on that roof. I hope it is strong and new. Perhaps there are kind people inside who will not mind. Soon they'll get so much used to it that when they hear the preliminary rush among their apple-trees and the cracking of the branches followed by the thud over their heads, they won't even look up from their books, but just murmur to each other, 'There's Fräulein Schmidt on the roof again,' and go on with their studies.
Now I'm talking nonsense, and the sort of nonsense you like least; but I'm in a silly mood today, and you must take me as you find me. At any time when I have grown too unendurable you can stop my writing to you simply by not writing to me. Then I shall know you have at last had enough of me, of my moods, of my odious fits of bombastic eloquence, of my still more odious facetiousness, of my scoldings of you and of my complacency about myself. It is true you actually seem to like my scoldings. That is very abject of you. What you apparently resent are the letters with sturdy sentiments in them and a robust relish of life. It almost seems as though you didn't want me to be happy. That is very odd of you. And I sometimes wonder if it is possible for two persons to continue friends who have a different taste in what, for want of a nicer word, I must call jokes. My taste in them is so elementary that an apple-pie bed makes me laugh tears, and when I go to the play I love to see chairs pulled away just as people are going to sit down. You, of course, shudder at these things. They fill you with so great a dreariness that it amounts to pain. I am at least sensible enough to understand the attitude. But pleasantries quite high up, as I consider, in the scale of humor have not been able to make you smile. I have seen you sit unalterably grave while Papa was piping out the nicest little things, and I know you never liked even your adored Professor Martens when he began to bubble. Well, either I laugh too easily or you don't laugh enough. I can only repeat that if I set your teeth on edge the remedy is in your own hands.
We are going to be vegetarians this summer. Papa, who hasn't tried it yet, is perfectly willing, and if we live chiefly on nuts and lettuces we shall hardly want any money at all. I read Shelley's Vindication of Natural Diet aloud to him before we left the flat to prepare his mind, and he not only heartily agreed with every word, but went at once to the Free Library and dug out all the books he could find about muscles and brains and their surprising dependence on the kind of stuff you have eaten, and brought them home for me to study. I do love Papa. He falls in so sweetly with one's little plans, and lets me do what I want without the least waste of time in questionings or the giving of advice. I have read the books with profound interest. Only a person who cooks, who has to handle meat when it is raw, pick out the internals of geese, peel off the skins of rabbits, scrape away the scales of a fish that is still alive—my step-mother insisted on this, the flavor, she said, being so infinitely superior that way—can know with what a relief, what a feeling of personal purification and turning of the back on evil, one flings a cabbage into a pot of fair water or lets one's fingers linger lovingly among lentils. I brought a bag of lentils up the hill with us, and the cabbage, remnant of my last marketing, came up too in a net, and we had our dinner today of them: lentil soup, and cabbage with bread-and-butter—what could be purer? And for Johanna, who has not read Shelley, there was the last of the Rauchgasse sausage for the soothing of her more immature soul.
That was an hour ago, and Papa has just been in to say he is hungry.
'Why, you've only just had dinner, Papachen,' said I, surprised.
'I know—I know,' he said, looking vaguely troubled.
'You can't really be hungry. Perhaps it's indigestion.'
'Perhaps,' agreed Papa; and drifted out again, still looking troubled.
Before we took this house it had stood empty for several years, and the man it belongs to was so glad to find somebody who would live in it and keep it warm that he lets us have it for hardly any rent at all. I expect what the impoverished want—and only the impoverished would live in a thing so small—is a garden flat enough to grow potatoes in, and to have fowls walking about it, and a pig in a nice level sty. You can't have them here. At least, you couldn't have a sty on such a slope. The poor pig would spend his days either anxiously hanging on with all his claws—or is it paws? I forget what pigs have; anyhow, with all his might—to the hillside, or huddled dismally down against the end planks, and never be of that sublime detachment of spirit necessary to him if he would end satisfactorily in really fat bacon. And the fowls, I suppose, would have to lay their eggs flying—they certainly couldn't do it sitting down—and how disturbing that would be to a person engaged, as I often am, in staring up at the sky, for how can you stare up at the sky under an umbrella? I asked the landlord about the potatoes, and he said I must grow them as the last tenant did, a widow who lived and died here, in a strip against the north side of the house where there is a level space about two yards running from one end of the house to the other, representing a path and keeping the hill from tumbling in at our windows. It really is the only place, for I don't see how Johanna and I, gifted and resourceful as we undoubtedly are, can make terraces with no tools but a spade and a watering-pot; but it will do away with our only path, and it does seem necessary to have a path up to one's front door. Can one be respectable without a path up to one's front door? Perhaps one can, and that too may be a superfluity to those who face life squarely. I am convinced that there must be potatoes, but I am not convinced, on reflection, that there need be a path. Have you ever felt the joy of getting rid of things? It is so great that it is almost ferocious. After each divestment, each casting off and away, there is such a gasp of relief, such a bounding upward, the satisfied soul, proud for once of its body, saying to it smilingly, 'This, too, then, you have discovered you can do without and yet be happy.' And I, just while writing these words to you, have discovered that I can and will do without paths.
Papa has been in again. 'Is it not coffee-time?' he asked.
I looked at him amazed. 'Darling, coffee-time is never at half-past two,' I said reproachfully.
'Half-past two is it only? Der Teufel' said Papa.
'Isn't your book getting on well?' I inquired.
'Yes, yes,—the book progresses. That is, it would progress if my attention did not continually wander.'
'Wander? Whereto?'
'Rose-Marie, there is a constant gnawing going on within me that will not permit me to believe that I have dined.'
'Well, but, Papachen, you have. I saw you doing it.'
'What you saw me doing was not dining,' said Papa.
'Not dining?'
Papa waved his arms round oddly and suddenly. 'Grass—grass,' he cried with a singular impatience.
'Grass?' I echoed, still more amazed.
'Books of an enduring nature, works of any monumentalness, cannot, never were, and shall not be raised on a foundation of grass,' said Papa, his face quite red.
'I can't think what you mean,' said I. 'Where is there any grass?'
'Here,' said Papa, quickly clasping his hands over that portion of him that we boldly talk about and call Magen, and you allude to sideways, by a variety of devious expressions. 'I have been fed today,' he said, looking at me quite severely, 'on a diet appropriate only to the mountain goat, and probably only appropriate to him because he can procure nothing better.'
'Why, you had a lentil soup—proved scientifically to contain all that is needed—'
'I congratulate the lentil soup. I envy it. I wish I too contained all that is needed. But here'—he clasped his hands again—'there is nothing.'
'Yes there is. There is cabbage.'
'Pooh,' said Papa. 'Green stuff. Herbage.'
'Herbage?'
'And scanty herbage, too—appropriate, I suppose, to the mountainous region in which we now find ourselves.'
'Papa, don't you want to be a vegetarian?'
'I want my coffee,' said Papa.
'What, now?'
'And why not now, Rose-Marie? Is there anything more rational than to eat when one is hungry? Let there, pray, be much—very much—bread-and-butter with it.'
'But, Papa, we weren't going to have coffee any more. Didn't you agree that we would give up stimulants?'
Papa looked at me defiantly. 'I did,' he said.
'Well, coffee is one.'
'It is our only one.'
'You said you would give it up.'
'I said gradually. To do so today would not be doing so gradually. Nothing is good that is not done gradually.'
'But one must begin.'
'One must begin gradually.'
'You were delighted with Shelley.'
'It was after dinner.'
'You were quite convinced.'
'I was not hungry.'
'You know he is all for pure water.'
'He is all for many things that seem admirable to those who have lately dined.'
'You know he says that if the populace of Paris at the time of the Revolution had drunk at the pure source of the Seine—'
'There is no pure source of the Seine within reach of the populace of Paris. There would only be cats. Dead cats. And cats interspersed, no doubt, with a variety of objects of the nature of portions of crockery and empty tins.'
'But he says pure source.'
'Then he says pure nonsense.'
'He says if they had done that and satisfied their hunger at the ever-furnished table of vegetable nature—'
'Ever-furnished table? Holy Heaven—the good, the excellent young man.'
'—they would never have lent their brutal suffrage to the proscription list of Robespierre.'
'Rose-Marie, today I care not what this young man says.'
'He says—look, I've got the book in my pocket—'
'I will not look.'
'He says, could a set of men whose passions were not perverted by unnatural stimuli—that's coffee, of course—gaze with coolness on an auto-da-fè?'
'I engage to gaze with heat on any auto-da-fè I may encounter if only you will quickly—'
'He says—'
'Put down the book, Rose-Marie, and see to the getting of coffee.'
'But he says—'
'Let him say it, and see to the coffee.'
'He says, is it to be believed that a being of gentle feelings rising from his meal of roots—'
'Gott, Gott,—meal of roots!'
'—would take delight in sports of blood?'
'Enough. I am not in the temper for Shelley.'
'But you quite loved him a day or two ago.'
'Except food, nobody loves anything—anything at all—while his stomach is empty.'
'I don't think that's very pretty, Papachen.'
'But it is a great truth. Remember it if you should marry. Shape your conduct by its light. Three times every day, Rose-Marie,—that is, before breakfast, before dinner, and before supper,—no husband loves any wife. She may be as beautiful as the stars, as wise as Pallas-Athene, as cultured as Goethe, as entertaining as a circus, as affectionate as you please—he cares nothing for her. She exists not. Go, my child, and prepare the coffee, and let the bread-and-butter be cut thick.'
Well, since then I have been cutting bread-and-butter and pouring out cups of coffee. I thought Papa would never leave off. If that is the effect of a vegetarian dinner I don't think it can really be less expensive than meat. Papa ate half a pound of butter, which is sixty pfennings, and for sixty pfennings I could have bought him a Kalbsschnitzel so big that it would have lasted, under treatment, two days. I must go for a walk and think it out.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXXVI
Galgenberg, July 21st.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—I assure you that we have all we want, so do not, please, go on feeling distressed about us. Why should you feel distressed? I am not certain that I do not resent it. Put baldly (you will say brutally), you have no right to be distressed, uneasy, anxious, and all the other things you say you are, about the private concerns of persons who are nothing to you. Even a lamb might conceivably feel nettled by persistent pity when it knows it has everything in the world it wants. Come now, if it is a question of pity, we will have it in the right place, and I will pity you. There is always, you know, a secret satisfaction in the soul of him who pities. He does hug himself, and whether he does it consciously or unconsciously depends on his aptitude for clear self-criticism. Compared with yours I deliberately consider my life glorious. And when will you see that there are kinds of gloriousness that cannot be measured in money or position? It is plain to me—and it would be so to you if you thought it over—that the less one has the more one enjoys. We want space, time, concentration, for getting at the true sweet root of life. And I think—and you probably do not—that the true sweet root of life is in any one thing, no matter what thing, on which your whole undisturbed attention is fixed. Once I read a little French story, years ago, with my mother, when I was a child, and I don't know now who wrote it or what it was called. It was the story of a prisoner who found a plant growing between the flags of the court he might walk in, and I think it was a wallflower; and it, unfolding itself slowly and putting out one tender bit of green after the other in that gray and stony place, stretched out little hands of life and hope and interest to the man who had come there a lost soul. It was the one thing he had. It ended by being his passion. With nothing else to distract him, he could study all its wonders. From that single plant he learned more than the hurried passer-on, free of the treasures of the universe, learns in a life. It saved him from despair. It brought him back to the eager interest in the marvellous world that soul feels which is unencumbered by too heavy a weight of trappings. Why, I still have too much; and here are you pitying me because I have not more when I am distracted by all the claims on my attention. I can look at whole beds of wallflowers every spring, and pass on with nothing but a vague admiration for their massed beauty of scent and color. I get nothing out of them but just that transient glimpse and whiff. There are too many. There is no time for them all. But shut me up for weeks alone with one of them in a pot, and I too would get out of it the measure of the height and the depth and the wonder of life.
And then you exhort me not to live on vegetables. Is it because you live on meat? I don't think I mind your eating meat, so why should you mind my eating vegetables? I have done it for a week now quite steadily, and mean to give it at least a fair trial. If what the books we have got about it say is true, health and sanity lie that way. And how delightful to have a pure kitchen into which ghastly dead things never come. I will not be a partaker of the nature of beasts. I will not become three parts pig, or goose, or foolish sheep. I turn with aversion from the reddened horror called gravy. I consider it a monstrous ugly thing to have particles of pig rioting up and down my veins, turning into brains, coloring my thoughts, becoming a very part of my body. Surely a body is a wonderful thing? So wonderful that it cannot be treated with too much care and respect? So wonderful that it cannot be too carefully guarded from corruption? And have you ever studied the appearance and habits of pigs?
But I do admit that being a vegetarian is bewildering. None of the books say a word about the odd feeling one has of not having had anything to eat. What Papa felt that first day I have felt every day since. I am perpetually hungry; and it is the unpleasant hunger that expresses itself in a dislike for food, in listlessness, inability to work, flabbiness, even faintness. At eight in the morning I begin with bread and plums. My entire being cries out while I am eating them for coffee with milk in it and butter on my bread. But coffee is a stimulant, and the books say that butter contains no nourishment whatever, and since what I most yearn for is to be nourished I will waste no time eating stuff that doesn't do it. Instead, I eat heaps of bread and stacks of plums, not because I want to but because I'm afraid the gnawing feeling will follow sooner than ever if I don't. Papa sits opposite me, breakfasting pleasantly on eggs, for he explains he is doing things gradually and is using the eggs to build wise bridges across the gulf between the end of meat and the beginning of what he persists in describing as herbage. At nine I feel as if I had had no breakfast. All the pains I took to get through the bread were of no real use. I struggle against this for as long as possible, because the books say you mustn't have things between meals, and then I go and eat more plums. I am amazed when I remember that once I liked plums. No words can express my abhorrence of them now. But what is to be done? They are the only fruit we can get. Cherries are over. Apples have not begun. We buy the plums from the neighbor down the hill. To add to my horror of them I have discovered that hardly one is without a wriggly live thing inside it. I wonder how many of them I have eaten. Can they be brought into the category vegetarian? Papa says yes, because they have lived and moved and had their being in an atmosphere of pure plum. They are plum, says Papa, consoling me,—bits of plum that have acquired the power to walk about. But according to that beef must be vegetarian too,—so much grass grown able to walk about. It is very bewildering. One day the neighbor—he is a nice neighbor, interested in our experiment—sent us some raspberries, a basket of them, all glowing, and downy, and delicious with dew, and covered with a beautiful silvery cabbage leaf; but they were afflicted in just the same way, only more so. Papa says, why do I look? I must look now that I have seen the things once; and so the end of the raspberries was that most of them went out into the kitchen, and Johanna, who has no prejudices, stewed them into compote and ate them, including the inhabitants, for her supper.
For dinner, by which time I am curiously shaky, quite indifferent to food, and possessed of an immense longing to lie down on a sofa and do nothing, we have salad and potatoes and fruit—of course plums—and lentils because they are so good for us (it is a pity they are also so nasty), and cheese because one book says (it is an extraordinarily convincing book) that if a man shall eat beef steadily for a whole morning from six to twelve without stopping, he will not at the end have taken in half the nourishing matter that he would have absorbed after two minutes laid out judiciously on cheese. Unfortunately I don't like cheese. After dinner I shut myself up with the works of Mr. Eustace Miles, which tell me in invigorating language of all the money, time, and energy I have saved, of my increase of bodily health, of how active I am getting, how skilful and of what a tough endurance, how my brains have grown clear and nimble, my morals risen high above the average, and how keen my enjoyment of everything has become, including, strange to say, my food. I read lying down, too spiritless to sit up; and Johanna in the kitchen, who has dined on pig and beer, washes up with the clatter of exuberant energy, singing while she does so in a voice that shakes the house that once she liebte ein Student.
It is very bewildering. The advice one gets points in such opposite directions. For instance, the neighbor made friends the very first evening with Papa, who walked with injudicious inattention in our garden and slipped down through a gap in the fence into his orchard and his arms, he being engaged in picking up the fallen plums for his wife to make jam of; and he told me when he came in one day at dinner and found me struggling through what he considered dark ways and I thought were cabbages, that my salvation lay in almonds. I went down to Jena that afternoon and bought three pounds of them. They were dear, and dreadfully heavy to carry up the hill, and when I was panting past the neighbor's gate his wife, a friendly lady who reads right through the advertisements in the paper every morning and spends her evenings with a pencil working out the acrostics, was standing at it cool and comfortable; and she asked me, with the simple inquisitiveness natural to our nation, what I had got in my parcel; and I, glad to stop a moment and get my breath, told her; and she immediately scoffed both at her husband and at the almonds, and said if I ate them I would lay up for myself an old age steeped in a dreadful thing called xanthin poison. I went home and consulted the books. The neighbor's wife was right. Johanna made macaroons of the almonds, and Papa, who loves macaroons, chose to disbelieve the neighbor's wife and ate them.
But the books are not always so unanimous as they were about this. One exhorted us to eat many peas and beans, which we were cheerfully doing,—for are they not in summer pleasant things?—when I read in another that we might as well eat poison, so full were they, too, of qualities ending in xanthin poison. Lentils, recommended warmly by most books, are discountenanced by two because they make you fat. Rice has shared the same condemnation. Lettuces we may eat, but without the oil that soothes and the vinegar that interests, and if you add salt to them you will be thirsty, and you must never drink. An undressed lettuce—a quite naked lettuce—is a very dull thing. Really, I would as soon eat grass. We do refuse at present to follow this cruel advice, and have salad every day in defiance of it, but my conscience forces me to put less and less dressing in it each time, hoping that so shall we wean ourselves from the craving for it—'gradually,' as Papa says. Carrots, too, the books warn us against. I forget what it is they do to you that is serious, but the neighbor told me they make your skin shine, and since he told me that no carrot has crossed our threshold. Apples we may eat, but we are not to suppose that they will nourish us; they are useful only for preventing, by their bulk, the walls of our insides from coming together. The walls of the vegetarian inside are very apt to come together if the owner strikes out all the things he is warned against from his menu, and then it is, when they are about to do that, that fibrous bulk, most convenient in this form, should be applied; and, like the roasted Sunday goose of our fleshlier days in Rauchgasse, the vegetarian goes about stuffed with apples. Meanwhile there are no apples, and I know not whither I must turn in search of bulk. Do you think that in another week I shall be strong enough to write to you?
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXXVII
Galgenberg, July 28th.
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
Now I will take me to a place of peace,
Forget my heart's desire—
In solitude and prayer work out my soul's release?
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
Galgenberg, Aug. 7th.
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
Galgenberg, Aug. 13th.
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
Galgenberg, Aug. 18th.
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
Galgenberg, Aug. 25th.
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?
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XLII
Galgenberg, Aug. 31st.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—Yes, of course he does. He plays every evening. And every evening I go and listen, either in the orchard beneath the open window or, more ceremoniously, inside the room with or without Papa. I find it a pleasant thing. I am living in a bath of music. And I hope you don't expect me to agree with your criticism of music as a stirrer-up of, on the whole, second-rate emotions. What are second-rate emotions? Are they the ones that you have? And was it to have them stirred that you used to journey so often to Munich and Mottl? Stirred up I certainly am. Not in the way, I admit, in which a poem of Milton's does it, not affected in the least as I am affected by, for instance, the piled-up majesty of the poem on Time, but if less nobly still very effectually. There; I have apparently begun to agree with you. Well, I do see, the moment I begin to consider, that what is stirred is less noble. I do see that what I feel when I listen to music is chiefly Wehmuth, and I don't think much of Wehmuth. You have no word for it. Perhaps in England you do not have just that form of sentiment. It is a forlorn thing, made up mostly of vague ingredients,—vague yearnings, vague regrets, vague dissatisfactions. When it comes over you, you remember all the people who are absent, and you are sad; and the people who are dead, and you sigh; and the times you have been naughty, and you groan. I do see that a sentiment that makes you do that is not the highest. It is profitless, sterile. It doesn't send you on joyfully to the next thing, but keeps you lingering in the dust of churchyards, barren places of the past which should never be revisited by the wholesome-minded. Now this looks as though I were agreeing with you quite, but I still don't. You put it so extremely. It is so horrid to think that even my emotions may be second-rate. I long ago became aware that my manners were so, but I did like to believe there was nothing second-rate about my soul. Well, what is one to do? Never be soft? Never be sad? Or sorry? Or repentant? Always stay up at the level of Milton's Time poem, or of his At a Solemn Musick, strung high up to an unchanging pitch of frigid splendor and nobleness? It is what I try to aim at. It is what I would best like. Then comes our friend of the red tie, and in the cool of the day when the world is dim and scented shakes a little fugue of Bach's out of his fiddle, a sparkling, sly little fugue, frolicsome for all its minor key, a handful of bright threads woven together, twisted in and out, playing, it would seem, at some game of hide-and-seek, of pretending to want to catch each other into a tangle, but always gayly coming out of the knots, each distinct and holding on its shining way till the meeting at the end, the final embrace when the game is over and they tie themselves contentedly together into one comfortable major chord,—our friend plays this, this manifestly happy thing, and my soul listens, and smiles, and sighs, and longs, and ends by being steeped in Wehmuth. I choose the little fugue of Bach as an instance, for of all music it is aimed most distinctly at the intellect, it is the furthest removed from Wehmuth; and if it has this effect on me I will not make you uncomfortable by a description of what the baser musics do, the musics of passion, of furious exultations and furious despairs. But my vague wish for I do not know what, gentle, and rather sweetly resigned when the accompaniment is Bach, swells suddenly while I listen to them into a terrifying longing that rends and shatters my soul.
What private things I tell you. I wouldn't if I were talking. I would be affected by your actual presence. But writing is so different, and so strange; at once so much more and so much less intimate. The body is safe—far away, unassailable; and the spirit lets itself go out to meet a fellow spirit with the frankness it can never show when the body goes too, that grievous hinderer of the communion of saints, that officious blunderer who can spoil the serenest intercourse by a single blush.
Johanna came in just there. She was decked in smiles, and wanted to say good-by till to-morrow morning. It is her night out, and she really looked rather wonderful to one used to her kitchen condition. Her skin, cleansed from week-day soilure, was surprisingly fair; her hair, waved more beautifully than mine will ever be, was piled up in bright imposing masses; her starched white dress had pink ribbons about it; she wore cotton gloves; and held the handkerchief I lend her on these occasions genteelly by its middle in her hand. Every second Sunday she descends the mountain at sunset, the door-key in her pocket, and dances all night in some convivial Gasthof in the town, coming up again at sunrise or later according to the amount of fun she was having. On the Monday I do nearly everything alone, for she sleeps half the day, and the other half she doesn't like being talked to. She is a good servant, and she would certainly go if we tried to get her in again under the twelve hours. On the alternate Sundays we allow her to have her young man up for the afternoon and evening. He is a trumpeter in the regiment stationed in Jena, and he brings his trumpet to fill up awkward silences. Engaged couples of that kind don't seem able to talk much, so that the trumpet is a great comfort to them. Whenever conversation flags he whips it out and blows a rousing blast, giving her time to think of something to say next. I had to ask him to do it in the garden, for the first time it nearly blew our roof, which isn't very tightly on, off. Now he and she sit together on a bench outside the door, and the genius down the hill with the exclusive ears suffers, I am afraid, rather acutely. Papa and I wander as far away as we can get among the mountains.
It is rather dreadful when they quarrel. Then, of course, Johanna sulks as girls will, and sulks are silent things, so that the trumpet has to fill up a yawning gulf and never leaves off at all. Last Sunday it blew the whole time we were out, and I expected when I got home to find the engagement broken off. We stayed away as long as we could, climbing higher and higher, wandering further and further, supping at last reluctantly on cucumber salad and cold herrings in the little restaurant up on the Schweizerhohe because the trumpet wouldn't stop and we didn't dare go home till it did. Its blasts pursued us even into the recesses of the dingy wooden hall we took our ears into, vainly trying to carry them somewhere out of range. It seemed to be a serious quarrel. We had a depressing meal. We both esteem Johanna with the craven esteem you feel for a person, at any moment capable of giving notice, who does all the unpleasant things you would otherwise have to do yourself. The state of her temper seriously affects our peace. You see, the house is small, and if her trumpeter has been unsatisfactory and she throws the saucepans about or knocks the broom in sweeping against all the wooden things like doors and skirting-boards, it makes an unendurable clatter and puts an end at once to Papa's work and to my equally earnest play. If, her nerves being already on edge, I were to suggest to her even smilingly to be quiet, she would at once give notice—I know she would—and the dreary search begin again for that impossible treasure you in England call a paragon and we in Jena call a pearl. Where am I to find a clean, honest, strong pearl, able to cook and willing to come and live in what is something like an unopened oyster-shell, so shut-up, so cut-off so solitary would her existence here be, for eight pounds a year? It is easy for you august persons who never see your servants, who have so many that by sheer force of numbers they become unnoticeable, to deride us who have only one for being so greatly at her mercy. I know you will deride. I see your letter already: 'Dear Fräulein Schmidt, Is not your attitude toward the maid Johanna unworthy?' It isn't unworthy, because it is natural. Defiantly I confess that it is also cringing. Well, it is natural to cringe under the circumstances. So would you. I dare say if your personal servant is a good one, and you depend much on him for comfort, you do do it as it is. And there are very few girls in Jena who would come out of it and take a situation on the side of a precipice for eight pounds a year. Really the wages are small, balanced against the disadvantages. And wages are going up. Down in Jena a good servant can get ten pounds a year now without much difficulty. So that it behooves us who cannot pay such prices to humor Johanna.