'Really?' said I, in a voice of concern.
'Yes. It is a pity for you. You would then see how elegant Berlin people are. I expect this—' she waved her hand—'is quite different from Jena, and seems strange to you, but it is nothing, I assure you nothing at all, compared to Elschen's mother-in-law's furniture and food.'
'Really?' said I, again with concern.
I did a dreadful thing next morning at breakfast: I broke a jug. Never shall I forget the dismay and shame of that moment. Really I am rather a deft person, used to jugs, and not, as a rule, of hasty or unconsidered movements. It was, I think, the electric current streaming out of Onkel Heinrich that had at last reached me too and galvanized me into a nervous and twitching behavior. He came in last, and the moment he appeared words froze, smiles vanished, eyes fell, and Papa's piping alone continued to be heard in the cheerless air. I don't know what had passed between him and Tante Else since last we had seen him, but his opaque black eyes were crosser and blacker than ever. Perhaps it was only that he had smoked more than was good for him, and the whole family was punished for that over-indulgence. I could not help reflecting how lucky it was that we were his relations and not hers; what must happen to hers if they ever come to see her I dare not think. It was while I was reflecting on their probable scorched and shrivelled condition, and at the same time was eagerly passing him some butter that I don't think he wanted but that I was frantically afraid he might want, that my zealous arm swept the milk-jug off the table, and it fell on the varnished floor, and with a hideous clatter of what seemed like malicious satisfaction smashed itself to atoms.
'There now,' cried my step-mother casting up her hands, 'Rose-Marie all over.'
'I am very sorry,' I stammered, pushing back my chair and gathering up the pieces and mopping up the milk with my handkerchief.
'Dear niece, it is of no consequence,' faltered Tante Else, her eyes anxiously on her husband.
'No consequence?' cried he—and his words sounded the more terrific from their being the first, beyond a curt good morning, that he had uttered. 'No consequence?'
And when my shameful head reappeared above the table and I got on to my feet and carried the ruins to a sideboard, murmuring hysterical apologies as I went, he pointed with a lean finger to what had once been a jug and said with an owlish solemnity and weightiness of utterance I have never heard equalled, 'It was very expensive.' I can't tell you how glad, how thankful I was to get home.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
LV
Galgenberg, Nov. 15th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—I shall send this to Jermyn Street, as it can no longer catch you in Italy. Jena is not on the way from London to Berlin, and I don't know what map persuaded you that it was. It is very faithful and devoted of you to want so much to see Professor Martens again, but you know he is a busy man, and for five minutes with him as he rushes from a lecture to a private lesson it hardly seems worth while to make such a tremendous détour. Why, you would be hours pottering about on branch lines and at junctions, and would never, I am certain, see your luggage again. Still, it is not for me to refuse your visit to Professor Martens on his behalf who as yet knows nothing about it. I merely advise; and you know I do not easily miss an opportunity of doing that.
What another odd idea of yours to want to call on our Berlin relations. Has Italy put these various warm genialities into your head? I did not think I had made the Heinrich Schmidts attractive. I was shivering while I wrote with renewed horror, as the remembrance of that evening with them and of that morning rose up again before me. That the result should be a thirst on your part for their address fills me with astonishment. Do you want to go and do them good? Soften Onkel Heinrich, and teach him to cherish kind Tante Else with the meek blue eyes and claret-colored silk dress? You cannot seriously intend to set up regular social intercourse with them. It is certain you will never meet them at any party you go to,—no, not even Elschen's mother-in-law. The classes are with us divided so rigorously that the needle's eye was child's play to the camel compared to this other entering. You will, very properly, remembering my cloistered life, inquire what I know about it; but it seems to me, only please don't laugh, that I have seen and known quite a good deal. When Experience leaves gaps, quick Imagination fills them up. The straws I have noticed have been enough to show me which way the wind was blowing; and women, pray remember, are artists at putting two and two together. Therefore I prophesy that if you are at the English Embassy in Berlin fifty years and meet fresh people every day of them, among those people will never be Onkel Heinrich and Tante Else. What, then, is the use of giving you their address? I will, if you really seriously wish it, but I must warn you that they would be intensely surprised by a call from you, and it would in no way add to their comfort. The connecting thread is altogether too slender. Papa is not a relation whose introductions they value, and to come from him is a handicap rather than a recommendation. Do you know the only possible conclusion they would come to?—and come to it they certainly would—that somehow, somewhere, in a train, or a shop, or walking, you had seen Lieschen, and had fallen in love with her. And before you knew where you were you would be married to Lieschen.
How sad to have to come away from the flaming Spanish chestnuts of Italy, and turn your face toward London fogs. You don't seem to mind. You never do seem to mind the things that would fill my heart with leaden despair, and over other things that should not matter you cry out. Indeed, far from minding you seem eager to be off. Yet London can't be nice in November, and Berlin, where you so soon will be, is simply horrid. It was in November that we were there, and we splashed about in a raw, wet cold,—rain on the verge of sleet and snow, a bitter wind at the corners, the omnibuses all full (we could not afford the dearer and more respectable tram), and everybody we met had an unkind strange face that stared at us, in spite of hurry and umbrellas, with a thoroughness and comprehensiveness that must be peculiar to Berlin. Papa's galoshes didn't fit and kept coming off, and they always did it at the most difficult moment, generally when we were crossing a street, and there they would lie, scattered beneath hoofs and wheels, till I had rescued them again. Also his umbrella, being old and never having been very strong, turned inside out at extra gusty corners, and we, who had come to look and wonder, found that the Berlin people thought we had come to be looked and wondered at. But do not let me damp your ardor with these gloomy tales. It is such an excellent thing that you should be ardent at all after this long while of dissatisfaction with life that I ought to cheer you on and not talk dreary. Besides, your umbrella won't mind corners, and you do not wear galoshes. I wish you joy, then, of your new post, and hope you will be very happy in it. Papa was most interested to hear you were coming so near us, and sends you many messages whose upshot is that you are to be a good boy and do him credit. He doesn't know about the unfortunate ending to your engagement, and I shall not tell him, for he would be sorry; and more and more as the days and months melt away into a dream I am anxious that he should not be made sorry. Do you not think that old people should never be made sorry?
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
I hope you will waste no precious time coming to Jena to see Professor Martens. I heard a rumor that he was ill, or away or something, so that you would have your long and extremely tiresome journey positively for nothing.
LVI
Galgenberg, Nov. 23d.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—Was it so short? I don't remember. This one shall be longer, then. Tell me, do you think there is any use in trying to cure a person of being in love? I have come to the conclusion that it's hopeless. Such cures must be made from the inside outward, and not from the outside inward. I thought I was going to stir Vicki to a noble independence, and you should have heard the speeches I made her. Sometimes I had to laugh at them myself, they were such extraordinarily heroic and glowing things for one dripping Fräulein with none too brave a heart to hurl at another dripping Fräulein with no brave heart at all, as they trotted along with shortened skirts and umbrellas through wind-racked, howling forests. Vicki has gone all to pieces again, and her eyes are redder than ever. I don't know whether it is these November mists that have done it, but certainly after all my hauling of her up the rocks of proud self-sufficiency she has flopped back again deeper than before into the morass in which I found her. It's a perfect bog of sentiment she's sunk in now. I make her go for ten-mile walks, and aim at doing them in two hours, thus hoping to bring out her love-sickness in the form of healthy perspiration, but it's no good. 'Oh,' gasps Vicki, when we start off up the sombre aisles of pines, and see them stretching away before us into a gray infinity, and mark their reeking trunks, black with damp, hoar with lichen, and hear their sighings and their creakings through the patter of rain on our umbrellas, and feel their wet breath on our cheeks, 'oh what an empty, frightening world it is.'
Then I tell her, with what enthusiasm I may, that it's not, that it's beautiful, that we are young and strong, that our life can be made just exactly as glorious as we are energetic enough to make it. And she doesn't believe a word; she simply shakes her head, and moans that she isn't energetic.
'But you are,' I say with a fine show of confidence. 'Come, let us walk faster. Who would dare say you were not who saw you now?'
'Oh,' wails Vicki; and trots along blowing her nose.
Poor little soul. I've tried kissing her, and it did no good either. I petted her for a whole day; sat with my arms round her; had her head on my shoulder; whispered every consolation I could think of; but unfortunately the only person who has ever petted her was the faithless one, and it made her think of him with renewed agony, and opened positive sluices of despair. I've tried scolding her—the 'My dear Vicki, really for a woman grown' tone, but she gets so much of that from her mother, and besides she isn't a woman grown, but only a poor, unhappy, cheated little child. But how dull, how dry, how profitless are the comfortings of one woman for another. I feel it in every nerve the whole time I am applying them. One kiss from the wretched man himself and the world blazes into radiance. A thousand of the most beautiful and eminent verities enunciated by myself only collect into a kind of frozen pall that hangs about her miserable little head and does nothing more useful than suffocate her. She has been inclined to feel bad ever since the fatal letter about the soup, but there were intervals in which with infinite haulings I did get her up on to the rocks again, those rocks she finds so barren, but from whose tops she can at least see clearly and be kept dry. Now that this terrible weather has come upon us, and every day is wetter and sadder than the last, she has collapsed entirely. If I could write as well as Papa I would like to write an essay on the connection between a wet November and the renewed buddings of love. Frau von Lindeberg is dreadfully angry, and came up, and actually came in, a thing she has not done yet, and sat on the sofa, carefully enthroned in its middle and well spread out in case I should so far forget myself as to want to sit upon it too, and asked me what nonsense I had been putting into the child's head.
'Nonsense?' I exclaimed, remembering my noble talk.
'She was getting over it. You must have said something.'
'Said something? Yes, indeed I said something. Never has one person said so many things before.'
She stared in amazement. 'What,' she cried, 'you actually—you dared—you have the effrontery—'
'Shall I tell you what I said?'
And for an hour I gave the astonished lady, hemmed in on the sofa by the table and by my chair, the outlines of my views on ideals and conduct. I made the most of the hour. The outlines were very thick. No fidgeting or attempts to stop me were considered. She had come to scold; she should stay to learn.
'Well, well,' she said, when I, tired of talking, got up and removed the impeding table with something of the brisk politeness of a dentist unhooking the patient's bib and screwing down his chair after he has done his worst, 'you seem to be a good sort of girl. You have, I see, meant no harm.'
'Meant no harm? I neither meant it nor did I do it. Allow me to make the point clearer—' And I prepared to push back the table upon her and began again.
'No, no—it is quite clear, thank you. Kindly go on endeavoring, then, to influence my unhappy child for good. I trust your excellent father is well. Good morning.'
But influence as I may Vicki has given up wearing those starched shirts with the high linen collars and neat ties in which she first dazzled me, and has gone into nondescript woollen clothes something like mine. She says it is because, of the washing bills, but I know it to be but a further symbol of her despair. The one remnant of her first trimness is her beautifully brushed hair. Stooping over her to see that her English exercises are correct I like to lay my cheek a moment on it, so lightly that she does not notice, for it is wonderful stuff,—soft, wavy, shining, and ought alone without the little ear and curve of the young cheek, without the silly pretty mouth and kind straightforward eyes, to have immeshed that stupid man beyond all possibility of disentangling himself. She was not made for Milton and the Muses. Nature, carving her out, moulding her body and her mind, putting in a dimple here and giving an eyelash an extra curl there, had a pleasant eye on a firelit future for Vicki, a cosy, sheltered future with a fender for her feet, a baby for each arm, and an adored husband coming in at the end of the day to be fed and kissed. But this man has outwitted nature. He weighed, with true German caution, Vicki and her dimples against the tiny portion which was all he could extract from her parents, and found them not heavy enough to make up for the alarming emptiness of that other scale. Now Vicki's fender and babies and busy happy life have vanished into the land of Never Will Be's. She will not find some one else to take his place. She has a story attached to her: a fatal thing here for a girl. Unlike your Miss Cheriton, who gently waves you aside and engages herself without the least difficulty to a duke, Vicki is a marked person, and will be avoided by our careful and calculating young men. She is doomed never to spoil and tease those babies, never to spoil and worship that husband. Instead she will, for a year, continue to range the hills here with me, trying to listen politely to my admonishments while inwardly she shudders at the loneliness and vastness of the forests and of life, and then her parents' lease will be up, and they and she will drift down into some little town in the Harz where retired officers finish lives grown vegetable, and the years will pounce upon her and strip her one by one of her little stock of graces. Don't suppose I blame the man, because I don't; I only resent that he should have so much the best of it. There is no law obliging a man to marry because some lovesick girl wants him to—if I were a man I would never marry—but I do deplore the exceeding number of the girls who want him to. If each girl would say her prayers and go her own way, go about her business, her parents having seen to it that she should have a business to go about, what a cheerful, tearless place the world would be. And you must forgive my vociferousness, but really I have had a woeful morning with Vicki, who cried so bitterly into the pages of my Milton that the best part of Samson Agonistes is stuck together, and all the red has come off the edges.
Papa Lindeberg came in at the end of the lesson to offer me his umbrella to go home with. 'It is a wet day, Fräulein Hebe,' said he, looking round.
'It is,' said I, gazing ruefully at my poor Milton.
'Even the daughters of the gods,' said he—thus mildly do we continue to joke together—'must sometimes use umbrellas.'
'Yes,' said I, smiling at this pleasant old man, this old man I thought at first so disagreeable; and he went with me to the door, and asked me in an anxious whisper what I thought of Vicki. 'It lasts long—it lasts long,' said he, helplessly.
'Yes,' said I, standing under the umbrella in the rain, while he in the porch rubbed one hand mechanically over the other and stared at me.
'You are a very fortunate young lady,' he said wistfully.
'I?'
'Our poor Vicki—if she were more like you—'
'Like me?'
'It is so clear that you have never known this terrible malady of love. You have the face of a joyful Backfisch.'
'Oh,'—I began to laugh; and laughed, and laughed till the umbrella shook showers of raindrops off each of its points.
He stood watching me thoughtfully. 'It is true,' he said.
'Oh,' was all I could ejaculate; for indeed the idea made me very merry.
'No member of our sex,' said he, 'has ever even for a moment caught what is still a bright and untouched maiden fancy.'
'There was a young man once,' I began, 'in the Jena cake-shop—'
'Ach' he interrupted, waving the young man and his cakes away with an impatient movement of the hand.
'I didn't know,' said I, 'that you could read people's past.'
'Yours is easy enough to read. It is shining so clearly in your eyes, it is reflected so limpidly in your face—'
'How nice,' said I, interrupting in my turn, for my feet were getting grievously wet; and you note, I hope, with what industriousness I preserve and record anything of a flattering nature that any one ever says to me.
But you shall hear the other side too; for I turned away, and he turned away, and before I had gone a yard my shoelace came undone and I had to go back to the shelter of the porch to tie it up, and while I had my foot on the scraper and was bending down tying a bow and a knot that should last me till I got home I heard Frau von Lindeberg from the parlor off the passage make him the following speech:
'I am constantly surprised, Ludwig, at the amount of time and conversation I see you bestow on Fräulein Schmidt. I can hardly call it impertinence, but there is something indescribable about her manners,—an unbecoming freedom, an almost immodest frankness, an almost naked naturalness, that is perilously near impertinence. People of that class do not understand people of ours; and she will, if you are kinder than is absolutely necessary, certainly take advantage of it. Let me beg you to be careful.'
And Ludwig, beginning then and there, never answered a word.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
What do you think? Papa's book has been refused by the Jena publisher, by three Berlin publishers, by two in Stuttgart, and one in Leipzig. It is now journeying round Leipzig to the remaining publishers. The first time it came back we felt the blow and drooped; the second time we felt it but did not droop; the third time we felt nothing; the fourth time we laughed. 'Foolish men,' chuckled Papa, tickled by such blindness to their own interests, 'if none will have it we will translate it and send it to England, what?'
'Who is we, darling?' I asked anxiously.
'We is you, Rose-Marie,' said Papa, pulling my ear.
'Oh,' said I.
Scene closes.
LVII
Galgenberg, Dec. 1st.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—It is strange to address this letter to Berlin, and to know that by the time it gets there you will be there too. Well, let it welcome you very heartily back to the Fatherland. I think I know the street you are in; it is facing the Thiergarten, isn't it, and looks north? Quite close to the Brandenburg Thor? I remember it because we trudged, among other places, also about the Thiergarten on our memorable visit, and Papa's eye caught the name of your street and he stood for ten minutes in the rain giving us a spirited sketch of the man's life and claims to have a street called after him. My step-mother waited with a grim patience, her skirts firmly clutched in each hand. She had come to sight-see and to have things explained to her, so that it would be waste of a railway fare not to look and listen. Papa was in great splendor that day, so obviously superior, in the universatility of his knowledge, to either of us damp womenfolk. You won't get much sun there unless your rooms are at the back, but on the other hand it is undoubtedly a street for the exclusive and well-to-do, as even I could see to whom marble steps and wrought-iron gates convey the usual lesson. I, however, would sooner live in a kennel facing south than in a palace where the sun never came; but then, as you know, my tendencies are incurably kennelwards.
Today I am humble and hanging my head, for I have discovered to my pain and horror that Papa and I are living well beyond our income. I expect we have bought too many books, and spent too much in stamps to be used by publishers; but it is certain that we've already consumed over seventy pounds of our yearly hundred, and that we only took five months to do it in. What do you think of that? We have been squandering money right and left somehow. There were no clothes to buy, for what we have will last us at least two years, and where it has all gone to I can't imagine. Indeed I am a useless person if I cannot even manage a tiny house like this and make such sufficient means do. Papa has written to Professor Martens to tell him he is willing to take in a young man again. Willing? He is eager, hungry for a young man, for he sees that without one things will go badly with us. And I, remembering the wealth we enjoyed while Mr. Collins was with us, have written to him to ask if he cares to come back and finish learning German. I don't know if he still wants to, or rather if his father still wants him to, for German to Joey was as the fly in the apothecary's ointment, in its extreme offensiveness, nor have I told Papa that I wrote, because of the peculiar horror with which he regards Joey; but I couldn't resist when I know that six months of Joey would deliver us for two whole years from all young men whatever, and I hope when the time comes, if it ever does, and Joey with it, to persuade Papa by judicious argument of the eminent desirability of this particular young man.
There are, however, certain difficulties in the way. Our house has two bedrooms, two sitting-rooms, an attic, a kitchen, and a coal-hole. Johanna inhabits the attic. One sitting-room is sacred to Papa and his work. The other is a scrap room in which we have our meals and receive Frau von Lindeberg when she calls, and I write letters and read books and darn stockings. Where, then, will Joey sleep? The answer is as clear as daylight and very startling: Joey must sleep with Papa. Now that this truth has dawned upon me I spend hours lost in thoughts of things like screens and dividing curtains, besides preparing elaborate speeches for the bringing of Papa to reason. He himself was the first to declare we must positively take in a young man again, and he surely will see, when it is pointed out to him, that any one we have must sleep at the intervals appointed by nature. I'm afraid he'll see it in the case of every one except the fruitful Joey. It is most unfortunate that Joey should be so foolish about Goethe, for we really do want somebody who doesn't mind about money, and I remember several poor boys in the past who were so very poor that on the days when my step-mother demanded payment I used to have to go out early and wander among the hills till evening, unable to endure the sound of the thalers being wrung out of them. Oh, money is the most horrid of all necessities. I am ashamed to think of the many bright hours of life soiled by anxieties about it, by meannesses about it. Wherever even a question of it arises Love and the Graces fly affrighted, followed closely, by the entire troop of equally terrified Muses, out of the nearest window. I detest it. I do not want it. But with all my defiance of it I am crushed beneath the yoke of the penny as completely as everybody else. Well do I know that penny, and how much it is when there's one over, and what worlds away when there's one too few.
Here comes Johanna to lay the dinner. We are rankly vegetarian again, Papa leading the way with immense determination, for he has set his heart at this unfortunate juncture on a new biography of Goethe that must needs come out just now, a big thing in two volumes costing a terrible number of marks, very well done, full of the result of original digging among archives; but he dare not buy it, he says, in the present state of our affairs. 'Dost thou not think, Rose-Marie,' he said, his face in grievous puckers at the prospect, 'that a renewed and careful course of herbage may quickly-set the matter right?'
'Not quickly,' said I, shaking my head, and pondering privately what, exactly, he meant by the word renewed.
He looked crestfallen.
'But ultimately,' I said, wishing to cheer him.
'Ultimately—ultimately,' he echoed peevishly. 'The word has a knell-like sound about it that I do not like. When we have reached thy Ultimately I shall no longer be in a state to desire or appreciate Bielschowsky's Goethe. My brain, by then, will be clothed with grass, and my veins be streams of running water.'
'Well, darling,' said I, putting my arm through his, 'you'll be at least very nice and refreshing, and extraordinarily like a verse of the Psalms.'
And for two days he has held out undaunted, and here comes our lentil soup and roast apples, so good-by.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
LVIII
Galgenberg, Dec. 4th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—This morning I woke up and wondered at the strange hush that had fallen on our house, set so near to a sighing, restless forest; and I looked out of the window and it was the first snow. All night it must have snowed, for there was the most beautiful smooth bank of it without a knob anywhere to show where lately I had been digging, from beneath my window up into the forest. Each pine tree was a fairy tree, its laden branches one white sparkle. The clouds were gone, and by the time I had done breakfast there was a brilliant blue sky, and the hills round Jena stood out so sharply against it that they looked as if somebody had been at them with a hatchet. Never was there such a serene and silent world as the one I stepped out into, shovel in hand. I had come to clear a pathway from the kitchen to the pump; instead I stood as silent as everything else, the shovel beneath my arm, gazing about me and drinking in the purity in a speechless ecstasy. Oh the air, Mr. Anstruther, the air! Unhappy young man, who did not breathe it. It was like nothing you've got in Berlin, of that you may be very certain. It was absolutely calm; not a breath stirring. It was icy, yet crisp and frappé du soleil. And then how wonderful the world looked after the sodden picture of yesterday still in my mind. Each twig of the orchard trees had its white rim on the one side, exact and smooth, drawn along it by the finger of the north wind. The steps down from the back door had vanished beneath the loveliest, sleekest white covering. The pump, till the day before and ever since I have known it, a bleakly impressive object silhouetted in all its lankness and gauntness against a background of sky and mountain, was grown grotesque, bulky, almost playful, its top and long iron handle heaped with an incredible pile of snow, its spout hung about with a beard of icicles. Frau von Lindeberg's kitchen smoke went up straight and pearly into the golden light. The roofs of Jena were in blue shadow. Our neighbor's roof flashed with a million diamonds in the sun. Two rooks cawed to each other from the pine tree nearest our door; and Rose-Marie Schmidt said her morning prayers then and there, still clinging to her shovel. Then she pulled off her coat, hung her hat on the door-handle, and began in a sort of high rapture to make a pathway to the pump. What are the joys of summer to these? There is nothing like it, nothing, nothing in the world. I know no mood of Nature's that I do not love—or think I do when it is over—but for keenness of feeling, for stinging pleasure, for overflowing life, give me a winter's day with the first snow, a clear sky, and the thermometer ten degrees Réaumur below zero.
Vicki called out from her doorway—you could hear the least call this morning at an extraordinary distance—to ask if I were snowed up too much to come down as usual.
'I'm coming down, and I'm making the path to do it with,' I called back, shovelling with an energy that set my hair dancing about my ears.
She shouted back—her very shout was cheerful, and I did not need to see her face to know that today there would be no tears—that she too would make a path up to meet mine; and presently I heard the sounds of another joyful shovel.
Underneath, the ground was hard with frost; it had frozen violently for several hours before the snow came up on the huge purple wings of the north wind. The muddy roads, the soaked forest, the plaintive patter of the rain, were wiped out of existence between a sleeping and a waking. This was no world in which to lament. This was no place in which sighs were possible. The thought that a man's marrying one or not could make so much as the faintest smudge across the bright hopefulness of life made me laugh aloud with healthiest derision. Oh, how my shovel rang against the frozen stones! The feathery snow was scattered broadcast at each stroke. My body glowed and tingled. My hair grew damp about my forehead. The sun smiled broadly down upon my back. Papa flung up his window to cheer me on, but shut it again with a slam before he had well got out his words. Johanna came for an instant to the door, peeped out, gasped that it was cold—unheimlich kalt was her strange expression: unheimlich=dismal, uncanny; think of it!—and shut the door as hurriedly as Papa had shut the window. An hour later two hot and smiling young women met together on the path they had shovelled, and straightened themselves up, and looked proudly at the results of their work, and laughed at each other's scarlet faces and at the way their noses and chins were covered with tiny beads. 'As if it were August and we'd been reaping,' said Vicki; and the big girl laughed at this, and the small girl laughed at this, with an excessiveness that would have convinced a passer-by that somebody was being very droll.
But there was no passer-by. You don't pass by if snow lies on the roads three feet deep. We are cut off entirely from Jena and shops. This letter won't start for I haven't an idea how long. Milk cannot come to us, and we cannot go to where there is a cow. I have flour enough to bake bread with for about ten days unless the Lindebergs should have none, in which case it will last less than five. The coal-hole is stored with cabbages and carrots, buried, with cunning circumvention of decay, in sand. Potatoes abound in earth-covered heaps out of doors. Apples abound in Johanna's attic. We vegetarians come off well on occasions like this, for the absence of milk and butter does not afflict the already sorely afflicted, and of course the absence of meat leaves us completely cold.
Vicki and I have been mending a boy's sled we found in the lumber room of their house, I suppose the sled used in his happier days by the Assessor now chained to a desk in Berlin, and with this we are going out after coffee this afternoon when the sky turns pale green and stars come out and blink at us, to the top of the road where it joins the forest, dragging the sled up as best we can over the frozen snow, and then, tightly clutching each other, and I expect not altogether in silence, we intend to career down again as far as the thing will career, flashing, we hope, past her mother's gate at a speed that will prevent all interference. Perhaps we shall not be able to stop, and will be landed at last in the middle of the market-place in Jena. I'll take this letter with me in case that happens, because then I can post it. Good-by. It's going to be glorious. Don't you wish you had a sled and a mountain too?
Yours in a great hurry,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
LIX
Galgenberg, Dec. 9th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—We are still in sunshine and frost up here, and are all very happy, we three Schmidts—Johanna is the third—because Joey arrives to-morrow and we shall once more roll in money. I hasten to tell you this, for there were signs in your last two letters that you were taking our position to heart. It is wonderfully kind, I think, the way you are interested in our different little pains and pleasures. I am often more touched than I care to tell you by the sincerity of your sympathy with all we do, and feel very grateful for so true a friend. I was so glad you gave up coming to Jena on your way to Berlin, for it showed that you try to be reasonable, and then you know Professor Martens goes to Berlin himself every now and then to take sweet counsel with men like Harnack, so you will be sure to see him sooner or later, and see him comfortably, without a rush to catch a train. You say you did not come because I urged you not to, and that in all things you want to please me. Well, I would prefer to suppose you a follower of that plain-faced but excellent guide Common Sense. Still, being human, the less lofty and conscientious side of me does like to know there is some one who wishes to please me. I feel deliciously flattered—when I let myself think of it; nearly always I take care to think of something else—that a young man of your undoubted temporal and spiritual advantages should be desirous of pleasing an obscure person like me. What would Frau von Lindeberg say? Do you remember Shelley's wife's sister, the Miss Westbrook who brushed her hair so much, with her constant 'Gracious Heavens, what would Miss Warne say?' I feel inclined to exclaim the same thing about Frau von Lindeberg, but with an opposite meaning. And it is really very surprising that you should be so kind, for I have been a shrew to you often, and have been absorbed in my own affairs, and have not erred on the side of over-sympathy about yours. Some day, when we are both very old, perhaps you will get a few hours' leave from the dowager duchess you'll marry when you are forty, and will come and look at my pigs and my garden and sit with me before the fire and talk over our long friendship and all the long days of our life. And I, when I hear you are coming, shall be in a flutter, and will get out my best dress, and will fuss over things like asparagus and a salad, and tell the heated and awe-stricken maid that His Britannic Majesty's Ambassador at the Best Place to be an Ambassador in in the World is coming to supper; and we shall feel how sweet it is to be old dear friends.
Meanwhile we are both very busy with the days we have got to now. Today, for instance, has been so violently active that every bone I possess is aching. I'll tell you what happened, since you so earnestly assure me that all we do interests you. The snow is frozen so hard that far from being cut off as I had feared from shops and food there is the most glorious sledding road down to Jena; and at once on hearing of Joey's imminence Vicki and I coasted down on the sled and I bought the book Papa has been wanting and a gigantic piece of beef. Then we persuaded a small but strong boy, a boy of open countenance and superior manners whom we met in the market-place, to drag the sled with the beef and the book up the hill again for us; and so we set out homeward, walking gayly one on each side of him, encouraging him with loud admiration of his prowess. 'See,' said I, when I knew a specially steep bit was coming, 'see what a great thing it is to be able to draw so much so easily.'
A smirk and renewed efforts were the result of this speech at first; but the smirk grew smaller as the hill grew steeper, and the efforts dwindled to vanishing point with the higher windings of the road. At last there was no smirk at all, and at my sixth repetition of the encouragement he stopped dead. 'If it is such a great thing,' he said, wiping his youthful forehead with a patched sleeve, and looking at me with a precociousness I had not till then observed in his eyes, 'why do you not do it yourself?'
Vicki and I stared at each other in silent wonder.
'Because,' I said, turning a reproachful gaze on him, 'because, my dear little boy, I desire you to have the chance of earning the fifty pfennings we have promised to give you when we get to the top.'
He began to pull again, but no longer with any pride in his performance. Vicki and I walked in silence behind, and at the next steep bit, instead of repeating a form of words I felt had grown vain, I skilfully unhooked the parcel of meat hanging on the right-hand runner and carried it, and Vicki, always quick to follow my example, unhooked the biography of Goethe from the left-hand runner and carried that. The sled leaped forward, and for a space the boy climbed with greater vigor. Then came another long steep bit, and he flagged again.
'Come, come,' said I, 'it is quite easy.'
He at once stopped and wiped his forehead. 'If it is easy,' he asked, 'why do you not do it yourself?'
'Because, my dear little boy,' said I, trying to be patient, but meat is heavy, and I knew it to be raw, and I feared every moment to feel a dreadful dampness oozing through the paper, and I was out of breath, and no longer completely calm, 'you engaged to pull it up for us, and having engaged to do it it is your duty to do it. I will not come between a boy and his duty.'
The boy looked at Vicki. 'How she talks,' he said.
Vicki and I again stared at each other in silent wonder, and while we were staring he pulled the sled sideways across the road and sat down.
'Come, come,' said I, striving after a brisk severity.
'I am tired,' he said, leaning his chin on his hand and studying first my face and then Vicki's with a detached, impartial scrutiny.
'We too are tired,' said I, 'and see, yet we carry the heavy parcels for you. The sled, empty, is quite light.'
'Then why do you not pull it yourself?' he asked again.
'Anyhow,' said Vicki, 'while he sits there we needn't hold these great things.' And she put the volumes on the sled, and I let the meat drop on it, which it did with a horrible, soft, heavy thud.
The boy sat motionless.
'Let him get his wind,' said Vicki, turning away to look over the edge of the road at the view.
'I'm afraid he's a bad little boy,' said I, following her and gazing too at the sparkling hills across the valley. 'A bad little boy, encased in an outer semblance of innocence.'
'He only wants his wind,' said Vicki.
'He shows no symptoms of not having got it,' said I; for the boy was very calm, and his mouth was shut sweetly in a placid curve.
We waited, looking at the view, humanely patient as became two highly civilized persons. The boy got up after a few minutes and shook himself. 'I am rested,' he announced with a sudden return to the politeness that had charmed us in Jena.
'It certainly was rather a long pull up,' said I kindly, softened by his manner.
'Yes,' said he, 'but I will not keep the ladies waiting longer.'
And he did not, for he whisked the sled round, sat himself upon it, and before we had in the least understood what was happening he and it and the books for Papa and the beef for Joey were darting down the hill, skimming along the track with the delicious swiftness none knew and appreciated better than we did. At the bend of the road he gave a joyful whoop and waved his cap. Then he disappeared.
Vicki and I stared at each other once more in silent wonder. 'What an abandoned little boy,' she gasped at last—he must have been almost in Jena by the time we were able to speak.
'The poor beef,' said I very ruefully, for it was a big piece and had cost vast sums.
'Yes, and the books,' said Vicki.
'Yes, and the Assessor's sled,' said I.
There was nothing for it but to hurry down after him and seek out the authorities and set them in pursuit; and so we hurried as much as can be hurried over such a road, tired, silent, and hungry, and both secretly nettled to the point of madness at having been so easily circumvented by one small boy.
'Little boys are more pestilential than almost anything I know,' said Vicki, after a period of speechless crunching over the snow.
'Far more than anything I know,' said I.
'I'm thankful I did not marry,' said she.
'So am I,' said I.
'The world's much too full of them as it is,' said she.
'Much,' said I.
'Oh,' she cried suddenly, stamping her foot, 'if I could only get hold of him—wicked, wicked little wretch!'
'What would you do?' I asked, curious to see if her plans were at all like mine.
'Gr—r—r—r—r,' said Vicki, clenching all those parts of her, such as teeth and fists, that would clench.
'Oh so would I!' I cried.
We were almost at the bottom; the road was making its final bend; and, as we turned the corner, behold the boy, his cap off, his head bent, his shoulders straining at the rope, pulling the sled laboriously up again. And there was the beef hung on one runner, and there were the books hung on the other. We both stopped dead, arrested by this spectacle. He was almost upon us before he saw us, so intent was he on his business, his eyes on the ground, the sun shining on his yellow hair, the drops of labor rolling down his crimson cheeks.
'What?' he panted, pausing when he saw our four boots in a row in his path, and had looked up and recognized the rest of us, 'what, am I there already?'
'No,' I cried in the voice of justified anger, 'you are not there—you are here, at the very beginning of the mountain. Now what have you to say for yourself?'
'Nothing,' said he, grinning and wiping his face with his sleeve. 'But it was a good ride.'
'You have only just escaped the police and prison,' I said, still louder. 'We were on our way to hand you over to them.'
'If I had been there to hand,' said he, winking at Vicki, to whom he had apparently taken a fancy that was in no way encouraged.
'You had stolen our sled and our parcels,' I continued, glaring down on him.
'Here they are. They are all here. What more do you want?' said he. 'How she talks,' he added, turning to Vicki and thrusting out his underlip with an expression that could only mean disgust.
'You are a very naughty little boy,' said Vicki. 'Give me the rope and be off.'
'Give me my fifty pfennings.'
'Your fifty pfennings?' we exclaimed with one voice.
'You promised me fifty pfennings.'
'To pull the sled up to the top.'
'I am ready to do it.'
'Thank you. We have had enough. Let the rope go—'
'And get home to your mother—'
'And ask her to give you a thorough—'
'A bargain is a bargain,' said the boy, planting himself squarely in front of me, while I adjusted the rope over my shoulders and prepared to pull.
'Now run away, you very naughty little boy,' said I, pulling sideways to pass him by.
He stepped aside too, and faced me again. 'You promised me fifty pfennings,' he said.
'To pull the sled up.'
'I am willing to do it.'
'Yes, and coast down again as soon as you have got to the top. Be off with you. We are not playing games.'
'A promise is a promise,' said the boy.
'Vicki, remove him from my path,' said I.
Vicki took him by the arm and gingerly drew him on one side, and I started up the hill, surprised to find what hard work it was.
'I am coming too,' said the boy.
'Are you?' said Vicki.
'Yes. To fetch my fifty pfennings.'
We said no more. I couldn't, because I was so breathlessly pulling, and Vicki marched by my side in indignant silence, with a jealous eye divided between the parcels and the boy. He, unencumbered, thrust his hands into his pockets and beguiled the way by shrilly whistling.
At each winding of the road when Vicki and I changed places he renewed his offer to fulfil his first bargain; but we, more and more angry as we grew hotter and hotter, refused with an ever increasing wrath.
'Come, come,' said he, when a very steep bit had forced me to pause and struggle for breath.
'Come, come—' and he imitated my earlier manner—'it is quite easy.'
I looked at him with what of majesty I could, and answered not a word.
At Vicki's gate he was still with us. 'I will see you safely home,' Vicki said to me when we got there.
'This where you live?' inquired the boy, peeping through the bars of the gate with cheerful interest. 'Nice little house.'
We were silent.
'I will see her home,' he said to Vicki, 'if you don't want to. But she can surely take care of herself, a great girl like that?'
We were silent.
At my gate he was still with us. 'This where she lives?' he asked Vicki, again peeping through the bars with cheerful interest. 'Funny little house.'
We were silent. In silence we opened the gate and dragged the sled in. He came too.
'You cannot come in here,' said Vicki. 'This is private property.'
'I only wish to fetch my fifty pfennings,' said he. 'It will save you trouble if I come to the door.'
We went in in silence, and together carried the sled inside, a thing we had not yet done, and took it with immense exertions into the parlor, and put it under the table, and tied it by each of its four corners to each of the table's four legs.
'There,' said Vicki, scrambling to her feet again and looking at her knots with satisfaction, 'that's safe if anything is.'
I went with her to the door. The boy was still there, cap in hand, very polite, very patient. 'And my fifty pfennings?' he asked pleasantly.
I cannot explain what we did next. I pulled out my purse and paid him, which was surprising enough, but Vicki, to whom fifty pfennings are also precious, pulled out hers too and gave him fifty on her own account. I am quite unable to explain either her action or mine. The boy made us each the politest bow, his cap sweeping the snow. 'She,' he said to Vicki, jerking his head my way, 'may think she is the prettiest, but you are certainly the best.'
And he left us to settle it between us, and walked away shrilly whistling.
And I am so tired that my very pen has begun to ache, so good-by.
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
Oh, I must tell you that Papa refused to have Joey sleep in his room with a flatness that put a stop to my arguments before they were even begun. 'Nay,' he cried, 'I will not.' And when I opened my mouth to produce the arguments—' 'Nay,' he cried again, 'I will not.' He drowned my speech. He would not listen. He would not reason. Parrot-like through the house resounded his cry—'Nay, I will not.' I was in despair. But everything has arranged itself. Joey is to have the Assessor's room on the ground floor of our neighbor's house, and will come up here for lessons and meals. He is only to sleep down there, and will be all day here. We telegraphed to Weimar to ask about it, and the ever kind owner immediately agreed. Frau von Lindeberg is displeased, for she says no Dammerlitz has ever yet been known to live in a house where there was a lodger,—a common lodger she said first, but corrected herself, and covered up the common with a cough.
LX
Galgenberg, Dec. 12th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—I must write to-night, though it is late, to tell you of my speechless surprise when I came in an hour ago and found you had been here. I knew you had the moment I came in. At once I recognized the smell of the cigarettes you smoke. I went upstairs and called Johanna, for I was not sure that you were not still here, in the parlor, and frankly I was not going down if you were, for I do not choose to have my fastnesses stormed. She told me of your visit; how you had come up on foot soon after Vicki and Joey and I had started off for an afternoon's tobogganing on the hills, how you had stayed talking to Papa, and talking and talking, till you had to hurry down to catch the last train. 'And he bade me greet you for him,' finished Johanna. 'Indeed?' said I.
Do you like winter excursions into the country? Is Berlin boring you already? I shook my head in grave disapproval as Johanna proceeded with her tale. I am all for a young man's attending to his business and not making sudden wild journeys that take him away for a whole day and most of a night. Papa was delighted, I must say, to have had at last, as he told me with disconcerting warmth, at last after all these months an intelligent conversation, but with his delight the success of your visit ends, for when I heard of it I was not delighted at all. Why did you go into the kitchen? Johanna says you would go, and then that you went out hatless at the back door and down to the bottom of the garden and that you stood there leaning against the fence as though it were summer. 'Still without a hat,' said Johanna, in her turn shaking her head, 'bei dieser Kälte.'
Bei dieser Kälte, indeed. Yes; what made you do it? I am glad I was out, for I do not care to look on while the usually reasonable behave unaccountably. I don't think I can be friends with you for a little after this. I think I really must quarrel, for it isn't very decent to drop unexpectedly upon a person who from time to time has told you with the frankness that is her most marked feature that she doesn't want to be dropped upon. No doubt you wished to see Papa as well, and, on your way through Jena, Professor Martens; but I will not pretend to suppose your call was not chiefly intended for me, for it is to me and not to either of those wiser ones that you have written every day for months past. You are a strange young man. Heaven knows what you have accustomed yourself to imagining me to be. I almost wish now that you had seen me when I came in from our violent exercise, a touzled, short-skirted, heated person. It might have cured you. I forgot to look in the glass, but of course my hair and eyelashes were as white with hoar-frost as Vicki's and Joey's, and from beneath them and from above my turned-up collar must have emerged just such another glowing nose. Even Papa was struck by my appearance—after having gazed, I suppose, for hours on your composed correctness—and remarked that living in the country did not necessarily mean a complete return to savage nature.
The house feels very odd to-night. So do I. It feels haunted. So do I. I want to scold you, and yet I cannot. I have the strangest desire to cry. It is the thought that you came this long way, toiled up this long hill, waited those long hours, all to see some one who is glad to have missed you, that makes me want to. The night is so black outside my window, and somewhere through that blackness you are travelling at this moment, disappointed, across the endless frozen fields and forests that you must go through inch by inch before you reach Berlin. Why did you do a thing so comfortless? And here have I actually begun to cry,—I think because it is so dark, and you are not yet home.
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
LXI
Galgenberg, Dec. 16th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—I don't quite understand. Purely motherly, I should say. Perhaps our notions of the exact meaning of the word friend are different. I include in it a motherly and sisterly interest in bodily well-being, in dry socks, warm feet, regular meals. I do not like my friend to be out on a bitter night, to take a tiring journey, to be disappointed. My friend's mother would have, I imagine, precisely the same feeling. My friend should not, then, mistake mere motherliness for other and less comfortable sentiments. But I am busy today, and have no time to puzzle out your letter. It must have been the outcome of a rather strange mood.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
Tell me more about your daily life in Berlin, the people you see, the houses you go to, the attitude, kind or otherwise, of your chief. Tell me these things, instead of swamping me with subtleties of sentiment. I don't understand subtleties, and I fear and despise sentiment as a certain spoiler of plain bread-and-butter happiness. There should be no sentiment between friends. The moment there is they leave off being just friends; and is not that what we both most want to be?
LXII
Galgenberg, Dec. 19th.
Oh, I can do nothing with you. You are bent, I'm afraid, on losing your friend. Don't write me such letters—don't, don't, don't! My heart sinks when I see you deliberately setting about strangling our friendship. Am I to lose it then, that too? Your last letters are like bad dreams, so strange and unreasonable, so without the least order or self-control. I read them with my fingers in my ears,—an instinctive foolish movement of protection against words I do not want to hear. Dear friend, do not take your friendship from me. Give yourself a shake; come out from those vain imaginings your soul has gone to dwell among. What shall I talk to you about this bright winter's morning? Yes, I will write you longer letters; you needn't beg so hard, as though the stars couldn't get along in their courses if I didn't. See, I am willing to do anything to keep my friend. You are my only one, the only person in the world to whom I tell the silly thoughts that come into my head and so get rid of them. You listen, and you are the only person in the world who does. You help me, and I in my turn want to be allowed to go on helping you. Do not put an end to what is precious,—believe me it will grow more and more precious with years. Do not, in the heat and impatience of youth, kill the poor goose who, if left alone, will lay the most beautiful golden eggs. What shall I talk to you about to turn your attention somewhere else, somewhere far removed from that unhappy bird? Shall I tell you about Papa's book, finally refused by every single publisher, come back battered and draggled to be galvanized by me into fresh life in an English translation? Shall I tell you how I sit for three hours daily doing it, pen in hand, ink on fingers, hair pushed back from an anxious brow, Papa hovering behind with a dictionary in which, full of distrust, he searches as I write to see if it contains the words I have used? Shall I tell you about Joey, whose first disgust at finding himself once more with us has given place by degrees that grow visibly wider to a rollicking enjoyment. Less and less does he come up here. More and more does he stay down there. He hurries through his lessons with a speed that leaves Papa speechless, and is off and hauling the sled up past our gate with Vicki walking demurely beside him and is whizzing down again past our gate with Vicki sitting demurely in front of him before Papa is well through the list of adjectives he applies to him once at least every day. I never see the sled now nearer than in the distance. Vicki wears her stiff shirts again, and her neat ties again, and the sporting belt that makes her waist look so very trim and tiny. If anything she is more aggressively starched and boyish than before. Her collars seem to grow higher and cleaner each time I see her. Her hat is tilted further forward. Her short skirts show the neatest little boots. She is extraordinarily demure. She never cries. Joey reads Samson Agonistes with us, and points out the jokes to Vicki. Vicki says why did I never tell her it was so funny? I stare first at one and then at the other, and feel a hundred years old.
'I say,' said Joey, coming into the kitchen just now.
'Well, what?' said I.
'I'm going to Berlin for a day.'
'Are you indeed?'
'Tell the old man, will you?'
'Tell the who?'
'The old man. I shan't be here for the lesson to-morrow, thank the Lord. I'm off by the first train.'
'Indeed,' said I.
There was a silence, during which Joey fidgeted about among the culinary objects scattered around him. I went on peeling apples. When he had fidgeted as much as he wanted to be lit a cigarette.
'No,' said I. 'Not in kitchens. A highly improper thing to do.'
He threw it into the dustbin. 'I say,' he said again.
'Well, what?' said I again.
'What do you think—what do you think—' He paused. I waited. As he didn't go on I thought he had done. 'What do I think?' I said. 'You'd be staggered if I told you, it's such a lot, and it's so terrific.'
'What do you think,' repeated Joey, taking no heed of me, but, with his hands in his pockets, kicking a fallen apple aimlessly about on the floor, 'what do you think the little girl'd like for Christmas and that, don't you know?'
I stopped peeling and gazed at him, knife and apple suspended in mid-air. 'The little girl?' I inquired. 'Do you mean Johanna?'
Joey stared. Then he grinned at me monstrously. 'You bet,' was his cryptic reply.
'What am I to bet?' I asked patiently.
Joey gave the fallen apple a kick. Looking down I observed that it was the biggest and the best, and stooped to rescue it. 'It's not pretty,' said I, rebuking him, 'to kick even an apple when it's down.'
'Oh, I say,' said Joey impatiently, 'do be sensible. There never was any gettin' much sense out of you I remember. And you're only pretendin'. You know I mean Vicki.'
'Vicki?'
He had the grace to blush. 'Well, Fräulein What's her name. You can't expect any one decent to get the hang of these names of yours. They ain't got any hang, so how's one to get it? What'd she like for Christmas? Don't you all kick up a mighty fuss here over Christmas? Trees, and presents, and that? Plummier plum-puddings than we have, and mincier mince-pies, what?'
'If you think you will get even one plum-pudding or mince-pie,' said I, thoughtfully peeling, 'you are gravely mistaken. The national dish is carp boiled in beer.'
Joey looked really revolted. 'What?' he cried, not liking to credit his senses.
'Carp boiled in beer,' I repeated distinctly. 'It is what I'm going to give you on Christmas Day.'
'No you're not,' he said hastily.
'Yes I am,' I insisted. 'And before it and after it you will be required, in accordance with German custom, to sing chorales.'
'I'd like to see myself doin' it. You'll have to sing 'em alone. I'm invited to feed down there.'
And he jerked his head toward that portion of the kitchen wall beyond which, if you passed through it and the intervening coal-hole and garden and orchard, you would come to the dwelling of the Lindebergs.
'Oh,' said I; and looked at him thoughtfully.
'Yes,' said he, trying to meet my look with an equal calm, but conspicuously failing. 'That bein' so,' he went on hurriedly, 'and my droppin', so to speak, into the middle of somebody's Christmas tree and that, it seems to me only decent to give the little girl somethin'. What shall I get her? Somethin' to put on, I suppose. A brooch, or a pin, what?'
'Or a ring,' said I, thoughtfully peeling.
'A ring? What, can one—oh I say, don't let's waste time rottin'—'
And glancing up through cautious eyelashes I saw he was very red.
'It'd be easy enough if it was you,' he said revengefully.
'What would?'
'Hittin' on what you'd like.'
'Would it?'
'All you'd want to do the trick would be a dictionary.'
'Now Mr. Collins that's unkind,' said I, laying down my knife.
He began to grin again. 'It's true,' he insisted.
'It suggests such an immeasurable stuffiness,' I complained.
'It isn't my fault,' said he grinning.
'But perhaps I deserve it because I mentioned a ring. Let me tell you, as man to man, that you must buy no brooches for Vicki.'
'A pin, then?'
'No pins.'
'A necklace, then?'
'Nothing of the sort. What would her parents say? Give her chocolates, a bunch of roses, perhaps a book—but nothing more. If you do you'll get into a nice scrape.'
Joey looked at me. 'What sort of scrape?' he asked curiously.
'Gracious heavens, don't you see? Are you such a supreme goose? My poor young man, the parents would immediately ask you your intentions.'
'Oh would they,' said Joey, in his turn becoming thoughtful; and after a moment he said again, 'Oh would they.'
'It's as certain as anything I know,' said I.
'Oh is it,' said Joey, still thoughtful.
'It's a catastrophe young men very properly dread,' said I.
'Oh do they,' said Joey, sunk in thought.
'Well, if you're not listening—' And I shrugged my shoulders, and went on with my peeling.
He pulled his cap out of the pocket into which it had been stuffed, and began to put it on, tugging it first over one ear and then over the other in a deep abstraction.
'You're in my kitchen,' I observed.
'Sorry,' he said, snatching it off. 'I forgot. You always make me feel as if I were out of doors.'
'How very odd,' said I, interested and slightly flattered.
'Ain't it. East wind, you know—decidedly breezy, not to say nippin'. Well, I must be goin'.'
'I think so too,' said I coldly.
'Don't be dull while I'm away,' said Joey; and departed with a nod.
But he put in his head again the next moment. 'I say, Miss Schmidt—'
'Well, what?'
'You think I ought to stick to chocolates, then?' 'If you don't there'll be extraordinary complications,' said I.
'You're sure of that?'
'Positive.'
'You'd swear it?'
I threw down my knife and apple. 'Now what's the matter with the boy!' I exclaimed impatiently. 'Do I ever swear?'
'But if you did you would?'
'Swear what?'
'That a bit of jewelry would bring the complications about?'
'Oh—dense, dense, dense! Of course it would. You'd be surprised at the number and size of them. You can't be too careful. Give her a hymn-book.
Joey gave a loud whoop.
'Well, it's safe,' said I severely, 'and it appeals to parents.'
'You bet,' said Joey, screwing his face into a limitlessly audacious wink.
'I wish,' said I, very plaintively, 'that I knew exactly what it is I am to bet. You constantly tell me to do so, but never add the necessary directions.'
'Oh, I'm goin',' was Joey's irrelevant reply; and his head popped out as suddenly as it had popped in.
Or shall I tell you—I am anxious to make this letter long enough to please you—about Frau von Lindeberg, who spent two days elaborately cutting Joey, the two first days of his appearance in their house as lodger, persuaded, I suppose, that no one even remotely and by business connected with the Schmidts could be anything but undesirable, and how, meeting him in the passage, or on his way through the garden to us, the iciest stare was all she felt justified in giving him in return for his friendly grin, and how on the third day she suddenly melted, and stopped and spoke pleasantly to the poor solitary, commiserating with his situation as a stranger in a foreign country, and suggesting the alleviation to his loneliness of frequent visits to them? No one knows the first cause of this melting. I think she must have heard through her servant of the number and texture of those pink and blue silk handkerchiefs, of his amazing piles of new and costly shirts, of the obvious solidity of the silver on everything of his that has a back or a stopper or a handle or a knob. Anyhow on that third morning she came up and called on us, asking particularly for Papa. 'I particularly wished,' she said to me, spreading herself out as she did the last time on the sofa, 'to see your good father on a matter of some importance.'
'I'll go and call him,' said I, concealing my conviction that though I might call he would not come.
And he would not. 'What, interrupt my work?' he cried. 'Is the woman mad?'
I went back and made excuses. They were very lame ones, and Frau von Lindeberg instantly brushed them aside. 'I will go to him,' she said, getting up. 'Your excellent father will not refuse me, I am sure.'
Papa was sitting in his slippers before the stove, doing nothing, so far as I could see, except very comfortably read the new book about Goethe.
'I am sorry to disturb so busy a man,' said Frau von Lindeberg, bearing down with smiles on this picture of peace.
Papa sprang up, and seeing there was no escape pretended to be quite pleased to see her. He offered her his chair, he prayed for indulgence toward his slippers, and sitting down facing her inquired in what way he could be of service.
'I want to know something about the young Englishman who occupies a room in our house,' said Frau von Lindeberg, without losing time. 'You understand that it is not only natural but incumbent on a parent to wish for information in regard to a person dwelling under the same roof.'
'I can give every information,' said Papa readily. 'His name in English is Collins. In German it is Esel.'
'Oh really,' said Frau von Lindeberg, taken aback.
'It is, madam,' said Papa, looking very pleasant, as became a man in his own house confronted by a female visitor. 'We have re-christened him. And no array of words with which I am acquainted will express the exactness of his resemblance to that useful but unintelligent beast.'
'Oh really,' said Frau von Lindeberg, not yet recovered.
'The ass, madam, is conspicuous for the narrowness of its understanding. So is Mr. Collins. The ass is exasperating to persons of normal brains. So is Mr. Collins. The ass is lazy in regard to work, and obstinate. So is Mr. Collins. The ass is totally indifferent to study. So is Mr. Collins. The ass has never heard of Goethe. Neither has Mr. Collins. The ass is useful to the poor. So is Mr. Collins. The ass, indeed, is the poor man's most precious possession. So, emphatically, is Mr. Collins.'
'Oh really,' said Frau von Lindeberg again.
'Is there anything more you wish to know?' Papa inquired politely, for she seemed unable immediately to go on.
She cleared her throat. 'In what way—in what way is he useful?' she asked.
'Madam, he pays.'
'Yes—of course, of course. You cannot—' she smiled—'be expected to teach him German for nothing.'
'Far from doing that I teach him German for a great deal.'
'Is he—do you know anything about his relations? You understand,' she added, 'that it is not altogether pleasant for a private family like ours to have a strange young man living under the same roof.'
'Understand?' cried Papa. 'I understand it so thoroughly that I most positively refused to have him under this one.'
'Ah—yes,' said Frau von Lindeberg, a Dammerlitz expression coming into her face. 'The cases are not—are not quite—pray tell me, who and what is his father?'
'A respectable man, madam, I should judge.'
'Respectable? And besides respectable?'
'Eminently worthy, I should say from his letters.'
'Ah yes. And—and anything else?'
'Honorable too, I fancy. Indeed, I have not a doubt.'
'Is he of any family?'
'He is of his own family, madam.'
'Ah yes. And did you—did you say he was well off?'
'He is apparently revoltingly rich.'
An electric shock seemed to make Frau von Lindeberg catch her breath. 'Oh really,' she then said evenly. 'Did he inherit his wealth?'
'Made it, madam. He is an ironmonger.'
Another electric shock made Frau von Lindeberg catch her breath again. Then she again said, 'Oh really.'