Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Elizabeth von Arnim

  Title Page

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Chapter XXVII

  Chapter XXVIII

  Chapter XXIX

  Chapter XXX

  Chapter XXXI

  Chapter XXXII

  Chapter XXXIII

  Chapter XXXIV

  Chapter XXXV

  Chapter XXXVI

  Chapter XXXVII

  Chapter XXXVIII

  Chapter XXXIX

  Chapter XL

  Chapter XLI

  Chapter XLII

  Chapter XLIII

  Chapter XLIV

  Chapter XLV

  Chapter XLVI

  Chapter XLVII

  Chapter XLVIII

  Chapter XLIX

  Chapter L

  Chapter LI

  Chapter LII

  Chapter LIII

  Chapter LIV

  Chapter LV

  Chapter LVI

  Chapter LVII

  Chapter LVIII

  Chapter LIX

  Chapter LX

  Chapter LXI

  Chapter LXII

  Chapter LXIII

  Chapter LXIV

  Chapter LXV

  Chapter LXVI

  Chapter LXVII

  Chapter LXVIII

  Chapter LXIX

  Chapter LXX

  Chapter LXXI

  Chapter LXXII

  Chapter LXXIII

  Chapter LXXIV

  Chapter LXXV

  Chapter LXXVI

  Chapter LXXVII

  Chapter LXXVIII

  Chapter LXXIX

  Chapter LXXX

  Chapter LXXXI

  Copyright

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  What on earth could have induced Mr Anstruther to fall in love with Fraulein Schmidt? He is an eligible English bachelor from a good family with great expectations; she is the plain, poor, ‘spinster’ daughter of a German scholar. But Rose-Marie Schmidt is also funny, intelligent, brave and gifted with an irrepressible talent for happiness. The real question is, does Mr Anstruther know how lucky he is?

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Elizabeth von Arnim was born on 31 August 1866 in Australia. She was cousin to the writer Katherine Mansfield. In 1890 she married her first husband, Count Henning August von Arnim-Schlagenthin, a Prussian aristocrat, with whom she had five children. Elizabeth and her German Garden, published anonymously in 1898, was a barely fictionalised account of Elizabeth’s life and the creation of her garden at the family home of Nassenheide in Pomerania, where Hugh Walpole and E. M. Forster were tutors to her children. Its instant success was followed by many more novels, including Vera (1921) and The Enchanted April (1922), and another almost-autobiography, All the Dogs of My Life (1936). She separated from Count von Arnim in 1908, and after his death two years later she built a house in Switzerland, marrying John Francis Stanley Russell in 1916. This marriage also ended in separation in 1919 when Elizabeth moved to America, where she died on 9 February 1941, aged 74.

  ALSO BY ELIZABETH VON ARNIM

  Elizabeth and her German Garden

  The Solitary Summer

  The Benefactress

  The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen

  The Princess Priscilla’s Fortnight

  Christopher and Columbus

  In the Mountains

  Vera

  The Enchanted April

  Love

  All the Dogs of My Life

  Mr Skeffington

  ELIZABETH VON ARNIM

  Fräulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

  I

  Jena, Nov. 6.

  DEAR ROGER,—THIS is only to tell you that I love you, supposing you should have forgotten it by the time you get to London. The letter will follow you by the train after the one you left by, and you will have it with your breakfast the day after tomorrow. Then you will be eating the marmalade Jena could not produce, and you’ll say, ‘What a very indiscreet young woman to write first.’ But look at the ‘Dear Roger,’ and you’ll see I’m not so indiscreet after all. What could be more sober? And you’ve no idea of all the nice things I could have put instead of that, only I wouldn’t. It is a most extraordinary thing that this time yesterday we were on the polite-conversation footing, you, in your beautiful new German, carefully calling me gnädiges Fräulein at every second breath, and I making appropriate answers to the Mr Anstruther who in one bewildering hour turned for me into Dear Roger. Did you always like me so much?—I mean, love me so much? My spirit is rather unbendable as yet to the softnesses of these strange words, stiff for want of use, so forgive a tendency to go round them. Don’t you think it is very wonderful that you should have been here a whole year, living with us, seeing me every day, practising your German on me—oh, wasn’t I patient?—and never have shown the least sign that I could see of thinking of me or of caring for me at all except as a dim sort of young lady who assisted her stepmother in the work of properly mending and feeding you? And then an hour ago, just one hour by that absurd cuckoo-clock here in this room where we said good-bye, you suddenly turned into something marvellous, splendid, soul-thrilling—well, into Dear Roger. It is so funny that I’ve been laughing, and so sweet that I’ve been crying. I’m so happy that I can’t help writing, though I do think it rather gushing—loathsome word—to write first. But then you strictly charged me not to tell a soul yet, and how can I keep altogether quiet? You, then, my poor Roger, must be the one to listen. Do you know what Jena looks like tonight? It is the most dazzling place in the world, radiant with promise, shining and dancing with all sorts of little lovely lights that I know are only the lamps being lit in people’s rooms down the street, but that look to me extraordinarily like stars of hope come out, in defiance of nature and fog, to give me a glorious welcome. You see, I’m new, and they know it. I’m not the Rose-Marie they’ve twinkled down on from the day I was born till tonight. She was a dull person: a mere ordinary, dull person, climbing doggedly up the rows of hours each day set before her, doggedly doing certain things she was told were her daily duties, equally doggedly circumventing certain others, and actually supposing she was happy. Happy? She was not. She was most wretched. She was blind and deaf. She was asleep. She was only half a woman. What is the good or the beauty of anything, alive or dead, in the world, that has not fulfilled its destiny? And I never saw that before. I never saw a great many things before. I am amazed at the suddenness of my awaking. Love passed through this house today, this house that other people think is just the same dull place it was yesterday, and behold—well, I won’t grow magnificent, and it is what you do if you begin a sentence with ‘Behold.’ But really there’s a splendour—oh well. And as for this room where you—where I—where we—well, I won’t grow sentimental either, though now I know, I who always scoffed at it, how fatally easy a thing it is to be. That is, supposing one has had great prov
ocation; and haven’t I? Oh, haven’t I?

  I had got as far as that when your beloved Professor Martens came in, very much agitated because he had missed you at the station, where he had been to give you a send-off. And what do you think he said? He said, why did I sit in this dreary hole without a lamp, and why didn’t I draw the curtains, and shut out the fog and drizzle. Fog and drizzle? It really seemed too funny. Why, the whole sky is shining. And as for the dreary hole—gracious heavens, is it possible that just being old made him not able to feel how the air of the room was still quivering with all you said to me, with all the sweet, wonderful, precious things you said to me? The place was full of you. And there was your darling coffee-cup still where you had put it down, and the very rug we stood on still all ruffled up.

  ‘I think it’s a glorious hole,’ I couldn’t help saying.

  ‘De gustibus,’ said he, indulgently; and he stretched himself in the easy-chair—the one you used to sit in—and said he should miss young Anstruther.

  ‘Shall you?’ said I.

  ‘Fräulein Rose-Marie,’ said he, solemnly, ‘he was a most intelligent young man. Quite the most intelligent young man I have ever had here.’

  ‘Really?’ said I, smiling all over my silly face.

  And so of course you were, or how would you ever have found out that I—well, that I’m not wholly unlovable?

  Yours quite, quite truly,

  R.-M.

  II

  Jena, Nov. 7.

  DEAR ROGER,—YOU left on Tuesday night—that’s yesterday—and you’ll get to London on Thursday morning—that’s tomorrow—and first you’ll want to wash yourself, and have breakfast—please notice my extreme reasonableness—and it will be about eleven before you are able to begin to write to me. I shan’t get the letter till Saturday, and today is only Wednesday, so how can I stop myself from writing to you again, I should like to know? I simply can’t. Besides, I want to tell you all the heaps of important things I would have told you yesterday, if there had been time when you asked me in that amazing sudden way if I’d marry you.

  Do you know I’m poor? Of course you do. You couldn’t have lived with us a year and not seen by the very sort of puddings we have that we are poor. Do you think that anybody who can help it would have dicker Reis three times a week? And then if we were not, my stepmother would never bother to take in English young men who want to study German; she would do quite different sorts of things, and we should have different sorts of puddings—proud ones, with Schlagsahne on their tops—and two servants instead of one, and I would never have met you. Well, you know then that we are poor; but I don’t believe you know how poor. When girls here marry, their parents give them, as a matter-of-course, house-linen enough to last them all their lives, furniture enough to furnish all their house, clothes enough for several generations, and so much a year besides. Then, greatly impoverished, they spend the evenings of their days doing without things and congratulating themselves on having married off their daughter. The man need give only himself. You’ve heard that my own mother, who died ten years ago, was English? Yes, I remember I told you that, when you were so much surprised at what you called, in politest German, my colossally good English. From her I know that people in England do not buy their son-in-law’s carpets and saucepans, but confine their helpfulness to suggesting Maple. It is the husband, they think, who should, like the storks of the Fatherland, prepare and beautify the nest for the wife. If the girl has money, so much the better; but if she has not, said my mother, it doesn’t put an absolute stop to her marrying.

  Here, it does; and I belong here. My mother had some money, or my father would never have let himself fall in love with her—I believe you can nip these things in the bud if you see the bud in time—and you know my father is not a mercenary man; he only, like the rest of us, could not get away altogether from his bringing-up and the points of view he had been made to stare from ever since he stared at all. It was a hundred a year (pounds, thank Heaven, not marks), and it is all we have except what he gets for his books, when he does get anything, which is never, and what my stepmother has, which is an annuity of a hundred and fifty pounds. So the hundred a year will be the whole sum of my riches, for I have no aunts. What I want you to consider is the awfulness of marrying a woman absolutely without saucepans. Not a single towel will she be able to add to your linen-room, not a single pot to your kitchen. All Jena when it hears of it will say, ‘Poor, infatuated young man,’ and if I had sisters all England would refuse in future to send its sons to my stepmother. Why, if you were making a decently suitable marriage do you suppose your Braut would have to leave off writing to you at this point, in the very middle of luminous prophecy, and hurry into the kitchen and immerse herself in the preparation of potato soup? Yet that is exactly what your Braut, who has caught sight of the clock, is about to do. So good-bye.

  Your poor, but infinitely honest

  R.-M.

  See how wise and practical I am today. I believe my letter last night was rather aflame. Now comes morning with its pails of cold water, and drenches me back into discretion. Thank God, say I, for mornings.

  III

  Jena, Nov. 8.

  DEAR ROGER,—I can’t leave you alone, you see. I must write. But though I must write you need not read. Last night I was seized with misgivings—awful things for a hitherto placid Fräulein to be seized with—and I wrestled with them all night, and they won. So now, in the calm frostiness of the early morning atmosphere, I wish to inquire very seriously, very soberly, whether you have not made a mistake. In one sense, of course, you have. It is absurd, from a worldly point of view, for you to marry me. But I mean more than that: I mean, have you not mistaken your own feelings, being hurled into the engagement by impulsiveness, by, if you choose, some spell I may unconsciously have put upon you? If you have even quite a faint misgiving about what you really feel for me, tell me—oh, tell me straight and plainly, and we will both rub out that one weak hour with a sponge well soaked in common sense. It would not hurt so much, I think, now as it might later on. Up to last night, since you left, I’ve been walking on air. It is a most pleasant form of exercise, as perhaps you know. You not only walk on air, but you walk in what seems to be an arrested sunset, a bath of liquid gold, breathing it, touching it, wrapped in it. It really is most pleasant. Well, I did that till last night; then came my stepmother, and catching at my flying feet pulled them down till they got to the painted deal floors of Rauchgasse 5, Jena, and once having got there, stuck there. Observe, I speak in images. My stepmother, so respectable, so solidly Christian, would not dream of catching hold of anybody’s feet and spoiling their little bit of happiness. Quite unconsciously she blew on that glow of sunset in which I was flying, and it went out with the promptness and completeness of a tallow candle, and down came Rose-Marie with a thud. Yes, I did come down with a thud. You will never be able to pretend, however much you try, that I’m one of your fairy little women that can be lifted about, and dandled, and sugared with dainty diminutives, will you? Facts are things that are best faced. I stand five feet ten without my heels, and when I fall I do it with a thud. Said my stepmother, then, after supper, when Johanna had cleared the last plate away, and we were sitting alone—my father is not back yet from Weimar—she on one side of the table, I on the other, the lamp in the middle, your chair gaping empty, she, poor herself, knitting wool into warmth for the yet poorer at Christmas, I mending the towels you helped to wear out, while my spirit soared and made a joyful noise somewhere far away, up among angels and archangels and other happy beings—said my stepmother, ‘Why do you look so pleased?’

  Slightly startled, I explained that I looked pleased because I was pleased.

  ‘But nothing has happened,’ said my stepmother, examining me over her spectacles. ‘You have been nowhere today, and not seen any one, and the dinner was not at all good.’

  ‘For all that, I’m pleased. I don’t need to go somewhere or see some one to be pleased. I can be it q
uite by myself.’

  ‘Yes, you are blest with a contented nature, that is true,’ said my stepmother, with a sigh, knitting faster. You remember her sighs, don’t you? They are always to me very unaccountable. They come in such odd places. Why should she sigh because I have a contented nature? Ought she not rather to rejoice? But the extremely religious people I have known have all sighed an immense deal. Well, I won’t probe into that now, though I rather long to.

  ‘I suppose it’s because it has been a fine day,’ I said, foolishly going on explaining to a person already satisfied.

  My stepmother looked up sharply. ‘But it has not been fine at all, Rose-Marie,’ she said. ‘The sun has not appeared once all day.’

  ‘What?’ said I, for a moment genuinely surprised. I couldn’t help being happy, and I don’t believe really happy people are ever in the least aware that the sun is not shining. ‘Oh well,’ I hurried on, ‘perhaps not an Italian blue sky, but still mild, and very sweet, and November always smells of violets, and that’s another thing to be pleased about.’

  ‘Violets?’ echoed my stepmother, who dislikes all talk about things one can neither eat nor warm one’s self with nor read about in the Bible. ‘Do you not miss Mr Anstruther,’ she asked, getting off such flabbinesses as quickly as she could, ‘with whom you were so constantly talking?’

  Of course I jumped. But I said ‘Yes,’ quite naturally, I think.

  It was then that she pulled me down by the feet to earth.

  ‘He has a great future before him,’ she said. ‘A young man so clever, so good looking, and so well connected may rise to anything. Martens tells me he has the most brilliant prospects. He will be a great ornament to the English diplomatic service. Martens says his father’s hopes are all centred on this only son. And as he has very little money and much will be required, Roger’—she said it indeed—‘is to marry as soon as possible, some one who will help him in every way, some one as wealthy as she is well born.’

  I murmured something suitable; I think a commendation of the plan as prudent.