Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther Read online

  Tell me, what mood were you in when you wrote? Was it not, apart from its dejection, one rather inclined to peevishness? You ask, for instance, why I write so much about a tipsy trumpeter when I know you are anxious to hear about the other things I never tell you. I can’t imagine what they are. You must let me write how and what I like—bear with me while I discourse of roses and nasturtium-beds, of rain and sunshine, clouds and wind, cats, birds, servants, even trumpeters. My life holds nothing greater than these. If you want to hear from me you must hear also of them. And why have you taken so bitter a dislike to our gifted young neighbour down the hill, calling him contemptuously a fiddler? He is certainly a fiddler, if to fiddle in one’s hours of ease produces one, and perhaps you would be twice as happy as you are if you could fiddle half so wonderfully as he does. He is gone. His holiday either came to an end or was put to an end by Johanna’s fiancé. Now, in these early September days, this season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, of cloudy mornings and calm evenings and golden afternoons, he has turned his back on the hills and forests, on the reddening creepers and sweetening grapes, on the splash of water among ferns and rocks, on all those fresh, quiet things that make life worth having, and is sitting at a desk somewhere in Berlin doggedly bent on becoming, by means of a great outlay of days and years, a Landrath, a Regierungsrath, a Geheimrath, and a Wirklicher Geheimrath mit dem Prädikat Excellenz. When he has done that he will take down his hat and go forth at last to enjoy life, and will find to his surprise that it isn’t there, that it is all behind him, a heap of dusty days piled in the corners of offices, and that his knees shake as he goes about looking for it, and that he can no longer even tune his fiddle by himself but has to have it done for him by the footman.

  Isn’t that what happens to all you wise men, so prudently determined to make your way in the world? You must be very sure of another life, or how could you bear to squander this? The things you are missing—oh, the things you are missing! while you so carefully add little gain to little gain, or what I would rather call little loss to little loss. I see no point in slaving day after day through one’s best years. Suppose you do not, in the end, have a footman to open your door—the footman is merely a symbol, conveniently expressing the multitude of superfluities that gather about the declining years of the person who has got on, things bought with the sacrifice of his life, and none of them giving him back the lost power, gone with youth, to enjoy them—suppose, then, you do not end gloriously with a footman, what of that? I must be blind, for I never can see the desirability of these trappings. Yet they surely are of an immense desirability, since everybody, really everybody, is willing to give so much in payment for them. Our elder neighbour down the hill has actually given his eyes and his back; he peers at life through spectacles, and walks about like Wordsworth’s leech-gatherer, bent double through poking about for years in the muddy pools of little boys’ badly written exercises; and here he is at fifty still not satisfied with what he has earned, still going on drudging the whole year round, except for his six short weeks in summer. His wife is thrifty; they have only the one son; they live frugally; long ago they must have put by enough to keep them warm and fed and clothed without his doing another stroke of work.

  I was interrupted there by a message from him asking if I would come down and help him gather up the windfalls in his orchard, his wife being busy pickling beans. I went, my head full of what I had just been writing to you, and I gathered up together with the apples a little lesson in the foolishness of officious and hasty criticism. It was this way.

  Our baskets being full, and our backs rested, he groaned and said that in another week he must leave for Weimar.

  ‘But you like your work,’ said I.

  ‘I detest my work,’ he said peevishly. ‘I detest teaching. I detest little boys.’

  ‘Then why——’ I began, but stopped.

  ‘Why? Why? Because I detest it is no reason I should not do it.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘What, and at my age begin another?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘You would not have me idle?’

  ‘Yes, I would.’

  He stared at me gravely through his spectacles. ‘This is unprincipled,’ he said.

  I laughed. It is years since I have observed that the principled groan a good deal and make discontented criticisms of life, and I don’t think I care to be one of them.

  ‘It is,’ he persisted, seeing that I only laughed.

  ‘Is it?’ said I.

  ‘It is man’s lot to work,’ said he.

  ‘Is it?’ said I.

  ‘Certainly,’ said he.

  ‘All day?’

  ‘If he cannot get it done in less time, certainly.’

  ‘Every day?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘All through the years of his life?’

  ‘All through the years of his strength, certainly.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘My dear young lady, have you been living again on vegetables lately?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Your words sound as though your thoughts were watery.’

  A nettled silence fell upon me, and while I was arranging how best to convince him of their substance he was shaking his head and saying that it was strange how the most intelligent women are unable really to think. ‘Water,’ he continued, ‘is indispensable in its proper place and good in many others where, strictly, it might be done without. I have nothing to say against watery emotions, watery sentiments, even watery affections, especially in ladies, who would be less charming in proportion as they were more rigid. Ebb and flow, uncertainty, instability, unaccountableness, are becoming to your sex. But in the region of thought, of the intellect, of pure reason, everything should be very dry. The one place, my dear young lady, in which I will endure no water is on the brain.’

  I had no answer ready. There seemed to be nothing left to do but to go home. I did go a few steps up the orchard, reflecting on the way men have of telling you you cannot think, or are not logical, at the very moment when you appear to yourself to be most unanswerable—a regrettable habit that at once puts a stop to interesting conversation—and presently, as I was nearing our fence, he called after me. ‘Fräulein Rose-Marie,’ he called pleasantly.

  ‘Well?’ said I, looking down at him over a displeased shoulder.

  ‘Come back.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come back and dine with us.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There is mutton for dinner, and before that a soup full of the concentrated strength of beasts. Up there I know you will eat carrots and stewed apples, and I shall never be able to make you see what I see.’

  ‘Heaven forbid that I ever should.’

  ‘What, you do not desire to be reasonable?’

  ‘I don’t choose to argue with you.’

  ‘Have I done anything?’

  ‘You are not logical enough for me,’ said I, anxious to be beforehand with the inevitable remark.

  ‘Come, come,’ said he, his face crinkling into smiles.

  ‘It’s true,’ said I.

  ‘Come back and prove it.’

  ‘Useless.’

  ‘You cannot.’

  ‘I will not.’

  ‘It is the same thing.’

  I went on up the hill.

  ‘Fräulein Rose-Marie!’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Come back.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come back, and tell me why you think I ought to give up my work and sit for the rest of my days with hanging hands.’

  I turned and looked down at him. ‘Because,’ I said, ‘are you not fifty? And is not that high time to begin and get something out of life?’

  He adjusted his spectacles, and stared up at me attentively. ‘Continue,’ he said.

  ‘I look at your life, at all those fifty years of it, and I see it insufferably monotonous.’

  ‘Continue.’

  ‘Dull.’
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  ‘Continue.’

  ‘Dusty.’

  ‘Continue.’

  ‘Dreary.’

  ‘Continue.’ He nodded his head gently at each adjective and counted them off on his fingers.

  ‘I see it full of ink-spots, dog-eared grammars, and little boys.’

  ‘Continue.’

  ‘It is a constant going over the same ground—in itself a maddening process. No sooner do the boys reach a certain age and proficiency and become slightly more interesting than they go on to somebody else, and you begin again at the beginning with another batch. You teach in a bare-walled room with enormous glaring windows, and the ring of the electric tram-bell in the street below makes the commas in your sentences. You have been doing this every day for thirty years. The boys you taught at first are fathers of families now. The trees in the playground have grown from striplings into big shady things. Everything has gone on, and so have you—but you have only gone on getting drier and more bored.’

  ‘Continue,’ said he, smiling.

  ‘Your intelligence,’ said I, coming down a little nearer, ‘restless at first, and for ever trying to push green shoots through the thick rind of routine——’

  ‘Good. Quite good. Continue.’

  ‘—through to a wider space, a more generous light——’

  ‘Poetic. Quite poetic. My compliments.’

  ‘Thank you. Your intelligence, then, for ever—for ever—you’ve interrupted me, and I don’t know where I’d got to.’

  ‘You had got to my intelligence having green shoots.’

  ‘Oh yes. Well, they’re not green now. That’s the point I’ve been stumbling towards. They ought to be if you had taken bigger handfuls of leisure and had not wholly wasted your time drudging. But now they ought to be more than shoots—great trees, in whose shade we all would sit gratefully, and you enjoying free days, with the pleasant memory of free years behind you and the cheerful hope of roomy years to come. And during all that time of your imprisonment in a classroom the world outside went on its splendid way, the seasons filled it with beauty which you were not there to see, the sun shone and warmed other people, the winds blew and made other people’s flesh tingle and their blood dance—you, of course, were cramped up with cold feet and a headache—the birds sang to other people tunes of heaven, while in your ears buzzed only the false quantities of reluctant little boys, the delicious rain——’

  ‘Stop, stop. You forget I had to earn a living.’

  ‘Of course you had. But you know you earned your living long ago. What you are earning now is much more like your dying—the dying, the atrophy of your soul. What does it matter if your wife has one bonnet less a year, and no silk dress——’

  ‘Do not let her hear you,’ he said, glancing round.

  ‘—or if you keep no servant, and have less to eat on Sundays than your neighbours, give no parties, and don’t cumber yourselves up with acquaintances who care nothing for you? If you gave up these things you could also give up drudging. You are too old to drudge. You have been too old these twenty years. A man of your brains’—he pretended to look grateful—‘who cannot earn enough between twenty and thirty to keep him from the necessity of slaving for the rest of his days is not—is not——’

  ‘Worthy of the name of man?’

  ‘I don’t know that that’s a great thing,’ said I doubtfully.

  ‘Let it pass. It is an accepted ending to a sentence beginning as yours did. And now, my dear young lady, you have preached me a sermon——’

  ‘Not a sermon.’

  ‘Permitted me, then, to be present at a lecture——’

  ‘Not a lecture.’

  ‘Anyhow, held forth on the unworthily puny outer conditions of my existence. Tell me, now, one thing. I concede the ink-spots, the little boys, the monotony, the tram-bells, the regrettable number of years; they are all there, and you with your vivid imagination see them all. But tell me one thing: has it never occurred to you that they are the merest shell, the merest husk and envelopment, and that it is possible that, in spite of them’—his voice grew serious—‘my life may be very rich within?’

  And you, my friend, tell me another thing. Am I not desperately, hopelessly horrid? Shortsighted? Impertinent? The readiest jumper at conclusions? The most arrogant critic of other people? Rich within. Of course. Hidden with God. That is what I have never seen when I have looked on superciliously from the height of my own idleness at these drudging lives. And see how amazing has been my foolishness, for would not my own life judged from outside, this life here alone with Papa, this restricted, poor, solitary life, my first youth gone, my future without prospects, no distractions, few friends, Papa’s affection growing vaguer as he grows older,—would it not, looked at as I have been looking at my neighbour’s, seem entirely blank and desolate? Yet how sincerely can I echo what he said—My life is very rich within.

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  XLIV

  Galgenberg, Sept. 16.

  DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—It is kind of you to want to contradict what I said in my last letter about the outward appearance of my life, but really you know I am past my first youth. At twenty-six I cannot pretend to be what is known as a young girl, and I don’t want to. Not for anything would I be seventeen or eighteen again. I like to be a woman grown, to have entered into the full possession of whatever faculties I am to have, to know what I want, to look at things in their true proportions. I don’t know that eighteen has anything that compensates for that. It is such a rudderless sort of age. It may be more charming to the beholder, but it is not half so nice to the person herself. What is the good of loving chocolate to distraction when it only ends by making you sick? And the joy of a new frock or hat is dashed at once when you meet the superior gorgeousness of some other girl’s frock or hat. And parties are often disappointing things. And students, though they are deeply interesting, easily lead to tiresome complications if they admire you, and if they don’t that isn’t very nice either. Why, even the young man in the cake-shop who used so gallantly to serve us with lemonade and had such wonderful curly eyelashes was not much good really, for he couldn’t be invited to tea, and whenever we wanted to look at his eyelashes we had to buy a cake, and cakes are dreadfully expensive for persons who have no money. Yes, it is a silly, tittering, calf-like age, and I am glad it can’t come back again. Please do not think that I need comforting because it is gone, or because of any of the other items in the list I gave you. The future looks quite pleasant to me—quite bright and sunny. It is only empty of what people call prospects, by which I take them to mean husbands, but I shall fill it with pigs instead. I have great plans. I see what can be done with even one pig from my neighbour’s example, who has dug out a sort of terrace and put a sty on it: simply wonders. And how much more could be done with two. I mean to be a very happy old maid. I shall fix my attention in the mornings on remunerative objects like pigs, and spend beautiful afternoons, quite idle physically but with my soul busy up among the poets. Later on in distant years, when Papa doesn’t want me any more, I shall try to find a little house somewhere where it is flat, so that I can have other creatures about me besides bees, which are the only live-stock I can keep here. And you mustn’t think I shall not be happy, because I shall. So happy. I am happy now, and I mean to be happy then; and when I am very old and have to die I shall be happy about that too. I shall ‘lay me down with a will,’ as the bravest of your countrymen sang.

  Do my plans seem to you selfish? I expect they do. People so easily call those selfish who stand a little aside and look on at life. We have a poet of whom we are proud, but whose fame has not, I think, reached across to England, a rugged, robust poet, not very far below Goethe, a painter on large canvases, best at mighty scenes, perhaps least good in small things, in lyrics, in the things in which Heine was so exquisite; and he for my encouragement has said—

  Bei sich selber fängt man an,

  Da man nicht Alle
n helfen kann.

  Isn’t it a nice jingle? The man’s name is Hebbel, and he lived round about the forties, and perhaps you know more of him than I do, and I have been arrogant again; but it is a jingle that has often cheered me when I was afraid I ought to be teaching somebody something, or making clothes for somebody, or paying somebody domiciliary visits and talking fluently of the lieber Gott. I shrink from these things; and a shrinking visitor, shy and uncertain, cannot be so nice as no visitor at all. Is it very wrong of me? When my conscience says it is—it does not say so often—I try to make up by going into the kitchen and asking Johanna kind questions about her mother. I must say she is rather odd when I do. She not only doesn’t meet me halfway, she doesn’t come even part of the way. She clatters her saucepans with an energy very like fury, and grows wholly monosyllabic. Yet it is not her stepmother; it is her very own mother, and it ought to be the best way of touching responsive chords in her heart and making her feel I am not merely a mistress but a friend. Once, struck by the way the lids of the saucepans were falling about, I tried her with her father, but the din instantly became so terrific that I was kept silent quite a long time, and when it left off felt instinctively that I had better say something about the weather. I don’t think I told you that after that trumpeting Sunday, moved to real compassion by the sufferings of him you call the fiddler man, I took my courage in both hands and told Johanna with the pleasantest of smiles—I dare say it was really a rather ghastly one—that her trumpeter must not again bring his instrument with him when he called. ‘It can so very well stay at home,’ I explained suavely.

  She immediately said she would leave on the first of October.

  ‘But, Johanna!’ I cried.

  She repeated the formula.

  ‘But, Johanna! How can a clever girl like you be so unreasonable? He is to visit you as often as before. All we beg is that it shall be done without music.’

  She repeated the formula.

  ‘But, Johanna!’ I expostulated again—eloquent exclamation, expressing the most varied sentiments.

  She once again repeated the formula; and next day I was forced to descend into Jena, shaking an extremely rueful fist at the neighbour’s house on the way, and set about searching in the obscurity of a registry office for the pearl we are trying all our lives to find.