Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther Page 4

  I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul.

  And you say that a person in the grip of a great feeling should not carea straw for circumstance, should defy it, trample it under foot. Heavenknows that I too am for love and laughter, for the snatching of flyingopportunities, for all that makes the light and the glory of life; butwhat afterwards? The Afterwards haunts me like a weeping ghost. It istrue there is still the wide world, the warm sun, seed-time and harvest,Shakespeare, the Book of Job, singing birds, flowers; but the soul thathas transgressed the laws of man seems for ever afterwards unable to usethe gifts of God. If supreme joy could be rounded off by death, death atthe exact right moment, how easy things would be. Only death has astrange way of shunning those persons who want him most. To long to dieseems to make you as nearly immortal as it is possible to become. Nowjust think what would have happened if Tristan had not been killed, hadlived on quite healthily. King Mark, than whom I know no man inliterature more polite, would have handed Isolde over to him as hedeclared himself ready to have done had he been aware of theunfortunately complicated state of things, and he would have done itwith every expression of decent regret at the inconvenience he hadcaused. Isolde would have married Tristan. There would have been nophilosophy, no divine hours in the garden, no acute, exquisite anguishof love and sorrow. But there would presently have been the Middle Agesequivalent for a perambulator, a contented Tristan coming to meet it, afaded Isolde who did not care for poetry, admonishing, perhaps withsharpness, a mediaeval nursemaid, and quite quickly afterwards a Tristangrown too comfortable to move, and an Isolde with wrinkles. Would we nothave lost a great deal if they had lived? It is certain that theythemselves would have lost a great deal; for I don't see thatcontentment beaten out thin enough to cover a long life--and beat asthin as you will it never does cover quite across the years--is to becompared with one supreme contentment heaped in one heap on the highest,keenest point of living we reach. Now I am apparently arguing on yourside, but I'm not really, because you, you know, think of love as aperpetual _crescendo,_ and I, though I do hear the _crescendo_ andfollow it with a joyful clapping of hands up to the very top of itssplendor, can never forget the drop on the other side, the inevitable_diminuendo_ to the dead level--and then? Why, the rest is not evensilence, but a querulous murmur, a querulous, confused whining, confusedcomplaining, not very loud, not very definite, but always there till thelast chord is reached a long time afterwards--that satisfactory commonchord of death. My point is, that if you want to let yourself go togreat emotions you ought to have the luck to die at an interestingmoment. The alternative makes such a dreary picture; and it is thepicture I always see when I hear of love at defiance with the law. Thelaw wins; always, inevitably. Husbands are best; always, inevitably.Really, the most unsatisfactory husband is a person who should be clungto steadily from beginning to end, for did not one marry him of one'sown free will? How ugly then, because one had been hasty, foolish,unacquainted with one's usually quite worthless mind, to punish him. Thebrilliant professor, the fascinating little lady, what are they butgrossly selfish people, cruelly punishing the husband and wife who hadthe misfortune to marry them? Oh, it's a mercy most of us are homely,slow of wit, heavy of foot; for so at least we stay at home and find ourpeace in fearful innocence and household laws. (Please note myfamiliarity with the British poets.) But isn't that a picture of frugalhappiness, of the happiness that comes from a daily simple obedience tothe Stern Daughter of the Voice of God, beside which stormy, tremendous,brief things come off very badly? I don't believe you do in your heartside with the two sinners. Bother them. They have made me feel like aLutheran pastor on a Sunday afternoon. But you know I love you.

  R.-M.

  XII

  Jena, Nov. 22d.

  When do you go back to Jermyn Street? Surely today, for is not theexamination to-morrow? Your description of the Cheriton _menage_ atClinches is like fairyland. No wonder you feel so happy there. My motherused to tell me about life in England, but apparently the Watson familydid not dwell in houses like Clinches. Anyhow I had an impression oflittle houses with little staircases, and oil-cloth, and a servant in acap with streamers, and round white balls of suet with currants in themvery often for dinner. But Clinches, beautiful and dignified in themists and subtleties of a November afternoon, its massed graynessmelting into that other grayness, its setting of mysterious blurred woodand pale light of water, its spaciousness, its pleasant people, itsdaughter with the dusky hair and odd gray eyes--is a vision offairyland. I cannot conceive what life is like in such places; nor I amsure could any other inhabitant of Jena. What, for instance, can it belike to live in a thing so big that you do not hear the sounds nor smellthe smells of the kitchen? Ought not people who live in such places tohave unusually beautiful ways of looking at life? of thinking? ofspeaking? One imagines it all very noble, very gracious, altogetherworthy. That complete separation from the kitchen is what wrings thebiggest sigh of envy out of me. Is it my English blood that makes merebel against kitchens? Or is it only my unfortunate sensitiveness tosmell? I wish I had no nose. It has always been a nuisance. It is asextravagantly delighted by exquisite scents as it is extravagantlyhorrified by nasty ones. Why, a beautiful smell, if it is delicate,subtle, intermittent, can ruin a morning for me. It fills me with aquite unworthy rapture. Things that ought to be hard in me melt. Thingsthat ought to be fixed are scattered heaven knows where. I go soft,ecstatic, basely idle. I forget that my business is to get dinner, andnot to stand still and just sniff. In March I dare not pass the houseSchiller used to live in on my way to market, because the people wholive there now have planted violets along the railings. It is theshortest way, and it takes ten more minutes out of a busy morning to goround by the Post Office; but really for a grown woman to stand lost inwhat is mere voluptuous pleasure, leaning against somebody else'srailing while the family dinner lies still unbought in the market-place,is conduct that I cannot justify. As for a beanfield--my dear Roger, didyou ever come across a beanfield in flower? It is the divinestexperience the nose can give us. Two years ago an Englishman came andspent a spring and summer in the little house in the apple orchard up onthe road over the Galgenberg--the little house with the blueshutters--and he was a great gardener. And he dug a big patch, andplanted a beanfield, and it was the first beanfield Jena had ever seen;for those beans called broad that you eat in England and are properlythankful for are only grown in Germany for the use of pigs, and thereare no pigs in Jena. Sow-beans they are called here, mindful of theirdestiny. The Englishman, who possessed no visible sow, was a source ofastonishment to us. The things came up, and were undoubtedly sow-beans.A great square patch of them grew up just over the fence on which Jenaleaned and pondered. The man himself was seen in his shirt-sleevesweeding them on rainy afternoons. Jena could only suspect a pigconcealed in the parlor, and was indulgent; and it was indulgent becauseno one, in its opinion, can be both English and sane. 'God made us all,'was its invariable helpless conclusion as it went, shaking its head,home down the hill. When in June the beanfield flowered I blessed thatEnglishman. No one hung over his fence more persistently than I. It wasthe first time I had smelt the like. It became an obsession. I wanted tobe there at every sort of time and under every sort of weather-condition.At noon, when the sun shone straight down on it drawing up its perfumein hot breaths, I was there; in the morning, so early that it was stillin the blue shadow of the Galgenberg and every gray leaf and white petalwas drenched with dew, I was there; on wet afternoons, when the scentwas crushed out of it by the beating of heavy rain, and the road forhalf a mile, the slippery clay road with its puddles and amazing mud,was turned into a bath of fragrance fit for the tenderest, mostfastidious goddess to bare her darling little limbs in, I was there; andonce after lying awake in my hot room so near the roof for hoursthinking of it, out there on the hillside in the freshness under thestars, I got up and dressed, and crept with infinite caution past mystep-mother's door, and stole the latchkey, and slunk, my heart in mymo
uth, through the stale streets, along all the railings and dusty frontgardens, out into the open country, up on to the hill, to where it stoodin straight and motionless rows sending out waves of fragrance into thatwonderful clean air you find in all the places where men leave off andGod begins. Did you ever know a woman before who risked her reputationfor a beanfield? Well, it is what I did. And I'll tell you, I am soincurably honest that I can never for long pretend, why I write all thisabout it. It is that I am sick with anxiety--oh, sick, cold, shiveringwith it--about your exam. I didn't want you to know. I've tried to writeof beanfields instead. I didn't want you to be bothered. The clamoringsfor news of the person not on the spot are always a worry, and I did notwant to worry. But the letter I got from you this morning never mentionsthe exam, the thing on which, as you told me, everything depends for us.You talk about Clinches, about the people there, about the shooting, thelong days in woods, the keen-wittedness of Nancy who goes with you, whounderstands before you have spoken, who sympathizes so kindly about me,who fits, you say, so strangely into the misty winter landscape in herpaleness, her thinness, her spiritualness. There was one whole page--oh,I grudged it--about her loosely done dark hair, how softly dusky it is,how it makes you think of twilight, and her eyes beneath it of the firstfaint shining of stars. I wonder if these things really fill yourthoughts, or whether you are only using them to drive away useless worryabout Saturday. I know you are a poet, and a poet's pleasure in eyes andhair is not a very personal thing, so I do not mind that. But to-morrowis Saturday. Shall you send me a telegram, I wonder? A week ago I wouldnot have wondered; I should have been so sure you would let me have onelittle word at once about how you felt it had gone off--one little wordfor the person so far away, so helpless, so dependent on your kindnessfor the very power to go on living. Oh, what stuff this is. Worse eventhan the beanfield. But I must be sentimental sometimes, now mustn't I?or I would not be a woman. But really, my darling, I am very anxious.

  R.-M.

  XIII

  Jena, Nov. 23 d.

  I have waited all day, and there has been no telegram. Well, on Monday Ishall get a letter about it, and how much more satisfactory that is.Today after all is nearly over, and there is only Sunday to be gotthrough first, and I shall be helped to endure that by the lookingforward. Isn't it a mercy that we never get cured of being expectant? Itmakes life so bearable. However regularly we are disappointed andnothing whatever happens, after the first blow has fallen, after thefirst catch of the breath, the first gulp of misery, we turn our eyeswith all their old eagerness to a point a little further along the road.I suppose in time the regular repetition of shocks does wear out hope,and then I imagine one's youth collapses like a house of cards. Real oldage begins then, inward as well as outward; and one's soul, that kept sobravely young for years after one's face got its first wrinkles,suddenly shrivels up. Its light goes out. It is suddenly andirrecoverably old, blank, dark, indifferent.

  Sunday Night.

  I didn't finish my letter last night because, observing the strain I hadgot into, I thought it better for your comfort that I should go to bed.So I did. And while I went there I asked myself why I should burden youwith the dull weight of my elementary reflections. You who are so cleverand who think so much and so clearly, must laugh at theirelementariness. They are green and immature, the acid juice of animperfect fruit that has always hung in the shadow. And yet I don'tthink you must laugh, Roger. It would, after all, be as cruel as thelaughter of a child watching a blind man ridiculously stumbling amongthe difficulties of the way.

  The one Sunday post brought nothing from you. The day has been verylong. I cannot tell you how glad I am night has come, and only sleepseparates me now from Monday morning's letter. These Sundays now thatyou are gone are intolerable. Before you came they rather amusedme,--the furious raging of Saturday, with its extra cleaning andfeverish preparations till far into the night; Johanna more than usuallyslipshod all day, red of elbow, wispy of hair, shuffling about in herfelt slippers, her skirt girded up very high, a moist mop and anoverflowing pail dribbling soapy tracks behind her in her progress; mystep-mother baking and not lightly to be approached; Papa fled fromearly morning till supper-time; and then the dead calm of Sunday, day offood and sleep. Cake for breakfast--such a bad beginning. Church in theUniversity chapel, with my step-mother in her best hat with the blackfeathers and the pink rose--it sounds frivolous, but you must havenoticed the awe-inspiring effect of it coming so unexpectedly on the topof her long respectable face and oiled-down hair. A fluffy person inthat hat would have all the students offering to take her for a walk orshare their umbrella with her. My step-mother stalks along panoplied inher excellences, and the feather waves and nods gayly at the passingstudent as he slinks away down by-streets. Once last spring a silly beethought the rose must be something alive and honeyful, and went andsmelt it. I think it must have been a very young bee; anyhow nobody elseup to now has misjudged my step-mother like that. She sits near the doorin church, and has never yet heard the last half of the sermon becauseshe has to go out in time to put the goose or other Sunday succulencesafely into the oven. I wish she would let me do that, for I don't carefor sermons. When you were here and condescended to come with us atleast we could criticize them comfortably on our way home; but alonewith my step-mother I may do nothing but praise. It is the most tiring,tiresome of all attitudes, the one of undiscriminating admiration. Tohear you pull the person who had preached to pieces, and laugh at thethings he had said that would not bear examination, used to be likehaving a window thrown open in a stuffy room on a clear winter'smorning. Shall you ever forget the elaborateness of the Sunday dinner?For that, chiefly, is Saturday sacrificed, a whole day that might befilled with lovely leisure. I do hope you never thought that I toolooked upon it as a nice way of celebrating Sunday. How amazing it is,the way women waste life. Men waste enough of it, heaven knows, butnever anything like so much as women. Papa and I both hate that Sundaydinner, both dread the upheavals of Saturday made necessary by it, andyou, I know, disliked them just as much, and so has every other youngman we have had here; yet my step-mother inflicts these things on uswith an iron determination that nothing will ever alter. And why? Onlybecause she was brought up in the belief that it was proper, andbecause, if she omitted to do the proper, female Jena would be aghast.Well, I think it's a bad thing to be what is known as brought up, don'tyou? Why should we poor helpless little children, all soft andresistless, be squeezed and jammed into the rusty iron bands of parentalpoints of view? Why should we have to have points of view at all? Whynot, for those few divine years when we are still so near God, leave usjust to guess and wonder? We are not given a chance. On our pulpy littleminds our parents carve their opinions, and the mass slowly hardens, andall those deep, narrow, up and down strokes harden with it, and thefirst thing the best of us have to do on growing up is to waste precioustime rubbing and beating at the things to try to get them out. Surelythe child of the most admirable, wise parent is richer with his ownfaulty but original point of view than he would be fitted out with thechoicest selection of maxims and conclusions that he did not have tothink out for himself? I could never be a schoolmistress. I should beafraid to teach the children. They know more than I do. They know how tobe happy, how to live from day to day in god-like indifference to whatmay come next. And is not how to be happy the secret we spend our livestrying to guess? Why then should I, by forcing them to look through mystale eyes, show them as through a dreadful magnifying glass theterrific possibilities, the cruel explosiveness of what they had beenlightly tossing to each other across the daisies and thinking were onlytoys?

  Today at dinner, when Papa had got to the stage immediately followingthe first course at which, his hunger satisfied, he begins to fidget andgrow more and more unhappy, and my step-mother was conversing blandlybut firmly with the tried and ancient friend she invites to bear witnessthat we too have a goose on Sundays, and I had begun to droop, I hopepoetically, like a thirsty flower let us say, or a broken lily,
over myplate, I thought--oh, how longingly I thought--of the happy past meals,made happy because you were here sitting opposite me and I could watchyou. How short they seemed in those days. You didn't know I was watchingyou, did you? But I was. And I learned to do it so artfully, socautiously. When you turned your head and talked to Papa I could do itopenly; when you talked to me I could look straight in your dear eyeswhile I answered; but when I wasn't answering I still looked at you, bydevious routes carefully concealed, routes that grew so familiar bypractice that at last I never missed a single expression, while you, Isuppose, imagined you had nothing before you but a young woman with avacant face. What talks and laughs we will have about that odd, foolishyear we spent here together in our blindness when next we meet! We'vehad no time to say anything at all yet. There are thousands of things Iwant to ask you about, thousands of little things we said and did thatseem so strange now in the light of our acknowledged love. My heartstands still at the thought of when next we meet. These letters havebeen so intimate, and we were not intimate. I shall be deadly shy whenin your presence I remember what I have written and what you havewritten. We are still such strangers, bodily, personally; strangers withthe overwhelming memory of that last hour together to make us turn hotand tremble.

  Now I am going to bed,--to dream of you, I suppose, considering that allday long I am thinking of you; and perhaps I shall have a little luck,and dream that I hear you speaking. You know, Roger, I love you for allsorts of queer and apparently inadequate reasons--I won't tell you whatthey are, for they are quite absurd; things that have to do witheyebrows, and the shape of hands, so you see quite foolish things--butmost of all I love you for your voice. A beautiful speaking voice is oneof the best of the gifts of the gods. It is so rare; and it is soirresistible. Papa says heaps of nice poetic things, but then thedarling pipes. The most eloquent lecturer we have here does all hiseloquence, which is really very great read afterward in print, in avoice of beer, loose, throaty, reminiscent of barrels. Not one of thepreachers who come to the University chapel has a voice that does notspoil the merit there may be in what he says. Sometimes I think that ifa man with the right voice were to get up in that pulpit and just say,'Children, Christ died for you,'--oh, then I think that all I have andam, body, mind, soul, would be struck into one great passion ofgratefulness and love, and that I would fall conquered on my face beforethe Cross on the altar, and cry and cry....