Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther Page 7
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXIX
Jena, April 30.
DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—You know the little strip of balcony outside our sitting-room window, with its view over the trees of the Paradies valley to the beautiful hills across the river? Well, this morning is so fine, the sun is shining so warmly, that I had my coffee and roll there, and now, wrapped up in rugs, am still there writing to you. I can’t tell you how wonderful it is. The birds are drunk with joy. There are blackbirds, and thrushes, and chaffinches, and yellow-hammers, all shouting at once; and every now and then, when the clamour has a gap in it, I hear the whistle of the great tit, the dear small bird who is the very first to sing, bringing its pipe of hope to those early days in February when the world is at its blackest. Have you noticed how different one’s morning coffee tastes out of doors from what it does in a room? And the roll and butter—oh, the roll and butter I So must rolls and butter have tasted in the youth of the world, when gods and mortals were gloriously mixed up together, and you went for walks on exquisite things like parsley and violets. If Thoreau—I know you don’t like him, but that’s only because you have read and believed Stevenson about him—could have seen the eager interest with which I ate my roll just now, he would, I am afraid, have been disgusted; for he severely says that it is not what you eat, but the spirit in which you eat it—you are not, that is, to like it too much—that turns you into a glutton. It is, he says, neither the quality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual savours that makes your eating horrid. A puritan, he says, may go to his brown bread crust with as gross an appetite as ever an alderman to his turtle. Thus did I go, as grossly as the grossest alderman, this morning to my crust, and rejoiced in the sensual savour of it and was very glad. How nice it is, how pleasant, not to be with people you admire. Admiration, veneration, the best form of love—they are all more comfortably indulged in from a distance. There is too much whalebone about them at close quarters with their object, too much whalebone and not nearly enough slippers. I am glad Thoreau is dead. I love him far too much ever to want to see him; and how thankful I am he cannot see me.
It is my stepmother’s birthday, and trusted friends have been streaming up our three flights of stairs since quite early to bring her hyacinths in pots and unhappy roses spiked on wires and make her congratulatory speeches. I hear them talking through the open window, and what they say, wafted out to me here in the sun, sounds like the pleasant droning of bees when one is only half awake. First, there is the distant electric bell and the tempestuous whirl of Johanna down the passage. Then my stepmother emerges from the kitchen and meets the arriving friend with vociferous welcoming. Then the friend is led into the room here, talking in gasps as we all do on getting to the top of this house, and flinging cascades of good wishes for her liebe Emilie on to the liebe Emilie’s head. Then the hyacinths or the roses are presented:—‘I have brought thee a small thing,’ says the friend, presenting; and my stepmother, who has been aware of their presence the whole time, but, with careful decency, has avoided looking at them, starts, protests, and launches forth on to heaving billows of enthusiasm. She does not care for flowers, either in pots or on wires or in any other condition, so her gratitude is really most creditably done. Then they settle down in the corners of the sofa and talk about the things they really want to talk about—neighbours, food, servants, pastors, illnesses, Providence; beginning, since I was ill, with a perfunctory inquiry from the visitor as to the health of die gute Rose-Marie.
‘Danke, danke,’ says my stepmother. You know in Germany whenever anybody asks after anybody you have to begin your answer with danke. Sometimes the results are odd; for instance: ‘How is your poor husband today?’ ‘Oh, danke, he is dead.’
So my stepmother, too, says danke, and then I hear a murmur of further information, and catch the world zart. Then they talk, still in murmurs not supposed to be able to get through the open window and into my ears, about the quantity of beef-tea I have consumed, the length of the chemist’s bill, the unfortunate circumstance that I am so overgrown—‘Weedy,’ says my stepmother.
‘Would you call her weedy?’ says the friend, with a show of polite hesitation.
‘Weedy,’ repeats my stepmother emphatically; and the friend remarks quite seriously that when a person is so very long there is always some part of her bound to be in a draught and catching cold. ‘It is such a pity,’ concludes the friend, ‘that she did not marry.’ (Notice the tense. Half a dozen birthdays back it used to be ‘does not.’)
‘Gentlemen,’ says my stepmother, ‘do not care for her.’
‘Armes Mädchen,’ murmurs the friend.
‘Herr Gott, ja,’ says my stepmother; ‘but what is to be done? I have invited gentlemen in past days. I have invited them to coffees, to beer evenings, to music on Sunday afternoons, to the reading aloud of Schiller’s dramas, each with his part and Rose-Marie with the heroine’s; and though they came they also went away again. Nothing was changed, except the size of my beer bill. No, no, gentlemen do not care for her. In society she does not please.’
‘Armes Mädchen,’ says the friend again; and the armes Mädchen out in the sun laughs profanely into her furs.
The fact is it is quite extraordinary the effect my illness has had on me. I thought it was bad, and I see it was good. Beyond words ghastly at the time, terrible, hopeless, the aches of my body as nothing compared with the amazing anguish of my soul, the world turned into one vast pit of pain, impossible to think of the future, impossible to think of the past, impossible to bear the present—after all that behold me awake again, and so wide awake, with eyes grown so quick to see the wonder and importance of the little things of life, the beauty of them, the joy of them, that I can laugh aloud with glee at the delicious notion of calling me an armes Mädchen. Three months ago with what miserable groanings, what infinite self-pityings, I would have agreed. Now, clear of vision, I see how many precious gifts I have—life, and freedom from pain, and time to be used and enjoyed—gifts no one can take from me except God. Do you know any George Herbert? He was one of the many English poets my mother’s love of poetry made me read. Do you remember
I once more smell the dew, the rain,
And relish versing.
O, my only Light!
It cannot be
That I am he
On whom thy tempests fell all night?
Well, that is how I feel: full of wonder and an unspeakable relief. It is so strange how bad things—things we call bad—bring forth good things, from the manure that brings forth roses lovely in proportion to its manuriness to the worst experiences that can overtake the soul. And as far as I have been able to see (which is not very far, for I know I am not a clever woman) it is also true that good things bring forth bad ones. I cannot tell you how much life surprises me. I never get used to it. I never tire of pondering and watching and wondering. The way in which eternal truths lurk along one’s path, lie among the potatoes in cellars (did you ever observe the conduct of potatoes in cellars? their desperate determination to reach up to the light? their absolute concentration on that one distant glimmer?), peep out at one from every apparently dull corner, sit among the stones, hang upon the bushes, come into one’s room in the morning with the hot water, come out at night in heaven with the stars, never leave us, touch us, press upon us, if we choose to open our eyes and look, and our ears and listen—how extraordinary it is. Can one be bored in a world so wonderful? And then the keen interest there is to be got out of people, the keen joy to be got out of common affections, the delight of having a fresh day every morning before you, a fresh, long day, bare and empty, to be filled as you pass along it with nothing but clean and noble hours. You must forgive this exuberance. The sun has got into my veins and has turned everything golden.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXX
Jena, May 6.
DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—How can I help it if t
hings look golden to me? You almost reproach me for it. You seem to think it selfish, and talk of the beauty of sympathy with persons less fortunately constituted. That’s a grey sort of beauty; the beauty of mists, and rains, and tears. I wish you could have been in the meadows across the river this morning and seen the dandelions. There was not much greyness about them. From the bridge to the tennis-courts—you know that is a long way, at least twenty minutes’ walk—they are one sheet of gold. If you had been there before breakfast, with your feet on that divine carpet, and your head in the flickering slight shadows of the first willow leaves, and your eyes on the shining masses of slow white clouds, and your ears filled with the fresh sound of the river, and your nose filled with the smell of young wet things, you wouldn’t have wanted to think much about such grey negations as sympathizing with the gloomy. Bother the gloomy. They are an ungrateful set. If they can they will turn the whole world sour, and sap up all the happiness of the children of light without giving out any shining in return. I am all for sun, and heat, and colour, and scent—for all things radiant and positive. If, crushing down my own nature, I set out deliberately to console those you call the less fortunately constituted, do you know what would happen? They would wring me quite dry of cheerfulness, and not be one whit more cheerful for all the wringing themselves. They can’t. They were not made that way. People are born in one of three classes: children of light, children of twilight, children of night. And how can they help into which class they are born? But I do think the twilight children can by diligence, by, if you like, prayer and fasting, come out of the dusk into a greater brightness. Only they must come out by themselves. There must be no pulling. I don’t at all agree with your notion of the efficacy of being pulled. Don’t you, then, know—of course you do, but you have not yet realized—that you are to seek first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added unto you? And don’t you know—oh, have you forgotten?—that the Kingdom of God is within you? So what is the use of looking to anything outside of you and separated from you for help? There is no help, except what you dig out of your own self; and if I could make you see that I would have shown you all the secrets of life.
How wisely I talk. It is the wisdom of the ever-recurring grass, the good green grass, the grass starred with living beauty, that has got into me; the wisdom of a May morning filled with present joy, of the joy of the moment, without any weakening waste of looking beyond. So don’t mock. I can’t help it.
Do you, then, want to be pitied? I will pity you if you like, in so many carefully chosen words; but they will not be words from the heart but only, as the charming little child in the flat below us, the child with the flaunting yellow hair and audacious eyes, said of some speech that didn’t ring true to her quick ears, ‘from the tip of the nose.’ I cannot really pity you, you know. You are too healthy, too young, too fortunate for that. You ought to be quite jubilant with cheerfullest gratitude; and, since you are not, you very perfectly illustrate the truth of le trop being l’ennemi du bien, or, if you prefer your clumsier mother tongue, of the half being better than the whole. How is it that I, bereft of everything you think worth having, am so offensively cheerful? Your friends would call it a sordid existence, if they considered it with anything more lengthy than just a sniff. No excitements, no clothes, acquaintances so shabby that they seem almost moth eaten, the days filled with the same dull round, a home in a little town where we all get into one groove and having got into it stay in it, to which only faint echoes come of what is going on in the world outside, a place where one is amused and entertained by second-rate things, second-rate concerts, second-rate plays, and feels one’s self grow cultured by attendance at second-rate debating-society meetings. Would you not think I must starve in such a place? But I don’t. My soul doesn’t dream of starving; in fact, I am quite anxious about it, it has lately grown so fat. There is so little outside it—for the concerts, plays, debates, social gatherings, are dust and ashes near which I do not go—that it eagerly turns to what is inside it, and finds itself full of magic forces of heat and light, forces hot and burning enough to set every common bush afire with God. That is Elizabeth Barrett Browning; I mean about the common bushes. A slightly mutilated Elizabeth Barrett Browning, but still a quotation; and if you do not happen to know it I won’t have you go about thinking it pure Schmidt. Ought I, if I quote, to warn you of the fact by the pointing fingers of inverted commas? I don’t care to, somehow. They make such a show of importance. I prefer to suppose you cultured. Oh, I can see you shiver at that impertinence, for I know down in your heart, though you always take pains to explain how ignorant you are, you consider yourself an extremely cultured young man. And so you are; cultured, I should say, out of all reason; so much cultured that there’s hardly anything left that you are able to like. Indeed, it is surprising that you should care to write to a rough, unscraped sort of person like myself. Do not my crudities set your teeth on edge as acutely as the juice of a very green apple? You who love half tones, subtleties, suggestions, who, lifting the merest fringe of things, approach them nearer only by infinite implications, what have you to do with the downrightness of an east wind or a green apple? Why, I wonder that just the recollection of my red hands, knobbly and spread with work, does not make you wince into aloofness. And my clothes? What about my clothes? Do you not like exquisite women? Perfectly got-up women? Fresh and dainty, constantly renewed women? It is two years since I had a new hat; and as for the dress that sees me through my days, I really cannot count the time since it started in my company a Sunday and fête-day garment. If you were once, only once, to see me in the middle of your friends over there, you would be cured for ever of wanting to write to me. I belong to your Jena days; days of hard living and working and thinking; days when, by dint of being forced to do without certain bodily comforts, the accommodating spirit made up for it by its own increased comfort and warmth. Probably your spirit will never again attain to quite so bright a shining as it did that year. How can it, unless it is amazingly strong—and I know it well not to be that—shine through the suffocating masses of upholstery your present life piles about it? Poor spirit. At least see to it that its flicker doesn’t quite go out. To urge you to strip your life of all this embroidery and let it get the draught of air it needs would be, I know, mere waste of ink.
My people send you every good wish.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXXI
Jena, May 14.
DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—Of course I am full of contradictions. Did you expect me to be full of anything else? And I have no doubt whatever that in every letter I say exactly the opposite from what I said in the last one. But you must not mind this and make it an occasion for reproof. I do not pretend to think quite the same even two days running; if I did I would be stagnant, and the very essence of life is to be fluid, to pass perpetually on. So please do not hold me responsible for convictions that I have changed by the time they get to you, and above all things don’t bring them up against me and ask me to prove them. I don’t want to prove them. I don’t want to prove anything. My attitude towards life is one of open-mouthed wonder and delight, and the open-mouthed cannot talk. You write, too, plaintively, that some of the things I say hurt you. I am sorry. Sorry, I mean, that you should be so soft. Can you not, then, bear anything? But I will smooth my tongue if you prefer it smooth, and send you envelopes filled only with sugar; talk to you about the parks, the London season, the Foreign Office—all things of which I know nothing—and, patting you at short intervals on the back, tell you you are admirable. You say there is a bitter flavour about some of my remarks. I have not felt bitter. Perhaps a little shrewish; a little like, not a mild exhorting elder sister, but an irritated aunt. You see, I am interested enough in you to be fidgety when I hear you groan. What, I ask myself uneasily, can be the matter with this apparently healthy, well-cared-for young man? And then, forced to the conclusion by unmistakable symptoms that there
is nothing the matter except a surfeit of good things, I have perhaps pounced upon you with something of the zeal of an aunt moved to anger, and given you a spiritual slapping. You sighed for a sister—you are always sighing for something—and asked me to be one; well, I have apparently gone beyond the sister in decision and authority, and developed something of the acerbity of an aunt.
So you are down at Clinches. How beautiful it must be there this month. I think of it as a harmony in grey and amethyst, remembering your description of it the first time you went there; a harmony in a minor key, that captured you wholly by its tender subtleties. When I think of you inheriting such a place later on through your wife I do from my heart feel that your engagement is an excellent thing. She must indeed be happy in the knowledge that she can give you so much that is absolutely worth having. It is beautiful, beautiful to give; one of the very most beautiful things in life. I quarrel with my poverty only because I can give so little, so seldom, and then never more than ridiculous small trumperies. To make up for them I try to give as much of myself as possible, gifts of sympathy, helpfulness, kindness. Don’t laugh, but I am practising on my stepmother. It is easy to pour out love on Papa; so easy, so effortless, that I do not feel as if it could be worth much; but I have made up my mind, not without something of a grim determination that seems to have little enough to do with love, to give my stepmother as much of me, my affections, my services, as she can do with. Perhaps she won’t be able to do with much. Anyhow, all she wants she shall have. You know I have often wished I had been a man, able to pull on my boots and go out into the wide world without let or hindrance; but for one thing I am glad to be a woman, and that one thing is that the woman gives. It is so far less wonderful to take. The man is always taking, the woman always giving; and giving so wonderfully, in the face sometimes of dreadful disaster, of shipwreck, of death—which explains perhaps her longer persistence in clinging to the skirts of a worn-out passion; for is not the tenderer feeling on the side of the one who gave and blessed? Always, always on that side? Mixing into what was sensual some of the dear divineness of the mother-love? I think I could never grow wholly indifferent to a person to whom I had given much. He or she would not, could not, be the same to me as other people. Time would pass, and the growing number of the days blunt the first sharp edge of feeling; but the memory of what I had given would bind us together in a friendship for ever unlike any other.