Jena, Nov. 6th.
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 to-morrow. 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 step-mother 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-by, 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 to-night? 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 to-night. 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 splendor—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 provocation; 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.
Jena, Nov. 7th.
Dear Roger,—You left on Tuesday night—that's yesterday—and you'll get to London on Thursday morning—that's to-morrow—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 step-mother 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 step-mother 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 step-mother. 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-by.
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.
Jena, Nov. 8th.
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 wordly point of view, for you to marry me. But I mean more than that: I mean, have you not mistaken your own feelings, been 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 step-mother, 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 step-mother, 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 step-mother, 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 arch-angels and other happy beings,—said my step-mother, 'Why do you look so pleased?'
Slightly startled, I explained that I looked pleased because I was pleased.
'But nothing has happened,' said my step-mother, 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 quite by myself.'
'Yes, you are blessed with a contented nature, that is true,' said my step-mother 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 step-mother 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 step-mother, who dislikes all talk about things one can neither eat nor warm oneself 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.
'No one could help liking Roger,' she went on—Roger, do you like being Rogered?—' and my only fear is, and Martens fears it too, that he will entangle himself with some undesirable girl. Then he is ruined. There would be no hope for him.'
'But why-' I began; then suffocated a moment behind a towel. 'But why,' I said again, gasping, 'should he?'
'Well, let us hope he will not. I fear, though, he is soft. Still, he has steered safely through a year often dangerous to young men. It is true his father could not have sent him to a safer place than my house. You so sensible-' oh Roger!
'Besides being arrived at an age when serious and practical thoughts replace the foolish sentimentalness of earlier years,'—oh Roger, I'm twenty-five, and not a single one of my foolish sentimentalnesses has been replaced by anything at all. Do you think there is hope for me? Do you think it is very bad to feel exactly the same, just exactly as calf-like now as I did at fifteen?—'so that under my roof,' went on my step-mother, 'he has been perfectly safe. It would have been truly deplorable if his year in Germany had saddled him with a German wife from a circle beneath his own, a girl who had caught his passing fancy by youth and prettiness, and who would have spent the rest of her life dragging him down, an ever-present punishment with a faded face.'
She is eloquent, isn't she? Eloquent with the directness that instinctively finds out one's weak spots and aims straight at them. 'Luckily,' she concluded, 'there are no pretty faces in Jena just now.'
Then I held a towel up before my own, before my ignominious face, excluded by a most excellent critic from the category pretty, and felt as though I would hide it for ever in stacks of mending, in tubs of soup, in everything domestic and drudging and appropriate. But some of the words you rained down on me on Tuesday night between all those kisses came throbbing through my head, throbbing with great throbs through my whole body—Roger, did I hear wrong, or were they not 'Lovely—lovely—lovely'? And always kisses between, and always again that 'Lovely—lovely—lovely'? Where am I getting to? Perhaps I had better stop.
R.-M.
Jena, Nov. 12th.
Dearest of Living Creatures, the joy your dear, dear letters gave me! You should have seen me seize the postman. His very fingers seemed rosy-tipped as he gave me the precious things. Two of them—two love-letters all at once. I could hardly bear to open them, and put an end to the wonderful moment. The first one, from Frankfurt, was so sweet—oh, so unutterably sweet—that I did sit gloating over the unbroken envelope of the other for at least five minutes, luxuriating, purring. I found out exactly where your hand must have been, by the simple process of getting a pen and pretending to write the address where you had written it, and then spent another five minutes most profitably kissing the place. Perhaps I ought not to tell you this, but there shall be no so-called maidenly simperings between you and me, no pretences, no affectations. If it was silly to kiss that blessed envelope, and silly to tell you that I did, why then I was silly, and there's an end of it.
Do you know that my mother's maiden name was Watson? Well, it was. I feel bound to tell you this, for it seems to add to my ineligibleness, and my duty plainly is to take you all round that and expatiate on it from every point of view. What has the grandson of Lord Grasmere—you never told me of Lord G. before, by the way—to do with the granddaughter of Watson? I don't even rightly know what Watson was. He was always for me an obscure and rather awful figure, shrouded in mystery. Of course Papa could tell me about him, but as he never has, and my mother rarely mentioned him, I fancy he was not anything I should be proud of. Do not, then, require of me that I shall tear the veil from Watson.
And of course your mother was handsome. How dare you doubt it? Look in the glass and be grateful to her. You know, though you may only have come within the spell of what you so sweetly call my darling brown eyes during the last few weeks, I fell a victim to your darling blue ones in the first five minutes. And how great was my joy when I discovered that your soul so exactly matched your outside. Your mother had blue eyes, too, and was very tall, and had an extraordinarily thoughtful face. Look, I tell you, in the glass, and you'll see she had; for I refuse to believe that your father, a man who talks port wine and tomatoes the whole of the first meal he has with his only son after a year's separation, is the parent you are like. Heavens, how I shake when I think of what will happen when you tell him about me. 'Sir,' he'll say, in a voice of thunder—or don't angry English parents call their sons 'sir' any more? Anyhow, they still do in books—'Sir, you are far too young to marry. Young men of twenty-five do not do such things. The lady, I conclude, will provide the income?
Roger, rushing to the point: She hasn't a pfenning.
Incensed Parent: Pfenning, sir? What, am I to understand she's a German?
Roger, dreadfully frightened: Please.
I.P., forcing himself to be calm: Who is this young person?
Roger: Fräulein Schmidt, of Jena.
I.P., now of a horrible calmness: And who, pray, is Fräulein Schmidt, of Jena?
Roger, pale but brave: The daughter of old Schmidt, in whose house I boarded. Her mother was English. She was a Watson.
I.P.: Sir, oblige me by going to the—
Roger goes.
Seriously, I think something of the sort will happen. I don't see how it can help giving your father a dreadful shock; and suppose he gets ill, and his blood is on my head? I can't see how it is to be avoided. There is nothing to recommend me to him. He'll know I'm poor. He'll doubt if I'm respectable. He won't even think me pretty. You might tell him that I can cook, darn, manage as well as the thriftiest of Hausfraus, and I believe it would leave him cold. You might dwell on my riper age as an advantage, say I have lived down the first fevers of youth—I never had them—say, if he objects to it, that Eve was as old as Adam when they started life in their happy garden, and yet they got on very well, say that I'm beautiful as an angel, or so plain that I am of necessity sensible, and he'll only answer 'Fool.' Do you see anything to be done? I don't; but I'm too happy to bother.
Later.
I had to go and help get supper ready. Johanna had let the fire out, and it took rather ages. Why do you say you feel like screaming when you think of me wrestling with Johanna? I tell you I'm so happy that nothing any Johanna can do or leave undone in the least affects me. I go about the house on tiptoe; I am superstitious, and have an idea that all sorts of little envious Furies are lying about in dusty corners asleep, put to sleep by you, and that if I don't move very delicately I shall wake them—
O Freude, habe Acht,
Sprich leise, dass nicht der Schmerz erwacht....
That's not Goethe. By the way, poor Goethe. What an unforeseen result of a year in the City of the Muses, half an hour's journey from the Ilm Athens itself, that you should pronounce his poetry coarse, obvious, and commonplace. What would Papa say if he knew? Probably that young Anstruther is not the intelligent young man he took him for. But then Papa is soaked in Goethe, and the longer he soaks the more he adores him. In this faith, in this Goethe-worship, I have been brought up, and cannot, I'm afraid, get rid of it all at once. It is even possible that I never shall, in spite of London and you. Will you love me less if I don't? Always I have thought Goethe uninspired. The Muse never seized and shook him till divinenesses dropped off his pen without his knowing how or whence, divinenesses like those you find sometimes in the pages of lesser men, lesser all-round men, stamped with the unmistakable stamp of heavenly birth. Goethe knew very well, very exactly, where each of his sentences had come from. But I don't see that his poetry is either of the three things you say. I'm afraid it is not the last two, for the world would grow very interesting if thinking and writing as he did were so obvious that we all did it. As to its being coarse, I'm incurably incapable of seeing coarseness in things. To me
All is clean for ever and ever.
Everything is natural and everything is clean, except for the person who is afraid it isn't. Perhaps, dear Roger, you won't, as Papa says, quite apprehend my meaning; if you cannot, please console yourself with the reflection that probably I haven't got one.
What you say about the money you'll have dazzles me. Why, it's a fortune. We shall be richer than our Bürgermeister. You never told me you were so rich. Five hundred pounds a year is ten thousand marks; nearly double what we have always lived on, and we've really been quite comfortable, now haven't we? But think of our glory when my hundred pounds is added, and we have an income of twelve thousand marks. The Bürgermeister will be utterly eclipsed. And I'm such a good manager. You'll see how we'll live. You'll grow quite fat. I shall give you lovely food; and Papa says that lovely food is the one thing that ever really makes a man give himself the trouble to rise up and call his wife blessed.
It is so late. Good-night.
R.-M.
Don't take my Goethe-love from me. I know simply masses of him, and can't let him go. My mind is decked out with him as a garden is decked with flowers. Now isn't that pretty? Or is it only silly? Anyhow it's dreadfully late. Good-night.
Jena, Nov. 13th.
No letter from you today. I am afraid you are being worried, and because of me. Here am I, quiet and cheerful, nobody bothering me, and your dear image in my heart to warm every minute of life; there are you, being forced to think things out, to make plans for the future, decide on courses of action, besides having to pass exams, and circumvent a parent whom I gather you regard as refractory. How lucky I am in my dear father. If I could have chosen, I would have chosen him. Never has he been any trouble. Never does he bore me. Never am I forced to criticisms. He knows that I have no brains, and has forgiven me. I know he hasn't much common-sense, and have forgiven him. We spend our time spoiling and petting and loving each other—do you remember how you sometimes laughed?
But I wish you were not worried. It is all because I'm so ineligible. If I could come to you with a pot of money in each hand, turned by an appreciative ruler into Baroness von Schmidt, with a Papa in my train weighed down by Orders, and the road behind me black with carts containing clothes, your father would be merciful unto us and bless us. As things are, you are already being punished, you have already begun to pay the penalty for that one little hour's happiness; and it won't be quite paid ever, not so long as we both shall live. Do you, who think so much, ever think of the almost indecent haste with which punishments hurry in the wake of joys? They really seem to tumble over one another in their eagerness each to get there first. You took me to your heart, told me you loved me, asked me to be your wife. Was it so wrong? So wrong to let oneself go to happiness for those few moments that one should immediately be punished? My father will not let me believe anything. He says—when my step-mother is not listening; when she is he doesn't—that belief is not faith, and you can't believe if you do not know. But he cannot stop my silently believing that the Power in whose clutches we are is an amazing disciplinarian, a relentless grudger of joys. And what pitiful small joys they are, after all. Pitiful little attempts of souls doomed to eternal solitude to put out feelers in the dark, to get close to each other, to touch each other, to try to make each other warm. Now I am growing lugubrious; I who thought never to be lugubrious again. And at ten o'clock on a fine November morning, of all times in the world.
Papa comes back from Weimar today. There has been a prolonged meeting there of local lights about the damage done by some Goth to the Shakespeare statue in the park; and though Papa is not a light, still he did burn with indignation over that, and has been making impassioned speeches, and suggesting punishments for the Goth when they shall have caught him. I think I shall go over by the two o'clock train and meet him and bring him home, and look in at Goethe's sponge on the way. You know how the little black thing lies in his bedroom there, next to a basin not much bigger than a breakfast-cup. With this he washed and was satisfied. And whenever I feel depressed, out of countenance with myself and life, I go and look at it and come home cheered and strengthened. I wonder if you'll be able to make out why? Bless you my dearest.
R.-M.
Jena, Nov. 14th.
That sponge had no effect yesterday. I stared and stared at it, and it only remained a sponge, far too small for the really cleanly, instead of what it has up to now been, the starting-point for a train of thrilling, enthusiastic thoughts. I'm an unbalanced creature. Do you divide your time too, I wonder, between knocking your head against the stars and, in some freezing depth of blackness, listening to your heart, how it will hardly beat for fear? Of course you don't. You are much too clever. And then you have been educated, trained, taught to keep your thoughts within bounds, and not let them start off every minute on fresh and aimless wanderings. Yet the star-knocking is so wonderful that I believe I would rather freeze the whole year round for one hour of it than go back again to the changeless calm, the winter-afternoon sunshine, in which I used to sit before I knew you. All this only means that you have not written. See how variously one can state a fact.
I have run away from the sitting-room and the round table and the lamp, because Papa and my step-mother had begun to discuss you again, your prospects, your probable hideous fate if you were not prudent, your glorious career if you were. I felt guilty, wounded, triumphant, vain, all at once. Papa, of course, was chiefly the listener. He agreed; or at most he temporized. I tell you, Roger, I am amazed at the power a woman has over her husband if she is in every way inferior to him. It is not only that, as we say, der Klügere giebt nach, it is the daily complete victory of the coarser over the finer, the rough over the gentle, the ignorant over the wise. My step-mother is an uneducated person, shrewd about all the things that do not matter, unaware of the very existence of the things that do, ready to be charitable, helpful, where the calamity is big enough, wholly unsympathetic, even antagonistic, toward all those many small calamities that make up one's years; the sort of woman parsons praise, and who get tombstones put over them at last peppered with frigid adjectives like virtuous and just. Did you ever chance to live with a just person? They are very chilling, and not so rare as one might suppose. And Papa, laxest, most tolerant of men, so lax that nothing seems to him altogether bad, so tolerant that nobody, however hard he tries, can pass, he thinks, beyond the reach of forgiveness and love, so humorous that he has to fight continually to suppress it, for humor lands one in odd morasses of dislike and misconception here, married her a year after my mother died, and did it wholly for my sake. Imagine it. She was to make me happy. Imagine that too. I was not any longer to be a solitary Backfisch, with holes in her stockings and riotous hair. There came a painful time when Papa began to suspect that the roughness of my hair might conceivably be a symbol of the dishevelment of my soul. Neighboring matrons pointed out the possibility to him. He took to peering anxiously at unimportant parts of me such as my nails, and was startled to see them often black. He caught me once or twice red-eyed in corners, when it had happened that the dear ways and pretty looks of my darling mother had come back for a moment with extra vividness. He decided that I was both dirty and wretched, and argued, I am sure during sleepless nights, that I would probably go on being dirty and wretched for ever. And so he put on his best clothes one day, and set out doggedly in search of a wife.
He found her quite easily, in a house in the next street. She was making doughnuts, for it was the afternoon of New Year's Eve. She had just taken them out of the oven, and they were obviously successful. Papa loves doughnuts. His dinner had been uneatable. The weather was cold. She took off her apron, and piled them on a dish, and carried them, scattering fragrance as they went, into the sitting-room; and the smell of them was grateful; and they were very hot.
Papa came home engaged. 'I am not as a rule in favor of second marriages, Rose-Marie,' he began, breaking the news to me with elaborate art.
'Oh, horrid things,' I remarked, my arm round his neck, my face against his, for even then I was as tall as he. You know how he begins abruptly about anything that happens to cross his mind, so I was not surprised.
He rubbed his nose violently. 'I never knew anybody with such hair as yours for tickling a person,' he said, trying to push it back behind my ears. Of course it would not go. 'Would it do that,' he added suspiciously, 'if it were properly brushed?'
'I don't know. Well, Papachen?'
'Well what?'
'About second marriages.'
He had forgotten, and he started. In an instant I knew. I took my arm away quickly, but put it back again just as quickly and pressed my face still closer: it was better we should not see each other's eyes while he told me.
'I am not, as a rule, in favor of them,' he repeated, when he had coughed and tried a second time to induce my hair to go behind my ears, 'but there are cases where they are—imperative.'
'Which ones?'
'Why, if a man is left with little children, for instance.'
'Then he engages a good nurse.'
'Or his children run wild.'
'Then he gets a severe aunt to live with him.'
'Or they grow up.'
'Then they take care of themselves.'
'Or he is an old man left with, say, one daughter.'
'Then she would take care of him.'
'And who would take care of her, Rose-Marie?'
'He would.'
'And if he is an incapable? An old person totally unable to notice lapses from convention, from social customs? If no one is there to tell her how to dress and how to behave? And she is growing up, and yet remains a barbarian, and the day is not far distant when she must go out, and he knows that when she does go out Jena will be astounded.'
'Does the barbarian live in Jena?'
'My dear, she is universal. Wherever there is a widower with an only female child, there she is.'
'But if she had been happy?'
'But she had not been happy. She used to cry.'
'Oh, of course she used to cry sometimes, when she thought more than usual of her sweet—of her sweet—But for all that she had been happy, and so had he. Why, you know he had. Didn't she look after him, and keep house for him? Didn't she cook for him? Not very beautifully, perhaps, but still she did cook, and there was dinner every day. Didn't she go to market three times a week, and taste all the butter? Didn't she help to do the rooms? And in the evenings weren't they happy together, with nobody to worry them? And then, when he missed his darling wife, didn't the barbarian always know he was doing it, and come and sit on his knee, and kiss him, and make up for it? Didn't she? Now didn't she?'
Papa unwound himself, and walked up and down with a desperate face.
'Girls of sixteen must learn how to dress and to behave. A father cannot show them that,' he said.
'But they do dress and behave.'
'Rose-Marie, unmended stockings are not dressing. And to talk to a learned stranger well advanced in years with the freedom of his equal in age and knowledge, as I saw one doing lately, is not behaving.'
'Oh, Papa, she wouldn't do that again, I'm certain.'
'She wouldn't have done it that once if she had had a mother.'
'But the poor wretch hadn't got a mother.'
'Exactly. A mother, therefore, must be provided.'
Here, I remember, there was a long pause. Papa walked, and I watched him in despair. Despair, too, was in his own face. He had had time to forget the doughnuts, and how cold he had been, and how hungry. So shaken was I that I actually suggested the engagement of a finishing governess to finish that which had never been begun, pointing out that she, at least, having finished would go; and he said he could not afford one; and he added the amazing statement that a wife was cheaper.
Well, I suppose she has been cheap: that is she has made one of Papa's marks go as far as two of other people's; but oh how expensive she has been in other ways! She has ruined us in such things as freedom, and sweetness, and light. You know the sort of talk here at meals. I wish you could have heard it before her time. She has such a strong personality that somehow we have always followed her lead; and Papa, who used to bubble out streams of gayety when he and I sat untidily on either side of a tureen of horrible bad soup, who talked of all things under heaven, and with undaunted audacity of many things in it, and who somehow put a snap and a sparkle into whatever he said, sits like a schoolboy invited to a meal at his master's, eager to agree, anxious to give satisfaction. The wax cloth on the table is clean and shiny; the spoons are bright; a cruet with clear oil and nice-looking vinegar stands in the midst; the food, though simple, is hot and decent; we are quite comfortable; and any of the other Jena Hausfraus coming in during a meal would certainly cry out Wie gemüthlich. But of what use is it to be whitewashed and trim outside, to have pleasant creepers and tidy shutters, when inside one's soul wanders through empty rooms, mournfully shivers in damp and darkness, is hungry and no one brings it food, is cold and no one lights a fire, is miserable and tired and there's not a chair to sit on?
Why I write all this I can't think; except that I feel as if I were talking to you. You must tell me if I bore you. When I begin a letter to you the great difficulty is to leave off again. Oh how warm it makes one feel to know that there is one person in the world to whom one is everything. A lover is the most precious, the most marvellous possession. No wonder people like having them. And I used to think that so silly. Heavens, what an absurd person I have been. Why, love is the one thing worth having. Everything else, talents, work, arts, religion, learning, the whole tremblement, are so many drugs with which the starved, the loverless, try to dull their pangs, to put themselves to sleep. Good-night, and God bless you a thousand times. R.-M.
Jena, Nov. 15th, 11 p.m.
Dearest,—Your letter came this afternoon. How glad I was to get it. And I do think it a good idea to go down into the country to those Americans before your exam. Who knows but they may, by giving you peace at the right moment, be the means of making you pass extra brilliantly? That you should not pass at all is absolutely out of the question. Why have the gods showered gifts on you if not for the proper passing of exams? For I suppose in this as in everything else there are different ways, ways of excellence and mediocrity. I know which way yours will be. If only the presence of my spirit by your side on Saturday could be of use. But that's the worst of spirits: they never seem to be the least good unless they take their bodies with them. Yet mine burns so hotly when I am thinking of you—and when am I not thinking of you?—that I feel as if you actually must feel the glow of it as it follows you about. How strange and dreadful love is. Till you know it, you are so sure the world is very good and pleasant up in those serene, frost-bitten regions where you stand alone, breathing the thin air of family affection, shone upon gently by the mild and misty sun of general esteem. Then comes love, and pulls you down. For isn't it a descent? Isn't it? Somehow, though it is so great a glory, it's a coming-down as well—down from the pride of absolute independence of body and soul, down from the high-mightiness of indifference, to something fierce, and hot, and consuming. Oh, I daren't tell you how little of serenity I have left. At first, just at first, I didn't feel like this. I think I was stunned. My soul seemed to stand still. Surely it was extraordinary, that tempestuous crossing from the calm of careless friendship to the place where love dashes madly against the rocks? Don't laugh at my images. I'm in deadly earnest to-night. I do feel that love hurts. I do feel as if I'd been thrown on to rocks, left by myself on them to come slowly to my senses and find I am lying alone in a new and burning sun. It's an exquisite sort of pain, but it's very nearly unbearable. You see, you are so far away. And I, I'm learning for the first time in my life what it means, that saying about eating out one's heart.
R.-M.
Jena, Nov. 16th, 9 a.m.
Really, my dear Roger, nicest of all Bräutigams, pleasantest, best, and certainly most charming, I don't think I'll write to you again in the evenings. One of those hard clear hours that lie round breakfast-time will be the most seemly for consecration to you. Moods are such queer things, each one so distinct and real, so seemingly eternal, and I am influenced by them to an extraordinary degree. The weather, the time of day, the light in the room—yes, actually the light in the room, sunlight, cloudlight, lamplight—the scent of certain flowers, the sound of certain voices—the instant my senses become aware of either of these things I find myself flung into the middle of a fresh mood. And the worst part of it is the blind enthusiasm with which I am sure that as I think and feel at that moment so will I think and feel for ever. Nothing cures me. No taking of myself aside, no weight of private admonishment, no bringing of my spirit within the white glare of pure reason. Oh, women are fools; and of all fools the most complete is myself. But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to say that I had to go to a Kaffee-Klatsch yesterday at four, which is why I put off answering your letter of the 13th till the evening. My dear Roger, you must take no notice of that letter. Pray think of me as a young person of sobriety; collected, discreet, cold to frostiness. Think of me like that, my dear, and in return I'll undertake to write to you only in my after-breakfast mood, quite the most respectable I possess. It is nine now. Papa, in the slippers you can't have forgotten, is in his corner by the stove, loudly disagreeing with the morning paper; he keeps on shouting Schafskopf. Johanna is carrying coals about and dropping them with a great noise. My step-mother is busy telling her how wrong it is to drop dirty coals in clean places. I am writing on a bit of the breakfast-table, surrounded by crumbs and coffee-cups. I will not clear them away till I've finished my letter, because then I am sure you'll get nothing either morbid or lovesick. Who, I'd like to know, could flame into love-talk or sink into the mud of morbidness from a starting-point of anything so sprightly as crumbs and coffee-cups?
It was too sweet of you to compare me to Nausicaa in your letter yesterday. Nobody ever did that before. Various aunts, among whom a few years ago there was a great mortality, so that they are all now aunts in heaven, told me in divers tones that I was much too long for my width, that I was like the handle of a broom, like the steeple of the Stadtkirche, like a tree walking; but none of them ever said anything about Nausicaa. I doubt if they had ever heard of her. I'm afraid if they had they wouldn't have seen that I am like her. You know the blindness of aunts. Jena is full of them (not mine, Gott sei Dank, but other people's) and they are all stone-blind. I don't mean, of course, that the Jena streets are thick with aunts being led by dogs on strings, but that they have that tragic blindness of the spirit that misses seeing things that are hopeful and generous and lovely; things alight with young enthusiasms, or beautiful with a patience that has had time to grow gray. They also have that odd, unfurnished sort of mind that can never forget and never forgive. Yesterday at the Kaffee-Klatsch I met them all again, the Jena aunts I know so well and who are yet for ever strange, for ever of a ghastly freshness. It was the first this season, and now I suppose I shall waste many a good afternoon klatsching. How I wish I had not to go. My step-mother says that if I do not show myself I shall be put down as eccentric. 'You are not very popular,' says she, 'as it is. Do not, therefore, make matters worse.' Then she appeals, should a more than usual stubbornness cloud my open countenance, to Papa. 'Ferdinand,' she says, 'shall she not, then, do as others of her age?' And of course Papa says, bless him, that girls must see life occasionally, and is quite unhappy if I won't. Life? God bless him for a dear, innocent Papa. And how they talked yesterday. Papa would have writhed. He never will talk or listen to talk about women unless they've been dead some time, so uninteresting, so unworthy of discussion does he consider all live females except Johanna to be. And if I hadn't had my love-letter (I took it with me tucked inside my dress, where my heart could beat against it), I don't think I would have survived that Klatsch. You've no idea how proudly I set out. Hadn't I just been reading the sweetest things about myself in your letter? Of course I was proud. And I felt so important, and so impressive, and simply gloriously good-tempered. The pavement of Jena, I decided as I walked over it, was quite unworthy to be touched by my feet; and if the passers-by only knew it, an extremely valuable person was in their midst. In fact, my dear Roger, I fancied myself yesterday. Didn't Odysseus think Nausicaa was Artemis when first he met her among the washing, so god-like did she appear? Well, I felt god-like yesterday, made god-like by your love. I actually fancied people would see something wonderful had happened to me, that I was transfigured, verklärt. Positively, I had a momentary feeling that my coming in, the coming in of anything so happy, must blind the Kaffee-Klatsch, that anything so burning with love must scorch it. Well, it didn't. Never did torch plunged into wetness go out with a drearier fizzle than did my little shining. Nobody noticed anything different. Nobody seemed even to look at me. A few careless hands were stretched out, and the hostess told me to ask the servant to bring more milk.
They were talking about sin. We don't sin much in Jena, so generally they talk about sick people, or their neighbor's income and what he does with it. But yesterday they talked sin. You know because we are poor and Papa has no official position and I have come to be twenty-five without having found a husband, I am a quantité négligeableKlatsches