Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther
Page 25
Well, I am weak, you see, just as weak and silly as the very weakest andsilliest in spite of my big words and brave face. I am writing now asnear the stove as possible in Papa's room, glad to be with him, glad tobe warm, grateful to sit with somebody alive after that hour with theghosts; and the result of deep considering has been to force me to facethe fact that there is much meanness in my nature. There is. Don'tbother to contradict; there is. All my forlornness since yesterday issimply the outcome of a mixture of envy and self-pity. I do miss dearVicki whom I greatly loved, I do miss the cheery Joey, I miss PapaLindeberg who likened me to Hebe, I miss his wife who kept me in myproper place--it is quite true that I miss these people, but that wouldnever of itself be a feeling strong enough to sweep me off my feet intoblack pools of misery as I was swept this afternoon, and never, neverwould make me, who have so fine a contempt for easy tears, cry. No, Mr.Anstruther, bitter truths once seen have to be stared at squarely, and Iam simply comparing my lot with Vicki's and being sorry for myself. Itis amazing that it should be so, for have I not everything a reasonablebeing needs, and am I not, then, a reasonable being? And the meanness ofit; for it does imply a grudging, an uneasiness in the presence ofsomebody else's happiness. Well, I'm thoroughly ashamed, and that atleast is a good thing; and now that you know how badly I too needlecturing and how I am torn by particularly ungenerous emotions perhapsyou'll see what a worthless person I am and will take me down from theabsurd high pinnacle on which you persist in keeping me and on which Ihave felt so desperately uncomfortable for months past. It is infinitelyhumiliating, I do assure you, to be--shall we say venerated? forexcellences one would like to possess but is most keenly aware one doesnot. Persons with any tendency to be honest about themselves and witheven the smallest grain of a sense of humor should never be chosen asidols and set up aloft in giddy places. They make shockingly bad idols.They are divided by a desire to laugh and an immense pity for thevenerator.
I add these observations, dear friend, to the description of my realnature that has gone before because your letters are turning more andmore into the sort of letters that ends a placid friendship. I want tobe placid. I love being placid. I insist on being placid. And thethought of your letters with so little placidness about them, was withme this afternoon in that terrible house, and it added to the fear ofthe future that seized me by the throat and would not let me go. Is it,then, so impossible to be friends, just friends with a man, in the samedear frank way one is with another woman, or a man is with a man? Ihoped you and I were going to prove the possibility triumphantly. Ieven, so keenly do I desire it, prayed that we were. But perhaps thereis little use in such praying.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
You may scold me as much as you like, but you are not to comfort me. Donot make the mistake, I earnestly beg you, of supposing that I want tobe comforted.
LXVIII
Galgenberg, Jan. 13th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--Just a line to tell you that I have recovered, andyou are not to take my letter yesterday too seriously. I woke up thismorning perfectly normal, and able to look out on the day before me withthe usual interest. Then something very nice happened: my translation ofPapa's book didn't come back, but instead arrived an urbane letterexpressing a kind of reluctant willingness, if you can imagine themixture, to publish it. What do you think of that? The letter, it istrue, goes on to suggest, still with urbanity, that no doubt no one willever buy it, but promises if ever any one does to send us a certain justportion of what was paid for it. 'Observe, Rose-Marie,' said Papa whenhis first delight had calmed, 'the unerring instinct with which theEnglish, very properly called a nation of shopkeepers, instantlyrecognize the value of a good thing when they see it. Consider the longyears during which I have vainly beaten at the doors of the Germanpublic, and compare its deafness with the quick response of our alertand admirable cousins across the Channel. Well do I know which was thepart that specially appealed to this man's business instinct--'
And he mentioned, while my guilty ears burned crimson, a chapter ofstatistics, the whole of which I had left out.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
LXIX
Galgenberg, Jan. 14th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--I see no use whatever in a friend if one cannottell him about one's times of gloom without his immediately proposing todo the very thing one doesn't want him to do, which is to pay one acall. Your telegram has upset me, you see, into a reckless use of theword one, a word I spend hours sometimes endeavoring to circumvent, andwhich I do circumvent if I am in good bodily and spiritual health, butthe moment my vitality is lowered, as it is now by your telegram, Icease to be either strong enough or artful enough to dodge it. There arefour of it in that sentence: I fling them to you in a handful, onlyremarking that they are your fault, not mine.
Now listen to me--I will drop this playfulness, which I don't in theleast feel, and be serious:--why do you want to come and, as youtelegraph, talk things over? I don't want to talk things over; it is afatal thing to do. May I not tell you frankly of my moods, of my downsas well as of my ups, without at once setting you off in the directionof too much kindness? After I had written that letter I was afraid; andI opened it again to tell you it was not your comfortings and pityingsthat I wanted, but the sterner remedy of a good scolding; yet youranswer is a telegram to ask if you may come. Of course I telegraphedback that I should not be here. It is quite true: I should not if youcame. I will not see you. Nothing can be gained by it, and everythingmight be lost,--oh everything, everything might be lost. I would see toit that you did not find me. The forests are big, and I can walk ifneeds be for hours. You will think me quite savagely unkind, but I can'thelp that. Perhaps if your letters lately had been different I would notso obstinately refuse to see you, but I have a wretched feeling that mypoor soul is going to be pruned again, pruned of its last, most pleasantgrowth, and you are on the road to saying and doing things we shall bothbe for ever sorry for. I have tried my best to stop you, to pull you up,and I hope with all my heart that I may not be going to get a letterthat will spoil things irreparably. Have not my hints been big enough?Let me beg you not to write foolishnesses that cannot, once sent, be gotback again and burned. But at least when you sit down to write you canconsider your words, and those that have come out too impulsively can gointo the fire; while if you came here what would you do with yourtongue, I wonder? There is no means of stopping that once it is wellstarted, and the smallest things sets it off in terrible directions. AmI not your friend? Will you not spare me? Must I be forced to speak witha plainness that will, by comparison, make all my previous plainnessseem the very essence of polite artificialness? Of all the wise counselany one could offer you at this moment there is none half so wise, nonethat, taken, would be half so precious to us both, as the counsel toleave well alone. I offer it you earnestly; oh, more thanearnestly--with a passionate anxiety lest you should refuse it.
Your sincere friend,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
I suppose it is true what I have often suspected, that I am a persondoomed to lose, one by one, the things that have been most dear to me.
LXX
Jan. 16th.
Well, there is no help, then. You will do it. You will put an end to it.You have written me a love-letter, the thing I have been trying so hardfor so long to stop your doing, and there is nothing to be done but todrop into silence.
LXXI
Jan. 17th.
But what is there possible except silence? I will not marry you. Icannot after this keep you my friend.
LXXII
Jan. 19th.
Oh, I have tried, I have hoped to keep you. It has been so sweet to me.It has made everything so different. For the second time you have wipedthe brightness out of my life.
LXXIII
Jan. 21 st.
Leave me alone. Don't torment me with wild letters. I do not love you. Iwill not marry you. I cared for you sincerely as a friend, but
what agulf there is between that and the abandonment of worship last year inJena. Only just that, just that breathless passion, would make me marry,and I would never feel it for a man I am forced to pity. Is not worshipa looking up? a rapture of faith? I cannot look up to you. I have nofaith in you. Leave me alone.
LXXIV
Jan. 22d.
Let us consider the thing calmly. Let us try to say good-by without toogreat a clamor. What is the use, after all, of being so vocal? We haveeach given the other many hours of pleasure, and shall we not begrateful rather than tragic? Here we are, got at last to the point wherewe face the inevitable, and we may as well do it decently. See, here isa woman who does not love you: would you have her marry you when she hadrather not? And you mustn't be angry with me because I don't love you,for how can I help it? So far am I from the least approach to it that itmakes me tired just to think of a thing so strenuous, of the bother ofit, of the perpetual screwed-up condition of mind and body to a pitchabove the normal. The normal is what I want. My heart is set upon it. Idon't want ecstasies. I don't want excitement. I don't want alternationsof bliss and terror. I want to be that peaceful individual a maidenlady,--a maiden lady looking after her aged father, tending her flowers,fondling her bees--no, I don't think she could fondle bees,--fondling acat, then, which I haven't yet got. Oh, I know I have moods of a moretempestuous nature, such as the one I was foolish enough to write to youabout the other day, stirring you up to a still more violenttempestuousness yourself, but they roll away again when they havegrowled themselves out, and the mood that succeeds them is like clearshining after rain. I intend this clear shining as I grow older to bemore and more my surrounding atmosphere. I make the bravest resolutions;will you not make some too? Dear late friend and sometime lover, do notwant me to give you what I have not got. We are both suffering just now;but what about Time, that kindest soother, softener, healer, that finaltidier up of ragged edges, and sweeper away of the broken fragments ofthe past?
LXXV
Jan. 23d.
I tell you you have taken away what I held precious for the second time,and there shall be no third. You showed me once that you could not be afaithful lover, you have shown me now you cannot be a faithful friend. Iam not an easy woman, who can be made much of and dropped in an unendingsee-saw. Even if I loved you we would be most wretched married, you withthe feeling that I did not fit into your set, I with the knowledge thatyou felt so, besides the deadly fear of you, of your changes and fits ofhot and cold. But I do not love you. This is what you seem unable torealize. Yet it is true, and it settles everything for ever.
LXXVI
Jan. 25th.
Must there be so much explaining? It was because I thought I was makingamends that way for having, though unconsciously, led you to fancy youcared for me last year. I wanted to be of some use to you, and I saw howmuch you liked to get them. By gradual degrees, as we both grew wiser, Imeant my letters to be a help to you who have no sister, no mother, anda father you don't speak to. I was going to be the person to whom youcould tell everything, on whose devotion and sincerity you could alwayscount. It was to have been a thing so honest, so frank, so clear, soaffectionate. And I've not even had time really to begin, for at firstthere was my own struggling to get out of the deep waters where I wasdrowning, and afterward it seemed to be nothing but a staving off, awriting about other things, a determined telling of little anecdotes, oftalk about our neighbors, about people you don't know, about anythingrather than your soul and my soul. Each time I talked of those, inmoments of greater stress when the longing for a real friend to whom Icould write openly was stronger than I could resist, there came a letterback that made my heart stand still. I had lost my lover, and it seemedas if I must lose my friend. At first I believed that you would settledown. I thought it could only be a question of patience. But you couldnot wait, you could not believe you were not going to be given what youwanted in exactly the way you wanted it, and you have killed the poorgoose after all, the goose I have watched so anxiously, who was going tolay us such beautiful golden eggs. I am very sorry for you. I know thehorrors of loving somebody who doesn't love you. And it is terrible forus both that you should not understand me to the point, as you say, ofnot being able to believe me. I have not always understood myself, buthere everything seems so plain. Love is not a thing you can pick up andthrow into the gutter and pick up again as the fancy takes you. I am aperson, very unfortunately for you, with a quite peculiar dread ofthrusting myself or my affections on any one, of in any way outstayingmy welcome. The man I would love would be the man I could trust to loveme for ever. I do not trust you. I did outstay my welcome once. I didget thrown into the gutter, and came near drowning in that sordid place.Oh, call me hard, wickedly revengeful, unbelievably cruel if it makesyou feel less miserable--but will you listen to a last prophecy? Youwill get over this as surely as you have got over your other similarvexations, and you will live to say, 'Thank God that German girl--whatwas her name? wasn't it Schmidt? good heavens, yes--thank God she was sofoolish as not to take advantage of an unaccountable but strictlytemporary madness.'
And if I am bitter, forgive me.
LXXVII
Jan. 27th.
It would be useless.
LXXVIII
Jan. 29th.
I would not see you.
LXXIX
Jan. 31st.
I do not love you.
LXXX
Feb. 2d.
I will never marry you.
LXXXI
Feb. 4th.
I shall not write again.
[THE END]