Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  ‘Must one go every time all the way to Epsom?’

  Joey ceased from speech and began to stare.

  ‘Are we not talking about salts?’ I inquired hastily, feeling that one of us was off the track.

  ‘Salts?’ echoed Joey, his mouth hanging open.

  ‘You mentioned Epsom, surely?’

  ‘Salts?’

  ‘You did say Epsom, didn’t you?’

  ‘Salts?’

  ‘Salts,’ said I, becoming very distinct in the presence of what looked like deliberate wilfulness.

  ‘What’s it got to do with salts?’ asked Joey, his underlip of a measureless vacancy.

  ‘Hasn’t it got everything?’

  ‘Look here, what are you drivin’ at? Is it goin’ to be a game?’

  ‘Certainly not. It’s Sunday. Did you never hear of Epsom salts?’

  ‘Oh—ah—I see—Eno, and all that. Castor oil. Rhubarb and magnesia. Well, I’ll forgive you as you’re only German. Pretty weird, what bits of information you get hold of. Never the right bits, somehow. I’ll tell you what, Miss Schmidt——’

  ‘Oh, do.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Tell me what.’

  ‘Well, ain’t I goin’ to? You all seem to know everything in this house that’s not worth knowin’, and not a blessed thing that is.’

  ‘Do you include Goethe?’

  ‘Confound Gerty,’ said Joey.

  Such are my conversations with Joey. Is there anything more you want to know?

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  XXXIV

  Jena, July 3.

  DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—I am sorry not to have been able to answer your letters for so many weeks, and sorry that you should have been, as you say, uneasy, but my telegram in reply to yours will have explained what has been happening to us. My stepmother died a fortnight ago. Almost immediately after I wrote last to you she began to be very ill. My feelings towards her have undergone a complete upheaval. I cannot speak of her. She is revenging herself, as only the dead in their utter unresentfulness can revenge themselves, for every hard and scoffing thought I had of her in life. I think I told you once about her annuity. Now it is gone Papa and I must see to it that we live on my mother’s money alone. It is a hundred pounds a year, so the living will have to be prudent; not so prudent, I hope, but that we shall have everything to enjoy that is worth enjoying, but quite prudent enough to force us to take thought. So we are leaving the flat, grown far too expensive for us, as soon as we can find some other home. We have almost decided on one already. Mr Collins went to England when the illness grew evidently hopeless, and we shall not take him back again, for my father does not care, at least at present, to have strangers with us, and I myself do not feel as though I could cook for and look after a young man in the way my stepmother did. Not having one will make us poor, but I think we shall be able to manage quite well, for we do not want much.

  Thank you for your kind letters since the telegram. The ones before that, coming into this serious house filled with the nearness of Death, and of Death in his sternest mood, his hands cruel with scourges, seemed to me so inexpressibly—well, I will not say it; it is not fair to blame you, who could not know in whose shadow we were sitting, for being preoccupied with the trivialities of living. But letters sent to friends a long way off do sometimes fall into their midst with a rather ghastly clang of discord. It is what yours did. I read them sometimes in the night, watching by my stepmother in the half-dark room during the moments when she had a little peace and was allowed to slip away from torture into sleep. By the side of that racked figure and all it meant and the tremendous sermons it was preaching me, wordless, voiceless sermons, more eloquent than any I shall hear again, how strange, how far-away your echoes from life and the world seemed! Distant tinklings of artificialness; not quite genuine writhings beneath not quite genuine burdens; idle questionings and self-criticisms; plaints, doubts, and complicated half-veiled reproaches of myself that I should be able to be pleased with a world so worm-eaten, that I should still be able to chant my song of life in a major key in a world so manifestly minor and chromatic. These things fell oddly across the gravity of that room. Shadows in a place where everything was clear, cobwebs of unreality where everything was real. They made me sigh, and they made me smile, they were so very black and yet so very little. I used to wonder what that usually excellent housemaid Experience is about, that she has not yet been after you with her broom. You know her speciality is the pulling up of blinds and the letting in of the morning sun. But it is unfair to judge you. Your letters since you knew have been kindness itself. Thank you for them.

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  It seemed so strange for any one to die in June; so strange to be lifeless in the midst of the wanton profusion of life, to grow cold in that quivering radiance of heat. The people below us have got boxes of calla-lilies on their balcony this year. Their hot, heavy scent used to come in at the open window in the afternoons when the sun was on them, the honey-sweet smell of life, intense, penetrating, filling every corner of the room with splendid, pagan summer. And on the bed tossed my stepmother, muttering ceaselessly to herself of Christ.

  XXXV

  Jena, July 15.

  DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—Our new address is Galgenberg, Jena,—rather grim, but what’s in a name? The thing itself is perfect. It is a tiny house, white, with green shutters, on the south slope of the hill among apple-trees. The garden is so steep that you can’t sit down in it except on the north side of the house, where you can because the house is there to stop you from sliding farther. It is a strip of rough grass out of which I shall make haycocks, with three apple-trees in it. There is also a red currant bush, out of which I shall make jelly. At the bottom, below the fence—rotten in places, but I’m going to mend that—begins a real apple orchard, and through its leaves we can look down on the roof of another house, white like ours, but a little bigger, and with blue shutters instead of green. People take it for the summer, and once an Englishman came and made a beanfield there—but I think I told you about the beanfield. Behind us, right away up the slope, are pine trees that brush restlessly backwards and forwards all day long across the clouds, trying to sweep bits of clear blue in the sky, and at night spread themselves out stiff and motionless against the stars. I saw them last night from my window. We moved in yesterday. The moving in was not very easy, because of what Papa calls the precipitous nature of the district. He sat with his back propped against the wall of the house on the only side on which, as I have explained, you can sit, and worked with a pencil at his book about Goethe in Jena with perfect placidity while Johanna and I and the man who urged the furniture-cart up the hill kept on stepping over his legs as we went in and out furnishing the house. There was not much to furnish, which was lucky, there not being much to furnish with. We have got rid of all superfluities, including the canary, which I presented, its cage beautifully tied up with the blue ribbons I wore at my first party, to the little girl with the flame-coloured hair on the second floor. As much of the other things as any one could be induced to buy we sold, and we burnt what nobody would buy or endure having given them. And so, pared down, we fit in here quite nicely, and after a day or two conceded to the suavities of life, such as the tacking up in appropriate places of muslin curtains and the tying of them with bows, I intend to buy a spade and a watering-pot and see what I can do with the garden.

  I wish it were not quite so steep. If I’m not on the upper side of one of the apple-trees, with my back firmly pressed against its trunk, I don’t yet see how I am to garden. It must be disturbing, and a great waste of time, to have to hold on to something with one hand while you garden with the other. And suppose the thing gives way, and you roll down on to the broken fence? And if that, too, gave way, there would be nothing but a few probably inadequate apple trunks between me and the roof of the house with the blue shutters. I should think it extremel
y likely that until I’ve got the mountain-side equivalent for what are known as one’s sea-legs I shall very often be on that roof. I hope it is strong and new. Perhaps there are kind people inside who will not mind. Soon they’ll get so much used to it that when they hear the preliminary rush among their apple-trees and the cracking of the branches, followed by the thud over their heads, they won’t even look up from their books, but just murmur to each other, ‘There’s Fräulein Schmidt on the roof again,’ and go on with their studies.

  Now I’m talking nonsense, and the sort of nonsense you like least; but I’m in a silly mood today, and you must take me as you find me. At any time when I have grown too unendurable you can stop my writing to you simply by not writing to me. Then I shall know you have at last had enough of me, of my moods, of my odious fits of bombastic eloquence, of my still more odious facetiousness, of my scoldings of you, and of my complacency about myself. It is true, you actually seem to like my scoldings. That is very abject of you. What you apparently resent are the letters with sturdy sentiments in them and a robust relish of life. It almost seems as though you didn’t want me to be happy. That is very odd of you. And I sometimes wonder if it is possible for two persons to continue friends who have a different taste in what, for want of a nicer word, I must call jokes. My taste in them is so elementary that an apple-pie bed makes me laugh tears, and when I go to the play I love to see chairs pulled away just as people are going to sit down. You, of course, shudder at these things. They fill you with so great a dreariness that it amounts to pain. I am at least sensible enough to understand the attitude. But pleasantries quite high up, as I consider, in the scale of humour have not been able to make you smile. I have seen you sit unalterably grave while Papa was piping out the nicest little things, and I know you never liked even your adored Professor Martens when he began to bubble. Well, either I laugh too easily or you don’t laugh enough. I can only repeat that if I set your teeth on edge, the remedy is in your own hands.

  We are going to be vegetarians this summer. Papa, who hasn’t tried it yet, is perfectly willing, and if we live chiefly on nuts and lettuces we shall hardly want any money at all. I read Shelley’s Vindication of Natural Diet aloud to him before we left the flat to prepare his mind, and he not only heartily agreed with every word, but went at once to the Free Library and dug out all the books he could find about muscles and brains and their surprising dependence on the kind of stuff you have eaten, and brought them home for me to study. I do love Papa. He falls in so sweetly with one’s little plans, and lets me do what I want without the least waste of time in questionings or the giving of advice. I have read the books with profound interest. Only a person who cooks, who has to handle meat when it is raw, pick out the internals of geese, peel off the skins of rabbits, scrape away the scales of a fish that is still alive—my stepmother insisted on this, the flavour, she said, being so infinitely superior that way—can know with what a relief, what a feeling of personal purification and turning of the back on evil, one flings a cabbage into a pot of fair water or lets one’s fingers linger lovingly among lentils. I brought a bag of lentils up the hill with us, and the cabbage, remnant of my last marketing, came up too in a net, and we had our dinner today of them: lentil soup, and cabbage with bread-and-butter—what could be purer? And for Johanna, who has not read Shelley, there was the last of the Rauchgasse sausage for the soothing of her more immature soul.

  That was an hour ago, and Papa has just been in to say he is hungry.

  ‘Why, you’ve only just had dinner, Papachen,’ said I, surprised.

  ‘I know—I know,’ he said, looking vaguely troubled.

  ‘You can’t really be hungry. Perhaps it’s indigestion.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ agreed Papa; and drifted out again, still looking troubled.

  Before we took this house it had stood empty for several years, and the man it belongs to was so glad to find somebody who would live in it and keep it warm that he lets us have it for hardly any rent at all. I expect what the impoverished want—and only the impoverished would live in a thing so small—is a garden flat enough to grow potatoes in, and to have fowls walking about it, and a pig in a nice level sty. You can’t have them here. At least, you couldn’t have a sty on such a slope. The poor pig would spend his days either anxiously hanging on with all his claws—or is it paws? I forget what pigs have; anyhow, with all his might—to the hillside, or huddled dismally down against the end planks, and never be of that sublime detachment of spirit necessary to him if he would end satisfactorily in really fat bacon. And the fowls, I suppose, would have to lay their eggs flying—they certainly couldn’t do it sitting down—and how disturbing that would be to a person engaged, as I often am, in staring up at the sky, for how can you stare up at the sky under an umbrella? I asked the landlord about the potatoes, and he said I must grow them as the last tenant did, a widow who lived and died here, in a strip against the north side of the house where there is a level space about two yards running from one end of the house to the other, representing a path and keeping the hill from tumbling in at our windows. It really is the only place, for I don’t see how Johanna and I, gifted and resourceful as we undoubtedly are, can make terraces with no tools but a spade and a watering-pot; but it will do away with our only path, and it does seem necessary to have a path up to one’s front door. Can one be respectable without a path up to one’s front door? Perhaps one can, and that too may be a superfluity to those who face life squarely. I am convinced that there must be potatoes, but I am not convinced, on reflection, that there need be a path. Have you ever felt the joy of getting rid of things? It is so great that it is almost ferocious. After each divestment, each casting off and away, there is such a gasp of relief, such a bounding upwards, the satisfied soul, proud for once of its body, saying to it smilingly, ‘This, too, then, you have discovered you can do without and yet be happy.’ And I, just while writing these words to you, have discovered that I can and will do without paths.

  Papa has been in again. ‘Is it not coffee-time?’ he asked.

  I looked at him amazed. ‘Darling, coffee-time is never at half-past two,’ I said reproachfully.

  ‘Half-past two is it only? Der Teufel,’ said Papa.

  ‘Isn’t your book getting on well?’ I inquired.

  ‘Yes, yes,—the book progresses. That is, it would progress if my attention did not continually wander.’

  ‘Wander? Where to?’

  ‘Rose-Marie, there is a constant gnawing going on within me that will not permit me to believe that I have dined.’

  ‘Well, but, Papachen, you have. I saw you doing it.’

  ‘What you saw me doing was not dining,’ said Papa.

  ‘Not dining?’

  Papa waved his arms round oddly and suddenly.

  ‘Grass, grass,’ he cried with a singular impatience.

  ‘Grass?’ I echoed, still more amazed.

  ‘Books of an enduring nature, works of any monumentalness, cannot, never were, and shall not be raised on a foundation of grass,’ said Papa, his face quite red.

  ‘I can’t think what you mean,’ said I. ‘Where is there any grass?’

  ‘Here,’ said Papa, quickly clasping his hands over that portion of him that we boldly talk about and call Magen, and you allude to sideways, by a variety of devious expressions. ‘I have been fed today,’ he said, looking at me quite severely, ‘on a diet appropriate only to the mountain goat, and probably only appropriate to him because he can procure nothing better.’

  ‘Why, you had a lentil soup—proved scientifically to contain all that is needed——’

  ‘I congratulate the lentil soup. I envy it. I wish I too contained all that is needed. But here’—he clasped his hands again—‘there is nothing.’

  ‘Yes, there is. There is cabbage.’

  ‘Pooh,’ said Papa. ‘Green stuff. Herbage.’

  ‘Herbage?’

  ‘And scanty herbage, too—appropriate, I suppose, to the mountainous region in w
hich we now find ourselves.’

  ‘Papa, don’t you want to be a vegetarian?’

  ‘I want my coffee,’ said Papa.

  ‘What, now?’

  ‘And why not now, Rose-Marie? Is there anything more rational than to eat when one is hungry? Let there, pray, be much—very much—bread-and-butter with it.’

  ‘But, Papa, we weren’t going to have coffee any more. Didn’t you agree that we would give up stimulants?’

  Papa looked at me defiantly. ‘I did,’ he said.

  ‘Well, coffee is one.’

  ‘It is our only one.’

  ‘You said you would give it up.’

  ‘I said gradually. To do so today would not be doing so gradually. Nothing is good that is not done gradually.’

  ‘But one must begin.’

  ‘One must begin gradually.’

  ‘You were delighted with Shelley.’

  ‘It was after dinner.’

  ‘You were quite convinced.’

  ‘I was not hungry.’

  ‘You know he is all for pure water.’

  ‘He is all for many things that seem admirable to those who have lately dined.’

  ‘You know he says that if the populace of Paris at the time of the Revolution had drunk at the pure source of the Seine——’

  ‘There is no pure source of the Seine within reach of the populace of Paris. There would only be cats. Dead cats. And cats interspersed, no doubt, with a variety of objects of the nature of portions of crockery and empty tins.’

  ‘But he says pure source.’

  ‘Then he says pure nonsense.’

  ‘He says if they had done that and satisfied their hunger at the ever-furnished table of vegetable nature——’

  ‘Ever-furnished table? Holy Heaven—the good, the excellent young man.’

  ‘—they would never have lent their brutal suffrage to the proscription list of Robespierre.’

  ‘Rose-Marie, today I care not what this young man says.’