This office consists of two rooms, the first filled with servants looking for mistresses, and the second with mistresses looking for servants. A Fräulein of vague age but determined bearing sits at a desk in the second room, and notes in a ledger the requirements of both parties. They are always the same: the would-be mistress, full of a hopefulness that crops up again and again to the end of her days, causing attributes like fleissig, treu, ehrlich, anständig, arbeitslieb, kinderlieb, to be written down together with her demands in cooking, starching, and ironing, and often adding the information that though the wages may appear small they are not really so, owing to the unusually superior quality of the treatment; and the would-be maid, briefer because without illusions, dictates her firm resolve to go nowhere where there is cooking, washing, or a baby.
‘Gott, diese Mädchen,’ exclaimed a waiting lady to me as I arrived, hot and ruffled after my long tramp in the sun. I dropped into a chair beside her; and hot and ruffled as I was, she, who had been sitting there hours, was still more so. In her agitation she had cried out to the first human being at hand, the Fräulein at the desk having something too distinctly inhuman about her—strange as a result of her long and intimate intercourse with human beings—to be lightly applied to for sympathy. Then, looking at me again, she cried, ‘Why, it is the good Rose-Marie!’ And I saw she was an old friend of my stepmother’s, Frau Meyer, the wife of one of the doctors at the Lunatic Asylum, who used to come in often while you were with us, and whenever she came in you went out.
‘Not married yet?’ she asked, as we shook hands, smiling as though the joke were good.
I smiled with an equal conviction of its goodness, and said I was not.
‘Not even engaged?’
‘Not even engaged,’ said I, smiling more broadly, as if infinitely tickled.
‘You must be quick,’ said she.
I admitted the necessity by a nod.
‘You are twenty-six—I know your age because poor Emilie’—Emilie was my stepmother—‘was married ten years, and when she married you were sixteen. Twenty-six is a great age for a girl. When I was your age I had already had four children. What do you think of that?’
I didn’t know what to think of it, so smiled vaguely, and turning to the waiting machine at the desk began my list. ‘Hard-working, clean, honest——’
‘Yes, yes, if we could but find such treasures,’ interrupted Frau Meyer, with a reverberating sigh. ‘Here am I engaged to give the first coffee-party of the season——’
‘What, in summer?’
‘It is not summer in September. If the weather chooses to pretend it is I cannot help it. It is autumn, and I will no longer endure the want of social gatherings. Invariably I find the time between the last Coffee of spring and the first of autumn almost unendurable. What do you do, Rose-Marie, up there on that horrible mountain of yours, to pass the time?’
Pass the time? I who am so much afraid of Time’s passing me that I try to catch at him as he goes, pull him back, make him creep slowly while I squeeze the full preciousness out of every minute? I gazed at her abstractedly, haunted by the recollection of flying days, days gone so quickly, vanished before I well knew how happy I was being. ‘I really couldn’t tell you,’ I said.
‘Hard-working, clean, honest——’ read out the Fräulein, reminding me that I was busy.
‘Moral,’ I dictated, ‘able to wash——’
‘You will never find one,’ interrupted Frau Meyer again. ‘At least, never one who is both moral and able to wash. Two good things don’t go together with these girls, I find. The trouble I am in for want of one! They are as scarce and as expensive as roses in December. Since April I have had three, and all had to leave by the merest accident—nothing at all to do with the place or me; but the ones in there seem to know there have been three in the time, and make the most extravagant demands. I have been here the whole morning, and am in despair.’
She stopped to fan herself with her handkerchief.
‘Able to wash,’ I resumed, ‘iron, cook, mend—have you any one suitable, Fräulein?’
‘Many,’ was the laconic answer.
‘I’m afraid we cannot give more than a hundred and sixty marks,’ said I.
‘Pooh,’ said Frau Meyer; and there was a pause in the scratching of the pen.
‘But there are no children,’ I continued.
The pen went on more glibly. Frau Meyer fanned herself harder.
‘And only two Herrschaften.’
The pen skimmed over the paper.
‘We live up—we live up on the Galgenberg.’
The pen stopped dead.
‘You will never find one who will go up there,’ cried Frau Meyer, triumphantly. ‘I need not fear your taking a good one away from me. They will not leave the town.’
The Fräulein rang a bell and called out a name. ‘It is another one for you, Frau Doctor,’ she said; and a large young lady came in from the other room. ‘The general servant Fräulein Ottilie Krummacher—Frau Doctor Meyer,’ introduced the Fräulein. ‘I think you may suit each other.’
‘It is time you showed me some one who will,’ groaned Frau Meyer. ‘Six have I already interviewed, and the demands of all are enough to make my mother, who was Frau Gutsbesitzer Grosskopf of the Grosskopfs of Grosskopfsecke, born Knoblauch, and a lady of the most exact knowledge in household matters, turn in her grave.’
‘Town?’ asked the large girl, quickly, hardly allowing Frau Meyer to get to a full stop, and obviously callous as to the Grosskopfs of Grosskopfsecke.
‘Yes, yes—here, overlooking the marketplace and the interesting statue of the electoral founder of the University. No way to go, therefore, to market. Enlivening scenes constantly visible from the windows——’
‘Which floor?’
‘Second. Shallow steps, and a nice balustrade. Really hardly higher than the first floor, or even than an ordinary ground floor, the rooms being very low.’
‘Washing?’
‘Done out of the house. Except the smallest, fewest trifles such as—such as—ahem. The ironing, dear Fräulein, I will do mostly myself. There are the shirts, you know—husbands are particular——’
‘How many?’
‘How many?’ echoed Frau Meyer. ‘How many what?’
‘Husbands.’
‘Aber, Fräulein,’ expostulated the secretary.
‘She said husbands,’ said the large girl. ‘Shirts, then—how many? It’s all the same.’
‘All the same?’ cried Frau Meyer, who adored her husband.
‘In the work it makes.’
‘But, dear Fräulein, the shirts are not washed at home.’
‘But ironed.’
‘I iron them.’
‘And I heat the irons and keep up the fire to heat them with.’
‘Yes, yes,’ cried Frau Meyer, affecting the extreme pleasure of one who has just received an eager assurance, ‘so you do.’
The large girl stared. ‘Cooking?’ she inquired, after a slightly stony pause.
‘Most of that I will do myself, also. The Herr is very particular. I shall only need a little—quite a little assistance. And think of all the new and excellent dishes you will learn to make.’
The girl waved this last inducement aside as unworthy of consideration. ‘Number of persons in the household?’
Frau Meyer coughed before she could answer. ‘Oh,’ said she, ‘oh, well—there is my husband, and naturally myself, and then there are—there are—are you fond of children?’ she ended hastily.
The girl fixed her with a suspicious eye. ‘It depends how many there are,’ she said cautiously.
Frau Meyer got up and leaned over the Fräulein at the desk, and whispered into her impassive ear.
The Fräulein shook her head. ‘I am afraid it is no use,’ she said.
Frau Meyer whispered again. The Fräulein looked up, and, fastening her eyes on a point somewhere below the large girl’s chin, said, ‘The wages are good.’
/> ‘What are they?’ asked the girl.
‘Considering the treatment you will receive——’ the girl’s eyes again became suspicious—‘they are excellent.’
‘What are they?’
‘Everything found, and a hundred and eighty marks a year.’
The girl turned and walked towards the door.
‘Stop! Stop!’ cried Frau Meyer desperately. ‘I cannot see you throw away a good place with so little preliminary reflection. Have you considered that there would be no trudging to market, and consequently you will only require half the boots and stockings and skirts those poor girls have to buy who live up in the villas that look so grand and pretend to give such high wages?’
The girl paused.
‘And no steep stairs to climb, laden with heavy baskets? And hardly any washing—hardly any washing, I tell you!’ she almost shrieked in her anxiety. ‘And no cooking to speak of? And every Sunday—mind, every Sunday evening free? And I never scold, and my husband never scolds, and with a hundred and eighty marks a year there is nothing a clever girl cannot buy. Why, it is an ideal, a delightful place—one at which I would jump if I were a girl, and this lady’—indicating me—‘would jump, too, would you not, Rose-Marie?’
The girl wavered. ‘How many children are there?’ she asked.
‘Children? Children? Angels, you mean. They are perfect angels, so good and well behaved—are they not, Rose-Marie? Fit to go at once to heaven—unberufen—without a day’s more training, so little would they differ in manner when they got there from angels who have been used to it for years. You are fond of children, Fräulein, I am sure. Naturally you are. I see it in your nice face. No nice Fräulein is not. And these, I tell you, are such unusual——’
‘How many are there?’
‘Ach Gott, there are only six, and so small still that they can hardly be counted as six—six of the dearest——’
The girl turned on her heel. ‘I cannot be fond of six,’ she said; and went out with the heavy tread of finality.
Frau Meyer looked at me. ‘There now,’ she said, in tones of real despair.
‘It is very tiresome,’ said I, sympathizing the more acutely that I knew my turn was coming next.
‘Tiresome? It is terrible. In two days I have my Coffee, and no—and no—and no——’ She burst into tears, hiding her face from the dispassionate stare of the Fräulein at the desk in her handkerchief, and trying to conceal her sobs by a ceaseless blowing of her nose.
‘I am so sorry,’ I murmured, touched by this utter melting.
An impulse seized me on which I instantly acted. ‘Take Johanna,’ I cried. ‘Take her for that day. She will at least get you over that. She is excellent at a party, and knows all about Coffees. I’ll send her down early, and you keep her as late as you like. She would enjoy the outing, and we can manage quite well for one day without her.’
‘Is that—is that the Johanna you had in the Rauchgasse?’
‘Yes—trained by my stepmother—really good in an emergency.’
Frau Meyer flung her arms round my neck. ‘Ach danke, danke, Du liebes, gutes Kind!’ she cried, embracing me with a warmth that showed me what heaps of people she must have asked to her party.
And I, after the first flush of doing a good deed was over and cool reflection had resumed its sway, which it did by the time I was toiling up the hill on the way home after having been unanimously rejected as mistress by the assembled maidens, I repented; for was not Johanna now my only hope? ‘Frau Meyer,’ whispered Reflection in my despondent ear, ‘will engage her to go to her permanently on the 1st, and she will go because of the twenty marks more salary. You have been silly. Of course she would have stayed with you with a little persuasion rather than have to look for another place and spend her money at a registry-office. It is not likely, however, that she will refuse a situation costing her nothing.’
But see how true it sometimes is that virtue is rewarded. Johanna went down as I had promised, and worked all day for Frau Meyer. She was given a thaler as a present, as much cake and coffee as she could consume, and received the offer of a permanent engagement when she should leave us. This she told me standing by my bedside late that night, the candle in her hand lighting up her heated, shining face, and hair dishevelled by exertion. ‘But,’ said she, ‘Fräulein Rose-Marie, not for the world would I take the place. Such a restless lady, such a nervous gentleman, such numbers of spoilt and sprawling children. If I had not been there today and beheld it from the inside I would have engaged myself to go. But after this’—she waved the candle—‘never.’
‘What are you going to do, then, Johanna?’ I asked, thinking wistfully of the four years we had passed together.
‘Stay here,’ she announced defiantly.
I put my arms round her neck and kissed her.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XLV
Galgenberg, Sept. 23.
DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—Today I went down to Jena with the girl from next door, who wanted to do such mild shopping as Jena is prepared for, mild shopping suited to mild purses, and there I drifted into the bookshop in the market-place where I so often used to drift, and there I found a book dealing with English poetry from Chaucer onwards, with pictures of the poets who had written it. But before I go on about that—and you’ll be surprised at the amount I have to say—I must explain the girl next door. I don’t think I ever told you that there is one. The neighbour let his house just before he left, and let it unexpectedly well, the people taking the upper part of it for a whole year, and this is their daughter. The neighbour went off jubilant to his little inky boys.
‘See,’ said he, at parting, ‘my life actually threatens to become rich without as well as within.’
‘Don’t,’ I murmured, turning as hot as people do when they are reminded of past foolishness.
The new neighbours have been here ten days, and I made friends at once with the girl over the fence. She saw me gathering together into one miserable haycock the September grass Johanna and I had been hacking at in turns with a sickle for the last week, and stood watching me with so evident an interest that at last I couldn’t help smiling at her.
‘This is our crop for the winter,’ I said, pointing to the haycock; ‘I protest I have seen many a mole-hill bigger.’
‘It isn’t much,’ said the girl.
‘No,’ I agreed, raking busily.
‘Have you a cow?’ she asked.
‘No.’
‘A pig?’
‘No.’
‘No animals?’
‘Bees.’
The girl was silent; then she said bees were not animals.
‘But they’re live-stock,’ I said. ‘They’re the one link that connects us with farming.’
‘What do you make hay for, then?’
‘Only to keep the grass short, and then we try to imagine it’s a lawn.’
Raking, I came a little nearer; and so I saw she had been, quite recently, crying.
I looked at her more attentively. She was pretty, with the prettiness of twenty; round and soft, fair and smooth. She had on an elaborately masculine shirt, and high stiff collar, and tie, and pin, and belt; and from under the edge of the hard straw hat, tilted up at the back by masses of burnished coils of hair, I saw a pulpy red mouth, the tip of an indeterminate nose, and two unhappy eyes, tired with crying.
‘How early to begin,’ I said.
‘Begin what?’
‘It’s not nine yet. Do you always get your crying done by breakfast-time?’
She flushed all over her face.
‘Forgive me,’ I said, industriously raking. ‘I’m a rude person.’
The girl was silent for a few moments, considering, I suppose, whether she should turn her back on the impertinent stranger once and for all, or forgive the indiscretion and make friends.
Well, she made friends. She and I, alone up on the hill, the only creatures of anything like the same age, sure
to see each other continually in the forests, on the road, over the fence, certainly we were bound either to a tiresome system of pretending to be unaware of each other’s existence or to be friends. We are friends. It is the wisest thing to be at all times. In ten days we have become fast friends, and after the first six she left off crying.
Now I’ll tell you why we have done it so quickly. It is not, as perhaps you know, my practice to fall easily on the stranger’s neck. I am too lumbering, too slow, too acutely conscious of my shortcomings for that; really too dull and too awkward for anything but a life almost entirely solitary. But this girl has lately been in love. It is the common fate. It happens to us all. That in itself would not stir me to friendship. The man, however, in defiance of German custom, so strong on this point that the breaking of it makes a terrific noise, after being publicly engaged to her, after letting things go so far that the new flat was furnished, and the wedding-guests bidden, said he was afraid he didn’t love her enough, and gave her up.
When she told me that my heart went out to her with a rush. I shall not stop to explain why, but it did rush, and from that moment I felt that I must put my arms round her, I, the elder and quieter, take her by the hand, help her to dry her poor silly eyes, pet her and make her happy again. And really after six days there was no more crying, and for the last three she has been looking at life with something of the critical indifference that lifts one over so many tiresome bits of the road. Unfortunately her mother doesn’t like me. Don’t you think it’s dreadful of her not to? She fears I am emancipated, and knows that I am Schmidt. If I were a Wedel, or an Alvensleben, or a Schulenburg, or of any other ancient noble family, even an obscure member of its remotest branch, she would consider my way of living and talking merely as a thing to be smiled at with kind indulgence. But she knows that I am Schmidt. Nothing I can say or do, however sweet and sane, can hide that horrid fact. And she knows that my father is a careless child of nature, lamentably unimpressible by birth and office; that my mother was an Englishwoman with a name inspiring little confidence; and that we let ourselves go to an indecent indifference to appearances, not even trying to conceal that we are poor. How useless it is to be pleasant and pretty—I really have been very pleasant to her, and the daughter kindly tells me I am pretty—if you are both Schmidt and poor. Though I speak with the tongues of angels and have no family it avails me nothing. If I had family and no charity I would get on much better in the world, in defiance of St Paul. Frau von Lindeberg would take me to her heart, think me distinguished where now she thinks me odd, think me witty where now she thinks me bold, listen to my speeches, laugh at my sallies, be interested in my gardening and in my efforts to live without meat; but here I am, burning, I hope, with charity, with love for my neighbours, with ready sympathy, eager friendliness, desire to be of use, and it all avails me nothing because my name is Schmidt.
Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther Page 14
