Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  It is the first time I have been brought into daily contact with our nobility. In Jena there were very few: rare bright spots here and there on the sober background of academic middle class; little stars whose shining even from a distance made us blink. Now I see them every day, and find them very chilly and not in the least dazzling. I no longer blink. Perhaps Frau von Lindeberg feels that I do not, and cannot, forgive an unblinking Schmidt. But really, now, these pretensions are very absurd. The free blood of the Watsons surges within me at the sight of them. I think of things like Albion’s daughters, and Britannia ruling waves, and I feel somehow that it is a proud thing to be partly Watson and to have had progenitors who lived in a house called The Acacias in a street called Plantagenet Road, which is what the Watsons did. What claims have these Lindebergs to the breathless, nay, sprawling respect they apparently demand? Here is a retired Colonel who was an officer all his life, and, not clever enough to go on to the higher military positions, was obliged to retire at fifty. He belongs to a good family, and married some one of slightly better birth than his own. She was a Freiin—Free Lady—von Dammerlitz, a family, says Papa, large, unpleasant, and mortgaged. It has given Germany no great warriors or statesmen. Its sons have all been officers who did not turn that corner round which the higher honours lie, and its daughters either did not marry at all, being portionless, or married impossible persons, said Papa, such as——

  ‘Such as?’ I inquired, expecting to hear they married postmen.

  ‘Pastors, my dear,’ said Papa, smiling.

  ‘Pastors?’ I said, surprised, pastors having seemed to me, who view them from their own level, eminently respectable and desirable as husbands.

  ‘But not from the Dammerlitz point of view, my dear,’ said Papa.

  ‘Oh,’ said I, trying to imagine how pastors would look seen from that.

  Well, here are these people freezing us into what they consider our proper place whenever we come across them, taking no pains to hide what undesirable beings we are in their sight, staring at Papa’s hat in eloquent silence when it is more than usually tilted over one ear, running eyes that chill my blood over my fustian clothes—I’m not sure what fustian is, but I’m quite sure my clothes are made of it—oddly deaf when we say anything, oddly blind when we meet anywhere unless we actually run into them, here they are, doing all these things every day with a repeated gusto, and with no reason whatever that I can see to support their pretensions. Is it so wonderful to be a von? For that is all, look as I will, that I can see they have to go on. They are poor, as the retired officer invariably is, and they spend much time pretending they are not. They know nothing; he has spent his best years preoccupied with the routine of his calling, which leaves no room for anything approaching study or interest in other things, she in bringing up her son, also an officer, and in taking her daughter to those parties in Berlin that so closely resemble, I gather from the girl Vicki’s talk, the parties in Jena—a little wider, a little more varied, with more cups and glasses, and with, of course, the chance we do not have in Jena of seeing some one quite new, but on the whole the same. He is a solemn, elderly person in a black-rimmed pince-nez, dressed in clothes that give one the impression of always being black. He vegetates as completely as any one I have ever seen or dreamed of. Prolonged coffee in the morning, prolonged newspaper-reading, and a tortoise-like turn in the garden kill his mornings. Dinner, says Vicki, kills another hour and a half; then there is what we call the Dinner Sleep on the sofa in his darkened room, and that brings him to coffee-time. They sit over the cups till Vicki wants to scream, at least she wants to since she has known me, she says; up to then, after her miserable affair, she sat as sluggishly as the others, but huddled while they were straight, and red-eyed, which they were not. After coffee the parents walk up the road to a certain point, and walk back again. Then comes the evening paper, which he reads till supper-time, and after supper he smokes till he goes to bed.

  ‘Why, he’s hardly alive at all,’ I said to Vicki, when she described this existence.

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s what they all do,’ she said, ‘all the retired. I’ve seen it a hundred times in Berlin. They’re old, and they never can start anything fresh.’

  ‘We won’t be like that when we’re old, will we?’ I said, gazing at her wide-eyed, struck as by a vision.

  She gazed back into my eyes, misgiving creeping into hers.

  ‘Sleep, and eat, and read the paper?’ she murmured.

  ‘Sleep, and eat, and read the paper?’ I echoed.

  And we stared at each other in silence, and the far-away dim years seemed to catch up what we had said, and mournfully droned back, ‘Sleep, and eat, and read the paper ….

  But what is to be done with girls of good family who do not marry and have no money? They can’t go governessing, and indeed it is a dreary trade. Vicki has learned nothing except a little cooking and other domestic drudgery, only of use if you have a house to drudge in and a husband to drudge for; of those pursuits that bring in money and make you independent and cause you to flourish and keep green and lusty she knows nothing. If I had a daughter I would bring her up with an eye fixed entirely on a husbandless future. She should be taught some trade as carefully as any boy. Her head should be filled with as much learning as it would conveniently hold side by side with a proper interest in ribbons. I would spend my days impressing her with the gloriousness of independence, of having her time entirely at her own disposal, her life free and clear, the world open before her, as open as it was to Adam and Eve when they turned their backs once and for all on the cloying sweetness of Paradise, and far more interesting than it was to them, for it would be full of inhabitants eager to give her the hearty welcome always awaiting those rare persons, the cheery and the brave.

  ‘Oh,’ sighed Vicki, when with great eloquence and considerable elaboration I unfolded these views, ‘how beautiful!’

  Papa was nearer the open window under which we were sitting than I had thought, for he suddenly popped out his head.

  ‘It is a merciful thing, Rose-Marie,’ he said, ‘that you have no daughter.’

  We both jumped.

  ‘She would be a most dreary young female,’ he went on, smiling down as from a pulpit on our heads, and wiping his spectacles. ‘Offspring continually goaded and galvanized by a parent, hammered upon, chiselled, beaten out flat——’

  ‘Dear me, Papachen,’ I murmured.

  ‘Beaten out flat,’ said Papa, waving my interruption aside with his spectacles, ‘by the dead weight of opinions already stale, the victims of a system, the subjects of an experiment, the prisoners of prejudice, are bound either to flare into rank rebellion on the first opportunity or to grow continually drearier and more conspicuously stupid.’

  Vicki stared first up at Papa, then at me, her soft, crumpled sort of mouth twisted into troubled surprise.

  Papa leaned further out and hit the windowsill with his hand for all the world like a parson hitting his pulpit’s cushion.

  ‘One word,’ he said, ‘one word of praise or blame, one single word from an outsider will have more effect upon your offspring than years of trouble taken by yourself, mountains of doctrine preached by you, rivers of good advice, oceans of exhortations, cautions as numerous as Abraham’s posterity, well known to have been as numerous as the sea sand, private prayers, and public admonition.’

  And he disappeared with a jerk.

  ‘Ach,’ said Vicki, much impressed.

  Papa popped out his head again. ‘You may believe me, Rose-Marie,’ he said.

  ‘I do, Papachen,’ said I.

  ‘You have to thank me for much.’

  ‘And I do,’ said I, heartily, smiling up at him.

  ‘But for nothing more than for leaving you free to put forth such shoots as your nature demanded in whatever direction your instincts propelled you.’ And he disappeared and shut the window.

  Vicki looked at me doubtfully. ‘You said beautiful things,’ she said, �
�and he said just the opposite. Which is true?’

  ‘Both,’ said I, promptly, determined not to be outdone as a prophet by Papa.

  Poor Vicki. It is so hard to have life turned into a smudge when one is only twenty. She adored this man, was so proud of him, so proud of herself for being chosen by him. She grew, in the year during which they were engaged, into a woman, and can never now retrace her steps back to that fairy place of sunshine and carelessness in which we so happily wander if we are left alone for years and years after we are supposed to be grown up. Do you realize what a blow in the face she has received, as well as in her unfortunate little heart? All her vanities, without which a girl is but a poor thing, shrivelled up, her self-respect gone, her conceit, if there was any, and I suppose there was because there always is, gone headlong after it. A betrothal here is almost as binding and quite as solemn as a marriage. It is announced in the papers. It is abundantly celebrated. And the parents on both sides fall on each other’s necks and think highly of one another till the moment comes for making settlements. The Lindebergs spent all they had laid by and borrowed more to buy the trousseau and furnish the house. Vicki cried bitterly when she talked of her table-napkins. She says there were twelve dozen in twelve different patterns, and each twelve was tied up with a pink ribbon fastened by a buckle and a bow. They had to be sold again at a grievous loss, and the family fled from Berlin and the faces of their acquaintances, faces crooked with the effort to sympathize when what they really wanted to do, says Vicki, was to smile, and came to this cheap place where they can sit in obscurity darning up the holes in their damaged fortunes. Frau von Lindeberg, who has none of the torment of rejected love to occupy her feelings and all the bitterness of the social and financial blow, cannot help saying hard things to Vicki, things pointed and poisoned with reproaches that sometimes almost verge on taunts. The man was a good parti for Vicki; little money, but much promise for the future, a good deal older than herself and already brilliant as an officer; and during the engagement the satisfied mother overflowed, as mothers will, with love for the creditable daughter.

  ‘It was so nice,’ said Vicki, dolefully sniffing. ‘She seemed to love me almost as much as she loves my brother. I was so happy. I had so much. Then everything went at once. Mamma can’t bear to think that no one will ever want to marry me now, because I have been engaged.’

  Well, love is a cruel, horrible thing. Hardly ever do both the persons love with equal enthusiasm, and if they do, what is the use? It is all bound to end in smoke and nothingness, put out by the steady drizzle of marriage. And for the others, for the masses of people who do not love equally, of whom one half is at a miserable disadvantage, at the mercy absolutely of the other half, what is there but pain in the end? And yet—and yet it is a pretty thing in its beginnings, a sweet, darling thing. But, like a kitten, all charm and delicious ways at first, innocent, soft, enchanting, it turns into a cat with appalling rapidity and cruelly claws you. I’d like to know if there’s a single being on earth so happy and so indifferent that he has not got hidden away beneath a brave show of clothes and trimmings the mark of Love’s claws. And I think most of the clawings are so ferocious that they are for a long time ghastly tears that open and bleed again; and when with years they slowly dry up there is always the scar, red and terrible, that makes you wince if by any chance it is touched. That is what I think. What do you think?

  Good-bye.

  No, don’t tell me what you think. I don’t want to know.

  XLVI

  Galgenberg, Sept. 24.

  DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—Yesterday I was so much absorbed by Vicki’s woes that I never got to what I really wanted to write about. It’s that book I found in the Jena bookshop. It was second-hand and cheap, and I bought it, and it has unkindly revenged itself by playing havoc with my illusions. It is a collection of descriptions of what is known of the lives of the English poets, beginning with Chaucer, who is luckily too far away to provide much tattle, and coming down the centuries growing bigger with gossip as it comes, till it ends with Rossetti and Fitzgerald and Stevenson. Each poet has his portrait. It was for that I bought it. I cannot tell you how eagerly I looked at them. At last I was going to see what Wordsworth looked like, and Coleridge, and Keats, and Shelley. One of my dreams has been to go to the National Portrait Gallery of yours in London, described in an old Baedeker I once saw, and gaze at the faces of those whose spirits I know so well. Now I don’t want to. Can you imagine what it is like, what an extremely blessed state it is, only to have read the works of a poet, the filtered-out best of him, and to have lived so far from his country and from biographies or collections of his letters that all gossip about his private life and criticisms of his morals are unknown to you? Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Burns, have been to me great teachers, great examples, before whose shining image, built up out of the radiant materials their works provided, I have spent glorious hours in worship. Not a cloud, not a misgiving has dimmed my worship. We need altars—anyhow, we women do—and they were mine. I have not been able to be religious in the ordinary sense, and they have taken the place of religion. Our own best poets, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, and the rest, do not appeal to me in the same way. Goethe is wonderful, but he leaves you sitting somehow in a cold place from which you call out at intervals with conviction that he is immense the while you wish he would keep the feet of your soul a little warmer. Schiller beats his patriotic drum, his fine eyes rolling continually towards the gallery, too unintermittently for perfect delight. Heine the exquisite, the cunning worker in gems, the stringer of pearls on frailest golden threads, is too mischievous, too malicious, to be set up in a temple; and then you can’t help laughing at his extraordinary gift for maddening the respectable, at the extraordinary skill and neatness with which he deposits poison in their tenderest places, and how can he worship who is being made to laugh? If I knew little about our poets’ lives—inevitably I know more than I want to—I still would feel the same. There is, I think, in their poetry nothing heavenly. It is true, I bless God for them, thank Him for having let them live and sing, for having given us such a noble heritage, but I can’t go all the way Papa goes, and melt in a bath of rapture whenever Goethe’s name is mentioned. I remember what you said about Goethe. It has not influenced me. I do think you were wrong. But I do, too, think that everything really heavenly in our nation, everything purely inspired, manifestly immortal, has gone, not into our poetry but into our music. That has absorbed our whole share of divine fire, and left our poets nothing but the cool and conscious exercise of their intellects.

  Well, I am preaching. I would make a very arrogant parson, wouldn’t I, laying down the law more often than the prophets from that safe citadel a pulpit; but please have patience, for I want you to comfort me. The book really has made me unhappy. It is the kind of book you must go on reading—angry, rebelling at every page, but never leaving it till you’ve reached the last word. Then you throw it as hard as you can into the furthest corner of the room, and shake yourself as a dog does come up out of muddy water, and think to shake it off as easily as he does his mud; but you can’t, because it has burned itself into your soul. I don’t suppose you will understand what I feel. When a person possesses very few things those few things are terribly precious. See the mother of the only child, and compare her conduct, when it coughs, to the conduct of the mother of six, all coughing. See how one agonizes; and see with what serenity the other brings out her bottle of mixture and pours it calmly down her children’s throats. Well, I’m like the first mother, and you are like the second. I expect you knew long ago, and have never minded knowing, the littlenesses of my gods; but I, I felt as unsettled while I read about them, as uneasy, as fidgety, as frightened as a horse being driven by somebody cruel, which knows that every minute the lash will come down in some fresh place. Think: I knew nothing about Harriet Westbrook and her tragic life and death; I had never heard of Emilia Viviani; of Mary; of her whose name was Eliza, but who soared aloft in the sunshi
ne of Shelley’s admiration re-christened Portia, only presently to descend once more into the font and come out luridly as the Brown Demon. I never knew that Keats loved somebody called Brawne, and that she was unwilling, that she saw little in him, in Endymion the god-like, the divinely gifted, and that he was so persistent, so unworthily persistent, that the only word I can find that at all describes it is the German zappelnd. I had never heard of Jean Armour, of the headlong descent from being ‘him who walked in glory and in joy, Following his plough along the mountain-side’ to hopeless black years spent in public-houses at the beck and call—think of it, think of the divine spirit forced to it by its body—of any one who would pay for a drink. I never knew about Coleridge’s opium, or that to Carlyle he appeared as a helpless Psyche overspun with Church of England cobwebs, as a weak, diffusive, weltering, ineffectual man. I never knew that Wordsworth’s greeting was a languid handful of numb, unresponsive fingers, that his speech was prolix, thin, endlessly diluted. I never knew that Milton had three wives, that the first one ran away from him a month after their marriage, that he was hard to his daughters, so hard that they wished him dead. All these things I never knew; and for years I have been walking with glorious spirits, and have been fed on honey-dew, and drunk the milk of Paradise. When first I saw Wordsworth’s portrait I turned cold. Don’t laugh; I did actually turn cold. He had been so much in my life. I had pictured him so wonderful. Calm; beautiful, with the loftiest kind of beauty; faintly frosty at times, and detached, yet gently cheery and always dignified. It is the picture from a portrait by some one called Hancock. Very bitterly do I dislike Hancock. It is a profile. It would, if I had seen it in the flesh, completely have hidden from my silly short sight the inner splendours. I’m afraid—oh, I’m afraid, and I shiver with shame to think it—that I would have regarded him only as an elderly gentleman of irreproachable character, out of whose way it was as well to get because he showed every sign of being a bore. Will you think me irretrievably silly when I tell you that I cried over that picture? For one dreadful moment I stared at it in startled horror; then I banged the book to and fled up into the forest to cry. There was a smugness—but no, I won’t think of it. I’ll upset all my theories about the face being the mirror of the soul. It can’t be. If it is, Peter Bell and The Thorn are accounted for; but who shall account for the bleak nobility, the communings with nature on lofty heights in the light of setting suns? Or, when he comes down nearer, for that bright world he unlocks of things dear to memory, of home, of childhood, of quiet places, of calm affections? And for the tenderness with which it is done? And for its beautiful, simple goodness?