Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  Papa chuckled. ‘Insides are no safe criterion, my dear,’ he said. ‘It is the outside that tells.’

  ‘Tells what?’

  ‘A woman’s age.’

  Evidently I have not yet reminded my own Papa of Hebe.

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  LII

  Galgenberg, Oct. 28.

  DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—Well, yes, I do think you must get over it without much help from me. You have a great deal of my sympathy, I assure you; far more than you think. I don’t put it into my letters because there’s so much of it that it would make them overweight. Also, it would want a great deal of explaining. You see, it’s a different sort from what you expect, and given for other reasons than those you have in your mind; and it is quite impossible to account for in any way you are likely to understand. But do consider what, as regards the broken-off engagement, you must look like from my point of view. Candidly, are you a fit object for my compassion? I see you wandering now through Italy in its golden autumn looking at all your dear Luinis and Bellinis and Botticellis and other delights of your first growing up, and from my bleak hilltop I watch you hungrily as you go. November is nearly upon us, and we shiver under leaden clouds and driving rain. The windows are loose, and all of them rattle. The wind screams through their chinks as though somebody had caught it by the toes and was pinching it. We can’t see out for the raindrops on the panes. When I go to the door to get a breath of something fresher than house air I see only mists, and wreaths of clouds, and mists again, where a fortnight ago lay a little golden town in a cup of golden hills. Do you think that a person with this cheerless prospect can pity you down there in the sun? I trace your bright line of march on the map and merely feel envy. I am haunted by visions of the many beautiful places and climates there are in the world that I shall never see. The thought that there are people at this moment sitting under palm-trees or in the shadow of pyramids fanning themselves with their handkerchiefs while I am in my clammy room—the house gets clammy, I find, in persistent wet weather—not liking to light a lamp because it is only three o’clock, and yet hardly able to see because of the streaming panes and driving mist, the thought of these happy people makes me restive. I too want to be up and off, to run through the wet pall hanging over this terrible grey North down into places where sunshine would dry the fog out of my hair, and brown my face, and loosen my joints, and warm my poor frozen spirit. I would change places with you this minute if I could. Gladly would I take the burden of your worries on to my shoulders, and, carrying them like a knapsack, lay them at the feet of the first Bellini Madonna I met and leave them there for good. It would give me no trouble to lay them down, those worries produced by other people. One little shake, and they’d tumble off. Always things and places have been more to me than people. Perhaps it is often so with persons who live lonely lives. Anyhow, don’t at once cry out that I’m unnatural and inhuman, for things are, after all, only filtered out people—their ideas crystallized into tangibleness, their spirit taking visible form; either they are that, or they are, I suppose, God’s ideas—after all, the same thing put into shapes we can see and touch. So that it’s not so dreadful of me to like them best, to prefer their company, their silent teaching, although you will, I know, lecture me and perhaps tell me I am petrifying into a mere thing myself. Well, it is only fair that you should lecture me, who so often lecture you.

  Yours quite meekly,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  LIII

  Galgenberg, Nov. 1.

  DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—I won’t talk about it any more. Let us have done with it. Let us think of something else. I shall get tired of the duke if you are not careful, so please save me from an attitude so unbecoming. This is All Saints’ Day: the feast of white chrysanthemums and dear memories. My mother used to keep it as a day apart, and made me feel something of its mysticalness. She had a table in her bedroom, the nearest approach that was possible to an altar, with one of those pictures hung above it of Christ on the Cross that always make me think of Swinburne’s

  God of this grievous people, wrought

  After the likeness of their race—

  do you remember?—and candles, and jars of flowers, and many little books; and she used on her knees to read in the little books, kneeling before the picture. She explained to me that the Lutheran whitewash starved her soul, and that she wanted, however clumsily, to keep some reminder with her of the manner of prayer in England. Did I ever tell you how pretty she was? She was so very pretty, and so adorably nimble of tongue. Quick, glancing, vivid, she twinkled in the heavy Jena firmament like some strange little star. She led Papa and me by the nose, and we loved it. I can see her now expounding her rebellious theories, sitting limply—for she was long and thin—in a low chair, but with nothing limp about her flower-like face and eyes shining with interest in what she was talking about. She was great on the necessity, a necessity she thought quite good for everybody but absolutely essential for a woman, of being stirred up thoroughly once a week at the very least to an enthusiasm for religion and the life of the world to come. She said there was nothing so good for one as being stirred up, that only the well stirred ever achieve great things, that stagnation never yet produced a soul that had shot up out of reach of fogs on to the clear heights from which alone you can call out directions for the guidance of those below. The cold, empty Lutheran churches were abhorrent to her. ‘They are populated on Sundays,’ she said, ‘solely by stagnant women—women so stagnant that you can almost see the duckweed growing on them.’

  She could not endure, and I, taught to see through her eyes, cannot endure either, the chilly blend of whitewash and painted deal pews in the midst of which you are required here once a week to magnify the Lord. Our churches—all those I have seen—are either like vaults or barns, the vault variety being slightly better and also more scarce. Their aggressive ugliness, and cold, repellent service, keeping the congealed sinner at arm’s length, nearly drove my mother into the Roman Church, a place no previous Watson had ever wanted to go to. The churches in Jena made her think with the tenderest regard of the old picturesque pre-Lutheran days, of the light and colour and emotions of the Catholic services, and each time she was forced into one she said she made a bigger stride towards Rome. ‘Luther was a most mischievous person,’ she would say, glancing half defiantly through long eyelashes at Papa. But he only chuckled. He doesn’t mind about Luther. Yet in case he did, in case some national susceptibility should have been hurt, she would get up lazily—her movements were as lazy as her tongue was quick—and take him by the ears and kiss him.

  She died when she was thirty-five: sweet and wonderful to the last. Not did her beauty suffer in the least in the sudden illness that killed her. ‘A lily in a linen-clout She looked when they had laid her out,’ as your Meredith says; and on this day every year, this day of saints so dear to us, my spirit is all the time in those long ago happy years with her. I have no private altar in my room, no picture of a ‘piteous Christ’—Papa took that—and no white flowers in this drenched autumnal place to show that I remember; nor do I read in the little books, except with gentle wonderment that she should have found nourishment in them, she who fed so constantly on the great poets. But I have gone each All Saints’ Day for ten years past to church in Jena in memory of her, and tried by shutting my eyes to imagine I was in a beautiful place without whitewash, or hideous, almost brutal, stained glass.

  This morning, knowing that if I went down into the town I would arrive spattered with mud up to my ears and so bedraggled that the pew-opener might conceivably refuse me admission on the ground that I would spoil her pews, I set out for the nearest village across the hills, hoping that a country congregation would be more used to mud. I found the church shut, and nobody with the least desire to have it opened. The rain beat dismally down on my umbrella as I stood before the blank locked door. A neglected fence divided the graves from the parson’s front yard, protecting them, I suppose, as much as in it lay, from
the depredations of wandering cows. On the other side of it was the parson’s manure heap, on which stood wet fowls mournfully investigating its contents. His windows, shut and impenetrable, looked out on to the manure heap, the fowls, the churchyard, and myself. It is a very ancient church, picturesque, and with beautiful lancet windows with delicate traceries carefully bricked up. Not choosing to have walked five miles for nothing, and not wishing to break a habit ten years’ old of praying in a church for my darling mother’s soul on this day of souls and darling saints, I gathered up my skirts and splashed across the parson’s pools and knocked modestly at his door for the key. The instant I did it two dogs from nowhere, two infamous little dogs of that unpleasant breed from which I suppose Pomerania takes its name, rushed at me, furiously barking. The noise was enough to wake the dead; and since nobody stirred in the house or showed other signs of being wakened, it became plain to my deductive intelligence that its inmates couldn’t be dead. So I knocked again. The dogs yelled again. I stood looking at them in deep disgust, quite ashamed of the way in which the dripping stillness was being rent because of me. A soothing umbrella shaken at them only increased their fury. They seemed, like myself, to grow more and more indignant the longer the door was kept shut. At last a servant opened it a few inches, eyed me with astonishment, and when she heard my innocent request eyed me with suspicion. She hesitated, half shut the door, hesitated again, and then, saying she would go and see what the Herr Pastor had to say, shut the door quite. I do not remember ever having felt less respectable. The girl clearly thought I was not; the dogs clearly were sure I was not. Properly incensed by the shutting of the door and the expression on the girl’s face, I decided that the only dignified course was to go away; but I couldn’t because of the dogs.

  The girl came back with the key. She looked as though she had a personal prejudice against me. She opened the door just wide enough for a lean person to squeeze through, and bade me, with manifest reluctance, come in. The hall had a brick floor and an umbrella-stand. In the umbrella-stand stood an umbrella, and as the girl, who walked in front of me, passed it, she snatched out the umbrella and carried it with her, firmly pressed to her bosom. I did not at once grasp the significance of this action. She put me into an icy shut-up room and left me to myself. It was the gute Stube—good room—room used only on occasions of frigid splendour. Its floor was shiny with yellow paint, and to meet the difficulty of the paint being spoiled if people walked on it, and that other difficulty of a floor being the only place you can walk on, strips of cocoanut matting were laid across it from one important point to another. There was a strip from the door to the window; a strip from the door to another door; a strip from the door to the sofa; and a strip from the sofa on which the caller sits to the chair on which sits the callee. A baby of apparently brand newness was crying in an adjoining room. I waited, listening to it for what seemed an interminable time, not daring to sit down because it is not expected in Germany that you shall sit in any house but your own until specially requested to do so. I stood staring at the puddles my clothes and umbrella were forming on the strip of matting, vainly trying to rub them out with my feet. The wail of the unfortunate in the next room was of an uninterrupted and haunting melancholy. The rain beat on the windows forlornly. As minute after minute passed and no one came, I grew very restless. My fingers began to twitch and my feet to tap. And I was cooling down after my quick walk with a rapidity that meant a cough and a sore throat. There was no bell, or I would have rung it and begged to be allowed to go away. I did turn round to open the door and try to attract the servant’s notice and tell her I could wait no longer, but I found to my astonishment that the door was locked. After that the whole of my reflections were resolved into one chaotic Dear me, from which I did not emerge till the parson appeared through the other door, bringing with him a gust of wailing from the unhappy baby within and of the characteristic smell of infant garments drying at a stove.

  He was cold, suspicious, inquisitive. Evidently unused to being asked for permission to go into his church, and equally evidently unused to persons passing through a village which was, for most persons, on the way to nowhere, he endeavoured with some skill to discover what I was doing there. With equal skill I evaded answering his questions. They included inquiries as to my name, my age, my address, my father’s profession, the existence or not of a husband, the number of my brothers and sisters, and distinct probings into the size of our income. It struck me that he had a great deal of time and very few visitors, except thieves. Delicately I conveyed this impression to him, leaving out only the thieves, by means of implications of a vaguely flattering nature. He shrugged his shoulders, and said it was too wet for funerals, which were the only things doing at this time of the year.

  ‘What, don’t they die when it is wet?’ I asked, surprised.

  ‘Certainly, if it is necessary,’ said he.

  ‘Oh,’ said I, pondering. ‘But if some one does he has to be buried?’

  ‘We put it off,’ said he.

  ‘Put it off?’

  ‘We put it off,’ he repeated firmly.

  ‘But——’ I began, in a tone of protest.

  ‘There’s always a fine day if one waits long enough,’ said he.

  ‘That’s true,’ said I, struck by a truth I had not till then consciously observed.

  He did not ask me to sit down, a careful eye, I suppose, having gauged the probable effect of my wet clothes on his dry chairs, so we stood facing each other on the strip of matting throwing questions and answers backwards and forwards like a ball. And I think I played quite skilfully, for at the end of the game he knew little more than when we began.

  And so at last he gave me the key, and having with a great rattling of its handle concealed that he was unlocking the door, and further cloaked this process by a pleasant comment on the way doors stick in wet weather, which I met with the cold information that ours didn’t, he whistled off the dogs, and I left him still with an inquiry in his eye.

  The church is very ancient and dates from the thirteenth century. You would like its outside—I wonder if in your walks you ever came here—but its inside has been spoilt by the zealous Lutherans and turned into the usual barn. In its first state of beauty in those far-off Catholic days what a haven it must have been for all the women and most of the men of that lonely turnip-growing village; the one beauty spot, the one place of mystery and enthusiasm. No one, I thought, staring about me, could possibly have their depths stirred in the middle of so much whitewash. The inhabitants of these bald agricultural parishes are not sufficiently spiritual for the Lutheran faith. Black gowns and bareness may be enough for those whose piety is so exalted that ceremonies are only a hindrance to the purity of their devotions; but the ignorant and the dull, if they are to be stirred, and especially the women who have entered upon that long series of grey years that begins for those worked gaunt and shapeless in the fields somewhere about twenty-five and never leaves off again, if they are to be helped to be less forlorn need many ceremonies, many symbols, much show, and mystery and awfulness. You will say that it is improbable that the female inhabitants of such a poor parish should know what it is to feel forlorn; but I know better. You will, turning some of my own words against me, tell me that one does not feel forlorn if one is worked hard enough; but I know better about that too—and I said it only in reference to young men like yourself. It is true, the tragedy of the faded face combined with the uncomfortably young heart, which is the tragedy that every woman who has had an easy life has to endure for quite a number of years, finds no place in the existence of a drudge; it is true, too, that I never yet saw, and I am sure you didn’t, a woman of the labouring classes make efforts to appear younger than she is; and it is also true that I have seldom seen, and I am sure you haven’t, women of the class that has little to do leave off making them. Ceaseless hard work and the care of many children do away very quickly with the youth both of face and heart of the poor man’s wife, and with the youth of
heart go the yearnings that rend her whose heart, whatever her face may be doing, is still without a wrinkle. But drudgery and a lost youth do not make your life less, but more dreary. These poor women have not, like their husbands, the solace of the public-house Schnaps. They go through the bitterness of the years wholly without anaesthetics. Really I don’t think I can let you go on persisting that they feel nothing. Why, we shall soon have you believing that only you in this groaning and travailing creation suffer. Please divest yourself of these illusions. Read, my young friend, read the British poet Crabbe. Read him much; ponder him more. He knew all about peasants. He was a plain man, with a knack for rhyme and rhythm that sets your brain ajingling for weeks, who saw peasants as they are. They must have been the very ones we have here. In his pages no honeysuckle clambers picturesquely about their path, no simple virtues shine in their faces. Their hearth is not snowy, their wife not neat and nimble. They do not gather round bright fires and tell artless tales on winter evenings. Their cheer is certainly homely, but that doesn’t make them like it, and they never call down blessings upon it with moist uplifted eyes. Grandsires with venerable hair are rather at a discount; the young men’s way of trudging cannot be described as elastic; and their talk, when there is any, does not consist of praise of the local landowner. Do you think they do not know that they are cold and underfed? And do not know they have grown old before their time through working in every sort of weather? And do not know where their rheumatism and fevers come from?

  I walked back through the soaking, sighing woods thinking of these things and of how unfairly the goods of life are distributed and of the odd tendency misfortunes have to collect themselves together in one place in a heap. Old thoughts, you’ll say; old thoughts are stale as life, thoughts that have drifted through countless heads, and after a while drifted out of them again, leaving no profit behind them. But one can’t help thinking them and greatly marvelling. Make the most, you fortunate young man, of freedom, and Italy, and sunshine, and your six and twenty years. If I could only persuade you to let yourself go quite simply to being happy! Our friendship, in spite of its sincerity, has up to now been of so little use to you; and a friendship which is not helpful might just as well not exist. I wish I knew what words of mine would help you most. How gladly would I write them. How gladly would I see you in untroubled waters, forging straight ahead towards a full and fruitful life. But I am a foolish, ineffectual woman, and write you waspish letters when I might, if I had more insight, have found out what those words are that would set you tingling with the joy of life.