Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  ‘Foolish men,’ chuckled Papa, tickled by such blindness to their own interests, ‘if none will have it we will translate it and send it to England, what?’

  ‘Who is we, darling?’ I asked anxiously.

  ‘We is you, Rose-Marie,’ said Papa, pulling my ear.

  ‘Oh,’ said I.

  Scene closes.

  LVII

  Galgenberg, Dec. 1.

  DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—It is strange to address this letter to Berlin, and to know that by the time it gets there you will be there too. Well, let it welcome you very heartily back to the Fatherland. I think I know the street you are in; it is facing the Thiergarten, isn’t it, and looks north? Quite close to the Brandenburg Thor? I remember it because we trudged, among other places, also about the Thiergarten on our memorable visit, and Papa’s eye caught the name of your street, and he stood for ten minutes in the rain giving us a spirited sketch of the man’s life and claims to have a street called after him. My stepmother waited with a grim patience, her skirts firmly clutched in each hand. She had come to sight-see and to have things explained to her, so that it would be waste of a railway fare not to look and listen. Papa was in great splendour that day, so obviously superior, in the universality of his knowledge, to either of us damp womenfolk. You won’t get much sun there unless your rooms are at the back, but, on the other hand, it is undoubtedly a street for the exclusive and well-to-do, as even I could see as to whom marble steps and wrought-iron gates convey the usual lesson. I, however, would sooner live in a kennel facing south than in a palace where the sun never came; but then, as you know, my tendencies are incurably kennelwards.

  Today I am humble and hanging my head, for I have discovered to my pain and horror that Papa and I are living well beyond our income. I expect we have bought too many books, and spent too much in stamps to be used by publishers; but it is certain that we’ve already consumed over seventy pounds of our yearly hundred, and that we only took five months to do it in. What do you think of that? We have been squandering money right and left somehow. There were no clothes to buy, for what we have will last us at least two years, and where it has all gone to I can’t imagine. Indeed, I am a useless person if I cannot even manage a tiny house like this and make such sufficient means do. Papa has written to Professor Martens to tell him he is willing to take in a young man again. Willing? He is eager, hungry for a young man, for he sees that without one things will go badly with us. And I, remembering the wealth we enjoyed while Mr Collins was with us, have written to him to ask if he cares to come back and finish learning German. I don’t know if he still wants to, or rather if his father still wants him to, for German to Joey was as the fly in the apothecary’s ointment, in its extreme offensiveness, nor have I told Papa that I wrote, because of the peculiar horror with which he regards Joey; but I couldn’t resist when I know that six months of Joey would deliver us for two whole years from all young men whatever, and I hope, when the time comes, if it ever does, and Joey with it, to persuade Papa by judicious argument of the eminent desirability of this particular young man.

  There are, however, certain difficulties in the way. Our house has two bedrooms, two sitting-rooms, an attic, a kitchen, and a coal-hole. Johanna inhabits the attic. One sitting-room is sacred to Papa and his work. The other is a scrap-room in which we have our meals and receive Frau von Lindeberg when she calls, and I write letters and read books and darn stockings. Where, then, will Joey sleep? The answer is as clear as daylight and very startling: Joey must sleep with Papa. Now that this truth has dawned upon me I spend hours lost in thoughts of things like screens and dividing curtains, besides preparing elaborate speeches for the bringing of Papa to reason. He himself was the first to declare we must positively take in a young man again, and he surely will see, when it is pointed out to him, that any one we have must sleep at the intervals appointed by Nature. I’m afraid he’ll see it in the case of every one except the fruitful Joey. It is most unfortunate that Joey should be so foolish about Goethe, for we really do want somebody who doesn’t mind about money, and I remember several poor boys in the past who were so very poor that on the days when my stepmother demanded payment I used to have to go out early and wander among the hills till evening, unable to endure the sound of the thalers being wrung out of them. Oh, money is the most horrid of all necessities! I am ashamed to think of the many bright hours of life soiled by anxieties about it, by meannesses about it. Wherever even a question of it arises Love and the Graces fly affrighted, followed closely by the entire troop of equally terrified Muses, out of the nearest window. I detest it. I do not want it. But with all my defiance of it I am crushed beneath the yoke of the penny as completely as everybody else. Well do I know that penny, and how much it is when there’s one over, and what worlds away when there’s one too few.

  Here comes Johanna to lay the dinner. We are rankly vegetarian again, Papa leading the way with immense determination, for he has set his heart at this unfortunate juncture on a new biography of Goethe that must needs come out just now, a big thing in two volumes costing a terrible number of marks, very well done, full of the result of original digging among archives; but he dare not buy it, he says, in the present state of our affairs. ‘Dost thou not think, Rose-Marie,’ he said, his face in grievous puckers at the prospect, ‘that a renewed and careful course of herbage may quickly set the matter right?’

  ‘Not quickly,’ said I, shaking my head, and pondering privately what, exactly, he meant by the word renewed.

  He looked crestfallen.

  ‘But ultimately,’ I said, wishing to cheer him.

  ‘Ultimately—ultimately,’ he echoed peevishly. ‘The word has a knell-like sound about it that I do not like. When we have reached thy Ultimately I shall no longer be in a state to desire or appreciate Bielschowsky’s Goethe. My brain, by then, will be clothed with grass, and my veins be streams of running water.’

  ‘Well, darling,’ said I, putting my arm through his, ‘you’ll be at least very nice and refreshing, and extraordinarily like a verse of the Psalms.’

  And for two days he has held out undaunted, and here comes our lentil soup and roast apples, so good-bye.

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  LVIII

  Galgenberg, Dec. 4.

  DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—This morning I woke up and wondered at the strange hush that had fallen on our house, set so near to a sighing, restless forest; and I looked out of the window and it was the first snow. All night it must have snowed, for there was the most beautiful smooth bank of it without a knob anywhere to show where lately I had been digging, from beneath my window up into the forest. Each pine tree was a fairy tree, its laden branches one white sparkle. The clouds were gone, and by the time I had done breakfast there was a brilliant blue sky, and the hills round Jena stood out so sharply against it that they looked as if somebody had been at them with a hatchet. Never was there such a serene and silent world as the one I stepped out into, shovel in hand. I had come to clear a pathway from the kitchen to the pump; instead, I stood as silent as everything else, the shovel beneath my arm, gazing about me and drinking in the purity in a speechless ecstasy. Oh, the air, Mr Anstruther, the air! Unhappy young man, who did not breathe it. It was like nothing you’ve got in Berlin, of that you may be very certain. It was absolutely calm; not a breath stirring. It was icy, yet crisp and frappé du soleil. And then how wonderful the world looked after the sodden picture of yesterday still in my mind. Each twig of the orchard trees had its white rim on the one side, exact and smooth, drawn along it by the finger of the north wind. The steps down from the back door had vanished beneath the loveliest, sleekest white covering. The pump, till the day before and ever since I have known it, a bleakly impressive object silhouetted in all its lankness and gauntness against a background of sky and mountain, was grown grotesque, bulky, almost playful, its top and long iron handle heaped with an incredible pile of snow, its spout hung about with a beard of icicles. Frau von L
indeberg’s kitchen smoke went up straight and pearly into the golden light. The roofs of Jena were in blue shadow. Our neighbour’s roof flashed with a million diamonds in the sun. Two rooks cawed to each other from the pine tree nearest our door; and Rose-Marie Schmidt said her morning prayers then and there, still clinging to her shovel. Then she pulled off her coat, hung her hat on the door-handle, and began in a sort of high rapture to make a pathway to the pump. What are the joys of summer to these? There is nothing like it, nothing, nothing in the world. I know no mood of Nature’s that I do not love—or think I do when it is over—but for keenness of feeling, for stinging pleasure, for overflowing life, give me a winter’s day with the first snow, a clear sky, and the thermometer ten degrees Réaumur below zero.

  Vicki called out from her doorway—you could hear the least call this morning at an extraordinary distance—to ask if I were snowed up too much to come down as usual.

  ‘I’m coming down, and I’m making the path to do it with,’ I called back, shovelling with an energy that set my hair dancing about my ears.

  She shouted back—her very shout was cheerful, and I did not need to see her face to know that today there would be no tears—that she too would make a path up to meet mine; and presently I heard the sounds of another joyful shovel.

  Underneath, the ground was hard with frost; it had frozen violently for several hours before the snow came up on the huge purple wings of the north wind. The muddy roads, the soaked forest, the plaintive patter of the rain, were wiped out of existence between a sleeping and a waking. This was no world in which to lament. This was no place in which sighs were possible. The thought that a man’s marrying one or not could make so much as the faintest smudge across the bright hopefulness of life made me laugh aloud with healthiest derision. Oh, how my shovel rang against the frozen stones! The feathery snow was scattered broadcast at each stroke. My body glowed and tingled. My hair grew damp about my forehead. The sun smiled broadly down upon my back. Papa flung up his window to cheer me on, but shut it again with a slam before he had well got out his words. Johanna came for an instant to the door, peeped out, gasped that it was cold—unheimlich kalt was her strange expression: unheimlich = dismal, uncanny; think of it!—and shut the door as hurriedly as Papa had shut the window. An hour later two hot and smiling young women met together on the path they had shovelled, and straightened themselves up, and looked proudly at the results of their work, and laughed at each other’s scarlet faces and at the way their noses and chins were covered with tiny beads. ‘As if it were August and we’d been reaping,’ said Vicki; and the big girl laughed at this, and the small girl laughed at this, with an excessiveness that would have convinced a passer-by that somebody was being very droll.

  But there was no passer-by. You don’t pass by if snow lies on the roads three feet deep. We are cut off entirely from Jena and shops. This letter won’t start for I haven’t an idea how long. Milk cannot come to us, and we cannot go to where there is a cow. I have flour enough to bake bread with for about ten days unless the Lindebergs should have none, in which case it will last less than five. The coal-hole is stored with cabbages and carrots, buried, with cunning circumvention of decay, in sand. Potatoes abound in earth-covered heaps out of doors. Apples abound in Johanna’s attic. We vegetarians come off well on occasions like this, for the absence of milk and butter does not afflict the already sorely afflicted, and of course the absence of meat leaves us completely cold.

  Vicki and I have been mending a boy’s sledge we found in the lumber-room of their house—I suppose the sledge used in his happier days by the Assessor now chained to a desk in Berlin—and with this we are going out after coffee this afternoon when the sky turns pale green and stars come out and blink at us, to the top of the road where it joins the forest, dragging the sledge up as best we can over the frozen snow, and then, tightly clutching each other, and I expect not altogether in silence, we intend to career down again as far as the thing will career, flashing, we hope, past her mother’s gate at a speed that will prevent all interference. Perhaps we shall not be able to stop, and will be landed at last in the middle of the market-place in Jena. I’ll take this letter with me in case that happens, because then I can post it. Good-bye. It’s going to be glorious. Don’t you wish you had a sledge and a mountain too?

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  LIX

  Galgenberg, Dec. 9.

  DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—We are still in sunshine and frost up here, and are all very happy, we three Schmidts—Johanna is the third—because Joey arrives tomorrow and we shall once more roll in money. I hasten to tell you this, for there were signs in your last two letters that you were taking our position to heart. It is wonderfully kind, I think, the way you are interested in our different little pains and pleasures. I am often more touched than I care to tell you by the sincerity of your sympathy with all we do, and feel very grateful for so true a friend. I was so glad you gave up coming to Jena on your way to Berlin, for it showed that you try to be reasonable, and then you know Professor Martens goes to Berlin himself every now and then to take sweet counsel with men like Harnack, so you will be sure to see him sooner or later, and see him comfortably, without a rush to catch a train. You say you did not come because I urged you not to, and that in all things you want to please me. Well, I would prefer to suppose you a follower of that plain-faced but excellent guide, Common Sense. Still, being human, the less lofty and conscientious side of me does like to know there is some one who wishes to please me. I feel deliciously flattered—when I let myself think of it; nearly always I take care to think of something else—that a young man of your undoubted temporal and spiritual advantages should be desirous of pleasing an obscure person like me. What would Frau von Lindeberg say? Do you remember Shelley’s wife’s sister, the Miss Westbrook who brushed her hair so much, with her constant ‘Gracious Heavens, what would Miss Warne say?’ I feel inclined to exclaim the same thing about Frau von Lindeberg, but with an opposite meaning. And it is really very surprising that you should be so kind, for I have been a shrew to you often, and have been absorbed in my own affairs, and have not erred on the side of over-sympathy about yours. Some day, when we are both very old, perhaps you will get a few hours’ leave from the dowager duchess you’ll marry when you are forty, and will come and look at my pigs and my garden, and sit with me before the fire and talk over our long friendship and all the long days of our life. And I, when I hear you are coming, shall be in a flutter, and will get out my best dress, and will fuss over things like asparagus and a salad, and tell the heated and awe-stricken maid that His Britannic Majesty’s Ambassador at the Best Place to be an Ambassador in in the World is coming to supper; and we shall feel how sweet it is to be old dear friends.

  Meanwhile we are both very busy with the days we have got to now. Today, for instance, has been so violently active that every bone I possess is aching. I’ll tell you what happened, since you so earnestly assure me that all we do interests you. The snow is frozen so hard that far from being cut off as I had feared from shops and food, there is the most glorious sledging road down to Jena; and at once, on hearing of Joey’s imminence, Vicki and I coasted down on the sledge, and I bought the book Papa has been wanting and a gigantic piece of beef. Then we persuaded a small but strong boy, a boy of open countenance and superior manners whom we met in the market-place, to drag the sledge with the beef and the book up the hill again for us; and so we set out homewards, walking gaily one on each side of him, encouraging him with loud admiration of his prowess. ‘See,’ said I, when I knew a specially steep bit was coming, ‘see what a great thing it is to be able to draw so much so easily.’

  A smirk and renewed efforts were the result of this speech at first; but the smirk grew smaller as the hill grew steeper, and the efforts dwindled to vanishing point with the higher windings of the road. At last there was no smirk at all, and at my sixth repetition of the encouragement he stopped dead. ‘If it is such a great t
hing,’ he said, wiping his youthful forehead with a patched sleeve, and looking at me with a precociousness I had not till then observed in his eyes, ‘why do you not do it yourself?’

  Vicki and I stared at each other in silent wonder.

  ‘Because,’ I said, turning a reproachful gaze on him, ‘because, my dear little boy, I desire you to have the chance of earning the fifty pfennings we have promised to give you when we get to the top.’

  He began to pull again, but no longer with any pride in his performance. Vicki and I walked in silence behind, and at the next steep bit, instead of repeating a form of words I felt had grown vain, I skilfully unhooked the parcel of meat hanging on the right-hand runner and carried it, and Vicki, always quick to follow my example, unhooked the biography of Goethe from the left-hand runner and carried that. The sledge leaped forward, and for a space the boy climbed with greater vigour. Then came another long steep bit, and he flagged again.

  ‘Come, come,’ said I, ‘it is quite easy.’

  He at once stopped and wiped his forehead. ‘If it is easy,’ he asked, ‘why do you not do it yourself?’

  ‘Because, my dear little boy,’ said I, trying to be patient, but meat is heavy, and I knew it to be raw, and I feared every moment to feel a dreadful dampness oozing through the paper, and I was out of breath, and no longer completely calm, ‘you engaged to pull it up for us, and having engaged to do it, it is your duty to do it. I will not come between a boy and his duty.’

  The boy looked at Vicki. ‘How she talks,’ he said.

  Vicki and I again stared at each other in silent wonder, and while we were staring he pulled the sledge sideways across the road and sat down.

  ‘Come, come,’ said I, striving after a brisk severity.

  ‘I am tired,’ he said, leaning his chin on his hand and studying first my face and then Vicki’s with a detached, impartial scrutiny.