LXVI
Galgenberg, Jan. 7.
DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—I couldn’t write before, I’ve been too busy. The manuscript went this morning after real hard work day and night, and now I feel like a squeezed lemon that yet is cheerful, if you can conceive such a thing. Joey’s father has been and gone. He arrived late one night, inspected the Lindebergs, gave his consent, and was off twenty-four hours later. The Lindebergs were much disconcerted by these quick methods, they who like to move slowly, think slowly, and sit hours over each meal; and they had not said half they wanted to say, and he had not eaten half he was intended to eat before he was gone. Also, he disconcerted them—indeed, it was more than that, he upset them utterly, by not looking like what they had made up their minds he would look like. The Galgenberg expected to see some one who should be blatantly rich, and blatant riches, it dimly felt, would be expressed by much flesh and a thick watch chain. Instead, the man had a head like Julius Caesar, lean, thoughtful, shrewd, and a spare body that made Papa Lindeberg’s seem strangely pulpy and as if it were held together only by the buttons of his clothes. We were staggered. Frau von Lindeberg couldn’t understand why a man so rich should also be so thin—‘He is in a position to have the costliest cooking,’ she said several times, looking at me with amazed eyebrows; nor could she understand why a man without ancestors should yet make her husband, whose past bristles with them, be the one to look as if he hadn’t got any. She mused much, and aloud. While Vicki was being run breathlessly over the mountains by her nimble future father-in-law, with Joey, devoured by pride in them both, in attendance, I went down to ask if I could help in the cooking, and found her going about her kitchen like one in a dream. She let me tuck up my sleeves and help her, and while I did it she gave vent to many musings about England and its curious children. ‘Strange, strange people,’ she kept on saying helplessly.
But she is the happiest woman in Germany at this moment, happier far than Vicki, for she sees with her older eyes the immense advantages that are to be Vicki’s, who sees at present nothing at all but Joey. And then the deliciousness of being able to write to all those relations grown of late so supercilious, to Cousin Mienchen who came and played the rich, and tell them the glorious news. Vicki basks in the sunshine of a mother’s love again, and never hears a cross word. Good things are showered down on her, presents, pettings, admiration, all those charming things that every girl should enjoy once before her pretty girlhood has gone. It is the most delightful experience to see a family in the very act of receiving a stroke of luck. Strokes of luck, especially of these dimensions, are so very rare. It is like being present at a pantomime that doesn’t leave off, and watching the good fairy touching one grey dull unhappy thing after another into radiance and smiles. But I lose my friends, for they go to Berlin almost immediately, and from there to Manchester on a visit to Mr Collins, a visit during which the business part of the marriage is to be settled. Also, and naturally, we lose Joey. This is rather a blow, just as we had begun so pleasantly to roll in his money; but where Vicki goes he goes too, and so Papa and I will soon be left again alone on our mountain, face to face with vegetarian economies.
Well, it has been a pleasant interlude, and I who first saw Vicki steeped in despair, red-eyed, piteous, slighted, talked about, shall see her at last departing down the hill arrayed in glory as with a garment. Then I shall turn back, when the last whisk of her shining skirts has gleamed round the bend of the road, to my own business, to the sober trudging along the row of days allotted me, to the making of economies, the reading of good books, the practice of abstract excellences, the pruning of my soul. My soul, I must say, has had some vigorous prunings. It ought by now to be of an admirable sturdiness. You yourself once lopped off a most luxuriant growth that was, I agree, best away, and now these buds of friendship, of easier circumstances, are going to be nipped off too, and when they are gone what will be left, I wonder, but the uncompromising and the rugged? Is it possible I am so base as to be envious? In spite of my real pleasure I can’t shut out a certain wistfulness, a certain little pang, and exactly what kind of wistfulness it is and exactly what kind of pang I don’t well know, unless it is envy. Vicki’s lot is the last one I would choose, yet it makes me wistful. It includes Joey, yet I feel a little pang. This is very odd; for Joey as a husband, a person from whom you cannot get away, would be rather more than I could suffer with any show of gladness. How, then, can I be envious? Of course, if Joey knew what I am writing he would thrust an incredulous tongue in his cheek, wink a sceptical eye, and mutter some eternal truth about grapes; but I, on the other hand, would watch him doing it with the perfect calm of him who sticks unshakably to his point. What would his cheek, his tongue, and his winking eye be to me? They would leave me wholly unmoved, not a hair’s breadth moved from my original point, which is that Joey is not a person you can marry. But certainly it is a good and delightful thing that Vicki thinks he is and thinks it with such conviction. I tell you the top of our mountain is in a perpetual rosy glow nowadays, as though the sun never left it; and the entire phenomenon is due solely to these two joyful young persons.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
LXVII
Galgenberg, Jan. 12.
DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—I did a silly thing today: I went and mourned in an empty house. I don’t think I’m generally morbid, but today I indulged in a perfect orgy of morbidness. Write and scold me. It is your turn to scold, and by doing it thoroughly you will bring me back to my ordinary cheerful state. The Lindebergs are gone, and I am feeling it absurdly. I didn’t realize how much I loved that little dear Vicki, nor in the least the interest Frau von Lindeberg’s presence and doings gave life. The last three weeks have been so thrilling, there was so much warmth and brightness going about, that it reached even onlookers like myself, and warmed and lighted them; and now in the twinkling of an eye it is gone—gone, wiped out, snuffed out, and Papa and I are alone again, and there is a northeast wind. These are the times when philosophy is so useful; but do explain why it is that one is only a philosopher so long as one is happy. When I am contented, and everything is just as I like it, I can philosophize beautifully, and do it with a hearty sincerity that convinces both myself and the person listening to me; but when the bad days come, the empty days, the disappointing, chilly days, behold Philosophy, that serene and dignified companion so long as the weather was fine, clutching her academic skirts hastily together and indulging in the form of rapid retreat known to the vulgar and the graphic as skedaddling. ‘Do not all charms fly,’ your Keats inquires, ‘at the mere touch of cold Philosophy?’ But I have found that nothing flies quite so fast as cold Philosophy herself; she would win in any race when the race is who shall run away quickest; she is of no use whatever—it is my deliberate conclusion—except to sit with in the sun on the south side of a sheltering wall on those calm afternoons of life when you’ve only got to open your mouth and ripe peaches drop into it. I used to think if I could love her enough she would, in her gratitude, chloroform me safely over all the less pleasant portions of life, see to it that I was unconscious during the passage, never let me be aware of anything but the beautiful and the good; but either she has no gratitude or I have little love, and the years have brought me the one conviction that she is an artist at leaving you in the lurch. The world is strewn with persons she has left in it, and out of the three inhabitants of a mountain to leave one there is surely an enormous percentage. Now, what is your opinion of a woman with a healthy body, a warm room, and a sufficient dinner, who feels as though the soul within her were an echoing cavern, empty, cold, and dark? It is what I feel at this moment, and it is shameful. Isn’t it shameful that the sight of leaden clouds—but they really are dreadful clouds, inky, ragged, harassed—scudding across the sky, and of furious brown beech-leaves on the little trees in front of the Lindebergs’ deserted house being lashed and maddened by the wind, should make me suddenly catch my breath for pain? It is pain, quite sharp,
unmistakable pain, and it is because I am alone, and my friends gone, and the dusk is falling. This afternoon I leaned against their gate and really suffered. Regret for the past, fear for the future—vague, rather terrifying fears, not wholly unconnected with you—hurt so much that they positively succeeded in wringing a tear out of me. It was a very reluctant tear, and only came out after a world of wringing, and I had stood there a most morbid long time before it appeared; but it did appear, and the vicious wind screamed round the Lindebergs’ blank house, rattled its staring naked windows, banged in wild gusts about the road where the puddles of half-melted snow reflected the blackness of the sky, tore at my hair and dress, stung my cheeks, shook the gate I held on to, thundered over the hills. Dear young man, I don’t want to afflict you with these tales of woe and weakness, but I must tell you what I did next. I went up and got the key from Johanna, in whose keeping Frau von Lindeberg had left it, and came down again, and unlocked the door of the house lately so full of light and life, and crept fearfully about the echoing rooms and up the dismal stairs, and let myself go, as I tell you, to a very orgy of morbidness. It was like a nightmare. Memories took the form of ghosts, and clutched at me through the balusters and from behind doors with thin cold fingers; and the happiest memories were those that clutched the coldest. I fled at last in a sudden panic, flying out of reach of them, slamming the door to, running for my life up the road and in at our gate. Johanna did not let me in at once, and I banged with my fists in a frenzy to get away from the black sky and the threatening thunder of the storm-stricken pines. ‘Herr Gott,’ said Johanna, when she saw me; so that I must have looked rather wild.
Well, I am weak, you see, just as weak and silly as the very weakest and silliest in spite of my big words and brave face. I am writing now as near the stove as possible in Papa’s room, glad to be with him, glad to be warm, grateful to sit with somebody alive after that hour with the ghosts; and the result of deep considering has been to force me to face the fact that there is much meanness in my nature. There is. Don’t bother to contradict; there is. All my forlornness since yesterday is simply the outcome of a mixture of envy and self-pity. I do miss dear Vicki, whom I greatly loved, I do miss the cheery Joey, I miss Papa Lindeberg who likened me to Hebe, I miss his wife who kept me in my proper place—it is quite true that I miss these people, but that would never of itself be a feeling strong enough to sweep me off my feet into black pools of misery as I was swept this afternoon, and never, never would make me, who have so fine a contempt for easy tears, cry. No, Mr Anstruther, bitter truths once seen have to be stared at squarely, and I am simply comparing my lot with Vicki’s and being sorry for myself. It is amazing that it should be so, for have I not everything a reasonable being needs, and am I not, then, a reasonable being? And the meanness of it; for it does imply a grudging, an uneasiness in the presence of somebody else’s happiness. Well, I’m thoroughly ashamed, and that at least is a good thing; and now that you know how badly I too need lecturing, and how I am torn by particularly ungenerous emotions, perhaps you’ll see what a worthless person I am, and will take me down from the absurd high pinnacle on which you persist in keeping me, and on which I have felt so desperately uncomfortable for months past. It is infinitely humiliating, I do assure you, to be—shall we say venerated? for excellences one would like to possess but is most keenly aware one does not. Persons with any tendency to be honest about themselves and with even the smallest grain of a sense of humour should never be chosen as idols and set up aloft in giddy places. They make shockingly bad idols. They are divided by a desire to laugh and an immense pity for the venerator.
I add these observations, dear friend, to the description of my real nature that has gone before because your letters are turning more and more into the sort of letters that ends a placid friendship. I want to be placid. I love being placid. I insist on being placid. And the thought of your letters, with so little of placidness about them, was with me this afternoon in that terrible house, and it added to the fear of the future that seized me by the throat and would not let me go. Is it, then, so impossible to be friends, just friends with a man, in the same dear frank way one is with another woman, or a man is with a man? I hoped you and I were going to prove the possibility triumphantly. I even, so keenly do I desire it, prayed that we were. But perhaps there is little use in such praying.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
You may scold me as much as you like, but you are not to comfort me. Do not make the mistake, I earnestly beg you, of supposing that I want to be comforted.
LXVIII
Galgenberg, Jan. 13.
DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—Just a line to tell you that I have recovered, and you are not to take my letter yesterday too seriously. I woke up this morning perfectly normal, and able to look out on the day before me with the usual interest. Then something very nice happened: my translation of Papa’s book didn’t come back, but instead arrived an urbane letter expressing a kind of reluctant willingness, if you can imagine the mixture, to publish it. What do you think of that? The letter, it is true, goes on to suggest, still with urbanity, that no doubt no one will ever buy it, but promises if ever any one does to send us a certain just portion of what was paid for it. ‘Observe, Rose-Marie,’ said Papa, when his first delight had calmed, ‘the unerring instinct with which the English, very properly called a nation of shopkeepers, instantly recognize the value of a good thing when they see it. Consider the long years during which I have vainly beaten at the doors of the German public, and compare its deafness with the quick response of our alert and admirable cousins across the Channel. Well do I know which was the part that specially appealed to this man’s business instinct——’
And he mentioned, while my guilty ears burned crimson, a chapter of statistics, the whole of which I had left out.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
LXIX
Galgenberg, Jan. 14.
DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—I see no use whatever in a friend if one cannot tell him about one’s times of gloom without his immediately proposing to do the very thing one doesn’t want him to do, which is to pay one a call. Your telegram has upset me, you see, into a reckless use of the word ‘one,’ a word I spend hours sometimes endeavouring to circumvent, and which I do circumvent if I am in good bodily and spiritual health, but the moment my vitality is lowered, as it is now by your telegram, I cease to be either strong enough or artful enough to dodge it. There are four of it in that sentence: I fling them to you in a handful, only remarking that they are your fault, not mine.
Now, listen to me—I will drop this playfulness, which I don’t in the least feel, and be serious:—why do you want to come and, as you telegraph, talk things over? I don’t want to talk things over; it is a fatal thing to do. May I not tell you frankly of my moods, of my downs as well as of my ups, without at once setting you off in the direction of too much kindness? After I had written that letter I was afraid; and I opened it again to tell you it was not your comfortings and pityings that I wanted, but the sterner remedy of a good scolding; yet your answer is a telegram to ask if you may come. Of course I telegraphed back that I should not be here. It is quite true: I should not if you came. I will not see you. Nothing can be gained by it, and everything might be lost—oh, everything, everything might be lost. I would see to it that you did not find me. The forests are big, and I can walk, if needs be, for hours. You will think me quite savagely unkind, but I can’t help that. Perhaps if your letters lately had been different I would not so obstinately refuse to see you, but I have a wretched feeling that my poor soul is going to be pruned again, pruned of its last, most pleasant growth, and you are on the road to saying and doing things we shall both be for ever sorry for. I have tried my best to stop you, to pull you up, and I hope with all my heart that I may not be going to get a letter that will spoil things irreparably. Have not my hints been big enough? Let me beg you not to write foolishnesses that cannot, once sent, be g
ot back again and burned. But at least when you sit down to write you can consider your words, and those that have come out too impulsively can go into the fire; while if you came here what would you do with your tongue, I wonder? There is no means of stopping that once it is well started, and the smallest thing sets it off in terrible directions. Am I not your friend? Will you not spare me? Must I be forced to speak with a plainness that will, by comparison, make all my previous plainness seem the very essence of polite artificialness? Of all the wise counsel any one could offer you at this moment there is none half so wise, none that, taken, would be half so precious to us both, as the counsel to leave well alone. I offer it you earnestly; oh, more than earnestly—with a passionate anxiety lest you should refuse it.
Your sincere friend,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
I suppose it is true what I have often suspected, that I am a person doomed to lose, one by one, the things that have been most dear to me.
LXX
Jan. 16.
WELL, THERE IS no help, then. You will do it. You will put an end to it. You have written me a love-letter, the thing I have been trying so hard for so long to stop your doing, and there is nothing to be done but to drop into silence.
Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther Page 25
