It was too sweet of you to compare me to Nausicaa in your letter yesterday. Nobody ever did that before. Various aunts, among whom a few years ago there was a great mortality, so that they are all now aunts in heaven, told me in divers tones that I was much too long for my width, that I was like the handle of a broom, like the steeple of the Stadtkirche, like a tree walking; but none of them ever said anything about Nausicaa. I doubt if they had ever heard of her. I’m afraid if they had they wouldn’t have seen that I am like her. You know the blindness of aunts. Jena is full of them (not mine, Gott sei Dank, but other people’s) and they are all stone-blind. I don’t mean, of course, that the Jena streets are thick with aunts being led by dogs on strings, but that they have that tragic blindness of the spirit that misses seeing things that are hopeful and generous and lovely; things alight with young enthusiasms, or beautiful with a patience that has had time to grow gray. They also have that odd, unfurnished sort of mind that can never forget and never forgive. Yesterday at the Kaffee-Klatsch I met them all again, the Jena aunts I know so well and who are yet for ever strange, for ever of a ghastly freshness. It was the first this season, and now I suppose I shall waste many a good afternoon klatsching. How I wish I had not to go. My step-mother says that if I do not show myself I shall be put down as eccentric. ‘You are not very popular,’ says she, ‘as it is. Do not, therefore, make matters worse.’ Then she appeals, should a more than usual stubbornness cloud my open countenance, to Papa. ‘Ferdinand,’ she says, ‘shall she not, then, do as others of her age?’ And of course Papa says, bless him, that girls must see life occasionally, and is quite unhappy if I won’t. Life? God bless him for a dear, innocent Papa. And how they talked yesterday. Papa would have writhed. He never will talk or listen to talk about women unless they’ve been dead some time, so uninteresting, so unworthy of discussion does he consider all live females except Johanna to be. And if I hadn’t had my love-letter (I took it with me tucked inside my dress, where my heart could beat against it), I don’t think I would have survived that Klatsch. You’ve no idea how proudly I set out. Hadn’t I just been reading the sweetest things about myself in your letter? Of course I was proud. And I felt so important, and so impressive, and simply gloriously good-tempered. The pavement of Jena, I decided as I walked over it, was quite unworthy to be touched by my feet; and if the passers-by only knew it, an extremely valuable person was in their midst. In fact, my dear Roger, I fancied myself yesterday. Didn’t Odysseus think Nausicaa was Artemis when first he met her among the washing, so god-like did she appear? Well, I felt god-like yesterday, made god-like by your love. I actually fancied people would see something wonderful had happened to me, that I was transfigured, verklärt. Positively, I had a momentary feeling that my coming in, the coming in of anything so happy, must blind the Kaffee-Klatsch, that anything so burning with love must scorch it. Well, it didn’t. Never did torch plunged into wetness go out with a drearier fizzle than did my little shining. Nobody noticed anything different. Nobody seemed even to look at me. A few careless hands were stretched out, and the hostess told me to ask the servant to bring more milk.
They were talking about sin. We don’t sin much in Jena, so generally they talk about sick people, or their neighbor’s income and what he does with it. But yesterday they talked sin. You know because we are poor and Papa has no official position and I have come to be twenty-five without having found a husband, I am a quantité négligeable in our set, a being in whose presence everything can be said, and who is expected to sit in a draught if there is one. Too old to join the young girls in the corner set apart for them, where they whisper and giggle and eat amazing quantities of whipped cream, I hover uneasily on the outskirts of the group of the married, and try to ingratiate myself by keeping on handing them cakes. It generally ends in my being sent out every few minutes by the hostess to the kitchen to fetch more food and things. ‘Rose-Marie is so useful,’ she will explain to the others when I have been extra quick and cheerful; but I don’t suppose Nausicaa’s female acquaintances said more. The man Ulysses might take her for a goddess, but the most the women would do would be to commend the way she did the washing. Sometimes I have great trouble not to laugh when I see their heads, often quite venerable, gathered together in an eager bunch, and hear them expressing horror, sympathy, pity, in every sort of appropriate tone, while their eyes, their tell-tale eyes, betrayers of the soul, look pleased. Why they should be pleased when somebody has had an operation or doesn’t pay his debts I can’t make out. But they do. And after a course of Klatsches throughout the winter, you are left toward April with one firm conviction in a world where everything else is shaky, that there’s not a single person who isn’t either extraordinarily ill, or, if he’s not, who does not misuse his health and strength by not paying his servants’ wages.
Yesterday the Klatsch was in a fearful flutter. It had got hold of a tale of sin, real or suspected. It was a tale of two people who, after leading exemplary lives for years, had suddenly been clutched by the throat by Nature; and Nature, we know, cares nothing at all for the claims of husbands and wives or any other lawfulnesses, and is a most unmoral and one-idea’d person. They have, says Jena, begun to love each other in defiance of the law. Nature has been too many for them, I suppose. All Jena is a-twitter. Nothing can be proved, but everything is being feared, said the hostess; from her eyes I’m afraid she wanted to say hoped. Isn’t it ugly? — pfui, as we say. And so stale, if it’s true. Why can’t people defy Nature and be good? The only thing that is always fresh and beautiful is goodness. It is also the only thing that can make you go on being happy indefinitely.
I know her well. My heart failed me when I heard her being talked about so hideously. She is the nicest woman in Jena. She has been kind to me often. She is very clever. Perhaps if she had been more dull she would have found no temptation to do anything but jog along respectably — sometimes I think that to be without imagination is to be so very safe. He has only come to these parts lately. He used to be in Berlin, and has been appointed to a very good position in Weimar. I have not met him, but Papa says he is brilliant. He has a wife, and she has a husband, and they each have a lot of children; so you see if it’s true it really is very pfui.
Just as the Kaffee-Klatsch was on the wane, and crumbs were being brushed off laps, and bonnet-strings tied, in she walked. There was a moment’s dead silence. Then you should have heard the effusion of welcoming speeches. The hostess ran up and hugged her. The others were covered with pleasant smiles. Perhaps they were grateful to her for having provided such thrilling talk. When I had to go and kiss her hand I never in my life felt baser. You should have seen her looking round cheerfully at all the Judases, and saying she was sorry to be late, and asking if they hadn’t missed her; and you should have heard the eager chorus of assurances.
Oh, pfui, pfui.
R.-M.
How much I love goodness, straightness, singleness of heart — you.
Later.
I walked part of the way home with the calumniated one. How charming she is. Dear little lady, it would be difficult not to love her. She talked delightfully about German and English poetry. Do you think one can talk delightfully about German and English poetry and yet be a sinner? Tell me, do you think a woman who is very intellectual, but very very intellectual, could yet be a sinner? Would not her wits save her? Would not her bright wits save her from anything so dull as sin?
IX
Jena, Nov. 18th.
Dearest, — I don’t think I like that girl at all. Your letter from Clinches has just come, and I don’t think I like her at all. What is more, I don’t think I ever shall like her. And what is still more, I don’t think I even want to. So your idea of her being a good friend to me later on in London must retire to that draughty corner of space where abortive ideas are left to eternal shivering. I’m sorry if I am offensively independent. But then I know so well that I won’t be lonely if I’m with you, and I think rooting up, which you speak of as a difficult
and probably painful process, must be very nice if you are the one to do it, and I am sure I could never by any possibility reach such depths of strangeness and doubt about what to do next as would induce me to stretch out appealing hands to a young woman with eyes that, as you put it, tilt at the corners. I wish you hadn’t told her about us, about me. It has profaned things so, dragged them out into the streets, cheapened them. I don’t in the least want to tell my father, or any one else. Does this sound as though I were angry? Well, I don’t think I am. On the contrary, I rather want to laugh. You dear silly! So clever and so simple, so wise and crammed with learning, and such a dear, ineffable goose. How old am I, I wonder? Only as old as you? Really only as old? Nonsense: I’m fifteen, twenty years your senior, my dear sir. I’ve lived in Jena, you in London I frequent Kaffee-Klatsches, and you the great world. I talk much with Johanna in the kitchen, and you with heaven knows what in the way of geniuses. Yet no male Nancy Cheriton, were his eyelids never so tilted, would wring a word out of me about a thing so near, so precious, so much soul of my soul as my lover.
How would you explain this? I’ve tried and can’t.
Your rebellious
ROSE-MARIE.
Darling, darling, don’t ask me to like Nancy. The thing’s unthinkable.
Later.
Now I know why I am wiser than you: life in kitchens and Klatsches turns the soul gray very early. Didn’t one of your poets sing of somebody who had a sad lucidity of soul? I’m afraid that is what’s the matter with me.
X
Jena, Nov. 19th.
Oh, what nonsense everything seems, — everything of the nature of differences, of arguments, on a clear morning up among the hills. I am ashamed of what I wrote about Nancy; ashamed of my eagerness and heat about a thing that does not matter. On the hills this morning, as I was walking in the sunshine, it seemed to me that I met God. And He took me by the hand, and let me walk with Him. And He showed me how beautiful the world is, how beautiful the background He has given us, the spacious, splendid background on which to paint our large charities and loves. And I looked across the hilltops, golden, utterly peaceful, and amazement filled me in the presence of that great calm at the way I flutter through my days and at the noise I make. Why should I cry out before I am hurt? flare up into heat and clamor? The pure light up there made it easy to see clearly, and I saw that I have been silly and ungrateful. Forgive me. You know best about Nancy, you who have seen her; and I, just come down from that holy hour on the hills, am very willing to love her. I will not turn my back upon a ready friend. She can have no motive but a good one. Roger, I am a blunderer, a clumsy creature with not one of my elemental passions bound down yet into the decent listlessness of chains. But I shall grow better, grow more worthy of you. Not a day shall pass without my having been a little wiser than the day before, a little kinder, a little more patient. I wish you had been with me this morning. It was so still and the sky so clear that I sat on the old last year’s grass as warmly as in summer. I felt irradiated with life and love; light shining on to every tiresome incident of life and turning it into beauty, love for the whole wonderful world, and all the people in it, and all the beasts and flowers, and all the happy living things. Indeed blessings have been given me in full measure, pressed down and running over. In the whole of that little town at my feet, so quiet, so bathed in lovely light, there was not, there could not be, another being so happy as myself. Surely I am far too happy to grudge accepting a kindness? I tell you I marvel at the energy of my protest yesterday. Perhaps it was — oh Roger, after those hours on the hills I will be honest, I will pull off the veil from feelings that the female mind generally refuses to uncover — perhaps the real reason, the real, pitiful, mean reason was that I felt sure somehow from your description of her that Nancy’s blouses must be very perfect things, things beyond words very perfect. And I was jealous of her blouses. There now. Good-by.
XI
Jena, Nov. 20th.
I am glad you did not laugh at that silly letter of mine about scorching in the sun on rocks. Indeed I gather, my dear Roger, that you liked it. Make the most of it then, for there will be no more of the sort. A decent woman never gets on to rocks, and if she scorches she doesn’t say so. And I believe that it is held to be generally desirable that she should not, even under really trying circumstances, part with her dignity. I rather think the principle was originally laid down by the husband of an attractive wife, but it is a good one, and so long as I am busy clinging to my dignity obviously I shall have no leisure for clinging to you, and then you will not be suffocated with the superabundance of my follies.
About those two sinners who are appalling us: how can I agree with you? To do so would cut away the ground from under my own feet. The woman plays such a losing game. She gives so much, and gets so little. So long as the man loves her I do see that he is worth the good opinion of neighbors and relations, which is one of the chilliest things in the world; but he never seems able to go on loving her once she has begun to wither. That is very odd. She does not mind his withering. And has she not a soul? And does not that grow always lovelier? But what, then, becomes of her? For wither she certainly will, and years rush past at such a terrific pace that almost before she has begun to be happy it is over. He goes back to his wife, a person who has been either patient or bitter according to the quantity of her vitality and the quality of her personal interests, and concludes, while he watches her sewing on his buttons in the corner she has probably been sitting in through all his vagrant years, that marriage has its uses, and that it is good to know there will be some one bound to take care of you up to the last, and who will shed decent tears when you are buried. She goes back — but where, and to what? They have gone long ago, her husband, her children, her friends. And she is old, and alone. You too, like everybody else, seem unable to remember how transient things are. Time goes, emotions wear out. You say these people are in the hands of Fate, and can no more get out of them and do differently than a fly in a web can walk away when it sees the hungry spider coming nearer. I don’t believe in webs and spiders; at least, I don’t today. Today I believe only in my unconquerable soul —
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
And you say that a person in the grip of a great feeling should not care a straw for circumstance, should defy it, trample it under foot. Heaven knows that I too am for love and laughter, for the snatching of flying opportunities, for all that makes the light and the glory of life; but what afterwards? The Afterwards haunts me like a weeping ghost. It is true there is still the wide world, the warm sun, seed-time and harvest, Shakespeare, the Book of Job, singing birds, flowers; but the soul that has transgressed the laws of man seems for ever afterwards unable to use the gifts of God. If supreme joy could be rounded off by death, death at the exact right moment, how easy things would be. Only death has a strange way of shunning those persons who want him most. To long to die seems to make you as nearly immortal as it is possible to become. Now just think what would have happened if Tristan had not been killed, had lived on quite healthily. King Mark, than whom I know no man in literature more polite, would have handed Isolde over to him as he declared himself ready to have done had he been aware of the unfortunately complicated state of things, and he would have done it with every expression of decent regret at the inconvenience he had caused. Isolde would have married Tristan. There would have been no philosophy, no divine hours in the garden, no acute, exquisite anguish of love and sorrow. But there would presently have been the Middle Ages equivalent for a perambulator, a contented Tristan coming to meet it, a faded Isolde who did not care for poetry, admonishing, perhaps with sharpness, a mediæval nursemaid, and quite quickly afterwards a Tristan grown too comfortable to move, and an Isolde with wrinkles. Would we not have lost a great deal if they had lived? It is certain that they themselves would have lost a great deal; for I don’t see that contentment beaten out thin enough to cover a long life — and beat a
s thin as you will it never does cover quite across the years — is to be compared with one supreme contentment heaped in one heap on the highest, keenest point of living we reach. Now I am apparently arguing on your side, but I’m not really, because you, you know, think of love as a perpetual crescendo, and I, though I do hear the crescendo and follow it with a joyful clapping of hands up to the very top of its splendor, can never forget the drop on the other side, the inevitable diminuendo to the dead level — and then? Why, the rest is not even silence, but a querulous murmur, a querulous, confused whining, confused complaining, not very loud, not very definite, but always there till the last chord is reached a long time afterwards — that satisfactory common chord of death. My point is, that if you want to let yourself go to great emotions you ought to have the luck to die at an interesting moment. The alternative makes such a dreary picture; and it is the picture I always see when I hear of love at defiance with the law. The law wins; always, inevitably. Husbands are best; always, inevitably. Really, the most unsatisfactory husband is a person who should be clung to steadily from beginning to end, for did not one marry him of one’s own free will? How ugly then, because one had been hasty, foolish, unacquainted with one’s usually quite worthless mind, to punish him. The brilliant professor, the fascinating little lady, what are they but grossly selfish people, cruelly punishing the husband and wife who had the misfortune to marry them? Oh, it’s a mercy most of us are homely, slow of wit, heavy of foot; for so at least we stay at home and find our peace in fearful innocence and household laws. (Please note my familiarity with the British poets.) But isn’t that a picture of frugal happiness, of the happiness that comes from a daily simple obedience to the Stern Daughter of the Voice of God, beside which stormy, tremendous, brief things come off very badly? I don’t believe you do in your heart side with the two sinners. Bother them. They have made me feel like a Lutheran pastor on a Sunday afternoon. But you know I love you.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 87
