‘Continue.’
‘Dreary.’
‘Continue.’ He nodded his head gently at each adjective and counted them off on his fingers.
‘I see it full of ink-spots, dog-eared grammars, and little boys.’
‘Continue.’
‘It is a constant going over the same ground — in itself a maddening process. No sooner do the boys reach a certain age and proficiency and become slightly more interesting than they go on to somebody else, and you begin again at the beginning with another batch. You teach in a bare-walled room with enormous glaring windows, and the ring of the electric tram-bell in the street below makes the commas in your sentences. You have been doing this every day for thirty years. The boys you taught at first are fathers of families now. The trees in the playground have grown from striplings into big shady things. Everything has gone on, and so have you — but you have only gone on getting drier and more bored.’
‘Continue,’ said he, smiling.
‘Your intelligence,’ said I, coming down a little nearer, ‘restless at first, and for ever trying to push green shoots through the thick rind of routine—’
‘Good. Quite good. Continue.’
‘ — through to a wider space, a more generous light—’
‘Poetic. Quite poetic. My compliments.’
‘Thank you. Your intelligence, then, for ever — for ever — you’ve interrupted me, and I don’t know where I’d got to.’
‘You have got to my intelligence having green shoots.’
‘Oh, yes. Well, they’re not green now. That’s the point I’ve been stumbling toward. They ought to be, if you had taken bigger handfuls of leisure and had not wholly wasted your time drudging. But now they ought to be more than shoots — great trees, in whose shade we all would sit gratefully, and you enjoying free days, with the pleasant memory of free years behind you and the cheerful hope of roomy years to come. And during all that time of your imprisonment in a class-room the world outside went on its splendid way, the seasons filled it with beauty which you were not there to see, the sun shone and warmed other people, the winds blew and made other people’s flesh tingle and their blood dance — you, of course, were cramped up with cold feet and a headache — the birds sang to other people tunes of heaven, while in your ears buzzed only the false quantities of reluctant little boys, the delicious rain—’
‘Stop, stop. You forget I had to earn a living.’
‘Of course you had. But you know you earned your living long ago. What you are earning now is much more like your dying — the dying, the atrophy of your soul. What does it matter if your wife has one bonnet less a year, and no silk dress—’
‘Do not let her hear you,’ he said, glancing round.
‘ — or if you keep no servant, and have less to eat on Sundays than your neighbors, give no parties, and don’t cumber yourselves up with acquaintances who care nothing for you? If you gave up these things you could also give up drudging. You are too old to drudge. You have been too old these twenty years. A man of your brains—’ he pretended to look grateful— ‘who cannot earn enough between twenty and thirty to keep him from the necessity of slaving for the rest of his days is not — is not—’
‘Worthy of the name of man?’
‘I don’t know that that’s a great thing,’ said I doubtfully.
‘Let it pass. It is an accepted ending to a sentence beginning as yours did. And now, my dear young lady, you have preached me a sermon—’
‘Not a sermon.’
‘Permitted me, then, to be present at a lecture—’
‘Not a lecture.’
‘Anyhow held forth on the unworthily puny outer conditions of my existence. Tell me, now, one thing. I concede the ink-spots, the little boys, the monotony, the tram-bells, the regrettable number of years; they are all there, and you with your vivid imagination see them all. But tell me one thing: has it never occurred to you that they are the merest shell, the merest husk and envelopment, and that it is possible that in spite of them—’ his voice grew serious— ‘my life may be very rich within?’
And you, my friend, tell me another thing. Am I not desperately, hopelessly horrid? Short-sighted? Impertinent? The readiest jumper at conclusions? The most arrogant critic of other people? Rich within. Of course. Hidden with God. That is what I have never seen when I have looked on superciliously from the height of my own idleness at these drudging lives. And see how amazing has been my foolishness, for would not my own life judged from outside, this life here alone with Papa, this restricted, poor, solitary life, my first youth gone, my future without prospects, no distractions, few friends, Papa’s affection growing vaguer as he grows older, would it not, looked at as I have been looking at my neighbor’s, seem entirely blank and desolate? Yet how sincerely can I echo what he said — My life is very rich within. Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XLIV
Galgenberg, Sept. 16th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther, — It is kind of you to want to contradict what I said in my last letter about the outward appearance of my life, but really you know I am past my first youth. At twenty-six I cannot pretend to be what is known as a young girl, and I don’t want to. Not for anything would I be seventeen or eighteen again. I like to be a woman grown, to have entered into the full possession of whatever faculties I am to have, to know what I want, to look at things in their true proportions. I don’t know that eighteen has anything that compensates for that. It is such a rudderless sort of age. It may be more charming to the beholder, but it is not half so nice to the person herself. What is the good of loving chocolate to distraction when it only ends by making you sick? And the joy of a new frock or hat is dashed at once when you meet the superior gorgeousness of some other girl’s frock or hat. And parties are often disappointing things. And students, though they are deeply interesting, easily lead to tiresome complications if they admire you, and if they don’t that isn’t very nice either. Why, even the young man in the cake-shop who used so gallantly to serve us with lemonade and had such wonderful curly eyelashes was not much good really, for he couldn’t be invited to tea, and whenever we wanted to look at his eyelashes we had to buy a cake, and cakes are dreadfully expensive for persons who have no money. Yes, it is a silly, tittering, calf-like age, and I am glad it can’t come back again. Please do not think that I need comforting because it is gone, or because of any of the other items in the list I gave you. The future looks quite pleasant to me, — quite bright and sunny. It is only empty of what people call prospects, by which I take them to mean husbands, but I shall fill it with pigs instead. I have great plans. I see what can be done with even one pig from my neighbor’s example, who has dug out a sort of terrace and put a sty on it: simply wonders. And how much more could be done with two. I mean to be a very happy old maid. I shall fix my attention in the mornings on remunerative objects like pigs, and spend beautiful afternoons, quite idle physically but with my soul busy up among the poets. Later on in distant years, when Papa doesn’t want me any more, I shall try to find a little house somewhere where it is flat, so that I can have other creatures about me besides bees, which are the only live stock I can keep here. And you mustn’t think I shall not be happy, because I shall. So happy. I am happy now, and I mean to be happy then; and when I am very old and have to die I shall be happy about that too. I shall ‘lay me down with a will,’ as the bravest of your countrymen sang.
Do my plans seem to you selfish? I expect they do. People so easily call those selfish who stand a little aside and look on at life. We have a poet of whom we are proud, but whose fame has not, I think, reached across to England, a rugged, robust poet, not very far below Goethe, a painter on large canvasses, best at mighty scenes, perhaps least good in small things, in lyrics, in the things in which Heine was so exquisite; and he for my encouragement has said,
Bei sich selber fangt man an,
Da man nicht Allen helfen kann.
Isn’t it a nice jingle? The man’s
name is Hebbel, and he lived round about the forties, and perhaps you know more of him than I do, and I have been arrogant again; but it is a jingle that has often cheered me when I was afraid I ought to be teaching somebody something, or making clothes for somebody, or paying somebody domiciliary visits and talking fluently of the lieber Gott. I shrink from these things; and a shrinking visitor, shy and uncertain, cannot be so nice as no visitor at all. Is it very wrong of me? When my conscience says it is — it does not say so often — I try to make up by going into the kitchen and asking Johanna kind questions about her mother. I must say she is rather odd when I do. She not only doesn’t meet me half-way, she doesn’t come even part of the way. She clatters her saucepans with an energy very like fury, and grows wholly monosyllabic. Yet it is not her step-mother; it is her very own mother, and it ought to be the best way of touching responsive chords in her heart and making her feel I am not merely a mistress but a friend. Once, struck by the way the lids of the saucepans were falling about, I tried her with her father, but the din instantly became so terrific that I was kept silent quite a long time, and when it left off felt instinctively that I had better say something about the weather. I don’t think I told you that after that trumpeting Sunday, moved to real compassion by the sufferings of him you call the fiddler man, I took my courage in both hands and told Johanna with the pleasantest of smiles — I daresay it was really a rather ghastly one — that her trumpeter must not again bring his instrument with him when he called. ‘It can so very well stay at home,’ I explained suavely.
She immediately said she would leave on the first of October.
‘But, Johanna!’ I cried.
She repeated the formula.
‘But, Johanna! How can a clever girl like you be so unreasonable? He is to visit you as often as before. All we beg is that it shall be done without music.’
She repeated the formula.
‘But, Johanna!’ I expostulated again, — eloquent exclamation, expressing the most varied sentiments.
She once again repeated the formula; and next day I was forced to descend into Jena, shaking an extremely rueful fist at the neighbor’s house on the way, and set about searching in the obscurity of a registry office for the pearl we are trying all our lives to find.
This office consists of two rooms, the first filled with servants looking for mistresses, and the second with mistresses looking for servants. A Fräulein of vague age but determined bearing sits at a desk in the second room, and notes in a ledger the requirements of both parties. They are always the same: the would-be mistress, full of a hopefulness that crops up again and again to the end of her days, causing attributes like fleissig, treu, ehrlich, anständig, arbeitslieb, kinderlieb, to be written down together with her demands in cooking, starching, and ironing, and often adding the information that though the wages may appear small they are not really so, owing to the unusually superior quality of the treatment; and the would-be maid, briefer because without illusions, dictates her firm resolve to go nowhere where there is cooking, washing, or a baby.
‘Gott, diese Mädchen,’ exclaimed a waiting lady to me as I arrived, hot and ruffled after my long tramp in the sun. I dropped into a chair beside her; and hot and ruffled as I was, she, who had been sitting there hours, was still more so. In her agitation she had cried out to the first human being at hand, the Fräulein at the desk having something too distinctly inhuman about her — strange as a result of her long and intimate intercourse with human beings — to be lightly applied to for sympathy. Then looking at me again she cried, ‘Why, it is the good Rose-Marie!’ And I saw she was an old friend of my step-mother’s, Frau Meyer, the wife of one of the doctors at the Lunatic Asylum, who used to come in often while you were with us, and whenever she came in you went out.
‘Not married yet?’ she asked as we shook hands, smiling as though the joke were good.
I smiled with an equal conviction of its goodness, and said I was not.
‘Not even engaged?’
‘Not even engaged,’ said I, smiling more broadly, as if infinitely tickled.
‘You must be quick,’ said she.
I admitted the necessity by a nod.
‘You are twenty-six — I know your age because poor Emilie’ — Emilie was my step-mother— ‘was married ten years, and when she married you were sixteen. Twenty-six is a great age for a girl. When I was your age I had already had four children. What do you think of that?’
I didn’t know what to think of it, so smiled vaguely, and turning to the waiting machine at the desk began my list. ‘Hard-working, clean, honest—’
‘Yes, yes, if we could but find such treasures,’ interrupted Frau Meyer with a reverberating sigh. ‘Here am I engaged to give the first coffee-party of the season—’
‘What, in summer?’
‘It is not summer in September. If the weather chooses to pretend it is I cannot help it. It is autumn, and I will no longer endure the want of social gatherings. Invariably I find the time between the last Coffee of spring and the first of autumn almost unendurable. What do you do, Rose-Marie, up there on that horrible mountain of yours, to pass the time?’
Pass the time? I who am so much afraid of Time’s passing me that I try to catch at him as he goes, pull him back, make him creep slowly while I squeeze the full preciousness out of every minute? I gazed at her abstractedly, haunted by the recollection of flying days, days gone so quickly, vanished before I well knew how happy I was being. ‘I really couldn’t tell you,’ I said.
‘Hard-working, clean, honest,—’ read out the Fräulein, reminding me that I was busy.
‘Moral,’ I dictated, ‘able to wash—’
‘You will never find one,’ interrupted Frau Meyer again. ‘At least, never one who is both moral and able to wash. Two good things don’t go together with these girls, I find. The trouble I am in for want of one! They are as scarce and as expensive as roses in December. Since April I have had three, and all had to leave by the merest accident — nothing at all to do with the place or me; but the ones in there seem to know there have been three in the time, and make the most extravagant demands. I have been here the whole morning, and am in despair.’
She stopped to fan herself with her handkerchief.
‘Able to wash,’ I resumed, ‘iron, cook, mend — have you any one suitable, Fräulein?’
‘Many,’ was the laconic answer.
‘I’m afraid we cannot give more than a hundred and sixty marks,’ said I.
‘Pooh,’ said Frau Meyer; and there was a pause in the scratching of the pen.
‘But there are no children,’ I continued.
The pen went on more glibly. Frau Meyer fanned herself harder.
‘And only two Herrschaften.’
The pen skimmed over the paper.
‘We live up — we live up on the Galgenberg.’
The pen stopped dead.
‘You will never find one who will go up there,’ cried Frau Meyer triumphantly. ‘I need not fear your taking a good one away from me. They will not leave the town.’
The Fräulein rang a bell and called out a name. ‘It is another one for you, Frau Doctor,’ she said; and a large young lady came in from the other room. ‘The general servant Fräulein Ottilie Krummacher — Frau Doctor Meyer,’ introduced the Fräulein. ‘I think you may suit each other.’
‘It is time you showed me some one who will,’ groaned Frau Meyer. ‘Six have I already interviewed, and the demands of all are enough to make my mother, who was Frau Gutsbesitzer Grosskopf of the Grosskopfs of Grosskopfsecke, born Knoblauch, and a lady of the most exact knowledge in household matters, turn in her grave.’
‘Town?’ asked the large girl quickly, hardly allowing Frau Meyer to get to a full stop, and obviously callous as to the Grosskopfs of Grosskopfsecke.
‘Yes, yes — here, overlooking the market-place and the interesting statue of the electoral founder of the University. No way to go, therefore, to market. Enlivening scenes constantly visib
le from the windows—’
‘Which floor?’
‘Second. Shallow steps, and a nice balustrade. Really hardly higher than the first floor, or even than an ordinary ground floor, the rooms being very low.’
‘Washing?’
‘Done out of the house. Except the smallest, fewest trifles such as — such as — ahem. The ironing, dear Fräulein, I will do mostly myself. There are the shirts, you know — husbands are particular—’
‘How many?’
‘How many?’ echoed Frau Meyer. ‘How many what?’
‘Husbands.’
‘Aber, Fräulein,’ expostulated the secretary.
‘She said husbands,’ said the large girl. ‘Shirts, then — how many? It’s all the same.’
‘All the same?’ cried Frau Meyer, who adored her husband.
‘In the work it makes.’
‘But, dear Fräulein, the shirts are not washed at home.’
‘But ironed.’
‘I iron them.’
‘And I heat the irons and keep up the fire to heat them with.’
‘Yes, yes,’ cried Frau Meyer, affecting the extreme pleasure of one who has just received an eager assurance, ‘so you do.’
The large girl stared. ‘Cooking?’ she inquired, after a slightly stony pause.
‘Most of that I will do myself, also. The Herr is very particular. I shall only need a little — quite a little assistance. And think of all the new and excellent dishes you will learn to make.’
The girl waved this last inducement aside as unworthy of consideration. ‘Number of persons in the household?’
Frau Meyer coughed before she could answer. ‘Oh,’ said she, ‘oh, well — there is my husband, and naturally myself, and then there are — there are — are you fond of children?’ she ended hastily.
The girl fixed her with a suspicious eye. ‘It depends how many there are,’ she said cautiously.
Frau Meyer got up and leaned over the Fräulein at the desk, and whispered into her impassive ear.
The Fräulein shook her head. ‘I am afraid it is no use,’ she said.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 97
