Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  Frau Meyer whispered again. The Fräulein looked up, and fastening her eyes on a point somewhere below the large girl’s chin said, ‘The wages are good.’

  ‘What are they?’ asked the girl.

  ‘Considering the treatment you will receive—’ the girl’s eyes again became suspicious— ‘they are excellent.’

  ‘What are they?’

  ‘Everything found, and a hundred and eighty marks a year.’

  The girl turned and walked toward the door.

  ‘Stop! Stop!’ cried Frau Meyer desperately. ‘I cannot see you throw away a good place with so little preliminary reflection. Have you considered that there would be no trudging to market, and consequently you will only require half the boots and stockings and skirts those poor girls have to buy who live up in the villas that look so grand and pretend to give such high wages?’

  The girl paused.

  ‘And no steep stairs to climb, laden with heavy baskets? And hardly any washing — hardly any washing, I tell you!’ she almost shrieked in her anxiety. ‘And no cooking to speak of? And every Sunday — mind, every Sunday evening free? And I never scold, and my husband never scolds, and with a hundred and eighty marks a year there is nothing a clever girl cannot buy. Why, it is an ideal, a delightful place — one at which I would jump if I were a girl, and this lady’ — indicating me— ‘would jump, too, would you not, Rose-Marie?’

  The girl wavered. ‘How many children are there?’ she asked.

  ‘Children? Children? Angels, you mean. They are perfect angels, so good and well-behaved — are they not, Rose-Marie? Fit to go at once to heaven — unberufen — without a day’s more training, so little would they differ in manner when they got there from angels who have been used to it for years. You are fond of children, Fräulein, I am sure. Naturally you are. I see it in your nice face. No nice Fräulein is not. And these, I tell you, are such unusual—’

  ‘How many are there?’

  ‘Ach Gott, there are only six, and so small still that they can hardly be counted as six — six of the dearest—’

  The girl turned on her heel. ‘I cannot be fond of six,’ she said; and went out with the heavy tread of finality.

  Frau Meyer looked at me. ‘There now,’ she said, in tones of real despair.

  ‘It is very tiresome,’ said I, sympathizing the more acutely that I knew my turn was coming next.

  ‘Tiresome? It is terrible. In two days I have my Coffee, and no — and no — and no—’ She burst into tears, hiding her face from the dispassionate stare of the Fräulein at the desk in her handkerchief, and trying to conceal her sobs by a ceaseless blowing of her nose.

  ‘I am so sorry,’ I murmured, touched by this utter melting.

  An impulse seized me on which I instantly acted. ‘Take Johanna,’ I cried. ‘Take her for that day. She will at least get you over that. She is excellent at a party, and knows all about Coffees. I’ll send her down early, and you keep her as late as you like. She would enjoy the outing, and we can manage quite well for one day without her.’

  ‘Is that — is that the Johanna you had in the Rauchgasse?’

  ‘Yes — trained by my step-mother — really good in an emergency.’

  Frau Meyer flung her arms round my neck. ‘Ach danke, danke, Du liebes, gutes Kind!’ she cried, embracing me with a warmth that showed me what heaps of people she must have asked to her party.

  And I, after the first flush of doing a good deed was over and cool reflection had resumed its sway, which it did by the time I was toiling up the hill on the way home after having been unanimously rejected as mistress by the assembled maidens, I repented; for was not Johanna now my only hope? ‘Frau Meyer,’ whispered Reflection in my despondent ear, ‘will engage her to go to her permanently on the 1st, and she will go because of the twenty marks more salary. You have been silly. Of course she would have stayed with you with a little persuasion rather than have to look for another place and spend her money at a registry-office. It is not likely, however, that she will refuse a situation costing her nothing.’

  But see how true it sometimes is that virtue is rewarded. Johanna went down as I had promised, and worked all day for Frau Meyer. She was given a thaler as a present, as much cake and coffee as she could consume, and received the offer of a permanent engagement when she should leave us. This she told me standing by my bedside late that night, the candle in her hand lighting up her heated, shining face, and hair dishevelled by exertion. ‘But,’ said she, ‘Fräulein Rose-Marie, not for the world would I take the place. Such a restless lady, such a nervous gentleman, such numbers of spoilt and sprawling children. If I had not been there today and beheld it from the inside I would have engaged myself to go. But after this—’ she waved the candle— ‘never.’

  ‘What are you going to do, then, Johanna?’ I asked, thinking wistfully of the four years we had passed together.

  ‘Stay here,’ she announced defiantly.

  I put my arms round her neck and kissed her.

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  XLV

  Galgenberg, Sept. 23d.

  Dear Mr. Anstruther, — Today I went down to Jena with the girl from next door who wanted to do such mild shopping as Jena is prepared for, mild shopping suited to mild purses, and there I drifted into the bookshop in the market-place where I so often used to drift, and there I found a book dealing with English poetry from Chaucer onward, with pictures of the poets who had written it. But before I go on about that — and you’ll be surprised at the amount I have to say — I must explain the girl next door. I don’t think I ever told you that there is one. The neighbor let his house just before he left, and let it unexpectedly well, the people taking the upper part of it for a whole year, and this is their daughter. The neighbor went off jubilant to his little inky boys. ‘See,’ said he at parting, ‘my life actually threatens to become rich without as well as within.’

  ‘Don’t,’ I murmured, turning as hot as people do when they are reminded of past foolishness.

  The new neighbors have been here ten days, and I made friends at once with the girl over the fence. She saw me gathering together into one miserable haycock the September grass Johanna and I had been hacking at in turns with a sickle for the last week, and stood watching me with so evident an interest that at last I couldn’t help smiling at her. ‘This is our crop for the winter,’ I said, pointing to the haycock; I protest I have seen many a molehill bigger.

  ‘It isn’t much,’ said the girl.

  ‘No,’ I agreed, raking busily.

  ‘Have you a cow?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘A pig?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No animals?’

  ‘Bees.’

  The girl was silent; then she said bees were not animals.

  ‘But they’re live-stock,’ I said. ‘They’re the one link that connects us with farming.’

  ‘What do you make hay for, then?’

  ‘Only to keep the grass short, and then we try to imagine it’s a lawn.’

  Raking, I came a little nearer; and so I saw she had been, quite recently, crying.

  I looked at her more attentively. She was pretty, with the prettiness of twenty; round and soft, fair and smooth. She had on an elaborately masculine shirt and high stiff collar and tie and pin and belt; and from under the edge of the hard straw hat tilted up at the back by masses of burnished coils of hair I saw a pulpy red mouth, the tip of an indeterminate nose, and two unhappy eyes, tired with crying.

  ‘How early to begin,’ I said.

  ‘Begin what?’

  ‘It’s not nine yet. Do you always get your crying done by breakfast time?’

  She flushed all over her face.

  ‘Forgive me,’ I said, industriously raking. ‘I’m a rude person.’

  The girl was silent for a few moments; considering, I suppose, whether she should turn her back on the impertinent stranger once and for all, or forgive the indis
cretion and make friends.

  Well, she made friends. She and I, alone up on the hill, the only creatures of anything like the same age, sure to see each other continually in the forests, on the road, over the fence, certainly we were bound either to a tiresome system of pretending to be unaware of each other’s existence or to be friends. We are friends. It is the wisest thing to be at all times. In ten days we have become fast friends, and after the first six she left off crying.

  Now I’ll tell you why we have done it so quickly. It is not, as perhaps you know, my practice to fall easily on the stranger’s neck. I am too lumbering, too slow, too acutely conscious of my shortcomings for that; really too dull and too awkward for anything but a life almost entirely solitary. But this girl has lately been in love. It is the common fate. It happens to us all. That in itself would not stir me to friendship. The man, however, in defiance of German custom, so strong on this point that the breaking of it makes a terrific noise, after being publicly engaged to her, after letting things go so far that the new flat was furnished, and the wedding-guests bidden, said he was afraid he didn’t love her enough and gave her up.

  When she told me that my heart went out to her with a rush. I shall not stop to explain why, but it did rush, and from that moment I felt that I must put my arms round her, I, the elder and quieter, take her by the hand, help her to dry her poor silly eyes, pet her and make her happy again. And really after six days there was no more crying, and for the last three she has been looking at life with something of the critical indifference that lifts one over so many tiresome bits of the road. Unfortunately her mother doesn’t like me. Don’t you think it’s dreadful of her not to? She fears I am emancipated, and knows that I am Schmidt. If I were a Wedel, or an Alvensleben, or a Schulenburg, or of any other ancient noble family, even an obscure member of its remotest branch, she would consider my way of living and talking merely as a thing to be smiled at with kind indulgence. But she knows that I am Schmidt. Nothing I can say or do, however sweet and sane, can hide that horrid fact. And she knows that my father is a careless child of nature, lamentably unimpressible by birth and office; that my mother was an Englishwoman with a name inspiring little confidence; and that we let ourselves go to an indecent indifference to appearances, not even trying to conceal that we are poor. How useless it is to be pleasant and pretty — I really have been very pleasant to her, and the daughter kindly tells me I am pretty — if you are both Schmidt and poor. Though I speak with the tongues of angels and have no family it avails me nothing. If I had family and no charity I would get on much better in the world, in defiance of St. Paul. Frau von Lindeberg would take me to her heart, think me distinguished where now she thinks me odd, think me witty where now she thinks me bold, listen to my speeches, laugh at my sallies, be interested in my gardening and in my efforts to live without meat; but here I am, burning, I hope, with charity, with love for my neighbors, with ready sympathy, eager friendliness, desire to be of use, and it all avails me nothing because my name is Schmidt.

  It is the first time I have been brought into daily contact with our nobility. In Jena there were very few: rare bright spots here and there on the sober background of academic middle-class; little stars whose shining even from a distance made us blink. Now I see them every day, and find them very chilly and not in the least dazzling. I no longer blink. Perhaps Frau von Lindeberg feels that I do not, and cannot forgive an unblinking Schmidt. But really, now, these pretensions are very absurd. The free blood of the Watsons surges within me at the sight of them. I think of things like Albion’s daughters, and Britannia ruling waves, and I feel somehow that it is a proud thing to be partly Watson and to have had progenitors who lived in a house called The Acacias in a street called Plantagenet Road, which is what the Watsons did. What claims have these Lindebergs to the breathless, nay, sprawling respect they apparently demand? Here is a retired Colonel who was an officer all his life, and, not clever enough to go on to the higher military positions, was obliged to retire at fifty. He belongs to a good family, and married some one of slightly better birth than his own. She was a Freiin — Free Lady — von Dammerlitz, a family, says Papa, large, unpleasant, and mortgaged. It has given Germany no great warriors or statesmen. Its sons have all been officers who did not turn that corner round which the higher honors lie, and its daughters either did not marry at all, being portionless, or married impossible persons, said Papa, such as —

  ‘Such as?’ I inquired, expecting to hear they married postmen.

  ‘Pastors, my dear,’ said Papa smiling.

  ‘Pastors?’ I said, surprised, pastors having seemed to me, who view them from their own level, eminently respectable and desirable as husbands.

  ‘But not from the Dammerlitz point of view, my dear,’ said Papa.

  ‘Oh,’ said I, trying to imagine how pastors would look seen from that.

  Well, here are these people freezing us into what they consider our proper place whenever we come across them, taking no pains to hide what undesirable beings we are in their sight, staring at Papa’s hat in eloquent silence when it is more than usually tilted over one ear, running eyes that chill my blood over my fustian clothes — I’m not sure what fustian is, but I’m quite sure my clothes are made of it — oddly deaf when we say anything, oddly blind when we meet anywhere unless we actually run into them, here they are, doing all these things every day with a repeated gusto, and with no reason whatever that I can see to support their pretensions. Is it so wonderful to be a von? For that is all, look as I will, that I can see they have to go on. They are poor, as the retired officer invariably is, and they spend much time pretending they are not. They know nothing; he has spent his best years preoccupied with the routine of his calling, which leaves no room for anything approaching study or interest in other things, she in bringing up her son, also an officer, and in taking her daughter to those parties in Berlin that so closely resemble, I gather from the girl Vicki’s talk, the parties in Jena — a little wider, a little more varied, with more cups and glasses, and with, of course, the chance we do not have in Jena of seeing some one quite new, but on the whole the same. He is a solemn elderly person in a black-rimmed pince-nez, dressed in clothes that give one the impression of always being black. He vegetates as completely as any one I have ever seen or dreamed of. Prolonged coffee in the morning, prolonged newspaper-reading, and a tortoise-like turn in the garden kill his mornings. Dinner, says Vicki, kills another hour and a half; then there is what we call the Dinner Sleep on the sofa in his darkened room, and that brings him to coffee time. They sit over the cups till Vicki wants to scream, at least she wants to since she has known me, she says; up to then, after her miserable affair, she sat as sluggishly as the others, but huddled while they were straight, and red-eyed, which they were not. After coffee the parents walk up the road to a certain point, and walk back again. Then comes the evening paper, which he reads till supper-time, and after supper he smokes till he goes to bed.

  ‘Why, he’s hardly alive at all,’ I said to Vicki, when she described this existence.

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘It’s what they all do,’ she said, ‘all the retired. I’ve seen it a hundred times in Berlin. They’re old, and they never can start anything fresh.’

  ‘We won’t be like that when we’re old, will we?’ I said, gazing at her wide-eyed, struck as by a vision.

  She gazed back into my eyes, misgiving creeping, into hers. ‘Sleep, and eat, and read the paper?’ she murmured.

  ‘Sleep, and eat, and read the paper?’ I echoed.

  And we stared at each other in silence, and the far-away dim years seemed to catch up what we had said, and mournfully droned back, ‘Sleep, and eat, and read the paper....’

  But what is to be done with girls of good family who do not marry, and have no money? They can’t go governessing, and indeed it is a dreary trade. Vicki has learned nothing except a little cooking and other domestic drudgery, only of use if you have a house to drudge in and a husband to drudge f
or; of those pursuits that bring in money and make you independent and cause you to flourish and keep green and lusty she knows nothing. If I had a daughter I would bring her up with an eye fixed entirely on a husbandless future. She should be taught some trade as carefully as any boy. Her head should be filled with as much learning as it would conveniently hold side by side with a proper interest in ribbons. I would spend my days impressing her with the gloriousness of independence, of having her time entirely at her own disposal, her life free and clear, the world open before her, as open as it was to Adam and Eve when they turned their backs once and for all on the cloying sweetness of Paradise, and far more interesting that it was to them, for it would be full of inhabitants eager to give her the hearty welcome always awaiting those rare persons, the cheery and the brave.

  ‘Oh,’ sighed Vicki, when with great eloquence and considerable elaboration I unfolded these views, ‘how beautiful!’

  Papa was nearer the open window under which we were sitting than I had thought, for he suddenly popped out his head. ‘It is a merciful thing, Rose-Marie,’ he said, ‘that you have no daughter.’

  We both jumped.

  ‘She would be a most dreary young female,’ he went on, smiling down as from a pulpit on our heads, and wiping his spectacles. ‘Offspring continually goaded and galvanized by a parent, hammered upon, chiselled, beaten out flat—’

  ‘Dear me, Papachen,’ I murmured.

  ‘Beaten out flat,’ said Papa, waving my interruption aside with his spectacles, ‘by the dead weight of opinions already stale, the victims of a system, the subjects of an experiment, the prisoners of prejudice, are bound either to flare into rank rebellion on the first opportunity or to grow continually drearier and more conspicuously stupid.’

  Vicki stared first up at Papa then at me, her soft, crumpled sort of mouth twisted into troubled surprise.

  Papa leaned further out and hit the window sill with his hand for all the world like a parson hitting his pulpit’s cushion. ‘One word,’ he said, ‘one word of praise or blame, one single word from an outsider will have more effect upon your offspring than years of trouble taken by yourself, mountains of doctrine preached by you, rivers of good advice, oceans of exhortations, cautions as numerous as Abraham’s posterity, well known to have been as numerous as the sea sand, private prayers, and public admonition.’