Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  He is a huge rawboned man, with the flat-backed head and protruding ears so many Germans have. What is it that is left out of their heads, I wonder? His moustache is like the Kaiser’s, and he looks rather a fine figure of a man in his grey-green forester’s uniform and becoming slouch hat with a feather stuck in it. Without his hat he is less impressive, because of his head. I suppose he has to have a head, but if he didn’t have to he’d be very good-looking.

  This is such a sweet place, little mother. I’ve got the dearest little clean bare bedroom, so attractive after the grim splendours of my drawingroom-bedroom at Frau Berg’s. You can’t think how lovely it is being here after the long hot journey. It’s no fun travelling alone in Germany if you’re a woman. I was elbowed about and pushed out of the way at stations by any men and boys there were as if I had been an ownerless trunk. Either that, or they stared incredibly, and said things. One little boy — he couldn’t have been more than ten — winked at me and whispered something about kissing. The station at Stettin was horrible, much worse than the Berlin one. I don’t know where they all came from, the crowds of hooligan boys, just below military age, and extraordinarily disreputable and insolent. To add to the confusion on the platform there were hundreds of Russians and Poles with their families and bundles — I asked my porter who they were, and he told me — being taken from one place where they had been working in the fields to another place, shepherded by a German overseer with a fierce dog and a revolver; very poor and ragged, all of them, but gentle, and, compared to the Germans, of beautiful manners; and there were a good many officers — it was altogether the most excited station I’ve seen, I think — and they stared too, but I’m certain that if I had been in a difficulty and wanted help they would have walked away. Kloster told me Germans divide women into two classes: those they want to kiss, and those they want to kick, who are all those they don’t want to kiss. One can be kissed and kicked in lots of ways besides actually, I think, and I felt as if I had been both on that dreadful platform at Stettin. So you can imagine how heavenly it was to get into this beautiful forest, away from all that, into the quiet, the holiness. Frau Bornsted, who learned English at school, told me all the farms, including hers, are worked by Russians and Poles who are fetched over every spring in thousands by German overseers. “It is a good arrangement,” she said. “In case of war we would not permit their departure, and so would our fields continue to be tilled.” In case of war! Always that word on their tongues. Even in this distant corner of peace.

  The Oberforsterei is a low white house with a clearing round it in which potatoes have been planted, and a meadow at the back going down to a stream, and a garden in front behind a low paling, full of pinks and larkspurs and pansies. A pair of antlers is nailed over the door, proud relic of an enormous stag the Oberforster shot on an unusually lucky day, and Frau Bornsted was sewing in the porch beneath honeysuckle when we arrived. It was just like the Germany one had in one’s story books in the schoolroom days. It seemed too good to be true after the Lutzowstrasse. Frau Bornsted is quite a pretty young woman, flat rather than slender, tall, with lovely deep blue eyes and long black eyelashes. She would be very pretty if it occurred to her that she is pretty, but evidently it doesn’t, or else it isn’t proper to be pretty here; I think this is the real explanation of the way her hair is scraped hack into a little hard knob, and her face shows signs of being scrubbed every day with the same soap and the same energy she uses for the kitchen table. She has no children, and isn’t, I suppose, more than twenty five, but she looks as thirty five, or even forty, looks in England.

  I love it all. It is really just like a story book. We had supper out in the porch, prepared, spread, and fetched by Frau Bornsted, and it was a milk soup — very nice and funny, and I lapped it up like a thirsty kitten — and cold meat, and fried potatoes, and curds and whey, and wild strawberries and cream. They have an active cow who does all the curds and whey and cream and butter and milk-soup, besides keeping on having calves without a murmur,— “She is an example,” said Frau Bornsted, who wants to talk English all the time, which will play havoc, I’m afraid, with my wanting to talk German.

  She took me to a window and showed me the cow, pasturing, like David, beside still waters. “And without rebellious thoughts unsuited to her sex,” said Frau Bornsted, turning and looking at me. She showed what she was thinking of by adding, “I hope you are not a suffragette?”

  The Oberforster put on a thin green linen coat for supper, which he left unbuttoned to mark that he was off duty, and we sat round the table till it was starlight. Owls hooted in the forest across the road, and bats darted about our heads. Also there were mosquitoes. A great many mosquitoes. Herr Bornsted told me I wouldn’t mind them after a while. “Herrlich,” I said, with real enthusiasm.

  And now I’m going to bed. Kloster was right to send me here. I’ve been leaning out of my window. The night tonight is the most beautiful thing, a great dark cave of softness. I’m at the back of the house where the meadow is and the good cow, and beyond the meadow there’s another belt of forest, and then just over the tops of the pines, which are a little more softly dark than the rest of the soft darkness, there’s a pale line of light that is the star-lit water of the Haff. Frogs are croaking down by the stream, every now and then an owl hoots somewhere in the distance, and the air comes up to my face off the long grass cool and damp. I can’t tell you the effect the blessed silence, the blessed peace has on me after the fret of Berlin. It feels like getting back to God. It feels like being home again in heaven after having been obliged to spend six weeks in hell. And yet here, even here in the very lap of peace, as we sat in the porch after supper the Oberforster talked ceaselessly of Weltpolitik. The very sound of that word now makes me wince; for translated into plain English, what it means when you’ve pulled all the trimmings off and look at it squarely, is just taking other people’s belongings, beginning with their blood. I must learn enough German to suggest that to the Oberforster: Murder, as a preliminary to Theft. I’m afraid he would send me straight back in disgrace to Frau Berg.

  Good night darling mother. I’ll write oftener now. My rules don’t count this fortnight. Bless you, beloved little mother.

  Your Chris.

  Schuppenfelde, Monday, July 13th.

  Sweet mother,

  I got your letter from Switzerland forwarded on this morning, and like to feel you’re by so much nearer me than you were a week ago. At least, I try to persuade myself that it’s a thing to like, but I know in my heart it makes no earthly difference. If you’re only a mile away and I mayn’t see you, what’s the good? You might as well be a thousand. The one thing that will get me to you again is accomplished work. I want to work, to be quick; and here I am idle, precious days passing, each of which not used for working means one day longer away from you. And I’m so well. There’s no earthly reason why I shouldn’t start practising again this very minute. A day yesterday in the forest has cured me completely. By the time I’ve lived through my week of promised idleness I shall be kicking my loose box to pieces! And then for another whole week there’ll only be two hours of my violin allowed. Why, I shall fall on those miserable two hours like a famished beggar on a crust.

  Well, I’m not going to grumble. It’s only that I love you so, and miss you so very much. You know how I always missed you on Sunday in Berlin, because then I had time to feel, to remember; and here it is all Sundays. I’ve had two of them already, yesterday and today, and I don’t know what it will be like by the time I’ve had the rest. I walked miles yesterday, and the more beautiful it was the more I missed you. What’s the good of having all this loveliness by oneself? I want somebody with me to see it and feel it too. If you were here how happy we should be!

  I wish you knew Herr von Inster, for I know you’d like him. I do think he’s unusual, and you like unusual people. I had a letter from him today, sent with a book he thought I’d like, but I’ve read it, — it is Selma Lagerlof’s Jerusalem; do you remembe
r our reading it together that Easter in Cornwall? But wasn’t it very charming of him to send it? He says he is coming this way the end of the week and will call on me and renew his acquaintance with the Oberforster, with whom he says he has gone shooting sometimes when he has been staying at Koseritz. His Christian name is Bernd. Doesn’t it sound nice and honest.

  I suppose by the end of the week he means Saturday, which is a very long way off. Saturdays used to seem to come rushing on to the very heels of Mondays in Berlin when I was busy working. Little mother, you can take it from me, from your wise, smug daughter, that work is the key to every happiness. Without it happiness won’t come unlocked. What do people do who don’t do anything, I wonder?

  Koseritz is only five miles away, and as he’ll stay there, I suppose, with his relations, he won’t have very far to come. He’ll ride over, I expect. He looks so nice on a horse. I saw him once in the Thiergarten, riding. I’d love to ride on these forest roads, — the sandy ones are perfect for riding; but when I asked the Oberforster today, after I got Herr von Inster’s letter, whether he could lend me a horse while I was here, what do you think I found out? That Kloster, suspecting I might want to ride, had written him instructions on no account to allow me to. Because I might tumble off, if you please, and sprain either of my precious wrists. Did you ever. I believe Kloster regards me only as a vessel for carrying about music to other people, not as a human being at all. It is like the way jockeys are kept, strict and watched, before a race.

  Frau Bornsted gazed at me with her large serious eyes, and said, “Do you play the violin, then, so well?”

  “No,” I snapped. “I don’t.” And I drummed with my fingers on the windowpane and felt as rebellious as six years old.

  But of course I’m going to be good. I won’t do anything that may delay my getting home to you.

  The Bornsteds say Koseritz is a very beautiful place, on the very edge of the Haff. They talk with deep respectfulness of the Herr Graf, and the Frau Grafin, and the junge Komtesse. It’s wonderful how respectful Germans are towards those definitely above them. And so uncritical. Kloster says that it is drill does it. You never get over the awe, he says, for the sergeant, for the lieutenant, for whoever, as you rise a step, is one step higher. I told the Bornsteds I had met the Koseritzes in Berlin, and they looked at me with a new interest, and Frau Bornsted, who has been very prettily taking me in hand and endeavouring to root out the opinions she takes for granted that I hold, being an Englanderin, came down for a while more nearly to my level, and after having by questioning learned that I had lunched with the Koseritzes, and having endeavoured to extract, also by questioning, what we had had to eat, which I couldn’t remember except the whipped cream I spilt on the floor, she remarked, slowly nodding her head, “It must have been very agreeable for you to be with the grafliche Familie.”

  “And for them to be with me,” I said, moved to forwardness by being full of forest air, which goes to my head.

  I suppose this was what they call disrespectful without being funny, for Frau Bornsted looked at me in silence, and Herr Bornsted, who doesn’t understand English, asked in German, seeing his wife solemn, “What does she say?” And when she told him he said, “Ach,” and showed his disapproval by absorbing himself in the Deutsche Tageszeitzing.

  It’s wonderful how easy it is to be disrespectful in Germany. You’ve only got to be the least bit cheerful and let some of it out, and you’ve done it.

  “Why are the English always so like that?” Frau Bornsted asked presently, after having marked her regret at my behaviour by not saying anything for five minutes.

  “Like what?”

  “So — so without reverence. And yet you are a religious people. You send out missionaries.”

  “Yes, and support bishops,” I said. “You haven’t got any bishops.”

  “You are the first nation in the world as regards missionaries,” she said, gazing at me thoughtfully and taking no notice of the bishops. “My father” — her father is a pastor— “has a great admiration for your missionaries. How is it you have so many missionaries and at the same time so little reverence ?”

  “Perhaps that is why,” I said; and started off explaining, while she looked at me with beautiful uncomprehending eyes, that the reaction from the missionaries and from the kind of spirit that prompts their raising and export might conceivably produce a desire to be irreverent and laugh, and that life more and more seemed to me like a pendulum, and that it needs must swing both ways.

  Frau Bornsted sat twisting her wedding ring on her finger till I was quiet again. She does this whenever I emit anything that can be called an idea. It reminds her that she is married, and that I, as she says, am nur ein junges Madchen, and therefore not to be taken seriously.

  When I had finished about the pendulum, she said, “All this will be cured when you have a husband.”

  There was a tea party here yesterday afternoon. At least, it was coffee. I thought there were no neighbours, and when I came back late from having been all day in the forest, missing with an indifference that amazed Frau Bornsted the lure of her Sunday dinner, and taking some plum-cake and two Bibles with me, English and German, because I’m going to learn German that way among other ways while I’m here, and I think it’s a very good way, and it immensely impressed Frau Bornsted to see me take two Bibles out for a walk, — when I got back about five, untidy and hot and able to say off a whole psalm in perfect Lutheran German, I found several high yellow carriages, like the one I was fetched in on Saturday, in front of the paling, with nosebags and rugs on the horses, and indoors in the parlour a number of other foresters and their wives, besides Frau Bornsted’s father and mother and younger sister, and the local doctor and his wife, and the Herr Lehrer, a tall young man in spectacles who teaches in the village school two miles away.

  I was astonished, for I imagined complete isolation here. Frau Bornsted says, though, that this only happens on Sundays. They were sitting round the remnants of coffee and cake, the men smoking and talking together apart from the women, the women with their bonnet-strings untied and hanging over their bosoms, of which there seemed to be many and much, telling each other, while they fanned themselves with immense handkerchiefs, what they had had for their Sunday dinner.

  I would have slunk away when I heard the noise of voices, and gone round to the peaceful company of the cow, but Frau Bornsted saw me coming up the path and called me in.

  I went in reluctantly, and on my appearing there was a dead silence, which would have unnerved me if I hadn’t still had my eyes so full of sunlight that I hardly saw anything in the dark room, and stood there blinking.

  “Unsere junge Englanderin,” said Frau Bornsted, presenting me. “Schuhlerin von Kloster — grosses Talent,—” I heard her adding, handing round the bits of information as though it was cake.

  They all said Ach so, and Wirklich, and somebody asked if I liked Germany, and I said, still not seeing much, “Es ist wundervoll,” which provoked a murmur of applause, as the newspapers say.

  I found I was expected to sit in a corner with Frau Bornsted’s sister, who with the Lehrer and myself, being all of us unmarried, represented what the others spoke of as die Jugend, and that I was to answer sweetly and modestly any question I was asked by the others, but not to ask any myself, or indeed not to speak at all unless in the form of answering. I gathered this from the behaviour of Frau Bornsted’s sister; but I do find it very hard not to be natural, and it’s natural to me, as you know to your cost, don’t you, little mother, to ask what things mean and why.

  There was a great silence while I was given a cup of coffee and some cake by Frau Bornsted, helped by her sister. The young man, the third in our trio of youth, sat motionless in the chair next to me while this was done. I wanted to fetch my cup myself, rather than let Frau Bornsted wait on me, but she pressed me down into my chair again with firmness and the pained look of one who is witnessing the committing of a solecism. “Bitte — take place again,”
she said, her English giving way in the stress of getting me to behave as I should.

  The women looked on with open interest and curiosity, examining my clothes and hair and hands and the Bibles I was clutching and the flowers I had stuck in where the Psalms are, because I never can find the Psalms right off. The men looked too, but with caution. I was fearfully untidy. You would have been shocked. But I don’t know how one is to lie about on moss all day and stay neat, and nobody told me I was going to tumble into the middle of a party.

  The first to disentangle himself from the rest and come and speak to me was Frau Bornsted’s father, Pastor Wienicke. He came and stood in front of me, his legs apart and a cigar in his mouth, and he took the cigar out to tell me, what I already knew, that I was English. “Sie sind englisch,” said Herr Pastor Wienicke.

  “Ja,” said I, as modestly as I could, which wasn’t very.

  There was something about the party that made me sit up on the edge of my chair with my feet neatly side by side, and hold my cup as carefully as if I had been at a school treat and expecting the rector every minute. “England,” said the pastor, while everybody else listened, — he spoke in German— “is, I think I may say, still a great country.”

  “Ja?” said I politely, tilting up the ja a little at its end, which was meant to suggest not only a deferential, “If you say so it must be so” attitude, but also a courteous doubt as to whether any country could properly be called great in a world in which the standard of greatness was set by so splendid an example of it as his own country.