‘You shouldn’t bother about the old ones,’ I murmured, watching a little white steamer rounding the Göhren headland. ‘Get the young to co-operate, my dear Charlotte. The young inherit the earth — Teutonic earth certainly they do. If you got all the pretty women between twenty and thirty on your side the thing’s done. No wringing would be required. The concessions would simply shower down.’
‘I detest the word concession,’ said Charlotte.
‘Do you? But there it is. We live on the concessions made us by those beings you would probably call the enemy. And, after all, most of us live fairly comfortably.’
‘By the way,’ she said, turning her head suddenly and looking at me, ‘what have you been doing all these years?’
‘Doing?’ I repeated in some confusion. I don’t know why there should have been any confusion, unless it was a note in Charlotte’s voice that made her question sound like a stern inquiry after that one talent which is death to hide lodged with me useless. ‘Now, as though you didn’t very well know what I have been doing. I have had a row of babies and brought it up quite nicely.’
‘That isn’t anything to be proud of.’
‘I didn’t say it was.’
‘Your cat achieves precisely the same thing.’
‘My dear Charlotte, I haven’t got a cat.’
‘And now — what are you doing now?’
‘You see what I am doing. Apparently exactly what you are.’
‘I don’t mean that. Of course you know I don’t mean that. What are you doing now with your life?’
I turned my head and gazed reproachfully at Charlotte. How pretty she used to be. How prettily the corners of her mouth used to turn up, as though her soul were always smiling. And she had had the dearest chin with a dimple in it, and she had had clear, hopeful eyes, and all the lines of her body had been comely and gracious. These are solid advantages that should not lightly be allowed to go. Not a trace of them was left. Her face was thin, and its expression of determination made it look hard. There was a deep line straight down between her eyebrows, as though she frowned at life more than is needful. Angles had everywhere taken the place of curves. Her eyes were as bright and intelligent as ever, but seemed to have grown larger. Something had completely done for Charlotte as far as beauty of person goes; whether it was the six Bernhards, or her actual enthusiasms, or the unusual mixture of both, I could not at this stage discover; nor could I yet see if her soul had gained the beauty that her body had lost, which is undoubtedly what the rightly cared-for soul does do. Meanwhile anything more utterly unlike the wife of a famous professor I have never seen. The wife of an aged German celebrity should be, and is, calm, comfortable, large, and slow. She must be, and is, proud of her great man. She attends to his bodily wants, and does not presume to share his spiritual excitements. In their common life he is the brain, she the willing hands and feet. It is perfectly fair. If there are to be great men some one must be found to look after them — some one who shall be more patient, faithful, and admiring than a servant, and unable like a servant to throw up the situation on the least provocation. A wife is an admirable institution. She is the hedge set between the precious flowers of the male intellect and the sun and dust of sordid worries. She is the flannel that protects when the winds of routine are cold. She is the sheltering jam that makes the pills of life possible. She is buffer, comforter, and cook. And so long as she enjoys these various roles the arrangement is perfect. The difficulties begin when, defying Nature’s teaching, which on this point is luminous, she refuses to be the hedge, flannel, jam, buffer, comforter, and cook; and when she goes so far on the sulphuric path of rebellion as to insist on being clever on her own account and publicly, she has, in Germany at least, set every law of religion and decency at defiance. Charlotte had been doing this, if all I had heard was true, for the last three years; therefore her stern inquiry addressed to a wife of my sobriety struck me as singularly out of place. What had I been doing with my life? Looking back into it in search of an answer it seemed very spacious, and sunny, and quiet. There were children in it, and there was a garden, and a spouse in whose eyes I was precious; but I had not done anything. And if I could point to no pamphlets or lectures, neither need I point to a furrow between my eyebrows.
‘It is very odd,’ Charlotte went on, as I sat silent, ‘our meeting like this. I was on the verge of writing to ask if I might come and stay with you.’
‘Oh were you?’
‘So often lately I have thought just you might be such a help to me if only I could wake you up.’
‘Wake me up, my dear Charlotte?’
‘Oh, I’ve heard about you. I know you live stuffed away in the country in a sort of dream. You needn’t try to answer my question about what you have done. You can’t answer it. You have lived in a dream, entirely wrapped up in your family and your plants.’
‘Plants, my dear Charlotte?’
‘You do not see nor want to see farther than the ditch at the end of your garden. All that is going on outside, out in the great real world where people are in earnest, where they strive, and long, and suffer, where they unceasingly pursue their ideal of a wider life, a richer experience, a higher knowledge, is absolutely indifferent to you. Your existence — no one could call it life — is quite negative and unemotional. It is as negative and as unemotional as — —’ She paused and looked at me with a faint, compassionate smile.
‘As what?’ I asked, anxious to hear the worst.
‘Frankly, as an oyster’s.’
‘Really, my dear Charlotte,’ I exclaimed, naturally upset. How very unfortunate that I should have hurried away from Göhren. Why had I not stayed there two or three days, as I had at first intended? It was such a safe place; you could get out of it so easily and so quickly. If I were an oyster — curious how much the word disconcerted me — at least I was a happy oyster, which was surely better than being miserable and not an oyster at all. Charlotte was certainly nearer being miserable than happy. People who are happy do not have the look she had in her eyes, nor is their expression so uninterruptedly determined. And why should I be lectured? When I am in the mood for a lecture, my habit is to buy a ticket and go and listen; and when I have not bought a ticket, it is a sign that I do not want a lecture. I did not like to explain this beautifully simple position to Charlotte, yet felt that at all costs I must nip her eloquence in the bud or she would keep me out till it was dark; so I got up, cleared my throat, and said in the balmy tone in which people on platforms begin their orations, ‘Geehrte Anwesende.’
‘Are you going to give me a lecture?’ she inquired with a surprised smile.
‘In return for yours.’
‘My dear soul, may I not talk to you about anything except plants?’
‘I really don’t know why you should think plants are the only things that interest me. I have not yet mentioned them. And, as a matter of fact, you are the last person with whom I would share my vegetable griefs. But that isn’t what I wished to say. I was going to offer you, geehrte Anwesende, a few remarks about husbands.’
Charlotte frowned.
‘About husbands,’ I repeated blandly, in a voice of milk and honey. ‘Geehrte Anwesende, in the course of an uneventful existence I have had much leisure for reflection, and my reflections have led me to the conclusion, erroneous perhaps, but fixed, that having got a husband, taken him of one’s own free will, taken him sometimes even in the face of opposition, the least one can do is to stick to him. Now, Charlotte, where is yours? What have you done with him? Is he here? And if not, why is he not here, and where is he?’
Charlotte got up hastily and brushed the sand out of the folds of her dress. ‘You haven’t changed a bit,’ she said with a slight laugh. ‘You are just as — —’
‘Silly?’ I suggested.
‘Oh, I didn’t say that. And as for Bernhard, he is where he always was, marching triumphantly along the road to undying fame. But you know that. You only ask because your ideas of the duties
of woman are medieval, and you are shocked. Well, I’m afraid you must be shocked then. I haven’t seen him for a whole year.’
Luckily at this moment, for I think we were going to quarrel, Gertrud came heaving through the sand towards us with a packet of letters. She had been to the post, and knowing I loved getting letters came out to look for me so that I might have them at once; and as I eagerly opened them and buried myself in them, Charlotte confined her occasional interjections to deprecating the obviously inferior shape of Gertrud’s head.
THE FIFTH DAY
FROM THIESSOW TO SELLIN
Many a time have I wondered at the unworthy ways of Fate, at the pettiness of the pleasure it takes in frustrating plans that are small and innocent, at its entire want of dignity, at its singular spitefulness, at the resemblance of its manners to those of an evilly-disposed kitchen-maid; but never have I wondered more than I did that night at Thiessow.
We had been for a walk after tea through the beechwood, up a hill behind it to the signal station, along a footpath on the edge of the cliff with blue gleams of sea on one side through a waving fringe of blue and purple flowers, and the ryefields on the other. We had stood looking down at the village of Thiessow far below us, a cluster of picturesque roofs surrounded on three sides by sunlit water; had gazed across the vast plain to the distant hill and village of Gross Zickow; watched the shadows passing over meadows miles away; seen how the sea to the west had the calm colours of a pearl; how the sea beneath us through the parting stalks of scabious and harebells was quiet but very blue; and how behind us, over the beech-tops, there was the eastern sea where the wind was, as brilliant and busy and foam-flecked as before. It was all very wide, and open, and roomy. It was a place to bless God in and cease from vain words. And when the stars came out we went down into the plain, and wandered out across the dewy grass in the gathering night, our faces towards the red strip of sky where the sun had set.
Charlotte had not been silent all this time; she had been, on the contrary, passionately explanatory. She had passionately explained the intolerableness of her life with the famous Nieberlein; she had passionately justified her action in cutting it short. And listening in silence, I had soon located the real wound, the place she did not mention where all the bruises were; for talk and explain as she might it was clear that her chief grievance was that the great man had never taken her seriously. To be strenuous, to hold intense views on questions that seem to you to burn, and to be treated as an airy nothing, a charming nothing perhaps, but still a nothing, must be, on the whole, disconcerting. I do not know that I should call it more than disconcerting. You need not, after all, let your vision be blocked entirely by the person with whom you chance to live; however vast his intellectual bulk may be, you can look round him and see that the stars and the sky are still there, and you need not run away from him to do that. If the great Nieberlein had not taken Charlotte sufficiently seriously, she had manifestly taken him much too seriously. It is better to laugh at one’s Nieberlein than to be angry with him, and it is infinitely more personally soothing. And presently you find you have grown old together, and that your Nieberlein has become unaccountably precious, and that you do not want to laugh at all, — or if you do, it is a very tender laughter, tender almost to tears.
And then, as we walked on over the wonderful starlit plain in the huge hush of the brooding night, the air, heavy with dew and the smell of grass cut that afternoon in distant meadows, so sweet and soft that it seemed as if it must smooth away every line of midday eagerness from our tired faces, Charlotte paused; and before I had done praising Providence for this refreshment, she not yet having paused at all, she began again in a new key of briskness, and said, ‘By the way, I may as well come with you when you leave this. I have nothing particular to do. I came down here for a day or two to get away from some English people I was with at Binz who had rather got on to my nerves. And I have so much to say to you, and it will be a good opportunity. We can talk all day, while we are driving.’
Talk all day while we were driving! If Hazlitt saw no wit in talking and walking, I see less than none in talking and driving. It was this speech of Charlotte’s that set me marvelling anew at the maliciousness of Fate. Here was I, the most harmless of women, engaged in the most harmless of little expeditions, asking and wanting nothing but to be left alone; a person so obscure as to be, one would think, altogether out of the reach of the blind Fury with the accursèd shears; a person with a plan so mild and humble that I was ashamed of the childishness of the Fate that could waste its energies spoiling it. Yet before the end of the fourth day I was confronted with the old familiar inexorableness, taking its stand this time on the impossibility of refusing the company of a cousin whom you have not seen for ten years.
‘Oh Charlotte,’ I cried, seized her arm convulsively, struggling in the very clutches of Fate, ‘what — what a good idea! And what a thousand pities that it can’t be managed! You see it is a victoria, and there are only two places because of all the luggage, so that we can’t use the little seat, or Gertrud might have sat on that — —’
‘Gertrud? Send her home. What do you want with Gertrud if I am with you?’
I stared dismayed through the dusk at Charlotte’s determined face. ‘But she — packs,’ I said.
‘Don’t be so helpless. As though two healthy women couldn’t wrap up their own hair-brushes.’
‘Oh it isn’t only hair-brushes,’ I went on, still struggling, ‘it’s everything. You can’t think how much I loathe buttoning boots — I know I never would button them, but go about with them undone, and then I’d disgrace you, and I don’t want to do that. But that isn’t it really either,’ I went on hurriedly, for Charlotte had opened her mouth to tell me, I felt certain, that she would button them for me, ‘my husband never will let me go anywhere without Gertrud. You see she looked after his mother too, and he thinks awful things would happen if I hadn’t got her. I’m very sorry, Charlotte. It is most unfortunate. I wish — I wish I had thought of bringing the omnibus.’
‘But is your husband such an absurd tyrant?’ asked Charlotte, a robust scorn for my flabby obedience in her voice.
‘Oh — tyrant!’ I ejaculated, casting up my eyes to the stars, and mentally begging the unconscious innocent’s pardon.
‘Well, then, we must get a luggage cart and put the things into that.’
‘Oh,’ I cried, seizing her arm again, my thoughts whirling round in search of a loophole of escape, ‘what — what another good idea!’
‘And Gertrud can go in the cart too.’
‘So she can. What — what a trilogy of good ideas! Have you got any more, Charlotte? What a resourceful woman you are. I believe you like fighting and getting over difficulties.’
‘I believe I do,’ said Charlotte complacently.
I dropped her arm, ceased to struggle, walked on vanquished. Henceforth, if no more interesting difficulties presented themselves, Charlotte was going to spend her time overcoming me. And besides an eloquent Charlotte sitting next to me, there would be a cart rattling along behind me all day. I could have wept at the sudden end to the peace and perfect freedom of my journey. I went to bed, to a clean and pleasant bed that at another time would have pleased me, strongly of opinion that life was not worth while. Nor did it comfort me that from my pillow I looked out at the mysterious dark plain with its roof of stars and its faint red window in the north-west, because Charlotte had opened the door between our rooms and every now and then asked me if I were asleep. I lay making plans for the circumvention of Charlotte, and rejecting them one after the other as too uncousinly; and when I had made my head ache with the difficulty of uniting a becoming cousinliness with the cold-bloodedness necessary for shaking her off, I spent my time feebly deprecating the superabundance of cousins in the world. Surely there are too many? Surely almost everybody has more than he can manage comfortably? It must have been long after midnight that Charlotte, herself very restless, called out once more to know if I wer
e asleep.
‘Yes I am,’ I answered; not quite kindly I fear, but indeed it is an irritating question.
We left Thiessow at ten the next morning under a grey sky, and drove, at the strong recommendation of the landlord, along the hard sands as far as a little fishing place called Lobberort, where we struck off to the left on to the plain again, and so came once more to Philippshagen and the high road that runs from there to Göhren, Baabe, and Sellin. I took the landlord’s advice willingly, because I did not choose to drive on that grey morning in my altered circumstances over the plain along which I had walked so happily only the day before. The landlord, as obliging a person as his wife was a capable one, had provided a cart with two long-tailed, raw-boned horses who were to come with us as far as Binz, my next stopping-place. Gertrud sat next to the driver of this cart looking grim. Her prospects were gloomy, for the seat was hard, the driver was dirty, the cart had no springs, and she had had to pack Charlotte’s clothes. She did not approve of the Frau Professor; how should she? Gertrud read her Kreuzzeitung as regularly as she did her Bible, and believed it as implicitly; she knew all about the pamphlets, and only from the Kreuzzeitung’s point of view. And then Charlotte made the mistake clever people sometimes do of too readily supposing that others are stupid; and it did not need much shrewdness on Gertrud’s part to see that the Frau Professor disliked the shape of her head.
The drive along the wet sands was uninteresting because of the prevailing greyness of sky and sea; but the waves made so much noise that Charlotte, unable to get anything out of me but head-shakings and pointings to my ears, gave up trying to talk and kept quiet. The luggage cart came on close behind, the lean horses showing an undesirable skittishness, and once, in an attempt to run away, swerved so close to the water that Gertrud’s gloom became absolutely leaden. But we reached Lobberort safely, ploughed up through the deep sand on to the track again, and after Philippshagen the sky cleared, the sun came out, and the world began on a sudden to sparkle.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 303
