Front matter (continued 3)

For dinner, by which time I am curiously shaky, quite indifferent to food, and possessed of an immense longing to lie down on a sofa and do nothing, we have salad and potatoes and fruit—of course plums—and lentils because they are so good for us (it is a pity they are also so nasty), and cheese because one book says (it is an extraordinarily convincing book) that if a man shall eat beef steadily for a whole morning from six to twelve without stopping, he will not at the end have taken in half the nourishing matter that he would have absorbed after two minutes laid out judiciously on cheese. Unfortunately I don't like cheese. After dinner I shut myself up with the works of Mr. Eustace Miles, which tell me in invigorating language of all the money, time, and energy I have saved, of my increase of bodily health, of how active I am getting, how skilful and of what a tough endurance, how my brains have grown clear and nimble, my morals risen high above the average, and how keen my enjoyment of everything has become, including, strange to say, my food. I read lying down, too spiritless to sit up; and Johanna in the kitchen, who has dined on pig and beer, washes up with the clatter of exuberant energy, singing while she does so in a voice that shakes the house that once she liebte ein Student.

It is very bewildering. The advice one gets points in such opposite directions. For instance, the neighbor made friends the very first evening with Papa, who walked with injudicious inattention in our garden and slipped down through a gap in the fence into his orchard and his arms, he being engaged in picking up the fallen plums for his wife to make jam of; and he told me when he came in one day at dinner and found me struggling through what he considered dark ways and I thought were cabbages, that my salvation lay in almonds. I went down to Jena that afternoon and bought three pounds of them. They were dear, and dreadfully heavy to carry up the hill, and when I was panting past the neighbor's gate his wife, a friendly lady who reads right through the advertisements in the paper every morning and spends her evenings with a pencil working out the acrostics, was standing at it cool and comfortable; and she asked me, with the simple inquisitiveness natural to our nation, what I had got in my parcel; and I, glad to stop a moment and get my breath, told her; and she immediately scoffed both at her husband and at the almonds, and said if I ate them I would lay up for myself an old age steeped in a dreadful thing called xanthin poison. I went home and consulted the books. The neighbor's wife was right. Johanna made macaroons of the almonds, and Papa, who loves macaroons, chose to disbelieve the neighbor's wife and ate them.

But the books are not always so unanimous as they were about this. One exhorted us to eat many peas and beans, which we were cheerfully doing,—for are they not in summer pleasant things?—when I read in another that we might as well eat poison, so full were they, too, of qualities ending in xanthin poison. Lentils, recommended warmly by most books, are discountenanced by two because they make you fat. Rice has shared the same condemnation. Lettuces we may eat, but without the oil that soothes and the vinegar that interests, and if you add salt to them you will be thirsty, and you must never drink. An undressed lettuce—a quite naked lettuce—is a very dull thing. Really, I would as soon eat grass. We do refuse at present to follow this cruel advice, and have salad every day in defiance of it, but my conscience forces me to put less and less dressing in it each time, hoping that so shall we wean ourselves from the craving for it—'gradually,' as Papa says. Carrots, too, the books warn us against. I forget what it is they do to you that is serious, but the neighbor told me they make your skin shine, and since he told me that no carrot has crossed our threshold. Apples we may eat, but we are not to suppose that they will nourish us; they are useful only for preventing, by their bulk, the walls of our insides from coming together. The walls of the vegetarian inside are very apt to come together if the owner strikes out all the things he is warned against from his menu, and then it is, when they are about to do that, that fibrous bulk, most convenient in this form, should be applied; and, like the roasted Sunday goose of our fleshlier days in Rauchgasse, the vegetarian goes about stuffed with apples. Meanwhile there are no apples, and I know not whither I must turn in search of bulk. Do you think that in another week I shall be strong enough to write to you?

Yours sincerely,

ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

XXXVII

Galgenberg, July 28th.

Dear Mr. Anstruther,—This is a most sweet evening, dripping, quiet, after a rainy day, with a strip of clear yellow sky behind the pine trees on the crest of the hill. I gathered up my skirts and went down through the soaked grass to where against the fence there is a divine straggly bush of pink China roses. I wanted to see how they were getting on after their drenching; and as I stood looking at them in the calm light, the fence at the back of them sodden into dark greens and blacks that showed up every leaf and lovely loose wet flower, a robin came and sat on the fence near me and began to sing. You will say: Well, what next? And there isn't any next; at least, not a next that I am likely to make understandable. It was only that I felt extraordinarily happy. You will say: But why? And if I were to explain, at the end you would still be saying Why? Well, you cannot see my face while I am writing to you, so that I have been able often to keep what I was really thinking safely covered up, but you mustn't suppose that my letters have always exactly represented my state of mind, and that my soul has made no pilgrimages during this half year. I think it has wandered thousands of miles. And often while I wrote scolding you, or was being wise and complacent, or sprightly and offensive, often just then the tired feet of it were bleeding most as they stumbled among the bitter stones. And this evening I felt that the stones were at an end, that my soul has come home to me again, securely into my keeping, glad to be back, and that there will be no more effort needed when I look life serenely in the face. Till now there was always effort. That I talk to you about it is the surest sign that it is over. The robin's singing, the clear light behind the pines, the dripping trees and bushes, the fragrance of the wet roses, the little white house, so modest and hidden, where Papa and I are going to be happy, the perfect quiet after a stormy day, the perfect peace after discordant months,—oh, I wanted to say thank you for each of these beautiful things. Do you remember you gave me a book of Ernest Dowson's poems on the birthday I had while you were with us? And do you remember his

Now I will take me to a place of peace, Forget my heart's desire— In solitude and prayer work out my soul's release?

It is what I feel I have done.

But I will not bore you with these sentiments. See, I am always anxious to get back quickly to the surface of things, anxious to skim lightly over the places where tears, happy or miserable, lie, and not to touch with so much as the brush of a wing the secret tendernesses of the soul. Let us, sir, get back to vegetables. They are so safe as subjects for polite letter-writing. And I have had three letters from you this week condemning their use with all the fervor the English language places at your disposal—really it is generous to you in this respect—as a substitute for the mixed diet of the ordinary Philistine. Yes, sir, I regard you as an ordinary Philistine; and if you want to know what that in my opinion is, it is one who walks along in the ruts he found ready instead of, after sitting on a milestone and taking due thought, making his own ruts for himself. You are one of a flock; and you disapprove of sheep like myself that choose to wander off and browse alone. You condemn all my practices. Nothing that I think or do seems good in your eyes. You tell me roundly that I am selfish, and accuse me, not roundly because you are afraid it might be indecorous, but obliquely, in a mask of words that does not for an instant hide your meaning, of wearing Jaeger garments beneath my outer apparel. Soon, I gather you expect, I shall become a spiritualist and a social democrat; and quite soon after that I suppose you are sure I shall cut off my hair and go about in sandals. Well, I'll tell you something that may keep you quiet: I'm tired of vegetarianism. It isn't that I crave for fleshpots, for I shall continue as before to turn my back on them, on 'the boiled and roast, The heated nose in face of ghost,' but I grudge the time it takes and the thought it takes. For the fortnight I have followed its precepts I have lived more entirely for my body than in any one fortnight of my life. It was all body. I could think of nothing else. I was tending it the whole day. Instead of growing, as I had fondly hoped, so free in spirit that I would be able to draw quite close to the liebe Gott, I was sunk in a pit of indifference to everything needing effort or enthusiasm. And it is not simple after all. Shelley's meal of roots sounds easy and elementary, but think of the exertion of going out, strengthened only by other roots, to find more for your next meal. Nuts and fruits, things that require no cooking, really were elaborate nuisances, the nuts having to be cracked and the fruit freed from what Papa called its pedestrian portions. And they were so useless even then to a person who wanted to go out and dig in the garden. All they could do for me was to make me appreciate sofas. I am tired of it, tired of wasting precious time thinking about and planning my wretched diet. Yesterday I had an egg for breakfast—it gave me one of Pater's 'exquisite moments'—and a heavenly bowl of coffee with milk in it, and the effect was to send me out singing into the garden and to start me mending the fence. The neighbor came up to see what the vigorous hammer-strokes and snatches of Siegfried could mean, and when he saw it was I immediately called out, 'You have been eating meat!'

'I have not,' I said, swinging my hammer to show what eggs and milk can do.

'In some form or other you have this day joined yourself to the animal kingdom,' he persisted; and when I told him about my breakfast he wiped his hands (he had been picking fruit) and shook mine and congratulated me. 'I have watched with concern,' he said, 'your eyes becoming daily bigger. It is not good when eyes do that. Now they will shrink to their normal size, and you will at last set your disgraceful garden in order. Are you aware that the grass ought to have been made into hay a month ago?'

He is a haggard man, thin of cheek, round of shoulder, short of sight, who teaches little boys Latin and Greek in Weimar. For thirty years has he taught them, eking out his income in the way we all do in these parts by taking in foreigners wanting to learn German. In July he shakes Eis foreigners off and comes up here for six weeks' vacant pottering in his orchard. He bought the house as a speculation, and lets the upper part to any one who will take it, living himself, with his wife and son, on the ground floor. He is extremely kind to me, and has given me to understand that he considers me intelligent, so of course I like him. Only those persons who love intelligence in others and have doubts about their own know the deliciousness of being told a thing like that. I adore being praised. I am athirst for it. Dreadfully vain down in my heart, I go about pretending a fine aloofness from such weakness, so that when nobody sees anything in me—and nobody ever does—I may at least make a show of not having expected them to. Thus does a girl in a ball-room with whom no one will dance pretend she does not want to. Thus did the familiar fox conduct himself toward the grapes of tradition. Very well do I know there is nothing to praise; but because I am just clever enough to know that I am not clever, to be told that I am clever—do you follow me?—sets me tingling.

Now that's enough about me. Let us talk about you. You must not come to Jena. What could have put such an idea into your head? It is a blazing, deserted place just now, looking from the top of the hills like a basin of hot bouillon down there in the hollow, wrapped in its steam. The University is shut up. The professors scattered. Martens is in Switzerland, and won't be back till September. Even the Schmidts, those interesting people, have flapped up with screams of satisfaction into a nest on the side of a precipice. I urge you with all my elder-sisterly authority to stay where you are. Plainly, if you were to come I would not see you. Oh, I will leave off pretending I cannot imagine what you want here: I know you want to see me. Well, you shall not. Why you should want to is altogether beyond my comprehension. I believe you have come to regard me as a sort of medicine, medicine of the tonic order, and wish to bring your sick soul to the very place where it is dispensed. But I, you see, will have nothing to do with sick souls, and I wholly repudiate the idea of being somebody's physic. I will not be your physic. What medicinal properties you can extract from my letters you are welcome to, but pray are you mad that you should think of coming here? When you do come you are to come with your wife, and when you have a wife you are not to come at all. How simple.

Really, I feel inclined to laugh when I try to picture you, after the life you have been leading in London, after the days you are living now at Clinches, attempting to arrange yourself on this perch of ours up here. I cannot picture you. We have reduced our existence to the crudest elements, to the raw material; and you, I know, have grown a very exquisite young man. The fact is you have had time to forget what we are really like, my father and I and Johanna, and since my step-mother's time we have advanced far in the casual scrappiness of housekeeping that we love. You would be like some strange and splendid bird in the midst of three extremely shabby sparrows. That is the physical point of view: a thing to be laughed at. From the moral it is for ever impossible.

Yours sincerely,

ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

XXXVIII

Galgenberg, Aug. 7th.

Dear Mr. Anstruther,—It is pleasant of you to take the trouble to emulate our neighbor and tell me that you too think me intelligent. You put it, it is true, more elaborately than he does, with a greater embroidery of fine words, but I will try to believe you equally sincere. I make you a profound Knix,—it's a more expressive word than curtsey—of polite gratitude. But it is less excellent of you to add on the top of these praises that I am adorable. With words like that, inappropriate, and to me eternally unconvincing, this correspondence will come to an abrupt end. I shall not write again if that is how you are going to play the game. I would not write now if I were less indifferent. As it is, I can look on with perfect calm, most serenely unmoved by anything in that direction you may say to me; but if you care to have letters do not say them again. I shall never choose to allow you to suppose me vile.

Yours sincerely,

ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

XXXIX

Galgenberg, Aug. 13th.

Dear Mr. Anstruther,—You need not have sent me so many pages of protestations. Nothing you can say will persuade me that I am adorable, and I did exactly mean the world vile. Do not quarrel with Miss Cheriton; but if you must, do not tell me about it. Why should you always want to tell one of us about the other? Have you no sense of what is fit? I am nothing to you, and I will not hear these things.

Yours sincerely,

ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

XL

Galgenberg, Aug. 18th.

Dear Mr. Anstruther,—You must really write a book. Write a very long one, with plenty of room for all your words. What is your bill for postage now? Johanna, I am sure, thinks you are sending me instalments of manuscript, and marvels at the extravagance that shuts it up in envelopes instead of leaving its ends open and tying it up with string. Once more I must beg you not to write about Miss Cheriton. It is useless to remind me that I have posed as your sister, and that to your sister you may confide anything, because I am not your sister. Sometimes I have written of an elder-sisterly attitude toward you, but that, of course, was only talk. I am not irascible enough for the position. I do think, though, you ought to be surrounded by women who are cross. Six cross and determined elder sisters would do wonders for you. And so would a mother with an iron will. And perhaps an aunt living in the house might be a good thing; one of those aunts—I believe sufficiently abundant—who pierce your soul with their eyes and then describe it minutely at meal-times in the presence of the family, expatiating particularly on what those corners of it look like, those corners you thought so secret, in which are huddled your dearest faults.

Yours sincerely,

ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

XLI

Galgenberg, Aug. 25th.

Dear Mr. Anstruther,—Very well; I won't quarrel; I will be friends,—friends, that is, so long as you allow me to be so in the only right and possible way. Don't murder too many grouse. Think of my disapproving scowl when you are beginning to do it, and then perhaps your day of slaughter will resolve itself into an innocent picnic on the moors, alone with sky and heather and a bored, astonished dog. Are you not glad now that you went to Scotland instead of coming to Jena to find the Schmidts not at home? Surely long days in the heather by yourself will do much toward making you friends with life. I think those moors must be so beautiful. Really very nearly as good as my Galgenberg. My Galgenberg, by the bye, has left off being quite so admirably solitary as it was at first. The neighbor is, as I told you, extremely friendly, so is his wife, though I do not set such store by her friendliness as I do by his, for, frankly, I find men are best; and they have a son who is an Assessor in Berlin. You know what an Assessor is, don't you?—it is a person who will presently be a Landrath. And you know what a Landrath is? It's what you are before you turn into a Regierungsrath. And a Regierungsrath is what you are before you are a Geheimrath. And a Geheimrath, if he lives long enough and doesn't irritate anybody in authority, becomes ultimately that impressive and glorious being a Wirklicher Geheimrath—implying that before he was only in fun—mit dem Prädikat Excellenz. And don't say I don't explain nicely, because I do. Well, where was I? Oh, yes; at the son. Well, he appeared a fortnight ago, brown and hot and with a knapsack, having walked all the way from Berlin, and is spending his holiday with his people. For a day or two I thought him quite ordinary. He made rather silly jokes, and wore a red tie. Then one evening I heard lovely sounds, lovely, floating, mellow sounds coming up in floods through the orchard into my garden where I was propped against a tree-trunk watching a huge yellow moon disentangling itself slowly from the mists of Jena,—oh, but exquisite sounds, sounds that throbbed into your soul and told it all it wanted to hear, showed it the way to all it was looking for, talked to it wonderfully of the possibilities of life. First they drew me on to my feet, then they drew me down the garden, then through the orchard, nearer and nearer, till at last I stood beneath the open window they were coming from, listening with all my ears. Against the wall I leaned, holding my breath, spell-bound, forced to ponder great themes, themes of life and death, the music falling like drops of liquid light in dark and thirsty places. I don't know how long it lasted or how long I stood there after it was finished, but some one came to the window and put his head out into the freshness, and what do you think he said? He said, 'Donnerwetter, wie man im Zimmer schwitzt.' And it was the son, brown and hot, and with a red tie.

'Ach, Fräulein Schmidt,' said he, suddenly perceiving me. 'Good evening. A fine evening. I did not know I had an audience.'

'Yes,' said I, unable at once to adjust myself to politenesses.

'Do you like music?'

'Yes,' said I, still vibrating.

'It is a good violin. I picked it up—' and he told me a great many things that I did not hear, for how can you hear when your spirit refuses to come back from its journeyings among the stars?

'Will you not enter?' he said at last. 'My mother is fetching up some beer and will be here in a moment. It makes one warm playing.'

But I would not enter. I walked back slowly through the long orchard grass between the apple-trees trees. The moon gleamed along the branches. The branches were weighed down with apples. The place was full of the smell of fruit, of the smell of fruit fallen into the grass, that had lain there bruised all day in the sun. I think the beauty of the world is crushing. Often it seems almost unbearable, calling out such an acuteness of sensation, such a vivid, leaping sensitiveness of feeling, that indeed it is like pain.

But what I want to talk about is the strange way good things come out of evil. It really almost makes you respect and esteem the bad things, doing it with an intelligent eye fixed on the future. Here is our young friend down the hill, a young man most ordinary in every way but one, so ordinary that I think we must put him under the heading bad, taking bad in the sense of negation, of want of good, here he is, robust of speech, fond of beer, red of tie, chosen as her temple by that delicate lady the Muse of melody. Apparently she is not very particular about her temples. It is true while he is playing at her dictation she transforms him wholly, and I suppose she does not care what he is like in between. But I do. I care because in between he thinks it pleasant to entertain me with facetiousness, his mother hanging fondly on every word in the amazing way mothers, often otherwise quite intelligent persons, do. Since that first evening he has played every evening, and his taste in music is as perfect as it is bad in everything else. It is severe, exquisite, exclusive. It is the taste that plays Mozart and Bach and Beethoven, and wastes no moments with the Mendelssohn sugar or the lesser inspiration of Brahms. I tried to strike illumination out of him on these points, wanted to hear his reasons for a greater exclusiveness than I have yet met, went through a string of impressive names beginning with Schumann and ending with Wagner and Tchaikowsky, but he showed no interest, and no intelligence either, unless a shrug of the shoulder is intelligent. It is true he remarked one day that he found life too short for anything but the best—'That is why,' he added, unable to forbear from wit, 'I only drink Pilsner.'

'What?' I cried, ignoring the Pilsner, 'and do not these great men'—again I ran through a string of them—'do not they also belong to the very best?'

'No,' he said; and would say no more. So you see he is obstinate as well as narrow-minded.

Of course such exclusiveness in art is narrow-minded, isn't it? Besides, it is very possible he is wrong. You, I know, used to perch Brahms on one of the highest peaks of Parnassus (I never thought there was quite room enough for him on it), and did you not go three times all the way to Munich while you were with us to hear Mottl conduct the Ring? Surely it is probable a person of your all-round good taste is a better judge than a person of his very nearly all-round bad taste? Whatever your faults may be, you never made a fault in ties, never clamored almost ceaselessly for drink, never talked about schwitzen, nor entertained young women from next door with the tricks and facetiousness of a mountebank. I wonder if his system were carried into literature, and life were wholly concentrated on the half dozen absolutely best writers, so that we who spread our attention out thin over areas I am certain are much too wide knew them as we never can know them, became part of them, lived with them and in them, saw through their eyes and thought with their thoughts, whether there would be gain or loss? I don't know. Tell me what you think. If I might only have the six mightiest books to go with me through life I would certainly have to learn Greek because of Homer. But when it comes to the very mightiest, I cannot even get my six; I can only get four. Of course when I loosely say six books I mean the works of six writers. But beyond my four I cannot get; there must be a slight drop for the other two,—very slight, hardly a drop, rather a slight downward quiver into a radiance the faintest degree less blazing, but still a degree less. These two would be Milton and Virgil. The other four—but you know the other four without my telling you. I am not sure that the Assessor is not right, and that one cannot, in matters of the spirit, be too exclusive. Exclusiveness means concentration, deeper study, minuter knowledge; for we only have a handful of years to do anything in, and they are quite surely not enough to go round when going round means taking in the whole world.

On the other hand, wouldn't my speech become archaic? I'm afraid I would have a tendency that would grow to address Papa in blank verse. My language, even when praying him at breakfast to give me butter, would be incorrigibly noble. I don't think Papa would like it. And what would he say to a daughter who was forced by stress of concentration on six works to go through life without Goethe? Goethe, you observe, was not one of the two less glorious and he certainly was not one of the four completely glorious. I begin to fear I should miss a great deal by my exclusions. It would be sad to die without ever having been thrilled by Werther, exalted by Faust, amazed by the Wahlverwandtschaften, sent to sleep by Wilhelm Meister. To die innocent of any knowledge of Schiller's Glocke, with no memory of strenuous hours spent getting it by heart at school, might be quite pleasant. But I think it would end by being tiring to be screwed up perpetually to the pitch of the greatest men's greatest moments. Such heights are not for insects like myself. I would hang very dismally, with drooping head and wings, on those exalted hooks. And has not the soul too its longings at times for a dressing-gown and slippers? And do you see how you could do without Boswell?

Yours sincerely,

ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

XLII

Galgenberg, Aug. 31st.

Dear Mr. Anstruther,—Yes, of course he does. He plays every evening. And every evening I go and listen, either in the orchard beneath the open window or, more ceremoniously, inside the room with or without Papa. I find it a pleasant thing. I am living in a bath of music. And I hope you don't expect me to agree with your criticism of music as a stirrer-up of, on the whole, second-rate emotions. What are second-rate emotions? Are they the ones that you have? And was it to have them stirred that you used to journey so often to Munich and Mottl? Stirred up I certainly am. Not in the way, I admit, in which a poem of Milton's does it, not affected in the least as I am affected by, for instance, the piled-up majesty of the poem on Time, but if less nobly still very effectually. There; I have apparently begun to agree with you. Well, I do see, the moment I begin to consider, that what is stirred is less noble. I do see that what I feel when I listen to music is chiefly Wehmuth, and I don't think much of Wehmuth. You have no word for it. Perhaps in England you do not have just that form of sentiment. It is a forlorn thing, made up mostly of vague ingredients,—vague yearnings, vague regrets, vague dissatisfactions. When it comes over you, you remember all the people who are absent, and you are sad; and the people who are dead, and you sigh; and the times you have been naughty, and you groan. I do see that a sentiment that makes you do that is not the highest. It is profitless, sterile. It doesn't send you on joyfully to the next thing, but keeps you lingering in the dust of churchyards, barren places of the past which should never be revisited by the wholesome-minded. Now this looks as though I were agreeing with you quite, but I still don't. You put it so extremely. It is so horrid to think that even my emotions may be second-rate. I long ago became aware that my manners were so, but I did like to believe there was nothing second-rate about my soul. Well, what is one to do? Never be soft? Never be sad? Or sorry? Or repentant? Always stay up at the level of Milton's Time poem, or of his At a Solemn Musick, strung high up to an unchanging pitch of frigid splendor and nobleness? It is what I try to aim at. It is what I would best like. Then comes our friend of the red tie, and in the cool of the day when the world is dim and scented shakes a little fugue of Bach's out of his fiddle, a sparkling, sly little fugue, frolicsome for all its minor key, a handful of bright threads woven together, twisted in and out, playing, it would seem, at some game of hide-and-seek, of pretending to want to catch each other into a tangle, but always gayly coming out of the knots, each distinct and holding on its shining way till the meeting at the end, the final embrace when the game is over and they tie themselves contentedly together into one comfortable major chord,—our friend plays this, this manifestly happy thing, and my soul listens, and smiles, and sighs, and longs, and ends by being steeped in Wehmuth. I choose the little fugue of Bach as an instance, for of all music it is aimed most distinctly at the intellect, it is the furthest removed from Wehmuth; and if it has this effect on me I will not make you uncomfortable by a description of what the baser musics do, the musics of passion, of furious exultations and furious despairs. But my vague wish for I do not know what, gentle, and rather sweetly resigned when the accompaniment is Bach, swells suddenly while I listen to them into a terrifying longing that rends and shatters my soul.

What private things I tell you. I wouldn't if I were talking. I would be affected by your actual presence. But writing is so different, and so strange; at once so much more and so much less intimate. The body is safe—far away, unassailable; and the spirit lets itself go out to meet a fellow spirit with the frankness it can never show when the body goes too, that grievous hinderer of the communion of saints, that officious blunderer who can spoil the serenest intercourse by a single blush.

Johanna came in just there. She was decked in smiles, and wanted to say good-by till to-morrow morning. It is her night out, and she really looked rather wonderful to one used to her kitchen condition. Her skin, cleansed from week-day soilure, was surprisingly fair; her hair, waved more beautifully than mine will ever be, was piled up in bright imposing masses; her starched white dress had pink ribbons about it; she wore cotton gloves; and held the handkerchief I lend her on these occasions genteelly by its middle in her hand. Every second Sunday she descends the mountain at sunset, the door-key in her pocket, and dances all night in some convivial Gasthof in the town, coming up again at sunrise or later according to the amount of fun she was having. On the Monday I do nearly everything alone, for she sleeps half the day, and the other half she doesn't like being talked to. She is a good servant, and she would certainly go if we tried to get her in again under the twelve hours. On the alternate Sundays we allow her to have her young man up for the afternoon and evening. He is a trumpeter in the regiment stationed in Jena, and he brings his trumpet to fill up awkward silences. Engaged couples of that kind don't seem able to talk much, so that the trumpet is a great comfort to them. Whenever conversation flags he whips it out and blows a rousing blast, giving her time to think of something to say next. I had to ask him to do it in the garden, for the first time it nearly blew our roof, which isn't very tightly on, off. Now he and she sit together on a bench outside the door, and the genius down the hill with the exclusive ears suffers, I am afraid, rather acutely. Papa and I wander as far away as we can get among the mountains.

It is rather dreadful when they quarrel. Then, of course, Johanna sulks as girls will, and sulks are silent things, so that the trumpet has to fill up a yawning gulf and never leaves off at all. Last Sunday it blew the whole time we were out, and I expected when I got home to find the engagement broken off. We stayed away as long as we could, climbing higher and higher, wandering further and further, supping at last reluctantly on cucumber salad and cold herrings in the little restaurant up on the Schweizerhohe because the trumpet wouldn't stop and we didn't dare go home till it did. Its blasts pursued us even into the recesses of the dingy wooden hall we took our ears into, vainly trying to carry them somewhere out of range. It seemed to be a serious quarrel. We had a depressing meal. We both esteem Johanna with the craven esteem you feel for a person, at any moment capable of giving notice, who does all the unpleasant things you would otherwise have to do yourself. The state of her temper seriously affects our peace. You see, the house is small, and if her trumpeter has been unsatisfactory and she throws the saucepans about or knocks the broom in sweeping against all the wooden things like doors and skirting-boards, it makes an unendurable clatter and puts an end at once to Papa's work and to my equally earnest play. If, her nerves being already on edge, I were to suggest to her even smilingly to be quiet, she would at once give notice—I know she would—and the dreary search begin again for that impossible treasure you in England call a paragon and we in Jena call a pearl. Where am I to find a clean, honest, strong pearl, able to cook and willing to come and live in what is something like an unopened oyster-shell, so shut-up, so cut-off so solitary would her existence here be, for eight pounds a year? It is easy for you august persons who never see your servants, who have so many that by sheer force of numbers they become unnoticeable, to deride us who have only one for being so greatly at her mercy. I know you will deride. I see your letter already: 'Dear Fräulein Schmidt, Is not your attitude toward the maid Johanna unworthy?' It isn't unworthy, because it is natural. Defiantly I confess that it is also cringing. Well, it is natural to cringe under the circumstances. So would you. I dare say if your personal servant is a good one, and you depend much on him for comfort, you do do it as it is. And there are very few girls in Jena who would come out of it and take a situation on the side of a precipice for eight pounds a year. Really the wages are small, balanced against the disadvantages. And wages are going up. Down in Jena a good servant can get ten pounds a year now without much difficulty. So that it behooves us who cannot pay such prices to humor Johanna.

About nine the trumpet became suddenly dumb. Papa and I, after waiting a few minutes, set out for home, conjecturing as we went in what state we should find Johanna. Did the silence mean a rupture or a making-up? I inclined toward the rupture, for how can a girl, I asked Papa, murmur mild words of making-up to a lover engaged in blowing a trumpet? Papa said he didn't know; and engrossed by fears we walked home without speaking.

No one was to be seen. The house was dark and empty. Everything was quiet except the crickets. The trumpeter had gone, but so, apparently, had Johanna. She had forgotten to lock the door, so that all we—or anybody else passing that way—had to do was to walk in. Nobody, however,—and by nobody I mean the criminally intentioned, briefly burglars—walks into houses perched as ours is. They would be very breathless burglars by the time they got to our garden gate. We should hear their stertorous breathing as they labored up well in time to lock the door; and Papa, ever pitiful and polite, would as likely as not unlock it again to hasten out and offer them chairs and lemonade. It was not, then, with any misgivings of that sort that we went into our deserted house and felt about for matches; but I was surprised that Johanna, when she could sit comfortably level on the seat by the door, should rather choose to go and stroll in the garden. You cannot stroll in my garden. You can do very few of the things in it that most people can do in most gardens, and certainly strolling is not one of them. It is no place for lovers, or philosophers, or leisurely persons of the sort. It is an unrestful place, in which you are forced to be energetic, to watch where you put your feet, to balance yourself to a nicety, to be continually on the alert. I lit a lantern, and went out in search of Johanna strolling. I stood on the back door steps and looked right and looked left. No Johanna. No sounds of Johanna. Only the crickets, and the soft darting by of a bat. I went down the steps—they are six irregular stones embedded one beneath the other in the clay and leading to the pump from which, in buckets, we supply our need for water—and standing still again, again heard only crickets. I went to the mignonette beds I have made—mignonette and nasturtiums; mignonette for scent and nasturtiums for beauty, and I hope you like nasturtiums—and standing still again, again heard only crickets. The night was dark and soft, and seemed of a limitless vastness. The near shrill of the crickets made the silence beyond more intense. A cat prowled past, velvet-footed, silent as the night, a vanishing gray streak, intent and terrible, concentrated wholly on prey. I went on through the grass, my shoes wet with dew, the lantern light fitfully calling out my possessions from the blackness,—the three apple-trees, the currant-bush, the pale group of starworts, children of some accidental wind-dropped seed of long ago; and beside the starworts I stopped again and listened. Still only the crickets; and presently very far away the whistle of the night express from Berlin to Munich as it hurried past the little station in the Paradies valley. It was extraordinarily quiet. Once I thought my own heart-beats were the footsteps of a late wanderer on the road. I went further, down to the very end, to the place where my beautiful, untiring monthly-rose bush unfolds pink flower after pink flower against the fence that separates us from our neighbor's kingdom, and stopped again and listened. At first still only crickets, and the anxious twitter of a bird toward whose nest that stealthy, murderous streak of gray was drawing. It began to rain; soft, warm drops, from the motionless clouds spread low across the sky. I forgot Johanna, and became wholly possessed by the brooding spirit of the night, by the feeling of oneness, of identity with the darkness, the silence, the scent. My feet were wet with dew; my hair with the warm and gentle rain. I lifted up my face and let the drops fall on it through the leaves of the apple-trees, warm and gentle as a caress. Then the sudden blare of a trumpet made me start and quiver. I quivered so much that the lantern fell down and went out. The blare was the loudest noise I thought I had ever heard, ripping up the silence like a jagged knife. The startled hills couldn't get over it, but went on echoing and re-echoing it, tossing it backward and forward to each other in an endless surprise, and had hardly settled down again with a kind of shudder when they were roused to frenzy by another. After that there was blare upon blare. The man only stopped to take breath. They were louder, more rollicking than any I had heard him produce. And they came from the neighbor's house, from the very dwelling of him of the easily tortured ears, of him for whom Wagner is not good enough. Well, do you know what he had done? I ran down to question, and to extract Johanna and explain the trumpeter, and I met the poor genius, very pale and damp-looking, his necktie struggled up behind to the top of his collar, its bow twisted round somehow under his left ear. He was hurrying out into the night as I arrived, panting, on the doorstep. 'Why in the world—' I began; but a blast drowned further speech.

He flung up his hands, and the darkness engulfed him.

'It's raining,' I tried to cry after his hatless figure.

I thought I heard him call back something about Pilsner—'It's the Pilsner,' I thought I heard him say; but the noise coming from the kitchen was too violent for me to be sure.

His father was in the passage, walking up and down it, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders up to his ears as though he were shrinking from blows. He told me what his unhappy son had done. Not able to endure the trumpet when it was being blown up at our house earlier in the evening, not able to endure it even softened, chastened, subdued by distance and the intervening walls, he had directed his mother to go up and invite the player down to her kitchen, where he was to be cajoled into eating and drinking, because, as the son explained, full of glee at his sagacity, no man who is eating and drinking can at the same time be blowing a trumpet. 'Thus,' said his father, in jerks coincident with the breath-takings of the trumpeter, 'did he hope to obtain peace.'

'But he didn't,' said I.

'No. For a period there was extreme, delicious quiet. Mother'—so he invariably describes his wife—' sacrificed her best sausage, for how shall we permit our son to be tortured? The bread was spread with butter three centimeters deep. The trumpeter and his Schatz sat quietly in the kitchen eating it. We sat quietly on the veranda discussing great themes. Then that good beer my son so often praises, that excellent, barrel-kept, cellar-lodged Pilsner beer, bright as amber, clear as ice, cool as—cool as—'

'A cucumber,' I assisted.

'Good. Very good. As a cucumber—as a salad of cucumbers.'

'No, no—there's pepper in a salad. You'd better just keep to plain cucumber,' I interrupted, always rather nice in the matter of images.

'Cool, then, as plain cucumber—this usually admirable stuff instead of, as we had expected, sending him gradually and pleasantly to sleep—I mean, of course, making him gradually and pleasantly so sleepy that thoughts of his bed, growing in affection with every glass, would cause him to arise and depart to his barracks,—woke him up. And, my dear Fräulein, you yourself heard—you are hearing now—how completely it did it.'

'Is he—is he—?' I inquired nervously.

The neighbor nodded. 'He is,' he said; 'he has consumed fourteen glasses.'

And indeed he was; and I should say from the tumult, from the formlessness of it, the tunelessness, the rollicksomeness, that never was anybody more so.

'I fear my son will leave us for some quieter spot before his holiday is over,' said the neighbor, looking distressed.

And perhaps it will convince you more than anything else I have said of the extreme value of our Johannas, when I tell you that, goaded by the noise and by his disappointed face to rash promises, I declared I would dismiss the girl unless she broke off such an engagement, and he stared at me for a moment in astonishment and then resignedly shook his head and said with the weary conviction of a householder of thirty years' standing, 'Das geht doch nicht.'

Yours sincerely,

ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

XLIII

Galgenberg, Sept. 9th.

Dear Mr. Anstruther,—But it is true. Our servants do not get more than from 100 to 250 marks a year, and indeed I think it is a great deal and cannot see why, because you spend as much (you say you do, so I must believe it) in a month on gloves and ties, it should make you hate yourself. Do not hate yourself. Your doing so doesn't make us pay our servants more. Why, how do you suppose we could get all we need out of our hundred pounds a year—I translate our marks into your pounds for your greater convenience—if we had to give a servant more than eight of them and for our house more than fifteen? Papa and I do not like to be kept hungry in the matter of books, and we shall probably spend every penny of our income; but I know a number of families with children who live decently and have occasional coffee-parties and put by for their daughters' trousseaux on the same sum. As for the servants themselves, have I not described Johanna's splendid appearance on her Sundays, her white dress and gloves, and the pink ribbons round her waist? She finds her wages will buy these things and still leave enough for the savings-bank. She is quite content. Only I don't know if she would remain so if you were to come and lament over her and tell her what a little way you make the same money go. You see, she would probably not grasp the true significance of the admission, which is, I take it, not that she has too little but that you spend too much. Yet how can I from my Galgenberg judge what is necessary in gloves and ties for a splendid young man like yourself? The sum seems to me terrific. There must be stacks of gloves and ties constantly growing higher about your path. You, then, spend on these two things alone almost exactly what we three spend in a year on everything. But my astonishment is only the measure of my ignorance. Do not hate yourself. Either spend the money without compunction, or, if you have compunction, don't spend it. A sinner should always, I think, sin gayly or not at all. I don't mean that you in this are a sinner; I only mean that as a general principle half-hearted sinners are contemptible. It is a poor creature who while he sins is sorry. If he must sin, let him at least do it with all his heart, and having done it waste no time in whimpers but try to turn his back on it and his face toward the good. Please do not hate yourself. I am sure you have to have the things. Your letter is more than usually depressed. Please do not hate yourself. It does no good and lowers your vitality. It is as bad as sorrow, which surely is very bad. I think nothing great was done by any one who wasted time peering about among his faults; but if ever you meet the pastor who prepared me for confirmation don't tell him I said so. I don't know how it is with yours in England, but here the pastors seem altogether unable to bear listening to descriptions of plain facts. When they come to doctor my soul, why may I not tell them its symptoms as badly as I tell my body's symptoms to the physician who would heal it? He is not shocked or angry when I show him my sore places; he recommends a plaster or a dose, encourages, and goes away. But your spiritual doctor takes your spiritual sore places as a kind of personal affront; at least, his manner often shows indignation in proportion as you are frank. Instead of being patient, he hardly lets you speak; instead of prescribing, he denounces; instead of helping, he passionately scolds; and so you do not go to him again, but fight through your later miseries alone. Just at the time of my preparation for confirmation my mother died. My heart, blank with sorrow, was very fit for religious impressions and consolations. The preparation lasts two years, and three times every week during that time I went to classes. For two years I was not allowed to dance or to go to even the mildest parties. For two years, from sixteen to eighteen, I was earnest, prayerful, humbly seeking after righteousness. Then one day, when questionings had come upon me that my conscience could not approve, I went to the pastor who had prepared me as confidently as I would go with a toothache to a dentist, and bared my sensitive conscience to him and begged to have my thoughts arranged and my doubts and questionings settled. To my amazement and extreme fright I beheld him shocked, angry, hardly able to endure hearing me tell all I had been wondering. It seemed very strange. I sat at last with downcast eyes, silent, ashamed, my heart shrunk back into reserve and frost. I was not being helped; I was being scolded, and bitterly scolded. At last at the door some special word of blame stung me to heat, and I cried, 'Herr Pastor, when my tongue is bad and I show it to a doctor, he gives me a pill. Are you not the doctor of my spirit? Why, then, when I come to you to be healed, do you, instead of giving me medicine, so cruelly rate me?'

And he, staring at me a moment aghast, struck his hands together above his head. 'Thy father!' he cried, 'Thy father! It is he who speaks—it is he speaking in thee. Such words come not unaided from the mouth of eighteen, from the mouth of one confirmed by these very hands. Ach, miserable maiden, it is not with such as thee that Paradise is peopled. The taint of thy parentage is heavy upon thee. Thou art not, thou canst not be, thou hast never been, a child of God.'

And that was all I got for my pains.

Tell me, what mood were you in when you wrote? Was it not, apart from its dejection, one rather inclined to peevishness? You ask, for instance, why I write so much about a tipsy trumpeter when I know you are anxious to hear about the other things I never tell you. I can't imagine what they are. You must let me write how and what I like—bear with me while I discourse of roses and nasturtium-beds, of rain and sunshine, clouds and wind, cats, birds, servants, even trumpeters. My life holds nothing greater than these. If you want to hear from me you must hear also of them. And why have you taken so bitter a dislike to our gifted young neighbor down the hill, calling him contemptuously a fiddler? He is certainly a fiddler, if to fiddle in one's hours of ease produces one, and perhaps you would be twice as happy as you are if you could fiddle half so wonderfully as he does. He is gone. His holiday either came to an end or was put to an end by Johanna's fiancé. Now, in these early September days, this season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, of cloudy mornings and calm evenings and golden afternoons, he has turned his back on the hills and forests, on the reddening creepers and sweetening grapes, on the splash of water among ferns and rocks, on all those fresh, quiet things that make life worth having, and is sitting at a desk somewhere in Berlin doggedly bent on becoming, by means of a great outlay of days and years, a Landrath, a Regierungsrath, a Geheimrath, and a Wirklicher Geheimrath mit dem Prädikat Excellenz. When he has done that he will take down his hat and go forth at last to enjoy life, and will find to his surprise that it isn't there, that it is all behind him, a heap of dusty days piled in the corners of offices, and that his knees shake as he goes about looking for it, and that he can no longer even tune his fiddle by himself but has to have it done for him by the footman.

Isn't that what happens to all you wise men, so prudently determined to make your way in the world? You must be very sure of another life, or how could you bear to squander this? The things you are missing—oh, the things you are missing!—while you so carefully add little gain to little gain, or what I would rather call little loss to little loss. I see no point in slaving day after day through one's best years. Suppose you do not, in the end, have a footman to open your door—the footman is merely a symbol, conveniently expressing the multitude of superfluities that gather about the declining years of the person who has got on, things bought with the sacrifice of his life, and none of them giving him back the lost power, gone with youth, to enjoy them—suppose, then, you do not end gloriously with a footman, what of that? I must be blind, for I never can see the desirability of these trappings. Yet they surely are of an immense desirability, since everybody, really everybody, is willing to give so much in payment for them. Our elder neighbor down the hill has actually given his eyes and his back; he peers at life through spectacles, and walks about like Wordsworth's leech-gatherer, bent double through poking about for years in the muddy pools of little boys' badly written exercises; and here he is at fifty still not satisfied with what he has earned, still going on drudging the whole year round, except for his six short weeks in summer. His wife is thrifty; they have only the one son; they live frugally; long ago they must have put by enough to keep them warm and fed and clothed without his doing another stroke of work.

I was interrupted there by a message from him asking if I would come down and help him gather up the windfalls in his orchard, his wife being busy pickling beans. I went, my head full of what I had just been writing to you, and I gathered up together with the apples a little lesson in the foolishness of officious and hasty criticism. It was this way:

Our baskets being full, and our backs rested, he groaned and said that in another week he must leave for Weimar.

'But you like your work,' said I.

'I detest my work,' he said peevishly. 'I detest teaching. I detest little boys.'

'Then why—' I began, but stopped.

'Why? Why? Because I detest it is no reason why I should not do it.'

'Yes, it is.'

'What, and at my age begin another?'

'No, no.'

'You would not have me idle?'

'Yes, I would.'

He stared at me gravely through his spectacles. 'This is unprincipled,' he said.

I laughed. It is years since I have observed that the principled groan a good deal and make discontented criticisms of life, and I don't think I care to be one of them.

'It is,' he persisted, seeing that I only laughed.

'Is it?' said I.

'It is man's lot to work,' said he.

'Is it?' said I.

'Certainly,' said he.

'All day?'

'If he cannot get it done in less time, certainly.'

'Every day?'

'Certainly.'

'All through the years of his life?'

'All through the years of his strength, certainly.'

'What for?'

'My dear young lady, have you been living again on vegetables lately?'

'Why?'

'Your words sound as though your thoughts were watery.'

A nettled silence fell upon me, and while I was arranging how best to convince him of their substance he was shaking his head and saying that it was strange how the most intelligent women are unable really to think. 'Water,' he continued, 'is indispensable in its proper place and good in many others where, strictly, it might be done without. I have nothing to say against watery emotions, watery sentiments, even watery affections, especially in ladies, who would be less charming in proportion as they were more rigid. Ebb and flow, uncertainty, instability, unaccountableness, are becoming to your sex. But in the region of thought, of the intellect, of pure reason, everything should be very dry. The one place, my dear young lady, in which I will endure no water is on the brain.'

I had no answer ready. There seemed to be nothing left to do but to go home. I did go a few steps up the orchard, reflecting on the way men have of telling you you cannot think, or are not logical, at the very moment when you appear to yourself to be most unanswerable—a regrettable habit that at once puts a stop to interesting conversation,—and presently, as I was nearing our fence, he called after me. 'Fräulein Rose-Marie,' he called pleasantly.

'Well?' said I, looking down at him over a displeased shoulder.

'Come back.'

'No.'

'Come back and dine with us.'

'No.'

'There is mutton for dinner, and before that a soup full of the concentrated strength of beasts. Up there I know you will eat carrots and stewed apples, and I shall never be able to make you see what I see.'

'Heaven forbid that I ever should.'

'What, you do not desire to be reasonable?'

'I don't choose to argue with you.'

'Have I done anything?'

'You are not logical enough for me,' said I, anxious to be beforehand with the inevitable remark.

'Come, come,' said he, his face crinkling into smiles.

'It's true,' said I.

'Come back and prove it.'

'Useless.'

'You cannot.'

'I will not.'

'It is the same thing.'

I went on up the hill.

'Fräulein Rose-Marie!'

'Well?'

'Come back.'

'No.'

'Come back, and tell me why you think I ought to give up my work and sit for the rest of my days with hanging hands.'

I turned and looked down at him. 'Because,' I said, 'are you not fifty? And is not that high time to begin and get something out of life?'

He adjusted his spectacles, and stared up at me attentively. 'Continue,' he said.

'I look at your life, at all those fifty years of it, and I see it insufferably monotonous.'

'Continue.'

'Dull.'

'Continue.'

'Dusty.'

'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 visible 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.

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 indiscretion 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.