I
Jena, Nov. 6th.
Dear Roger,--This is only to tell you that I love you, supposing you
should have forgotten it by the time you get to London. The letter will
follow you by the train after the one you left by, and you will have it
with your breakfast the day after to-morrow. Then you will be eating the
marmalade Jena could not produce, and you'll say, 'What a very
indiscreet young woman to write first.' But look at the Dear Roger, and
you'll see I'm not so indiscreet after all. What could be more sober?
And you've no idea of all the nice things I could have put instead of
that, only I wouldn't. It is a most extraordinary thing that this time
yesterday we were on the polite-conversation footing, you, in your
beautiful new German, carefully calling me _gnädiges Fräulein_ at every
second breath, and I making appropriate answers to the Mr. Anstruther
who in one bewildering hour turned for me into Dear Roger. Did you
always like me so much?--I mean, love me so much? My spirit is rather
unbendable as yet to the softnesses of these strange words, stiff for
want of use, so forgive a tendency to go round them. Don't you think it
is very wonderful that you should have been here a whole year, living
with us, seeing me every day, practising your German on me--oh, wasn't I
patient?--and never have shown the least sign, that I could see, of
thinking of me or of caring for me at all except as a dim sort of young
lady who assisted her step-mother in the work of properly mending and
feeding you? And then an hour ago, just one hour by that absurd
cuckoo-clock here in this room where we said good-by, you suddenly
turned into something marvellous, splendid, soul-thrilling--well, into
Dear Roger. It is so funny that I've been laughing, and so sweet that
I've been crying. I'm so happy that I can't help writing, though I do
think it rather gushing--loathsome word--to write first. But then you
strictly charged me not to tell a soul yet, and how can I keep
altogether quiet? You, then, my poor Roger, must be the one to listen.
Do you know what Jena looks like to-night? It is the most dazzling place
in the world, radiant with promise, shining and dancing with all sorts
of little lovely lights that I know are only the lamps being lit in
people's rooms down the street, but that look to me extraordinarily like
stars of hope come out, in defiance of nature and fog, to give me a
glorious welcome. You see, I'm new, and they know it. I'm not the
Rose-Marie they've twinkled down on from the day I was born till
to-night. She was a dull person: a mere ordinary, dull person, climbing
doggedly up the rows of hours each day set before her, doggedly doing
certain things she was told were her daily duties, equally doggedly
circumventing certain others, and actually supposing she was happy.
Happy? She was not. She was most wretched. She was blind and deaf. She
was asleep. She was only half a woman. What is the good or the beauty of
anything, alive or dead, in the world, that has not fulfilled its
destiny? And I never saw that before. I never saw a great many things
before. I am amazed at the suddenness of my awaking. Love passed through
this house today, this house that other people think is just the same
dull place it was yesterday, and behold--well, I won't grow magnificent,
and it is what you do if you begin a sentence with Behold. But really
there's a splendor--oh well. And as for this room where you--where
I--where we--well, I won't grow sentimental either, though now I know, I
who always scoffed at it, how fatally easy a thing it is to be. That is,
supposing one has had great provocation; and haven't I? Oh, haven't I?
I had got as far as that when your beloved Professor Martens came in,
very much agitated because he had missed you at the station, where he
had been to give you a send-off. And what do you think he said? He said,
why did I sit in this dreary hole without a lamp, and why didn't I draw
the curtains, and shut out the fog and drizzle. Fog and drizzle? It
really seemed too funny. Why, the whole sky is shining. And as for the
dreary hole--gracious heavens, is it possible that just being old made
him not able to feel how the air of the room was still quivering with
all you said to me, with all the sweet, wonderful, precious things you
said to me? The place was full of you. And there was your darling
coffee-cup still where you had put it down, and the very rug we stood on
still all ruffled up.
'I think it's a glorious hole,' I couldn't help saying.
'_De gustibus_' said he indulgently; and he stretched himself in the
easy-chair--the one you used to sit in--and said he should miss young
Anstruther.
'Shall you?' said I.
'Fräulein Rose-Marie,' said he solemnly, 'he was a most intelligent
young man. Quite the most intelligent young man I have ever had here.'
'Really?' said I, smiling all over my silly face.
And so of course you were, or how would you ever have found out that
I--well, that I'm not wholly unlovable?
Yours quite, quite truly,