Jena, Nov. 7th.
Dear Roger,--You left on Tuesday night--that's yesterday--and you'll get
to London on Thursday morning--that's to-morrow--and first you'll want
to wash yourself, and have breakfast--please notice my extreme
reasonableness--and it will be about eleven before you are able to begin
to write to me. I shan't get the letter till Saturday, and today is only
Wednesday, so how can I stop myself from writing to you again, I should
like to know? I simply can't. Besides, I want to tell you all the heaps
of important things I would have told you yesterday, if there had been
time when you asked me in that amazing sudden way if I'd marry you.
Do you know I'm poor? Of course you do. You couldn't have lived with us
a year and not seen by the very sort of puddings we have that we are
poor. Do you think that anybody who can help it would have _dicker Reis_
three times a week? And then if we were not, my step-mother would never
bother to take in English young men who want to study German; she would
do quite different sorts of things, and we should have different sorts
of puddings,--proud ones, with _Schlagsahne_ on their tops--and two
servants instead of one, and I would never have met you. Well, you know
then that we are poor; but I don't believe you know _how_ poor. When
girls here marry, their parents give them, as a matter-of-course,
house-linen enough to last them all their lives, furniture enough to
furnish all their house, clothes enough for several generations, and so
much a year besides. Then, greatly impoverished, they spend the evenings
of their days doing without things and congratulating themselves on
having married off their daughter. The man need give only himself.
You've heard that my own mother, who died ten years ago, was English?
Yes, I remember I told you that, when you were so much surprised at what
you called, in politest German, my colossally good English. From her I
know that people in England do not buy their son-in-law's carpets and
saucepans, but confine their helpfulness to suggesting Maple. It is the
husband, they think, who should, like the storks of the Fatherland,
prepare and beautify the nest for the wife. If the girl has money, so
much the better; but if she has not, said my mother, it doesn't put an
absolute stop to her marrying.
Here, it does; and I belong here. My mother had some money, or my father
would never have let himself fall in love with her--I believe you can
nip these things in the bud if you see the bud in time--and you know my
father is not a mercenary man; he only, like the rest of us, could not
get away altogether from his bringing-up and the points of view he had
been made to stare from ever since he stared at all. It was a hundred a
year (pounds, thank heaven, not marks), and it is all we have except
what he gets for his books, when he does get anything, which is never,
and what my step-mother has, which is an annuity of a hundred and fifty
pounds. So the hundred a year will be the whole sum of my riches, for I
have no aunts. What I want you to consider is the awfulness of marrying
a woman absolutely without saucepans. Not a single towel will she be
able to add to your linen-room, not a single pot to your kitchen. All
Jena when it hears of it will say, 'Poor, infatuated young man,' and if
I had sisters all England would refuse in future to send its sons to my
step-mother. Why, if you were making a decently suitable marriage do you
suppose your _Braut_ would have to leave off writing to you at this
point, in the very middle of luminous prophecy, and hurry into the
kitchen and immerse herself in the preparation of potato soup? Yet that
is exactly what your _Braut,_ who has caught sight of the clock, is
about to do. So good-by.
Your poor, but infinitely honest,