Don't take my Goethe-love from me. I know simply masses of him, and
can't let him go. My mind is decked out with him as a garden is decked
with flowers. Now isn't that pretty? Or is it only silly? Anyhow it's
dreadfully late. Good-night.
V
Jena, Nov. 13th.
No letter from you today. I am afraid you are being worried, and because
of me. Here am I, quiet and cheerful, nobody bothering me, and your dear
image in my heart to warm every minute of life; there are you, being
forced to think things out, to make plans for the future, decide on
courses of action, besides having to pass exams, and circumvent a parent
whom I gather you regard as refractory. How lucky I am in my dear
father. If I could have chosen, I would have chosen him. Never has he
been any trouble. Never does he bore me. Never am I forced to
criticisms. He knows that I have no brains, and has forgiven me. I know
he hasn't much common-sense, and have forgiven him. We spend our time
spoiling and petting and loving each other--do you remember how you
sometimes laughed?
But I wish you were not worried. It is all because I'm so ineligible. If
I could come to you with a pot of money in each hand, turned by an
appreciative ruler into Baroness von Schmidt, with a Papa in my train
weighed down by Orders, and the road behind me black with carts
containing clothes, your father would be merciful unto us and bless us.
As things are, you are already being punished, you have already begun to
pay the penalty for that one little hour's happiness; and it won't be
quite paid ever, not so long as we both shall live. Do you, who think so
much, ever think of the almost indecent haste with which punishments
hurry in the wake of joys? They really seem to tumble over one another
in their eagerness each to get there first. You took me to your heart,
told me you loved me, asked me to be your wife. Was it so wrong? So
wrong to let oneself go to happiness for those few moments that one
should immediately be punished? My father will not let me believe
anything. He says--when my step-mother is not listening; when she is he
doesn't--that belief is not faith, and you can't believe if you do not
know. But he cannot stop my silently believing that the Power in whose
clutches we are is an amazing disciplinarian, a relentless grudger of
joys. And what pitiful small joys they are, after all. Pitiful little
attempts of souls doomed to eternal solitude to put out feelers in the
dark, to get close to each other, to touch each other, to try to make
each other warm. Now I am growing lugubrious; I who thought never to be
lugubrious again. And at ten o'clock on a fine November morning, of all
times in the world.
Papa comes back from Weimar today. There has been a prolonged meeting
there of local lights about the damage done by some Goth to the
Shakespeare statue in the park; and though Papa is not a light, still he
did burn with indignation over that, and has been making impassioned
speeches, and suggesting punishments for the Goth when they shall have
caught him. I think I shall go over by the two o'clock train and meet
him and bring him home, and look in at Goethe's sponge on the way. You
know how the little black thing lies in his bedroom there, next to a
basin not much bigger than a breakfast-cup. With this he washed and was
satisfied. And whenever I feel depressed, out of countenance with myself
and life, I go and look at it and come home cheered and strengthened. I
wonder if you'll be able to make out why? Bless you my dearest.