VI

Jena, Nov. 14th.

That sponge had no effect yesterday. I stared and stared at it, and it

only remained a sponge, far too small for the really cleanly, instead of

what it has up to now been, the starting-point for a train of thrilling,

enthusiastic thoughts. I'm an unbalanced creature. Do you divide your

time too, I wonder, between knocking your head against the stars and, in

some freezing depth of blackness, listening to your heart, how it will

hardly beat for fear? Of course you don't. You are much too clever. And

then you have been educated, trained, taught to keep your thoughts

within bounds, and not let them start off every minute on fresh and

aimless wanderings. Yet the star-knocking is so wonderful that I believe

I would rather freeze the whole year round for one hour of it than go

back again to the changeless calm, the winter-afternoon sunshine, in

which I used to sit before I knew you. All this only means that you have

not written. See how variously one can state a fact.

I have run away from the sitting-room and the round table and the lamp,

because Papa and my step-mother had begun to discuss you again, your

prospects, your probable hideous fate if you were not prudent, your

glorious career if you were. I felt guilty, wounded, triumphant, vain,

all at once. Papa, of course, was chiefly the listener. He agreed; or at

most he temporized. I tell you, Roger, I am amazed at the power a woman

has over her husband if she is in _every_ way inferior to him. It is not

only that, as we say, _der Klügere giebt nach_, it is the daily complete

victory of the coarser over the finer, the rough over the gentle, the

ignorant over the wise. My step-mother is an uneducated person, shrewd

about all the things that do not matter, unaware of the very existence

of the things that do, ready to be charitable, helpful, where the

calamity is big enough, wholly unsympathetic, even antagonistic, toward

all those many small calamities that make up one's years; the sort of

woman parsons praise, and who get tombstones put over them at last

peppered with frigid adjectives like virtuous and just. Did you ever

chance to live with a just person? They are very chilling, and not so

rare as one might suppose. And Papa, laxest, most tolerant of men, so

lax that nothing seems to him altogether bad, so tolerant that nobody,

however hard he tries, can pass, he thinks, beyond the reach of

forgiveness and love, so humorous that he has to fight continually to

suppress it, for humor lands one in odd morasses of dislike and

misconception here, married her a year after my mother died, and did it

wholly for my sake. Imagine it. She was to make me happy. Imagine that

too. I was not any longer to be a solitary _Backfisch_, with holes in

her stockings and riotous hair. There came a painful time when Papa

began to suspect that the roughness of my hair might conceivably be a

symbol of the dishevelment of my soul. Neighboring matrons pointed out

the possibility to him. He took to peering anxiously at unimportant

parts of me such as my nails, and was startled to see them often black.

He caught me once or twice red-eyed in corners, when it had happened

that the dear ways and pretty looks of my darling mother had come back

for a moment with extra vividness. He decided that I was both dirty and

wretched, and argued, I am sure during sleepless nights, that I would

probably go on being dirty and wretched for ever. And so he put on his

best clothes one day, and set out doggedly in search of a wife.

He found her quite easily, in a house in the next street. She was making

doughnuts, for it was the afternoon of New Year's Eve. She had just

taken them out of the oven, and they were obviously successful. Papa

loves doughnuts. His dinner had been uneatable. The weather was cold.

She took off her apron, and piled them on a dish, and carried them,

scattering fragrance as they went, into the sitting-room; and the smell

of them was grateful; and they were very hot.

Papa came home engaged. 'I am not as a rule in favor of second

marriages, Rose-Marie,' he began, breaking the news to me with elaborate

art.

'Oh, horrid things,' I remarked, my arm round his neck, my face against

his, for even then I was as tall as he. You know how he begins abruptly

about anything that happens to cross his mind, so I was not surprised.

He rubbed his nose violently. 'I never knew anybody with such hair as

yours for tickling a person,' he said, trying to push it back behind my

ears. Of course it would not go. 'Would it do that,' he added

suspiciously, 'if it were properly brushed?'

'I don't know. Well, _Papachen_?'

'Well what?'

'About second marriages.'

He had forgotten, and he started. In an instant I knew. I took my arm

away quickly, but put it back again just as quickly and pressed my face

still closer: it was better we should not see each other's eyes while he

told me.

'I am not, as a rule, in favor of them,' he repeated, when he had

coughed and tried a second time to induce my hair to go behind my ears,

'but there are cases where they are--imperative.'

'Which ones?'

'Why, if a man is left with little children, for instance.'

'Then he engages a good nurse.'

'Or his children run wild.'

'Then he gets a severe aunt to live with him.'

'Or they grow up.'

'Then they take care of themselves.'

'Or he is an old man left with, say, one daughter.'

'Then she would take care of him.'

'And who would take care of her, Rose-Marie?'

'He would.'

'And if he is an incapable? An old person totally unable to notice

lapses from convention, from social customs? If no one is there to tell

her how to dress and how to behave? And she is growing up, and yet

remains a barbarian, and the day is not far distant when she must go

out, and he knows that when she does go out Jena will be astounded.'

'Does the barbarian live in Jena?'

'My dear, she is universal. Wherever there is a widower with an only

female child, there she is.'

'But if she had been happy?'

'But she had not been happy. She used to cry.'

'Oh, of course she used to cry sometimes, when she thought more than

usual of her sweet--of her sweet--But for all that she had been happy,

and so had he. Why, you know he had. Didn't she look after him, and keep

house for him? Didn't she cook for him? Not very beautifully, perhaps,

but still she did cook, and there was dinner every day. Didn't she go to

market three times a week, and taste all the butter? Didn't she help to

do the rooms? And in the evenings weren't they happy together, with

nobody to worry them? And then, when he missed his darling wife, didn't

the barbarian always know he was doing it, and come and sit on his knee,

and kiss him, and make up for it? Didn't she? Now didn't she?'

Papa unwound himself, and walked up and down with a desperate face.

'Girls of sixteen must learn how to dress and to behave. A father cannot

show them that,' he said.

'But they do dress and behave.'

'Rose-Marie, unmended stockings are not dressing. And to talk to a

learned stranger well advanced in years with the freedom of his equal in

age and knowledge, as I saw one doing lately, is not behaving.'

'Oh, Papa, she wouldn't do that again, I'm certain.'

'She wouldn't have done it that once if she had had a mother.'

'But the poor wretch hadn't got a mother.'

'Exactly. A mother, therefore, must be provided.'

Here, I remember, there was a long pause. Papa walked, and I watched him

in despair. Despair, too, was in his own face. He had had time to forget

the doughnuts, and how cold he had been, and how hungry. So shaken was I

that I actually suggested the engagement of a finishing governess to

finish that which had never been begun, pointing out that she, at least,

having finished would go; and he said he could not afford one; and he

added the amazing statement that a wife was cheaper.

Well, I suppose she has been cheap: that is she has made one of Papa's

marks go as far as two of other people's; but oh how expensive she has

been in other ways! She has ruined us in such things as freedom, and

sweetness, and light. You know the sort of talk here at meals. I wish

you could have heard it before her time. She has such a strong

personality that somehow we have always followed her lead; and Papa, who

used to bubble out streams of gayety when he and I sat untidily on

either side of a tureen of horrible bad soup, who talked of all things

under heaven, and with undaunted audacity of many things in it, and who

somehow put a snap and a sparkle into whatever he said, sits like a

schoolboy invited to a meal at his master's, eager to agree, anxious to

give satisfaction. The wax cloth on the table is clean and shiny; the

spoons are bright; a cruet with clear oil and nice-looking vinegar

stands in the midst; the food, though simple, is hot and decent; we are

quite comfortable; and any of the other Jena _Hausfraus_ coming in

during a meal would certainly cry out _Wie gemüthlich_. But of what use

is it to be whitewashed and trim outside, to have pleasant creepers and

tidy shutters, when inside one's soul wanders through empty rooms,

mournfully shivers in damp and darkness, is hungry and no one brings it

food, is cold and no one lights a fire, is miserable and tired and

there's not a chair to sit on?

Why I write all this I can't think; except that I feel as if I were

talking to you. You must tell me if I bore you. When I begin a letter to

you the great difficulty is to leave off again. Oh how warm it makes one

feel to know that there is one person in the world to whom one is

everything. A lover is the most precious, the most marvellous

possession. No wonder people like having them. And I used to think that

so silly. Heavens, what an absurd person I have been. Why, love is the

one thing worth having. Everything else, talents, work, arts, religion,

learning, the whole _tremblement,_ are so many drugs with which the

starved, the loverless, try to dull their pangs, to put themselves to

sleep. Good-night, and God bless you a thousand times. R.-M.