Jena, Nov. 16th, 9 a.m.
Really, my dear Roger, nicest of all _Bräutigams,_ pleasantest, best,
and certainly most charming, I don't think I'll write to you again in
the evenings. One of those hard clear hours that lie round
breakfast-time will be the most seemly for consecration to you. Moods
are such queer things, each one so distinct and real, so seemingly
eternal, and I am influenced by them to an extraordinary degree. The
weather, the time of day, the light in the room--yes, actually the light
in the room, sunlight, cloudlight, lamplight--the scent of certain
flowers, the sound of certain voices--the instant my senses become aware
of either of these things I find myself flung into the middle of a fresh
mood. And the worst part of it is the blind enthusiasm with which I am
sure that as I think and feel at that moment so will I think and feel
for ever. Nothing cures me. No taking of myself aside, no weight of
private admonishment, no bringing of my spirit within the white glare of
pure reason. Oh, women are fools; and of all fools the most complete is
myself. But that's not what I want to talk about. I want to say that I
had to go to a _Kaffee-Klatsch_ yesterday at four, which is why I put
off answering your letter of the 13th till the evening. My dear Roger,
you must take no notice of that letter. Pray think of me as a young
person of sobriety; collected, discreet, cold to frostiness. Think of me
like that, my dear, and in return I'll undertake to write to you only in
my after-breakfast mood, quite the most respectable I possess. It is
nine now. Papa, in the slippers you can't have forgotten, is in his
corner by the stove, loudly disagreeing with the morning paper; he keeps
on shouting _Schafskopf._ Johanna is carrying coals about and dropping
them with a great noise. My step-mother is busy telling her how wrong it
is to drop dirty coals in clean places. I am writing on a bit of the
breakfast-table, surrounded by crumbs and coffee-cups. I will not clear
them away till I've finished my letter, because then I am sure you'll
get nothing either morbid or lovesick. Who, I'd like to know, could
flame into love-talk or sink into the mud of morbidness from a
starting-point of anything so sprightly as crumbs and coffee-cups?
It was too sweet of you to compare me to Nausicaa in your letter
yesterday. Nobody ever did that before. Various aunts, among whom a few
years ago there was a great mortality, so that they are all now aunts in
heaven, told me in divers tones that I was much too long for my width,
that I was like the handle of a broom, like the steeple of the
_Stadtkirche_, like a tree walking; but none of them ever said anything
about Nausicaa. I doubt if they had ever heard of her. I'm afraid if
they had they wouldn't have seen that I am like her. You know the
blindness of aunts. Jena is full of them (not mine, _Gott sei Dank_, but
other people's) and they are all stone-blind. I don't mean, of course,
that the Jena streets are thick with aunts being led by dogs on strings,
but that they have that tragic blindness of the spirit that misses
seeing things that are hopeful and generous and lovely; things alight
with young enthusiasms, or beautiful with a patience that has had time
to grow gray. They also have that odd, unfurnished sort of mind that can
never forget and never forgive. Yesterday at the _Kaffee-Klatsch_ I met
them all again, the Jena aunts I know so well and who are yet for ever
strange, for ever of a ghastly freshness. It was the first this season,
and now I suppose I shall waste many a good afternoon _klatsch_ing. How
I wish I had not to go. My step-mother says that if I do not show myself
I shall be put down as eccentric. 'You are not very popular,' says she,
'as it is. Do not, therefore, make matters worse.' Then she appeals,
should a more than usual stubbornness cloud my open countenance, to
Papa. 'Ferdinand,' she says, 'shall she not, then, do as others of her
age?' And of course Papa says, bless him, that girls must see life
occasionally, and is quite unhappy if I won't. Life? God bless him for a
dear, innocent Papa. And how they talked yesterday. Papa would have
writhed. He never will talk or listen to talk about women unless they've
been dead some time, so uninteresting, so unworthy of discussion does he
consider all live females except Johanna to be. And if I hadn't had my
love-letter (I took it with me tucked inside my dress, where my heart
could beat against it), I don't think I would have survived that
_Klatsch._ You've no idea how proudly I set out. Hadn't I just been
reading the sweetest things about myself in your letter? Of course I was
proud. And I felt so important, and so impressive, and simply gloriously
good-tempered. The pavement of Jena, I decided as I walked over it, was
quite unworthy to be touched by my feet; and if the passers-by only knew
it, an extremely valuable person was in their midst. In fact, my dear
Roger, I fancied myself yesterday. Didn't Odysseus think Nausicaa was
Artemis when first he met her among the washing, so god-like did she
appear? Well, I felt god-like yesterday, made god-like by your love. I
actually fancied people would _see_ something wonderful had happened to
me, that I was transfigured, _verklärt._ Positively, I had a momentary
feeling that my coming in, the coming in of anything so happy, must
blind the _Kaffee-Klatsch_, that anything so burning with love must
scorch it. Well, it didn't. Never did torch plunged into wetness go out
with a drearier fizzle than did my little shining. Nobody noticed
anything different. Nobody seemed even to look at me. A few careless
hands were stretched out, and the hostess told me to ask the servant to
bring more milk.
They were talking about sin. We don't sin much in Jena, so generally
they talk about sick people, or their neighbor's income and what he does
with it. But yesterday they talked sin. You know because we are poor and
Papa has no official position and I have come to be twenty-five without
having found a husband, I am a _quantité négligeable_ in our set, a
being in whose presence everything can be said, and who is expected to
sit in a draught if there is one. Too old to join the young girls in the
corner set apart for them, where they whisper and giggle and eat amazing
quantities of whipped cream, I hover uneasily on the outskirts of the
group of the married, and try to ingratiate myself by keeping on handing
them cakes. It generally ends in my being sent out every few minutes by
the hostess to the kitchen to fetch more food and things. 'Rose-Marie is
so useful,' she will explain to the others when I have been extra quick
and cheerful; but I don't suppose Nausicaa's female acquaintances said
more. The man Ulysses might take her for a goddess, but the most the
women would do would be to commend the way she did the washing.
Sometimes I have great trouble not to laugh when I see their heads,
often quite venerable, gathered together in an eager bunch, and hear
them expressing horror, sympathy, pity, in every sort of appropriate
tone, while their eyes, their tell-tale eyes, betrayers of the soul,
look pleased. Why they should be pleased when somebody has had an
operation or doesn't pay his debts I can't make out. But they do. And
after a course of _Klatsches_ throughout the winter, you are left toward
April with one firm conviction in a world where everything else is
shaky, that there's not a single person who isn't either extraordinarily
ill, or, if he's not, who does not misuse his health and strength by not
paying his servants' wages.
Yesterday the _Klatsch_ was in a fearful flutter. It had got hold of a
tale of sin, real or suspected. It was a tale of two people who, after
leading exemplary lives for years, had suddenly been clutched by the
throat by Nature; and Nature, we know, cares nothing at all for the
claims of husbands and wives or any other lawfulnesses, and is a most
unmoral and one-idea'd person. They have, says Jena, begun to love each
other in defiance of the law. Nature has been too many for them, I
suppose. All Jena is a-twitter. Nothing can be proved, but everything is
being feared, said the hostess; from her eyes I'm afraid she wanted to
say hoped. Isn't it ugly?--_pfui_, as we say. And so stale, if it's
true. Why can't people defy Nature and be good? The only thing that is
always fresh and beautiful is goodness. It is also the only thing that
can make you go on being happy indefinitely.
I know her well. My heart failed me when I heard her being talked about
so hideously. She is the nicest woman in Jena. She has been kind to me
often. She is very clever. Perhaps if she had been more dull she would
have found no temptation to do anything but jog along respectably--sometimes
I think that to be without imagination is to be so very safe. He has
only come to these parts lately. He used to be in Berlin, and has been
appointed to a very good position in Weimar. I have not met him, but
Papa says he is brilliant. He has a wife, and she has a husband, and
they each have a lot of children; so you see if it's true it really is
very _pfui_.
Just as the _Kaffee-Klatsch_ was on the wane, and crumbs were being
brushed off laps, and bonnet-strings tied, in she walked. There was a
moment's dead silence. Then you should have heard the effusion of
welcoming speeches. The hostess ran up and hugged her. The others were
covered with pleasant smiles. Perhaps they were grateful to her for
having provided such thrilling talk. When I had to go and kiss her hand
I never in my life felt baser. You should have seen her looking round
cheerfully at all the Judases, and saying she was sorry to be late, and
asking if they hadn't missed her; and you should have heard the eager
chorus of assurances.
Oh, _pfui, pfui_.