Jena, Nov. 22d.
When do you go back to Jermyn Street? Surely today, for is not the
examination to-morrow? Your description of the Cheriton _ménage_ at
Clinches is like fairyland. No wonder you feel so happy there. My mother
used to tell me about life in England, but apparently the Watson family
did not dwell in houses like Clinches. Anyhow I had an impression of
little houses with little staircases, and oil-cloth, and a servant in a
cap with streamers, and round white balls of suet with currants in them
very often for dinner. But Clinches, beautiful and dignified in the
mists and subtleties of a November afternoon, its massed grayness
melting into that other grayness, its setting of mysterious blurred wood
and pale light of water, its spaciousness, its pleasant people, its
daughter with the dusky hair and odd gray eyes--is a vision of
fairyland. I cannot conceive what life is like in such places; nor I am
sure could any other inhabitant of Jena. What, for instance, can it be
like to live in a thing so big that you do not hear the sounds nor smell
the smells of the kitchen? Ought not people who live in such places to
have unusually beautiful ways of looking at life? of thinking? of
speaking? One imagines it all very noble, very gracious, altogether
worthy. That complete separation from the kitchen is what wrings the
biggest sigh of envy out of me. Is it my English blood that makes me
rebel against kitchens? Or is it only my unfortunate sensitiveness to
smell? I wish I had no nose. It has always been a nuisance. It is as
extravagantly delighted by exquisite scents as it is extravagantly
horrified by nasty ones. Why, a beautiful smell, if it is delicate,
subtle, intermittent, can ruin a morning for me. It fills me with a
quite unworthy rapture. Things that ought to be hard in me melt. Things
that ought to be fixed are scattered heaven knows where. I go soft,
ecstatic, basely idle. I forget that my business is to get dinner, and
not to stand still and just sniff. In March I dare not pass the house
Schiller used to live in on my way to market, because the people who
live there now have planted violets along the railings. It is the
shortest way, and it takes ten more minutes out of a busy morning to go
round by the Post Office; but really for a grown woman to stand lost in
what is mere voluptuous pleasure, leaning against somebody else's
railing while the family dinner lies still unbought in the market-place,
is conduct that I cannot justify. As for a beanfield--my dear Roger, did
you ever come across a beanfield in flower? It is the divinest
experience the nose can give us. Two years ago an Englishman came and
spent a spring and summer in the little house in the apple orchard up on
the road over the Galgenberg--the little house with the blue
shutters--and he was a great gardener. And he dug a big patch, and
planted a beanfield, and it was the first beanfield Jena had ever seen;
for those beans called broad that you eat in England and are properly
thankful for are only grown in Germany for the use of pigs, and there
are no pigs in Jena. Sow-beans they are called here, mindful of their
destiny. The Englishman, who possessed no visible sow, was a source of
astonishment to us. The things came up, and were undoubtedly sow-beans.
A great square patch of them grew up just over the fence on which Jena
leaned and pondered. The man himself was seen in his shirt-sleeves
weeding them on rainy afternoons. Jena could only suspect a pig
concealed in the parlor, and was indulgent; and it was indulgent because
no one, in its opinion, can be both English and sane. 'God made us all,'
was its invariable helpless conclusion as it went, shaking its head,
home down the hill. When in June the beanfield flowered I blessed that
Englishman. No one hung over his fence more persistently than I. It was
the first time I had smelt the like. It became an obsession. I wanted to
be there at every sort of time and under every sort of weather-condition.
At noon, when the sun shone straight down on it drawing up its perfume
in hot breaths, I was there; in the morning, so early that it was still
in the blue shadow of the Galgenberg and every gray leaf and white petal
was drenched with dew, I was there; on wet afternoons, when the scent
was crushed out of it by the beating of heavy rain, and the road for
half a mile, the slippery clay road with its puddles and amazing mud,
was turned into a bath of fragrance fit for the tenderest, most
fastidious goddess to bare her darling little limbs in, I was there; and
once after lying awake in my hot room so near the roof for hours
thinking of it, out there on the hillside in the freshness under the
stars, I got up and dressed, and crept with infinite caution past my
step-mother's door, and stole the latchkey, and slunk, my heart in my
mouth, through the stale streets, along all the railings and dusty front
gardens, out into the open country, up on to the hill, to where it stood
in straight and motionless rows sending out waves of fragrance into that
wonderful clean air you find in all the places where men leave off and
God begins. Did you ever know a woman before who risked her reputation
for a beanfield? Well, it is what I did. And I'll tell you, I am so
incurably honest that I can never for long pretend, why I write all this
about it. It is that I am sick with anxiety--oh, sick, cold, shivering
with it--about your exam. I didn't want you to know. I've tried to write
of beanfields instead. I didn't want you to be bothered. The clamorings
for news of the person not on the spot are always a worry, and I did not
want to worry. But the letter I got from you this morning never mentions
the exam, the thing on which, as you told me, everything depends for us.
You talk about Clinches, about the people there, about the shooting, the
long days in woods, the keen-wittedness of Nancy who goes with you, who
understands before you have spoken, who sympathizes so kindly about me,
who fits, you say, so strangely into the misty winter landscape in her
paleness, her thinness, her spiritualness. There was one whole page--oh,
I grudged it--about her loosely done dark hair, how softly dusky it is,
how it makes you think of twilight, and her eyes beneath it of the first
faint shining of stars. I wonder if these things really fill your
thoughts, or whether you are only using them to drive away useless worry
about Saturday. I know you are a poet, and a poet's pleasure in eyes and
hair is not a very personal thing, so I do not mind that. But to-morrow
is Saturday. Shall you send me a telegram, I wonder? A week ago I would
not have wondered; I should have been so sure you would let me have one
little word at once about how you felt it had gone off--one little word
for the person so far away, so helpless, so dependent on your kindness
for the very power to go on living. Oh, what stuff this is. Worse even
than the beanfield. But I must be sentimental sometimes, now mustn't I?
or I would not be a woman. But really, my darling, I am very anxious.