XIII

Jena, Nov. 23 d.

I have waited all day, and there has been no telegram. Well, on Monday I

shall get a letter about it, and how much more satisfactory that is.

Today after all is nearly over, and there is only Sunday to be got

through first, and I shall be helped to endure that by the looking

forward. Isn't it a mercy that we never get cured of being expectant? It

makes life so bearable. However regularly we are disappointed and

nothing whatever happens, after the first blow has fallen, after the

first catch of the breath, the first gulp of misery, we turn our eyes

with all their old eagerness to a point a little further along the road.

I suppose in time the regular repetition of shocks does wear out hope,

and then I imagine one's youth collapses like a house of cards. Real old

age begins then, inward as well as outward; and one's soul, that kept so

bravely young for years after one's face got its first wrinkles,

suddenly shrivels up. Its light goes out. It is suddenly and

irrecoverably old, blank, dark, indifferent.

Sunday Night.

I didn't finish my letter last night because, observing the strain I had

got into, I thought it better for your comfort that I should go to bed.

So I did. And while I went there I asked myself why I should burden you

with the dull weight of my elementary reflections. You who are so clever

and who think so much and so clearly, must laugh at their

elementariness. They are green and immature, the acid juice of an

imperfect fruit that has always hung in the shadow. And yet I don't

think you must laugh, Roger. It would, after all, be as cruel as the

laughter of a child watching a blind man ridiculously stumbling among

the difficulties of the way.

The one Sunday post brought nothing from you. The day has been very

long. I cannot tell you how glad I am night has come, and only sleep

separates me now from Monday morning's letter. These Sundays now that

you are gone are intolerable. Before you came they rather amused

me,--the furious raging of Saturday, with its extra cleaning and

feverish preparations till far into the night; Johanna more than usually

slipshod all day, red of elbow, wispy of hair, shuffling about in her

felt slippers, her skirt girded up very high, a moist mop and an

overflowing pail dribbling soapy tracks behind her in her progress; my

step-mother baking and not lightly to be approached; Papa fled from

early morning till supper-time; and then the dead calm of Sunday, day of

food and sleep. Cake for breakfast--such a bad beginning. Church in the

University chapel, with my step-mother in her best hat with the black

feathers and the pink rose--it sounds frivolous, but you must have

noticed the awe-inspiring effect of it coming so unexpectedly on the top

of her long respectable face and oiled-down hair. A fluffy person in

that hat would have all the students offering to take her for a walk or

share their umbrella with her. My step-mother stalks along panoplied in

her excellences, and the feather waves and nods gayly at the passing

student as he slinks away down by-streets. Once last spring a silly bee

thought the rose must be something alive and honeyful, and went and

smelt it. I think it must have been a very young bee; anyhow nobody else

up to now has misjudged my step-mother like that. She sits near the door

in church, and has never yet heard the last half of the sermon because

she has to go out in time to put the goose or other Sunday succulence

safely into the oven. I wish she would let me do that, for I don't care

for sermons. When you were here and condescended to come with us at

least we could criticize them comfortably on our way home; but alone

with my step-mother I may do nothing but praise. It is the most tiring,

tiresome of all attitudes, the one of undiscriminating admiration. To

hear you pull the person who had preached to pieces, and laugh at the

things he had said that would not bear examination, used to be like

having a window thrown open in a stuffy room on a clear winter's

morning. Shall you ever forget the elaborateness of the Sunday dinner?

For that, chiefly, is Saturday sacrificed, a whole day that might be

filled with lovely leisure. I do hope you never thought that I too

looked upon it as a nice way of celebrating Sunday. How amazing it is,

the way women waste life. Men waste enough of it, heaven knows, but

never anything like so much as women. Papa and I both hate that Sunday

dinner, both dread the upheavals of Saturday made necessary by it, and

you, I know, disliked them just as much, and so has every other young

man we have had here; yet my step-mother inflicts these things on us

with an iron determination that nothing will ever alter. And why? Only

because she was brought up in the belief that it was proper, and

because, if she omitted to do the proper, female Jena would be aghast.

Well, I think it's a bad thing to be what is known as brought up, don't

you? Why should we poor helpless little children, all soft and

resistless, be squeezed and jammed into the rusty iron bands of parental

points of view? Why should we have to have points of view at all? Why

not, for those few divine years when we are still so near God, leave us

just to guess and wonder? We are not given a chance. On our pulpy little

minds our parents carve their opinions, and the mass slowly hardens, and

all those deep, narrow, up and down strokes harden with it, and the

first thing the best of us have to do on growing up is to waste precious

time rubbing and beating at the things to try to get them out. Surely

the child of the most admirable, wise parent is richer with his own

faulty but original point of view than he would be fitted out with the

choicest selection of maxims and conclusions that he did not have to

think out for himself? I could never be a schoolmistress. I should be

afraid to teach the children. They know more than I do. They know how to

be happy, how to live from day to day in god-like indifference to what

may come next. And is not how to be happy the secret we spend our lives

trying to guess? Why then should I, by forcing them to look through my

stale eyes, show them as through a dreadful magnifying glass the

terrific possibilities, the cruel explosiveness of what they had been

lightly tossing to each other across the daisies and thinking were only

toys?

Today at dinner, when Papa had got to the stage immediately following

the first course at which, his hunger satisfied, he begins to fidget and

grow more and more unhappy, and my step-mother was conversing blandly

but firmly with the tried and ancient friend she invites to bear witness

that we too have a goose on Sundays, and I had begun to droop, I hope

poetically, like a thirsty flower let us say, or a broken lily, over my

plate, I thought--oh, how longingly I thought--of the happy past meals,

made happy because you were here sitting opposite me and I could watch

you. How short they seemed in those days. You didn't know I was watching

you, did you? But I was. And I learned to do it so artfully, so

cautiously. When you turned your head and talked to Papa I could do it

openly; when you talked to me I could look straight in your dear eyes

while I answered; but when I wasn't answering I still looked at you, by

devious routes carefully concealed, routes that grew so familiar by

practice that at last I never missed a single expression, while you, I

suppose, imagined you had nothing before you but a young woman with a

vacant face. What talks and laughs we will have about that odd, foolish

year we spent here together in our blindness when next we meet! We've

had no time to say anything at all yet. There are thousands of things I

want to ask you about, thousands of little things we said and did that

seem so strange now in the light of our acknowledged love. My heart

stands still at the thought of when next we meet. These letters have

been so intimate, and we were not intimate. I shall be deadly shy when

in your presence I remember what I have written and what you have

written. We are still such strangers, bodily, personally; strangers with

the overwhelming memory of that last hour together to make us turn hot

and tremble.

Now I am going to bed,--to dream of you, I suppose, considering that all

day long I am thinking of you; and perhaps I shall have a little luck,

and dream that I hear you speaking. You know, Roger, I love you for all

sorts of queer and apparently inadequate reasons--I won't tell you what

they are, for they are quite absurd; things that have to do with

eyebrows, and the shape of hands, so you see quite foolish things--but

most of all I love you for your voice. A beautiful speaking voice is one

of the best of the gifts of the gods. It is so rare; and it is so

irresistible. Papa says heaps of nice poetic things, but then the

darling pipes. The most eloquent lecturer we have here does all his

eloquence, which is really very great read afterward in print, in a

voice of beer, loose, throaty, reminiscent of barrels. Not one of the

preachers who come to the University chapel has a voice that does not

spoil the merit there may be in what he says. Sometimes I think that if

a man with the right voice were to get up in that pulpit and just say,

'Children, Christ died for you,'--oh, then I think that all I have and

am, body, mind, soul, would be struck into one great passion of

gratefulness and love, and that I would fall conquered on my face before

the Cross on the altar, and cry and cry....