Jena, May 20th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--I am sorry you think me unsympathetic. Hard, I
think, was the word; but unsympathetic sounds prettier. Is it
unsympathetic not to like fruitless, profitless, barren things? Not to
like fogs and blights and other deadening, decaying things? From my
heart I pity all the people who are so made that they cannot get on with
their living for fear of their dying; but I do not admire them. Is that
being unsympathetic? Apparently you think so. How odd. There is a little
man here who hardly ever can talk to anybody without beginning about his
death. He is perfectly healthy, and I suppose forty or fifty, so that
there is every reasonable hope of his going on being a little man for
years and years more; but he will have it that as he has never married
or, as he puts it, done anything else useful, he might just as well be
dead, and then at the word Dead his eyes get just the look of absolute
scaredness in them that a hare's eyes do when a dog is after it. 'If
only one knew what came next,' he said last time he was here, looking at
me with those foolish frightened hare's eyes.
'Nice things I should think,' said I, trying to be encouraging.
'But to those who have deserved punishment?'
'If they have deserved it they will probably get it,' said I cheerfully.
He shuddered.
'You don't look very wicked,' I went on amiably. He leads a life of
sheerest bread-and-milk, so simple, so innocent, so full of little
hearth-rug virtues.
'But I am,' he declared angrily.
'I shouldn't think half so bad as a great many people,' said I, bent,
being the hostess, on a perfect urbanity.
'Worse,' said he, more angrily.
'Oh, come now,' said I, very politely as I thought.
Then he really got into a rage, and asked me what I could possibly know
about it, and I said I didn't know anything; and still he stormed and
grew more and more like a terrified hare, frightening himself by his own
words; and at last, dropping his voice, he confessed that he had one
particularly deadly fear, a fear that haunted him and gave him no rest,
that the wicked would not burn eternally but would freeze.
'Oh,' said I shrinking; for it was a bitter day, and the northeast wind
was thundering among the hills.
'Great cold,' he said, fixing me with his hare's eyes, 'seems to me
incomparably more terrible than great heat.'
'Oh, incomparably,' I agreed, edging nearer to the stove. 'Only listen
to that wind.'
'So will it howl about us through eternity,' said he.
'Oh,' I shivered.
'Piercing one's unprotected--everything about us will be unprotected
then--one's unprotected marrow, and turning it to ice within us.'
'But we won't have any marrows,' said I.
'No marrows? Fräulein Rose-Marie, we shall have everything that will
hurt.'
'_Oh weh_' cried I, stopping up my ears.
'The thought frightens you?' said he.
'Terrifies me,' said I.
'How much more fearful, then, will be the reality.'
'Well, I'd like to--I'd like to give you some good advice,' said I,
hesitating.
'Certainly; if one of your sex may with any efficacy advise one of
ours.'
'Oh--efficacy,' murmured I with proper deprecation. 'But I'd like to
suggest--I daren't advise, I'll just suggest--'
'Fear nothing. I am all ears and willingness to be guided,' said he,
smiling with an indescribable graciousness.
'Well--don't go there.'
'Not go there?'
'And while you are here--still here, and alive, and in nice warm woolly
clothes, do you know what you want?'
'What I want?'
'Very badly do you want a wife. Why not go and get one?'
His eyes at that grew more hare-like than at the thought of eternal ice.
He seized his hat and scrambled to the door. He went through it hissing
scorching things about _moderne Mädchen_, and from the safety of the
passage I heard him call me _unverschämt_.
He hasn't been here since. I would like to go and shake him; shake him
till his brains settle into their proper place, and say while I shake,
'Oh, little man, little man, come out of the fog! Why do you choose to
die a thousand deaths rather than only one?'
Is that being unsympathetic? I think it is being quite kind.
Yours sincerely,