Jena, May 27th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--You asked me about your successor in our house,
and inquire why I have never mentioned him. Why should I mention him?
Must I mention everything? I suppose I forgot him. His name is Collins,
and some days he wears a pink shirt, and other days a blue shirt, and in
his right cuff there is a pink silk handkerchief on the pink days, and a
blue silk handkerchief on the blue days; and he has stuck up the
pictures he likes to have about him on the walls of his room, and where
your Luini used to be there is a young lady in a voluminous hat and
short skirts, and where your Bellini Madonna sat and looked at you with
austere, beautiful eyes there is the winner, complete with jockey, of
last year's Derby.
'I made a pot of money over that,' said Mr. Collins to me the day he
pinned it up and came to ask me for the pin.
'Did you?' said I.
But I think I am tired just now of Luinis and Bellinis and of the sort
of spirit in a young man that clothes the walls of his room with them,
each in some elaborately simple frame, and am not at all sure that the
frank fleshliness of a Collins does not please me best. You see, one
longs so much sometimes to get down to the soil, down to plain
instincts, to rude nature, to, if you like, elemental savagery.
But I'll go on with Mr. Collins; you shall have a dose of him while I am
about it. He has bought a canoe, and has won the cup for swimming,
wresting it from the reluctant hands of the discomfited Jena young men.
He paddles up to the weir, gets out, picks up his canoe, carries it
round to the other side, gets in, and vanishes in the windings of the
water and the folds of the hills, leaving the girls in the
tennis-courts--you remember the courts are opposite the weir--uncertain
whether to titter or to blush, for he wears I suppose the fewest clothes
that it is possible to wear and still be called dressed, and no
stockings at all.
'_Nein, dieser Engländer_!' gasp the girls, turning down decent eyes.
'_Höllish practisch_,' declare the young men, got up in as near an
imitation of the flannels you used to wear that they can reach, even
their hats bound about with a ribbon startlingly like your Oxford half
blue; and before the summer is over I dare say they will all be playing
tennis in the Collins canoe costume, stockingless, sleeveless, supposing
it to be the latest _cri_ in get-ups for each and every form of sport.
Professor Martens didn't care about teaching Mr. Collins, and insisted
on handing him over to Papa. Papa doesn't care about teaching him,
either, and says he is a _dummer Bengel_ who pronounces Goethe as though
it rhymed with dirty, and who the first time our great poet was
mentioned vacantly asked, with every indication of a wandering mind, if
he wasn't the joker who wrote the play for Irving with all the devils in
it. Papa was so angry that he began a letter to Collins _père_ telling
him to remove his son to a city where there are fewer muses; but Collins
_père_ is a person who makes nails in Manchester with immense skill and
application and is terrifyingly rich, and my step-mother's attitude
toward the terrifyingly rich is one of large forgiveness; so she tore up
Papa's letter just where it had got to the words _erbärmlicher Esel_,
said he was a very decent boy, that he should stay as long as he wanted
to, but that, since he seemed to be troublesome about learning, Papa
must write and demand a higher scale of payment. Papa wouldn't; my
step-mother did; and behold Joey--his Christian name is Joey--more
lucrative to us by, I believe, just double than any one we have had yet.
'I say,' said Joey to me this morning, 'come over to England some day,
and I'll romp you down to Epsom.'
'Divine,' said I, turning up my eyes.
'We'd have a rippin' time.'
'Rather.'
'I'd romp you down in the old man's motor.'
'Not really?'
'We'd be there before you could flutter an eyelash.'
'Are you serious?'
'Ain't I, though. It's a thirty-horse--'
'Can't you get them in London?'
'Get 'em in London? Get what in London?'
'Must one go every time all the way to Epsom?'
Joey ceased from speech and began to stare.
'Are we not talking about salts?' I inquired hastily, feeling that one
of us was off the track.
'Salts?' echoed Joey, his mouth hanging open.
'You mentioned Epsom, surely?'
'Salts?'
'You did say Epsom, didn't you?'
'Salts?'
'Salts,' said I, becoming very distinct in the presence of what looked
like deliberate wilfulness.
'What's it got to do with salts?' asked Joey, his underlip of a
measureless vacancy.
'Hasn't it got everything?'
'Look here, what are you drivin' at? Is it goin' to be a game?'
'Certainly not. It's Sunday. Did you ever hear of Epsom salts?'
'Oh--ah--I see--Eno, and all that. Castor oil. Rhubarb and magnesia.
Well, I'll forgive you as you're only German. Pretty weird, what bits of
information you get hold of. Never the right bits, somehow. I'll tell
you what, Miss Schmidt--'
'Oh, do.'
'Do what?'
'Tell me what.'
'Well, ain't I goin' to? You all seem to know everything in this house
that's not worth knowin', and not a blessed thing that is.'
'Do you include Goethe?'
'Confound Gerty,' said Joey.
Such are my conversations with Joey. Is there anything more you want to
know?
Yours sincerely,