XXXV

Jena, July 15th.

Dear Mr. Anstruther,--Our new address is Galgenberg, Jena,--rather grim,

but what's in a name? The thing itself is perfect. It is a tiny house,

white, with green shutters, on the south slope of the hill among

apple-trees. The garden is so steep that you can't sit down in it except

on the north side of the house, where you can because the house is there

to stop you from sliding farther. It is a strip of rough grass out of

which I shall make haycocks, with three apple-trees in it. There is also

a red currant bush, out of which I shall make jelly. At the bottom,

below the fence--rotten in places, but I'm going to mend that--begins a

real apple orchard, and through its leaves we can look down on the roof

of another house, white like ours, but a little bigger, and with blue

shutters instead of green. People take it for the summer, and once an

Englishman came and made a beanfield there--but I think I told you about

the beanfield. Behind us, right away up the slope, are pine trees that

brush restlessly backward and forward all day long across the clouds,

trying to sweep bits of clear blue in the sky, and at night spread

themselves out stiff and motionless against the stars. I saw them last

night from my window. We moved in yesterday. The moving in was not very

easy, because of what Papa calls the precipitous nature of the district.

He sat with his back propped against the wall of the house on the only

side on which, as I have explained, you can sit, and worked with a

pencil at his book about Goethe in Jena with perfect placidity while

Johanna and I and the man who urged the furniture cart up the hill kept

on stepping over his legs as we went in and out furnishing the house.

There was not much to furnish, which was lucky, there not being much to

furnish with. We have got rid of all superfluities, including the

canary, which I presented, its cage beautifully tied up with the blue

ribbons I wore at my first party, to the little girl with the

flame-colored hair on the second floor. As much of the other things as

any one could be induced to buy we sold, and we burnt what nobody would

buy or endure having given them. And so, pared down, we fit in here

quite nicely, and after a day or two conceded to the suavities of life,

such as the tacking up in appropriate places of muslin curtains and the

tying of them with bows, I intend to buy a spade and a watering-pot and

see what I can do with the garden.

I wish it were not quite so steep. If I'm not on the upper side of one

of the apple-trees with my back firmly pressed against its trunk I don't

yet see how I am to garden. It must be disturbing, and a great waste of

time, to have to hold on to something with one hand while you garden

with the other. And suppose the thing gives way, and you roll down on to

the broken fence? And if that, too, gave way, there would be nothing but

a few probably inadequate apple trunks between me and the roof of the

house with the blue shutters. I should think it extremely likely that

until I've got the mountain-side equivalent for what are known as one's

sea-legs I shall very often be on that roof. I hope it is strong and

new. Perhaps there are kind people inside who will not mind. Soon

they'll get so much used to it that when they hear the preliminary rush

among their apple-trees and the cracking of the branches followed by the

thud over their heads, they won't even look up from their books, but

just murmur to each other, 'There's Fräulein Schmidt on the roof again,'

and go on with their studies.

Now I'm talking nonsense, and the sort of nonsense you like least; but

I'm in a silly mood today, and you must take me as you find me. At any

time when I have grown too unendurable you can stop my writing to you

simply by not writing to me. Then I shall know you have at last had

enough of me, of my moods, of my odious fits of bombastic eloquence, of

my still more odious facetiousness, of my scoldings of you and of my

complacency about myself. It is true you actually seem to like my

scoldings. That is very abject of you. What you apparently resent are

the letters with sturdy sentiments in them and a robust relish of life.

It almost seems as though you didn't want me to be happy. That is very

odd of you. And I sometimes wonder if it is possible for two persons to

continue friends who have a different taste in what, for want of a nicer

word, I must call jokes. My taste in them is so elementary that an

apple-pie bed makes me laugh tears, and when I go to the play I love to

see chairs pulled away just as people are going to sit down. You, of

course, shudder at these things. They fill you with so great a

dreariness that it amounts to pain. I am at least sensible enough to

understand the attitude. But pleasantries quite high up, as I consider,

in the scale of humor have not been able to make you smile. I have seen

you sit unalterably grave while Papa was piping out the nicest little

things, and I know you never liked even your adored Professor Martens

when he began to bubble. Well, either I laugh too easily or you don't

laugh enough. I can only repeat that if I set your teeth on edge the

remedy is in your own hands.

We are going to be vegetarians this summer. Papa, who hasn't tried it

yet, is perfectly willing, and if we live chiefly on nuts and lettuces

we shall hardly want any money at all. I read Shelley's _Vindication of

Natural Diet_ aloud to him before we left the flat to prepare his mind,

and he not only heartily agreed with every word, but went at once to the

Free Library and dug out all the books he could find about muscles and

brains and their surprising dependence on the kind of stuff you have

eaten, and brought them home for me to study. I do love Papa. He falls

in so sweetly with one's little plans, and lets me do what I want

without the least waste of time in questionings or the giving of advice.

I have read the books with profound interest. Only a person who cooks,

who has to handle meat when it is raw, pick out the internals of geese,

peel off the skins of rabbits, scrape away the scales of a fish that is

still alive--my step-mother insisted on this, the flavor, she said,

being so infinitely superior that way--can know with what a relief, what

a feeling of personal purification and turning of the back on evil, one

flings a cabbage into a pot of fair water or lets one's fingers linger

lovingly among lentils. I brought a bag of lentils up the hill with us,

and the cabbage, remnant of my last marketing, came up too in a net, and

we had our dinner today of them: lentil soup, and cabbage with

bread-and-butter--what could be purer? And for Johanna, who has not read

Shelley, there was the last of the Rauchgasse sausage for the soothing

of her more immature soul.

That was an hour ago, and Papa has just been in to say he is hungry.

'Why, you've only just had dinner, Papachen,' said I, surprised.

'I know--I know,' he said, looking vaguely troubled.

'You can't really be hungry. Perhaps it's indigestion.'

'Perhaps,' agreed Papa; and drifted out again, still looking troubled.

Before we took this house it had stood empty for several years, and the

man it belongs to was so glad to find somebody who would live in it and

keep it warm that he lets us have it for hardly any rent at all. I

expect what the impoverished want--and only the impoverished would live

in a thing so small--is a garden flat enough to grow potatoes in, and to

have fowls walking about it, and a pig in a nice level sty. You can't

have them here. At least, you couldn't have a sty on such a slope. The

poor pig would spend his days either anxiously hanging on with all his

claws--or is it paws? I forget what pigs have; anyhow, with all his

might--to the hillside, or huddled dismally down against the end

planks, and never be of that sublime detachment of spirit necessary to

him if he would end satisfactorily in really fat bacon. And the fowls, I

suppose, would have to lay their eggs flying--they certainly couldn't do

it sitting down--and how disturbing that would be to a person engaged,

as I often am, in staring up at the sky, for how can you stare up at the

sky under an umbrella? I asked the landlord about the potatoes, and he

said I must grow them as the last tenant did, a widow who lived and died

here, in a strip against the north side of the house where there is a

level space about two yards running from one end of the house to the

other, representing a path and keeping the hill from tumbling in at our

windows. It really is the only place, for I don't see how Johanna and I,

gifted and resourceful as we undoubtedly are, can make terraces with no

tools but a spade and a watering-pot; but it will do away with our only

path, and it does seem necessary to have a path up to one's front door.

Can one be respectable without a path up to one's front door? Perhaps

one can, and that too may be a superfluity to those who face life

squarely. I am convinced that there must be potatoes, but I am not

convinced, on reflection, that there need be a path. Have you ever felt

the joy of getting rid of things? It is so great that it is almost

ferocious. After each divestment, each casting off and away, there is

such a gasp of relief, such a bounding upward, the satisfied soul, proud

for once of its body, saying to it smilingly, 'This, too, then, you have

discovered you can do without and yet be happy.' And I, just while

writing these words to you, have discovered that I can and will do

without paths.

Papa has been in again. 'Is it not coffee-time?' he asked.

I looked at him amazed. 'Darling, coffee-time is never at half-past

two,' I said reproachfully.

'Half-past two is it only? _Der Teufel_' said Papa.

'Isn't your book getting on well?' I inquired.

'Yes, yes,--the book progresses. That is, it would progress if my

attention did not continually wander.'

'Wander? Whereto?'

'Rose-Marie, there is a constant gnawing going on within me that will

not permit me to believe that I have dined.'

'Well, but, Papachen, you have. I saw you doing it.'

'What you saw me doing was not dining,' said Papa.

'Not dining?'

Papa waved his arms round oddly and suddenly. 'Grass--grass,' he cried

with a singular impatience.

'Grass?' I echoed, still more amazed.

'Books of an enduring nature, works of any monumentalness, cannot, never

were, and shall not be raised on a foundation of grass,' said Papa, his

face quite red.

'I can't think what you mean,' said I. 'Where is there any grass?'

'Here,' said Papa, quickly clasping his hands over that portion of him

that we boldly talk about and call _Magen_, and you allude to sideways,

by a variety of devious expressions. 'I have been fed today,' he said,

looking at me quite severely, 'on a diet appropriate only to the

mountain goat, and probably only appropriate to him because he can

procure nothing better.'

'Why, you had a lentil soup--proved scientifically to contain all that

is needed--'

'I congratulate the lentil soup. I envy it. I wish I too contained all

that is needed. But here'--he clasped his hands again--'there is

nothing.'

'Yes there is. There is cabbage.'

'Pooh,' said Papa. 'Green stuff. Herbage.'

'Herbage?'

'And scanty herbage, too--appropriate, I suppose, to the mountainous

region in which we now find ourselves.'

'Papa, don't you want to be a vegetarian?'

'I want my coffee,' said Papa.

'What, now?'

'And why not now, Rose-Marie? Is there anything more rational than to

eat when one is hungry? Let there, pray, be much--very much--bread-and-

butter with it.'

'But, Papa, we weren't going to have coffee any more. Didn't you agree

that we would give up stimulants?'

Papa looked at me defiantly. 'I did,' he said.

'Well, coffee is one.'

'It is our only one.'

'You said you would give it up.'

'I said gradually. To do so today would not be doing so gradually.

Nothing is good that is not done gradually.'

'But one must begin.'

'One must begin gradually.'

'You were delighted with Shelley.'

'It was after dinner.'

'You were quite convinced.'

'I was not hungry.'

'You know he is all for pure water.'

'He is all for many things that seem admirable to those who have lately

dined.'

'You know he says that if the populace of Paris at the time of the

Revolution had drunk at the pure source of the Seine--'

'There is no pure source of the Seine within reach of the populace of

Paris. There would only be cats. Dead cats. And cats interspersed, no

doubt, with a variety of objects of the nature of portions of crockery

and empty tins.'

'But he says pure source.'

'Then he says pure nonsense.'

'He says if they had done that and satisfied their hunger at the

ever-furnished table of vegetable nature--'

'Ever-furnished table? Holy Heaven--the good, the excellent young man.'

'--they would never have lent their brutal suffrage to the proscription

list of Robespierre.'

'Rose-Marie, today I care not what this young man says.'

'He says--look, I've got the book in my pocket--'

'I will not look.'

'He says, could a set of men whose passions were not perverted by

unnatural stimuli--that's coffee, of course--gaze with coolness on an

_auto-da-fè_?'

'I engage to gaze with heat on any _auto-da-fè_ I may encounter if only

you will quickly--'

'He says--'

'Put down the book, Rose-Marie, and see to the getting of coffee.'

'But he says--'

'Let him say it, and see to the coffee.'

'He says, is it to be believed that a being of gentle feelings rising

from his meal of roots--'

'_Gott, Gott_,--meal of roots!'

'--would take delight in sports of blood?'

'Enough. I am not in the temper for Shelley.'

'But you quite loved him a day or two ago.'

'Except food, nobody loves anything--anything at all--while his stomach

is empty.'

'I don't think that's very pretty, Papachen.'

'But it is a great truth. Remember it if you should marry. Shape your

conduct by its light. Three times every day, Rose-Marie,--that is,

before breakfast, before dinner, and before supper,--no husband loves

any wife. She may be as beautiful as the stars, as wise as

Pallas-Athene, as cultured as Goethe, as entertaining as a circus, as

affectionate as you please--he cares nothing for her. She exists not.

Go, my child, and prepare the coffee, and let the bread-and-butter be

cut thick.'

Well, since then I have been cutting bread-and-butter and pouring out

cups of coffee. I thought Papa would never leave off. If that is the

effect of a vegetarian dinner I don't think it can really be less

expensive than meat. Papa ate half a pound of butter, which is sixty

pfennings, and for sixty pfennings I could have bought him a

_Kalbsschnitzel_ so big that it would have lasted, under treatment, two

days. I must go for a walk and think it out.

Yours sincerely,