Galgenberg, July 28th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--This is a most sweet evening, dripping, quiet,
after a rainy day, with a strip of clear yellow sky behind the pine
trees on the crest of the hill. I gathered up my skirts and went down
through the soaked grass to where against the fence there is a divine
straggly bush of pink China roses. I wanted to see how they were getting
on after their drenching; and as I stood looking at them in the calm
light, the fence at the back of them sodden into dark greens and blacks
that showed up every leaf and lovely loose wet flower, a robin came and
sat on the fence near me and began to sing. You will say: Well, what
next? And there isn't any next; at least, not a next that I am likely to
make understandable. It was only that I felt extraordinarily happy. You
will say: But why? And if I were to explain, at the end you would still
be saying Why? Well, you cannot see my face while I am writing to you,
so that I have been able often to keep what I was really thinking safely
covered up, but you mustn't suppose that my letters have always exactly
represented my state of mind, and that my soul has made no pilgrimages
during this half year. I think it has wandered thousands of miles. And
often while I wrote scolding you, or was being wise and complacent, or
sprightly and offensive, often just then the tired feet of it were
bleeding most as they stumbled among the bitter stones. And this evening
I felt that the stones were at an end, that my soul has come home to me
again, securely into my keeping, glad to be back, and that there will be
no more effort needed when I look life serenely in the face. Till now
there was always effort. That I talk to you about it is the surest sign
that it is over. The robin's singing, the clear light behind the pines,
the dripping trees and bushes, the fragrance of the wet roses, the
little white house, so modest and hidden, where Papa and I are going to
be happy, the perfect quiet after a stormy day, the perfect peace after
discordant months,--oh, I wanted to say thank you for each of these
beautiful things. Do you remember you gave me a book of Ernest Dowson's
poems on the birthday I had while you were with us? And do you remember
his
Now I will take me to a place of peace,
Forget my heart's desire--
In solitude and prayer work out my soul's release?
It is what I feel I have done.
But I will not bore you with these sentiments. See, I am always anxious
to get back quickly to the surface of things, anxious to skim lightly
over the places where tears, happy or miserable, lie, and not to touch
with so much as the brush of a wing the secret tendernesses of the soul.
Let us, sir, get back to vegetables. They are so safe as subjects for
polite letter-writing. And I have had three letters from you this week
condemning their use with all the fervor the English language places at
your disposal--really it is generous to you in this respect--as a
substitute for the mixed diet of the ordinary Philistine. Yes, sir, I
regard you as an ordinary Philistine; and if you want to know what that
in my opinion is, it is one who walks along in the ruts he found ready
instead of, after sitting on a milestone and taking due thought, making
his own ruts for himself. You are one of a flock; and you disapprove of
sheep like myself that choose to wander off and browse alone. You
condemn all my practices. Nothing that I think or do seems good in your
eyes. You tell me roundly that I am selfish, and accuse me, not roundly
because you are afraid it might be indecorous, but obliquely, in a mask
of words that does not for an instant hide your meaning, of wearing
Jaeger garments beneath my outer apparel. Soon, I gather you expect, I
shall become a spiritualist and a social democrat; and quite soon after
that I suppose you are sure I shall cut off my hair and go about in
sandals. Well, I'll tell you something that may keep you quiet: I'm
tired of vegetarianism. It isn't that I crave for fleshpots, for I shall
continue as before to turn my back on them, on 'the boiled and roast,
The heated nose in face of ghost,' but I grudge the time it takes and
the thought it takes. For the fortnight I have followed its precepts I
have lived more entirely for my body than in any one fortnight of my
life. It was all body. I could think of nothing else. I was tending it
the whole day. Instead of growing, as I had fondly hoped, so free in
spirit that I would be able to draw quite close to the _liebe Gott_, I
was sunk in a pit of indifference to everything needing effort or
enthusiasm. And it is not simple after all. Shelley's meal of roots
sounds easy and elementary, but think of the exertion of going out,
strengthened only by other roots, to find more for your next meal. Nuts
and fruits, things that require no cooking, really were elaborate
nuisances, the nuts having to be cracked and the fruit freed from what
Papa called its pedestrian portions. And they were so useless even then
to a person who wanted to go out and dig in the garden. All they could
do for me was to make me appreciate sofas. I am tired of it, tired of
wasting precious time thinking about and planning my wretched diet.
Yesterday I had an egg for breakfast--it gave me one of Pater's
'exquisite moments'--and a heavenly bowl of coffee with milk in it, and
the effect was to send me out singing into the garden and to start me
mending the fence. The neighbor came up to see what the vigorous
hammer-strokes and snatches of _Siegfried_ could mean, and when he saw
it was I immediately called out, 'You have been eating meat!'
'I have not,' I said, swinging my hammer to show what eggs and milk can
do.
'In some form or other you have this day joined yourself to the animal
kingdom,' he persisted; and when I told him about my breakfast he wiped
his hands (he had been picking fruit) and shook mine and congratulated
me. 'I have watched with concern,' he said, 'your eyes becoming daily
bigger. It is not good when eyes do that. Now they will shrink to their
normal size, and you will at last set your disgraceful garden in order.
Are you aware that the grass ought to have been made into hay a month
ago?'
He is a haggard man, thin of cheek, round of shoulder, short of sight,
who teaches little boys Latin and Greek in Weimar. For thirty years has
he taught them, eking out his income in the way we all do in these parts
by taking in foreigners wanting to learn German. In July he shakes Eis
foreigners off and comes up here for six weeks' vacant pottering in his
orchard. He bought the house as a speculation, and lets the upper part
to any one who will take it, living himself, with his wife and son, on
the ground floor. He is extremely kind to me, and has given me to
understand that he considers me intelligent, so of course I like him.
Only those persons who love intelligence in others and have doubts about
their own know the deliciousness of being told a thing like that. I
adore being praised. I am athirst for it. Dreadfully vain down in my
heart, I go about pretending a fine aloofness from such weakness, so
that when nobody sees anything in me--and nobody ever does--I may at
least make a show of not having expected them to. Thus does a girl in a
ball-room with whom no one will dance pretend she does not want to. Thus
did the familiar fox conduct himself toward the grapes of tradition.
Very well do I know there is nothing to praise; but because I am just
clever enough to know that I am not clever, to be told that I am
clever--do you follow me?--sets me tingling.
Now that's enough about me. Let us talk about you. You must not come to
Jena. What could have put such an idea into your head? It is a blazing,
deserted place just now, looking from the top of the hills like a basin
of hot _bouillon_ down there in the hollow, wrapped in its steam. The
University is shut up. The professors scattered. Martens is in
Switzerland, and won't be back till September. Even the Schmidts, those
interesting people, have flapped up with screams of satisfaction into a
nest on the side of a precipice. I urge you with all my elder-sisterly
authority to stay where you are. Plainly, if you were to come I would
not see you. Oh, I will leave off pretending I cannot imagine what you
want here: I know you want to see me. Well, you shall not. Why you
should want to is altogether beyond my comprehension. I believe you have
come to regard me as a sort of medicine, medicine of the tonic order,
and wish to bring your sick soul to the very place where it is
dispensed. But I, you see, will have nothing to do with sick souls, and
I wholly repudiate the idea of being somebody's physic. I will not be
your physic. What medicinal properties you can extract from my letters
you are welcome to, but pray are you mad that you should think of coming
here? When you do come you are to come with your wife, and when you have
a wife you are not to come at all. How simple.
Really, I feel inclined to laugh when I try to picture you, after the
life you have been leading in London, after the days you are living now
at Clinches, attempting to arrange yourself on this perch of ours up
here. I cannot picture you. We have reduced our existence to the crudest
elements, to the raw material; and you, I know, have grown a very
exquisite young man. The fact is you have had time to forget what we are
really like, my father and I and Johanna, and since my step-mother's
time we have advanced far in the casual scrappiness of housekeeping that
we love. You would be like some strange and splendid bird in the midst
of three extremely shabby sparrows. That is the physical point of view:
a thing to be laughed at. From the moral it is for ever impossible.
Yours sincerely,