XLIII

Galgenberg, Sept. 9th.

Dear Mr. Anstruther,--But it is true. Our servants do not get more than

from 100 to 250 marks a year, and indeed I think it is a great deal and

cannot see why, because you spend as much (you say you do, so I must

believe it) in a month on gloves and ties, it should make you hate

yourself. Do not hate yourself. Your doing so doesn't make us pay our

servants more. Why, how do you suppose we could get all we need out of

our hundred pounds a year--I translate our marks into your pounds for

your greater convenience--if we had to give a servant more than eight of

them and for our house more than fifteen? Papa and I do not like to be

kept hungry in the matter of books, and we shall probably spend every

penny of our income; but I know a number of families with children who

live decently and have occasional coffee-parties and put by for their

daughters' _trousseaux_ on the same sum. As for the servants themselves,

have I not described Johanna's splendid appearance on her Sundays, her

white dress and gloves, and the pink ribbons round her waist? She finds

her wages will buy these things and still leave enough for the

savings-bank. She is quite content. Only I don't know if she would

remain so if you were to come and lament over her and tell her what a

little way you make the same money go. You see, she would probably not

grasp the true significance of the admission, which is, I take it, not

that she has too little but that you spend too much. Yet how can I from

my Galgenberg judge what is necessary in gloves and ties for a splendid

young man like yourself? The sum seems to me terrific. There must be

stacks of gloves and ties constantly growing higher about your path.

You, then, spend on these two things alone almost exactly what we three

spend in a year on everything. But my astonishment is only the measure

of my ignorance. Do not hate yourself. Either spend the money without

compunction, or, if you have compunction, don't spend it. A sinner

should always, I think, sin gayly or not at all. I don't mean that you

in this are a sinner; I only mean that as a general principle

half-hearted sinners are contemptible. It is a poor creature who while

he sins is sorry. If he must sin, let him at least do it with all his

heart, and having done it waste no time in whimpers but try to turn his

back on it and his face toward the good. Please do not hate yourself. I

am sure you have to have the things. Your letter is more than usually

depressed. Please do not hate yourself. It does no good and lowers your

vitality. It is as bad as sorrow, which surely is very bad. I think

nothing great was done by any one who wasted time peering about among

his faults; but if ever you meet the pastor who prepared me for

confirmation don't tell him I said so. I don't know how it is with yours

in England, but here the pastors seem altogether unable to bear

listening to descriptions of plain facts. When they come to doctor my

soul, why may I not tell them its symptoms as badly as I tell my body's

symptoms to the physician who would heal it? He is not shocked or angry

when I show him my sore places; he recommends a plaster or a dose,

encourages, and goes away. But your spiritual doctor takes your

spiritual sore places as a kind of personal affront; at least, his

manner often shows indignation in proportion as you are frank. Instead

of being patient, he hardly lets you speak; instead of prescribing, he

denounces; instead of helping, he passionately scolds; and so you do not

go to him again, but fight through your later miseries alone. Just at

the time of my preparation for confirmation my mother died. My heart,

blank with sorrow, was very fit for religious impressions and

consolations. The preparation lasts two years, and three times every

week during that time I went to classes. For two years I was not allowed

to dance or to go to even the mildest parties. For two years, from

sixteen to eighteen, I was earnest, prayerful, humbly seeking after

righteousness. Then one day, when questionings had come upon me that my

conscience could not approve, I went to the pastor who had prepared me

as confidently as I would go with a toothache to a dentist, and bared my

sensitive conscience to him and begged to have my thoughts arranged and

my doubts and questionings settled. To my amazement and extreme fright I

beheld him shocked, angry, hardly able to endure hearing me tell all I

had been wondering. It seemed very strange. I sat at last with downcast

eyes, silent, ashamed, my heart shrunk back into reserve and frost. I

was not being helped; I was being scolded, and bitterly scolded. At last

at the door some special word of blame stung me to heat, and I cried,

'Herr Pastor, when my tongue is bad and I show it to a doctor, he gives

me a pill. Are you not the doctor of my spirit? Why, then, when I come

to you to be healed, do you, instead of giving me medicine, so cruelly

rate me?'

And he, staring at me a moment aghast, struck his hands together above

his head. 'Thy father!' he cried, 'Thy father! It is he who speaks--it

is he speaking in thee. Such words come not unaided from the mouth of

eighteen, from the mouth of one confirmed by these very hands. _Ach_,

miserable maiden, it is not with such as thee that Paradise is peopled.

The taint of thy parentage is heavy upon thee. Thou art not, thou canst

not be, thou hast never been, a child of God.'

And that was all I got for my pains.

Tell me, what mood were you in when you wrote? Was it not, apart from

its dejection, one rather inclined to peevishness? You ask, for

instance, why I write so much about a tipsy trumpeter when I know you

are anxious to hear about the other things I never tell you. I can't

imagine what they are. You must let me write how and what I like--bear

with me while I discourse of roses and nasturtium-beds, of rain and

sunshine, clouds and wind, cats, birds, servants, even trumpeters. My

life holds nothing greater than these. If you want to hear from me you

must hear also of them. And why have you taken so bitter a dislike to

our gifted young neighbor down the hill, calling him contemptuously a

fiddler? He is certainly a fiddler, if to fiddle in one's hours of ease

produces one, and perhaps you would be twice as happy as you are if you

could fiddle half so wonderfully as he does. He is gone. His holiday

either came to an end or was put to an end by Johanna's _fiancé._ Now,

in these early September days, this season of mists and mellow

fruitfulness, of cloudy mornings and calm evenings and golden

afternoons, he has turned his back on the hills and forests, on the

reddening creepers and sweetening grapes, on the splash of water among

ferns and rocks, on all those fresh, quiet things that make life worth

having, and is sitting at a desk somewhere in Berlin doggedly bent on

becoming, by means of a great outlay of days and years, a _Landrath_, a

_Regierungsrath,_ a _Geheimrath_, and a _Wirklicher Geheimrath mit dem

Prädikat Excellenz_. When he has done that he will take down his hat and

go forth at last to enjoy life, and will find to his surprise that it

isn't there, that it is all behind him, a heap of dusty days piled in

the corners of offices, and that his knees shake as he goes about

looking for it, and that he can no longer even tune his fiddle by

himself but has to have it done for him by the footman.

Isn't that what happens to all you wise men, so prudently determined to

make your way in the world? You must be very sure of another life, or

how could you bear to squander this? The things you are missing--oh, the

things you are missing!--while you so carefully add little gain to

little gain, or what I would rather call little loss to little loss. I

see no point in slaving day after day through one's best years. Suppose

you do not, in the end, have a footman to open your door--the footman

is merely a symbol, conveniently expressing the multitude of

superfluities that gather about the declining years of the person who

has got on, things bought with the sacrifice of his life, and none of

them giving him back the lost power, gone with youth, to enjoy

them--suppose, then, you do not end gloriously with a footman, what of

that? I must be blind, for I never can see the desirability of these

trappings. Yet they surely are of an immense desirability, since

everybody, really everybody, is willing to give so much in payment for

them. Our elder neighbor down the hill has actually given his eyes and

his back; he peers at life through spectacles, and walks about like

Wordsworth's leech-gatherer, bent double through poking about for years

in the muddy pools of little boys' badly written exercises; and here he

is at fifty still not satisfied with what he has earned, still going on

drudging the whole year round, except for his six short weeks in summer.

His wife is thrifty; they have only the one son; they live frugally;

long ago they must have put by enough to keep them warm and fed and

clothed without his doing another stroke of work.

I was interrupted there by a message from him asking if I would come

down and help him gather up the windfalls in his orchard, his wife being

busy pickling beans. I went, my head full of what I had just been

writing to you, and I gathered up together with the apples a little

lesson in the foolishness of officious and hasty criticism. It was this

way:

Our baskets being full, and our backs rested, he groaned and said that

in another week he must leave for Weimar.

'But you like your work,' said I.

'I detest my work,' he said peevishly. 'I detest teaching. I detest

little boys.'

'Then why--' I began, but stopped.

'Why? Why? Because I detest it is no reason why I should not do it.'

'Yes, it is.'

'What, and at my age begin another?'

'No, no.'

'You would not have me idle?'

'Yes, I would.'

He stared at me gravely through his spectacles. 'This is unprincipled,'

he said.

I laughed. It is years since I have observed that the principled groan a

good deal and make discontented criticisms of life, and I don't think I

care to be one of them.

'It is,' he persisted, seeing that I only laughed.

'Is it?' said I.

'It is man's lot to work,' said he.

'Is it?' said I.

'Certainly,' said he.

'All day?'

'If he cannot get it done in less time, certainly.'

'_Every_ day?'

'Certainly.'

'All through the years of his life?'

'All through the years of his strength, certainly.'

'What for?'

'My dear young lady, have you been living again on vegetables lately?'

'Why?'

'Your words sound as though your thoughts were watery.'

A nettled silence fell upon me, and while I was arranging how best to

convince him of their substance he was shaking his head and saying that

it was strange how the most intelligent women are unable really to

think. 'Water,' he continued, 'is indispensable in its proper place and

good in many others where, strictly, it might be done without. I have

nothing to say against watery emotions, watery sentiments, even watery

affections, especially in ladies, who would be less charming in

proportion as they were more rigid. Ebb and flow, uncertainty,

instability, unaccountableness, are becoming to your sex. But in the

region of thought, of the intellect, of pure reason, everything should

be very dry. The one place, my dear young lady, in which I will endure

no water is on the brain.'

I had no answer ready. There seemed to be nothing left to do but to go

home. I did go a few steps up the orchard, reflecting on the way men

have of telling you you cannot think, or are not logical, at the very

moment when you appear to yourself to be most unanswerable--a

regrettable habit that at once puts a stop to interesting

conversation,--and presently, as I was nearing our fence, he called

after me. 'Fräulein Rose-Marie,' he called pleasantly.

'Well?' said I, looking down at him over a displeased shoulder.

'Come back.'

'No.'

'Come back and dine with us.'

'No.'

'There is mutton for dinner, and before that a soup full of the

concentrated strength of beasts. Up there I know you will eat carrots

and stewed apples, and I shall never be able to make you see what I

see.'

'Heaven forbid that I ever should.'

'What, you do not desire to be reasonable?'

'I don't choose to argue with you.'

'Have I done anything?'

'You are not logical enough for me,' said I, anxious to be beforehand

with the inevitable remark.

'Come, come,' said he, his face crinkling into smiles.

'It's true,' said I.

'Come back and prove it.'

'Useless.'

'You cannot.'

'I will not.'

'It is the same thing.'