'Fräulein Rose-Marie!'
'Well?'
'Come back.'
'No.'
'Come back, and tell me why you think I ought to give up my work and sit
for the rest of my days with hanging hands.'
I turned and looked down at him. 'Because,' I said, 'are you not fifty?
And is not that high time to begin and get something out of life?'
He adjusted his spectacles, and stared up at me attentively. 'Continue,'
he said.
'I look at your life, at all those fifty years of it, and I see it
insufferably monotonous.'
'Continue.'
'Dull.'
'Continue.'
'Dusty.'
'Continue.'
'Dreary.'
'Continue.' He nodded his head gently at each adjective and counted them
off on his fingers.
'I see it full of ink-spots, dog-eared grammars, and little boys.'
'Continue.'
'It is a constant going over the same ground--in itself a maddening
process. No sooner do the boys reach a certain age and proficiency and
become slightly more interesting than they go on to somebody else, and
you begin again at the beginning with another batch. You teach in a
bare-walled room with enormous glaring windows, and the ring of the
electric tram-bell in the street below makes the commas in your
sentences. You have been doing this every day for thirty years. The boys
you taught at first are fathers of families now. The trees in the
playground have grown from striplings into big shady things. Everything
has gone on, and so have you--but you have only gone on getting drier
and more bored.'
'Continue,' said he, smiling.
'Your intelligence,' said I, coming down a little nearer, 'restless at
first, and for ever trying to push green shoots through the thick rind
of routine--'
'Good. Quite good. Continue.'
'--through to a wider space, a more generous light--'
'Poetic. Quite poetic. My compliments.'
'Thank you. Your intelligence, then, for ever--for ever--you've
interrupted me, and I don't know where I'd got to.'
'You have got to my intelligence having green shoots.'
'Oh, yes. Well, they're not green now. That's the point I've been
stumbling toward. They ought to be, if you had taken bigger handfuls of
leisure and had not wholly wasted your time drudging. But now they ought
to be more than shoots--great trees, in whose shade we all would sit
gratefully, and you enjoying free days, with the pleasant memory of free
years behind you and the cheerful hope of roomy years to come. And
during all that time of your imprisonment in a class-room the world
outside went on its splendid way, the seasons filled it with beauty
which you were not there to see, the sun shone and warmed other people,
the winds blew and made other people's flesh tingle and their blood
dance--you, of course, were cramped up with cold feet and a
headache--the birds sang to other people tunes of heaven, while in your
ears buzzed only the false quantities of reluctant little boys, the
delicious rain--'
'Stop, stop. You forget I had to earn a living.'
'Of course you had. But you know you earned your _living_ long ago. What
you are earning now is much more like your dying--the dying, the atrophy
of your soul. What does it matter if your wife has one bonnet less a
year, and no silk dress--'
'Do not let her hear you,' he said, glancing round.
'--or if you keep no servant, and have less to eat on Sundays than your
neighbors, give no parties, and don't cumber yourselves up with
acquaintances who care nothing for you? If you gave up these things you
could also give up drudging. You are too old to drudge. You have been
too old these twenty years. A man of your brains--' he pretended to look
grateful--'who cannot earn enough between twenty and thirty to keep him
from the necessity of slaving for the rest of his days is not--is not--'
'Worthy of the name of man?'
'I don't know that that's a great thing,' said I doubtfully.
'Let it pass. It is an accepted ending to a sentence beginning as yours
did. And now, my dear young lady, you have preached me a sermon--'
'Not a sermon.'
'Permitted me, then, to be present at a lecture--'
'Not a lecture.'
'Anyhow held forth on the unworthily puny outer conditions of my
existence. Tell me, now, one thing. I concede the ink-spots, the little
boys, the monotony, the tram-bells, the regrettable number of years;
they are all there, and you with your vivid imagination see them all.
But tell me one thing: has it never occurred to you that they are the
merest shell, the merest husk and envelopment, and that it is possible
that in spite of them--' his voice grew serious--'my life may be very
rich within?'
And you, my friend, tell me another thing. Am I not desperately,
hopelessly horrid? Short-sighted? Impertinent? The readiest jumper at
conclusions? The most arrogant critic of other people? Rich within. Of
course. Hidden with God. That is what I have never seen when I have
looked on superciliously from the height of my own idleness at these
drudging lives. And see how amazing has been my foolishness, for would
not my own life judged from outside, this life here alone with Papa,
this restricted, poor, solitary life, my first youth gone, my future
without prospects, no distractions, few friends, Papa's affection
growing vaguer as he grows older, would it not, looked at as I have been
looking at my neighbor's, seem entirely blank and desolate? Yet how
sincerely can I echo what he said--My life is very rich within. Yours
sincerely,