Galgenberg, Sept. 16th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--It is kind of you to want to contradict what I
said in my last letter about the outward appearance of my life, but
really you know I _am_ past my first youth. At twenty-six I cannot
pretend to be what is known as a young girl, and I don't want to. Not
for anything would I be seventeen or eighteen again. I like to be a
woman grown, to have entered into the full possession of whatever
faculties I am to have, to know what I want, to look at things in their
true proportions. I don't know that eighteen has anything that
compensates for that. It is such a rudderless sort of age. It may be
more charming to the beholder, but it is not half so nice to the person
herself. What is the good of loving chocolate to distraction when it
only ends by making you sick? And the joy of a new frock or hat is
dashed at once when you meet the superior gorgeousness of some other
girl's frock or hat. And parties are often disappointing things. And
students, though they are deeply interesting, easily lead to tiresome
complications if they admire you, and if they don't that isn't very nice
either. Why, even the young man in the cake-shop who used so gallantly
to serve us with lemonade and had such wonderful curly eyelashes was not
much good really, for he couldn't be invited to tea, and whenever we
wanted to look at his eyelashes we had to buy a cake, and cakes are
dreadfully expensive for persons who have no money. Yes, it is a silly,
tittering, calf-like age, and I am glad it can't come back again. Please
do not think that I need comforting because it is gone, or because of
any of the other items in the list I gave you. The future looks quite
pleasant to me,--quite bright and sunny. It is only empty of what people
call prospects, by which I take them to mean husbands, but I shall fill
it with pigs instead. I have great plans. I see what can be done with
even one pig from my neighbor's example, who has dug out a sort of
terrace and put a sty on it: simply wonders. And how much more could be
done with two. I mean to be a very happy old maid. I shall fix my
attention in the mornings on remunerative objects like pigs, and spend
beautiful afternoons, quite idle physically but with my soul busy up
among the poets. Later on in distant years, when Papa doesn't want me
any more, I shall try to find a little house somewhere where it is flat,
so that I can have other creatures about me besides bees, which are the
only live stock I can keep here. And you mustn't think I shall not be
happy, because I shall. _So happy_. I am happy now, and I mean to be
happy then; and when I am very old and have to die I shall be happy
about that too. I shall 'lay me down with a will,' as the bravest of
your countrymen sang.
Do my plans seem to you selfish? I expect they do. People so easily call
those selfish who stand a little aside and look on at life. We have a
poet of whom we are proud, but whose fame has not, I think, reached
across to England, a rugged, robust poet, not very far below Goethe, a
painter on large canvasses, best at mighty scenes, perhaps least good in
small things, in lyrics, in the things in which Heine was so exquisite;
and he for my encouragement has said,
Bei sich selber fangt man an,
Da man nicht Allen helfen kann.
Isn't it a nice jingle? The man's name is Hebbel, and he lived round
about the forties, and perhaps you know more of him than I do, and I
have been arrogant again; but it is a jingle that has often cheered me
when I was afraid I ought to be teaching somebody something, or making
clothes for somebody, or paying somebody domiciliary visits and talking
fluently of the _lieber Gott_. I shrink from these things; and a
shrinking visitor, shy and uncertain, cannot be so nice as no visitor at
all. Is it very wrong of me? When my conscience says it is--it does not
say so often--I try to make up by going into the kitchen and asking
Johanna kind questions about her mother. I must say she is rather odd
when I do. She not only doesn't meet me half-way, she doesn't come even
part of the way. She clatters her saucepans with an energy very like
fury, and grows wholly monosyllabic. Yet it is not her step-mother; it
is her very own mother, and it ought to be the best way of touching
responsive chords in her heart and making her feel I am not merely a
mistress but a friend. Once, struck by the way the lids of the saucepans
were falling about, I tried her with her father, but the din instantly
became so terrific that I was kept silent quite a long time, and when it
left off felt instinctively that I had better say something about the
weather. I don't think I told you that after that trumpeting Sunday,
moved to real compassion by the sufferings of him you call the fiddler
man, I took my courage in both hands and told Johanna with the
pleasantest of smiles--I daresay it was really a rather ghastly
one--that her trumpeter must not again bring his instrument with him
when he called. 'It can so very well stay at home,' I explained suavely.
She immediately said she would leave on the first of October.
'But, Johanna!' I cried.
She repeated the formula.
'But, Johanna! How can a clever girl like you be so unreasonable? He is
to visit you as often as before. All we beg is that it shall be done
without music.'
She repeated the formula.
'But, Johanna!' I expostulated again,--eloquent exclamation, expressing
the most varied sentiments.
She once again repeated the formula; and next day I was forced to
descend into Jena, shaking an extremely rueful fist at the neighbor's
house on the way, and set about searching in the obscurity of a registry
office for the pearl we are trying all our lives to find.
This office consists of two rooms, the first filled with servants
looking for mistresses, and the second with mistresses looking for
servants. A Fräulein of vague age but determined bearing sits at a desk
in the second room, and notes in a ledger the requirements of both
parties. They are always the same: the would-be mistress, full of a
hopefulness that crops up again and again to the end of her days,
causing attributes like _fleissig, treu, ehrlich, anständig,
arbeitslieb, kinderlieb_, to be written down together with her demands
in cooking, starching, and ironing, and often adding the information
that though the wages may appear small they are not really so, owing to
the unusually superior quality of the treatment; and the would-be maid,
briefer because without illusions, dictates her firm resolve to go
nowhere where there is cooking, washing, or a baby.
'_Gott, diese Mädchen_,' exclaimed a waiting lady to me as I arrived,
hot and ruffled after my long tramp in the sun. I dropped into a chair
beside her; and hot and ruffled as I was, she, who had been sitting
there hours, was still more so. In her agitation she had cried out to
the first human being at hand, the Fräulein at the desk having something
too distinctly inhuman about her--strange as a result of her long and
intimate intercourse with human beings--to be lightly applied to for
sympathy. Then looking at me again she cried, 'Why, it is the good
Rose-Marie!' And I saw she was an old friend of my step-mother's, Frau
Meyer, the wife of one of the doctors at the Lunatic Asylum, who used to
come in often while you were with us, and whenever she came in you went
out.
'Not married yet?' she asked as we shook hands, smiling as though the
joke were good.