XLV

Galgenberg, Sept. 23d.

Dear Mr. Anstruther,--Today I went down to Jena with the girl from next

door who wanted to do such mild shopping as Jena is prepared for, mild

shopping suited to mild purses, and there I drifted into the bookshop in

the market-place where I so often used to drift, and there I found a

book dealing with English poetry from Chaucer onward, with pictures of

the poets who had written it. But before I go on about that--and you'll

be surprised at the amount I have to say--I must explain the girl next

door. I don't think I ever told you that there is one. The neighbor let

his house just before he left, and let it unexpectedly well, the people

taking the upper part of it for a whole year, and this is their

daughter. The neighbor went off jubilant to his little inky boys. 'See,'

said he at parting, 'my life actually threatens to become rich without

as well as within.'

'Don't,' I murmured, turning as hot as people do when they are reminded

of past foolishness.

The new neighbors have been here ten days, and I made friends at once

with the girl over the fence. She saw me gathering together into one

miserable haycock the September grass Johanna and I had been hacking at

in turns with a sickle for the last week, and stood watching me with so

evident an interest that at last I couldn't help smiling at her. 'This

is our crop for the winter,' I said, pointing to the haycock; I protest

I have seen many a molehill bigger.

'It isn't much,' said the girl.

'No,' I agreed, raking busily.

'Have you a cow?' she asked.

'No.'

'A pig?'

'No.'

'No animals?'

'Bees.'

The girl was silent; then she said bees were not animals.

'But they're live-stock,' I said. 'They're the one link that connects us

with farming.'

'What do you make hay for, then?'

'Only to keep the grass short, and then we try to imagine it's a lawn.'

Raking, I came a little nearer; and so I saw she had been, quite

recently, crying.

I looked at her more attentively. She was pretty, with the prettiness of

twenty; round and soft, fair and smooth. She had on an elaborately

masculine shirt and high stiff collar and tie and pin and belt; and from

under the edge of the hard straw hat tilted up at the back by masses of

burnished coils of hair I saw a pulpy red mouth, the tip of an

indeterminate nose, and two unhappy eyes, tired with crying.

'How early to begin,' I said.

'Begin what?'

'It's not nine yet. Do you always get your crying done by breakfast

time?'

She flushed all over her face.

'Forgive me,' I said, industriously raking. 'I'm a rude person.'

The girl was silent for a few moments; considering, I suppose, whether

she should turn her back on the impertinent stranger once and for all,

or forgive the indiscretion and make friends.

Well, she made friends. She and I, alone up on the hill, the only

creatures of anything like the same age, sure to see each other

continually in the forests, on the road, over the fence, certainly we

were bound either to a tiresome system of pretending to be unaware of

each other's existence or to be friends. We are friends. It is the

wisest thing to be at all times. In ten days we have become fast

friends, and after the first six she left off crying.

Now I'll tell you why we have done it so quickly. It is not, as perhaps

you know, my practice to fall easily on the stranger's neck. I am too

lumbering, too slow, too acutely conscious of my shortcomings for that;

really too dull and too awkward for anything but a life almost entirely

solitary. But this girl has lately been in love. It is the common fate.

It happens to us all. That in itself would not stir me to friendship.

The man, however, in defiance of German custom, so strong on this point

that the breaking of it makes a terrific noise, after being publicly

engaged to her, after letting things go so far that the new flat was

furnished, and the wedding-guests bidden, said he was afraid he didn't

love her enough and gave her up.

When she told me that my heart went out to her with a rush. I shall not

stop to explain why, but it did rush, and from that moment I felt that I

must put my arms round her, I, the elder and quieter, take her by the

hand, help her to dry her poor silly eyes, pet her and make her happy

again. And really after six days there was no more crying, and for the

last three she has been looking at life with something of the critical

indifference that lifts one over so many tiresome bits of the road.

Unfortunately her mother doesn't like me. Don't you think it's dreadful

of her not to? She fears I am emancipated, and knows that I am Schmidt.

If I were a Wedel, or an Alvensleben, or a Schulenburg, or of any other

ancient noble family, even an obscure member of its remotest branch, she

would consider my way of living and talking merely as a thing to be

smiled at with kind indulgence. But she knows that I am Schmidt. Nothing

I can say or do, however sweet and sane, can hide that horrid fact. And

she knows that my father is a careless child of nature, lamentably

unimpressible by birth and office; that my mother was an Englishwoman

with a name inspiring little confidence; and that we let ourselves go to

an indecent indifference to appearances, not even trying to conceal that

we are poor. How useless it is to be pleasant and pretty--I really have

been very pleasant to her, and the daughter kindly tells me I am

pretty--if you are both Schmidt and poor. Though I speak with the

tongues of angels and have no family it avails me nothing. If I had

family and no charity I would get on much better in the world, in

defiance of St. Paul. Frau von Lindeberg would take me to her heart,

think me distinguished where now she thinks me odd, think me witty where

now she thinks me bold, listen to my speeches, laugh at my sallies, be

interested in my gardening and in my efforts to live without meat; but

here I am, burning, I hope, with charity, with love for my neighbors,

with ready sympathy, eager friendliness, desire to be of use, and it all

avails me nothing because my name is Schmidt.

It is the first time I have been brought into daily contact with our

nobility. In Jena there were very few: rare bright spots here and there

on the sober background of academic middle-class; little stars whose

shining even from a distance made us blink. Now I see them every day,

and find them very chilly and not in the least dazzling. I no longer

blink. Perhaps Frau von Lindeberg feels that I do not, and cannot

forgive an unblinking Schmidt. But really, now, these pretensions are

very absurd. The free blood of the Watsons surges within me at the sight

of them. I think of things like Albion's daughters, and Britannia ruling

waves, and I feel somehow that it is a proud thing to be partly Watson

and to have had progenitors who lived in a house called The Acacias in a

street called Plantagenet Road, which is what the Watsons did. What

claims have these Lindebergs to the breathless, nay, sprawling respect

they apparently demand? Here is a retired Colonel who was an officer all

his life, and, not clever enough to go on to the higher military

positions, was obliged to retire at fifty. He belongs to a good family,

and married some one of slightly better birth than his own. She was a

Freiin--Free Lady--von Dammerlitz, a family, says Papa, large,

unpleasant, and mortgaged. It has given Germany no great warriors or

statesmen. Its sons have all been officers who did not turn that corner

round which the higher honors lie, and its daughters either did not

marry at all, being portionless, or married impossible persons, said

Papa, such as--

'Such as?' I inquired, expecting to hear they married postmen.

'Pastors, my dear,' said Papa smiling.

'Pastors?' I said, surprised, pastors having seemed to me, who view them

from their own level, eminently respectable and desirable as husbands.

'But not from the Dammerlitz point of view, my dear,' said Papa.

'Oh,' said I, trying to imagine how pastors would look seen from that.

Well, here are these people freezing us into what they consider our

proper place whenever we come across them, taking no pains to hide what

undesirable beings we are in their sight, staring at Papa's hat in

eloquent silence when it is more than usually tilted over one ear,

running eyes that chill my blood over my fustian clothes--I'm not sure

what fustian is, but I'm quite sure my clothes are made of it--oddly

deaf when we say anything, oddly blind when we meet anywhere unless we

actually run into them, here they are, doing all these things every day

with a repeated gusto, and with no reason whatever that I can see to

support their pretensions. Is it so wonderful to be a _von_? For that is

all, look as I will, that I can see they have to go on. They are poor,

as the retired officer invariably is, and they spend much time

pretending they are not. They know nothing; he has spent his best years

preoccupied with the routine of his calling, which leaves no room for

anything approaching study or interest in other things, she in bringing

up her son, also an officer, and in taking her daughter to those parties

in Berlin that so closely resemble, I gather from the girl Vicki's talk,

the parties in Jena--a little wider, a little more varied, with more

cups and glasses, and with, of course, the chance we do not have in Jena

of seeing some one quite new, but on the whole the same. He is a solemn

elderly person in a black-rimmed _pince-nez_, dressed in clothes that

give one the impression of always being black. He vegetates as

completely as any one I have ever seen or dreamed of. Prolonged coffee

in the morning, prolonged newspaper-reading, and a tortoise-like turn in

the garden kill his mornings. Dinner, says Vicki, kills another hour and

a half; then there is what we call the Dinner Sleep on the sofa in his

darkened room, and that brings him to coffee time. They sit over the

cups till Vicki wants to scream, at least she wants to since she has

known me, she says; up to then, after her miserable affair, she sat as

sluggishly as the others, but huddled while they were straight, and

red-eyed, which they were not. After coffee the parents walk up the road

to a certain point, and walk back again. Then comes the evening paper,

which he reads till supper-time, and after supper he smokes till he goes

to bed.

'Why, he's hardly alive at all,' I said to Vicki, when she described

this existence.

She shrugged her shoulders. 'It's what they all do,' she said, 'all the

retired. I've seen it a hundred times in Berlin. They're old, and they

never can start anything fresh.'

'We won't be like that when we're old, will we?' I said, gazing at her

wide-eyed, struck as by a vision.

She gazed back into my eyes, misgiving creeping, into hers. 'Sleep, and

eat, and read the paper?' she murmured.

'Sleep, and eat, and read the paper?' I echoed.

And we stared at each other in silence, and the far-away dim years

seemed to catch up what we had said, and mournfully droned back, 'Sleep,

and eat, and read the paper....'

But what is to be done with girls of good family who do not marry, and

have no money? They can't go governessing, and indeed it is a dreary

trade. Vicki has learned nothing except a little cooking and other

domestic drudgery, only of use if you have a house to drudge in and a

husband to drudge for; of those pursuits that bring in money and make

you independent and cause you to flourish and keep green and lusty she

knows nothing. If I had a daughter I would bring her up with an eye

fixed entirely on a husbandless future. She should be taught some trade

as carefully as any boy. Her head should be filled with as much learning

as it would conveniently hold side by side with a proper interest in

ribbons. I would spend my days impressing her with the gloriousness of

independence, of having her time entirely at her own disposal, her life

free and clear, the world open before her, as open as it was to Adam and

Eve when they turned their backs once and for all on the cloying

sweetness of Paradise, and far more interesting that it was to them, for

it would be full of inhabitants eager to give her the hearty welcome

always awaiting those rare persons, the cheery and the brave.

'Oh,' sighed Vicki, when with great eloquence and considerable

elaboration I unfolded these views, 'how beautiful!'

Papa was nearer the open window under which we were sitting than I had

thought, for he suddenly popped out his head. 'It is a merciful thing,

Rose-Marie,' he said, 'that you have no daughter.'

We both jumped.

'She would be a most dreary young female,' he went on, smiling down as

from a pulpit on our heads, and wiping his spectacles. 'Offspring

continually goaded and galvanized by a parent, hammered upon, chiselled,

beaten out flat--'

'Dear me, Papachen,' I murmured.

'Beaten out flat,' said Papa, waving my interruption aside with his

spectacles, 'by the dead weight of opinions already stale, the victims

of a system, the subjects of an experiment, the prisoners of prejudice,

are bound either to flare into rank rebellion on the first opportunity

or to grow continually drearier and more conspicuously stupid.'

Vicki stared first up at Papa then at me, her soft, crumpled sort of

mouth twisted into troubled surprise.

Papa leaned further out and hit the window sill with his hand for all

the world like a parson hitting his pulpit's cushion. 'One word,' he

said, 'one word of praise or blame, one single word from an outsider

will have more effect upon your offspring than years of trouble taken by

yourself, mountains of doctrine preached by you, rivers of good advice,

oceans of exhortations, cautions as numerous as Abraham's posterity,

well known to have been as numerous as the sea sand, private prayers,

and public admonition.'

And he disappeared with a jerk.

'_Ach_,' said Vicki, much impressed.

Papa popped out his head again. 'You may believe me, Rose-Marie,' he

said.

'I do, Papachen,' said I.

'You have to thank me for much.'

'And I do,' said I heartily, smiling up at him.

'But for nothing more than for leaving you free to put forth such shoots

as your nature demanded in whatever direction your instincts propelled

you.' And he disappeared and shut the window.

Vicki looked at me doubtfully. 'You said beautiful things,' she said,

'and he said just the opposite. Which is true?'

'Both,' said I promptly, determined not to be outdone as a prophet by

Papa.

Poor Vicki. It is so hard to have life turned into a smudge when one is

only twenty. She adored this man, was so proud of him, so proud of

herself for being chosen by him. She grew, in the year during which they

were engaged, into a woman, and can never now retrace her steps back to

that fairy place of sunshine and carelessness in which we so happily

wander if we are left alone for years and years after we are supposed to

be grown up. Do you realize what a blow in the face she has received, as

well as in her unfortunate little heart? All her vanities, without which

a girl is but a poor thing, shrivelled up, her self-respect gone, her

conceit, if there was any, and I suppose there was because there always

is, gone headlong after it. A betrothal here is almost as binding and

quite as solemn as a marriage. It is announced in the papers. It is

abundantly celebrated. And the parents on both sides fall on each

other's necks and think highly of one another till the moment comes for

making settlements. The Lindebergs spent all they had laid by and

borrowed more to buy the trousseau and furnish the house. Vicki cried

bitterly when she talked of her table-napkins. She says there were

twelve dozen in twelve different patterns, and each twelve was tied up

with a pink ribbon fastened by a buckle and a bow. They had to be sold

again at a grievous loss, and the family fled from Berlin and the faces

of their acquaintances, faces crooked with the effort to sympathize when

what they really wanted to do, says Vicki, was to smile, and came to

this cheap place where they can sit in obscurity darning up the holes in

their damaged fortunes. Frau von Lindeberg, who has none of the torment

of rejected love to occupy her feelings and all the bitterness of the

social and financial blow, cannot help saying hard things to Vicki,

things pointed and poisoned with reproaches that sometimes almost verge

on taunts. The man was a good _parti_ for Vicki; little money, but much

promise for the future, a good deal older than herself and already

brilliant as an officer; and during the engagement the satisfied mother

overflowed, as mothers will, with love for the creditable daughter. 'It

was so nice,' said Vicki-, dolefully sniffing. 'She seemed to love me

almost as much as she loves my brother. I was so happy. I had so much.

Then everything went at once. Mamma can't bear to think that no one will

ever want to marry me now, because I have been engaged.'

Well, love is a cruel, horrible thing. Hardly ever do both the persons

love with equal enthusiasm, and if they do what is the use? It is all

bound to end in smoke and nothingness, put out by the steady drizzle of

marriage. And for the others, for the masses of people who do not love

equally, of whom one half is at a miserable disadvantage, at the mercy

absolutely of the other half, what is there but pain in the end? And

yet--and yet it is a pretty thing in its beginnings, a sweet, darling

thing. But, like a kitten, all charm and delicious ways at first,

innocent, soft, enchanting, it turns into a cat with appalling rapidity

and cruelly claws you. I'd like to know if there's a single being on

earth so happy and so indifferent that he has not got hidden away

beneath a brave show of clothes and trimmings the mark of Love's claws.

And I think most of the clawings are so ferocious that they are for a

long time ghastly tears that open and bleed again; and when with years

they slowly dry up there is always the scar, red and terrible, that

makes you wince if by any chance it is touched. That is what I think.

What do you think?

Good-by.

No, don't tell me what you think. I don't want to know.