Galgenberg, Oct. 8th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--We are very happy here just now because Papa's new
book, at which he has been working two years, is finished. I am copying
it out, and until that is done we shall indulge in the pleasantest
day-dreams. It is our time, this interval between the finishing of a
book of his and its offer to a publisher, for being riotously happy. We
build the most outrageous castles in the air. Nothing is certain, and
everything is possible. The pains of composition are over, and the pains
of rejection are not begun. Each time we suppose they never will, and
that at last ears will be found respectfully ready to absorb his views.
Few and far between have the ears been till now. His books have fallen
as flat as books can fall. Nobody wanted to hear all, or even half, that
he could tell them about Goethe. Jena shrugged its shoulders, the larger
world was blank. The books have brought us no fame, no money, some
tragic hours, but much interest and amusement. Always tragic hours have
come when Papa clutched at his hair and raved rude things about the
German public; and when the money didn't appear there have been
uncomfortable moments. But these pass; Papa leaves his hair alone; and
the balance remains on the side of nice things. We don't really want any
more money, and Papa is kept busy and happy, and just to see him so
eager, so full of his work, seems to warm the house with pleasant
sunshine. Once, for one book, a check did come; and when we all rushed
to look we found it was for two marks and thirty pfennings--' being the
amount due,' said the accompanying stony letter, 'on royalties for the
first year of publication.' Papa thought this much worse than no check
at all, and took it round to the publisher in the molten frame of mind
of one who has been insulted. The publisher put his thumbs in the
armholes of his waistcoat, leaned back in his chair, gazed with
refreshing coolness at Papa who was very hot, and said that as trade
went it was quite a good check and that he had sent one that very
morning to another author--a Jena celebrity who employs his leisure
writing books about the Universe--for ninety pfennings.
Papa came home beaming with the delicious feeling that money was flowing
in and that he was having a boom. The universe man was a contemptuous
acquaintance who had been heard to speak lightly of Papa's books. Papa
felt all the sweetness of success, of triumph over a disagreeable rival;
and since then we have looked upon that special book as his _opus
magnum_.
While I copy he comes in and out to ask me where I have got to and if I
like it. I assure him that I think it delightful, and so honestly I do
in a way, but I don't think it will be the public's way. It begins by
telling the reader, presumably a person in search of information about
Goethe, that Jena is a town of twenty thousand inhabitants, of whom
nineteen thousand are apparently professors. The town certainly does
give you that impression as you walk about its little streets and at
every corner meet the same battered-looking persons in black you met at
the corner before, but what has that to do with Goethe? And the pages
that follow have nothing to do with him either that I can see, being a
disquisition on the origin and evolution of the felt hats the professors
wear--dingy, slouchy things--winding up with an explanation of their
symbolism and inevitableness, based on a carefully drawn parallel
between them and the kind of brains they have to cover. From this point,
the point of the head-wear of the learned in our present year, he has to
work back all the way to Goethe in Jena a century ago. It takes him
several chapters to get back, for he doesn't go straight, being
constitutionally unable to resist turning aside down the green lanes of
moralizing that branch so seductively off the main road and lead him at
last very far afield; and when he does arrive he is rather breathless,
and flutters for some time round the impassive giant waiting to be
described, jerking out little anecdotes, very pleasant little anecdotes,
but quite unconnected with his patient subject, before he has got his
wind and can begin.
He is rosy with hope about this book. 'All Jena will read it,' he says,
'because they will like to hear about themselves'--I wonder if they
will--'and all Germany will read it because it will like to hear about
Goethe.'
'It has heard a good deal about him already, you know Papachen,' I say,
trying gently to suggest certain possibilities.
'England might like to have it. There has been nothing since that man
Lewes, and never anything really thorough. A good translation,
Rose-Marie--what do you think of that as an agreeable task for you
during the approaching winter evenings? It is a matter worthy of
consideration. You will like a share in the work, a finger in the
literary pie, will you not?'
'Of course I would. But let me copy now, darling. I'm not half through.'
He says that if those blind and prejudiced persons, publishers, won't
risk bringing it out he'll bring it out at his own expense sooner than
prevent the world's rightly knowing what Goethe said and did in Jena; so
there's a serious eventuality ahead of us! We really will have to live
on lettuces, and in grimmest earnest this time. I hope he won't want to
keep race-horses next. Well, one thing has happened that will go a
little way toward meeting new expenses,--I go down every day now and
read English with Vicki, at the desire of her mother, for two hours, her
mother having come to the conclusion that it is better to legalize, as
it were, my relations with Vicki who flatly refused to keep away from
us. So I am a bread-winner, and can do something to help Papa. It is
true I can't help much, for what I earn is fifty pfennings each time,
and as the reading of English on Sundays is not considered nice I can
only altogether make three marks a week. But it is something, and it is
easily earned, and last Sunday, which was the end of my first week, I
bought the whole of the Sunday food with it, dinner and supper for us,
and beer for Johanna's lover, who says he cannot love her unless the
beer is a particular sort and has been kept for a fortnight properly
cold in the coal-hole.
Since I have read with Vicki Frau von Lindeberg is quite different. She
is courteous with the careful courtesy decent people show their
dependents; kindly, even gracious at times. She is present at the
reading, darning socks and ancient sheets with her carefully kept
fingers, and she treats me absolutely as though I were attached to her
household as governess. She is no longer afraid we will want to be
equals. She asks me quite often after the health of him she calls my
good father. And when a cousin of hers came last week to stay a night, a
female Dammerlitz on her way to a place where you drink waters and get
rid of yourself, she presented me to her with pleasant condescension as
the _kleine Engländerin_ engaged as her daughter's companion. '_Eine
recht Hebe Hausgenossin,'_ she was pleased to add, gently nodding her
head at each word; and the cousin went away convinced I was a resident
official and that the tales she had heard about the Lindeberg's poverty
couldn't be true.
'It's not scriptural,' I complained to Vicki, stirred to honest
indignation.
'You mean, to say things not quite--not quite?' said Vicki.
'Such big ones,' I fumed. 'I'm not little. I'm not English. I'm not a
_Hausgenossin_. Why such unnecessary ones?'
'Now, Rose-Marie, you do know why Mamma said "little."'
'It's a term of condescension?'
'And _Engländerins_ are rather grand things to have in the house, you
know--expensive, I mean. Always dearer than natives. Mamma only wants
Cousin Mienchen to suppose we are well off.'
'Oh,' said I.
'You don't mind?' said Vicki, rather timidly taking my hand.
'It doesn't hurt me,' said I, putting a little stress on the me, a
stress implying infinite possible hurt to Frau von Lindeberg's soul.
'It is horrid,' murmured Vicki, her head drooping over her book. 'I wish
we didn't always pretend we're not poor. We are. Poor as mice. And it
makes us so sensitive about it, so afraid of anything's being noticed.
We spend our lives on tenterhooks--not nice things at all to spend one's
life on.'
'Wriggly, uncomfortable things,' I agreed.
'I believe Cousin Mienchen isn't in the least taken in, for all our
pains.'
'I don't believe people ever are,' said I; and we drifted into a
consideration of the probable height of our temperatures and color of
our ears if we could know how much the world we pose to really knows
about us, if we could hear with what thoroughness those of our doings
and even of our thoughts that we believed so secret are discussed.
Frau von Lindeberg wasn't there, being too busy arranging comforts for
her cousin's journey to preside, and so it was that we drifted
unhindered from Milton into the foggier regions of private wisdom. We
are neither of us wise, but it is surprising how talking to a friend,
even to a friend as unwise as yourself, clears up your brains and lets
in new light. That is one of the reasons why I like writing to you and
getting your letters; only you mustn't be offended at my bracketing you,
you splendid young man, with poor Vicki and poor myself in the class
Unwise. Heaven knows I mean nothing to do with book-learning, in which,
I am aware, you most beautifully excel.
Yours sincerely,