LIII

Galgenberg, Nov. 1st.

Dear Mr. Anstruther,--I won't talk about it any more. Let us have done

with it. Let us think of something else. I shall get tired of the duke

if you are not careful, so please save me from an attitude so

unbecoming. This is All Saints' Day: the feast of white chrysanthemums

and dear memories. My mother used to keep it as a day apart, and made me

feel something of its mysticalness. She had a table in her bedroom, the

nearest approach that was possible to an altar, with one of those

pictures hung above it of Christ on the Cross that always make me think

of Swinburne's

God of this grievous people, wrought

After the likeness of their race--

do you remember?--and candles, and jars of flowers, and many little

books; and she used on her knees to read in the little books, kneeling

before the picture. She explained to me that the Lutheran whitewash

starved her soul, and that she wanted, however clumsily, to keep some

reminder with her of the manner of prayer in England. Did I ever tell

you how pretty she was? She was so very pretty, and so adorably nimble

of tongue. Quick, glancing, vivid, she twinkled in the heavy Jena

firmament like some strange little star. She led Papa and me by the

nose, and we loved it. I can see her now expounding her rebellious

theories, sitting limply--for she was long and thin--in a low chair, but

with nothing limp about her flower-like face and eyes shining with

interest in what she was talking about. She was great on the necessity,

a necessity she thought quite good for everybody but absolutely

essential for a woman, of being stirred up thoroughly once a week at the

very least to an enthusiasm for religion and the life of the world to

come. She said there was nothing so good for one as being stirred up,

that only the well stirred ever achieve great things, that stagnation

never yet produced a soul that had shot up out of reach of fogs on to

the clear heights from which alone you can call out directions for the

guidance of those below. The cold, empty Lutheran churches were

abhorrent to her. 'They are populated on Sundays,' she said, 'solely by

stagnant women,--women so stagnant that you can almost see the duckweed

growing on them.'

She could not endure, and I, taught to see through her eyes, cannot

endure either, the chilly blend of whitewash and painted deal pews in

the midst of which you are required here once a week to magnify the

Lord. Our churches--all those I have seen--are either like vaults or

barns, the vault variety being slightly better and also more scarce.

Their aggressive ugliness, and cold, repellent service keeping the

congealed sinner at arm's length, nearly drove my mother into the Roman

Church, a place no previous Watson had ever wanted to go to. The

churches in Jena made her think with the tenderest regard of the old

picturesque pre-Lutheran days, of the light and color and emotions of

the Catholic services, and each time she was forced into one she said

she made a bigger stride toward Rome. 'Luther was a most mischievous

person,' she would say, glancing half defiantly through long eyelashes

at Papa. But he only chuckled. He doesn't mind about Luther. Yet in case

he did, in case some national susceptibility should have been hurt, she

would get up lazily--her movements were as lazy as her tongue was

quick--and take him by the ears and kiss him.

She died when she was thirty-five: sweet and wonderful to the last. Nor

did her beauty suffer in the least in the sudden illness that killed

her. 'A lily in a linen-clout She looked when they had laid her out,' as

your Meredith says; and on this day every year, this day of saints so

dear to us, my spirit is all the time in those long ago happy years with

her. I have no private altar in my room, no picture of a 'piteous

Christ'--Papa took that--and no white flowers in this drenched autumnal

place to show that I remember; nor do I read in the little books, except

with gentle wonderment that she should have found nourishment in them,

she who fed so constantly on the great poets. But I have gone each All

Saints' Day for ten years past to church in Jena in memory of her, and

tried by shutting my eyes to imagine I was in a beautiful place without

whitewash, or hideous, almost brutal, stained glass.

This morning, knowing that if I went down into the town I would arrive

spattered with mud up to my ears and so bedraggled that the pew-opener

might conceivably refuse me admission on the ground that I would spoil

her pews, I set out for the nearest village across the hills, hoping

that a country congregation would be more used to mud. I found the

church shut, and nobody with the least desire to have it opened. The

rain beat dismally down on my umbrella as I stood before the blank

locked door. A neglected fence divided the graves from the parson's

front yard, protecting them, I suppose, as much as in it lay, from the

depredations of wandering cows. On the other side of it was the parson's

manure heap, on which stood wet fowls mournfully investigating its

contents. His windows, shut and impenetrable, looked out on to the

manure heap, the fowls, the churchyard, and myself. It is a very ancient

church, picturesque, and with beautiful lancet windows with delicate

traceries carefully bricked up. Not choosing to have walked five miles

for nothing, and not wishing to break a habit ten years old of praying

in a church for my darling mother's soul on this day of souls and

darling saints, I gathered up my skirts and splashed across the parson's

pools and knocked modestly at his door for the key. The instant I did it

two dogs from nowhere, two infamous little dogs of that unpleasant breed

from which I suppose Pomerania takes its name, rushed at me furiously

barking. The noise was enough to wake the dead; and since nobody stirred

in the house or showed other signs of being wakened it became plain to

my deductive intelligence that its inmates couldn't be dead. So I

knocked again. The dogs yelled again. I stood looking at them in deep

disgust, quite ashamed of the way in which the dripping stillness was

being rent because of me. A soothing umbrella shaken at them only

increased their fury. They seemed, like myself, to grow more and more

indignant the longer the door was kept shut. At last a servant opened it

a few inches, eyed me with astonishment, and when she heard my innocent

request eyed me with suspicion. She hesitated, half shut the door,

hesitated again, and then saying she would go and see what the Herr

Pastor had to say, shut the door quite. I do not remember ever having

felt less respectable. The girl clearly thought I was not; the dogs

clearly were sure I was not. Properly incensed by the shutting of the

door and the expression on the girl's face I decided that the only

dignified course was to go away; but I couldn't because of the dogs.

The girl came back with the key. She looked as though she had a personal

prejudice against me. She opened the door just wide enough for a lean

person to squeeze through, and bade me, with manifest reluctance, come

in. The hall had a brick floor and an umbrella stand. In the umbrella

stand stood an umbrella, and as the girl, who walked in front of me,

passed it, she snatched out the umbrella and carried it with her, firmly

pressed to her bosom. I did not at once grasp the significance of this

action. She put me into an icy shut-up room and left me to myself. It

was the _gute Stube_--good room--room used only on occasions of frigid

splendor. Its floor was shiny with yellow paint, and to meet the

difficulty of the paint being spoiled if people walked on it and that

other difficulty of a floor being the only place you can walk on, strips

of cocoanut matting were laid across it from one important point to

another. There was a strip from the door to the window; a strip from the

door to another door; a strip from the door to the sofa; and a strip

from the sofa on which the caller sits to the chair on which sits the

callee. A baby of apparently brand newness was crying in an adjoining

room. I waited, listening to it for what seemed an interminable time,

not daring to sit down because it is not expected in Germany that you

shall sit in any house but your own until specially requested to do so.

I stood staring at the puddles my clothes and umbrella were forming on

the strip of matting, vainly trying to rub them out with my feet. The

wail of the unfortunate in the next room was of an uninterrupted and

haunting melancholy. The rain beat on the windows forlornly. As minute

after minute passed and no one came I grew very restless. My fingers

began to twitch, and my feet to tap. And I was cooling down after my

quick walk with a rapidity that meant a cough and a sore throat. There

was no bell, or I would have rung it and begged to be allowed to go

away. I did turn round to open the door and try to attract the servant's

notice and tell her I could wait no longer, but I found to my

astonishment that the door was locked. After that the whole of my

reflections were resolved into one chaotic Dear me, from which I did not

emerge till the parson appeared through the other door, bringing with

him a gust of wailing from the unhappy baby within and of the

characteristic smell of infant garments drying at a stove.

He was cold, suspicious, inquisitive. Evidently unused to being asked

for permission to go into his church, and equally evidently unused to

persons passing through a village which was, for most persons, on the

way to nowhere, he endeavored with some skill to discover what I was

doing there. With equal skill I evaded answering his questions. They

included inquiries as to my name, my age, my address, my father's

profession, the existence or not of a husband, the number of my brothers

and sisters, and distinct probings into the size of our income. It

struck me that he had a great deal of time and very few visitors, except

thieves. Delicately I conveyed this impression to him, leaving out only

the thieves, by means of implications of a vaguely flattering nature. He

shrugged his shoulders, and said it was too wet for funerals, which were

the only things doing at this time of the year.

'What, don't they die when it is wet?' I asked, surprised.

'Certainly, if it is necessary,' said he.

'Oh,' said I, pondering. 'But if some one does he has to be buried?'

'We put it off,' said he.

'Put it off?'

'We put it off,' he repeated firmly.

'But--' I began, in a tone of protest.

'There's always a fine day if one waits long enough,' said he.

'That's true,' said I, struck by a truth I had not till then consciously

observed.

He did not ask me to sit down, a careful eye, I suppose, having gauged

the probable effect of my wet clothes on his dry chairs, so we stood

facing each other on the strip of matting throwing questions and answers

backward and forward like a ball. And I think I played quite skilfully,

for at the end of the game he knew little more than when we began.

And so at last he gave me the key, and having with a great rattling of

its handle concealed that he was unlocking the door, and further cloaked

this process by a pleasant comment on the way doors stick in wet

weather, which I met with the cold information that ours didn't, he

whistled off the dogs, and I left him still with an inquiry in his eye.

The church is very ancient and dates from the thirteenth century. You

would like its outside--I wonder if in your walks you ever came

here--but its inside has been spoilt by the zealous Lutherans and turned

into the usual barn. In its first state of beauty in those far-off

Catholic days what a haven it must have been for all the women and most

of the men of that lonely turnip-growing village; the one beauty spot,

the one place of mystery and enthusiasm. No one, I thought, staring

about me, could possibly have their depths stirred in the middle of so

much whitewash. The inhabitants of these bald agricultural parishes are

not sufficiently spiritual for the Lutheran faith. Black gowns and

bareness may be enough for those whose piety is so exalted that

ceremonies are only a hindrance to the purity of their devotions; but

the ignorant and the dull, if they are to be stirred, and especially the

women who have entered upon that long series of gray years that begins,

for those worked gaunt and shapeless in the fields, somewhere about

twenty-five and never leaves off again, if they are to be helped to be

less forlorn need many ceremonies, many symbols, much show, and mystery,

and awfulness. You will say that it is improbable that the female

inhabitants of such a poor parish should know what it is to feel

forlorn; but I know better. You will, turning some of my own words

against me, tell me that one does not feel forlorn if one is worked hard

enough; but I know better about that too,--and I said it only in

reference to young men like yourself. It is true the tragedy of the

faded face combined with the uncomfortably young heart, which is the

tragedy that every woman who has had an easy life has to endure for

quite a number of years, finds no place in the existence of a drudge; it

is true too that I never yet saw, and I am sure you didn't, a woman of

the laboring classes make efforts to appear younger than she is; and it

is also true that I have seldom seen, and I am sure you haven't, women

of the class that has little to do leave off making them. Ceaseless hard

work and the care of many children do away very quickly with the youth

both of face and heart of the poor man's wife, and with the youth of

heart go the yearnings that rend her whose heart, whatever her face may

be doing, is still without a wrinkle. But drudgery and a lost youth do

not make your life less, but more dreary. These poor women have not,

like their husbands, the solace of the public-house _Schnapps_. They go

through the bitterness of the years wholly without anæsthetics. Really I

don't think I can let you go on persisting that they feel nothing. Why,

we shall soon have you believing that only you in this groaning and

travailing creation suffer. Please divest yourself of these illusions.

Read, my young friend, read the British poet Crabbe. Read him much;

ponder him more. He knew all about peasants. He was a plain man, with a

knack for rhyme and rhythm that sets your brain a-jingling for weeks,

who saw peasants as they are. They must have been the very ones we have

here. In his pages no honeysuckle clambers picturesquely about their

path, no simple virtues shine in their faces. Their hearth is not snowy,

their wife not neat and nimble. They do not gather round bright fires

and tell artless tales on winter evenings. Their cheer is certainly

homely, but that doesn't make them like it, and they never call down

blessings upon it with moist uplifted eyes. Grandsires with venerable

hair are rather at a discount; the young men's way of trudging cannot be

described as elastic; and their talk, when there is any, does not

consist of praise of the local landowner. Do you think they do not know

that they are cold and underfed? And do not know they have grown old

before their time through working in every sort of weather? And do not

know where their rheumatism and fevers come from?

I walked back through the soaking, sighing woods thinking of these

things and of how unfairly the goods of life are distributed and of the

odd tendency misfortunes have to collect themselves together in one

place in a heap. Old thoughts, you'll say,--old thoughts as stale as

life, thoughts that have drifted through countless heads, and after a

while drifted out of them again, leaving no profit behind them. But one

can't help thinking them and greatly marvelling. Make the most, you

fortunate young man, of freedom, and Italy, and sunshine, and your six

and twenty years. If I could only persuade you to let yourself go quite

simply to being happy! Our friendship, in spite of its sincerity, has up

to now been of so little use to you; and a friendship which is not

helpful might just as well not exist. I wish I knew what words of mine

would help you most. How gladly would I write them. How gladly would I

see you in untroubled waters, forging straight ahead toward a full and

fruitful life. But I am a foolish, ineffectual woman, and write you

waspish letters when I might, if I had more insight, have found out what

those words are that would set you tingling with the joy of life.

Yours sincerely,