LVI

Galgenberg, Nov. 23d.

Dear Mr. Anstruther,--Was it so short? I don't remember. This one shall

be longer, then. Tell me, do you think there is any use in trying to

cure a person of being in love? I have come to the conclusion that it's

hopeless. Such cures must be made from the inside outward, and not from

the outside inward. I thought I was going to stir Vicki to a noble

independence, and you should have heard the speeches I made her.

Sometimes I had to laugh at them myself, they were such extraordinarily

heroic and glowing things for one dripping Fräulein with none too brave

a heart to hurl at another dripping Fräulein with no brave heart at all,

as they trotted along with shortened skirts and umbrellas through

wind-racked, howling forests. Vicki has gone all to pieces again, and

her eyes are redder than ever. I don't know whether it is these November

mists that have done it, but certainly after all my hauling of her up

the rocks of proud self-sufficiency she has flopped back again deeper

than before into the morass in which I found her. It's a perfect bog of

sentiment she's sunk in now. I make her go for ten-mile walks, and aim

at doing them in two hours, thus hoping to bring out her love-sickness

in the form of healthy perspiration, but it's no good. 'Oh,' gasps

Vicki, when we start off up the sombre aisles of pines, and see them

stretching away before us into a gray infinity, and mark their reeking

trunks, black with damp, hoar with lichen, and hear their sighings and

their creakings through the patter of rain on our umbrellas, and feel

their wet breath on our cheeks, 'oh what an empty, frightening world it

is.'

Then I tell her, with what enthusiasm I may, that it's not, that it's

beautiful, that we are young and strong, that our life can be made just

exactly as glorious as we are energetic enough to make it. And she

doesn't believe a word; she simply shakes her head, and moans that she

isn't energetic.

'But you are,' I say with a fine show of confidence. 'Come, let us walk

faster. Who would dare say you were not who saw you now?'

'Oh,' wails Vicki; and trots along blowing her nose.

Poor little soul. I've tried kissing her, and it did no good either. I

petted her for a whole day; sat with my arms round her; had her head on

my shoulder; whispered every consolation I could think of; but

unfortunately the only person who has ever petted her was the faithless

one, and it made her think of him with renewed agony, and opened

positive sluices of despair. I've tried scolding her--the 'My dear

Vicki, really for a woman grown' tone, but she gets so much of that from

her mother, and besides she isn't a woman grown, but only a poor,

unhappy, cheated little child. But how dull, how dry, how profitless are

the comfortings of one woman for another. I feel it in every nerve the

whole time I am applying them. One kiss from the wretched man himself

and the world blazes into radiance. A thousand of the most beautiful and

eminent verities enunciated by myself only collect into a kind of frozen

pall that hangs about her miserable little head and does nothing more

useful than suffocate her. She has been inclined to feel bad ever since

the fatal letter about the soup, but there were intervals in which with

infinite haulings I did get her up on to the rocks again, those rocks

she finds so barren, but from whose tops she can at least see clearly

and be kept dry. Now that this terrible weather has come upon us, and

every day is wetter and sadder than the last, she has collapsed

entirely. If I could write as well as Papa I would like to write an

essay on the connection between a wet November and the renewed buddings

of love. Frau von Lindeberg is dreadfully angry, and came up, and

actually came in, a thing she has not done yet, and sat on the sofa,

carefully enthroned in its middle and well spread out in case I should

so far forget myself as to want to sit upon it too, and asked me what

nonsense I had been putting into the child's head.

'Nonsense?' I exclaimed, remembering my noble talk.

'She was getting over it. You must have said something.'

'Said something? Yes, indeed I said something. Never has one person said

so many things before.'

She stared in amazement. 'What,' she cried, 'you actually--you

dared--you have the effrontery--'

'Shall I tell you what I said?'

And for an hour I gave the astonished lady, hemmed in on the sofa by the

table and by my chair, the outlines of my views on ideals and conduct. I

made the most of the hour. The outlines were very thick. No fidgeting or

attempts to stop me were considered. She had come to scold; she should

stay to learn.

'Well, well,' she said, when I, tired of talking, got up and removed the

impeding table with something of the brisk politeness of a dentist

unhooking the patient's bib and screwing down his chair after he has

done his worst, 'you seem to be a good sort of girl. You have, I see,

meant no harm.'

'Meant no harm? I neither meant it nor did I do it. Allow me to make the

point clearer--' And I prepared to push back the table upon her and

began again.

'No, no--it is quite clear, thank you. Kindly go on endeavoring, then,

to influence my unhappy child for good. I trust your excellent father is

well. Good morning.'

But influence as I may Vicki has given up wearing those starched shirts

with the high linen collars and neat ties in which she first dazzled me,

and has gone into nondescript woollen clothes something like mine. She

says it is because, of the washing bills, but I know it to be but a

further symbol of her despair. The one remnant of her first trimness is

her beautifully brushed hair. Stooping over her to see that her English

exercises are correct I like to lay my cheek a moment on it, so lightly

that she does not notice, for it is wonderful stuff,--soft, wavy,

shining, and ought alone without the little ear and curve of the young

cheek, without the silly pretty mouth and kind straightforward eyes, to

have immeshed that stupid man beyond all possibility of disentangling

himself. She was not made for Milton and the Muses. Nature, carving her

out, moulding her body and her mind, putting in a dimple here and giving

an eyelash an extra curl there, had a pleasant eye on a firelit future

for Vicki, a cosy, sheltered future with a fender for her feet, a baby

for each arm, and an adored husband coming in at the end of the day to

be fed and kissed. But this man has outwitted nature. He weighed, with

true German caution, Vicki and her dimples against the tiny portion

which was all he could extract from her parents, and found them not

heavy enough to make up for the alarming emptiness of that other scale.

Now Vicki's fender and babies and busy happy life have vanished into the

land of Never Will Be's. She will not find some one else to take his

place. She has a story attached to her: a fatal thing here for a girl.

Unlike your Miss Cheriton, who gently waves you aside and engages

herself without the least difficulty to a duke, Vicki is a marked

person, and will be avoided by our careful and calculating young men.

She is doomed never to spoil and tease those babies, never to spoil and

worship that husband. Instead she will, for a year, continue to range

the hills here with me, trying to listen politely to my admonishments

while inwardly she shudders at the loneliness and vastness of the

forests and of life, and then her parents' lease will be up, and they

and she will drift down into some little town in the Harz where retired

officers finish lives grown vegetable, and the years will pounce upon

her and strip her one by one of her little stock of graces. Don't

suppose I blame the man, because I don't; I only resent that he should

have so much the best of it. There is no law obliging a man to marry

because some lovesick girl wants him to--if I were a man I would never

marry--but I do deplore the exceeding number of the girls who want him

to. If each girl would say her prayers and go her own way, go about her

business, her parents having seen to it that she should have a business

to go about, what a cheerful, tearless place the world would be. And you

must forgive my vociferousness, but really I have had a woeful morning

with Vicki, who cried so bitterly into the pages of my Milton that the

best part of _Samson Agonistes_ is stuck together, and all the red has

come off the edges.

Papa Lindeberg came in at the end of the lesson to offer me his umbrella

to go home with. 'It is a wet day, Fräulein Hebe,' said he, looking

round.

'It is,' said I, gazing ruefully at my poor Milton.

'Even the daughters of the gods,' said he--thus mildly do we continue to

joke together--'must sometimes use umbrellas.'

'Yes,' said I, smiling at this pleasant old man, this old man I thought

at first so disagreeable; and he went with me to the door, and asked me

in an anxious whisper what I thought of Vicki. 'It lasts long--it lasts

long,' said he, helplessly.

'Yes,' said I, standing under the umbrella in the rain, while he in the

porch rubbed one hand mechanically over the other and stared at me.

'You are a very fortunate young lady,' he said wistfully.

'I?'

'Our poor Vicki--if she were more like you--'

'Like me?'

'It is so clear that you have never known this terrible malady of love.

You have the face of a joyful _Backfisch_.'

'Oh,'--I began to laugh; and laughed, and laughed till the umbrella

shook showers of raindrops off each of its points.

He stood watching me thoughtfully. 'It is true,' he said.

'Oh,' was all I could ejaculate; for indeed the idea made me very merry.

'No member of our sex,' said he, 'has ever even for a moment caught what

is still a bright and untouched maiden fancy.'

'There was a young man once,' I began, 'in the Jena cake-shop--'

'_Ach_' he interrupted, waving the young man and his cakes away with an

impatient movement of the hand.

'I didn't know,' said I, 'that you could read people's past.'

'Yours is easy enough to read. It is shining so clearly in your eyes, it

is reflected so limpidly in your face--'

'How nice,' said I, interrupting in my turn, for my feet were getting

grievously wet; and you note, I hope, with what industriousness I

preserve and record anything of a flattering nature that any one ever

says to me.

But you shall hear the other side too; for I turned away, and he turned

away, and before I had gone a yard my shoelace came undone and I had to

go back to the shelter of the porch to tie it up, and while I had my

foot on the scraper and was bending down tying a bow and a knot that

should last me till I got home I heard Frau von Lindeberg from the

parlor off the passage make him the following speech:

'I am constantly surprised, Ludwig, at the amount of time and

conversation I see you bestow on Fräulein Schmidt. I can hardly call it

impertinence, but there is something indescribable about her

manners,--an unbecoming freedom, an almost immodest frankness, an almost

naked naturalness, that is perilously near impertinence. People of that

class do not understand people of ours; and she will, if you are kinder

than is absolutely necessary, certainly take advantage of it. Let me beg

you to be careful.'

And Ludwig, beginning then and there, never answered a word.

Yours sincerely,