Galgenberg, Dec. 12th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--I must write to-night, though it is late, to tell
you of my speechless surprise when I came in an hour ago and found you
had been here. I knew you had the moment I came in. At once I recognized
the smell of the cigarettes you smoke. I went upstairs and called
Johanna, for I was not sure that you were not still here, in the parlor,
and frankly I was not going down if you were, for I do not choose to
have my fastnesses stormed. She told me of your visit; how you had come
up on foot soon after Vicki and Joey and I had started off for an
afternoon's tobogganing on the hills, how you had stayed talking to
Papa, and talking and talking, till you had to hurry down to catch the
last train. 'And he bade me greet you for him,' finished Johanna.
'Indeed?' said I.
Do you like winter excursions into the country? Is Berlin boring you
already? I shook my head in grave disapproval as Johanna proceeded with
her tale. I am all for a young man's attending to his business and not
making sudden wild journeys that take him away for a whole day and most
of a night. Papa was delighted, I must say, to have had at last, as he
told me with disconcerting warmth, at last after all these months an
intelligent conversation, but with his delight the success of your visit
ends, for when I heard of it I was not delighted at all. Why did you go
into the kitchen? Johanna says you would go, and then that you went out
hatless at the back door and down to the bottom of the garden and that
you stood there leaning against the fence as though it were summer.
'Still without a hat,' said Johanna, in her turn shaking her head, '_bei
dieser Kälte_.'
_Bei dieser Kälte_, indeed. Yes; what made you do it? I am glad I was
out, for I do not care to look on while the usually reasonable behave
unaccountably. I don't think I can be friends with you for a little
after this. I think I really must quarrel, for it isn't very decent to
drop unexpectedly upon a person who from time to time has told you with
the frankness that is her most marked feature that she doesn't want to
be dropped upon. No doubt you wished to see Papa as well, and, on your
way through Jena, Professor Martens; but I will not pretend to suppose
your call was not chiefly intended for me, for it is to me and not to
either of those wiser ones that you have written every day for months
past. You are a strange young man. Heaven knows what you have accustomed
yourself to imagining me to be. I almost wish now that you had seen me
when I came in from our violent exercise, a touzled, short-skirted,
heated person. It might have cured you. I forgot to look in the glass,
but of course my hair and eyelashes were as white with hoar-frost as
Vicki's and Joey's, and from beneath them and from above my turned-up
collar must have emerged just such another glowing nose. Even Papa was
struck by my appearance--after having gazed, I suppose, for hours on
your composed correctness--and remarked that living in the country did
not necessarily mean a complete return to savage nature.
The house feels very odd to-night. So do I. It feels haunted. So do I. I
want to scold you, and yet I cannot. I have the strangest desire to cry.
It is the thought that you came this long way, toiled up this long hill,
waited those long hours, all to see some one who is glad to have missed
you, that makes me want to. The night is so black outside my window, and
somewhere through that blackness you are travelling at this moment,
disappointed, across the endless frozen fields and forests that you must
go through inch by inch before you reach Berlin. Why did you do a thing
so comfortless? And here have I actually begun to cry,--I think because
it is so dark, and you are not yet home.