Galgenberg, Dec. 31st.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--My heartiest good wishes for the New Year. May it
be fruitful to you in every pleasant way; bring you interesting work,
agreeable companions, bright days; and may it, above all things confirm
and strengthen our friendship. There now; was ever young man more
thoroughly fitted out with invoked blessings? And each one wished from
the inmost sincerity of my heart.
But we can't come to Berlin as you suggest we should, and allow
ourselves to be shown round by you. Must I say thank you? No, I don't
think I will. I will not pretend conventionality with you, and I do not
thank you, for I don't like to have to believe that you really thought I
would come. And then your threat, though it amused me, vexed me too. You
say if I don't come you will be forced to suppose that I'm afraid of
meeting you. Kindly suppose anything you like. After that of course I
will not come. What a boy you are. And what an odd, spoilt boy. Why
should I be afraid of meeting you? Is it, you think, because once--see,
I am at least not afraid of speaking of it--you passed across my life
convulsively? I don't know that any man could stir me up now to even the
semblance of an earthquake. My quaking days are done; and after that one
thunderous upheaval I am fascinated by the charm of quiet weather, and
of a placid basking in a sunshine I have made with my very own hands. It
is useless for you to tell me, as I know you will, that it is only an
imitation of the real thing and has no heat in it. I don't want to be
any hotter. In this tempestuous world where everybody is so eager, here
is at least one woman who likes to be cool and slow. How strange it is
the way you try to alter me, to make me quite different. There seems to
be a perpetual battering going on at the bulwarks of my character. You
want to pull them down and erect new fabrics in their place, fabrics so
frothy and unreal that they are hardly more than fancies and would have
to be built up afresh every day. Yet I know you like me, and want to be
my friend. You make me think of those quite numerous husbands who fall
in love with their wives because they are just what they are, and after
marriage expend their energies training them into something absolutely
different. There was one in Jena while we were there who fell
desperately in love with a little girl of eighteen, when he was about
your age, and he adored her utterly because she was so divinely silly,
ignorant, soft and babyish. She knew nothing undesirable, and he adored
her for that. She knew nothing desirable either, and he adored her for
that too. He adored her to such an extent that all Jena, not given
overmuch to merriment, was distorted with mirth at the spectacle. He was
a clever man, a very promising professor, yet he found nothing more
profitable than to spend every moment he could spare adoring. And his
manner of adoring was to sit earnestly discovering, by means of repeated
experiment, which of his fingers fitted best into her dimples when she
laughed, and twisting the tendrils of her hair round his thumbs in an
endless enjoyment of the way, when he suddenly let them go, they
beautifully curled. He did this quite openly, before us all, seeing I
suppose no reason why he should dissemble his interest in his future
wife's dimples and curls. But alas for the dimples and curls once she
was married! _Oh weh,_ how quickly he grew blind to them. And as for the
divine silliness, ignorance, softness and babyishness that had so deeply
fascinated him, just those were what got most on to his nerves. He tried
to do away with them, to replace them by wit and learning combined with
brilliant achievements among saucepans and shirts, and the result was
disastrous. His little wife was scared. Her dimples disappeared from
want of practice. Her pretty colors seemed suddenly wiped out, as though
some one had passed over them roughly with a damp cloth. Her very hair
left off curling, and was as limp and depressed as the rest of her. Let
this, Mr. Anstruther, be an awful warning to you, not only when you
marry but now at once in regard to your friends. Do not attempt to alter
those long-suffering persons. It is true you would have some difficulty
in altering a person like myself, long ago petrified into her present
horrid condition, but even the petrified can and do get tired of hearing
the unceasing knocking of the reforming mallet on their skulls. Leave me
alone, dear young man. Like me for anything you find that can be liked,
express proper indignation at the rest of me, and go your way praising
God Who made us all. Really it would be a refreshment if you left off
for a space imploring me to change into something else. There is a ring
about your imploring as if you thought it was mere wilfulness holding me
back from being and doing all you wish. Believe me I am not wilful; I am
only petrified. I can't change. I have settled down, very comfortably I
must say, to the preliminary petrifaction of middle age, and middle age,
I begin to perceive, is a blessed period in which we walk along
mellowly, down pleasant slopes, with nothing gusty and fierce able to
pierce our incrustation, no inward volcanoes able to upset the
surrounding rockiness, nothing to distract our attention from the mild
serenity of the landscape, the little flowers by the way, the beauty of
the reddening leaves, the calm and sunlit sky. You will say it is absurd
at twenty-six to talk of middle age, but I feel it in my bones, Mr.
Anstruther, I feel it in my bones. It is after all simply a question of
bones. Yours are twenty years younger than mine; and did I not always
tell you I was old?
I am so busy that you must be extra pleased, please, to get a letter
today. The translation of Papa's book has ended by interesting me to
such an extent that I can't leave off working at it. I do it officially
in his presence for an hour daily, he as full of mistrust of my English
as ever, trying to check it with a dictionary, and using picturesque
language to convey his disgust to me that he should be so imperfectly
acquainted with a tongue so useful. He has forgotten the little he
learned from my mother in the long years since her death, and he has the
natural conviction of authors in the presence of their translators that
the translator is a grossly uncultured person who will leave out all the
_nuances_. For an hour I plod along obediently, then I pretend I must go
and cook. What I really do is to run up to my bedroom, lock myself in,
and work away feverishly for the rest of the morning at my version of
the book. It is, I suppose, what would be called a free translation, but
I protest I never met anything quite so free. Papa's book is charming,
and the charm can only be reproduced by going repeatedly wholly off the
lines. Accordingly I go, and find the process exhilarating and amusing.
The thing amuses and interests me; I wonder if it would amuse and
interest other people? I fear it would not, for when I try to imagine it
being read by my various acquaintances my heart sinks with the weight of
the certainty that it couldn't possibly. I imagine it in the hands of
Joey, of Frau von Lindeberg, of different people in Jena, and the
expression my inner eye sees on their faces makes me unable for a long
while to go on with it. Then I get over that and begin working again at
my salad. It really is a salad, with Papa as the groundwork of lettuce,
very crisp and fresh, and myself as the dressing and bits of garnishing
beetroot and hard-boiled egg. I work at it half the night sometimes, so
eager am I to get it done and sent off. Yes, my young friend, I have
inherited Papa's boldness in the matter of sending off, and the most
impressive of London publishers is shortly to hold it in his sacred
hands. And if his sacred hands forget themselves so far as to hurl it
rudely back at me they yet can never take away the fun I have had
writing it.
Yours sincerely,