Galgenberg, Jan. 7th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--I couldn't write before, I've been too busy. The
manuscript went this morning after real hard work day and night, and now
I feel like a squeezed lemon that yet is cheerful, if you can conceive
such a thing. Joey's father has been and gone. He arrived late one
night, inspected the Lindebergs, gave his consent, and was off
twenty-four hours later. The Lindebergs were much disconcerted by these
quick methods, they who like to move slowly, think slowly, and sit hours
over each meal; and they had not said half they wanted to say and he had
not eaten half he was intended to eat before he was gone. Also he
disconcerted them,--indeed it was more than that, he upset them utterly,
by not looking like what they had made up their minds he would look
like. The Galgenbergs expected to see some one who should be blatantly
rich, and blatant riches, it dimly felt, would be expressed by much
flesh and a thick watch chain. Instead the man had a head like Julius
Cæsar, lean, thoughtful, shrewd, and a spare body that made Papa
Lindeberg's seem strangely pulpy and as if it were held together only by
the buttons of his clothes. We were staggered. Frau von Lindeberg
couldn't understand why a man so rich should also be so thin,--' He is
in a position to have the costliest cooking,' she said several times,
looking at me with amazed eyebrows; nor could she understand why a man
without ancestors should yet make her husband, whose past bristles with
them, be the one to look as if he hadn't got any. She mused much, and
aloud. While Vicki was being run breathlessly over the mountains by her
nimble future father-in-law, with Joey, devoured by pride in them both,
in attendance, I went down to ask if I could help in the cooking, and
found her going about her kitchen like one in a dream. She let me tuck
up my sleeves and help her, and while I did it she gave vent to many
musings about England and its curious children. 'Strange, strange
people,' she kept on saying helplessly.
But she is the happiest woman in Germany at this moment, happier far
than Vicki, for she sees with her older eyes the immense advantages that
are to be Vicki's who sees at present nothing at all but Joey. And then
the deliciousness of being able to write to all those relations grown of
late so supercilious, to Cousin Mienchen who came and played the rich,
and tell them the glorious news. Vicki basks in the sunshine of a
mother's love again, and never hears a cross word. Good things are
showered down on her, presents, pettings, admiration, all those charming
things that every girl should enjoy once before her pretty girlhood has
gone. It is the most delightful experience to see a family in the very
act of receiving a stroke of luck. Strokes of luck, especially of these
dimensions, are so very rare. It is like being present at a pantomime
that doesn't leave off, and watching the good fairy touching one gray
dull unhappy thing after another into radiance and smiles. But I lose my
friends, for they go to Berlin almost immediately, and from there to
Manchester on a visit to Mr. Collins, a visit during which the business
part of the marriage is to be settled. Also, and naturally, we lose
Joey. This is rather a blow, just as we had begun so pleasantly to roll
in his money, but where Vicki goes he goes too, and so Papa and I will
soon be left again alone on our mountain, face to face with vegetarian
economies.
Well, it has been a pleasant interlude, and I who first saw Vicki
steeped in despair, red-eyed, piteous, slighted, talked about, shall see
her at last departing down the hill arrayed in glory as with a garment.
Then I shall turn back, when the last whisk of her shining skirts has
gleamed round the bend of the road, to my own business, to the sober
trudging along the row of days allotted me, to the making of economies,
the reading of good books, the practice of abstract excellences, the
pruning of my soul. My soul, I must say, has had some vigorous prunings.
It ought by now to be of an admirable sturdiness. You yourself once
lopped off a most luxuriant growth that was, I agree, best away, and now
these buds of friendship, of easier circumstances, are going to be
nipped off too, and when they are gone what will be left, I wonder, but
the uncompromising and the rugged? Is it possible I am so base as to be
envious? In spite of my real pleasure I can't shut out a certain
wistfulness, a certain little pang, and exactly what kind of wistfulness
it is and exactly what kind of pang I don't well know unless it is envy.
Vicki's lot is the last one I would choose, yet it makes me wistful. It
includes Joey, yet I feel a little pang. This is very odd; for Joey as a
husband, a person from whom you cannot get away, would be rather more
than I could suffer with any show of gladness. How then can I be
envious? Of course if Joey knew what I am writing he would thrust an
incredulous tongue in his cheek, wink a sceptical eye, and mutter some
eternal truth about grapes; but I, on the other hand, would watch him
doing it with the perfect calm of him who sticks unshakably to his
point. What would his cheek, his tongue, and his winking eye be to me?
They would leave me wholly unmoved, not a hair's breadth moved from my
original point, which is that Joey is not a person you can marry. But
certainly it is a good and delightful thing that Vicki thinks he is and
thinks it with such conviction. I tell you the top of our mountain is in
a perpetual rosy glow nowadays, as though the sun never left it; and the
entire phenomenon is due solely to these two joyful young persons.
Yours sincerely,