RUE AND ROSES
BY ANGELA LANGER
WITH INTRODUCTION BY W. L. COURTNEY
NEW YORK GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
RUE AND ROSES
ANGELA LANGER
Copyright, 1913
BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY
INTRODUCTION
You will like Anna, the heroine of "Rue and Roses," when you get
to know her. But perhaps it will take some time before she becomes
familiar to you, partly because she is intensely Teutonic, partly,
also, because the little history she gives about herself strikes the
ordinary reader as fragmentary. She certainly is very German. You
picture her to yourself with her large eyes and her, apparently, placid
exterior. Very likely she is wearing a shawl round her shoulders and
sits apart from other girls, for ever analyzing herself and her own
states of consciousness. That is the characteristic thing about her.
She is intensely self-analytic, and from the earliest moment when
she began to think at all, she has ceaselessly occupied herself with
her own soul-states and traversed one or two heart-crises. Having
nothing much external to interest her, she is driven to introspection,
and becomes, as a matter of course, a little priggish and pedantic,
exaggerating the importance of conditions about which the normal
healthy outdoor girl of another race never troubles herself.
Yet she is worth knowing for all that. She may be a little tiresome,
but she is a good, honest girl, who has not had the best of luck, who,
indeed, has come from a home where everything seems opposed to her own
instincts and inclinations. Her father's business is perpetually on
the down-grade, and his little commercial enterprises invariably fail,
and leave him worse off than he was before. The mother, of course,
is always on the verge of tears, because it is her painful duty to
try and make both ends meet--a feat which she is eternally unable
to accomplish. From one place they drift to another, and Anna's few
friends of childhood are left behind, or if she sees them again they
look at her askance, because her father has been in prison. And there
is a brother, too, who would be a severe affliction even in the most
favourable circumstances.
Meanwhile Anna pursues her own way, very humble, very insignificant,
but always trying to do her best. She is a governess, and endures
the usual fate of governesses, being either bullied or made love
to--bullied by the mistress, and on one occasion compromisingly made
love to by the master. One solace she has--the writing of poems. A
characteristic German trait this! And so she sits and dreams, for she
is the most sentimental little person you ever came across--sentimental
to the full extent of Teutonic capacity, with her head full of
Weltschmerz and Schwärmerei. Of course she sighs for the Prince
Charming who is to come and redeem her from her servitude, a being of
impossible virtues, noble and distinguished, and excessively handsome,
the highborn husband for whom Cinderella dreams while she sweeps out
the kitchen and cleans the pots and pans.
Nothing very significant so far. Indeed, Anna would seem to be the
very best example of the ordinary German maiden, ruthlessly exploring
her own limited soul and dreaming of the moon. Then suddenly an event
occurs which changes her crude immaturity into something more real.
She comes across a man of about thirty, who smokes his cigar, as she
herself says, "with elegant ease," and who discourses about many
things--about intoxication, about remorse, about books, about art, and
about her poems. Gradually the intimacy grows, and Anna's whole life,
and even her literary style, becomes eloquent because the love of her
life has dawned on her horizon. "By-and-by I began to think of him
whether I saw him or not; his face, his figure, rose like a blazing
question from the midst of the strange, wistful dreams that I had
dreamt all my life, and something that had lain within me, dull and
senseless like a trance, woke, wondered, and trembled into joy."
She has now got something to occupy her mind apart from the analysis
of her own soul. Her poems, naturally, become love poems. Her thoughts
are no longer turned inward, but outward, craving for his presence and
companionship. But the reader must not believe for a moment that he
is going to peruse the ordinary love story. No, the nameless hero--a
rather cryptic personage, suggesting now and again Manfred, certainly a
little Byronic in his presentment, who calls himself "a wolf in sheep's
clothing"--has no intention of making Anna either his mistress or his
wife. It puzzles her a little what the man means, or what her life is
henceforth to become. On one occasion she has a strange vision. She
is in a graveyard at night-time. "And as I stood there staring into
the darkness above and beyond the graves, I saw a vision--a circle of
flames, growing into enormous size, embracing all the world except
myself, leaving me outside and alone." Anna is like little Mowgli in
Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book," who stands desolate and alone in
the springtime when all the animal creation with whom he had consorted
so amicably are inspired by that passionate feeling which comes to them
in the opening year, but which leaves the little human boy untouched
and forlorn. Anna, too, has realized her loneliness. She is doomed
to be the Eternal Virgin, the predestinate spinster. In a world in
which the feminine race largely predominates there are not lovers and
husbands enough to go round, and she must remain outside that charmed
circle--the leaping flames of love and passion, which seem to embrace
all the world except herself.
Of course, she does not realize this at first. The truth only comes
home to her after she has left her native land and lived, not too
happily, in London. Because "he" had spoken enigmatically, always with
a sense that there was something dangerous in their companionship, she
had thought it best to leave him, he, too, assenting that that was
the best course to adopt. Then, after some weary months of exile, the
impulse comes upon her, too strong to be resisted, to write to her
lover, not the ordinary letter, but one containing a strong, insistent
question. "Do you think that I may come back?" she asked him. A long
answer arrives: "If you had remained here, I do not know what might
have happened; if you come back, I know what will happen. But the
question is, may it come thus? You are not a girl of the ordinary type;
you belong to the race of Asra, the people who die when they love.
And, because I have known that from the first, I have done for you what
I have never done for another woman yet--namely, got hold of the head
of the beast within, turned it round sharply, and laughed at it."
That, then, is the end of it. A very different end from what the girl
had imagined, but which she now recognizes as inevitable, and not
otherwise than consolatory. For which is more glorious for a girl--that
a man should make her his wife, or make her his most beautiful dream
and his lasting desire? As for him, he will doubtless lead the man's
life, never at peace with himself, tasting every pleasure and getting
to know every disgust. "But above all pleasure and above all disgust
there will be the one longing of his soul, which had denied itself the
drink because of the dregs it knew to be at the goblet's bottom." This
renunciation becomes Anna's ideal, and she smiles to herself that
strange, wonderful smile "which only a woman knows who is willing to
take upon herself the heaviest burden for the sweet sake of love."
Such is the life story of Anna, the heroine of "Rue and Roses." Very
simple, very sentimental, but with a rare charm for those who have the
wit to understand and the heart to feel, and written in a style of
much tenderness and felicity. Do not put it down because the earlier
portion may seem uninteresting. Read on to the finish, and you will
be rewarded; for this is the story of one who realized her mission, a
mission which falls to the lot of many women--a mission of loneliness
with occasional moments of inspiration. It is the history, not of
the eternal womanly, but of the eternal virginal. Anna is, like the
daughter of Jephthah, a predestined virgin, who does not, like her
Hebrew prototype, bewail her maidenhood among the mountains, but
accepts it with grave resignation as her lot in life.
W. L. COURTNEY.
_March 27, 1913._
RUE AND ROSES
Chapter I
My parents kept a little shop, and adjoining it was our small lodging.
The shop contained lots of different things, such as candles, soap,
brushes, and many other articles, all of which I regarded with profound
respect. Each time that Christmas came round my father used to receive
a large wooden chest, of which the opening and unpacking was my
greatest joy. Sometimes my father would show no hurry about this to me
so sacred a ceremony, and then I used to remind him of it. At last,
however, he declared that he was going to open the chest, and after
that I got so excited that I hardly knew what to do. I asked whether I
might be permitted to help. But my father said that I was a bother and
in his way. Fearing that he might dismiss me altogether, I managed to
sit still for two minutes; but then I could bear it no longer. I went
to fetch a pair of pinchers and a huge hammer, and stood in readiness,
long before the chest was opened, with the tools in my hands. Then I
watched my father with breathless admiration as he forced a chisel in
between the chest and the lid, and very often burst the lid. My heart
beat fast for a moment when the white, soft shavings became visible,
and the mere sight of the small, brown cardboard-boxes, which my father
lifted carefully out of the chest, made me tremble with delight. But
the most joyous moment came when I was asked to get a pair of scissors
to cut the string which tied the cardboard-boxes. I walked on tip-toe
and spoke softly. Then the unpacking of the brown boxes began, and with
loving eyes I looked at the figures made out of chocolate or sugar.
There were riders with faces so bold that I hardly dared to think of
eating them; angels with limbs so dainty and wings so transparent that
I thought them to be real; and many other beautiful things. Broken
pieces were found sometimes, and my father gave them to me. Although
I longed to eat them I did not do so at once, but fetched a twig, or
anything that might resemble a Christmas-tree, and fastened the rider,
who, with his helmet cut off, looked less fierce now, the colour-bearer
who had lost his flag, or the angel with but one arm, upon it. After I
had watched them dangling about for a while I took them off again, and
there can be but little doubt as to their final fate. My brother joined
me in all these things, especially in eating. I remember a Christmas
Eve, when I was five years old and my brother four. Father Christmas
had presented me with a small wooden doll that pleased me enormously.
It had no hair, nor could it move its limbs much, but I hardly noticed
that. I sat on the freshly washed floor and played happily. My brother
got a knife with but one blade, the kind that is used in our country
to cut the grapes with. The next day, when my mother was about to wash
us--an operation which was performed on the table--my brother told me
that he did not consider my doll to be beautiful, whereupon I answered
that I did not think his knife was a real knife. "Shall I," he asked,
when my mother had left us to fetch something out of the kitchen,
"shall I try it on your leg?" I don't believe I liked the idea; but
too proud to go back on what I had stated, I allowed it at once. After
that I felt a quick pain, and a few drops of blood showed on the white
cloth whereon we sat. When I saw the blood, however, I began to cry,
and my mother returned to the room. My brother was frightened too, but
he laughed nevertheless, and asked me whether I did believe now that
his knife was a real knife. After my mother had bandaged up my leg, she
gave my brother a sound whipping with a birch that Father Christmas had
left on the previous day for naughty children.