'She may as well take mine up at the same time,' Charlotte had remarked,
piling them on Gertrud's passive arms. Undeniably she might; and
accordingly she did. But her face was wry, and so had been the smile
with which she returned Charlotte's careless greetings. 'You still keep
that old fool, I see,' said Charlotte. 'It would send me mad to have a
person of inferior intellect for ever fussing round me.'
'It would send me much madder to have a person of superior intellect
buttoning my boots and scorning me while she does it,' I replied.
'Why was I so gracious to you in the water?' repeated Charlotte in
answer to my inquiry, made not without anxiousness, for one likes to
know one's own cousin above the practices of ordinary bath-guests. 'I'll
tell you why. I detest the stiff, icy way women have of turning their
backs if they don't know each other.'
'Oh they're not very stiff,' I remarked, thinking of past bathing
experiences, 'and besides, in the water----'
'It is not only unkind, it is simply wicked. For how shall we ever be
anything but tools and drudges if we don't co-operate, if we don't stand
shoulder to shoulder? Oh my heart goes out to all women! I never see one
without feeling I must do all in my power to get to know her, to help
her, to show her what she must do, so that when her youth is gone there
will still be something left, a so much nobler happiness, a so much
truer joy.'
'Than what?' I asked, puzzled.
Charlotte was looking into my eyes as though she were reading my soul.
She wasn't, whatever she might have thought she was doing. 'Than what
she had before, of course,' she said with some asperity.
'But perhaps what she had before was just what she liked best.'
'But if it was only the sort of joy every woman who is young and pretty
gets heaped on her, does it not take wings and fly away the moment she
happens to look haggard, or is low-spirited, or ill?'
It was as I had feared. Charlotte was strenuous. There was not a doubt
of it. And the strenuous woman is a form of the sex out of whose way I
have hitherto kept. Of course I knew from the pamphlets and the lectures
that she was not one to stay at home and see the point of purring over
her husband's socks; but I had supposed one might lecture and write
things without bringing the pamphlet manner to bear on one's own blood
relations.
'You were very jolly in the water,' I said. 'Why are you suddenly so
serious?'
'The water,' replied Charlotte, 'is the only place I am ever what you
call jolly in. It is the only place where I can ever forget how terribly
earnest life is.'
'My dear Charlotte, shall we sit down? The bathing has made me tired.'
We did sit down, and leaning my back against a rock, and pulling my hat
over my eyes, I gazed out at the sunlit sea and at the flocks of little
white clouds hanging over it to the point where they met the water,
while Charlotte talked. Yes, she was right, nearly always right, in
everything she said, and it was certainly meritorious to use one's
strength, and health, and talents as she was doing, trying to get rid of
mouldy prejudices. I gathered that what she was fighting for were equal
rights and equal privileges for women and men alike. It is a story I
have heard before, and up to now it has not had a satisfactory ending.
And Charlotte was so small, and the world she defied was so big and so
indifferent and had such an inconsequent habit of associating all such
efforts--in themselves nothing less than heroic--with the
ridiculousness of cropped hair and extremities clothed in bloomers. I
protest that the thought of this brick wall of indifference with
Charlotte hurling herself against it during all the years that might
have been pleasant was so tragic to me that I was nearly tempted to try
to please her by offering to come and hurl myself too. But I have no
heroism. The hardness and coldness of bricks terrifies me. What, I
wondered, could her experiences with her great thinker have been, to
make her turn her back so absolutely on the fair and sheltered land of
matrimony? I could not but agree with much that she was saying. That
women, if they chose, need not do or endure any of the things against
which those of them who find their voice cry out has long been clear to
me. That they are, on the whole, not well-disposed towards each other is
also a fact frequently to be observed. And that this secret antagonism
must be got over before there can be any real co-operation may, I
suppose, be regarded as certain. But when Charlotte spoke of
co-operation she was apparently thinking only of the co-operation of
those whom years, in place of the might of youth, have provided with the
sad sensibleness that comes of repeated disappointments--the
co-operation, that is, of the elderly; and the German elderly in the
immense majority of cases remains obscurely in her kitchen and does not
dream of co-operating. Has she not got over the conjugal quarrels of the
first married years? Has she not filled her nurseries and become
indefinite in outline? And do not these things make for content? If
thoughts of rebellion enter her head, she need only look honestly at her
image in the glass to be aware that it is not her kind that will ever
wring concessions from the other sex. She is a _brave Frau_, and a
_brave Frau_ who should try to do anything beyond keeping her home tidy
and feeding its inmates would be almost pathetically ridiculous.
'You shouldn't bother about the old ones,' I murmured, watching a little
white steamer rounding the Göhren headland. 'Get the young to
co-operate, my dear Charlotte. The young inherit the earth--Teutonic
earth certainly they do. If you got all the pretty women between twenty
and thirty on your side the thing's done. No wringing would be required.
The concessions would simply shower down.'
'I detest the word concession,' said Charlotte.
'Do you? But there it is. We live on the concessions made us by those
beings you would probably call the enemy. And, after all, most of us
live fairly comfortably.'
'By the way,' she said, turning her head suddenly and looking at me,
'what have you been doing all these years?'
'Doing?' I repeated in some confusion. I don't know why there should
have been any confusion, unless it was a note in Charlotte's voice that
made her question sound like a stern inquiry after that one talent which
is death to hide lodged with me useless. 'Now, as though you didn't very
well know what I have been doing. I have had a row of babies and brought
it up quite nicely.'
'_That_ isn't anything to be proud of.'
'I didn't say it was.'
'Your cat achieves precisely the same thing.'
'My dear Charlotte, I haven't got a cat.'
'And now--what are you doing now?'
'You see what I am doing. Apparently exactly what you are.'
'I don't mean that. Of course you know I don't mean that. What are you
doing now with your life?'
I turned my head and gazed reproachfully at Charlotte. How pretty she
used to be. How prettily the corners of her mouth used to turn up, as
though her soul were always smiling. And she had had the dearest chin
with a dimple in it, and she had had clear, hopeful eyes, and all the
lines of her body had been comely and gracious. These are solid
advantages that should not lightly be allowed to go. Not a trace of them
was left. Her face was thin, and its expression of determination made it
look hard. There was a deep line straight down between her eyebrows, as
though she frowned at life more than is needful. Angles had everywhere
taken the place of curves. Her eyes were as bright and intelligent as
ever, but seemed to have grown larger. Something had completely done for
Charlotte as far as beauty of person goes; whether it was the six
Bernhards, or her actual enthusiasms, or the unusual mixture of both, I
could not at this stage discover; nor could I yet see if her soul had
gained the beauty that her body had lost, which is undoubtedly what the
rightly cared-for soul does do. Meanwhile anything more utterly unlike
the wife of a famous professor I have never seen. The wife of an aged
German celebrity should be, and is, calm, comfortable, large, and slow.
She must be, and is, proud of her great man. She attends to his bodily
wants, and does not presume to share his spiritual excitements. In their
common life he is the brain, she the willing hands and feet. It is
perfectly fair. If there are to be great men some one must be found to
look after them--some one who shall be more patient, faithful, and
admiring than a servant, and unable like a servant to throw up the
situation on the least provocation. A wife is an admirable institution.
She is the hedge set between the precious flowers of the male intellect
and the sun and dust of sordid worries. She is the flannel that protects
when the winds of routine are cold. She is the sheltering jam that makes
the pills of life possible. She is buffer, comforter, and cook. And so
long as she enjoys these various roles the arrangement is perfect. The
difficulties begin when, defying Nature's teaching, which on this point
is luminous, she refuses to be the hedge, flannel, jam, buffer,
comforter, and cook; and when she goes so far on the sulphuric path of
rebellion as to insist on being clever on her own account and publicly,
she has, in Germany at least, set every law of religion and decency at
defiance. Charlotte had been doing this, if all I had heard was true,
for the last three years; therefore her stern inquiry addressed to a
wife of my sobriety struck me as singularly out of place. What had I
been doing with my life? Looking back into it in search of an answer it
seemed very spacious, and sunny, and quiet. There were children in it,
and there was a garden, and a spouse in whose eyes I was precious; but I
had not done anything. And if I could point to no pamphlets or lectures,
neither need I point to a furrow between my eyebrows.
'It is very odd,' Charlotte went on, as I sat silent, 'our meeting like
this. I was on the verge of writing to ask if I might come and stay with
you.'
'Oh were you?'
'So often lately I have thought just you might be such a help to me if
only I could wake you up.'
'Wake me up, my dear Charlotte?'
'Oh, I've heard about you. I know you live stuffed away in the country
in a sort of dream. You needn't try to answer my question about what you
have done. You can't answer it. You have lived in a dream, entirely
wrapped up in your family and your plants.'
'Plants, my dear Charlotte?'
'You do not see nor want to see farther than the ditch at the end of
your garden. All that is going on outside, out in the great real world
where people are in earnest, where they strive, and long, and suffer,
where they unceasingly pursue their ideal of a wider life, a richer
experience, a higher knowledge, is absolutely indifferent to you. Your
existence--no one could call it life--is quite negative and unemotional.
It is as negative and as unemotional as----' She paused and looked at me
with a faint, compassionate smile.
'As what?' I asked, anxious to hear the worst.
'Frankly, as an oyster's.'
'Really, my dear Charlotte,' I exclaimed, naturally upset. How very
unfortunate that I should have hurried away from Göhren. Why had I not
stayed there two or three days, as I had at first intended? It was such
a safe place; you could get out of it so easily and so quickly. If I
were an oyster--curious how much the word disconcerted me--at least I
was a happy oyster, which was surely better than being miserable and not
an oyster at all. Charlotte was certainly nearer being miserable than
happy. People who are happy do not have the look she had in her eyes,
nor is their expression so uninterruptedly determined. And why should I
be lectured? When I am in the mood for a lecture, my habit is to buy a
ticket and go and listen; and when I have not bought a ticket, it is a
sign that I do not want a lecture. I did not like to explain this
beautifully simple position to Charlotte, yet felt that at all costs I
must nip her eloquence in the bud or she would keep me out till it was
dark; so I got up, cleared my throat, and said in the balmy tone in
which people on platforms begin their orations, '_Geehrte Anwesende_.'
'Are you going to give me a lecture?' she inquired with a surprised
smile.
'In return for yours.'
'My dear soul, may I not talk to you about anything except plants?'
'I really don't know why you should think plants are the only things
that interest me. I have not yet mentioned them. And, as a matter of
fact, you are the last person with whom I would share my vegetable
griefs. But that isn't what I wished to say. I was going to offer you,
_geehrte Anwesende_, a few remarks about husbands.'
Charlotte frowned.
'About husbands,' I repeated blandly, in a voice of milk and honey.
'_Geehrte Anwesende_, in the course of an uneventful existence I have
had much leisure for reflection, and my reflections have led me to the
conclusion, erroneous perhaps, but fixed, that having got a husband,
taken him of one's own free will, taken him sometimes even in the face
of opposition, the least one can do is to stick to him. Now, Charlotte,
where is yours? What have you done with him? Is he here? And if not, why
is he not here, and where is he?'
Charlotte got up hastily and brushed the sand out of the folds of her
dress. 'You haven't changed a bit,' she said with a slight laugh. 'You
are just as----'
'Silly?' I suggested.
'Oh, I didn't say that. And as for Bernhard, he is where he always was,
marching triumphantly along the road to undying fame. But you know that.
You only ask because your ideas of the duties of woman are medieval, and
you are shocked. Well, I'm afraid you must be shocked then. I haven't
seen him for a whole year.'
Luckily at this moment, for I think we were going to quarrel, Gertrud
came heaving through the sand towards us with a packet of letters. She
had been to the post, and knowing I loved getting letters came out to
look for me so that I might have them at once; and as I eagerly opened
them and buried myself in them, Charlotte confined her occasional
interjections to deprecating the obviously inferior shape of Gertrud's
head.
THE FIFTH DAY
FROM THIESSOW TO SELLIN
Many a time have I wondered at the unworthy ways of Fate, at the
pettiness of the pleasure it takes in frustrating plans that are small
and innocent, at its entire want of dignity, at its singular
spitefulness, at the resemblance of its manners to those of an
evilly-disposed kitchen-maid; but never have I wondered more than I did
that night at Thiessow.
We had been for a walk after tea through the beechwood, up a hill behind
it to the signal station, along a footpath on the edge of the cliff with
blue gleams of sea on one side through a waving fringe of blue and
purple flowers, and the ryefields on the other. We had stood looking
down at the village of Thiessow far below us, a cluster of picturesque
roofs surrounded on three sides by sunlit water; had gazed across the
vast plain to the distant hill and village of Gross Zickow; watched the
shadows passing over meadows miles away; seen how the sea to the west
had the calm colours of a pearl; how the sea beneath us through the
parting stalks of scabious and harebells was quiet but very blue; and
how behind us, over the beech-tops, there was the eastern sea where the
wind was, as brilliant and busy and foam-flecked as before. It was all
very wide, and open, and roomy. It was a place to bless God in and cease
from vain words. And when the stars came out we went down into the
plain, and wandered out across the dewy grass in the gathering night,
our faces towards the red strip of sky where the sun had set.
Charlotte had not been silent all this time; she had been, on the
contrary, passionately explanatory. She had passionately explained the
intolerableness of her life with the famous Nieberlein; she had
passionately justified her action in cutting it short. And listening in
silence, I had soon located the real wound, the place she did not
mention where all the bruises were; for talk and explain as she might it
was clear that her chief grievance was that the great man had never
taken her seriously. To be strenuous, to hold intense views on questions
that seem to you to burn, and to be treated as an airy nothing, a
charming nothing perhaps, but still a nothing, must be, on the whole,
disconcerting. I do not know that I should call it more than
disconcerting. You need not, after all, let your vision be blocked
entirely by the person with whom you chance to live; however vast his
intellectual bulk may be, you can look round him and see that the stars
and the sky are still there, and you need not run away from him to do
that. If the great Nieberlein had not taken Charlotte sufficiently
seriously, she had manifestly taken him much too seriously. It is better
to laugh at one's Nieberlein than to be angry with him, and it is
infinitely more personally soothing. And presently you find you have
grown old together, and that your Nieberlein has become unaccountably
precious, and that you do not want to laugh at all,--or if you do, it is
a very tender laughter, tender almost to tears.
And then, as we walked on over the wonderful starlit plain in the huge
hush of the brooding night, the air, heavy with dew and the smell of
grass cut that afternoon in distant meadows, so sweet and soft that it
seemed as if it must smooth away every line of midday eagerness from our
tired faces, Charlotte paused; and before I had done praising Providence
for this refreshment, she not yet having paused at all, she began again
in a new key of briskness, and said, 'By the way, I may as well come
with you when you leave this. I have nothing particular to do. I came
down here for a day or two to get away from some English people I was
with at Binz who had rather got on to my nerves. And I have so much to
say to you, and it will be a good opportunity. We can talk all day,
while we are driving.'
Talk all day while we were driving! If Hazlitt saw no wit in talking and
walking, I see less than none in talking and driving. It was this speech
of Charlotte's that set me marvelling anew at the maliciousness of Fate.
Here was I, the most harmless of women, engaged in the most harmless of
little expeditions, asking and wanting nothing but to be left alone; a
person so obscure as to be, one would think, altogether out of the reach
of the blind Fury with the accursèd shears; a person with a plan so mild
and humble that I was ashamed of the childishness of the Fate that could
waste its energies spoiling it. Yet before the end of the fourth day I
was confronted with the old familiar inexorableness, taking its stand
this time on the impossibility of refusing the company of a cousin whom
you have not seen for ten years.
'Oh Charlotte,' I cried, seized her arm convulsively, struggling in the
very clutches of Fate, 'what--what a good idea! And what a thousand
pities that it can't be managed! You see it is a victoria, and there are
only two places because of all the luggage, so that we can't use the
little seat, or Gertrud might have sat on that----'
'Gertrud? Send her home. What do you want with Gertrud if I am with
you?'
I stared dismayed through the dusk at Charlotte's determined face. 'But
she--packs,' I said.
'Don't be so helpless. As though two healthy women couldn't wrap up
their own hair-brushes.'
'Oh it isn't only hair-brushes,' I went on, still struggling, 'it's
everything. You can't think how much I loathe buttoning boots--I know I
never would button them, but go about with them undone, and then I'd
disgrace you, and I don't want to do that. But that isn't it really
either,' I went on hurriedly, for Charlotte had opened her mouth to tell
me, I felt certain, that she would button them for me, 'my husband never
will let me go anywhere without Gertrud. You see she looked after his
mother too, and he thinks awful things would happen if I hadn't got her.
I'm very sorry, Charlotte. It is most unfortunate. I wish--I wish I had
thought of bringing the omnibus.'
'But is your husband such an absurd tyrant?' asked Charlotte, a robust
scorn for my flabby obedience in her voice.
'Oh--tyrant!' I ejaculated, casting up my eyes to the stars, and
mentally begging the unconscious innocent's pardon.
'Well, then, we must get a luggage cart and put the things into that.'
'Oh,' I cried, seizing her arm again, my thoughts whirling round in
search of a loophole of escape, 'what--what another good idea!'
'And Gertrud can go in the cart too.'
'So she can. What--what a trilogy of good ideas! Have you got any more,
Charlotte? What a resourceful woman you are. I believe you like fighting
and getting over difficulties.'
'I believe I do,' said Charlotte complacently.
I dropped her arm, ceased to struggle, walked on vanquished. Henceforth,
if no more interesting difficulties presented themselves, Charlotte was
going to spend her time overcoming me. And besides an eloquent Charlotte
sitting next to me, there would be a cart rattling along behind me all
day. I could have wept at the sudden end to the peace and perfect
freedom of my journey. I went to bed, to a clean and pleasant bed that
at another time would have pleased me, strongly of opinion that life was
not worth while. Nor did it comfort me that from my pillow I looked out
at the mysterious dark plain with its roof of stars and its faint red
window in the north-west, because Charlotte had opened the door between
our rooms and every now and then asked me if I were asleep. I lay making
plans for the circumvention of Charlotte, and rejecting them one after
the other as too uncousinly; and when I had made my head ache with the
difficulty of uniting a becoming cousinliness with the cold-bloodedness
necessary for shaking her off, I spent my time feebly deprecating the
superabundance of cousins in the world. Surely there are too many?
Surely almost everybody has more than he can manage comfortably? It must
have been long after midnight that Charlotte, herself very restless,
called out once more to know if I were asleep.
'Yes I am,' I answered; not quite kindly I fear, but indeed it is an
irritating question.
We left Thiessow at ten the next morning under a grey sky, and drove, at
the strong recommendation of the landlord, along the hard sands as far
as a little fishing place called Lobberort, where we struck off to the
left on to the plain again, and so came once more to Philippshagen and
the high road that runs from there to Göhren, Baabe, and Sellin. I took
the landlord's advice willingly, because I did not choose to drive on
that grey morning in my altered circumstances over the plain along which
I had walked so happily only the day before. The landlord, as obliging a
person as his wife was a capable one, had provided a cart with two
long-tailed, raw-boned horses who were to come with us as far as Binz,
my next stopping-place. Gertrud sat next to the driver of this cart
looking grim. Her prospects were gloomy, for the seat was hard, the
driver was dirty, the cart had no springs, and she had had to pack
Charlotte's clothes. She did not approve of the Frau Professor; how
should she? Gertrud read her _Kreuzzeitung_ as regularly as she did her
Bible, and believed it as implicitly; she knew all about the pamphlets,
and only from the _Kreuzzeitung's_ point of view. And then Charlotte
made the mistake clever people sometimes do of too readily supposing
that others are stupid; and it did not need much shrewdness on Gertrud's
part to see that the Frau Professor disliked the shape of her head.
The drive along the wet sands was uninteresting because of the
prevailing greyness of sky and sea; but the waves made so much noise
that Charlotte, unable to get anything out of me but head-shakings and
pointings to my ears, gave up trying to talk and kept quiet. The luggage
cart came on close behind, the lean horses showing an undesirable
skittishness, and once, in an attempt to run away, swerved so close to
the water that Gertrud's gloom became absolutely leaden. But we reached
Lobberort safely, ploughed up through the deep sand on to the track
again, and after Philippshagen the sky cleared, the sun came out, and
the world began on a sudden to sparkle.