ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
L
Galgenberg, Oct. 15th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--It's not much use for the absent to send blandadvice, to exhort to peace and putting aside of anger, when they haveonly general principles to go on. You know more about Miss Cheriton thanI do, and I am obliged to believe you when you tell me you have everyreason to be bitter. But I can make few comments. My mouth ispractically shut. Only, as you told me you long ago left off caring forher, the smart you are feeling now must be, it seems to me, simply thesmart of wounded vanity, and for that I'm afraid I have no soothinglotion ready. Also I am bound to say that I think she was quite right togive you up once she was sure you no longer loved her. I am all forgiving up, for getting rid of things grown rotten before it is too late,and the one less bright spot I see on her otherwise correct conduct isthat she did not do it sooner. Don't think me hard, dear friend. If Iwere your mother I would blindly yearn over my boy. As it is, you mustforgive my unfortunate trick of seeing plainly. I wish things would lookmore adorned to me, less palpably obvious and ungarnished. Thesetiresome eyes of mine have often made me angry. I would so much like tosympathize wholly with you now, to be able to be indignant with MissCheriton, call her a minx, say she is heartless, be ready with all sortsof healing balms and syrups for you, poor boy in the clutches of a cruelannoyance. But I can't. If you could love her again and make it up, thatindeed would be a happy thing. As it is--and your letter sets all hopesof the sort aside once and for ever--you have had an escape; for if shehad not given you up I don't suppose you would have given her up--Idon't suppose that is a thing one often does. You would have marriedher, and then heaven knows what would have become of your unfortunatesoul.
After all, you need not have told me you had left off loving her. I knewit. I knew it at the time, I knew it within a week of when it happened.And I have always hoped--I cannot tell you how sincerely--that it wasonly a mood, and that you would go back to her again and be happy.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
LI
Galgenberg, Oct. 22d.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--This is a world, it seems to me, where everybodyspends their time falling out of love and making their relationsuncomfortable. I have only two friends, the rest of my friends beingacquaintances, and both have done it or had it done to them. Is it thento be wondered at that I should argue that if it happens to both myfriends in a set where there are only two, the entire world must bedivided into those who give up and those who are given up, with a Greekchorus of lamenting and explanatory relatives as a finish? Really onemight think that love, and its caprices, and its tantrums--you see I'min my shrewish mood--makes up the whole of life. Here's Vicki groaningin the throes of a relapse because some one has written that she met herlate lover at a party and that he ate only soup,--here she is overcomeby this picture which she translates as a hankering in spite ofeverything after her, and wanting to write to him, and ready to consolehim and crying her eyes all red again, and no longer taking the remotestinterest in _Comus_ or in those frequent addresses of mine to her onHomely Subjects to which up to yesterday she listened with suchflattering respect; and here are you writing me the most melancholyletters, longer and drearier than any letters ever were before, filledwith yearnings after something that certainly is not Miss Cheriton--butbeyond that certainty I can make out nothing. It is a strange andwonderful world. I stand bewildered, with you on one side and Vicki onthe other, and fling exhortations at you in turn. I try scolding, tobrace you, but neither of you will be braced. I try sympathy, to sootheyou, but neither of you will be soothed. What am I to do? May I laugh?Will that give too deep offence? I'm afraid I did laugh over yourfather's cable from America when the news of your broken engagementreached him. You ask me what I think of a father who just cables 'Fool'to his son at a moment when his son is being horribly worried. Well, youmust consider that cabling is expensive, and he didn't care to put morethan one word, and if there had been two it might have made you stillangrier. But seriously, I do see that it must have annoyed you, and Isoon left off being so unkind as to laugh. It is odd how much older Ifeel than either of you lamenters; quite old, and quite settled, and soobjective somehow. I hope being objective doesn't make oneunsympathetic, but I expect it really rather tends that way; and yet ifit were so, and I were as hard and husky as I sometimes dimly fear I maybe growing, would you and Vicki want to tell me your sorrows? And otherpeople do too. Think of it, Papa Lindeberg, hitherto a long narrowperson buttoned up silently in black, mysterious simply because he heldhis tongue, a reader of rabid Conservative papers through black-rimmedglasses, and as numb in the fingers as Wordsworth when he shakes myrespectful hand, has begun to unbend, to unfold, to expand like thoseJapanese dried flowers you fling into water; and having started withgood mornings and weather comments and politics, and from them proceededto the satisfactorily confused state of the British army, has gone onimperceptibly but surely to confidential criticisms of the mistakes madehere at headquarters in invariably shelving the best officers at thevery moment when they have arrived at what he describes as their prime,and has now reached the stage when he comes up through the orchard everymorning at the hour I am due for my lesson to help me over the fence. Hecomes up with much stateliness and deliberation, but he does come up;and we walk down together, and every day the volume of his confidencesincreases and he more and more minutely describes his grievances. Ilisten and nod my head, which is easy and apparently all he wants. Hiswife stops him at once, if he begins to her, by telling him with as muchroundness as is consistent with being born a Dammerlitz that thecalamities that have overtaken them are entirely his fault. Why was henot as clever as those subordinates who were put over his head? she askswith dangerous tranquillity; and nobody can answer a question like that.
'It makes me twenty years younger,' he said yesterday as he handed meover the fence with the same politeness I have seen in the manner of oldmen handing large dowagers to their places in a set of quadrilles, 'tosee your cheerful morning face.'
'If you had said shining morning face you'd have been quotingShakespeare,' said I.
'Ah yes. I fear my Shakespeare days are done. I am now at the time oflife when serious and practical considerations take up the entireattention of a man. Shakespeare is more suitable now for my daughterthan for me.'
'But clever men do read him.'
'Ah yes.'
'Quite grown-up ones do.'
'Ah yes.'
'With beards.'
'Ah yes.'
'Real men.'
'Ah yes, yes. Professors. Theatre people. People of no family. Peoplewho have no serious responsibilities on their shoulders. People of thepen, not men of the sword. But officers--and who in our country of thewell-born is not, was not, or will not be an officer?--have no time forgeneral literature. Of course,' he added with a slight bow, for heregards me as personally responsible for everybody and everythingEnglish--'we have all heard of him.'
'Indeed?' said I.
'When I was a boy,' he said this morning, 'I read at school of a youngwoman--a mythological person--called Hebe.'
'She was the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce,' said I.
'It may be,' he said. 'The parentages of the mythological period arecuriously intricate. But why is it, dear Fraeulein Schmidt, that though Ican recollect nothing of her but her name, whenever I see you you remindme of her?'
Now was not that very pleasant? Hebe, the restorer of youth to gods andmen; Hebe, the vigorous and wholesome. Thoreau says she was probably theonly thoroughly sound-conditioned and robust young lady that ever walkedthe globe, and that whenever she came it was spring. No wonder I waspleased.
'Perhaps it's because I'm healthy,' said I.
'Is that it?' he said, obviously fumbling about in his brain for thereason. And when he got to the house he displayed the results of hisfumbling by saying, 'But many people are healthy.'
'Yes,' said I; and left him to think it out alone.
So now there are two nice young women I've been compared to--you oncesaid I was like Nausicaa, and here a year later, a year in which variousrather salt and stinging waves have gone over my head, is somebodycomparing me to Hebe. Evidently the waves did me no harm. It is true onthe other hand that Papa Lindeberg is short-sighted. It is also truethat last night I found a beautiful shining silvery hair insolentlyflaunting in the very front of my head. 'Yes, yes, my dear,' saidPapa--my Papa--when I showed it him, 'we are growing old.'
'And settled. And objective,' said I, carefully pulling it out beforethe glass. 'And yet, Papachen, inside me I feel quite young.'
Papa chuckled. 'Insides are no safe criterion, my dear,' he said. 'It isthe outside that tells.'
'Tells what?'
'A woman's age.'
Evidently I have not yet reminded my own Papa of Hebe.
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
LII
Galgenberg, Oct. 28th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--Well, yes, I do think you must get over it withoutmuch help from me. You have a great deal of my sympathy, I assure you;far more than you think. I don't put it into my letters because there'sso much of it that it would make them overweight. Also it would want agreat deal of explaining. You see it's a different sort from what youexpect, and given for other reasons than those you have in your mind;and it is quite impossible to account for in any way you are likely tounderstand. But do consider what, as regards the broken-off engagement,you must look like from my point of view. Candidly, are you a fit objectfor my compassion? I see you wandering now through Italy in its goldenautumn looking at all your dear Luinis and Bellinis and Botticellis andother delights of your first growing up, and from my bleak hill-top Iwatch you hungrily as you go. November is nearly upon us, and we shiverunder leaden clouds and driving rain. The windows are loose, and all ofthem rattle. The wind screams through their chinks as though somebodyhad caught it by the toes and was pinching it. We can't see out for theraindrops on the panes. When I go to the door to get a breath ofsomething fresher than house air I see only mists, and wreaths ofclouds, and mists again, where a fortnight ago lay a little golden townin a cup of golden hills. Do you think that a person with this cheerlessprospect can pity you down there in the sun? I trace your bright line ofmarch on the map and merely feel envy. I am haunted by visions of themany beautiful places and climates there are in the world that I shallnever see. The thought that there are people at this moment sittingunder palm-trees or in the shadow of pyramids fanning themselves withtheir handkerchiefs while I am in my clammy room--the house gets clammy,I find, in persistent wet weather--not liking to light a lamp because itis only three o'clock, and yet hardly able to see because of thestreaming panes and driving mist, the thought of these happy peoplemakes me restive. I too want to be up and off, to run through the wetpall hanging over this terrible gray North down into places wheresunshine would dry the fog out of my hair, and brown my face, and loosenmy joints, and warm my poor frozen spirit. I would change places withyou this minute if I could. Gladly would I take the burden of yourworries on to my shoulders, and, carrying them like a knapsack, lay themat the feet of the first Bellini Madonna I met and leave them there forgood. It would give me no trouble to lay them down, those worriesproduced by other people. One little shake, and they'd tumble off.Always things and places have been more to me than people. Perhaps it isoften so with persons who live lonely lives. Anyhow don't at once cryout that I'm unnatural and inhuman, for things are after all onlyfiltered out people,--their ideas crystallized into tangibleness, theirspirit taking visible form; either they are that, or they are, Isuppose, God's ideas--after all the same thing put into shapes we cansee and touch. So that it's not so dreadful of me to like them best, toprefer their company, their silent teaching, although you will I knowlecture me and perhaps tell me I am petrifying into a mere thing myself.Well, it is only fair that you should lecture me, who so often lectureyou.
Yours quite meekly,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
LIII
Galgenberg, Nov. 1st.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--I won't talk about it any more. Let us have donewith it. Let us think of something else. I shall get tired of the dukeif you are not careful, so please save me from an attitude sounbecoming. This is All Saints' Day: the feast of white chrysanthemumsand dear memories. My mother used to keep it as a day apart, and made mefeel something of its mysticalness. She had a table in her bedroom, thenearest approach that was possible to an altar, with one of thosepictures hung above it of Christ on the Cross that always make me thinkof Swinburne's
God of this grievous people, wrought After the likeness of their race--
do you remember?--and candles, and jars of flowers, and many littlebooks; and she used on her knees to read in the little books, kneelingbefore the picture. She explained to me that the Lutheran whitewashstarved her soul, and that she wanted, however clumsily, to keep somereminder with her of the manner of prayer in England. Did I ever tellyou how pretty she was? She was so very pretty, and so adorably nimbleof tongue. Quick, glancing, vivid, she twinkled in the heavy Jenafirmament like some strange little star. She led Papa and me by thenose, and we loved it. I can see her now expounding her rebellioustheories, sitting limply--for she was long and thin--in a low chair, butwith nothing limp about her flower-like face and eyes shining withinterest in what she was talking about. She was great on the necessity,a necessity she thought quite good for everybody but absolutelyessential for a woman, of being stirred up thoroughly once a week at thevery least to an enthusiasm for religion and the life of the world tocome. She said there was nothing so good for one as being stirred up,that only the well stirred ever achieve great things, that stagnationnever yet produced a soul that had shot up out of reach of fogs on tothe clear heights from which alone you can call out directions for theguidance of those below. The cold, empty Lutheran churches wereabhorrent to her. 'They are populated on Sundays,' she said, 'solely bystagnant women,--women so stagnant that you can almost see the duckweedgrowing on them.'
She could not endure, and I, taught to see through her eyes, cannotendure either, the chilly blend of whitewash and painted deal pews inthe midst of which you are required here once a week to magnify theLord. Our churches--all those I have seen--are either like vaults orbarns, the vault variety being slightly better and also more scarce.Their aggressive ugliness, and cold, repellent service keeping thecongealed sinner at arm's length, nearly drove my mother into the RomanChurch, a place no previous Watson had ever wanted to go to. Thechurches in Jena made her think with the tenderest regard of the oldpicturesque pre-Lutheran days, of the light and color and emotions ofthe Catholic services, and each time she was forced into one she saidshe made a bigger stride toward Rome. 'Luther was a most mischievousperson,' she would say, glancing half defiantly through long eyelashesat Papa. But he only chuckled. He doesn't mind about Luther. Yet in casehe did, in case some national susceptibility should have been hurt, shewould get up lazily--her movements were as lazy as her tongue wasquick--and take him by the ears and kiss him.
She died when she was thirty-five: sweet and wonderful to the last. Nordid her beauty suffer in the least in the sudden illness that killedher. 'A lily in a linen-clout She looked when they had laid her out,' asyour Meredith says; and on this day every year, this day of saints sodear to us, my spirit is all the time in those long ago happy years withher. I have no private altar in my room, no picture of a 'piteousChrist'--Papa took that--and no white flowers in this drenched autumnalplace to show that I remember; nor do I read in the little books, exceptwith gentle wonderment that she should have found nourishment in them,she who fed so constantly on the great poets. But I have gone each AllSaints' Day for ten years past to church in Jena in memory of her, andtried by shutting my eyes to imagine I was in a beautiful place withoutwhitewash, or hideous, almost brutal, stained glass.
This morning, knowing that if I went down into the town I would arrivespattered with mud up to my ears and so bedraggled that the pew-
openermight conceivably refuse me admission on the ground that I would spoilher pews, I set out for the nearest village across the hills, hopingthat a country congregation would be more used to mud. I found thechurch shut, and nobody with the least desire to have it opened. Therain beat dismally down on my umbrella as I stood before the blanklocked door. A neglected fence divided the graves from the parson'sfront yard, protecting them, I suppose, as much as in it lay, from thedepredations of wandering cows. On the other side of it was the parson'smanure heap, on which stood wet fowls mournfully investigating itscontents. His windows, shut and impenetrable, looked out on to themanure heap, the fowls, the churchyard, and myself. It is a very ancientchurch, picturesque, and with beautiful lancet windows with delicatetraceries carefully bricked up. Not choosing to have walked five milesfor nothing, and not wishing to break a habit ten years old of prayingin a church for my darling mother's soul on this day of souls anddarling saints, I gathered up my skirts and splashed across the parson'spools and knocked modestly at his door for the key. The instant I did ittwo dogs from nowhere, two infamous little dogs of that unpleasant breedfrom which I suppose Pomerania takes its name, rushed at me furiouslybarking. The noise was enough to wake the dead; and since nobody stirredin the house or showed other signs of being wakened it became plain tomy deductive intelligence that its inmates couldn't be dead. So Iknocked again. The dogs yelled again. I stood looking at them in deepdisgust, quite ashamed of the way in which the dripping stillness wasbeing rent because of me. A soothing umbrella shaken at them onlyincreased their fury. They seemed, like myself, to grow more and moreindignant the longer the door was kept shut. At last a servant opened ita few inches, eyed me with astonishment, and when she heard my innocentrequest eyed me with suspicion. She hesitated, half shut the door,hesitated again, and then saying she would go and see what the HerrPastor had to say, shut the door quite. I do not remember ever havingfelt less respectable. The girl clearly thought I was not; the dogsclearly were sure I was not. Properly incensed by the shutting of thedoor and the expression on the girl's face I decided that the onlydignified course was to go away; but I couldn't because of the dogs.