Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther

We both jumped.

  'She would be a most dreary young female,' he went on, smiling down asfrom a pulpit on our heads, and wiping his spectacles. 'Offspringcontinually goaded and galvanized by a parent, hammered upon, chiselled,beaten out flat--'

  'Dear me, Papachen,' I murmured.

  'Beaten out flat,' said Papa, waving my interruption aside with hisspectacles, 'by the dead weight of opinions already stale, the victimsof a system, the subjects of an experiment, the prisoners of prejudice,are bound either to flare into rank rebellion on the first opportunityor to grow continually drearier and more conspicuously stupid.'

  Vicki stared first up at Papa then at me, her soft, crumpled sort ofmouth twisted into troubled surprise.

  Papa leaned further out and hit the window sill with his hand for allthe world like a parson hitting his pulpit's cushion. 'One word,' hesaid, 'one word of praise or blame, one single word from an outsiderwill have more effect upon your offspring than years of trouble taken byyourself, mountains of doctrine preached by you, rivers of good advice,oceans of exhortations, cautions as numerous as Abraham's posterity,well known to have been as numerous as the sea sand, private prayers,and public admonition.'

  And he disappeared with a jerk.

  '_Ach_,' said Vicki, much impressed.

  Papa popped out his head again. 'You may believe me, Rose-Marie,' hesaid.

  'I do, Papachen,' said I.

  'You have to thank me for much.'

  'And I do,' said I heartily, smiling up at him.

  'But for nothing more than for leaving you free to put forth such shootsas your nature demanded in whatever direction your instincts propelledyou.' And he disappeared and shut the window.

  Vicki looked at me doubtfully. 'You said beautiful things,' she said,'and he said just the opposite. Which is true?'

  'Both,' said I promptly, determined not to be outdone as a prophet byPapa.

  Poor Vicki. It is so hard to have life turned into a smudge when one isonly twenty. She adored this man, was so proud of him, so proud ofherself for being chosen by him. She grew, in the year during which theywere engaged, into a woman, and can never now retrace her steps back tothat fairy place of sunshine and carelessness in which we so happilywander if we are left alone for years and years after we are supposed tobe grown up. Do you realize what a blow in the face she has received, aswell as in her unfortunate little heart? All her vanities, without whicha girl is but a poor thing, shrivelled up, her self-respect gone, herconceit, if there was any, and I suppose there was because there alwaysis, gone headlong after it. A betrothal here is almost as binding andquite as solemn as a marriage. It is announced in the papers. It isabundantly celebrated. And the parents on both sides fall on eachother's necks and think highly of one another till the moment comes formaking settlements. The Lindebergs spent all they had laid by andborrowed more to buy the trousseau and furnish the house. Vicki criedbitterly when she talked of her table-napkins. She says there weretwelve dozen in twelve different patterns, and each twelve was tied upwith a pink ribbon fastened by a buckle and a bow. They had to be soldagain at a grievous loss, and the family fled from Berlin and the facesof their acquaintances, faces crooked with the effort to sympathize whenwhat they really wanted to do, says Vicki, was to smile, and came tothis cheap place where they can sit in obscurity darning up the holes intheir damaged fortunes. Frau von Lindeberg, who has none of the tormentof rejected love to occupy her feelings and all the bitterness of thesocial and financial blow, cannot help saying hard things to Vicki,things pointed and poisoned with reproaches that sometimes almost vergeon taunts. The man was a good _parti_ for Vicki; little money, but muchpromise for the future, a good deal older than herself and alreadybrilliant as an officer; and during the engagement the satisfied motheroverflowed, as mothers will, with love for the creditable daughter. 'Itwas so nice,' said Vicki-, dolefully sniffing. 'She seemed to love mealmost as much as she loves my brother. I was so happy. I had so much.Then everything went at once. Mamma can't bear to think that no one willever want to marry me now, because I have been engaged.'

  Well, love is a cruel, horrible thing. Hardly ever do both the personslove with equal enthusiasm, and if they do what is the use? It is allbound to end in smoke and nothingness, put out by the steady drizzle ofmarriage. And for the others, for the masses of people who do not loveequally, of whom one half is at a miserable disadvantage, at the mercyabsolutely of the other half, what is there but pain in the end? Andyet--and yet it is a pretty thing in its beginnings, a sweet, darlingthing. But, like a kitten, all charm and delicious ways at first,innocent, soft, enchanting, it turns into a cat with appalling rapidityand cruelly claws you. I'd like to know if there's a single being onearth so happy and so indifferent that he has not got hidden awaybeneath a brave show of clothes and trimmings the mark of Love's claws.And I think most of the clawings are so ferocious that they are for along time ghastly tears that open and bleed again; and when with yearsthey slowly dry up there is always the scar, red and terrible, thatmakes you wince if by any chance it is touched. That is what I think.What do you think?

  Good-by.

  No, don't tell me what you think. I don't want to know.

  XLVI

  Galgenberg, Sept. 24th.

  Dear Mr. Anstruther,--Yesterday I was so much absorbed by Vicki's woesthat I never got to what I really wanted to write about. It's that bookI found in the Jena bookshop. It was second-hand and cheap, and I boughtit, and it has unkindly revenged itself by playing havoc with myillusions. It is a collection of descriptions of what is known of thelives of the English poets, beginning with Chaucer, who is luckily toofar away to provide much tattle, and coming down the centuries growingbigger with gossip as it comes, till it ends with Rossetti, andFitzGerald, and Stevenson. Each poet has his portrait. It was for that Ibought it. I cannot tell you how eagerly I looked at them. At last I wasgoing to see what Wordsworth looked like, and Coleridge, and Keats, andShelley. One of my dreams has been to go to that National PortraitGallery of yours in London, described in an old Baedeker I once saw, andgaze at the faces of those whose spirits I know so well. Now I don'twant to. Can you imagine what it is like, what an extremely blessedstate it is, only to have read the works of a poet, the filtered-outbest of him, and to have lived so far from his country and frombiographies or collections of his letters that all gossip about hisprivate life and criticisms of his morals are unknown to you? Milton,Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Burns, have been to me great teachers, greatexamples, before whose shining image, built up out of the radiantmaterials their works provided, I have spent glorious hours in worship.Not a cloud, not a misgiving has dimmed my worship. We needaltars--anyhow we women do--and they were mine--I have not been able tobe religious in the ordinary sense, and they have taken the place ofreligion. Our own best poets, Goethe, Schiller, Heine and the rest, donot appeal to me in the same way. Goethe is wonderful, but he leaves yousitting somehow in a cold place from which you call out at intervalswith conviction that he is immense the while you wish he would keep thefeet of your soul a little warmer. Schiller beats his patriotic drum,his fine eyes rolling continually toward the gallery, toounintermittently for perfect delight. Heine the exquisite, the cunningworker in gems, the stringer of pearls on frailest golden threads, istoo mischievous, too malicious, to be set up in a temple; and then youcan't help laughing at his extraordinary gift for maddening therespectable, at the extraordinary skill and neatness with which hedeposits poison in their tenderest places, and how can he worship who isbeing made to laugh? If I knew little about our poets' lives--inevitablyI know more than I want to--I still would feel the same. There is, Ithink, in their poetry nothing heavenly. It is true I bless God forthem, thank Him for having let them live and sing, for having given ussuch a noble heritage, but I can't go all the way Papa goes, and melt ina bath of rapture whenever Goethe's name is mentioned. I remember whatyou said about Goethe. It has not influenced me. I do think you werewrong. But I do, too, think that everything really heavenly in ournation, everything p
urely inspired, manifestly immortal, has gone, notinto our poetry but into our music. That has absorbed our whole share ofdivine fire, and left our poets nothing but the cool and consciousexercise of their intellects.

  Well, I am preaching. I would make a very arrogant parson, wouldn't I,laying down the law more often than the prophets from that safe citadel,a pulpit; but please have patience, for I want you to comfort me. Thebook really has made me unhappy. It is the kind of book you must go onreading,--angry, rebelling at every page, but never leaving it tillyou've reached the last word. Then you throw it as hard as you can intothe furthest corner of the room, and shake yourself as a dog does, comeup out of muddy water, and think to shake it off as easily as he doeshis mud; but you can't, because it has burned itself into your soul. Idon't suppose you will understand what I feel. When a person possessesvery few things those few things are terribly precious. See the motherof the only child, and compare her conduct when it coughs with theconduct of the mother of six, all coughing. See how one agonizes; andsee with what serenity the other brings out her bottle of mixture andpours it calmly down her children's throats. Well, I'm like the firstmother, and you are like the second. I expect you knew long ago, andhave never minded knowing, the littlenesses of my gods; but I, I felt asunsettled while I read about them, as uneasy, as fidgety, as frightened,as a horse being driven by somebody cruel, which knows that every minutethe lash will come down in some fresh place. Think: I knew nothing aboutHarriet Westbrook and her tragic life and death; I had never heard ofEmilia Viviani; of Mary; of her whose name was Eliza, but who soaredaloft in the sunshine of Shelley's admiration re-christened Portia, onlypresently to descend once more into the font and come out luridly as theBrown Demon. I never knew that Keats loved somebody called Brawne, andthat she was unwilling, that she saw little in him, in Endymion thegodlike, the divinely gifted, and that he was so persistent, sounworthily persistent, that the only word I can find that at alldescribes it is the German _zappelnd._ I had never heard of Jean Armour,of the headlong descent from being 'him who walked in glory and in joy,Following his plough along the mountain-side' to hopeless black yearsspent in public-houses at the beck and call--think of it, think of thedivine spirit forced to it by its body--of any one who would pay for adrink. I never knew about Coleridge's opium, or that to Carlyle heappeared as a helpless Psyche overspun with Church of England cobwebs,as a weak, diffusive, weltering, ineffectual man. I never knew thatWordsworth's greeting was a languid handful of numb, unresponsivefingers, that his speech was prolix, thin, endlessly diluted. I neverknew that Milton had three wives, that the first one ran away from him amonth after their marriage, that he was hard to his daughters, so hardthat they wished him dead. All these things I never knew; and for yearsI have been walking with glorious spirits, and have been fed onhoney-dew, and drunk the milk of Paradise. When first I saw Wordsworth'sportrait I turned cold. Don't laugh; I did actually turn cold. He hadbeen so much in my life. I had pictured him so wonderful. Calm;beautiful, with the loftiest kind of beauty; faintly frosty at times,and detached, yet gently cheery and always dignified. It is the picturefrom a portrait by some one called Hancock. Very bitterly do I dislikeHancock. It is a profile. It would, if I had seen it in the flesh,completely have hidden from my silly short sight the inner splendors.I'm afraid--oh, I'm afraid, and I shiver with shame to think it--that Iwould have regarded him only as an elderly gentleman of irreproachablecharacter out of whose way it was as well to get because he showed everysign of being a bore. Will you think me irretrievably silly when I tellyou that I cried over that picture? For one dreadful moment I stared atit in startled horror; then I banged the book to and fled up into theforest to cry. There was a smugness--but no, I won't think of it. I'llupset all my theories about the face being the mirror of the soul. Itcan't be. If it is, Peter Bell and The Thorn are accounted for; but whoshall account for the bleak nobility, the communings with nature onlofty heights in the light of setting suns? Or, when he comes downnearer, for that bright world he unlocks of things dear to memory, ofhome, of childhood, of quiet places, of calm affections? And for thetenderness with which it is done? And for its beautiful, simplegoodness?

  Coleridge's picture was another disillusionment, but not so great ashock, because I have loved him less. He was so rarely inspired. I don'tthink you need more than the fingers of one hand for the doing of sumswith Coleridge's inspirations. Still, it saddened me to be told he was ahelpless Psyche. I didn't like to hear about his cobwebs. I hated beingforced to know of his weakness, of his wasted life growing steadilydingier the farther he travelled from that East that had seen him setout so bright with morning radiance. Really, the world would be apeaceful place if we could only keep quiet about each other's weakpoints. Why are we so restless till we have pulled down, belittled,besmudged? You'll say that without a little malice talk would grow verydull; you'll tell me it is the salt, the froth, the sparkle, the gingerin the ginger-beer, the mustard in the sandwich. But you must admit thatit becomes only terrible when it can't leave the few truly great spiritsalone, when it must somehow drag them down to our lower level, pointingout--in writing, so that posterity too shall have no illusions--thespots on the sun, the weak places in the armor, and pushing us, who wantto be left alone praying in the fore-court of the temple, down the areasteps into the kitchen. Two nights and two days have I spent feverishlywith that book. I dare not hope that I shall forget it. I have never yetforgotten undesirable, bad things. Now, when I take my poets up with meinto the forest, and sit on one of those dusky pine-grown slopes wherethe light is subdued to a mysterious gray-green and the world is quietedinto a listening silence, and far away below the roofs of Jena glistenin the sun, and the white butterflies, like white flowers come to life,flutter after each other across the blue curtain of heat that hangsbeyond the trees, now when I open them and begin to read the noble,familiar words, will not those other words, those anecdotes, thosepersonal descriptions, those suggestions, those button-holings, leer atme between the lines? Shall I, straining my ears after the music, not beshown now for ever only the instrument, and how pitifully the ivory hascome off the keys? Shall I, hungering after my spiritual food, not havepushed upon my notice, so that I am forced to look, the saucepan,tarnished and not quite clean, in which it was cooked? Please don't tellme you can't understand. Try to imagine yourself in my place. Come outof that gay world of yours where you are talking or being talked to allday long, and suppose yourself Rose-Marie Schmidt, alone in Jena, on ahill, with books. Suppose yourself for hours and hours every day of yourlife with nothing particular that you must do, that you have noshooting, no hunting, no newspapers, no novels. Suppose you arepassionately fond of reading, and that of all reading you most lovepoetry. Suppose you have inherited from a mother who loved them as muchas you do a precious shelf-full of the poets, cheap editions, entirelyfree from the blight of commentaries, foot-notes, and introductorybiographies. And suppose these books in the course of years have becomeyour religion, your guide, the source of your best thoughts and happiestmoments--would you look on placidly while some one scrawled malicioustruths between their lines? Oh, you would not. You would feel as I do.Think what the writers are to me, how I have built up theirpersonalities entirely out of the materials they gave me in their work.They never told me horrid things about themselves. Their spirits, whichalone they talked about, were serene and white. I knew Milton was blind,because he chose beautifully to tell me so. I knew he must have been anappreciative and regretful husband, because no husband who did notappreciate and regret would go so far as to talk of his deceased wife ashis late espoused saint. I knew he was a tender friend, a friend capableof deepest love and sorrow, for in spite of Johnson's 'It is not to beconsidered as the effusion of real passion,' I was convinced by the loveand sorrow of 'Lycidas.' I knew he was a man whose spirit was dissolvedcontinually into the highest ecstasies, who lived with all heaven beforehis eyes,--briefly, I said Amen to Wordsworth's 'His soul was like astar, and dwelt apart.' And now a series of sordid little pictures
risesup before me and chokes my Amen. I cannot bear to think of him havingtwo or three olives for supper and a little cold water, and then beingcross to his daughters. Of course he must be cross on such a supper. Ican't conceive it kind to drill the daughters so strictly in languagesthey did not understand that they could read them aloud to him withextraordinary correctness. I shrink from the thought of the grumblingthere was in that house of heavenly visions, grumbling and squabblingstamped out, it is true, by the heavy parental foot wherever noticed,but smouldering on from one occasion to the other. I cannot believe--Iwish I could--that a child will dislike a parent without cause; thecause may be small things, a series of trifles each of little moment,snubs too often repeated, chills too often applied, stern looks, shortwords, sarcasms,--and these, as you and I both know, are quite ordinarydulnesses, often daily ingredients of family life; but they sit with astrange and upsetting grace on the poet of Paradise, and I would giveanything never to have heard of them.

  And then you know I loved FitzGerald. He had one of my best altars. Youremember you read _Omar Khayyam_ twice aloud to me--once in the spring(it was the third of April, a sudden hot day, blue and joyous, slippedin to show God had not forgotten us between weeks of hopeless skies andicy winds) and once last September, that afternoon we drifted down theriver past the town, away from houses and people and work and lessons,out to where the partridges scuttled across the stubble and all theworld was golden. (That was the eleventh of September; I am rather good,you see, at dates.) Well, now I call him Fitz, and laugh at thedescription of him going about Suffolk lanes in a battered tall hat tiedon in windy weather by a handkerchief, and trailing behind him, insteadof clouds of glory, a shawl of green and black plaid. It isn't, ofcourse, in any way a bad thing to trail shawls after you on countrywalks; there is nothing about it or him that shocks or grieves; he isvery lovable. But I don't want to laugh. I don't want to call him Fitz.He is one of the gods in my temple, a place from which I rigorouslyexclude the sense of humor. I don't like gods who are amusing. I cannotworship and laugh simultaneously. I know that laughter is good, and Iknow that even derision in small quantities is as wholesome as salt; butI like to laugh and deride outside holy places, and not be forced to doit while I am on my knees.