Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  XXV.

  Jena, March 31st.

  Dear Mr. Anstruther,--Yes, of course I will be friends. And if I can beof any use in the way of admonishment, which seems to be my strongpoint, pray, as people say in books, command me. Naturally we are allmuch interested in you, and shall watch your career, I hope, withpleasure. I am sorry the Foreign Office bores you so much. Do you reallyhave to spend your days gumming up envelopes? Not for that did you winall those scholarships and things at Eton and Oxford, and study Goetheand the minor German prophets so diligently here. You say it will go onfor a year. Well, if that is your fate and you cannot escape it, gumaway gayly, since gum you must. Later on when you are an ambassador andeverybody is talking to you at once, you will look back on the envelopetime as a blessed period when at least you were left alone. But I hopeyou have a nice wet sponge to do it with, and are not so lost to what isexpedient as to be like a little girl I sat next to yesterday at acoffee party, who had smudged most of the cream that ought to have goneinside her outside her, and when I suggested a handkerchief said shedidn't hold with handkerchiefs and never had one. 'But what does one do,then,' I asked, looking at her disgraceful little mouth, 'in a case likethis? You can't borrow somebody else's--it wouldn't be being select.''Oh,' she said airily, 'don't you know? You take your tongue.' And in atwinkling the thing was done. But please do not you do that with theenvelopes. My father and step-mother send you many kind messages. Yourssincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  XXVI

  Jena, April 9th.

  Dear Mr. Anstruther,--No, I do not in the least mind your writing to me.Do, whenever you feel you want to talk to a friend. It is pleasant to betold that my letters remind you of so many nice things. I expect youryear in Jena seems much more agreeable, now that you have had time toforget the uncomfortable parts of it, than it really was. But I don'tthink you would have been able to endure it if you had not been workingso hard. I am sorry you do not like your father. You say so straightout, so I see no reason for round-aboutness. I expect he will be calmerwhen you are married. Why do you not gratify him, and have a shortengagement? Yes, I do understand what you feel about the mercifulness ofbeing often left alone, though I have never been worried in quite thesame way as you seem to be; when I am driven it is to places like thekitchen, and your complaint is that you are driven to what most peoplewould call enjoying yourself. Really I think my sort of driving is best.There is so much satisfaction about work, about any work. But just toamuse oneself, and to be, besides, in a perpetual hurry over it becausethere is so much of it and the day can't be made to stretch, must be asorry business. I wonder why you do it. You say your father insists onyour going everywhere with the Cheritons, and the Cheritons will notmiss a thing; but, after all isn't it rather weak to let yourself be ledround by the nose if your nose doesn't like it? It is as though insteadof a dog wagging its tail the tail should wag the dog. And all Naturesurely would stand aghast before such an improper spectacle.

  The wind is icy, and the snow patches are actually still here, but inthe nearest garden I can get to I saw violets yesterday in flower, andcrocuses and scillas, and one yellow pansy staring up at the sunastonished and reproachful because it had bits of frozen snow stuck toits little cheeks. Dear me, it is a wonderful feeling, this resurrectionevery year. Does one ever grow too old, I wonder, to thrill over it? Iknow the blackbirds are whistling in the orchards if I could only get tothem, and my father says the larks have been out in the bare places forthese last four weeks. On days like this, when one's immortality isracing along one's blood, how impossible it is to think of death as theend of everything. And as for being grudging and disagreeable, thething's not to be done. Peevishness and an April morning? Why, even mystep-mother opened her window today and stood for a long time in the sunwatching how

  proud-pied April, dressed in all his trim, Hath put a spirit of youth in everything.

  The first part of the month with us is generally bustling and busy, agreat clatter and hustling while the shrieking winter is got away out ofsight over the hills, a sweeping of the world clear for themarsh-marigolds and daffodils, a diligent making of room for the divinecalms of May. I always loved this first wild frolic of cold winds andcatkins and hurriedly crimsoning pollards, of bleakness and promise, ofroughness and sweetness--a blow on one cheek and a kiss on theother--before the spring has learned good manners, before it has leftoff being anything but a boisterous, naughty, charming _Backfisch_; butthis year after having been ill so long it is more than love, it ispassion. Only people who have been buried in beds for weeks getting usedto listening for Death's step on the stairs, know what it is to go outinto the stinging freshness of the young year and meet the first scilla,and hear a chaffinch calling out, and feel the sun burn red patches oflife on their silly, sick white faces.

  My parents send you kind remembrances. They were extremely interested tohear, through Professor Martens, of your engagement to Miss Cheriton.They both think it a most excellent thing.

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  XXVII

  Jena, April 20th.

  Dear Mr. Anstruther,--You tell me I do not answer your letters, butreally I think I do quite often enough. I want to make the most of theseweeks of idle getting strong again, and it is a sad waste of timewriting. My step-mother has had such a dose of me sick and incapable, ofdoctor's bills and physic and beef-tea and night-lights, that she isprolonging the convalescent period quite beyond its just limits and willhave me do nothing lest I should do too much. So I spend strange,glorious days, days strange and glorious to me, with nothing to do foranybody but myself and a clear conscience to do it with. The singlesanction of my step-mother's approval has been enough to clear myconscience, from which you will see how illogically consciences can becleared; for have I not always been sure she has no idea whatever ofwhat is really good? Yet just her approval, a thing I know to be faultyand for ever in the wrong place, is sufficient to prop up my conscienceand make it feel secure. How then, while I am busy reading Jane Austenand Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth--books foreordained from all timefor the delight of persons getting well--shall I find time to write toyou? And you must forgive me for a certain surprise that you should havetime to write so much to me. What have I done to deserve these longletters? How many Foreign Office envelopes do you leave ungummed towrite them? _Es ist zu viel Ehre_. It is very good of you. No, I willnot make phrases like that, for I know you do not do it for any reasonwhatever but because you happen to want to.

  You are going through one of those tiresome soul-sicknesses thatperiodically overtake the too comfortable, and you must, apparently,tell somebody about it. Well, it is a form of _Weltschmerz,_ and onlyafflicts the well-fed. Pray do not suppose that I am insinuating thatfood is of undue interest to you; but it is true that if you did nothave several meals a day and all of them too nice, if there were doubtsabout their regular recurrence, if, briefly, you were a washerwoman or aplough-boy, you would not have things the matter with your soul.Washerwomen and ploughboys do not have sick souls. Probably you will saythey have no souls to be sick; but they have, you know. I imagine theirsouls thin and threadbare, stunted by cold and hunger, poor and pitiful,but certainly there. And I don't know that it is not a nicer sort ofsoul to have inside one's plodding body than an unwieldy, overgrownthing, chiefly water and air and lightly changeable stuff, sounsubstantial that it flops--forgive the word, but it does flop--on toother souls in search of sympathy and support and comfort and all therest of the things washer-women waste no time looking for, because theyknow they wouldn't find them.

  You are a poet, and I do not take a youthful poet seriously; but if youwere not I would laugh derisively at your comparing the entrance of myletters into your room at the Foreign Office to the bringing in of abunch of cottage flowers still fresh with dew. I don't know that mypride does not rather demand a comparison to a bunch of hot-houseflowers--
a bouquet it would become then, wouldn't it?--or my romanticsense to a bunch of field flowers, wild, graceful, easily weariedthings, that would not care at all for Foreign Offices. But I expectcottage is really the word. My letters conjure up homely visions, and Iam sure the bunch you see is a tight posy of

  Sweet-Williams, with their homely cottage smell.

  It was charming of Matthew Arnold to let Sweet-Williams have such a niceline, but I don't think they quite deserve it. They have a dear littlename and a dear little smell, but the things themselves might have beenmanufactured in a Berlin furniture shop where upholstery in plushprevails, instead of made in that sweetest corner of heaven from whenceall good flowers come.

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  XXVIII

  Jena, April 26th.

  Dear Mr. Anstruther,--You seem to be incurably doleful. You talk abouthow nice it must be to have a sister, a mother, some woman very closelyrelated to whom you could talk. You astonish me; for have you not MissCheriton? Still, on reflection I think I do see that what you feel youwant is more a solid bread-and-butter sort of relationship; nosentiment, genial good advice, a helping hand if not a guidingone--really a good thick slice of bread-and-butter as a set-off to adiet of constant cake. I can read between your lines with sufficientclearness; and as I always had a certain talent for stodginess I willwaste no words but offer myself as the bread-and-butter. Somehow I thinkit might work out my soul's release from self-reproach and doubts if Ican help you, as far as one creature can help another, over some of themore tiresome places of life. Exhortation, admonishment, encouragement,you shall have them all, if you like, by letter. In these my days ofdignified leisure I have had room to think, and so have learned to lookat things differently from the way I used to. Life is so short thatthere is hardly time for anything except to be, as St. Paul says--wasn'tit St. Paul?--kind to one another. You are, I think, a most weak person.Anything more easily delighted in the first place or more quickly tiredin the second I never in my life saw. Does nothing satisfy you for morethan a day or two? And the enthusiasm of you at the beginnings ofthings. And the depression, the despair of you once you have got used tothem. I know you are clever, full of brains, intellectually all that canbe desired, but what's the good of that when the rest of you is so weak?You are of a diseased fastidiousness. There's not a person you havepraised to me whom you have not later on disliked. When you were here Iused to wonder as I listened, but I did believe you. Now I know that theworld cannot possibly contain so many offensive people, and that it isalways so with you--violent heat, freezing cold. I cannot see you drownwithout holding out a hand. For you are young; you are, in the partsoutside your strange, ill-disciplined emotions, most full of promise;and circumstances have knitted me into an unalterable friend. Perhaps Ican help you to a greater stead-fastness, a greater compactness of soul.But do not tell me too much. Do not put me in an inextricably difficultposition. It would not of course be really inextricable, for I wouldextricate myself by the simple process of relapsing into silence. I saythis because your letters have a growing tendency to pour out everythingyou happen to be feeling. That in itself is not a bad thing, but youmust rightly choose your listener. Not every one should be allowed tolisten. Certain things cannot be shouted out from the housetops. Youforget that we hardly know each other, and that the well-mannered do notthrust their deeper feelings on a person who shrinks from them. I hopeyou understand that I am willing to hear you talk about most things, andthat you will need no further warning to keep off the few swampy places.And just think of all the things you can write to me about, all themasses of breathlessly interesting things in this breathlesslyinteresting world, without talking about people at all. Look round youthis fine spring weather and tell me, for instance, what April is doingup your way, and whether as you go to your work through the park you toohave not seen heavy Saturn laughing and leaping--how that sonnet has gotinto my head--and do not every day thank God for having bothered to makeyou at all.

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  XXIX

  Jena, April 30th.

  Dear Mr. Anstruther,--You know the little strip of balcony outside oursitting-room window, with its view over the trees of the Paradies valleyto the beautiful hills across the river? Well, this morning is so fine,the sun is shining so warmly, that I had my coffee and roll there, and,now, wrapped up in rugs, am still there writing to you. I can't tell youhow wonderful it is. The birds are drunk with joy. There are blackbirds,and thrushes, and chaffinches, and yellow-hammers, all shouting at once;and every now and then when the clamor has a gap in it I hear thewhistle of the great tit, the dear small bird who is the very first tosing, bringing its pipe of hope to those early days in February when theworld is at its blackest. Have you noticed how different one's morningcoffee tastes out of doors from what it does in a room? And the roll andbutter--oh, the roll and butter! So must rolls and butter have tasted inthe youth of the world, when gods and mortals were gloriously mixed uptogether, and you went for walks on exquisite things like parsley andviolets. If Thoreau--I know you don't like him, but that's only becauseyou have read and believed Stevenson about him--could have seen theeager interest with which I ate my roll just now, he would, I am afraid,have been disgusted; for he severely says that it is not what you eatbut the spirit in which you eat it,--you are not, that is, to like ittoo much--that turns you into a glutton. It is, he says, neither thequality nor the quantity, but the devotion to sensual savors that makesyour eating horrid. A puritan, he says, may go to his brown bread crustwith as gross an appetite as ever an alderman to his turtle. Thus did Igo, as grossly as the grossest alderman, this morning to my crust, andrejoiced in the sensual savor of it and was very glad. How nice it is,how pleasant, not to be with people you admire. Admiration, veneration,the best form of love--they are all more comfortably indulged in from adistance. There is too much whalebone about them at close quarters withtheir object, too much whalebone and not nearly enough slippers. I amglad Thoreau is dead. I love him far too much ever to want to see him;and how thankful I am he cannot see me.

  It is my step-mother's birthday, and trusted friends have been streamingup our three flights of stairs since quite early to bring her hyacinthsin pots and unhappy roses spiked on wires and make her congratulatoryspeeches. I hear them talking through the open window, and what theysay, wafted out to me here in the sun, sounds like the pleasant droningof bees when one is only half awake. First there is the distant electricbell and the tempestuous whirl of Johanna down the passage. Then mystep-mother emerges from the kitchen and meets the arriving friend withvociferous welcoming. Then the friend is led into the room here, talkingin gasps as we all do on getting to the top of this house, and flingingcascades of good wishes for her _liebe Emilie_ on to the _liebeEmilie's_ head. Then the hyacinths or the roses are presented:--'I havebrought thee a small thing,' says the friend, presenting; and mystep-mother, who has been aware of their presence the whole time, but,with careful decency, has avoided looking at them, starts, protests, andlaunches forth on to heaving billows of enthusiasm. She does not carefor flowers, either in pots or on wires or in any other condition, soher gratitude is really most creditably done. Then they settle down inthe corners of the sofa and talk about the things they really want totalk about--neighbors, food, servants, pastors, illnesses, Providence;beginning, since I was ill, with a perfunctory inquiry from the visitoras to the health of _die gute_ Rose-Marie.

  '_Danke, danke_,' says my step-mother. You know in Germany wheneveranybody asks after anybody you have to begin your answer with _danke._Sometimes the results are odd; for instance: 'How is your poor husbandtoday?' 'Oh, _danke_, he is dead.'

  So my step-mother, too, says _danke_, and then I hear a murmur offurther information, and catch the word _zart_. Then they talk, still inmurmurs not supposed to be able to get through the open window and intomy ears, about the quantity of beef-tea I have consumed, the length ofthe chemist's bill, the unfortunate circumstance
that I am soovergrown--'Weedy,' says my step-mother.

  'Would you call her weedy?' says the friend, with a show of politehesitation.

  'Weedy,' repeats my step-mother emphatically; and the friend remarksquite seriously that when a person is so very long there is always somepart of her bound to be in a draught and catching cold. 'It is such apity,' concludes the friend, 'that she did not marry.' (Notice thetense. Half a dozen birthdays back it used to be 'does not.')

  'Gentlemen,' says my step-mother, 'do not care for her.'

  '_Armes Maedchen_' murmurs the friend.