Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  I have not thanked you for the book you sent me. It was very kind indeed of you to wish me to share the pleasure you have had in reading it. But see how unfortunately contrary I am: I don’t care about it. And just the passages you marked are the ones I care about least. I do not hold with markings in books. Whenever I have come across mine after a lapse of years I have marvelled at the distance travelled since I marked, and shut up the book and murmured, ‘Little fool.’ I can’t imagine why you thought I should like this book. It has given me rather a surprised shock that you should know me so little, and that I should know you so little as to think you knew me better. Really all the explanations and pointings in the world will not show a person the exact position of his neighbour’s soul. It is astonishing enough that the book was printed, but how infinitely more astonishing that people like you should admire it. What is the matter with me that I cannot admire it? Why am I missing things that ought to give me pleasure? You do not, then, see that it is dull? I do. I see it and feel it in every bone, and it makes them ache. It is dull and bad because it is so dreary, so hopelessly dreary. Life is not like that. Life is only like that to cowards who are temporarily indisposed. I do not care to look at it through a sick creature’s jaundiced eyes and shudder with him at what he sees. If he cannot see better why not keep quiet, and let us braver folk march along with our heads in the air, held so high that we cannot bother to look at every slimy creepiness that crawls across our path? And did you not notice how he keeps on telling his friends in his letters not to mind when he is dead? Unnecessary advice, one would suppose; I can more easily imagine the friends gasping with an infinite relief. Persons who are everlastingly claiming pity, sympathy, condolences, are very wearing. Surely all talk about one’s death is selfish and bad? That is why, though there is so much that is lovely in them, the faint breath of corruption hanging about Christina Rossetti’s poetry makes me turn my head the other way. What a constant cry it is that she wants to die, that she hopes to die, that she’s going to die, shall die, can die, must die, and that nobody is to weep for her, but that there are to be elaborate and moving arrangements of lilies and roses and winding-sheets. And at least in one place she gives directions as to the proper use of green grass and wet dewdrops upon her grave—implying that dewdrops are sometimes dry. I think the only decent attitude towards one’s death is to be silent. Talk about it puts other people in such an awkward position. What is one to say to persons who sigh and tell us that they will no doubt soon be in heaven? One’s instinct is politely to murmur, ‘Oh no,’ and then they are angry. ‘Surely not’ also has its pitfalls. Cheery words, of the order in speech that a slap on the shoulder is in the sphere of physical expression, only seem to deepen the determined gloom. And if it is some one you love who thinks he will soon be dead and tells you so, the cruelty is very great. When death really comes, is not what the ordinary decent dier wants quiet, that he may leave himself utterly in the hands of God? There should be no massing of temporarily broken-hearted onlookers about his bed, no leave-takings and eager gatherings-up of last words, no revellings of relatives in the voluptuousness of woe, no futile exhortations, using up the last poor breaths, not to weep to persons who would consider it highly improper to leave off doing it, and no administration of tardy blessings. Any blessings the dier has to invoke should have been invoked and done with long ago. In this last hour, at least, can one not be left alone? Do you remember Pater’s strange feeling about death? Perhaps you do not, for you told me once you did not care about him. Well, it runs through his books, through all their serenity and sunlight, through exquisite descriptions of summer, of beautiful places, of heat and life and youth and all things lovely, like a musty black riband, very poor, very mean, very rotten, that yet must bind these gracious flowers of light at last together, bruising them into one piteous mass of corruption. It is all very morbid: the fair outward surface of daily life, the gay, flower-starred crust of earth, and just underneath horrible tainted things, things forlorn and pitiful, things which we who still walk on the wholesome grass must soon join, changing our life in the roomy sunshine into something infinitely dependent and helpless, something that can only dimly live if those strong friends of ours in the bright world will spare us a thought, a remembrance, a few minutes from their plenty for sitting beside us, room in their hearts for yet a little love and sorrow. ‘Dead cheek by dead cheek, and the rain soaking down upon one from above ….’ Does not that sound hopeless? After reading these things, sweet with the tainted sweetness of decay, of ruin, of the past, the gone, it is like having fresh spring water dashed over one on a languid afternoon to remember Walt Whitman’s brave attitude towards ‘delicate death,’ ‘the sacred knowledge of death,’ ‘lovely, soothing death,’ ‘cool, enfolding death,’ ‘strong deliveress,’ ‘vast and well-veiled death,’ ‘the body gratefully nestling close to death,’ ‘sane and sacred death.’ That is the spirit that makes one brave and fearless, that makes one live beautifully and well, that sends one marching straight ahead with limbs that do not tremble and head held high. Is it not natural to love such writers best? Writers who fill one with glad courage and make one proud of the path one has chosen to walk in?

  And yet you do not like Walt Whitman. I remember quite well my chill of disappointment when you told me so. At first, hearing it, I thought I must be wrong to like him; but, thank Heaven, I soon got my balance again, and presently was solaced by the reflection that it was at least as likely you were wrong not to. You told me it was not poetry. That upset me for a few days, and then I found I didn’t care. I couldn’t argue with you on the spot and prove anything, because the only esprit I have is that tiresome esprit d’escalier, so brilliant when it is too late, so constant in its habit of leaving its possessor in the dreadful condition—or is it a place?—called the lurch; but, poetry or not, I knew I must always love him. You, I suppose, have cultivated your taste in regard to things of secondary importance to such a pitch of sensitiveness that unless the outer shell is flawless you cannot, for sheer intellectual discomfort, look at the wonders that often lie within. I, who have not been educated, am so filled with elementary joy when some one shows me the light in this world of many shadows that I do not stop to consider what were the words he used while my eyes followed his pointing finger. You see, I try to console myself for having an unpruned intelligence. I know I am unpruned, and that at the most you pruned people, all trim and trained from the first, do but bear with me indulgently. But I must think with the apparatus I possess, and I think at this moment that perhaps what you really most want is a prolonged dose of Walt Whitman, a close study of him for several hours every day, shut up with no other book, quite alone with him in an empty country place. Listen to this—you shall listen:

     O we can wait no longer,

     We too take ship, O soul;

  Joyous we too launch out on trackless seas,

  Fearless for unknown shores on waves of ecstasy to sail,

  Amid the wafting winds (thou pressing me to thee, I thee to me, O soul).

  Carolling free, singing our song of God,

  Chanting our chant of pleasant exploration,

     O my brave soul!

     O farther, farther sail!

  O daring joy, but safe! are they not all the seas of God?

     O farther, farther sail!

  Well, how do you feel now? Can any one, can you, can even you read that without such a tingling in all your limbs, such a fresh rush of life and energy through your whole body that you simply must jump up and, shaking off the dreary nonsense that has been fooling you, turn your back on diseased self-questionings and run straight out to work at your salvation in the sun?

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  XXXII

  Jena, May 20.

  DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—I am sorry you think me unsympathetic. Hard, I think, was the word; but unsympathetic sounds prettier. Is it unsympathetic not to like fruitless, profitless, bar
ren things? Not to like fogs and blights and other deadening, decaying things? From my heart I pity all the people who are so made that they cannot get on with their living for fear of their dying; but I do not admire them. Is that being unsympathetic? Apparently you think so. How odd. There is a little man here who hardly ever can talk to anybody without beginning about his death. He is perfectly healthy, and I suppose forty or fifty, so that there is every reasonable hope of his going on being a little man for years and years more; but he will have it that as he has never married or, as he puts it, done anything else useful, he might just as well be dead, and then at the word Dead his eyes get just the look of absolute scaredness in them that a hare’s eyes do when a dog is after it. ‘If only one knew what came next,’ he said last time he was here, looking at me with those frightened eyes.

  ‘Nice things I should think,’ said I, trying to be encouraging.

  ‘But to those who have deserved punishment?’

  ‘If they have deserved it they will probably get it,’ said I, cheerfully.

  He shuddered.

  ‘You don’t look very wicked,’ I went on amiably. He leads a life of sheerest bread-and-milk, so simple, so innocent, so full of little hearthrug virtues.

  ‘But I am,’ he declared angrily.

  ‘I shouldn’t think half so bad as a great many people,’ said I, bent, being the hostess, on a perfect urbanity.

  ‘Worse,’ said he, more angrily.

  ‘Oh, come now,’ said I, very politely as I thought.

  Then he really got into a rage, and asked me what I could possibly know about it, and I said I didn’t know anything; and still he stormed and grew more and more terrified, frightening himself by his own words; and at last, dropping his voice, he confessed that he had one particularly deadly fear, a fear that haunted him and gave him no rest, that the wicked would not burn eternally but would freeze.

  ‘Oh,’ said I, shrinking; for it was a bitter day, and the north-east wind was thundering among the hills.

  ‘Great cold,’ he said, ‘seems to be incomparably more terrible than great heat.’

  ‘Oh, incomparably,’ I agreed, edging nearer to the stove. ‘Only listen to that wind.’

  ‘So will it howl about us through eternity,’ said he.

  ‘Oh,’ I shivered.

  ‘Piercing one’s unprotected—everything about us will be unprotected then—one’s unprotected marrow, and turning it to ice within us.’

  ‘But we won’t have any marrows,’ said I.

  ‘No marrows? Fräulein Rose-Marie, we shall have everything that will hurt.’

  ‘Oh weh,’ cried I, stopping up my ears.

  ‘The thought frightens you?’ said he.

  ‘Terrifies me,’ said I.

  ‘How much more fearful, then, will be the reality.’

  ‘Well, I’d like to—I’d like to give you some good advice,’ said I, hesitating.

  ‘Certainly; if one of your sex may with any efficacy advise one of ours.’

  ‘Oh—efficacy,’ murmured I, with proper deprecation. ‘But I’d like to suggest—I daren’t advise, I’ll just suggest—’

  ‘Fear nothing. I am all ears and willingness to be guided,’ said he, smiling with an indescribable graciousness.

  ‘Well—don’t go there.’

  ‘Not go there?’

  ‘And while you are here—still here, and alive, and in nice warm woolly clothes, do you know what you want?’

  ‘What I want?’

  ‘Very badly do you want a wife. Why not go and get one?’

  His eyes at that grew more frightened than at the thought of eternal ice. He seized his hat and scrambled to the door. He went through it hissing scorching things about moderne Mädchen, and from the safety of the passage I heard him call me unverschämt.

  He hasn’t been here since. I would like to go and shake him; shake him till his brains settle into their proper place, and say while I shake, ‘Oh, little man, little man, come out of the fog! Why do you choose to die a thousand deaths rather than only one?’

  Is that being unsympathetic? I think it is being quite kind.

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  What I really meant to write to you about today was to tell you that I read your learned and technical and I am sure admirable denouncements of Walt Whitman with the respectful attention due to so much earnestness; and when I had done, and wondered awhile pleasantly at the amount of time for letter-writing the Foreign Office allows its young men, I stretched myself, and got my hat, and went down to the river; and I sat at the water’s edge in the middle of a great many buttercups; and there was a little wind; and the little wind knocked the heads of the buttercups together; and it seemed to amuse them, or else something else did, for I do assure you I thought I heard them laugh.

  XXXIII

  Jena, May 27.

  DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—You asked me about your successor in our house, and inquire why I have never mentioned him. Why should I mention him? Must I mention everything? I suppose I forgot him. His name is Collins, and some days he wears a pink shirt, and other days a blue shirt, and in his right cuff there is a pink silk handkerchief on the pink days, and a blue silk handkerchief on the blue days; and he has stuck up the pictures he likes to have about him on the walls of his room, and where your Luini used to be there is a young lady in a voluminous hat and short skirts, and where your Bellini Madonna sat and looked at you with austere, beautiful eyes, there is the winner, complete with jockey, of last year’s Derby.

  ‘I made a pot of money over that,’ said Mr Collins to me the day he pinned it up and came to ask me for the pin.

  ‘Did you?’ said I.

  But I think I am tired just now of Luinis and Bellinis and of the sort of spirit in a young man that clothes the walls of his room with them, each in some elaborately simple frame, and am not at all sure that the frank fleshliness of a Collins does not please me best. You see, one longs so much sometimes to get down to the soil, down to plain instincts, to rude nature, to, if you like, elemental savagery.

  But I’ll go on with Mr Collins; you shall have a dose of him while I am about it. He has bought a canoe, and has won the cup for swimming, wresting it from the reluctant hands of the discomfited Jena young men. He paddles up to the weir, gets out, picks up his canoe, carries it round to the other side, gets in, and vanishes in the windings of the water and the folds of the hills, leaving the girls in the tennis-courts—you remember the courts are opposite the weir—uncertain whether to titter or to blush, for he wears, I suppose, the fewest clothes that it is possible to wear and still be called dressed, and no stockings at all.

  ‘Nein, dieser Engländer!’ gasp the girls, turning down decent eyes.

  ‘Höllisch practisch,’ declare the young men, got up in as near an imitation of the flannels you used to wear that they can reach, even their hats bound about with a ribbon startlingly like your Oxford half blue; and before the summer is over I dare say they will all be playing tennis in the Collins canoe costume, stockingless, sleeveless, supposing it to be the latest cri in get-ups for each and every form of sport.

  Professor Martens didn’t care about teaching Mr Collins, and insisted on handing him over to Papa. Papa doesn’t care about teaching him, either, and says he is a dummer Bengel who pronounces Goethe as though it rhymed with dirty, and who the first time our great poet was mentioned vacantly asked, with every indication of a wandering mind, if he wasn’t the joker who wrote the play for Irving with all the devils in it. Papa was so angry that he began a letter to Collins père, telling him to remove his son to a city where there are fewer muses; but Collins père is a person who makes nails in Manchester with immense skill and application, and is terrifyingly rich, and my stepmother’s attitude towards the terrifyingly rich is one of large forgiveness; so she tore up Papa’s letter just where it had got to the words erbärmlicher Esel, said he was a very decent boy, that he should stay as long as he wanted to, but that, since he seeme
d to be troublesome about learning, Papa must write and demand a higher scale of payment. Papa wouldn’t; my stepmother did; and behold Joey—his Christian name is Joey—more lucrative to us by, I believe, just double than any one we have had yet.

  ‘I say,’ said Joey to me this morning, ‘come over to England some day, and I’ll romp you down to Epsom.’

  ‘Divine,’ said I, turning up my eyes.

  ‘We’d have a rippin’ time.’

  ‘Rather.’

  ‘I’d romp you down in the old man’s motor.’

  ‘Not really?’

  ‘We’d be there before you could flutter an eyelash.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Ain’t I, though. It’s a thirty-horse——’

  ‘Can’t you get them in London?’

  ‘Get ’em in London? Get what in London?’