Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  He is rosy with hope about this book. ‘All Jena will read it,’ he says, ‘because they will like to hear about themselves’—I wonder if they will—‘and all Germany will read it because it will like to hear about Goethe.’

  ‘It has heard a good deal about him already, you know, Papachen,’ I say, trying gently to suggest certain possibilities.

  ‘England might like to have it. There has been nothing since that man Lewes, and never anything really thorough. A good translation, Rose-Marie—what do you think of that as an agreeable task for you during the approaching winter evenings? It is a matter worthy of consideration. You will like a share in the work, a finger in the literary pie, will you not?’

  ‘Of course I would. But let me copy now, darling. I’m not half through.’

  He says that if those blind and prejudiced persons publishers won’t risk bringing it out he’ll bring it out at his own expense sooner than prevent the world’s rightly knowing what Goethe said and did in Jena; so there’s a serious eventuality ahead of us! We really will have to live on lettuces, and in grimmest earnest this time. I hope he won’t want to keep racehorses next. Well, one thing has happened that will go a little way towards meeting new expenses,—I go down every day now and read English with Vicki, at the desire of her mother, for two hours, her mother having come to the conclusion that it is better to legalize, as it were, my relations with Vicki, who flatly refused to keep away from us. So I am a breadwinner, and can do something to help Papa. It is true I can’t help much, for what I earn is fifty pfennings each time, and as the reading of English on Sundays is not considered nice, I can only altogether make three marks a week. But it is something, and it is easily earned, and last Sunday, which was the end of my first week, I bought the whole of the Sunday food with it, dinner and supper for us, and beer for Johanna’s lover, who says he cannot love her unless the beer is a particular sort and has been kept for a fortnight properly cold in the coal-hole.

  Since I have read with Vicki Frau von Lindeberg is quite different. She is courteous with the careful courtesy decent people show their dependents; kindly; even gracious at times. She is present at the reading, darning socks and ancient sheets with her carefully kept fingers, and she treats me absolutely as though I were attached to her household as governess. She is no longer afraid we will want to be equals. She asks me quite often after the health of him she calls my good father. And when a cousin of hers came last week to stay a night, a female Dammerlitz on her way to a place where you drink waters and get rid of yourself, she presented me to her with pleasant condescension as the kleine Engländerin engaged as her daughter’s companion. ‘Eine recht liebe Hausgenossin,’ she was pleased to add, gently nodding her head at each word; and the cousin went away convinced I was a resident official, and that the tales she had heard about the Lindebergs’ poverty couldn’t be true.

  ‘It’s not scriptural,’ I complained to Vicki, stirred to honest indignation.

  ‘You mean, to say things not quite—not quite?’ said Vicki.

  ‘Such big ones,’ I fumed. ‘I’m not little. I’m not English. I’m not a Hausgenossin. Why such unnecessary ones?’

  ‘Now, Rose-Marie, you do know why Mamma said “little.” ’

  ‘It’s a term of condescension.’

  ‘And Engländerins are rather grand things to have in the house, you know—expensive, I mean. Always dearer than natives. Mamma only wants Cousin Mienchen to suppose we are well off.’

  ‘Oh,’ said I.

  ‘You don’t mind?’ said Vicki, rather timidly, taking my hand.

  ‘It does hurt me,’ said I, putting a little stress on the ‘me,’ a stress implying infinite possible hurt to Frau von Lindeberg’s soul.

  ‘It is horrid,’ murmured Vicki, her head drooping over her book. ‘I wish we didn’t always pretend we’re not poor. We are. Poor as mice. And it makes us so sensitive about it, so afraid of anything’s being noticed. We spend our lives on tenterhooks—not nice things at all to spend one’s life on.’

  ‘Wriggly, uncomfortable things,’ I agreed.

  ‘I believe Cousin Mienchen isn’t in the least taken in, for all our pains.’

  ‘I don’t believe people ever are,’ said I; and we drifted into a consideration of the probable height of our temperatures and colour of our ears if we could know how much the world we pose to really knows about us, if we could hear with what thoroughness those of our doings and even of our thoughts that we believed so secret are discussed.

  Frau von Lindeberg wasn’t there, being too busy arranging comforts for her cousin’s journey to preside, and so it was that we drifted unhindered from Milton into the foggier regions of private wisdom. We are neither of us wise, but it is surprising how talking to a friend, even to a friend as unwise as yourself, clears up your brains and lets in new light. That is one of the reasons why I like writing to you and getting your letters; only you mustn’t be offended at my bracketing you, you splendid young man, with poor Vicki and poor myself in the class Unwise. Heaven knows I mean nothing to do with book-learning, in which, I am aware, you most beautifully excel.

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  XLIX

  Galgenberg, Oct. 9.

  DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—I am very sorry indeed to hear that your engagement is broken off. I feared something of the sort was going to happen because of all the things you nearly said and didn’t in your letters lately. Are you very much troubled and worried? Please let me turn into the elder sister for a little again and give you the small relief of having an attentive listener. It seems to have been rather an unsatisfactory time for you all along. I don’t really quite know what to say. I am, anyhow, most sincerely sorry, but I find it extraordinarily difficult to talk about Miss Cheriton. It is, of course, lamentable that our writing to each other should have been, as you say it was, so often the cause of quarrels. You never told me so, or I would at once have stopped. You fill several pages with surprise that a girl of twenty-two can be so different from what she appears, that so soft and tender an outside can have beneath it such unfathomable depths of hardness. I think you have probably gone to the other extreme now, and because you admired so much are all the more violently critical. It is probable that Miss Cheriton is all that you first thought her, unusually charming and sympathetic and lovable, and your characters simply didn’t suit each other. Don’t think too unkindly in your first anger. I am so very sorry; sorry for you, who must feel as if your life had been convulsed by an earthquake, and all its familiar features disarranged; sorry for your father’s disappointment; sorry for Miss Cheriton, who must have been wretched. But how infinitely wiser to draw back in time and not, for want of courage, drift on into that supreme catastrophe marriage. You mustn’t suppose me cynical in calling it a catastrophe—perhaps I mean it only in its harmless sense of dénouement; and if I don’t I can’t see that it is cynical to recognize a spade when you see it as certainly a spade. But do not let yourself go to bitterness, and so turn into a cynic yourself. You say Miss Cheriton apparently prefers a duke, and are very angry. But why if, as you declare, you have not really loved her for months past, are you angry? Why should she not prefer a duke? Perhaps he is quite a nice one, and you may be certain she felt at once, the very instant, when you left off caring for her. About such things it is as difficult for a woman to be mistaken as it is for a barometer to be hoodwinked in matters meteorologic. It was that, and never the duke, that first influenced her. I am as sure of it as if I could see into her heart. Of course she loved you. But no girl with a spark of decency would cling on to a reluctant lover. What an exceedingly poor thing in girls she would be who did. I can’t tell you how much ashamed I am of that sort of girl, the girl who clings, who follows, who laments—as if the world, the splendid, amazing world, were empty of everything but one single man, and there were no sun shining, no birds singing, no winds blowing, no hills to climb, no trees to sit under, no books to read, no friends to be with, no work to do
, no heaven to go to. I feel now for the first time that I would like to know Miss Cheriton. But it is really almost impossibly difficult to write this letter; each thing I say seems something I had better not have said. Write to me about your troubles as often as you feel it helps you, and believe that I do most heartily sympathize with you both, but don’t mind, and forgive me, if my answers are not satisfactory. I am unpractised and ill at ease, clumsy, limited, in this matter of frank writing about feelings, a matter in which you so far surpass me. But I am always most sincerely your friend

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  L

  Galgenberg, Oct. 15.

  DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—It’s not much use for the absent to send bland advice, to exhort to peace and a putting aside of anger, when they have only general principles to go on. You know more about Miss Cheriton than I do, and I am obliged to believe you when you tell me you have every reason to be bitter. But I can make few comments. My mouth is practically shut. Only, as you told me you long ago left off caring for her, the smart you are feeling now must be, it seems to me, simply the smart of wounded vanity, and for that I’m afraid I have no soothing lotion ready. Also, I am bound to say that I think she was quite right to give you up once she was sure you no longer loved her. I am all for giving 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 is that she did not do it sooner. Don’t think me hard, dear friend. If I were your mother I would blindly yearn over my boy. As it is, you must forgive my unfortunate trick of seeing plainly. I wish things would look more adorned to me, less palpably obvious and ungarnished. These tiresome eyes of mine have often made me angry. I would so much like to sympathize wholly with you now, to be able to be indignant with Miss Cheriton, call her a minx, say she is heartless, be ready with all sorts of healing balms and syrups for you, poor boy, in the clutches of a cruel annoyance. But I can’t. If you could love her again and make it up, that indeed would be a happy thing. As it is—and your letter sets all hopes of the sort aside once and for ever—you have had an escape; for if she had not given you up, I don’t suppose you would have given her up—I don’t suppose that is a thing one often does. You would have married her, and then Heaven knows what would have become of your unfortunate soul.

  After all, you need not have told me you had left off loving her. I knew it. 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 was only a mood, and that you would go back to her again and be happy.

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  LI

  Galgenberg, Oct. 22.

  DEAR MR ANSTRUTHER,—This is a world, it seems to me, where everybody spends their time falling out of love and making their relations uncomfortable. I have only two friends, the rest of my friends being acquaintances, and both have done it or had it done to them. Is it then to be wondered at that I should argue that if it happens to both my friends in a set where there are only two, the entire world must be divided into those who give up and those who are given up, with a Greek chorus of lamenting and explanatory relatives as a finish? Really one might think that love, and its caprices, and its tantrums—you see, I’m in my shrewish mood—makes up the whole of life. Here’s Vicki groaning in the throes of a relapse because some one has written that she met her late lover at a party and that he ate only soup; here she is overcome by this picture, which she translates as a hankering in spite of everything after her, and wanting to write to him, and ready to console him, and crying her eyes all red again, and no longer taking the remotest interest in Comus or in those frequent addresses of mine to her on Homely Subjects, to which up to yesterday she listened with such flattering respect; and here are you writing me the most melancholy letters, longer and drearier than any letters ever were before, filled with yearnings after something that certainly is not Miss Cheriton—but beyond that certainty I can make out nothing. It is a strange and wonderful world. I stand bewildered, with you on one side and Vicki on the other, and fling exhortations at you in turn. I try scolding, to brace you, but neither of you will be braced. I try sympathy, to soothe you, 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 your father’s cable from America when the news of your broken engagement reached 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, you must consider that cabling is expensive, and he didn’t care to put more than one word, and if there had been two it might have made you still angrier. But, seriously, I do see that it must have annoyed you, and I soon left off being so unkind as to laugh. It is odd how much older I feel than either of you lamenters—quite old and quite settled, and so objective somehow. I hope being objective doesn’t make one unsympathetic, but I expect it really rather tends that way; and yet if it were so, and I were as hard and husky as I sometimes dimly fear I may be growing, would you and Vicki want to tell me your sorrows? And other people do too. Think of it, Papa Lindeberg, hitherto a long narrow person buttoned up silently in black, mysterious simply because he held his tongue, a reader of rabid Conservative papers through black-rimmed glasses, and as numb in the fingers as Wordsworth when he shakes my respectful hand, has began to unbend, to unfold, to expand like those Japanese dried flowers you fling into water; and having started with good mornings and weather-comments and politics, and from them proceeded to the satisfactorily confused state of the British army, has gone on imperceptibly but surely to confidential criticisms of the mistakes made here at head-quarters in invariably shelving the best officers at the very 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 every morning at the hour I am due for my lesson to help me over the fence. He comes up with much stateliness and deliberation, but he does come up; and we walk down together, and every day the volume of his confidences increases, and he more and more minutely describes his grievances. I listen and nod my head, which is easy, and apparently all he wants. His wife stops him at once, if he begins to her, by telling him with as much roundness as is consistent with being born a Dammerlitz that the calamities that have overtaken them are entirely his fault. Why was he not as clever as those subordinates who were put over his head? she asks with dangerous tranquillity; and nobody can answer a question like that.

  ‘It makes me twenty years younger,’ he said yesterday as he handed me over the fence with the same politeness I have seen in the manner of old men handing large dowagers to their places in a set of quadrilles, ‘to see your cheerful morning face.’

  ‘If you had said shining morning face you’d have been quoting Shakespeare,’ said I.

  ‘Ah yes. I fear my Shakespeare days are done. I am now at the time of life when serious and practical considerations take up the entire attention of a man. Shakespeare is more suitable now for my daughter than 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. People who have no serious responsibilities on their shoulders. People of the pen, not men of the sword. But officers—and who in our country of the well-born is not, was not, or will not be an officer?—have no time for general literature. Of course,’ he added, with a slight bow, for he regards me as personally responsible for everybody and everything English, ‘we have all heard of him.’

  ‘Indeed?’ said I.

  ‘When I was a boy,’ he said this morning, ‘I read at school of a young woman—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 p
eriod are curiously intricate. But why is it, dear Fräulein Schmidt, that though I can recollect nothing of her but her name, whenever I see you you remind me of her?’

  Now, was not that very pleasant? Hebe, the restorer of youth to gods and men; Hebe, the vigorous and wholesome. Thoreau says she was probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and that whenever she came it was spring. No wonder I was pleased.

  ‘Perhaps it’s because I’m healthy,’ said I.

  ‘Is that it?’ he said, obviously fumbling about in his brain for the reason. And when he got to the house he displayed the results of his fumbling 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 once said I was like Nausicaa, and here a year later, a year in which various rather salt and stinging waves have gone over my head, is somebody comparing me to Hebe. Evidently the waves did me no harm. It is true, on the other hand, that Papa Lindeberg is short-sighted. It is also true that last night I found a beautiful shining silvery hair insolently flaunting in the very front of my head. ‘Yes, yes, my dear,’ said Papa—my Papa—when I showed it him, ‘we are growing old.’

  ‘And settled. And objective,’ said I, carefully pulling it out before the glass. ‘And yet, Papachen, inside me I feel quite young.’