Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  After a time her natural shrewdness and common sense made her perceive that her one claim to the scanty attentions she did receive was her money. Her money had bought her Peter, and a pleasant future for her children; it had converted a Dobbs into an Estcourt; it had given her everything she had that was worth anything at all. Once she had thoroughly realised this, she began to attach a tremendous importance to the mere possession of money, and grew very stingy, making difficulties about spending that grieved Peter greatly; not because he ever wanted her money now that Estcourt had been restored to its old splendour and set going again for their boy, but because meanness about money in a woman was something he could not comprehend — something repulsive, unfeminine, contrary to her nature as he had always understood it. He left off making the least suggestion about Anna’s education or the household arrangements; everything that was done was done of Susie’s own accord; and he spent more and more time in Devonshire, and grew more and more philosophical, and when he did talk to his wife, restricted his conversation to the language of abstract wisdom.

  Now this was very hard on Susie, who had no appreciation of abstract wisdom, and who lived as lonely a life as it is possible to imagine. Peter kept out of her way. Anna was subject to prolonged fits of chilly silence. Susie used, at such times, to think regretfully of the cheerful Dobbs days, of their frank and congenial vulgarity.

  When Anna was eighteen, Susie’s prospects brightened for a time. Doors that had been shut ever since she married, opened before her on her appearing with such a pretty débutante under her wing, and she could enjoy the reflected glory of Anna’s little triumphs. And then, without any apparent reason, Anna had altered so strangely, and had disappointed every one’s expectations; never encouraging the right man, never ready to do as she was told, exasperatingly careless on all matters of vital importance, and ending by showing symptoms of freezing into something of the same philosophical state as Peter. Their mother had been German —— a lady-in-waiting to one of the German princesses; and their father had met her and married her while he was secretary at the English Embassy in St. Petersburg. And Susie, who had heard of German philosophy and German stolidity, and despised them both with all her heart, concluded that the German strain was accountable for everything about Peter and Anna that was beyond her comprehension; and sometimes, when Peter was more than usually wise and unapproachable, would call him Herr Schopenhauer — which had an immediate effect of producing a silence that lasted for weeks; for not only did he like her least when she was playful, but he had, as a matter of fact, read a great deal of Schopenhauer, and was uneasily conscious that it had not been good for him.

  While Peter fished, and meditated on the vanity of human wishes at Estcourt, Anna, with rare exceptions, was wherever Susie was, and Susie was wherever it was fashionable to be. For a week or two in the summer, for a day or two at Easter, they went down to Devonshire; and Anna might wander about the old house and grounds as she chose, and feel how much better she had loved it in its tumble-down state, the state she had known as a child, when her mother lived there and was happy. Everything was aggressively spruce now, indoors and out. Susie’s money and Susie’s taste had rubbed off all the mellowness and all the romance. Anna was glad to leave it again, and be taken to Marienbad, or any place where there was royalty, for Susie loved royalty. But what a life it was, going round year after year with Susie! London, Devonshire, Marienbad, Scotland, London again, following with patient feet wherever the unconscious royalties led, meeting the same people, listening to the same music, talking the same talk, eating the same dinners — would no one ever invent anything new to eat? The inexpressible boredom of riding up and down the Row every morning, the unutterable hours shopping and trying on clothes, the weariness of all the new pictures, and all the concerts, and all the operas, which seemed to grow less pleasing every year, as her eye and ear grew more critical. She knew at last every note of the stock operas and concerts, and every note seemed to have got on to her nerves.

  And then the people they knew — the everlasting sameness of them, content to go the same dull round for ever. Driving in the Park with Susie, neither of them speaking a word, she used to watch the faces in the other carriages, nearly all faces of acquaintances, to see whether any of them looked cheerful; and it was the rarest thing to come across any expression but one of blankest boredom. Bored and cross, hardly ever speaking to the person with them, their friends drove up and down every afternoon, and she and Susie did the same, as silent and as bored as any of them. A few unusually beautiful, or unusually witty, or unusually young persons appeared to find life pleasant and looked happy, but they avoided Susie. Her set was made up of the dull and plain; and all the amusing people, and all the interesting people, turned their backs with one accord on her and it.

  These were the circumstances that drove Anna to reflect on the problems of life every time she was beyond the sound of Susie’s voice.

  She passionately resented her position of dependence on Susie, and she passionately resented the fact that the only way to get out of it was to marry. Every time she had an offer, she first of all refused it with an energy that astonished the unhappy suitor, and then spent days and nights of agony because she had refused it, and because Susie wanted her to accept it, and because of an immense pity for Susie that had taken possession of her heart. How could Peter live so placidly at Susie’s expense, and treat her with such a complete want of tenderness? Anna’s love for her brother diminished considerably directly she began to understand Susie’s life. It was such a pitiful little life of cringing, and pushing, and heroically smiling in the face of ill-treatment. No one cared for her in the very least. She had hundreds of acquaintances, who would eat her dinners and go away and poke fun at her, but not a single friend. Her husband lived on her and hardly spoke to her. Her boy at Eton, an amazing prig, looked down on her. Her little daughter never dreamed of obeying her. Anna herself was prevented by some stubborn spirit of fastidiousness, evidently not possessed by any of her contemporaries, from doing the only thing Susie had ever really wanted her to do — marrying, and getting herself out of the way. What if Susie were a vulgar little woman of no education and no family? That did not make it any the more glorious for the Estcourts to take all they could and ignore her existence. It was, after all, Susie who paid the bills. Anna pitied her from the bottom of her heart; such a forlorn little woman, taken out of her proper sphere, and left to shiver all alone, without a shred of love to cover and comfort her.

  It was when she was away from Susie that she felt this. When she was with her, she found herself as cold and quiet and contradictory as Peter. She used, whenever she got the chance, to go to afternoon service at St. Paul’s. It was the only place and time in which all the bad part of her was soothed into quiet, and the good allowed to prevail in peace. The privacy of the great place, where she never met anyone she knew, the beauty of the music, the stateliness of the service offered every day in equal perfection to any poor wretch choosing to turn his back for an hour on the perplexities of life, all helped to hush her grievances to sleep and fill her heart with tenderness for those who were not happy, and for those who did not know they were unhappy, and for those who wasted their one precious life in being wretched when they might have been happy. How little it would need, she thought (for she was young and imaginative), to turn most people’s worries and sadness into joy. Such a little difference in Susie’s ways and ideas would make them all so happy; such a little change in Peter’s habits would make his wife’s life radiant. But they all lived blindly on, each day a day of emptiness, each of those precious days, so crowded with opportunities, and possibilities, and unheeded blessings, and presently life would be behind them, and their chances gone for ever.

  “The world is a dreadful place, full of unhappy people,” she thought, looking out on to the world with unhappy eyes. “Each one by himself, with no one to comfort him. Each one with more than he can bear, and no one to help him. Oh, if I could, I would hel
p and comfort everyone that is sad, or sick at heart, or sorry — oh, if I could!”

  And she dreamed of all that she would do if she were Susie — rich, and free from any sort of interference — to help others, less fortunate, to be happy too. But, since she was the very reverse of rich and free, she shook off these dreams, and made numbers of good resolutions instead — resolutions bearing chiefly on her future behaviour towards Susie. And she would come out of the church filled with the sternest resolves to be ever afterwards kind and loving to her; and the very first words Susie uttered would either irritate her into speeches that made her sorry, or freeze her back into her ordinary state of cold aloofness.

  If Susie had had an idea that Anna was pitying her, and making good resolutions of which she was the object at afternoon services, and that in her eyes she had come to be merely a cross which must with heroism be borne, she probably would have been indignant. Pitying people and being pitied oneself are two very different things. The first is soothing and sweet, the second is annoying, or even maddening, according to the temperament of the patient. Susie, however, never suspected that anyone could be sorry for her; and when, after a party, before they went to bed, Anna would put her arms round her and give her a disproportionately tender kiss, she would show her surprise openly. “Why, what’s the matter?” she would ask. “Another mood, Anna?” For she could not know how much Anna felt the snubs she had seen her receive. How should she? She was so used to them that she hardly noticed them herself.

  It was when Anna was twenty-five, and much vexed in body by efforts to be and to do as Susie wished, and in soul by those unanswerable questions as to the why and wherefore of the aimless, useless existence she was leading, that the wonderful thing happened that changed her whole life.

  CHAPTER II

  There was a German relation of Anna’s, her mother’s brother, known to Susie as Uncle Joachim. He had been twice to England; once during his sister’s life, when Anna was little, and Peter was unmarried, and they were all poor and happy together at Estcourt; and once after Susie’s introduction into the family, just at that period when Anna was beginning to stiffen and put her hair behind her ears.

  Susie knew all about him, having inquired with her usual frankness on first hearing of his existence whether he would be likely to leave Anna anything on his death; and upon being informed that he had a family of sons, and large estates and little money, looked upon it as a great hardship to be obliged to have him in her London house. She objected to all Germans, and thought this particular one a dreadful old man, and never wearied of making humorous comments on his clothes and the oddness of his manners at meals. She was vexed that he should be with them in Hill Street, and refused to give dinners while he was there. She also asked him several times if he would not enjoy a stay at Estcourt, and said that the country was now at its best, and the primroses were in full beauty.

  “I want not primroses,” said Uncle Joachim, who seldom spoke at length; “I live in the country. I will now see London.”

  So he went about diligently to all the museums and picture-galleries, sometimes alone and sometimes with Anna, who neglected her social duties more than ever in order to be with him, for she loved him.

  They talked together chiefly in German, Uncle Joachim carefully correcting her mistakes; and while they went frugally in omnibuses to the different sights, and ate buns in confectioners’ shops at lunch-time, and walked long distances where no omnibuses were to be found — for besides having a great fear of hansoms he was very thrifty — he drew her out, saying little himself, and in a very short time knew almost as much about her life and her perplexities as she did.

  She was very happy during his visit, and told herself contentedly that blood, after all, was thicker than water. She did not stop to consider what she meant exactly by this, but she had a vague notion that Susie was the water. She felt that Uncle Joachim understood her better than anyone had yet done; and was it not natural that her dear mother’s brother should? And it was only after she had taken him to service at St. Paul’s that she began to perceive that there might perhaps be points on which their tastes differed. Uncle Joachim had remained seated while other people knelt or stood; but that did not matter in that liberal place, where nobody notices the degree of his neighbour’s devoutness. And he had slept during the anthem, one of those unaccompanied anthems that are sung there with what seem of a certainty to be the voices of angels. And on coming out, when a fugue was rolling in glorious confusion down the echoing aisles, and Anna, who preferred her fugues confused, felt that her spirit was being caught up to heaven, he had looked at her rapt face and wet eyelashes, and patted her hand very kindly, and said encouragingly, “In my youth I too cultivated Bach. Now I cultivate pigs. Pigs are better.”

  Anna’s mother had been his only sister, and he had come over, not, as he told Susie, to see London, but to see Susie herself, and to find out how it was that Anna had reached an age that in Germany is the age of old maids without marrying. By the time he had spent two evenings in Hill Street he had formed his opinion of his nephew and his nephew’s wife, and they remained fixed until his death. “The good Peter,” he said suddenly one day to Anna when they were wandering together in the maze at Hampton Court — for he faithfully went the rounds of sightseeing prescribed by Baedeker, and Anna followed him wherever he went— “the good Peter is but a Quatschkopf.”

  “A Quatschkopf?” echoed Anna, whose acquaintance with her mother-tongue did not extend to the byways of opprobrium. “What in the world is a Quatschkopf?”

  “Quatschkopf is a Duselfritz,” explained Uncle Joachim, “and also it is the good Peter.”

  “I believe you are calling him ugly names,” said Anna, slipping her arm through his; by this time, if not kindred spirits, they were the best of friends.

  Uncle Joachim did not immediately reply. They had come to the open space in the middle of the maze, and he sat down on the seat to recover his breath, and to wipe his forehead; for though the wind was cold the sun was fierce. “Gott, was man Alles durchmacht auf Reisen!” he sighed. Then he put his handkerchief back into his pocket, looked up at Anna, who was standing in front of him leaning on her sunshade, and said, “A Quatschkopf is a foolish fellow who marries a woman like that.”

  “Oh, poor Susie!” cried Anna, at once ready to defend her, and full of the kindly feelings absence invariably produced. “Peter did a very sensible thing. But I don’t think Susie did, marrying Peter.”

  “He is a Quatschkopf,” said Uncle Joachim, not to be shaken in his opinions, “and the geborene Dobbs is a vulgar woman who is not rich enough.”

  “Not rich enough? Why, we are all suffocated by her money. We never hear of anything else. It would be dreadful if she had still more.”

  “Not rich enough,” persisted Uncle Joachim, pursing up his lips into an expression of great disapproval, and shaking his head. “Such a woman should be a millionnaire. Not of marks, but of pounds sterling. Short of that, a man of birth does not impose her as a mother on his children. Peter has done it. He is a Quatschkopf.”

  “It is a great mercy that she isn’t a millionnaire,” said Anna, appalled by the mere thought. “Things would be just the same, except that there would be all that money more to hear about. I hate the very name of money.”

  “Nonsense. Money is very good.”

  “But not somebody else’s.”

  “That is true,” said Uncle Joachim approvingly. “One’s own is the only money that is truly pleasant.” Then he added suddenly, “Tell me, how comes it that you are not married?”

  Anna frowned. “Now you are growing like Susie,” she said.