Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  R.-M.

  XII

  Jena, Nov. 22d.

  When do you go back to Jermyn Street? Surely today, for is not the examination to-morrow? Your description of the Cheriton ménage at Clinches is like fairyland. No wonder you feel so happy there. My mother used to tell me about life in England, but apparently the Watson family did not dwell in houses like Clinches. Anyhow I had an impression of little houses with little staircases, and oil-cloth, and a servant in a cap with streamers, and round white balls of suet with currants in them very often for dinner. But Clinches, beautiful and dignified in the mists and subtleties of a November afternoon, its massed grayness melting into that other grayness, its setting of mysterious blurred wood and pale light of water, its spaciousness, its pleasant people, its daughter with the dusky hair and odd gray eyes — is a vision of fairyland. I cannot conceive what life is like in such places; nor I am sure could any other inhabitant of Jena. What, for instance, can it be like to live in a thing so big that you do not hear the sounds nor smell the smells of the kitchen? Ought not people who live in such places to have unusually beautiful ways of looking at life? of thinking? of speaking? One imagines it all very noble, very gracious, altogether worthy. That complete separation from the kitchen is what wrings the biggest sigh of envy out of me. Is it my English blood that makes me rebel against kitchens? Or is it only my unfortunate sensitiveness to smell? I wish I had no nose. It has always been a nuisance. It is as extravagantly delighted by exquisite scents as it is extravagantly horrified by nasty ones. Why, a beautiful smell, if it is delicate, subtle, intermittent, can ruin a morning for me. It fills me with a quite unworthy rapture. Things that ought to be hard in me melt. Things that ought to be fixed are scattered heaven knows where. I go soft, ecstatic, basely idle. I forget that my business is to get dinner, and not to stand still and just sniff. In March I dare not pass the house Schiller used to live in on my way to market, because the people who live there now have planted violets along the railings. It is the shortest way, and it takes ten more minutes out of a busy morning to go round by the Post Office; but really for a grown woman to stand lost in what is mere voluptuous pleasure, leaning against somebody else’s railing while the family dinner lies still unbought in the market-place, is conduct that I cannot justify. As for a beanfield — my dear Roger, did you ever come across a beanfield in flower? It is the divinest experience the nose can give us. Two years ago an Englishman came and spent a spring and summer in the little house in the apple orchard up on the road over the Galgenberg — the little house with the blue shutters — and he was a great gardener. And he dug a big patch, and planted a beanfield, and it was the first beanfield Jena had ever seen; for those beans called broad that you eat in England and are properly thankful for are only grown in Germany for the use of pigs, and there are no pigs in Jena. Sow-beans they are called here, mindful of their destiny. The Englishman, who possessed no visible sow, was a source of astonishment to us. The things came up, and were undoubtedly sow-beans. A great square patch of them grew up just over the fence on which Jena leaned and pondered. The man himself was seen in his shirt-sleeves weeding them on rainy afternoons. Jena could only suspect a pig concealed in the parlor, and was indulgent; and it was indulgent because no one, in its opinion, can be both English and sane. ‘God made us all,’ was its invariable helpless conclusion as it went, shaking its head, home down the hill. When in June the beanfield flowered I blessed that Englishman. No one hung over his fence more persistently than I. It was the first time I had smelt the like. It became an obsession. I wanted to be there at every sort of time and under every sort of weather-condition. At noon, when the sun shone straight down on it drawing up its perfume in hot breaths, I was there; in the morning, so early that it was still in the blue shadow of the Galgenberg and every gray leaf and white petal was drenched with dew, I was there; on wet afternoons, when the scent was crushed out of it by the beating of heavy rain, and the road for half a mile, the slippery clay road with its puddles and amazing mud, was turned into a bath of fragrance fit for the tenderest, most fastidious goddess to bare her darling little limbs in, I was there; and once after lying awake in my hot room so near the roof for hours thinking of it, out there on the hillside in the freshness under the stars, I got up and dressed, and crept with infinite caution past my step-mother’s door, and stole the latchkey, and slunk, my heart in my mouth, through the stale streets, along all the railings and dusty front gardens, out into the open country, up on to the hill, to where it stood in straight and motionless rows sending out waves of fragrance into that wonderful clean air you find in all the places where men leave off and God begins. Did you ever know a woman before who risked her reputation for a beanfield? Well, it is what I did. And I’ll tell you, I am so incurably honest that I can never for long pretend, why I write all this about it. It is that I am sick with anxiety — oh, sick, cold, shivering with it — about your exam. I didn’t want you to know. I’ve tried to write of beanfields instead. I didn’t want you to be bothered. The clamorings for news of the person not on the spot are always a worry, and I did not want to worry. But the letter I got from you this morning never mentions the exam, the thing on which, as you told me, everything depends for us. You talk about Clinches, about the people there, about the shooting, the long days in woods, the keen-wittedness of Nancy who goes with you, who understands before you have spoken, who sympathizes so kindly about me, who fits, you say, so strangely into the misty winter landscape in her paleness, her thinness, her spiritualness. There was one whole page — oh, I grudged it — about her loosely done dark hair, how softly dusky it is, how it makes you think of twilight, and her eyes beneath it of the first faint shining of stars. I wonder if these things really fill your thoughts, or whether you are only using them to drive away useless worry about Saturday. I know you are a poet, and a poet’s pleasure in eyes and hair is not a very personal thing, so I do not mind that. But to-morrow is Saturday. Shall you send me a telegram, I wonder? A week ago I would not have wondered; I should have been so sure you would let me have one little word at once about how you felt it had gone off — one little word for the person so far away, so helpless, so dependent on your kindness for the very power to go on living. Oh, what stuff this is. Worse even than the beanfield. But I must be sentimental sometimes, now mustn’t I? or I would not be a woman. But really, my darling, I am very anxious.

  R.-M.

  XIII

  Jena, Nov. 23 d.

  I have waited all day, and there has been no telegram. Well, on Monday I shall get a letter about it, and how much more satisfactory that is. Today after all is nearly over, and there is only Sunday to be got through first, and I shall be helped to endure that by the looking forward. Isn’t it a mercy that we never get cured of being expectant? It makes life so bearable. However regularly we are disappointed and nothing whatever happens, after the first blow has fallen, after the first catch of the breath, the first gulp of misery, we turn our eyes with all their old eagerness to a point a little further along the road. I suppose in time the regular repetition of shocks does wear out hope, and then I imagine one’s youth collapses like a house of cards. Real old age begins then, inward as well as outward; and one’s soul, that kept so bravely young for years after one’s face got its first wrinkles, suddenly shrivels up. Its light goes out. It is suddenly and irrecoverably old, blank, dark, indifferent.

  Sunday Night.

  I didn’t finish my letter last night because, observing the strain I had got into, I thought it better for your comfort that I should go to bed. So I did. And while I went there I asked myself why I should burden you with the dull weight of my elementary reflections. You who are so clever and who think so much and so clearly, must laugh at their elementariness. They are green and immature, the acid juice of an imperfect fruit that has always hung in the shadow. And yet I don’t think you must laugh, Roger. It would, after all, be as cruel as the laughter of a child watching a blind man ridiculously stumbling among the difficultie
s of the way.

  The one Sunday post brought nothing from you. The day has been very long. I cannot tell you how glad I am night has come, and only sleep separates me now from Monday morning’s letter. These Sundays now that you are gone are intolerable. Before you came they rather amused me, — the furious raging of Saturday, with its extra cleaning and feverish preparations till far into the night; Johanna more than usually slipshod all day, red of elbow, wispy of hair, shuffling about in her felt slippers, her skirt girded up very high, a moist mop and an overflowing pail dribbling soapy tracks behind her in her progress; my step-mother baking and not lightly to be approached; Papa fled from early morning till supper-time; and then the dead calm of Sunday, day of food and sleep. Cake for breakfast — such a bad beginning. Church in the University chapel, with my step-mother in her best hat with the black feathers and the pink rose — it sounds frivolous, but you must have noticed the awe-inspiring effect of it coming so unexpectedly on the top of her long respectable face and oiled-down hair. A fluffy person in that hat would have all the students offering to take her for a walk or share their umbrella with her. My step-mother stalks along panoplied in her excellences, and the feather waves and nods gayly at the passing student as he slinks away down by-streets. Once last spring a silly bee thought the rose must be something alive and honeyful, and went and smelt it. I think it must have been a very young bee; anyhow nobody else up to now has misjudged my step-mother like that. She sits near the door in church, and has never yet heard the last half of the sermon because she has to go out in time to put the goose or other Sunday succulence safely into the oven. I wish she would let me do that, for I don’t care for sermons. When you were here and condescended to come with us at least we could criticize them comfortably on our way home; but alone with my step-mother I may do nothing but praise. It is the most tiring, tiresome of all attitudes, the one of undiscriminating admiration. To hear you pull the person who had preached to pieces, and laugh at the things he had said that would not bear examination, used to be like having a window thrown open in a stuffy room on a clear winter’s morning. Shall you ever forget the elaborateness of the Sunday dinner? For that, chiefly, is Saturday sacrificed, a whole day that might be filled with lovely leisure. I do hope you never thought that I too looked upon it as a nice way of celebrating Sunday. How amazing it is, the way women waste life. Men waste enough of it, heaven knows, but never anything like so much as women. Papa and I both hate that Sunday dinner, both dread the upheavals of Saturday made necessary by it, and you, I know, disliked them just as much, and so has every other young man we have had here; yet my step-mother inflicts these things on us with an iron determination that nothing will ever alter. And why? Only because she was brought up in the belief that it was proper, and because, if she omitted to do the proper, female Jena would be aghast. Well, I think it’s a bad thing to be what is known as brought up, don’t you? Why should we poor helpless little children, all soft and resistless, be squeezed and jammed into the rusty iron bands of parental points of view? Why should we have to have points of view at all? Why not, for those few divine years when we are still so near God, leave us just to guess and wonder? We are not given a chance. On our pulpy little minds our parents carve their opinions, and the mass slowly hardens, and all those deep, narrow, up and down strokes harden with it, and the first thing the best of us have to do on growing up is to waste precious time rubbing and beating at the things to try to get them out. Surely the child of the most admirable, wise parent is richer with his own faulty but original point of view than he would be fitted out with the choicest selection of maxims and conclusions that he did not have to think out for himself? I could never be a schoolmistress. I should be afraid to teach the children. They know more than I do. They know how to be happy, how to live from day to day in god-like indifference to what may come next. And is not how to be happy the secret we spend our lives trying to guess? Why then should I, by forcing them to look through my stale eyes, show them as through a dreadful magnifying glass the terrific possibilities, the cruel explosiveness of what they had been lightly tossing to each other across the daisies and thinking were only toys?

  Today at dinner, when Papa had got to the stage immediately following the first course at which, his hunger satisfied, he begins to fidget and grow more and more unhappy, and my step-mother was conversing blandly but firmly with the tried and ancient friend she invites to bear witness that we too have a goose on Sundays, and I had begun to droop, I hope poetically, like a thirsty flower let us say, or a broken lily, over my plate, I thought — oh, how longingly I thought — of the happy past meals, made happy because you were here sitting opposite me and I could watch you. How short they seemed in those days. You didn’t know I was watching you, did you? But I was. And I learned to do it so artfully, so cautiously. When you turned your head and talked to Papa I could do it openly; when you talked to me I could look straight in your dear eyes while I answered; but when I wasn’t answering I still looked at you, by devious routes carefully concealed, routes that grew so familiar by practice that at last I never missed a single expression, while you, I suppose, imagined you had nothing before you but a young woman with a vacant face. What talks and laughs we will have about that odd, foolish year we spent here together in our blindness when next we meet! We’ve had no time to say anything at all yet. There are thousands of things I want to ask you about, thousands of little things we said and did that seem so strange now in the light of our acknowledged love. My heart stands still at the thought of when next we meet. These letters have been so intimate, and we were not intimate. I shall be deadly shy when in your presence I remember what I have written and what you have written. We are still such strangers, bodily, personally; strangers with the overwhelming memory of that last hour together to make us turn hot and tremble.

  Now I am going to bed, — to dream of you, I suppose, considering that all day long I am thinking of you; and perhaps I shall have a little luck, and dream that I hear you speaking. You know, Roger, I love you for all sorts of queer and apparently inadequate reasons — I won’t tell you what they are, for they are quite absurd; things that have to do with eyebrows, and the shape of hands, so you see quite foolish things — but most of all I love you for your voice. A beautiful speaking voice is one of the best of the gifts of the gods. It is so rare; and it is so irresistible. Papa says heaps of nice poetic things, but then the darling pipes. The most eloquent lecturer we have here does all his eloquence, which is really very great read afterward in print, in a voice of beer, loose, throaty, reminiscent of barrels. Not one of the preachers who come to the University chapel has a voice that does not spoil the merit there may be in what he says. Sometimes I think that if a man with the right voice were to get up in that pulpit and just say, ‘Children, Christ died for you,’ — oh, then I think that all I have and am, body, mind, soul, would be struck into one great passion of gratefulness and love, and that I would fall conquered on my face before the Cross on the altar, and cry and cry....

  XIV

  Jena, Nov. 25th. Monday Night.

  The last post has been. No letter. If you had posted it in London on Saturday after the examination I ought to have had it by now. I am tortured by the fear that something has happened to you. Such dreadful things do happen. Those great, blundering, blind fists of Fate, laying about in mechanical cruelty, crushing the most precious lives as indifferently as we crush an ant in an afternoon walk, how they terrify me. All day I have been seeing foolish, horrible pictures — your train to London smashing up, your cab coming to grief — the thousand things that might so easily happen really doing it at last. I sent my two letters to Jermyn Street, supposing you would have left Clinches, but now somehow I don’t think you did leave it, but went up from there for the exam. Do you know it is three days since I heard from you? That wouldn’t matter so much — for I am determined never to bother you to write, I am determined I will never be an exacting woman — if it were not for the all-important examination.
You said that if you passed it well and got a good place in the Foreign Office you would feel justified in telling your father about us. That means that we would be openly engaged. Not that I care for that, or want it except as the next step to our meeting again. It is clear that we cannot meet again till our engagement is known. Even if you could get away and come over for a few days I would not see you. I will not be kissed behind doors. These things are too wonderful to be handled after the manner of kitchen-maids. I am willing to be as silent as the grave for as long as you choose, but so long as I am silent we shall not meet. I tell you I am incurably honest. I cannot bear to lie. And even these letters, this perpetual writing when no one is likely to look, this perpetual watching for the postman so that no one will be likely to see, does not make me love myself any better. It is true I need not have watched quite so carefully lately, need I? Oh Roger, why don’t you write? What has happened? Think of my wretched plight if you are ill. Just left to wonder at the silence, to gnaw away at my miserable heart. Or, if some one took pity on me and sent me word, — your servant, or the doctor, or the kind Nancy — what could I do even then but still sit here and wait? How could I, a person of whom nobody has heard, go to you? It seems to me that the whole world has a right to be with you, to know about you, except myself. I cannot wait for the next post. The waiting for these posts makes me feel physically sick. If the man is a little late, what torments I suffer lest he should not be coming at all. Then I hear him trudging up the stairs. I fly to the door, absolutely vainly trying to choke down hope. ‘There will be no letter, no letter, no letter,’ I keep on crying to my thumping heart so that the disappointment shall not be quite so bitter; and it takes no notice, but thumps back wildly, ‘Oh, there will, there will.’ And what the man gives me is a circular for Papa.