Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  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 I

  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 20th.

  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, barren 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 foolish frightened hare’s 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 hearth-rug 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 like a terrified hare, 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 northeast wind was thundering among the hills.

  ‘Great cold,’ he said, fixing me with his hare’s eyes, ‘seems to me 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 hare-like 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 a 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 27th.

  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.

  ‘Höllish
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 be 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 step-mother’s attitude toward 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 seemed to be troublesome about learning, Papa must write and demand a higher scale of payment. Papa wouldn’t; my step-mother 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?’

  ‘Must one go every time all the way to Epsom?’

  Joey ceased from speech and began to stare.

  ‘Are we not talking about salts?’ I inquired hastily, feeling that one of us was off the track.

  ‘Salts?’ echoed Joey, his mouth hanging open.

  ‘You mentioned Epsom, surely?’

  ‘Salts?’

  ‘You did say Epsom, didn’t you?’

  ‘Salts?’

  ‘Salts,’ said I, becoming very distinct in the presence of what looked like deliberate wilfulness.

  ‘What’s it got to do with salts?’ asked Joey, his underlip of a measureless vacancy.

  ‘Hasn’t it got everything?’

  ‘Look here, what are you drivin’ at? Is it goin’ to be a game?’

  ‘Certainly not. It’s Sunday. Did you ever hear of Epsom salts?’

  ‘Oh — ah — I see — Eno, and all that. Castor oil. Rhubarb and magnesia. Well, I’ll forgive you as you’re only German. Pretty weird, what bits of information you get hold of. Never the right bits, somehow. I’ll tell you what, Miss Schmidt—’

  ‘Oh, do.’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Tell me what.’

  ‘Well, ain’t I goin’ to? You all seem to know everything in this house that’s not worth knowin’, and not a blessed thing that is.’

  ‘Do you include Goethe?’

  ‘Confound Gerty,’ said Joey.

  Such are my conversations with Joey. Is there anything more you want to know?

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  XXXIV

  Jena, July 3d.

  Dear Mr. Anstruther, — I am sorry not to have been able to answer your letters for so many weeks, and sorry that you should have been, as you say, uneasy, but my telegram in reply to yours will have explained what has been happening to us. My step-mother died a fortnight ago. Almost immediately after I wrote last to you she began to be very ill. My feelings toward her have undergone a complete upheaval. I cannot speak of her. She is revenging herself, as only the dead in their utter unresentfulness can revenge themselves, for every hard and scoffing thought I had of her in life. I think I told you once about her annuity. Now it is gone Papa and I must see to it that we live on my mother’s money alone. It is a hundred pounds a year, so the living will have to be prudent; not so prudent, I hope, but that we shall have everything to enjoy that is worth enjoying, but quite prudent enough to force us to take thought. So we are leaving the flat, grown far too expensive for us, as soon as we can find some other home. We have almost decided on one already. Mr. Collins went to England when the illness grew evidently hopeless, and we shall not take him back again, for my father does not care, at least at present, to have strangers with us, and I myself do not feel as though I could cook for and look after a young man in the way my step-mother did. Not having one will make us poor, but I think we shall be able to manage quite well, for we do not want much.

  Thank you for your kind letters since the telegram. The ones before that, coming into this serious house filled with the nearness of Death, and of Death in his sternest mood, his hands cruel with scourges, seemed to me so inexpressibly — well, I will not say it; it is not fair to blame you, who could not know in whose shadow we were sitting, for being preoccupied with the trivialities of living. But letters sent to friends a long way off do sometimes fall into their midst with a rather ghastly clang of discord. It is what yours did. I read them sometimes in the night, watching by my step-mother in the half-dark room during the moments when she had a little peace and was allowed to slip away from torture into sleep. By the side of that racked figure and all it meant and the tremendous sermons it was preaching me, wordless, voiceless sermons, more eloquent than any I shall hear again, how strange, how far-away your echoes from life and the world seemed! Distant tinklings of artificialness; not quite genuine writhings beneath not quite genuine burdens; idle questionings and self-criticisms; plaints, doubts, and complicated half-veiled reproaches of myself that I should be able to be pleased with a world so worm-eaten that I should still be able to chant my song of life in a major key in a world so manifestly minor and chromatic. These things fell oddly across the gravity of that room. Shadows in a place where everything was clear, cobwebs of unreality where everything was real. They made me sigh, and they made me smile, they were so very black and yet so very little. I used to wonder what that usually excellent housemaid Experience is about, that she has not yet been after you with her broom. You know her specialty is the pulling up of blinds and the letting in of the morning sun. But it is unfair to judge you. Your letters since you knew have been kindness itself. Thank you for them.

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  It seemed so strange for any one to die in June; so strange to be lifeless in the midst of the wanton profusion of life, to grow cold in that quivering radiance of heat. The people below us have got boxes of calla-lilies on their balcony this year. Their hot, heavy scent used to come in at the open window in the afternoons when the sun was on them, the honey-sweet smell of life, intense, penetrating, filling every corner of the room with splendid, pagan summer. And on the bed tossed my step-mother, muttering ceaselessly to herself of Christ.

  XXXV

  Jena, July 15th.

  Dear Mr. Anstruther, — Our new address is Galgenberg, Jena, — rather grim, but what’s in a name? The thing itself is perfect. It is a tiny house, white, with green shutters, on the south slope of the hill among apple-trees. The garden is so steep that you can’t sit down in it except on the north side of the house, where you can because the house is there to stop you from sliding farther. It is a strip of rough grass out of which I shall make haycocks, with three apple-trees in it. There is also a red currant bush, out of which I shall make jelly. At the bottom, below the fence — rotten in places, but I’m going to mend that — begins a real apple or
chard, and through its leaves we can look down on the roof of another house, white like ours, but a little bigger, and with blue shutters instead of green. People take it for the summer, and once an Englishman came and made a beanfield there — but I think I told you about the beanfield. Behind us, right away up the slope, are pine trees that brush restlessly backward and forward all day long across the clouds, trying to sweep bits of clear blue in the sky, and at night spread themselves out stiff and motionless against the stars. I saw them last night from my window. We moved in yesterday. The moving in was not very easy, because of what Papa calls the precipitous nature of the district. He sat with his back propped against the wall of the house on the only side on which, as I have explained, you can sit, and worked with a pencil at his book about Goethe in Jena with perfect placidity while Johanna and I and the man who urged the furniture cart up the hill kept on stepping over his legs as we went in and out furnishing the house. There was not much to furnish, which was lucky, there not being much to furnish with. We have got rid of all superfluities, including the canary, which I presented, its cage beautifully tied up with the blue ribbons I wore at my first party, to the little girl with the flame-colored hair on the second floor. As much of the other things as any one could be induced to buy we sold, and we burnt what nobody would buy or endure having given them. And so, pared down, we fit in here quite nicely, and after a day or two conceded to the suavities of life, such as the tacking up in appropriate places of muslin curtains and the tying of them with bows, I intend to buy a spade and a watering-pot and see what I can do with the garden.

  I wish it were not quite so steep. If I’m not on the upper side of one of the apple-trees with my back firmly pressed against its trunk I don’t yet see how I am to garden. It must be disturbing, and a great waste of time, to have to hold on to something with one hand while you garden with the other. And suppose the thing gives way, and you roll down on to the broken fence? And if that, too, gave way, there would be nothing but a few probably inadequate apple trunks between me and the roof of the house with the blue shutters. I should think it extremely likely that until I’ve got the mountain-side equivalent for what are known as one’s sea-legs I shall very often be on that roof. I hope it is strong and new. Perhaps there are kind people inside who will not mind. Soon they’ll get so much used to it that when they hear the preliminary rush among their apple-trees and the cracking of the branches followed by the thud over their heads, they won’t even look up from their books, but just murmur to each other, ‘There’s Fräulein Schmidt on the roof again,’ and go on with their studies.