Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  ‘Ach, Fräulein Schmidt,’ said he, suddenly perceiving me. ‘Good evening. A fine evening. I did not know I had an audience.’

  ‘Yes,’ said I, unable at once to adjust myself to politenesses.

  ‘Do you like music?’

  ‘Yes,’ said I, still vibrating.

  ‘It is a good violin. I picked it up—’ and he told me a great many things that I did not hear, for how can you hear when your spirit refuses to come back from its journeyings among the stars?

  ‘Will you not enter?’ he said at last. ‘My mother is fetching up some beer and will be here in a moment. It makes one warm playing.’

  But I would not enter. I walked back slowly through the long orchard grass between the apple-trees trees. The moon gleamed along the branches. The branches were weighed down with apples. The place was full of the smell of fruit, of the smell of fruit fallen into the grass, that had lain there bruised all day in the sun. I think the beauty of the world is crushing. Often it seems almost unbearable, calling out such an acuteness of sensation, such a vivid, leaping sensitiveness of feeling, that indeed it is like pain.

  But what I want to talk about is the strange way good things come out of evil. It really almost makes you respect and esteem the bad things, doing it with an intelligent eye fixed on the future. Here is our young friend down the hill, a young man most ordinary in every way but one, so ordinary that I think we must put him under the heading bad, taking bad in the sense of negation, of want of good, here he is, robust of speech, fond of beer, red of tie, chosen as her temple by that delicate lady the Muse of melody. Apparently she is not very particular about her temples. It is true while he is playing at her dictation she transforms him wholly, and I suppose she does not care what he is like in between. But I do. I care because in between he thinks it pleasant to entertain me with facetiousness, his mother hanging fondly on every word in the amazing way mothers, often otherwise quite intelligent persons, do. Since that first evening he has played every evening, and his taste in music is as perfect as it is bad in everything else. It is severe, exquisite, exclusive. It is the taste that plays Mozart and Bach and Beethoven, and wastes no moments with the Mendelssohn sugar or the lesser inspiration of Brahms. I tried to strike illumination out of him on these points, wanted to hear his reasons for a greater exclusiveness than I have yet met, went through a string of impressive names beginning with Schumann and ending with Wagner and Tchaikowsky, but he showed no interest, and no intelligence either, unless a shrug of the shoulder is intelligent. It is true he remarked one day that he found life too short for anything but the best— ‘That is why,’ he added, unable to forbear from wit, ‘I only drink Pilsner.’

  ‘What?’ I cried, ignoring the Pilsner, ‘and do not these great men’ — again I ran through a string of them— ‘do not they also belong to the very best?’

  ‘No,’ he said; and would say no more. So you see he is obstinate as well as narrow-minded.

  Of course such exclusiveness in art is narrow-minded, isn’t it? Besides, it is very possible he is wrong. You, I know, used to perch Brahms on one of the highest peaks of Parnassus (I never thought there was quite room enough for him on it), and did you not go three times all the way to Munich while you were with us to hear Mottl conduct the Ring? Surely it is probable a person of your all-round good taste is a better judge than a person of his very nearly all-round bad taste? Whatever your faults may be, you never made a fault in ties, never clamored almost ceaselessly for drink, never talked about schwitzen, nor entertained young women from next door with the tricks and facetiousness of a mountebank. I wonder if his system were carried into literature, and life were wholly concentrated on the half dozen absolutely best writers, so that we who spread our attention out thin over areas I am certain are much too wide knew them as we never can know them, became part of them, lived with them and in them, saw through their eyes and thought with their thoughts, whether there would be gain or loss? I don’t know. Tell me what you think. If I might only have the six mightiest books to go with me through life I would certainly have to learn Greek because of Homer. But when it comes to the very mightiest, I cannot even get my six; I can only get four. Of course when I loosely say six books I mean the works of six writers. But beyond my four I cannot get; there must be a slight drop for the other two, — very slight, hardly a drop, rather a slight downward quiver into a radiance the faintest degree less blazing, but still a degree less. These two would be Milton and Virgil. The other four — but you know the other four without my telling you. I am not sure that the Assessor is not right, and that one cannot, in matters of the spirit, be too exclusive. Exclusiveness means concentration, deeper study, minuter knowledge; for we only have a handful of years to do anything in, and they are quite surely not enough to go round when going round means taking in the whole world.

  On the other hand, wouldn’t my speech become archaic? I’m afraid I would have a tendency that would grow to address Papa in blank verse. My language, even when praying him at breakfast to give me butter, would be incorrigibly noble. I don’t think Papa would like it. And what would he say to a daughter who was forced by stress of concentration on six works to go through life without Goethe? Goethe, you observe, was not one of the two less glorious and he certainly was not one of the four completely glorious. I begin to fear I should miss a great deal by my exclusions. It would be sad to die without ever having been thrilled by Werther, exalted by Faust, amazed by the Wahlverwandtschaften, sent to sleep by Wilhelm Meister. To die innocent of any knowledge of Schiller’s Glocke, with no memory of strenuous hours spent getting it by heart at school, might be quite pleasant. But I think it would end by being tiring to be screwed up perpetually to the pitch of the greatest men’s greatest moments. Such heights are not for insects like myself. I would hang very dismally, with drooping head and wings, on those exalted hooks. And has not the soul too its longings at times for a dressing-gown and slippers? And do you see how you could do without Boswell?

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  XLII

  Galgenberg, Aug. 31st.

  Dear Mr. Anstruther, — Yes, of course he does. He plays every evening. And every evening I go and listen, either in the orchard beneath the open window or, more ceremoniously, inside the room with or without Papa. I find it a pleasant thing. I am living in a bath of music. And I hope you don’t expect me to agree with your criticism of music as a stirrer-up of, on the whole, second-rate emotions. What are second-rate emotions? Are they the ones that you have? And was it to have them stirred that you used to journey so often to Munich and Mottl? Stirred up I certainly am. Not in the way, I admit, in which a poem of Milton’s does it, not affected in the least as I am affected by, for instance, the piled-up majesty of the poem on Time, but if less nobly still very effectually. There; I have apparently begun to agree with you. Well, I do see, the moment I begin to consider, that what is stirred is less noble. I do see that what I feel when I listen to music is chiefly Wehmuth, and I don’t think much of Wehmuth. You have no word for it. Perhaps in England you do not have just that form of sentiment. It is a forlorn thing, made up mostly of vague ingredients, — vague yearnings, vague regrets, vague dissatisfactions. When it comes over you, you remember all the people who are absent, and you are sad; and the people who are dead, and you sigh; and the times you have been naughty, and you groan. I do see that a sentiment that makes you do that is not the highest. It is profitless, sterile. It doesn’t send you on joyfully to the next thing, but keeps you lingering in the dust of churchyards, barren places of the past which should never be revisited by the wholesome-minded. Now this looks as though I were agreeing with you quite, but I still don’t. You put it so extremely. It is so horrid to think that even my emotions may be second-rate. I long ago became aware that my manners were so, but I did like to believe there was nothing second-rate about my soul. Well, what is one to do? Never be soft? Never be sad? Or sorry? Or repentant? Always stay up at the level of Milton�
�s Time poem, or of his At a Solemn Musick, strung high up to an unchanging pitch of frigid splendor and nobleness? It is what I try to aim at. It is what I would best like. Then comes our friend of the red tie, and in the cool of the day when the world is dim and scented shakes a little fugue of Bach’s out of his fiddle, a sparkling, sly little fugue, frolicsome for all its minor key, a handful of bright threads woven together, twisted in and out, playing, it would seem, at some game of hide-and-seek, of pretending to want to catch each other into a tangle, but always gayly coming out of the knots, each distinct and holding on its shining way till the meeting at the end, the final embrace when the game is over and they tie themselves contentedly together into one comfortable major chord, — our friend plays this, this manifestly happy thing, and my soul listens, and smiles, and sighs, and longs, and ends by being steeped in Wehmuth. I choose the little fugue of Bach as an instance, for of all music it is aimed most distinctly at the intellect, it is the furthest removed from Wehmuth; and if it has this effect on me I will not make you uncomfortable by a description of what the baser musics do, the musics of passion, of furious exultations and furious despairs. But my vague wish for I do not know what, gentle, and rather sweetly resigned when the accompaniment is Bach, swells suddenly while I listen to them into a terrifying longing that rends and shatters my soul.

  What private things I tell you. I wouldn’t if I were talking. I would be affected by your actual presence. But writing is so different, and so strange; at once so much more and so much less intimate. The body is safe — far away, unassailable; and the spirit lets itself go out to meet a fellow spirit with the frankness it can never show when the body goes too, that grievous hinderer of the communion of saints, that officious blunderer who can spoil the serenest intercourse by a single blush.

  Johanna came in just there. She was decked in smiles, and wanted to say good-by till to-morrow morning. It is her night out, and she really looked rather wonderful to one used to her kitchen condition. Her skin, cleansed from week-day soilure, was surprisingly fair; her hair, waved more beautifully than mine will ever be, was piled up in bright imposing masses; her starched white dress had pink ribbons about it; she wore cotton gloves; and held the handkerchief I lend her on these occasions genteelly by its middle in her hand. Every second Sunday she descends the mountain at sunset, the door-key in her pocket, and dances all night in some convivial Gasthof in the town, coming up again at sunrise or later according to the amount of fun she was having. On the Monday I do nearly everything alone, for she sleeps half the day, and the other half she doesn’t like being talked to. She is a good servant, and she would certainly go if we tried to get her in again under the twelve hours. On the alternate Sundays we allow her to have her young man up for the afternoon and evening. He is a trumpeter in the regiment stationed in Jena, and he brings his trumpet to fill up awkward silences. Engaged couples of that kind don’t seem able to talk much, so that the trumpet is a great comfort to them. Whenever conversation flags he whips it out and blows a rousing blast, giving her time to think of something to say next. I had to ask him to do it in the garden, for the first time it nearly blew our roof, which isn’t very tightly on, off. Now he and she sit together on a bench outside the door, and the genius down the hill with the exclusive ears suffers, I am afraid, rather acutely. Papa and I wander as far away as we can get among the mountains.

  It is rather dreadful when they quarrel. Then, of course, Johanna sulks as girls will, and sulks are silent things, so that the trumpet has to fill up a yawning gulf and never leaves off at all. Last Sunday it blew the whole time we were out, and I expected when I got home to find the engagement broken off. We stayed away as long as we could, climbing higher and higher, wandering further and further, supping at last reluctantly on cucumber salad and cold herrings in the little restaurant up on the Schweizerhohe because the trumpet wouldn’t stop and we didn’t dare go home till it did. Its blasts pursued us even into the recesses of the dingy wooden hall we took our ears into, vainly trying to carry them somewhere out of range. It seemed to be a serious quarrel. We had a depressing meal. We both esteem Johanna with the craven esteem you feel for a person, at any moment capable of giving notice, who does all the unpleasant things you would otherwise have to do yourself. The state of her temper seriously affects our peace. You see, the house is small, and if her trumpeter has been unsatisfactory and she throws the saucepans about or knocks the broom in sweeping against all the wooden things like doors and skirting-boards, it makes an unendurable clatter and puts an end at once to Papa’s work and to my equally earnest play. If, her nerves being already on edge, I were to suggest to her even smilingly to be quiet, she would at once give notice — I know she would — and the dreary search begin again for that impossible treasure you in England call a paragon and we in Jena call a pearl. Where am I to find a clean, honest, strong pearl, able to cook and willing to come and live in what is something like an unopened oyster-shell, so shut-up, so cut-off so solitary would her existence here be, for eight pounds a year? It is easy for you august persons who never see your servants, who have so many that by sheer force of numbers they become unnoticeable, to deride us who have only one for being so greatly at her mercy. I know you will deride. I see your letter already: ‘Dear Fräulein Schmidt, Is not your attitude toward the maid Johanna unworthy?’ It isn’t unworthy, because it is natural. Defiantly I confess that it is also cringing. Well, it is natural to cringe under the circumstances. So would you. I dare say if your personal servant is a good one, and you depend much on him for comfort, you do do it as it is. And there are very few girls in Jena who would come out of it and take a situation on the side of a precipice for eight pounds a year. Really the wages are small, balanced against the disadvantages. And wages are going up. Down in Jena a good servant can get ten pounds a year now without much difficulty. So that it behooves us who cannot pay such prices to humor Johanna.

  About nine the trumpet became suddenly dumb. Papa and I, after waiting a few minutes, set out for home, conjecturing as we went in what state we should find Johanna. Did the silence mean a rupture or a making-up? I inclined toward the rupture, for how can a girl, I asked Papa, murmur mild words of making-up to a lover engaged in blowing a trumpet? Papa said he didn’t know; and engrossed by fears we walked home without speaking.

  No one was to be seen. The house was dark and empty. Everything was quiet except the crickets. The trumpeter had gone, but so, apparently, had Johanna. She had forgotten to lock the door, so that all we — or anybody else passing that way — had to do was to walk in. Nobody, however, — and by nobody I mean the criminally intentioned, briefly burglars — walks into houses perched as ours is. They would be very breathless burglars by the time they got to our garden gate. We should hear their stertorous breathing as they labored up well in time to lock the door; and Papa, ever pitiful and polite, would as likely as not unlock it again to hasten out and offer them chairs and lemonade. It was not, then, with any misgivings of that sort that we went into our deserted house and felt about for matches; but I was surprised that Johanna, when she could sit comfortably level on the seat by the door, should rather choose to go and stroll in the garden. You cannot stroll in my garden. You can do very few of the things in it that most people can do in most gardens, and certainly strolling is not one of them. It is no place for lovers, or philosophers, or leisurely persons of the sort. It is an unrestful place, in which you are forced to be energetic, to watch where you put your feet, to balance yourself to a nicety, to be continually on the alert. I lit a lantern, and went out in search of Johanna strolling. I stood on the back door steps and looked right and looked left. No Johanna. No sounds of Johanna. Only the crickets, and the soft darting by of a bat. I went down the steps — they are six irregular stones embedded one beneath the other in the clay and leading to the pump from which, in buckets, we supply our need for water — and standing still again, again heard only crickets. I went to the mignonette beds I have made — mignonette and nasturtiums;
mignonette for scent and nasturtiums for beauty, and I hope you like nasturtiums — and standing still again, again heard only crickets. The night was dark and soft, and seemed of a limitless vastness. The near shrill of the crickets made the silence beyond more intense. A cat prowled past, velvet-footed, silent as the night, a vanishing gray streak, intent and terrible, concentrated wholly on prey. I went on through the grass, my shoes wet with dew, the lantern light fitfully calling out my possessions from the blackness, — the three apple-trees, the currant-bush, the pale group of starworts, children of some accidental wind-dropped seed of long ago; and beside the starworts I stopped again and listened. Still only the crickets; and presently very far away the whistle of the night express from Berlin to Munich as it hurried past the little station in the Paradies valley. It was extraordinarily quiet. Once I thought my own heart-beats were the footsteps of a late wanderer on the road. I went further, down to the very end, to the place where my beautiful, untiring monthly-rose bush unfolds pink flower after pink flower against the fence that separates us from our neighbor’s kingdom, and stopped again and listened. At first still only crickets, and the anxious twitter of a bird toward whose nest that stealthy, murderous streak of gray was drawing. It began to rain; soft, warm drops, from the motionless clouds spread low across the sky. I forgot Johanna, and became wholly possessed by the brooding spirit of the night, by the feeling of oneness, of identity with the darkness, the silence, the scent. My feet were wet with dew; my hair with the warm and gentle rain. I lifted up my face and let the drops fall on it through the leaves of the apple-trees, warm and gentle as a caress. Then the sudden blare of a trumpet made me start and quiver. I quivered so much that the lantern fell down and went out. The blare was the loudest noise I thought I had ever heard, ripping up the silence like a jagged knife. The startled hills couldn’t get over it, but went on echoing and re-echoing it, tossing it backward and forward to each other in an endless surprise, and had hardly settled down again with a kind of shudder when they were roused to frenzy by another. After that there was blare upon blare. The man only stopped to take breath. They were louder, more rollicking than any I had heard him produce. And they came from the neighbor’s house, from the very dwelling of him of the easily tortured ears, of him for whom Wagner is not good enough. Well, do you know what he had done? I ran down to question, and to extract Johanna and explain the trumpeter, and I met the poor genius, very pale and damp-looking, his necktie struggled up behind to the top of his collar, its bow twisted round somehow under his left ear. He was hurrying out into the night as I arrived, panting, on the doorstep. ‘Why in the world—’ I began; but a blast drowned further speech.