Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  He flung up his hands, and the darkness engulfed him.

  ‘It’s raining,’ I tried to cry after his hatless figure.

  I thought I heard him call back something about Pilsner— ‘It’s the Pilsner,’ I thought I heard him say; but the noise coming from the kitchen was too violent for me to be sure.

  His father was in the passage, walking up and down it, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders up to his ears as though he were shrinking from blows. He told me what his unhappy son had done. Not able to endure the trumpet when it was being blown up at our house earlier in the evening, not able to endure it even softened, chastened, subdued by distance and the intervening walls, he had directed his mother to go up and invite the player down to her kitchen, where he was to be cajoled into eating and drinking, because, as the son explained, full of glee at his sagacity, no man who is eating and drinking can at the same time be blowing a trumpet. ‘Thus,’ said his father, in jerks coincident with the breath-takings of the trumpeter, ‘did he hope to obtain peace.’

  ‘But he didn’t,’ said I.

  ‘No. For a period there was extreme, delicious quiet. Mother’ — so he invariably describes his wife—’ sacrificed her best sausage, for how shall we permit our son to be tortured? The bread was spread with butter three centimeters deep. The trumpeter and his Schatz sat quietly in the kitchen eating it. We sat quietly on the veranda discussing great themes. Then that good beer my son so often praises, that excellent, barrel-kept, cellar-lodged Pilsner beer, bright as amber, clear as ice, cool as — cool as—’

  ‘A cucumber,’ I assisted.

  ‘Good. Very good. As a cucumber — as a salad of cucumbers.’

  ‘No, no — there’s pepper in a salad. You’d better just keep to plain cucumber,’ I interrupted, always rather nice in the matter of images.

  ‘Cool, then, as plain cucumber — this usually admirable stuff instead of, as we had expected, sending him gradually and pleasantly to sleep — I mean, of course, making him gradually and pleasantly so sleepy that thoughts of his bed, growing in affection with every glass, would cause him to arise and depart to his barracks, — woke him up. And, my dear Fräulein, you yourself heard — you are hearing now — how completely it did it.’

  ‘Is he — is he — ?’ I inquired nervously.

  The neighbor nodded. ‘He is,’ he said; ‘he has consumed fourteen glasses.’

  And indeed he was; and I should say from the tumult, from the formlessness of it, the tunelessness, the rollicksomeness, that never was anybody more so.

  ‘I fear my son will leave us for some quieter spot before his holiday is over,’ said the neighbor, looking distressed.

  And perhaps it will convince you more than anything else I have said of the extreme value of our Johannas, when I tell you that, goaded by the noise and by his disappointed face to rash promises, I declared I would dismiss the girl unless she broke off such an engagement, and he stared at me for a moment in astonishment and then resignedly shook his head and said with the weary conviction of a householder of thirty years’ standing, ‘Das geht doch nicht.’

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  XLIII

  Galgenberg, Sept. 9th.

  Dear Mr. Anstruther, — But it is true. Our servants do not get more than from 100 to 250 marks a year, and indeed I think it is a great deal and cannot see why, because you spend as much (you say you do, so I must believe it) in a month on gloves and ties, it should make you hate yourself. Do not hate yourself. Your doing so doesn’t make us pay our servants more. Why, how do you suppose we could get all we need out of our hundred pounds a year — I translate our marks into your pounds for your greater convenience — if we had to give a servant more than eight of them and for our house more than fifteen? Papa and I do not like to be kept hungry in the matter of books, and we shall probably spend every penny of our income; but I know a number of families with children who live decently and have occasional coffee-parties and put by for their daughters’ trousseaux on the same sum. As for the servants themselves, have I not described Johanna’s splendid appearance on her Sundays, her white dress and gloves, and the pink ribbons round her waist? She finds her wages will buy these things and still leave enough for the savings-bank. She is quite content. Only I don’t know if she would remain so if you were to come and lament over her and tell her what a little way you make the same money go. You see, she would probably not grasp the true significance of the admission, which is, I take it, not that she has too little but that you spend too much. Yet how can I from my Galgenberg judge what is necessary in gloves and ties for a splendid young man like yourself? The sum seems to me terrific. There must be stacks of gloves and ties constantly growing higher about your path. You, then, spend on these two things alone almost exactly what we three spend in a year on everything. But my astonishment is only the measure of my ignorance. Do not hate yourself. Either spend the money without compunction, or, if you have compunction, don’t spend it. A sinner should always, I think, sin gayly or not at all. I don’t mean that you in this are a sinner; I only mean that as a general principle half-hearted sinners are contemptible. It is a poor creature who while he sins is sorry. If he must sin, let him at least do it with all his heart, and having done it waste no time in whimpers but try to turn his back on it and his face toward the good. Please do not hate yourself. I am sure you have to have the things. Your letter is more than usually depressed. Please do not hate yourself. It does no good and lowers your vitality. It is as bad as sorrow, which surely is very bad. I think nothing great was done by any one who wasted time peering about among his faults; but if ever you meet the pastor who prepared me for confirmation don’t tell him I said so. I don’t know how it is with yours in England, but here the pastors seem altogether unable to bear listening to descriptions of plain facts. When they come to doctor my soul, why may I not tell them its symptoms as badly as I tell my body’s symptoms to the physician who would heal it? He is not shocked or angry when I show him my sore places; he recommends a plaster or a dose, encourages, and goes away. But your spiritual doctor takes your spiritual sore places as a kind of personal affront; at least, his manner often shows indignation in proportion as you are frank. Instead of being patient, he hardly lets you speak; instead of prescribing, he denounces; instead of helping, he passionately scolds; and so you do not go to him again, but fight through your later miseries alone. Just at the time of my preparation for confirmation my mother died. My heart, blank with sorrow, was very fit for religious impressions and consolations. The preparation lasts two years, and three times every week during that time I went to classes. For two years I was not allowed to dance or to go to even the mildest parties. For two years, from sixteen to eighteen, I was earnest, prayerful, humbly seeking after righteousness. Then one day, when questionings had come upon me that my conscience could not approve, I went to the pastor who had prepared me as confidently as I would go with a toothache to a dentist, and bared my sensitive conscience to him and begged to have my thoughts arranged and my doubts and questionings settled. To my amazement and extreme fright I beheld him shocked, angry, hardly able to endure hearing me tell all I had been wondering. It seemed very strange. I sat at last with downcast eyes, silent, ashamed, my heart shrunk back into reserve and frost. I was not being helped; I was being scolded, and bitterly scolded. At last at the door some special word of blame stung me to heat, and I cried, ‘Herr Pastor, when my tongue is bad and I show it to a doctor, he gives me a pill. Are you not the doctor of my spirit? Why, then, when I come to you to be healed, do you, instead of giving me medicine, so cruelly rate me?’

  And he, staring at me a moment aghast, struck his hands together above his head. ‘Thy father!’ he cried, ‘Thy father! It is he who speaks — it is he speaking in thee. Such words come not unaided from the mouth of eighteen, from the mouth of one confirmed by these very hands. Ach, miserable maiden, it is not with such as thee that Paradise is peopled. The taint of thy parentage
is heavy upon thee. Thou art not, thou canst not be, thou hast never been, a child of God.’

  And that was all I got for my pains.

  Tell me, what mood were you in when you wrote? Was it not, apart from its dejection, one rather inclined to peevishness? You ask, for instance, why I write so much about a tipsy trumpeter when I know you are anxious to hear about the other things I never tell you. I can’t imagine what they are. You must let me write how and what I like — bear with me while I discourse of roses and nasturtium-beds, of rain and sunshine, clouds and wind, cats, birds, servants, even trumpeters. My life holds nothing greater than these. If you want to hear from me you must hear also of them. And why have you taken so bitter a dislike to our gifted young neighbor down the hill, calling him contemptuously a fiddler? He is certainly a fiddler, if to fiddle in one’s hours of ease produces one, and perhaps you would be twice as happy as you are if you could fiddle half so wonderfully as he does. He is gone. His holiday either came to an end or was put to an end by Johanna’s fiancé. Now, in these early September days, this season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, of cloudy mornings and calm evenings and golden afternoons, he has turned his back on the hills and forests, on the reddening creepers and sweetening grapes, on the splash of water among ferns and rocks, on all those fresh, quiet things that make life worth having, and is sitting at a desk somewhere in Berlin doggedly bent on becoming, by means of a great outlay of days and years, a Landrath, a Regierungsrath, a Geheimrath, and a Wirklicher Geheimrath mit dem Prädikat Excellenz. When he has done that he will take down his hat and go forth at last to enjoy life, and will find to his surprise that it isn’t there, that it is all behind him, a heap of dusty days piled in the corners of offices, and that his knees shake as he goes about looking for it, and that he can no longer even tune his fiddle by himself but has to have it done for him by the footman.

  Isn’t that what happens to all you wise men, so prudently determined to make your way in the world? You must be very sure of another life, or how could you bear to squander this? The things you are missing — oh, the things you are missing! — while you so carefully add little gain to little gain, or what I would rather call little loss to little loss. I see no point in slaving day after day through one’s best years. Suppose you do not, in the end, have a footman to open your door — the footman is merely a symbol, conveniently expressing the multitude of superfluities that gather about the declining years of the person who has got on, things bought with the sacrifice of his life, and none of them giving him back the lost power, gone with youth, to enjoy them — suppose, then, you do not end gloriously with a footman, what of that? I must be blind, for I never can see the desirability of these trappings. Yet they surely are of an immense desirability, since everybody, really everybody, is willing to give so much in payment for them. Our elder neighbor down the hill has actually given his eyes and his back; he peers at life through spectacles, and walks about like Wordsworth’s leech-gatherer, bent double through poking about for years in the muddy pools of little boys’ badly written exercises; and here he is at fifty still not satisfied with what he has earned, still going on drudging the whole year round, except for his six short weeks in summer. His wife is thrifty; they have only the one son; they live frugally; long ago they must have put by enough to keep them warm and fed and clothed without his doing another stroke of work.

  I was interrupted there by a message from him asking if I would come down and help him gather up the windfalls in his orchard, his wife being busy pickling beans. I went, my head full of what I had just been writing to you, and I gathered up together with the apples a little lesson in the foolishness of officious and hasty criticism. It was this way:

  Our baskets being full, and our backs rested, he groaned and said that in another week he must leave for Weimar.

  ‘But you like your work,’ said I.

  ‘I detest my work,’ he said peevishly. ‘I detest teaching. I detest little boys.’

  ‘Then why—’ I began, but stopped.

  ‘Why? Why? Because I detest it is no reason why I should not do it.’

  ‘Yes, it is.’

  ‘What, and at my age begin another?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘You would not have me idle?’

  ‘Yes, I would.’

  He stared at me gravely through his spectacles. ‘This is unprincipled,’ he said.

  I laughed. It is years since I have observed that the principled groan a good deal and make discontented criticisms of life, and I don’t think I care to be one of them.

  ‘It is,’ he persisted, seeing that I only laughed.

  ‘Is it?’ said I.

  ‘It is man’s lot to work,’ said he.

  ‘Is it?’ said I.

  ‘Certainly,’ said he.

  ‘All day?’

  ‘If he cannot get it done in less time, certainly.’

  ‘Every day?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘All through the years of his life?’

  ‘All through the years of his strength, certainly.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘My dear young lady, have you been living again on vegetables lately?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Your words sound as though your thoughts were watery.’

  A nettled silence fell upon me, and while I was arranging how best to convince him of their substance he was shaking his head and saying that it was strange how the most intelligent women are unable really to think. ‘Water,’ he continued, ’is indispensable in its proper place and good in many others where, strictly, it might be done without. I have nothing to say against watery emotions, watery sentiments, even watery affections, especially in ladies, who would be less charming in proportion as they were more rigid. Ebb and flow, uncertainty, instability, unaccountableness, are becoming to your sex. But in the region of thought, of the intellect, of pure reason, everything should be very dry. The one place, my dear young lady, in which I will endure no water is on the brain.’

  I had no answer ready. There seemed to be nothing left to do but to go home. I did go a few steps up the orchard, reflecting on the way men have of telling you you cannot think, or are not logical, at the very moment when you appear to yourself to be most unanswerable — a regrettable habit that at once puts a stop to interesting conversation, — and presently, as I was nearing our fence, he called after me. ‘Fräulein Rose-Marie,’ he called pleasantly.

  ‘Well?’ said I, looking down at him over a displeased shoulder.

  ‘Come back.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come back and dine with us.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘There is mutton for dinner, and before that a soup full of the concentrated strength of beasts. Up there I know you will eat carrots and stewed apples, and I shall never be able to make you see what I see.’

  ‘Heaven forbid that I ever should.’

  ‘What, you do not desire to be reasonable?’

  ‘I don’t choose to argue with you.’

  ‘Have I done anything?’

  ‘You are not logical enough for me,’ said I, anxious to be beforehand with the inevitable remark.

  ‘Come, come,’ said he, his face crinkling into smiles.

  ‘It’s true,’ said I.

  ‘Come back and prove it.’

  ‘Useless.’

  ‘You cannot.’

  ‘I will not.’

  ‘It is the same thing.’

  I went on up the hill.

  ‘Fräulein Rose-Marie!’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Come back.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Come back, and tell me why you think I ought to give up my work and sit for the rest of my days with hanging hands.’

  I turned and looked down at him. ‘Because,’ I said, ‘are you not fifty? And is not that high time to begin and get something out of life?’

  He adjusted his spectacles, and stared up at me attentively. ‘Continue,’ he said.

  �
��I look at your life, at all those fifty years of it, and I see it insufferably monotonous.’

  ‘Continue.’

  ‘Dull.’

  ‘Continue.’

  ‘Dusty.’