Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  The girl came back with the key. She looked as though she had a personal prejudice against me. She opened the door just wide enough for a lean person to squeeze through, and bade me, with manifest reluctance, come in. The hall had a brick floor and an umbrella stand. In the umbrella stand stood an umbrella, and as the girl, who walked in front of me, passed it, she snatched out the umbrella and carried it with her, firmly pressed to her bosom. I did not at once grasp the significance of this action. She put me into an icy shut-up room and left me to myself. It was the gute Stube — good room — room used only on occasions of frigid splendor. Its floor was shiny with yellow paint, and to meet the difficulty of the paint being spoiled if people walked on it and that other difficulty of a floor being the only place you can walk on, strips of cocoanut matting were laid across it from one important point to another. There was a strip from the door to the window; a strip from the door to another door; a strip from the door to the sofa; and a strip from the sofa on which the caller sits to the chair on which sits the callee. A baby of apparently brand newness was crying in an adjoining room. I waited, listening to it for what seemed an interminable time, not daring to sit down because it is not expected in Germany that you shall sit in any house but your own until specially requested to do so. I stood staring at the puddles my clothes and umbrella were forming on the strip of matting, vainly trying to rub them out with my feet. The wail of the unfortunate in the next room was of an uninterrupted and haunting melancholy. The rain beat on the windows forlornly. As minute after minute passed and no one came I grew very restless. My fingers began to twitch, and my feet to tap. And I was cooling down after my quick walk with a rapidity that meant a cough and a sore throat. There was no bell, or I would have rung it and begged to be allowed to go away. I did turn round to open the door and try to attract the servant’s notice and tell her I could wait no longer, but I found to my astonishment that the door was locked. After that the whole of my reflections were resolved into one chaotic Dear me, from which I did not emerge till the parson appeared through the other door, bringing with him a gust of wailing from the unhappy baby within and of the characteristic smell of infant garments drying at a stove.

  He was cold, suspicious, inquisitive. Evidently unused to being asked for permission to go into his church, and equally evidently unused to persons passing through a village which was, for most persons, on the way to nowhere, he endeavored with some skill to discover what I was doing there. With equal skill I evaded answering his questions. They included inquiries as to my name, my age, my address, my father’s profession, the existence or not of a husband, the number of my brothers and sisters, and distinct probings into the size of our income. It struck me that he had a great deal of time and very few visitors, except thieves. Delicately I conveyed this impression to him, leaving out only the thieves, by means of implications of a vaguely flattering nature. He shrugged his shoulders, and said it was too wet for funerals, which were the only things doing at this time of the year.

  ‘What, don’t they die when it is wet?’ I asked, surprised.

  ‘Certainly, if it is necessary,’ said he.

  ‘Oh,’ said I, pondering. ‘But if some one does he has to be buried?’

  ‘We put it off,’ said he.

  ‘Put it off?’

  ‘We put it off,’ he repeated firmly.

  ‘But—’ I began, in a tone of protest.

  ‘There’s always a fine day if one waits long enough,’ said he.

  ‘That’s true,’ said I, struck by a truth I had not till then consciously observed.

  He did not ask me to sit down, a careful eye, I suppose, having gauged the probable effect of my wet clothes on his dry chairs, so we stood facing each other on the strip of matting throwing questions and answers backward and forward like a ball. And I think I played quite skilfully, for at the end of the game he knew little more than when we began.

  And so at last he gave me the key, and having with a great rattling of its handle concealed that he was unlocking the door, and further cloaked this process by a pleasant comment on the way doors stick in wet weather, which I met with the cold information that ours didn’t, he whistled off the dogs, and I left him still with an inquiry in his eye.

  The church is very ancient and dates from the thirteenth century. You would like its outside — I wonder if in your walks you ever came here — but its inside has been spoilt by the zealous Lutherans and turned into the usual barn. In its first state of beauty in those far-off Catholic days what a haven it must have been for all the women and most of the men of that lonely turnip-growing village; the one beauty spot, the one place of mystery and enthusiasm. No one, I thought, staring about me, could possibly have their depths stirred in the middle of so much whitewash. The inhabitants of these bald agricultural parishes are not sufficiently spiritual for the Lutheran faith. Black gowns and bareness may be enough for those whose piety is so exalted that ceremonies are only a hindrance to the purity of their devotions; but the ignorant and the dull, if they are to be stirred, and especially the women who have entered upon that long series of gray years that begins, for those worked gaunt and shapeless in the fields, somewhere about twenty-five and never leaves off again, if they are to be helped to be less forlorn need many ceremonies, many symbols, much show, and mystery, and awfulness. You will say that it is improbable that the female inhabitants of such a poor parish should know what it is to feel forlorn; but I know better. You will, turning some of my own words against me, tell me that one does not feel forlorn if one is worked hard enough; but I know better about that too, — and I said it only in reference to young men like yourself. It is true the tragedy of the faded face combined with the uncomfortably young heart, which is the tragedy that every woman who has had an easy life has to endure for quite a number of years, finds no place in the existence of a drudge; it is true too that I never yet saw, and I am sure you didn’t, a woman of the laboring classes make efforts to appear younger than she is; and it is also true that I have seldom seen, and I am sure you haven’t, women of the class that has little to do leave off making them. Ceaseless hard work and the care of many children do away very quickly with the youth both of face and heart of the poor man’s wife, and with the youth of heart go the yearnings that rend her whose heart, whatever her face may be doing, is still without a wrinkle. But drudgery and a lost youth do not make your life less, but more dreary. These poor women have not, like their husbands, the solace of the public-house Schnapps. They go through the bitterness of the years wholly without anæsthetics. Really I don’t think I can let you go on persisting that they feel nothing. Why, we shall soon have you believing that only you in this groaning and travailing creation suffer. Please divest yourself of these illusions. Read, my young friend, read the British poet Crabbe. Read him much; ponder him more. He knew all about peasants. He was a plain man, with a knack for rhyme and rhythm that sets your brain a-jingling for weeks, who saw peasants as they are. They must have been the very ones we have here. In his pages no honeysuckle clambers picturesquely about their path, no simple virtues shine in their faces. Their hearth is not snowy, their wife not neat and nimble. They do not gather round bright fires and tell artless tales on winter evenings. Their cheer is certainly homely, but that doesn’t make them like it, and they never call down blessings upon it with moist uplifted eyes. Grandsires with venerable hair are rather at a discount; the young men’s way of trudging cannot be described as elastic; and their talk, when there is any, does not consist of praise of the local landowner. Do you think they do not know that they are cold and underfed? And do not know they have grown old before their time through working in every sort of weather? And do not know where their rheumatism and fevers come from?

  I walked back through the soaking, sighing woods thinking of these things and of how unfairly the goods of life are distributed and of the odd tendency misfortunes have to collect themselves together in one place in a heap. Old thoughts, you’ll say, — old thoughts as stale as li
fe, thoughts that have drifted through countless heads, and after a while drifted out of them again, leaving no profit behind them. But one can’t help thinking them and greatly marvelling. Make the most, you fortunate young man, of freedom, and Italy, and sunshine, and your six and twenty years. If I could only persuade you to let yourself go quite simply to being happy! Our friendship, in spite of its sincerity, has up to now been of so little use to you; and a friendship which is not helpful might just as well not exist. I wish I knew what words of mine would help you most. How gladly would I write them. How gladly would I see you in untroubled waters, forging straight ahead toward a full and fruitful life. But I am a foolish, ineffectual woman, and write you waspish letters when I might, if I had more insight, have found out what those words are that would set you tingling with the joy of life.

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  I’ve been reading some of the very beautiful prayers in my mother’s English Prayer Book to make up for not having prayed in church today. Its margins are thickly covered with pencilled comments. In parts like the Psalms and Canticles they overflow into the spaces between the verses. They are chiefly notes on the beauties of thought and language, and comparisons with similar passages in the Bible. Here and there between the pages are gummed little pictures of Madonnas and ‘piteous Christs.’ But when the Athanasian Creed is reached the tone of the comment changes. Over the top of it is written ‘Some one has said there is a vein of dry humor running through this Creed that is very remarkable.’ And at the end of each of those involved clauses that try quite vainly, yet with an air of defying criticism, to describe the undescribable, my mother has written with admirable caution ‘Perhaps.’

  LIV

  Galgenberg, Nov. 7th.

  Dear Mr. Anstruther, — So you are coming to Berlin next month. I thought you told me in one of your letters that Washington was probably going to be your first diplomatic post. Evidently you are glad it is not; but if I were going to be an attaché I’d much rather be it at Washington than Berlin, the reason being that I’ve not been to Washington and I have been to Berlin. Why are you so pleased — forgive me, I meant so much pleased, but it is strange how little instinct has to do with grammar — about Berlin? You didn’t like it when you were here and went for two days to look at it. You said it was a hard white place, full of broad streets with nobody in them. You said it was barren, soulless, arid, pretentious, police-ridden; that everybody was an official, and that all the officials were rude. You were furious with a policeman who stared at you without answering when you asked him the way. You were scandalized by the behavior of the men in the local trains who sat and smoked in the faces of the standing women, and by those men who walked with their female relations in the streets and caused their parcels to be carried by them. You came home to us saying that Jena was best, and you were thankful to be with us again. I went to Berlin once, a little while before you came to Germany, and didn’t like it either. But I didn’t like it because it was so full, because those streets that seemed to you so empty were bewildering to me in their tumultuous traffic, — so you see how a place is what your own eye makes it, your Jena or your London eye; and I didn’t like it besides because we spent a sulphuric night and morning with relations. The noise of the streets all day and the sulphur of the relations at night spoilt it for me. We went there for a jaunt, to look at the museums and things, and stay the night with Papa’s brother who lives there. He is Papa’s younger brother, and spends his days in a bank, handing out and raking in money through a hole in a kind of cage. He has a pen behind his ear — I know, because we were taken to gaze upon him between two museums — and wears a black coat on weekdays as well as on Sundays, which greatly dazzled my step-mother, who was with us. I believe he is eminently respectable, and the bank values him as an old and reliable servant, and has made him rich. His salary is eight thousand marks a year — four hundred pounds, sir; four times as much as what we have — and my step-mother used often and fervently to wish that Papa had been more like him. I thought him a terrifying old uncle, a parched, machine-like person, whose soul seemed withdrawn into unexplorable vague distances, reduced to a mere far-off flicker by the mechanical nature of his work. He is ten years younger than Papa, but infinitely more faded. He never laughs. He never even smiles. He is rude to his wife. He is withering to his daughters. He made me think of owls as he sat at supper that night in his prim clothes, with round gloomy eyes fixed on Papa, whom he was lecturing. Papa didn’t mind. He had had a happy day, ending with two very glorious hours in the Royal Library, and Tante Else’s herring salad was much to his taste. ‘Hast thou no respect, Heinrich,’ he cried at last when my uncle, warmed by beer, let his lecture slide over the line that had till then divided it from a rating, ‘hast thou then no respect for the elder brother, and his white and reverend hairs?’

  But Onkel Heinrich, aware that he is the success and example of the family, and as intolerant as successes and examples are of laxer and poorer relations, waved Papa’s banter aside with contempt, and proposed that instead of wasting any more of an already appallingly wasted life in idle dabblings in so-called literature he too should endeavor to get a post, however humble, in a bank in Berlin, and mend his ways, and earn an income of his own, and cease from living on an income acquired by marriages.

  My step-mother punctuated his words with nods of approval.

  ‘What, as a doorkeeper, eh, thou cistern filled with wisdom?’ cried Papa, lifting his glass and drinking gayly to Tante Else, who glanced uneasily at her husband, he not yet having been, to her recollection, called a cistern.

  ‘It is better,’ said my step-mother, to whom a man so punctual, so methodical, and so well-salaried as Onkel Heinrich seemed wholly ideal, ‘it is better to be a doorkeeper in — in-’

  She was seized with doubt as to the applicability of the text, and hesitated.

  ‘A bank?’ suggested Papa pleasantly.

  ‘Yes, Ferdinand, even in a bank rather than dwell in the tents of wickedness.’

  ‘That,’ explained Papa to Tante Else, leaning back in his chair and crossing his hands comfortably over what, you being English, I will call his chest, ’is my dear wife’s poetic way—’

  ‘Scriptural way, Ferdinand,’ interrupted my step-mother. ‘I know no poetic ways.’

  ‘It is the same thing, meine Liebste. The Scriptures are drenched in poetry. Poetic way, I say, of referring to Jena.’

  ‘Ach so,’ said Tante Else, vague because she doesn’t know her Bible any better than the rest of us Germans; it is only you English who have it at your fingers’ ends; and, of course, my step-mother had it at hers.

  ‘Tents,’ continued Tante Else, feeling that as Hausfrau it was her duty to make herself conversationally conspicuous, and anxious to hide that she was privately at sea, ‘tents are unwholesome as permanent dwellings. I should say a situation somewhere as doorkeeper in a healthy building was much to be preferred to living in nasty draughty things like tents.’

  ‘Quatsch,’ said Onkel Heinrich, with sudden and explosive bitterness; you remember of course that quatsch is German for silly, or nonsense, and that it is far more expressive, and also more rude, than either.

  My step-mother opened her mouth to speak, but Tante Else, urged by her sense of duty, flowed on. ‘You cannot,’ she said, addressing Papa, ‘be a doorkeeper unless there is a door to keep.’

  ‘Let no one,’ cried Papa, beating approving hands together, ‘say again that ladies are not logicians.’

  ‘Quatsch,’ said Onkel Heinrich.

  ‘And a door is commonly a — a-’ She cast about for the word.

  ‘A necessity?’ suggested Papa, all bright and pleased attention.

  ‘A convenience?’ suggested my cousin Lieschen, the rather pretty unmarried daughter, a girl with a neat head, an untidy body, and plump red hands.

  ‘An ornament?’ suggested my cousin Elschen, the rather pretty married daughter, another girl with a neat head, an untid
y body, and plump red hands.