Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  Well, I am weak, you see, just as weak and silly as the very weakest and silliest in spite of my big words and brave face. I am writing now as near the stove as possible in Papa’s room, glad to be with him, glad to be warm, grateful to sit with somebody alive after that hour with the ghosts; and the result of deep considering has been to force me to face the fact that there is much meanness in my nature. There is. Don’t bother to contradict; there is. All my forlornness since yesterday is simply the outcome of a mixture of envy and self-pity. I do miss dear Vicki whom I greatly loved, I do miss the cheery Joey, I miss Papa Lindeberg who likened me to Hebe, I miss his wife who kept me in my proper place — it is quite true that I miss these people, but that would never of itself be a feeling strong enough to sweep me off my feet into black pools of misery as I was swept this afternoon, and never, never would make me, who have so fine a contempt for easy tears, cry. No, Mr. Anstruther, bitter truths once seen have to be stared at squarely, and I am simply comparing my lot with Vicki’s and being sorry for myself. It is amazing that it should be so, for have I not everything a reasonable being needs, and am I not, then, a reasonable being? And the meanness of it; for it does imply a grudging, an uneasiness in the presence of somebody else’s happiness. Well, I’m thoroughly ashamed, and that at least is a good thing; and now that you know how badly I too need lecturing and how I am torn by particularly ungenerous emotions perhaps you’ll see what a worthless person I am and will take me down from the absurd high pinnacle on which you persist in keeping me and on which I have felt so desperately uncomfortable for months past. It is infinitely humiliating, I do assure you, to be — shall we say venerated? for excellences one would like to possess but is most keenly aware one does not. Persons with any tendency to be honest about themselves and with even the smallest grain of a sense of humor should never be chosen as idols and set up aloft in giddy places. They make shockingly bad idols. They are divided by a desire to laugh and an immense pity for the venerator.

  I add these observations, dear friend, to the description of my real nature that has gone before because your letters are turning more and more into the sort of letters that ends a placid friendship. I want to be placid. I love being placid. I insist on being placid. And the thought of your letters with so little placidness about them, was with me this afternoon in that terrible house, and it added to the fear of the future that seized me by the throat and would not let me go. Is it, then, so impossible to be friends, just friends with a man, in the same dear frank way one is with another woman, or a man is with a man? I hoped you and I were going to prove the possibility triumphantly. I even, so keenly do I desire it, prayed that we were. But perhaps there is little use in such praying.

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  You may scold me as much as you like, but you are not to comfort me. Do not make the mistake, I earnestly beg you, of supposing that I want to be comforted.

  LXVIII

  Galgenberg, Jan. 13th.

  Dear Mr. Anstruther, — Just a line to tell you that I have recovered, and you are not to take my letter yesterday too seriously. I woke up this morning perfectly normal, and able to look out on the day before me with the usual interest. Then something very nice happened: my translation of Papa’s book didn’t come back, but instead arrived an urbane letter expressing a kind of reluctant willingness, if you can imagine the mixture, to publish it. What do you think of that? The letter, it is true, goes on to suggest, still with urbanity, that no doubt no one will ever buy it, but promises if ever any one does to send us a certain just portion of what was paid for it. ‘Observe, Rose-Marie,’ said Papa when his first delight had calmed, ‘the unerring instinct with which the English, very properly called a nation of shopkeepers, instantly recognize the value of a good thing when they see it. Consider the long years during which I have vainly beaten at the doors of the German public, and compare its deafness with the quick response of our alert and admirable cousins across the Channel. Well do I know which was the part that specially appealed to this man’s business instinct—’

  And he mentioned, while my guilty ears burned crimson, a chapter of statistics, the whole of which I had left out.

  Yours sincerely,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  LXIX

  Galgenberg, Jan. 14th.

  Dear Mr. Anstruther, — I see no use whatever in a friend if one cannot tell him about one’s times of gloom without his immediately proposing to do the very thing one doesn’t want him to do, which is to pay one a call. Your telegram has upset me, you see, into a reckless use of the word one, a word I spend hours sometimes endeavoring to circumvent, and which I do circumvent if I am in good bodily and spiritual health, but the moment my vitality is lowered, as it is now by your telegram, I cease to be either strong enough or artful enough to dodge it. There are four of it in that sentence: I fling them to you in a handful, only remarking that they are your fault, not mine.

  Now listen to me — I will drop this playfulness, which I don’t in the least feel, and be serious: — why do you want to come and, as you telegraph, talk things over? I don’t want to talk things over; it is a fatal thing to do. May I not tell you frankly of my moods, of my downs as well as of my ups, without at once setting you off in the direction of too much kindness? After I had written that letter I was afraid; and I opened it again to tell you it was not your comfortings and pityings that I wanted, but the sterner remedy of a good scolding; yet your answer is a telegram to ask if you may come. Of course I telegraphed back that I should not be here. It is quite true: I should not if you came. I will not see you. Nothing can be gained by it, and everything might be lost, — oh everything, everything might be lost. I would see to it that you did not find me. The forests are big, and I can walk if needs be for hours. You will think me quite savagely unkind, but I can’t help that. Perhaps if your letters lately had been different I would not so obstinately refuse to see you, but I have a wretched feeling that my poor soul is going to be pruned again, pruned of its last, most pleasant growth, and you are on the road to saying and doing things we shall both be for ever sorry for. I have tried my best to stop you, to pull you up, and I hope with all my heart that I may not be going to get a letter that will spoil things irreparably. Have not my hints been big enough? Let me beg you not to write foolishnesses that cannot, once sent, be got back again and burned. But at least when you sit down to write you can consider your words, and those that have come out too impulsively can go into the fire; while if you came here what would you do with your tongue, I wonder? There is no means of stopping that once it is well started, and the smallest things sets it off in terrible directions. Am I not your friend? Will you not spare me? Must I be forced to speak with a plainness that will, by comparison, make all my previous plainness seem the very essence of polite artificialness? Of all the wise counsel any one could offer you at this moment there is none half so wise, none that, taken, would be half so precious to us both, as the counsel to leave well alone. I offer it you earnestly; oh, more than earnestly — with a passionate anxiety lest you should refuse it.

  Your sincere friend,

  ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

  I suppose it is true what I have often suspected, that I am a person doomed to lose, one by one, the things that have been most dear to me.

  LXX

  Jan. 16th.

  Well, there is no help, then. You will do it. You will put an end to it. You have written me a love-letter, the thing I have been trying so hard for so long to stop your doing, and there is nothing to be done but to drop into silence.

  LXXI

  Jan. 17th.

  But what is there possible except silence? I will not marry you. I cannot after this keep you my friend.

  LXXII

  Jan. 19th.

  Oh, I have tried, I have hoped to keep you. It has been so sweet to me. It has made everything so different. For the second time you have wiped the brightness out of my life.

  LXXIII

&n
bsp; Jan. 21 st.

  Leave me alone. Don’t torment me with wild letters. I do not love you. I will not marry you. I cared for you sincerely as a friend, but what a gulf there is between that and the abandonment of worship last year in Jena. Only just that, just that breathless passion, would make me marry, and I would never feel it for a man I am forced to pity. Is not worship a looking up? a rapture of faith? I cannot look up to you. I have no faith in you. Leave me alone.

  LXXIV

  Jan. 22d.

  Let us consider the thing calmly. Let us try to say good-by without too great a clamor. What is the use, after all, of being so vocal? We have each given the other many hours of pleasure, and shall we not be grateful rather than tragic? Here we are, got at last to the point where we face the inevitable, and we may as well do it decently. See, here is a woman who does not love you: would you have her marry you when she had rather not? And you mustn’t be angry with me because I don’t love you, for how can I help it? So far am I from the least approach to it that it makes me tired just to think of a thing so strenuous, of the bother of it, of the perpetual screwed-up condition of mind and body to a pitch above the normal. The normal is what I want. My heart is set upon it. I don’t want ecstasies. I don’t want excitement. I don’t want alternations of bliss and terror. I want to be that peaceful individual a maiden lady, — a maiden lady looking after her aged father, tending her flowers, fondling her bees — no, I don’t think she could fondle bees, — fondling a cat, then, which I haven’t yet got. Oh, I know I have moods of a more tempestuous nature, such as the one I was foolish enough to write to you about the other day, stirring you up to a still more violent tempestuousness yourself, but they roll away again when they have growled themselves out, and the mood that succeeds them is like clear shining after rain. I intend this clear shining as I grow older to be more and more my surrounding atmosphere. I make the bravest resolutions; will you not make some too? Dear late friend and sometime lover, do not want me to give you what I have not got. We are both suffering just now; but what about Time, that kindest soother, softener, healer, that final tidier up of ragged edges, and sweeper away of the broken fragments of the past?

  LXXV

  Jan. 23d.

  I tell you you have taken away what I held precious for the second time, and there shall be no third. You showed me once that you could not be a faithful lover, you have shown me now you cannot be a faithful friend. I am not an easy woman, who can be made much of and dropped in an unending see-saw. Even if I loved you we would be most wretched married, you with the feeling that I did not fit into your set, I with the knowledge that you felt so, besides the deadly fear of you, of your changes and fits of hot and cold. But I do not love you. This is what you seem unable to realize. Yet it is true, and it settles everything for ever.

  LXXVI

  Jan. 25th.

  Must there be so much explaining? It was because I thought I was making amends that way for having, though unconsciously, led you to fancy you cared for me last year. I wanted to be of some use to you, and I saw how much you liked to get them. By gradual degrees, as we both grew wiser, I meant my letters to be a help to you who have no sister, no mother, and a father you don’t speak to. I was going to be the person to whom you could tell everything, on whose devotion and sincerity you could always count. It was to have been a thing so honest, so frank, so clear, so affectionate. And I’ve not even had time really to begin, for at first there was my own struggling to get out of the deep waters where I was drowning, and afterward it seemed to be nothing but a staving off, a writing about other things, a determined telling of little anecdotes, of talk about our neighbors, about people you don’t know, about anything rather than your soul and my soul. Each time I talked of those, in moments of greater stress when the longing for a real friend to whom I could write openly was stronger than I could resist, there came a letter back that made my heart stand still. I had lost my lover, and it seemed as if I must lose my friend. At first I believed that you would settle down. I thought it could only be a question of patience. But you could not wait, you could not believe you were not going to be given what you wanted in exactly the way you wanted it, and you have killed the poor goose after all, the goose I have watched so anxiously, who was going to lay us such beautiful golden eggs. I am very sorry for you. I know the horrors of loving somebody who doesn’t love you. And it is terrible for us both that you should not understand me to the point, as you say, of not being able to believe me. I have not always understood myself, but here everything seems so plain. Love is not a thing you can pick up and throw into the gutter and pick up again as the fancy takes you. I am a person, very unfortunately for you, with a quite peculiar dread of thrusting myself or my affections on any one, of in any way outstaying my welcome. The man I would love would be the man I could trust to love me for ever. I do not trust you. I did outstay my welcome once. I did get thrown into the gutter, and came near drowning in that sordid place. Oh, call me hard, wickedly revengeful, unbelievably cruel if it makes you feel less miserable — but will you listen to a last prophecy? You will get over this as surely as you have got over your other similar vexations, and you will live to say, ‘Thank God that German girl — what was her name? wasn’t it Schmidt? good heavens, yes — thank God she was so foolish as not to take advantage of an unaccountable but strictly temporary madness.’

  And if I am bitter, forgive me.

  LXXVII

  Jan. 27th.

  It would be useless.

  LXXVIII

  Jan. 29th.

  I would not see you.

  LXXIX

  Jan. 31st.

  I do not love you.

  LXXX

  Feb. 2d.

  I will never marry you.

  LXXXI

  Feb. 4th.

  I shall not write again.

  THE END

  THE CARAVANERS

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XIV

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  POST SCRIPTUM

  The first edition’s title page

  CHAPTER I

  IN JUNE this year there were a few fine days, and we supposed the summer had really come at last. The effect was to make us feel our flat (which is really a very nice, well-planned one on the second floor at the corner overlooking the cemetery, and not at all stuffy) but a dull place after all, and think with something like longing of the country. It was the year of the fifth anniversary of our wedding, and having decided to mark the occasion by a trip abroad in the proper holiday season of August we could not afford, neither did we desire, to spend money on trips into the country in June. My wife, therefore, suggested that we should devote a few afternoons to a series of short excursions within a radius of, say, from five to ten miles round our town, and visit one after the other those of our acquaintances who live near enough to Storchwerder and farm their own estates. “In this way,” said she, “we shall get much fresh air at little cost.”