You can picture the frame of mind in which I walked down his stairs and along the Potsdamerstrasse home. I felt I could defy everybody now. Perhaps that remark will seem odd to you, but having given you such glorious news and told you how happy I am, I’ll not conceal from you that I’ve been feeling a little forlorn at Frau Berg’s. Lonely. Left out. Darkly suspecting that they don’t like me.
You see, Kloster hadn’t been able to have me go to him till yesterday, which was Saturday, and not then till the afternoon, so that I had had all Friday and most of Saturday to be at a loose end in, except for practising, and though I had got here prepared to find everybody very charming and kind it was somehow gradually conveyed to me, though for ages I thought it must be imagination, that Frau Berg and the other boarders and the Mittagsgaste dislike me. Well, I would have accepted it with a depressed resignation as the natural result of being unlikeable, and have tried by being pleasanter and pleasanter — wouldn’t it have been a dreadful sight to see me screwing myself up more and more tightly to an awful pleasantness — to induce them to like me, but the people in the streets don’t seem to like me either. They’re not friendly. In fact they’re rude. And the people in the streets can’t really personally dislike me, because they don’t know me, so I can’t imagine why they’re so horrid.
Of course one’s ideal when one is in the streets is to be invisible, not to be noticed at all. That’s the best thing. And the next best is to be behaved to kindly, with the patient politeness of the London policemen, or indeed of anybody one asks one’s way of in England or Italy or France. The Berlin man as he passes mutters the word Englanderin as though it were a curse, or says into one’s ear — they seem fond of saying or rather hissing this, and seem to think it both crushing and funny,— “Ros bif,” and the women stare at one all over and also say to each other Englanderin.
You never told me Germans were rude; or is it only in Berlin that they are, I wonder. After my first expedition exploring through the Thiergarten and down Unter den Linden to the museums last Friday between my practisings, I preferred getting lost to asking anybody my way. And as for the policemen, to whom I naturally turned when I wanted help, having been used to turning to policemen ever since I can remember for comfort and guidance, they simply never answered me at all. They just stood and stared with a sort of mocking. And of course they understood, for I got my question all ready beforehand. I longed to hit them, — I who don’t ever want to hit anybody, I whom you’ve so often reprimanded for being too friendly. But the meekest lamb, a lamb dripping with milk and honey, would turn into a lion if its polite approaches were met with such wanton rudeness. I was so indignantly certain that these people, any of them, policemen or policed, would have answered the same question with the most extravagant politeness if I had been an officer, or with an officer. They grovel if an officer comes along; and a woman with an officer might walk on them if she wanted to. They were rude simply because I was alone and a woman. And that being so, though I spoke with the tongue of angels, as St. Paul saith, and as I as a matter of fact did, if what that means is immense mellifluousness, it would avail me nothing.
So when I was out, and being made so curiously to feel conspicuous and disliked, the knowledge that the only alternative was to go back to the muffled unfriendliness at Frau Berg’s did make me feel a little forlorn. I can tell you now, because of the joy I’ve had since. I don’t mind any more. I’m raised up and blessed now. Indeed I feel I’ve got much more by a long way than my share of good things, and with what Kloster said hugged secretly to my heart I’m placed outside the ordinary toiling-moiling that life means for most women who have got to wring a living out of it without having anything special to wring with. It’s the sheerest, wonderfullest, most radiant luck that I’ve got this. Won’t I just work. Won’t this funny frowning bedroom of mine become a temple of happiness. I’m going to play Bach to it till it turns beautiful.
I don’t know why I always think of Bach first when I write about music. I think of him first as naturally when I think of music as I think of Wordsworth first when I think of poetry. I know neither of them is the greatest, though Bach is the equal of the greatest, but they are the ones I love best. What a world it is, my sweetest little mother! It is so full of beauty. And then there’s the hard work that makes everything taste so good. You have to have the hard work; I’ve found that out. I do think it’s a splendid world, — full of glory created in the past and lighting us up while we create still greater glory. One has only got to shut out the parts of the present one doesn’t like, to see this all clear and feel so happy. I shut myself up in this bedroom, this ugly dingy bedroom with its silly heavy trappings, and get out my violin, and instantly it becomes a place of light, a place full of sound, — shivering with light and sound, the light and sound of the beautiful gracious things great men felt and thought long ago. Who cares then about Frau Berg’s boarders not speaking to one, and the Berlin streets and policemen being unkind? Actually I forget the long miles and hours I am away from you, the endless long miles and hours that reach from me here to you there, and am happy, oh happy, — so happy that I could cry out for joy. And so I would, I daresay, if it wouldn’t spoil the music.
There’s Wanda coming to tell me dinner is ready. She just bumps the soup-tureen against my door as she carries it down the passage to the diningroom, and calls out briefly, “Essen.”
I’ll finish this tonight.
Bedtime.
I just want to say goodnight, and tell you, in case you shouldn’t have noticed it, how much your daughter loves you. I mayn’t practise on Sundays, because of the Hausruhe, Frau Berg says, and so I have time to think; and I’m astonished, mother darling, at the emptiness of life without you. It is as though most of me had somehow got torn off, and I have to manage as best I can with a fragment. What a good thing I feel it so much, for so I shall work all the harder to shorten the time. Hard work is the bridge across which I’ll get back to you. You see, you’re the one human being I’ve got in the world who loves me, the only one who is really, deeply, interested in me, who minds if I am hurt and is pleased if I am happy. That’s a watery word, — pleased; I should have said exults. It is so wonderful, your happiness in my being happy, — so touching. I’m all melted with love and gratitude when I think of it, and of the dear way you let me do this, come away here and realize my dream of studying with Kloster, when you knew it meant for you such a long row of dreary months alone. Forgive me if I sound sentimental. I know you will, so I needn’t bother to ask. That’s what I so love about you, — you always understand, you never mind. I can talk to you; and however idiotic I am, and whatever sort of a fool, — blind, unkind, ridiculous, obstinate or wilful — take your choice, little sweet mother, you’ll remember occasions that were fitted by each of these — you look at me with those shrewd sweet eyes that always somehow have a laugh in them, and say some little thing that shows you are brushing aside all the ugly froth of nonsense, and are intelligently and with perfect detachment searching for the reason. And having found the reason you understand and forgive; for of course there always is a reason when ordinary people, not born fiends, are disagreeable. I’m sure that’s why we’ve been so happy together, — because you’ve never taken anything I’ve done or said that was foolish or unkind personally. You’ve always known it was just so much irrelevant rubbish, just an excrescence, a passing sickness; never, never your real Chris who loves you.
Good-bye, my own blessed mother. It’s long past bedtime. Tomorrow I’m to have my first regular lesson with Kloster. And tomorrow I ought to get a letter from you. You will take care of yourself, won’t you? You wouldn’t like me to be anxious all this way off, would you? Anxious, and not sure?
Your Chris.
Berlin, Tuesday, June 2nd, 1914.
Darling mother, I’ve just got your two letters, two lovely long ones at once, and I simply can’t wait till next Sunday to tell you how I rejoiced over them, so I’m going to squander 20 pfennigs just on that.
I’m not breaking my rule and writing on a day that isn’t Sunday, because I’m not really writing. This isn’t a letter, it’s a kiss. How glad I am you’re so well and getting on so comfortably. And I’m well and happy too, because I’m so busy, — you can’t think how busy. I’m working harder than I’ve ever done in my life, and Kloster is pleased with me. So now that I’ve had letters from you there seems very little left in the world to want, and I go about on the tips of my toes. Good-bye my beloved one, till Sunday.
Chris.
Oh, I must just tell you that at my lesson yesterday I played the Ernst F sharp minor concerto, — the virtuoso, firework thing, you know, with Kloster putting in bits of the orchestra part on the piano every now and then because he wanted to see what I could do in the way of gymnastics. He laughed when I had finished, and patted my shoulder, and said, “Very good acrobatics. Now we will do no more of them. We will apply ourselves to real music.” And he said I was to play him what I could of the Bach Chaconne.
I was so happy, little mother. Kloster leading me about among the wonders of Bach, was like being taken by the hand by some great angel and led through heaven.
Berlin, Sunday, June 7th, 1914.
On Sunday mornings, darling mother, directly I wake I remember it is my day for being with you. I can hardly be patient with breakfast, and the time it takes to get done with those thick cups of coffee that are so thick that, however deftly I drink, drops always trickle down what would be my beard if I had one. And I choke over the rolls, and I spill things in my hurry to run away and talk to you. I got another letter from you yesterday, and Hilda Seeberg, a girl boarding here and studying painting, said when she met me in the passage after I had been reading it in my room, “You have had a letter from your Frau Mutter, nicht?” So you see your letters shine in my face.
Don’t be afraid I won’t take enough exercise. I go for an immense walk directly after dinner every day, a real quick hot one through the Thiergarten. The weather is fine, and Berlin I suppose is at its best, but I don’t think it looks very nice after London. There’s no mystery about it, no atmosphere; it just blares away at you. It has everything in it that a city ought to have, — public buildings, statues, fountains, parks, broad streets; and it is about as comforting and lovable as the latest thing in workhouses. It looks disinfected; it has just that kind of rather awful cleanness.
At dinner they talk of its beauty and its perfections till I nearly go to sleep. You know how oddly sleepy one gets when one isn’t interested. They’ve left off being silent now, and have gone to the other extreme, and from not talking to me at all have jumped to talking to me all together. They tell me over and over again that I’m in the most beautiful city in the world. You never knew such eagerness and persistence as these German boarders have when it comes to praising what is theirs, and also when it comes to criticizing what isn’t theirs. They’re so funny and personal. They say, for instance, London is too hideous for words, and then they look at me defiantly, as though they had been insulting some personal defect of mine and meant to brazen it out. They point out the horrors of the slums to me as though the slums were on my face. They tell me pityingly what they look like, what terrible blots and deformities they are, and how I — they say England, but no one could dream from their manner that it wasn’t me — can never hope to be regarded as fit for self-respecting European society while these spots and sore places are not purged away.
The other day they assured me that England as a nation is really unfit for any decent other nation to know politically, but they added, with stiff bows in my direction, that sometimes the individual inhabitant of that low-minded and materialistic country is not without amiability, especially if he or she is by some miracle without the lofty, high-nosed manner that as a rule so regrettably characterizes the unfortunate people. “Sie sind so hochnasig,” the bank clerk who sits opposite me had shouted out, pointing an accusing finger at me; and for a moment I was so startled that I thought something disastrous had happened to my nose, and my anxious hand flew up to it. Then they laughed; and it was after that that they made the speech conceding individual amiability here and there.
I sit neatly in my chair while this sort of talk goes on — and it goes on at every meal now that they have got over the preliminary stage of icy coldness towards me — and I try to be sprightly, and bandy my six German words about whenever they seem appropriate. Imagine your poor Chris trying to be sprightly with eleven Germans — no, ten Germans, for the eleventh is a Swede and doesn’t say anything. And the ten Germans, including Frau Berg, all fix their eyes reproachfully on me while as one man they tell me how awful my country is. Do people in London boarding houses tell the German boarders how awful Germany is, I wonder? I don’t believe they do. And I wish they would leave me alone about the Boer war. I’ve tried to explain my extreme youth at the time it was going on, but they still appear to hold me directly responsible for it. The fingers that have been pointed at me down that table on account of the Boer war! They raise them at me, and shake them, and tell me of the terrible things the English did, and when I ask them how they know, they say it was in the newspapers; and when I ask them what newspapers, they say theirs; and when I ask them how they know it was true, they say they know because it was in the newspapers. So there we are, stuck. I take to English when the worst comes to the worst, and they flounder in after me.
It is the funniest thing, their hostility to England, and the queer, reluctant, and yet passionate admiration that goes With it. It is like some girl who can’t get a man she admires very much to notice her. He stays indifferent, while she gets more exasperated the more indifferent he stays; exasperated with the bitterness of thwarted love. One day at dinner, when they had all been thumping away at me, this flashed across me as the explanation, and I exclaimed in English, “Why, you’re in love with us!”
Twenty round eyes stared at me, sombrely at first, not understanding, and then with horror slowly growing in them.
“In love with you? In love with England?” cried Frau Berg, the carving knife suspended in the air while she stared at me. “Nein, aber so was!” And she let down her heavy fists, knife and all, with a thud on the table.
I thought I had best stand up to them, having started off so recklessly, and tried to lash myself into bravery by remembering how full I was of the blood of all the Cholmondeleys, let alone those relations of yours alleged to have fought alongside the Black Prince; so though I wished there were several of me rather than only one, I said with courage and obstinacy, “Passionately.”
You can’t think how seriously they took it. They all talked at once, very loud. They were all extremely angry. I wished I had kept quiet, for I couldn’t elaborate my idea in my limping German, and it was quite difficult to go on smiling and behaving as though they were all not being rude, for I don’t think they mean to be rude, and I was afraid, if I showed a trace of thinking they were that they might notice they were, and then they would have felt so uncomfortable, and the situation would have become, as they say, peinlich.
Four of the Daily Dinner Guests are men, and one of the boarders is a man; and these five men and Frau Berg were the vociferous ones. They exclaimed things like “Nein, so was!” and, “Diese englische Hochmut!” and single words like unerhort; and then one of them called Herr Doctor Krummlaut, who is a lawyer and a widower and much esteemed by the rest, detached himself from them and made me a carefully patient speech, in which he said how sorry they all were to see so young and gifted a lady, — (he bowed, and I bowed) — oh yes, he said, raising his hand as though to ward off any modest objections I might be going to make, only I wasn’t going to make any, he had heard that I was undoubtedly gifted, and not only gifted but also, he would not be deterred from saying, and he felt sure his colleagues at the table would not be deterred from saying either if they were in his place, a lady of personal attractions, — (he bowed and I bowed,) — how sorry they all were to see a young Fraulein with these advantages, filled at the same time
with opinions and views that were not only highly unsuitable to her sex but were also, in any sex, so terribly wrong. Every lady, he said, should have some knowledge of history, and sufficient acquaintance with the three kinds of politics, — Politik, Weltpolitik, and Realpolitik, to enable her to avoid wrong and frivolous conclusions such as the one the young Fraulein had just informed them she had reached, and to listen intelligently to her husband or son when they discuss these matters. He said a great deal more, about a woman knowing these things just enough but not too well, for her intelligence must not be strained because of her supreme function of being the cradle of the race; and the cradle part of her, I gather, isn’t so useful if she is allowed to develop the other part of her beyond what is necessary for making an agreeable listener.
It was no use even trying to explain what I had meant about Germany really being in love with England, because I hadn’t got words enough; but that is exactly the impression I’ve received from my brief experiences of one corner of its life. In this small corner of it, anyhow, it behaves exactly like a woman who is so unlucky as to love somebody who doesn’t care about her. She naturally, I imagine, — for I can only guess at these enslavements, — is very much humiliated and angry, and all the more because the loved and hated one — isn’t it possible to love and hate at the same time, little mother? I can imagine it quite well — is so indifferent as to whether she loves or hates. And whichever she does, he is polite,— “Always gentleman,” as the Germans say. Which is, naturally, maddening.
Evening.
Do you know I wrote to you the whole morning? I wrote and wrote, with no idea how time was passing, and was astonished and indignant, for I haven’t half told you all I want to, when I was called to dinner. It seemed like shutting a door on you and leaving you outside without any dinner, to go away and have it without you.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 176