Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated)

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

  If it weren’t for its being my day with you I don’t know what I’d do with Sundays. I would hate them. I’m not allowed to play on Sundays, because practising is forbidden on that day, and, as Frau Berg said, how is she to know if I am practising or playing? Besides, it would disturb the others, which of course is true, for they all rest on Sundays, getting up late, sleeping after dinner, and not going out till they have had coffee about five. Today, when I hoped they had all gone out, I had such a longing to play a little that I muted my strings and played to myself in a whisper what I could remember of a very beautiful thing of Ravel’s that Kloster showed me the other day, — the most haunting, exquisite thing; and I hummed the weird harmonies as I went along, because they are what is so particularly wonderful about it. Well, it really was a whisper, and I had to bend my head right over the violin to hear it at all whenever a tram passed, yet in five minutes Frau Berg appeared, unbuttoned and heated from her Mittagsruhe, and requested me to have some consideration for others as well as for the day.

  I was very much ashamed of myself, besides feeling as though I were fifteen and caught at school doing something wicked. I didn’t mind not having consideration for the day, because I think Ravel being played on it can’t do Sunday anything but good, but I did mind having disturbed the other people in the flat. I could only say I was sorry, and wouldn’t do it again, — just like an apologetic schoolgirl. But what do you think I wanted to do, little mother? Run to Frau Berg, and put my arms round her neck, and tell her I was lonely and wanting you, and would she mind just pretending she was fond of me for a moment? She did look so comfortable and fat and kind, standing there filling up the doorway, and she wasn’t near enough for me to see her eyes, and it is her eyes that make one not want to run to her.

  But of course I didn’t run. I knew too well that she wouldn’t understand. And indeed I don’t know why I should have felt such a longing to run into somebody’s arms. Perhaps it was because writing to you brings you so near to me that I realize how far away you are. During the week I work, and while I work I forget; and there’s the excitement of my lessons, and the joy of hearing Kloster appreciate and encourage. But on Sundays the day is all you, and then I feel what months can mean when they have to be lived through each in turn and day by day before one gets back to the person one loves. Why are you so dear, my darling mother? If you were an ordinary mother I’d be so much more placid. I wouldn’t mind not being with an ordinary mother. When I look at other people’s mothers I think I’d rather like not being with them. But having known what it is to live in love and understanding with you, it wants a great deal of persistent courage, the sort that goes on steadily with no intervals, to make one able to do without it.

  Now please don’t think I am fretting, will you, because I’m not. It’s only that I love you. We’re such friends. You always understand, you are never shocked. I can say whatever comes into my head to you. It is as good as saying one’s prayers. One never stops in those to wonder whether one is shocking God, and that is what one loves God for, — because we suppose he always understands, and therefore forgives; and how much more — is this very wicked? — one loves one’s mother who understands, because, you see, there she is, and one can kiss her as well. There’s a great virtue in kissing, I think; an amazing comfort in just touching the person one loves. Goodnight, most blessed little mother, and good-bye for a week. Your Chris.

  Perhaps I might write a little note — not a letter, just a little note, — on Wednesdays? What do you think? It would be nothing more, really, than a postcard, except that it would be in an envelope.

  Berlin, Sunday, June 14th, 1914.

  Well, I didn’t write on Wednesday, I resisted. (Good morning, darling mother.) I knew quite well it wouldn’t be a postcard, or anything even remotely related to the postcard family. It would be a letter. A long letter. And presently I’d be writing every day, and staying all soft; living in the past, instead of getting on with my business, which is the future. That is what I’ve got to do at this moment: not think too much of you and home, but turn my face away from both those sweet, desirable things so that I may get back to them quicker. It’s true we haven’t got a home, if a home is a house and furniture; but home to your Chris is where you are. Just simply anywhere and everywhere you are. It’s very convenient, isn’t it, to have it so much concentrated and so movable. Portable, I might say, seeing how little you are and how big I am.

  But you know, darling mother, it makes it easier for me to harden and look ahead with my chin in the air rather than over my shoulder back at you when I see, as I do see all day long, the extreme sentimentality of the Germans. It is very surprising. They’re the oddest mixture of what really is a brutal hardness, the kind of hardness that springs from real fundamental differences from ours in their attitude towards life, and a squashiness that leaves one with one’s mouth open. They can’t bear to let a single thing that has happened to them ever, however many years ago, drop away into oblivion and die decently in its own dust. They hold on to it, and dig it out that day year and that day every year, for years apparently, — I expect for all their lives. When they leave off really feeling about it — which of course they do, for how can one go on feeling about a thing forever? — they start pretending that they feel. Conceive going through life clogged like that, all one’s pores choked with the dust of old yesterdays. I picture the Germans trailing through life more and more heavily as they grow old, hauling an increasing number of anniversaries along with them, rolling them up as they go, dragging at each remove a lengthening chain, as your dear Goldsmith says, — and if he didn’t, or it wasn’t, you’ll rebuke me and tell me who did and what it was, for you know I’ve no books here, except those two that are married as securely on one’s tongue as Tennyson and Browning, or Arnold Bennet and his, I imagine reluctant, bride, H. G. Wells, — I mean Shakespeare and the Bible.

  I went into Hilda Seeberg’s room the other day to ask her for some pins, and found her sitting in front of a photograph of her father, a cross-looking old man with a twirly moustache and a bald head; and she had put a wreath of white roses round the frame and tied it with a black bow, and there were two candles lit in front of it, and Hilda had put on a black dress, and was just sitting there gazing at it with her hands in her lap. I begged her pardon, and was going away again quickly, but she called me back.

  “I celebrate,” she said.

  “Oh,” said I politely, but without an idea what she meant.

  “It is my Papa’s birthday today,” she said, pointing to the photograph.

  “Is it?” I said, surprised, for I thought I remembered she had told me he was dead. “But didn’t you say—”

  “Yes. Certainly I told you Papa was dead since five years.”

  “Then why — ?”

  “But liebes Fraulein, he still continues to have birthdays,” she said, staring at me in real surprise, while I stared back at her in at least equally real surprise.

  “Every year,” she said, “the day comes round on which Papa was born. Shall he, then, merely because he is with God, not have it celebrated? And what would people think if I did not? They would think I had no heart.”

  After that I began to hope there would be a cake, for they have lovely birthday cakes here, and it is the custom to give a slice of them to every one who comes near you. So I looked round the room out of the corners of my eyes, discreetly, lest I should seem to be as greedy as I was, and I lifted my nose a little and waved it cautiously about, but I neither saw nor smelt a cake. Frau Berg had a birthday three days ago, and there was a heavenly cake at it, a great flat thing with cream in it, that one loved so that first one wanted to eat it and then to sit on it and see all the cream squash out at the sides; but evidently the cake is the one thing you don’t have for your birthday after you are dead. I don’t want to laugh, darling mother, and I know well enough what it is to lose one’s beloved Dad, but you see Hilda had shown me her family photographs only the other day, for we are making
friends in a sort of flabby, hesitating way, and when she got to the one of her father she said with perfect frankness that she hadn’t liked him, and that it had been an immense relief when he died. “He prevented my doing anything,” she said, frowning at the photograph, “except that which increased his comforts.”

  I asked Kloster about anniversaries when I went for my lesson on Friday. He is a very human little man, full of sympathy, — the sort of comprehending sympathy that laughs and understands together, yet his genius seems to detach him from other Germans, for he criticizes them with a dispassionate thoroughness that is surprising. The remarks he makes about the Kaiser, for instance, whom he irreverently alludes to as S. M. — (short and rude for Seine Majestat) — simply make me shiver in this country of lese majeste. In England, where we can say what we like, I have never heard anybody say anything disrespectful about the King. Here, where you go to prison if you laugh even at officials, even at a policeman, at anything whatever in buttons, for that is the punishable offence of Beamtenbeleidigung — haven’t they got heavenly words — Kloster and people I have come across in his rooms say what they like; and what they like is very rude indeed about that sacred man the Kaiser, who doesn’t appear to be at all popular. But then Kloster belongs to the intelligents, and his friends are all people of intelligence, and that sort of person doesn’t care very much, I think, for absolute monarchs. Kloster says they’re anachronisms, that the world is too old for them, too grown-up for pretences and decorations. And when I went for my lesson on Friday I found his front door wreathed with evergreens and paper flowers, — pretences and decorations crawling even round Kloster — and I went in very reluctantly, not knowing what sort of a memorial celebration I was going to tumble into. But it was only that his wife — I didn’t know he had a wife, he seemed altogether so happily unmarried — was coming home. She had been away for three weeks; not nearly long enough, you and I and others of our self-depreciatory and self-critical country would think, to deserve an evergreen garland round our door on coming back. He laughed when I told him I had been afraid to come in lest I should disturb retrospective obsequies.

  “We are still so near, my dear Mees Chrees,” he said, shrugging a fat shoulder — he asked me what I was called at home, and I said you called me Chris, and he said he would, with my permission, also call me Chrees, but with Mees in front of it to show that though he desired to be friendly he also wished to remain respectful— “we are still so near as a nation to the child and to the savage. To the clever child, and the powerful savage. We like simple and gross emotions and plenty of them; obvious tastes in our food and our pleasures, and a great deal of it; fat in our food, and fat in our women. And, like the child, when we mourn we mourn to excess, and enjoy ourselves in that excess; and, like the savage, we are afraid, and therefore hedge ourselves about with observances, celebrations, cannon, kings. In no other country is there more than one king. In ours we find three and an emperor necessary. The savage who fears all things does not fear more than we Germans. We fear other nations, we fear other people, we fear public opinion to an extent incredible, and tremble before the opinion of our servants and tradespeople; we fear our own manners and therefore are obliged to preserve the idiotic practice of duelling, in which as often as not the man whose honour is being satisfied is the one who is killed; we fear all those above us, of whom there are invariably a great many; we fear all officials, and our country drips with officials. The only person we do not fear is God.”

  “But—” I began, remembering their motto, bestowed on them by Bismarck,

  “Yes, yes, I know,” he interrupted. “It is not, however, true. The contrary is the truth. We Germans fear not God, but everything else in the world. It is only fear that makes us polite, fear of the duel; for, like the child and the savage, we have not had time to acquire the habit of good manners, the habit which makes manners inevitable and invariable, and it is not natural to us to be polite. We are polite only by the force of fear. Consequently — for all men must have their relaxations — whenever we meet the weak, the beneath us, the momentarily helpless, we are brutal. It is an immense relief to be for a moment natural. Every German welcomes even the smallest opportunity.”

  You would be greatly interested in Kloster, I’m certain. He sits there, his fiddle on his fat little knees, his bow punctuating his sentences with quivers and raps, his shiny bald head reflecting the light from the window behind him, and his eyes coming very much out of his face, which is excessively red. He looks like an amiable prawn; not in the least like a person with an active and destructive mind, not in the least like a great musician. He has the very opposite of the bushy eyebrows and overhanging forehead and deep set eyes and lots of hair you’re supposed to have if you’ve got much music in you. He came over to me the other day after I had finished playing, and stretched up — he’s a good bit smaller than I am — and carefully drew his finger along my eyebrows, each in turn. I couldn’t think what he was doing.

  “My finger is clean, Mees Chrees,” he said, seeing me draw back. “I have just wiped it, Be not, therefore, afraid. But you have the real Beethoven brow — the very shape — and I must touch it. I regret if it incommodes you, but I must touch it. I have seen no such resemblance to the brow of the Master. You might be his child.”

  I needn’t tell you, darling mother, that I went back to the boarders and the midday guests not minding them much. If I only could talk German properly I would have loved to have leant across the table to Herr Mannfried, an unwholesome looking young man who comes in to dinner every day from a bank in the Potsdamerstrasse, and is very full of that hatred which is really passion for England, and has pale hair and a mouth exactly like two scarlet slugs — I’m sorry to be so horrid, but it is like two scarlet slugs — and said,— “Have you noticed that I have a Beethovenkopf? What do you think of me, an Englanderin, having such a thing? One of your own great men says so, so it must be true.”

  We are studying the Bach Chaconne now. He is showing me a different reading of it, his idea. He is going to play it at the Philarmonie here next week. I wish you could hear him. He was intending to go to London this season and play with a special orchestra of picked players, but has changed his mind. I asked him why, and he shrugged his shoulder and said his agent, who arranges these things, seemed to think he had better not. I asked him why again — you know my persistency — for I can’t conceive why it should be better not for London to have such a joy and for him to give it, but he only shrugged his shoulder again, and said he always did what his agent told him to do. “My agent knows his business, my dear Mees Chrees,” he said. “I put my affairs in his hands, and having done so I obey him. It saves trouble. Obedience is a comfortable thing.”

  “Then why—” I began, remembering the things he says about kings and masters and persons in authority; but he picked up his violin and began to play a bit. “See,” he said, “this is how—”

  And when he plays I can only stand and listen. It is like a spell. One stands there, and forgets. . . .

  Evening.

  I’ve been reading your last darling letter again, so full of love, so full of thought for me, out in a corner of the Thiergarten this afternoon, and I see that while I’m eagerly writing and writing to you, page after page of the things I want to tell you, I forget to tell you the things you want to know. I believe I never answer any of your questions! It’s because I’m so all right, so comfortable as far as my body goes, that I don’t remember to say so. I have heaps to eat, and it is very satisfying food, being German, and will make me grow sideways quite soon, I should think, for Frau Berg fills us up daily with dumplings, and I’m certain they must end by somehow showing; and I haven’t had a single cold since I’ve been here, so I’m outgrowing them at last; and I’m not sitting up late reading, — I couldn’t if I tried, for Wanda, the general servant, who is general also in her person rather than particular — aren’t I being funny — comes at ten o’clock each night on her way to bed and takes away my la
mp.

  “Rules,” said Frau Berg briefly, when I asked if it wasn’t a little early to leave me in the dark. “And you are not left in the dark. Have I not provided a candle and matches for the chance infirmities of the night?”

  But the candle is cheap and dim, so I don’t sit up trying to read by that. I preserve it wholly for the infirmities.

  I’ve been in the Thiergarten most of the afternoon, sitting in a green corner I found where there is some grass and daisies down by a pond and away from a path, and accordingly away from the Sunday crowds. I watched the birds, and read the Winter’s Tale, and picked some daisies, and felt very happy. The daisies are in a saucer before me at this moment. Everything smelt so good, — so warm, and sweet, and young, with the leaves on the oaks still little and delicate. Life is an admirable arrangement, isn’t it, little mother. It is so clever of it to have a June in every year and a morning in every day, let alone things like birds, and Shakespeare, and one’s work. You’ve sometimes told me, when I was being particularly happy, that there were even greater happiness ahead for me, — when I have a lover, you said; when I have a husband; when I have a child. I suppose you know, my wise, beloved mother; but the delight of work, of doing the work well that one is best fitted for, will be very hard to beat. It is an exultation, a rapture, that manifest progress to better and better results through one’s own effort. After all, being obliged on Sundays to do nothing isn’t so bad, because then I have time to think, to step back a little and look at life.

  See what a quiet afternoon sunning myself among daisies has done for me. A week ago I was measuring the months to be got through before being with you again, in dismay. Now I feel as if I were very happily climbing up a pleasant hill, just steep enough to make me glad I can climb well, and all the way is beautiful and safe, and on the top there is you. To get to the top will be perfect joy, but the getting there is very wonderful too. You’ll judge, from all this that I’ve had a happy week, that work is going well, and that I’m hopeful and confident. I mustn’t be too confident, I know, but confidence is a great thing to work on. I’ve never done anything good on days of dejection.