Elizabeth Von Arnim

“ ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXIV Jena, March 25th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—You ask me to tell you more about my illness, but I am afraid I must refuse. I see no use in thinking of painful past things. They ought always to be forgotten as quickly as possible; if they are not, they have a trick of turning the present sour, and I cling to the present, to the one thing one really has, and like to make it as cheerful as possible—like to get, by industrious squeezing, every drop of honey out of it. Just now I cannot tell you how thankful I am simply to be alive with nothing in my body hurting. ”

“ But Clinches, beautiful and dignified in the mists and subtleties of a November afternoon, its massed grayness melting into that other grayness, its setting of mysterious blurred wood and pale light of water, its spaciousness, its pleasant people, its daughter with the dusky hair and odd gray eyes—is a vision of fairyland. I cannot conceive what life is like in such places; nor I am sure could any other inhabitant of Jena. What, for instance, can it be like to live in a thing so big that you do not hear the sounds nor smell the smells of the kitchen? ”

“ You are a strange young man. Heaven knows what you have accustomed yourself to imagining me to be. I almost wish now that you had seen me when I came in from our violent exercise, a touzled, short-skirted, heated person. It might have cured you. I forgot to look in the glass, but of course my hair and eyelashes were as white with hoar-frost as Vicki's and Joey's, and from beneath them and from above my turned-up collar must have emerged just such another glowing nose. ”

“ Such cures must be made from the inside outward, and not from the outside inward. I thought I was going to stir Vicki to a noble independence, and you should have heard the speeches I made her. Sometimes I had to laugh at them myself, they were such extraordinarily heroic and glowing things for one dripping Fräulein with none too brave a heart to hurl at another dripping Fräulein with no brave heart at all, as they trotted along with shortened skirts and umbrellas through wind-racked, howling forests. Vicki has gone all to pieces again, and her eyes are redder than ever. ”

“ ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
It seemed so strange for any one to die in June; so strange to be lifeless in the midst of the wanton profusion of life, to grow cold in that quivering radiance of heat. The people below us have got boxes of calla-lilies on their balcony this year. Their hot, heavy scent used to come in at the open window in the afternoons when the sun was on them, the honey-sweet smell of life, intense, penetrating, filling every corner of the room with splendid, pagan summer. And on the bed tossed my step-mother, muttering ceaselessly to herself of Christ.
XXXV Jena, July 15th. ”

“ It was a very reluctant tear, and only came out after a world of wringing, and I had stood there a most morbid long time before it appeared; but it did appear, and the vicious wind screamed round the Lindebergs' blank house, rattled its staring naked windows, banged in wild gusts about the road where the puddles of half melted snow reflected the blackness of the sky, tore at my hair and dress, stung my cheeks, shook the gate I held on to, thundered over the hills. Dear young man, I don't want to afflict you with these tales of woe and weakness, but I must tell you what I did next. ”

“ Jena shrugged its shoulders, the larger world was blank. The books have brought us no fame, no money, some tragic hours, but much interest and amusement. Always tragic hours have come when Papa clutched at his hair and raved rude things about the German public; and when the money didn't appear there have been uncomfortable moments. But these pass; Papa leaves his hair alone; and the balance remains on the side of nice things. We don't really want any more money, and Papa is kept busy and happy, and just to see him so eager, so full of his work, seems to warm the house with pleasant sunshine. ”

“ It is all very morbid: the fair outward surface of daily life, the gay, flower-starred crust of earth, and just underneath horrible tainted things, things forlorn and pitiful, things which we who still walk on the wholesome grass must soon join, changing our life in the roomy sunshine into something infinitely dependent and helpless, something that can only dimly live if those strong friends of ours in the bright world will spare us a thought, a remembrance, a few minutes from their plenty for sitting beside us, room in their hearts for yet a little love and sorrow. ”

“ But I do admit that being a vegetarian is bewildering. None of the books say a word about the odd feeling one has of not having had anything to eat. What Papa felt that first day I have felt every day since. I am perpetually hungry; and it is the unpleasant hunger that expresses itself in a dislike for food, in listlessness, inability to work, flabbiness, even faintness. At eight in the morning I begin with bread and plums. My entire being cries out while I am eating them for coffee with milk in it and butter on my bread. ”

“ So you see we are very happy up on the Galgenberg just now; the lovers like a pair of beaming babies, Frau von Lindeberg, sobered by the shock of her good fortune into the gentle kindliness that so often follows in the wake of a sudden great happiness, Papa Lindeberg warmed out of his tortoise-in-the-sun condition into much busy letter-writing, and Vicki's brother so uproariously pleased that I can only conclude him to be the possessor of many debts which he proposes to cause Joey to pay. Life is very thrilling when Love beats his wings so near. ”

“ The thought that a man's marrying one or not could make so much as the faintest smudge across the bright hopefulness of life made me laugh aloud with healthiest derision. Oh, how my shovel rang against the frozen stones! The feathery snow was scattered broadcast at each stroke. My body glowed and tingled. My hair grew damp about my forehead. The sun smiled broadly down upon my back. Papa flung up his window to cheer me on, but shut it again with a slam before he had well got out his words. ”

“ Frau von Lindeberg's kitchen smoke went up straight and pearly into the golden light. The roofs of Jena were in blue shadow. Our neighbor's roof flashed with a million diamonds in the sun. Two rooks cawed to each other from the pine tree nearest our door; and Rose-Marie Schmidt said her morning prayers then and there, still clinging to her shovel. Then she pulled off her coat, hung her hat on the door-handle, and began in a sort of high rapture to make a pathway to the pump. What are the joys of summer to these? There is nothing like it, nothing, nothing in the world. ”

“ We both esteem Johanna with the craven esteem you feel for a person, at any moment capable of giving notice, who does all the unpleasant things you would otherwise have to do yourself. The state of her temper seriously affects our peace. You see, the house is small, and if her trumpeter has been unsatisfactory and she throws the saucepans about or knocks the broom in sweeping against all the wooden things like doors and skirting-boards, it makes an unendurable clatter and puts an end at once to Papa's work and to my equally earnest play. ”

“ Beyond words ghastly at the time, terrible, hopeless, the aches of my body as nothing compared with the amazing anguish of my soul, the world turned into one vast pit of pain, impossible to think of the future, impossible to think of the past, impossible to bear the present—after all that behold me awake again, and so wide awake, with eyes grown so quick to see the wonder and importance of the little things of life, the beauty of them, the joy of them, that I can laugh aloud with glee at the delicious notion of calling me an armes Mädchen. ”

“ How amazing it is, the way women waste life. Men waste enough of it, heaven knows, but never anything like so much as women. Papa and I both hate that Sunday dinner, both dread the upheavals of Saturday made necessary by it, and you, I know, disliked them just as much, and so has every other young man we have had here; yet my step-mother inflicts these things on us with an iron determination that nothing will ever alter. And why? Only because she was brought up in the belief that it was proper, and because, if she omitted to do the proper, female Jena would be aghast. ”

“ But no girl with a spark of decency would cling on to a reluctant lover. What an exceedingly poor thing in girls she would be who did. I can't tell you how much ashamed I am of that sort of girl, the girl who clings, who follows, who laments,—as if the world, the splendid, amazing world, were empty of everything but one single man, and there were no sun shining, no birds singing, no winds blowing, no hills to climb, no trees to sit under, no books to read, no friends to be with, no work to do, no heaven to go to. I feel now for the first time that I would like to know Miss Cheriton. ”

“ ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
LXV Galgenberg, Dec. 31st.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—My heartiest good wishes for the New Year. May it be fruitful to you in every pleasant way; bring you interesting work, agreeable companions, bright days; and may it, above all things confirm and strengthen our friendship. There now; was ever young man more thoroughly fitted out with invoked blessings? And each one wished from the inmost sincerity of my heart.
But we can't come to Berlin as you suggest we should, and allow ourselves to be shown round by you. ”

“ Now Vicki's fender and babies and busy happy life have vanished into the land of Never Will Be's. She will not find some one else to take his place. She has a story attached to her: a fatal thing here for a girl. Unlike your Miss Cheriton, who gently waves you aside and engages herself without the least difficulty to a duke, Vicki is a marked person, and will be avoided by our careful and calculating young men. She is doomed never to spoil and tease those babies, never to spoil and worship that husband. ”

“ I love my freedom and forest trampings, my short skirts and swinging arms. I want the wind to blow on me, and the sun to burn me, and the mud to spatter me. Away with caskets, and settings, and frames! I am not a picture, or a jewel, whatever your poetic eye, misled by a sly and tricky Muse, persists in seeing. It would be quite a good plan, and of distinctly tonic properties, for you to write to Frau von Lindeberg and beg her to describe me. She, it is certain, would do it very accurately, untroubled by the deceptions of any Muse. ”

“ I walked back slowly through the long orchard grass between the apple-trees trees. The moon gleamed along the branches. The branches were weighed down with apples. The place was full of the smell of fruit, of the smell of fruit fallen into the grass, that had lain there bruised all day in the sun. I think the beauty of the world is crushing. Often it seems almost unbearable, calling out such an acuteness of sensation, such a vivid, leaping sensitiveness of feeling, that indeed it is like pain. ”

“ Instead the man had a head like Julius Cæsar, lean, thoughtful, shrewd, and a spare body that made Papa Lindeberg's seem strangely pulpy and as if it were held together only by the buttons of his clothes. We were staggered. Frau von Lindeberg couldn't understand why a man so rich should also be so thin,—' He is in a position to have the costliest cooking,' she said several times, looking at me with amazed eyebrows; nor could she understand why a man without ancestors should yet make her husband, whose past bristles with them, be the one to look as if he hadn't got any. ”

“ But writing is so different, and so strange; at once so much more and so much less intimate. The body is safe—far away, unassailable; and the spirit lets itself go out to meet a fellow spirit with the frankness it can never show when the body goes too, that grievous hinderer of the communion of saints, that officious blunderer who can spoil the serenest intercourse by a single blush.
Johanna came in just there. She was decked in smiles, and wanted to say good-by till to-morrow morning. It is her night out, and she really looked rather wonderful to one used to her kitchen condition. ”

“ I belong to your Jena days; days of hard living, and working, and thinking; days when, by dint of being forced to do without certain bodily comforts, the accommodating spirit made up for it by its own increased comfort and warmth. Probably your spirit will never again attain to quite so bright a shining as it did that year. How can it, unless it is amazingly strong—and I know it well not to be that—shine through the suffocating masses of upholstery your present life piles about it? ”

“ Did you ever chance to live with a just person? They are very chilling, and not so rare as one might suppose. And Papa, laxest, most tolerant of men, so lax that nothing seems to him altogether bad, so tolerant that nobody, however hard he tries, can pass, he thinks, beyond the reach of forgiveness and love, so humorous that he has to fight continually to suppress it, for humor lands one in odd morasses of dislike and misconception here, married her a year after my mother died, and did it wholly for my sake. ”

“ And then the deliciousness of being able to write to all those relations grown of late so supercilious, to Cousin Mienchen who came and played the rich, and tell them the glorious news. Vicki basks in the sunshine of a mother's love again, and never hears a cross word. Good things are showered down on her, presents, pettings, admiration, all those charming things that every girl should enjoy once before her pretty girlhood has gone. It is the most delightful experience to see a family in the very act of receiving a stroke of luck. ”

“ Nature, carving her out, moulding her body and her mind, putting in a dimple here and giving an eyelash an extra curl there, had a pleasant eye on a firelit future for Vicki, a cosy, sheltered future with a fender for her feet, a baby for each arm, and an adored husband coming in at the end of the day to be fed and kissed. But this man has outwitted nature. He weighed, with true German caution, Vicki and her dimples against the tiny portion which was all he could extract from her parents, and found them not heavy enough to make up for the alarming emptiness of that other scale. ”

“ Now what is your opinion of a woman with a healthy body, a warm room, and a sufficient dinner, who feels as though the soul within her were an echoing cavern, empty, cold, and dark? It is what I feel at this moment, and it is shameful. Isn't it shameful that the sight of leaden clouds—but they really are dreadful clouds, inky, ragged, harassed—scudding across the sky, and of furious brown beech-leaves on the little trees in front of the Lindebergs' deserted house being lashed and maddened by the wind, should make me suddenly catch my breath for pain? ”

“ I don't mean, of course, that the Jena streets are thick with aunts being led by dogs on strings, but that they have that tragic blindness of the spirit that misses seeing things that are hopeful and generous and lovely; things alight with young enthusiasms, or beautiful with a patience that has had time to grow gray. They also have that odd, unfurnished sort of mind that can never forget and never forgive. Yesterday at the Kaffee-Klatsch I met them all again, the Jena aunts I know so well and who are yet for ever strange, for ever of a ghastly freshness. ”

“ I went on through the grass, my shoes wet with dew, the lantern light fitfully calling out my possessions from the blackness,—the three apple-trees, the currant-bush, the pale group of starworts, children of some accidental wind-dropped seed of long ago; and beside the starworts I stopped again and listened. Still only the crickets; and presently very far away the whistle of the night express from Berlin to Munich as it hurried past the little station in the Paradies valley. ”

“ Do not put an end to what is precious,—believe me it will grow more and more precious with years. Do not, in the heat and impatience of youth, kill the poor goose who, if left alone, will lay the most beautiful golden eggs. What shall I talk to you about to turn your attention somewhere else, somewhere far removed from that unhappy bird? Shall I tell you about Papa's book, finally refused by every single publisher, come back battered and draggled to be galvanized by me into fresh life in an English translation? ”