Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther

Papa has been in again. 'Is it not coffee-time?' he asked.

I looked at him amazed. 'Darling, coffee-time is never at half-past two,' I said reproachfully.

'Half-past two is it only? Der Teufel' said Papa.

'Isn't your book getting on well?' I inquired.

'Yes, yes,—the book progresses. That is, it would progress if my attention did not continually wander.'

'Wander? Whereto?'

'Rose-Marie, there is a constant gnawing going on within me that will not permit me to believe that I have dined.'

'Well, but, Papachen, you have. I saw you doing it.'

'What you saw me doing was not dining,' said Papa.

'Not dining?'

Papa waved his arms round oddly and suddenly. 'Grass—grass,' he cried with a singular impatience.

'Grass?' I echoed, still more amazed.

'Books of an enduring nature, works of any monumentalness, cannot, never were, and shall not be raised on a foundation of grass,' said Papa, his face quite red.

'I can't think what you mean,' said I. 'Where is there any grass?'

'Here,' said Papa, quickly clasping his hands over that portion of him that we boldly talk about and call Magen, and you allude to sideways, by a variety of devious expressions. 'I have been fed today,' he said, looking at me quite severely, 'on a diet appropriate only to the mountain goat, and probably only appropriate to him because he can procure nothing better.'

'Why, you had a lentil soup—proved scientifically to contain all that is needed—'

'I congratulate the lentil soup. I envy it. I wish I too contained all that is needed. But here'—he clasped his hands again—'there is nothing.'

'Yes there is. There is cabbage.'

'Pooh,' said Papa. 'Green stuff. Herbage.'

'Herbage?'

'And scanty herbage, too—appropriate, I suppose, to the mountainous region in which we now find ourselves.'

'Papa, don't you want to be a vegetarian?'

'I want my coffee,' said Papa.

'What, now?'

'And why not now, Rose-Marie? Is there anything more rational than to eat when one is hungry? Let there, pray, be much—very much—bread-and-butter with it.'

'But, Papa, we weren't going to have coffee any more. Didn't you agree that we would give up stimulants?'

Papa looked at me defiantly. 'I did,' he said.

'Well, coffee is one.'

'It is our only one.'

'You said you would give it up.'

'I said gradually. To do so today would not be doing so gradually. Nothing is good that is not done gradually.'

'But one must begin.'

'One must begin gradually.'

'You were delighted with Shelley.'

'It was after dinner.'

'You were quite convinced.'

'I was not hungry.'

'You know he is all for pure water.'

'He is all for many things that seem admirable to those who have lately dined.'

'You know he says that if the populace of Paris at the time of the Revolution had drunk at the pure source of the Seine—'

'There is no pure source of the Seine within reach of the populace of Paris. There would only be cats. Dead cats. And cats interspersed, no doubt, with a variety of objects of the nature of portions of crockery and empty tins.'

'But he says pure source.'

'Then he says pure nonsense.'

'He says if they had done that and satisfied their hunger at the ever-furnished table of vegetable nature—'

'Ever-furnished table? Holy Heaven—the good, the excellent young man.'

'—they would never have lent their brutal suffrage to the proscription list of Robespierre.'

'Rose-Marie, today I care not what this young man says.'

'He says—look, I've got the book in my pocket—'

'I will not look.'

'He says, could a set of men whose passions were not perverted by unnatural stimuli—that's coffee, of course—gaze with coolness on an auto-da-fè?'

'I engage to gaze with heat on any auto-da-fè I may encounter if only you will quickly—'

'He says—'

'Put down the book, Rose-Marie, and see to the getting of coffee.'

'But he says—'

'Let him say it, and see to the coffee.'

'He says, is it to be believed that a being of gentle feelings rising from his meal of roots—'

'Gott, Gott,—meal of roots!'

'—would take delight in sports of blood?'

'Enough. I am not in the temper for Shelley.'

'But you quite loved him a day or two ago.'

'Except food, nobody loves anything—anything at all—while his stomach is empty.'

'I don't think that's very pretty, Papachen.'

'But it is a great truth. Remember it if you should marry. Shape your conduct by its light. Three times every day, Rose-Marie,—that is, before breakfast, before dinner, and before supper,—no husband loves any wife. She may be as beautiful as the stars, as wise as Pallas-Athene, as cultured as Goethe, as entertaining as a circus, as affectionate as you please—he cares nothing for her. She exists not. Go, my child, and prepare the coffee, and let the bread-and-butter be cut thick.'

Well, since then I have been cutting bread-and-butter and pouring out cups of coffee. I thought Papa would never leave off. If that is the effect of a vegetarian dinner I don't think it can really be less expensive than meat. Papa ate half a pound of butter, which is sixty pfennings, and for sixty pfennings I could have bought him a Kalbsschnitzel so big that it would have lasted, under treatment, two days. I must go for a walk and think it out.

Yours sincerely,

ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.

XXXVI

Galgenberg, July 21st.

Dear Mr. Anstruther,—I assure you that we have all we want, so do not, please, go on feeling distressed about us. Why should you feel distressed? I am not certain that I do not resent it. Put baldly (you will say brutally), you have no right to be distressed, uneasy, anxious, and all the other things you say you are, about the private concerns of persons who are nothing to you. Even a lamb might conceivably feel nettled by persistent pity when it knows it has everything in the world it wants. Come now, if it is a question of pity, we will have it in the right place, and I will pity you. There is always, you know, a secret satisfaction in the soul of him who pities. He does hug himself, and whether he does it consciously or unconsciously depends on his aptitude for clear self-criticism. Compared with yours I deliberately consider my life glorious. And when will you see that there are kinds of gloriousness that cannot be measured in money or position? It is plain to me—and it would be so to you if you thought it over—that the less one has the more one enjoys. We want space, time, concentration, for getting at the true sweet root of life. And I think—and you probably do not—that the true sweet root of life is in any one thing, no matter what thing, on which your whole undisturbed attention is fixed. Once I read a little French story, years ago, with my mother, when I was a child, and I don't know now who wrote it or what it was called. It was the story of a prisoner who found a plant growing between the flags of the court he might walk in, and I think it was a wallflower; and it, unfolding itself slowly and putting out one tender bit of green after the other in that gray and stony place, stretched out little hands of life and hope and interest to the man who had come there a lost soul. It was the one thing he had. It ended by being his passion. With nothing else to distract him, he could study all its wonders. From that single plant he learned more than the hurried passer-on, free of the treasures of the universe, learns in a life. It saved him from despair. It brought him back to the eager interest in the marvellous world that soul feels which is unencumbered by too heavy a weight of trappings. Why, I still have too much; and here are you pitying me because I have not more when I am distracted by all the claims on my attention. I can look at whole beds of wallflowers every spring, and pass on with nothing but a vague admiration for their massed beauty of scent and color. I get nothing out of them but just that transient glimpse and whiff. There are too many. There is no time for them all. But shut me up for weeks alone with one of them in a pot, and I too would get out of it the measure of the height and the depth and the wonder of life.