Now that's enough about me. Let us talk about you. You must not come to Jena. What could have put such an idea into your head? It is a blazing, deserted place just now, looking from the top of the hills like a basin of hot bouillon down there in the hollow, wrapped in its steam. The University is shut up. The professors scattered. Martens is in Switzerland, and won't be back till September. Even the Schmidts, those interesting people, have flapped up with screams of satisfaction into a nest on the side of a precipice. I urge you with all my elder-sisterly authority to stay where you are. Plainly, if you were to come I would not see you. Oh, I will leave off pretending I cannot imagine what you want here: I know you want to see me. Well, you shall not. Why you should want to is altogether beyond my comprehension. I believe you have come to regard me as a sort of medicine, medicine of the tonic order, and wish to bring your sick soul to the very place where it is dispensed. But I, you see, will have nothing to do with sick souls, and I wholly repudiate the idea of being somebody's physic. I will not be your physic. What medicinal properties you can extract from my letters you are welcome to, but pray are you mad that you should think of coming here? When you do come you are to come with your wife, and when you have a wife you are not to come at all. How simple.
Really, I feel inclined to laugh when I try to picture you, after the life you have been leading in London, after the days you are living now at Clinches, attempting to arrange yourself on this perch of ours up here. I cannot picture you. We have reduced our existence to the crudest elements, to the raw material; and you, I know, have grown a very exquisite young man. The fact is you have had time to forget what we are really like, my father and I and Johanna, and since my step-mother's time we have advanced far in the casual scrappiness of housekeeping that we love. You would be like some strange and splendid bird in the midst of three extremely shabby sparrows. That is the physical point of view: a thing to be laughed at. From the moral it is for ever impossible.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXXVIII
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—It is pleasant of you to take the trouble to emulate our neighbor and tell me that you too think me intelligent. You put it, it is true, more elaborately than he does, with a greater embroidery of fine words, but I will try to believe you equally sincere. I make you a profound Knix,—it's a more expressive word than curtsey—of polite gratitude. But it is less excellent of you to add on the top of these praises that I am adorable. With words like that, inappropriate, and to me eternally unconvincing, this correspondence will come to an abrupt end. I shall not write again if that is how you are going to play the game. I would not write now if I were less indifferent. As it is, I can look on with perfect calm, most serenely unmoved by anything in that direction you may say to me; but if you care to have letters do not say them again. I shall never choose to allow you to suppose me vile.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXXIX
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—You need not have sent me so many pages of protestations. Nothing you can say will persuade me that I am adorable, and I did exactly mean the world vile. Do not quarrel with Miss Cheriton; but if you must, do not tell me about it. Why should you always want to tell one of us about the other? Have you no sense of what is fit? I am nothing to you, and I will not hear these things.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XL
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—You must really write a book. Write a very long one, with plenty of room for all your words. What is your bill for postage now? Johanna, I am sure, thinks you are sending me instalments of manuscript, and marvels at the extravagance that shuts it up in envelopes instead of leaving its ends open and tying it up with string. Once more I must beg you not to write about Miss Cheriton. It is useless to remind me that I have posed as your sister, and that to your sister you may confide anything, because I am not your sister. Sometimes I have written of an elder-sisterly attitude toward you, but that, of course, was only talk. I am not irascible enough for the position. I do think, though, you ought to be surrounded by women who are cross. Six cross and determined elder sisters would do wonders for you. And so would a mother with an iron will. And perhaps an aunt living in the house might be a good thing; one of those aunts—I believe sufficiently abundant—who pierce your soul with their eyes and then describe it minutely at meal-times in the presence of the family, expatiating particularly on what those corners of it look like, those corners you thought so secret, in which are huddled your dearest faults.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XLI
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—Very well; I won't quarrel; I will be friends,—friends, that is, so long as you allow me to be so in the only right and possible way. Don't murder too many grouse. Think of my disapproving scowl when you are beginning to do it, and then perhaps your day of slaughter will resolve itself into an innocent picnic on the moors, alone with sky and heather and a bored, astonished dog. Are you not glad now that you went to Scotland instead of coming to Jena to find the Schmidts not at home? Surely long days in the heather by yourself will do much toward making you friends with life. I think those moors must be so beautiful. Really very nearly as good as my Galgenberg. My Galgenberg, by the bye, has left off being quite so admirably solitary as it was at first. The neighbor is, as I told you, extremely friendly, so is his wife, though I do not set such store by her friendliness as I do by his, for, frankly, I find men are best; and they have a son who is an Assessor in Berlin. You know what an Assessor is, don't you?—it is a person who will presently be a Landrath. And you know what a Landrath is? It's what you are before you turn into a Regierungsrath. And a Regierungsrath is what you are before you are a Geheimrath. And a Geheimrath, if he lives long enough and doesn't irritate anybody in authority, becomes ultimately that impressive and glorious being a Wirklicher Geheimrath—implying that before he was only in fun—mit dem Prädikat Excellenz. And don't say I don't explain nicely, because I do. Well, where was I? Oh, yes; at the son. Well, he appeared a fortnight ago, brown and hot and with a knapsack, having walked all the way from Berlin, and is spending his holiday with his people. For a day or two I thought him quite ordinary. He made rather silly jokes, and wore a red tie. Then one evening I heard lovely sounds, lovely, floating, mellow sounds coming up in floods through the orchard into my garden where I was propped against a tree-trunk watching a huge yellow moon disentangling itself slowly from the mists of Jena,—oh, but exquisite sounds, sounds that throbbed into your soul and told it all it wanted to hear, showed it the way to all it was looking for, talked to it wonderfully of the possibilities of life. First they drew me on to my feet, then they drew me down the garden, then through the orchard, nearer and nearer, till at last I stood beneath the open window they were coming from, listening with all my ears. Against the wall I leaned, holding my breath, spell-bound, forced to ponder great themes, themes of life and death, the music falling like drops of liquid light in dark and thirsty places. I don't know how long it lasted or how long I stood there after it was finished, but some one came to the window and put his head out into the freshness, and what do you think he said? He said, 'Donnerwetter, wie man im Zimmer schwitzt.' And it was the son, brown and hot, and with a red tie.