He flung up his hands, and the darkness engulfed him.
'It's raining,' I tried to cry after his hatless figure.
I thought I heard him call back something about Pilsner—'It's the Pilsner,' I thought I heard him say; but the noise coming from the kitchen was too violent for me to be sure.
His father was in the passage, walking up and down it, his hands in his pockets, his shoulders up to his ears as though he were shrinking from blows. He told me what his unhappy son had done. Not able to endure the trumpet when it was being blown up at our house earlier in the evening, not able to endure it even softened, chastened, subdued by distance and the intervening walls, he had directed his mother to go up and invite the player down to her kitchen, where he was to be cajoled into eating and drinking, because, as the son explained, full of glee at his sagacity, no man who is eating and drinking can at the same time be blowing a trumpet. 'Thus,' said his father, in jerks coincident with the breath-takings of the trumpeter, 'did he hope to obtain peace.'
'But he didn't,' said I.
'No. For a period there was extreme, delicious quiet. Mother'—so he invariably describes his wife—' sacrificed her best sausage, for how shall we permit our son to be tortured? The bread was spread with butter three centimeters deep. The trumpeter and his Schatz sat quietly in the kitchen eating it. We sat quietly on the veranda discussing great themes. Then that good beer my son so often praises, that excellent, barrel-kept, cellar-lodged Pilsner beer, bright as amber, clear as ice, cool as—cool as—'
'A cucumber,' I assisted.
'Good. Very good. As a cucumber—as a salad of cucumbers.'
'No, no—there's pepper in a salad. You'd better just keep to plain cucumber,' I interrupted, always rather nice in the matter of images.
'Cool, then, as plain cucumber—this usually admirable stuff instead of, as we had expected, sending him gradually and pleasantly to sleep—I mean, of course, making him gradually and pleasantly so sleepy that thoughts of his bed, growing in affection with every glass, would cause him to arise and depart to his barracks,—woke him up. And, my dear Fräulein, you yourself heard—you are hearing now—how completely it did it.'
'Is he—is he—?' I inquired nervously.
The neighbor nodded. 'He is,' he said; 'he has consumed fourteen glasses.'
And indeed he was; and I should say from the tumult, from the formlessness of it, the tunelessness, the rollicksomeness, that never was anybody more so.
'I fear my son will leave us for some quieter spot before his holiday is over,' said the neighbor, looking distressed.
And perhaps it will convince you more than anything else I have said of the extreme value of our Johannas, when I tell you that, goaded by the noise and by his disappointed face to rash promises, I declared I would dismiss the girl unless she broke off such an engagement, and he stared at me for a moment in astonishment and then resignedly shook his head and said with the weary conviction of a householder of thirty years' standing, 'Das geht doch nicht.'
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XLIII
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—But it is true. Our servants do not get more than from 100 to 250 marks a year, and indeed I think it is a great deal and cannot see why, because you spend as much (you say you do, so I must believe it) in a month on gloves and ties, it should make you hate yourself. Do not hate yourself. Your doing so doesn't make us pay our servants more. Why, how do you suppose we could get all we need out of our hundred pounds a year—I translate our marks into your pounds for your greater convenience—if we had to give a servant more than eight of them and for our house more than fifteen? Papa and I do not like to be kept hungry in the matter of books, and we shall probably spend every penny of our income; but I know a number of families with children who live decently and have occasional coffee-parties and put by for their daughters' trousseaux on the same sum. As for the servants themselves, have I not described Johanna's splendid appearance on her Sundays, her white dress and gloves, and the pink ribbons round her waist? She finds her wages will buy these things and still leave enough for the savings-bank. She is quite content. Only I don't know if she would remain so if you were to come and lament over her and tell her what a little way you make the same money go. You see, she would probably not grasp the true significance of the admission, which is, I take it, not that she has too little but that you spend too much. Yet how can I from my Galgenberg judge what is necessary in gloves and ties for a splendid young man like yourself? The sum seems to me terrific. There must be stacks of gloves and ties constantly growing higher about your path. You, then, spend on these two things alone almost exactly what we three spend in a year on everything. But my astonishment is only the measure of my ignorance. Do not hate yourself. Either spend the money without compunction, or, if you have compunction, don't spend it. A sinner should always, I think, sin gayly or not at all. I don't mean that you in this are a sinner; I only mean that as a general principle half-hearted sinners are contemptible. It is a poor creature who while he sins is sorry. If he must sin, let him at least do it with all his heart, and having done it waste no time in whimpers but try to turn his back on it and his face toward the good. Please do not hate yourself. I am sure you have to have the things. Your letter is more than usually depressed. Please do not hate yourself. It does no good and lowers your vitality. It is as bad as sorrow, which surely is very bad. I think nothing great was done by any one who wasted time peering about among his faults; but if ever you meet the pastor who prepared me for confirmation don't tell him I said so. I don't know how it is with yours in England, but here the pastors seem altogether unable to bear listening to descriptions of plain facts. When they come to doctor my soul, why may I not tell them its symptoms as badly as I tell my body's symptoms to the physician who would heal it? He is not shocked or angry when I show him my sore places; he recommends a plaster or a dose, encourages, and goes away. But your spiritual doctor takes your spiritual sore places as a kind of personal affront; at least, his manner often shows indignation in proportion as you are frank. Instead of being patient, he hardly lets you speak; instead of prescribing, he denounces; instead of helping, he passionately scolds; and so you do not go to him again, but fight through your later miseries alone. Just at the time of my preparation for confirmation my mother died. My heart, blank with sorrow, was very fit for religious impressions and consolations. The preparation lasts two years, and three times every week during that time I went to classes. For two years I was not allowed to dance or to go to even the mildest parties. For two years, from sixteen to eighteen, I was earnest, prayerful, humbly seeking after righteousness. Then one day, when questionings had come upon me that my conscience could not approve, I went to the pastor who had prepared me as confidently as I would go with a toothache to a dentist, and bared my sensitive conscience to him and begged to have my thoughts arranged and my doubts and questionings settled. To my amazement and extreme fright I beheld him shocked, angry, hardly able to endure hearing me tell all I had been wondering. It seemed very strange. I sat at last with downcast eyes, silent, ashamed, my heart shrunk back into reserve and frost. I was not being helped; I was being scolded, and bitterly scolded. At last at the door some special word of blame stung me to heat, and I cried, 'Herr Pastor, when my tongue is bad and I show it to a doctor, he gives me a pill. Are you not the doctor of my spirit? Why, then, when I come to you to be healed, do you, instead of giving me medicine, so cruelly rate me?'