Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther

I was interrupted there by a message from him asking if I would come down and help him gather up the windfalls in his orchard, his wife being busy pickling beans. I went, my head full of what I had just been writing to you, and I gathered up together with the apples a little lesson in the foolishness of officious and hasty criticism. It was this way:

Our baskets being full, and our backs rested, he groaned and said that in another week he must leave for Weimar.

'But you like your work,' said I.

'I detest my work,' he said peevishly. 'I detest teaching. I detest little boys.'

'Then why—' I began, but stopped.

'Why? Why? Because I detest it is no reason why I should not do it.'

'Yes, it is.'

'What, and at my age begin another?'

'No, no.'

'You would not have me idle?'

'Yes, I would.'

He stared at me gravely through his spectacles. 'This is unprincipled,' he said.

I laughed. It is years since I have observed that the principled groan a good deal and make discontented criticisms of life, and I don't think I care to be one of them.

'It is,' he persisted, seeing that I only laughed.

'Is it?' said I.

'It is man's lot to work,' said he.

'Is it?' said I.

'Certainly,' said he.

'All day?'

'If he cannot get it done in less time, certainly.'

'Every day?'

'Certainly.'

'All through the years of his life?'

'All through the years of his strength, certainly.'

'What for?'

'My dear young lady, have you been living again on vegetables lately?'

'Why?'

'Your words sound as though your thoughts were watery.'

A nettled silence fell upon me, and while I was arranging how best to convince him of their substance he was shaking his head and saying that it was strange how the most intelligent women are unable really to think. 'Water,' he continued, 'is indispensable in its proper place and good in many others where, strictly, it might be done without. I have nothing to say against watery emotions, watery sentiments, even watery affections, especially in ladies, who would be less charming in proportion as they were more rigid. Ebb and flow, uncertainty, instability, unaccountableness, are becoming to your sex. But in the region of thought, of the intellect, of pure reason, everything should be very dry. The one place, my dear young lady, in which I will endure no water is on the brain.'

I had no answer ready. There seemed to be nothing left to do but to go home. I did go a few steps up the orchard, reflecting on the way men have of telling you you cannot think, or are not logical, at the very moment when you appear to yourself to be most unanswerable—a regrettable habit that at once puts a stop to interesting conversation,—and presently, as I was nearing our fence, he called after me. 'Fräulein Rose-Marie,' he called pleasantly.

'Well?' said I, looking down at him over a displeased shoulder.

'Come back.'

'No.'

'Come back and dine with us.'

'No.'

'There is mutton for dinner, and before that a soup full of the concentrated strength of beasts. Up there I know you will eat carrots and stewed apples, and I shall never be able to make you see what I see.'

'Heaven forbid that I ever should.'

'What, you do not desire to be reasonable?'

'I don't choose to argue with you.'

'Have I done anything?'

'You are not logical enough for me,' said I, anxious to be beforehand with the inevitable remark.

'Come, come,' said he, his face crinkling into smiles.

'It's true,' said I.

'Come back and prove it.'

'Useless.'

'You cannot.'

'I will not.'

'It is the same thing.'

I went on up the hill.

'Fräulein Rose-Marie!'

'Well?'

'Come back.'

'No.'

'Come back, and tell me why you think I ought to give up my work and sit for the rest of my days with hanging hands.'

I turned and looked down at him. 'Because,' I said, 'are you not fifty? And is not that high time to begin and get something out of life?'

He adjusted his spectacles, and stared up at me attentively. 'Continue,' he said.

'I look at your life, at all those fifty years of it, and I see it insufferably monotonous.'

'Continue.'

'Dull.'

'Continue.'

'Dusty.'

'Continue.'

'Dreary.'

'Continue.' He nodded his head gently at each adjective and counted them off on his fingers.

'I see it full of ink-spots, dog-eared grammars, and little boys.'

'Continue.'

'It is a constant going over the same ground—in itself a maddening process. No sooner do the boys reach a certain age and proficiency and become slightly more interesting than they go on to somebody else, and you begin again at the beginning with another batch. You teach in a bare-walled room with enormous glaring windows, and the ring of the electric tram-bell in the street below makes the commas in your sentences. You have been doing this every day for thirty years. The boys you taught at first are fathers of families now. The trees in the playground have grown from striplings into big shady things. Everything has gone on, and so have you—but you have only gone on getting drier and more bored.'

'Continue,' said he, smiling.

'Your intelligence,' said I, coming down a little nearer, 'restless at first, and for ever trying to push green shoots through the thick rind of routine—'

'Good. Quite good. Continue.'

'—through to a wider space, a more generous light—'

'Poetic. Quite poetic. My compliments.'

'Thank you. Your intelligence, then, for ever—for ever—you've interrupted me, and I don't know where I'd got to.'

'You have got to my intelligence having green shoots.'

'Oh, yes. Well, they're not green now. That's the point I've been stumbling toward. They ought to be, if you had taken bigger handfuls of leisure and had not wholly wasted your time drudging. But now they ought to be more than shoots—great trees, in whose shade we all would sit gratefully, and you enjoying free days, with the pleasant memory of free years behind you and the cheerful hope of roomy years to come. And during all that time of your imprisonment in a class-room the world outside went on its splendid way, the seasons filled it with beauty which you were not there to see, the sun shone and warmed other people, the winds blew and made other people's flesh tingle and their blood dance—you, of course, were cramped up with cold feet and a headache—the birds sang to other people tunes of heaven, while in your ears buzzed only the false quantities of reluctant little boys, the delicious rain—'

'Stop, stop. You forget I had to earn a living.'

'Of course you had. But you know you earned your living long ago. What you are earning now is much more like your dying—the dying, the atrophy of your soul. What does it matter if your wife has one bonnet less a year, and no silk dress—'

'Do not let her hear you,' he said, glancing round.

'—or if you keep no servant, and have less to eat on Sundays than your neighbors, give no parties, and don't cumber yourselves up with acquaintances who care nothing for you? If you gave up these things you could also give up drudging. You are too old to drudge. You have been too old these twenty years. A man of your brains—' he pretended to look grateful—'who cannot earn enough between twenty and thirty to keep him from the necessity of slaving for the rest of his days is not—is not—'

'Worthy of the name of man?'

'I don't know that that's a great thing,' said I doubtfully.