'Let it pass. It is an accepted ending to a sentence beginning as yours did. And now, my dear young lady, you have preached me a sermon—'
'Not a sermon.'
'Permitted me, then, to be present at a lecture—'
'Not a lecture.'
'Anyhow held forth on the unworthily puny outer conditions of my existence. Tell me, now, one thing. I concede the ink-spots, the little boys, the monotony, the tram-bells, the regrettable number of years; they are all there, and you with your vivid imagination see them all. But tell me one thing: has it never occurred to you that they are the merest shell, the merest husk and envelopment, and that it is possible that in spite of them—' his voice grew serious—'my life may be very rich within?'
And you, my friend, tell me another thing. Am I not desperately, hopelessly horrid? Short-sighted? Impertinent? The readiest jumper at conclusions? The most arrogant critic of other people? Rich within. Of course. Hidden with God. That is what I have never seen when I have looked on superciliously from the height of my own idleness at these drudging lives. And see how amazing has been my foolishness, for would not my own life judged from outside, this life here alone with Papa, this restricted, poor, solitary life, my first youth gone, my future without prospects, no distractions, few friends, Papa's affection growing vaguer as he grows older, would it not, looked at as I have been looking at my neighbor's, seem entirely blank and desolate? Yet how sincerely can I echo what he said—My life is very rich within. Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XLIV
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—It is kind of you to want to contradict what I said in my last letter about the outward appearance of my life, but really you know I am past my first youth. At twenty-six I cannot pretend to be what is known as a young girl, and I don't want to. Not for anything would I be seventeen or eighteen again. I like to be a woman grown, to have entered into the full possession of whatever faculties I am to have, to know what I want, to look at things in their true proportions. I don't know that eighteen has anything that compensates for that. It is such a rudderless sort of age. It may be more charming to the beholder, but it is not half so nice to the person herself. What is the good of loving chocolate to distraction when it only ends by making you sick? And the joy of a new frock or hat is dashed at once when you meet the superior gorgeousness of some other girl's frock or hat. And parties are often disappointing things. And students, though they are deeply interesting, easily lead to tiresome complications if they admire you, and if they don't that isn't very nice either. Why, even the young man in the cake-shop who used so gallantly to serve us with lemonade and had such wonderful curly eyelashes was not much good really, for he couldn't be invited to tea, and whenever we wanted to look at his eyelashes we had to buy a cake, and cakes are dreadfully expensive for persons who have no money. Yes, it is a silly, tittering, calf-like age, and I am glad it can't come back again. Please do not think that I need comforting because it is gone, or because of any of the other items in the list I gave you. The future looks quite pleasant to me,—quite bright and sunny. It is only empty of what people call prospects, by which I take them to mean husbands, but I shall fill it with pigs instead. I have great plans. I see what can be done with even one pig from my neighbor's example, who has dug out a sort of terrace and put a sty on it: simply wonders. And how much more could be done with two. I mean to be a very happy old maid. I shall fix my attention in the mornings on remunerative objects like pigs, and spend beautiful afternoons, quite idle physically but with my soul busy up among the poets. Later on in distant years, when Papa doesn't want me any more, I shall try to find a little house somewhere where it is flat, so that I can have other creatures about me besides bees, which are the only live stock I can keep here. And you mustn't think I shall not be happy, because I shall. So happy. I am happy now, and I mean to be happy then; and when I am very old and have to die I shall be happy about that too. I shall 'lay me down with a will,' as the bravest of your countrymen sang.
Do my plans seem to you selfish? I expect they do. People so easily call those selfish who stand a little aside and look on at life. We have a poet of whom we are proud, but whose fame has not, I think, reached across to England, a rugged, robust poet, not very far below Goethe, a painter on large canvasses, best at mighty scenes, perhaps least good in small things, in lyrics, in the things in which Heine was so exquisite; and he for my encouragement has said,
Isn't it a nice jingle? The man's name is Hebbel, and he lived round about the forties, and perhaps you know more of him than I do, and I have been arrogant again; but it is a jingle that has often cheered me when I was afraid I ought to be teaching somebody something, or making clothes for somebody, or paying somebody domiciliary visits and talking fluently of the lieber Gott. I shrink from these things; and a shrinking visitor, shy and uncertain, cannot be so nice as no visitor at all. Is it very wrong of me? When my conscience says it is—it does not say so often—I try to make up by going into the kitchen and asking Johanna kind questions about her mother. I must say she is rather odd when I do. She not only doesn't meet me half-way, she doesn't come even part of the way. She clatters her saucepans with an energy very like fury, and grows wholly monosyllabic. Yet it is not her step-mother; it is her very own mother, and it ought to be the best way of touching responsive chords in her heart and making her feel I am not merely a mistress but a friend. Once, struck by the way the lids of the saucepans were falling about, I tried her with her father, but the din instantly became so terrific that I was kept silent quite a long time, and when it left off felt instinctively that I had better say something about the weather. I don't think I told you that after that trumpeting Sunday, moved to real compassion by the sufferings of him you call the fiddler man, I took my courage in both hands and told Johanna with the pleasantest of smiles—I daresay it was really a rather ghastly one—that her trumpeter must not again bring his instrument with him when he called. 'It can so very well stay at home,' I explained suavely.
She immediately said she would leave on the first of October.
'But, Johanna!' I cried.
She repeated the formula.
'But, Johanna! How can a clever girl like you be so unreasonable? He is to visit you as often as before. All we beg is that it shall be done without music.'
She repeated the formula.
'But, Johanna!' I expostulated again,—eloquent exclamation, expressing the most varied sentiments.
She once again repeated the formula; and next day I was forced to descend into Jena, shaking an extremely rueful fist at the neighbor's house on the way, and set about searching in the obscurity of a registry office for the pearl we are trying all our lives to find.
This office consists of two rooms, the first filled with servants looking for mistresses, and the second with mistresses looking for servants. A Fräulein of vague age but determined bearing sits at a desk in the second room, and notes in a ledger the requirements of both parties. They are always the same: the would-be mistress, full of a hopefulness that crops up again and again to the end of her days, causing attributes like fleissig, treu, ehrlich, anständig, arbeitslieb, kinderlieb, to be written down together with her demands in cooking, starching, and ironing, and often adding the information that though the wages may appear small they are not really so, owing to the unusually superior quality of the treatment; and the would-be maid, briefer because without illusions, dictates her firm resolve to go nowhere where there is cooking, washing, or a baby.