We both jumped.
'She would be a most dreary young female,' he went on, smiling down as from a pulpit on our heads, and wiping his spectacles. 'Offspring continually goaded and galvanized by a parent, hammered upon, chiselled, beaten out flat—'
'Dear me, Papachen,' I murmured.
'Beaten out flat,' said Papa, waving my interruption aside with his spectacles, 'by the dead weight of opinions already stale, the victims of a system, the subjects of an experiment, the prisoners of prejudice, are bound either to flare into rank rebellion on the first opportunity or to grow continually drearier and more conspicuously stupid.'
Vicki stared first up at Papa then at me, her soft, crumpled sort of mouth twisted into troubled surprise.
Papa leaned further out and hit the window sill with his hand for all the world like a parson hitting his pulpit's cushion. 'One word,' he said, 'one word of praise or blame, one single word from an outsider will have more effect upon your offspring than years of trouble taken by yourself, mountains of doctrine preached by you, rivers of good advice, oceans of exhortations, cautions as numerous as Abraham's posterity, well known to have been as numerous as the sea sand, private prayers, and public admonition.'
And he disappeared with a jerk.
'Ach,' said Vicki, much impressed.
Papa popped out his head again. 'You may believe me, Rose-Marie,' he said.
'I do, Papachen,' said I.
'You have to thank me for much.'
'And I do,' said I heartily, smiling up at him.
'But for nothing more than for leaving you free to put forth such shoots as your nature demanded in whatever direction your instincts propelled you.' And he disappeared and shut the window.
Vicki looked at me doubtfully. 'You said beautiful things,' she said, 'and he said just the opposite. Which is true?'
'Both,' said I promptly, determined not to be outdone as a prophet by Papa.
Poor Vicki. It is so hard to have life turned into a smudge when one is only twenty. She adored this man, was so proud of him, so proud of herself for being chosen by him. She grew, in the year during which they were engaged, into a woman, and can never now retrace her steps back to that fairy place of sunshine and carelessness in which we so happily wander if we are left alone for years and years after we are supposed to be grown up. Do you realize what a blow in the face she has received, as well as in her unfortunate little heart? All her vanities, without which a girl is but a poor thing, shrivelled up, her self-respect gone, her conceit, if there was any, and I suppose there was because there always is, gone headlong after it. A betrothal here is almost as binding and quite as solemn as a marriage. It is announced in the papers. It is abundantly celebrated. And the parents on both sides fall on each other's necks and think highly of one another till the moment comes for making settlements. The Lindebergs spent all they had laid by and borrowed more to buy the trousseau and furnish the house. Vicki cried bitterly when she talked of her table-napkins. She says there were twelve dozen in twelve different patterns, and each twelve was tied up with a pink ribbon fastened by a buckle and a bow. They had to be sold again at a grievous loss, and the family fled from Berlin and the faces of their acquaintances, faces crooked with the effort to sympathize when what they really wanted to do, says Vicki, was to smile, and came to this cheap place where they can sit in obscurity darning up the holes in their damaged fortunes. Frau von Lindeberg, who has none of the torment of rejected love to occupy her feelings and all the bitterness of the social and financial blow, cannot help saying hard things to Vicki, things pointed and poisoned with reproaches that sometimes almost verge on taunts. The man was a good parti for Vicki; little money, but much promise for the future, a good deal older than herself and already brilliant as an officer; and during the engagement the satisfied mother overflowed, as mothers will, with love for the creditable daughter. 'It was so nice,' said Vicki-, dolefully sniffing. 'She seemed to love me almost as much as she loves my brother. I was so happy. I had so much. Then everything went at once. Mamma can't bear to think that no one will ever want to marry me now, because I have been engaged.'
Well, love is a cruel, horrible thing. Hardly ever do both the persons love with equal enthusiasm, and if they do what is the use? It is all bound to end in smoke and nothingness, put out by the steady drizzle of marriage. And for the others, for the masses of people who do not love equally, of whom one half is at a miserable disadvantage, at the mercy absolutely of the other half, what is there but pain in the end? And yet—and yet it is a pretty thing in its beginnings, a sweet, darling thing. But, like a kitten, all charm and delicious ways at first, innocent, soft, enchanting, it turns into a cat with appalling rapidity and cruelly claws you. I'd like to know if there's a single being on earth so happy and so indifferent that he has not got hidden away beneath a brave show of clothes and trimmings the mark of Love's claws. And I think most of the clawings are so ferocious that they are for a long time ghastly tears that open and bleed again; and when with years they slowly dry up there is always the scar, red and terrible, that makes you wince if by any chance it is touched. That is what I think. What do you think?
Good-by.
No, don't tell me what you think. I don't want to know.
XLVI
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—Yesterday I was so much absorbed by Vicki's woes that I never got to what I really wanted to write about. It's that book I found in the Jena bookshop. It was second-hand and cheap, and I bought it, and it has unkindly revenged itself by playing havoc with my illusions. It is a collection of descriptions of what is known of the lives of the English poets, beginning with Chaucer, who is luckily too far away to provide much tattle, and coming down the centuries growing bigger with gossip as it comes, till it ends with Rossetti, and FitzGerald, and Stevenson. Each poet has his portrait. It was for that I bought it. I cannot tell you how eagerly I looked at them. At last I was going to see what Wordsworth looked like, and Coleridge, and Keats, and Shelley. One of my dreams has been to go to that National Portrait Gallery of yours in London, described in an old Baedeker I once saw, and gaze at the faces of those whose spirits I know so well. Now I don't want to. Can you imagine what it is like, what an extremely blessed state it is, only to have read the works of a poet, the filtered-out best of him, and to have lived so far from his country and from biographies or collections of his letters that all gossip about his private life and criticisms of his morals are unknown to you? Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Burns, have been to me great teachers, great examples, before whose shining image, built up out of the radiant materials their works provided, I have spent glorious hours in worship. Not a cloud, not a misgiving has dimmed my worship. We need altars—anyhow we women do—and they were mine—I have not been able to be religious in the ordinary sense, and they have taken the place of religion. Our own best poets, Goethe, Schiller, Heine and the rest, do not appeal to me in the same way. Goethe is wonderful, but he leaves you sitting somehow in a cold place from which you call out at intervals with conviction that he is immense the while you wish he would keep the feet of your soul a little warmer. Schiller beats his patriotic drum, his fine eyes rolling continually toward the gallery, too unintermittently for perfect delight. Heine the exquisite, the cunning worker in gems, the stringer of pearls on frailest golden threads, is too mischievous, too malicious, to be set up in a temple; and then you can't help laughing at his extraordinary gift for maddening the respectable, at the extraordinary skill and neatness with which he deposits poison in their tenderest places, and how can he worship who is being made to laugh? If I knew little about our poets' lives—inevitably I know more than I want to—I still would feel the same. There is, I think, in their poetry nothing heavenly. It is true I bless God for them, thank Him for having let them live and sing, for having given us such a noble heritage, but I can't go all the way Papa goes, and melt in a bath of rapture whenever Goethe's name is mentioned. I remember what you said about Goethe. It has not influenced me. I do think you were wrong. But I do, too, think that everything really heavenly in our nation, everything purely inspired, manifestly immortal, has gone, not into our poetry but into our music. That has absorbed our whole share of divine fire, and left our poets nothing but the cool and conscious exercise of their intellects.