Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther. Elizabeth von Arnim

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СКАЧАТЬ them out into the streets, cheapened them. I don't in the least want to tell my father, or any one else. Does this sound as though I were angry? Well, I don't think I am. On the contrary, I rather want to laugh. You dear silly! So clever and so simple, so wise and crammed with learning, and such a dear, ineffable goose. How old am I, I wonder? Only as old as you? Really only as old? Nonsense: I'm fifteen, twenty years your senior, my dear sir. I've lived in Jena, you in London I frequent Kaffee-Klatsches, and you the great world. I talk much with Johanna in the kitchen, and you with heaven knows what in the way of geniuses. Yet no male Nancy Cheriton, were his eyelids never so tilted, would wring a word out of me about a thing so near, so precious, so much soul of my soul as my lover.

      How would you explain this? I've tried and can't.

      Your rebellious

      ROSE-MARIE.

      Darling, darling, don't ask me to like Nancy. The thing's unthinkable.

      Later.

      Now I know why I am wiser than you: life in kitchens and Klatsches turns the soul gray very early. Didn't one of your poets sing of somebody who had a sad lucidity of soul? I'm afraid that is what's the matter with me.

      X

Jena, Nov. 19th.

      Oh, what nonsense everything seems,—everything of the nature of differences, of arguments, on a clear morning up among the hills. I am ashamed of what I wrote about Nancy; ashamed of my eagerness and heat about a thing that does not matter. On the hills this morning, as I was walking in the sunshine, it seemed to me that I met God. And He took me by the hand, and let me walk with Him. And He showed me how beautiful the world is, how beautiful the background He has given us, the spacious, splendid background on which to paint our large charities and loves. And I looked across the hilltops, golden, utterly peaceful, and amazement filled me in the presence of that great calm at the way I flutter through my days and at the noise I make. Why should I cry out before I am hurt? flare up into heat and clamor? The pure light up there made it easy to see clearly, and I saw that I have been silly and ungrateful. Forgive me. You know best about Nancy, you who have seen her; and I, just come down from that holy hour on the hills, am very willing to love her. I will not turn my back upon a ready friend. She can have no motive but a good one. Roger, I am a blunderer, a clumsy creature with not one of my elemental passions bound down yet into the decent listlessness of chains. But I shall grow better, grow more worthy of you. Not a day shall pass without my having been a little wiser than the day before, a little kinder, a little more patient. I wish you had been with me this morning. It was so still and the sky so clear that I sat on the old last year's grass as warmly as in summer. I felt irradiated with life and love; light shining on to every tiresome incident of life and turning it into beauty, love for the whole wonderful world, and all the people in it, and all the beasts and flowers, and all the happy living things. Indeed blessings have been given me in full measure, pressed down and running over. In the whole of that little town at my feet, so quiet, so bathed in lovely light, there was not, there could not be, another being so happy as myself. Surely I am far too happy to grudge accepting a kindness? I tell you I marvel at the energy of my protest yesterday. Perhaps it was—oh Roger, after those hours on the hills I will be honest, I will pull off the veil from feelings that the female mind generally refuses to uncover—perhaps the real reason, the real, pitiful, mean reason was that I felt sure somehow from your description of her that Nancy's blouses must be very perfect things, things beyond words very perfect. And I was jealous of her blouses. There now. Good-by.

      XI

Jena, Nov. 20th.

      I am glad you did not laugh at that silly letter of mine about scorching in the sun on rocks. Indeed I gather, my dear Roger, that you liked it. Make the most of it then, for there will be no more of the sort. A decent woman never gets on to rocks, and if she scorches she doesn't say so. And I believe that it is held to be generally desirable that she should not, even under really trying circumstances, part with her dignity. I rather think the principle was originally laid down by the husband of an attractive wife, but it is a good one, and so long as I am busy clinging to my dignity obviously I shall have no leisure for clinging to you, and then you will not be suffocated with the superabundance of my follies.

      About those two sinners who are appalling us: how can I agree with you? To do so would cut away the ground from under my own feet. The woman plays such a losing game. She gives so much, and gets so little. So long as the man loves her I do see that he is worth the good opinion of neighbors and relations, which is one of the chilliest things in the world; but he never seems able to go on loving her once she has begun to wither. That is very odd. She does not mind his withering. And has she not a soul? And does not that grow always lovelier? But what, then, becomes of her? For wither she certainly will, and years rush past at such a terrific pace that almost before she has begun to be happy it is over. He goes back to his wife, a person who has been either patient or bitter according to the quantity of her vitality and the quality of her personal interests, and concludes, while he watches her sewing on his buttons in the corner she has probably been sitting in through all his vagrant years, that marriage has its uses, and that it is good to know there will be some one bound to take care of you up to the last, and who will shed decent tears when you are buried. She goes back—but where, and to what? They have gone long ago, her husband, her children, her friends. And she is old, and alone. You too, like everybody else, seem unable to remember how transient things are. Time goes, emotions wear out. You say these people are in the hands of Fate, and can no more get out of them and do differently than a fly in a web can walk away when it sees the hungry spider coming nearer. I don't believe in webs and spiders; at least, I don't today. Today I believe only in my unconquerable soul—

      I am the master of my fate,

      I am the captain of my soul.

      And you say that a person in the grip of a great feeling should not care a straw for circumstance, should defy it, trample it under foot. Heaven knows that I too am for love and laughter, for the snatching of flying opportunities, for all that makes the light and the glory of life; but what afterwards? The Afterwards haunts me like a weeping ghost. It is true there is still the wide world, the warm sun, seed-time and harvest, Shakespeare, the Book of Job, singing birds, flowers; but the soul that has transgressed the laws of man seems for ever afterwards unable to use the gifts of God. If supreme joy could be rounded off by death, death at the exact right moment, how easy things would be. Only death has a strange way of shunning those persons who want him most. To long to die seems to make you as nearly immortal as it is possible to become. Now just think what would have happened if Tristan had not been killed, had lived on quite healthily. King Mark, than whom I know no man in literature more polite, would have handed Isolde over to him as he declared himself ready to have done had he been aware of the unfortunately complicated state of things, and he would have done it with every expression of decent regret at the inconvenience he had caused. Isolde would have married Tristan. There would have been no philosophy, no divine hours in the garden, no acute, exquisite anguish of love and sorrow. But there would presently have been the Middle Ages equivalent for a perambulator, a contented Tristan coming to meet it, a faded Isolde who did not care for poetry, admonishing, perhaps with sharpness, a mediæval nursemaid, and quite quickly afterwards a Tristan grown too comfortable to move, and an Isolde with wrinkles. Would we not have lost a great deal if they had lived? It is certain that they themselves would have lost a great deal; for I don't see that contentment beaten out thin enough to cover a long life—and beat as thin as you will it never does cover quite across the years—is to be compared with one supreme contentment heaped in one heap on the highest, keenest point of living we reach. Now I am apparently arguing on your side, but I'm not really, because you, you know, think of love as a perpetual crescendo, and I, though I do hear the crescendo and follow it with a joyful clapping of hands up to the very top of its splendor, can never forget the drop on the other side, the inevitable diminuendo to the dead level—and then? Why, the rest is not even silence, but a querulous murmur, a querulous, confused whining, confused СКАЧАТЬ