Well, how do you feel now? Can any one, can you, can even you read that without such a tingling in all your limbs, such a fresh rush of life and energy through your whole body that you simply must jump up and, shaking off the dreary nonsense that has been fooling you, turn your back on diseased self-questionings and run straight out to work at your salvation in the sun?
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXXII
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—I am sorry you think me unsympathetic. Hard, I think, was the word; but unsympathetic sounds prettier. Is it unsympathetic not to like fruitless, profitless, barren things? Not to like fogs and blights and other deadening, decaying things? From my heart I pity all the people who are so made that they cannot get on with their living for fear of their dying; but I do not admire them. Is that being unsympathetic? Apparently you think so. How odd. There is a little man here who hardly ever can talk to anybody without beginning about his death. He is perfectly healthy, and I suppose forty or fifty, so that there is every reasonable hope of his going on being a little man for years and years more; but he will have it that as he has never married or, as he puts it, done anything else useful, he might just as well be dead, and then at the word Dead his eyes get just the look of absolute scaredness in them that a hare's eyes do when a dog is after it. 'If only one knew what came next,' he said last time he was here, looking at me with those foolish frightened hare's eyes.
'Nice things I should think,' said I, trying to be encouraging.
'But to those who have deserved punishment?'
'If they have deserved it they will probably get it,' said I cheerfully.
He shuddered.
'You don't look very wicked,' I went on amiably. He leads a life of sheerest bread-and-milk, so simple, so innocent, so full of little hearth-rug virtues.
'But I am,' he declared angrily.
'I shouldn't think half so bad as a great many people,' said I, bent, being the hostess, on a perfect urbanity.
'Worse,' said he, more angrily.
'Oh, come now,' said I, very politely as I thought.
Then he really got into a rage, and asked me what I could possibly know about it, and I said I didn't know anything; and still he stormed and grew more and more like a terrified hare, frightening himself by his own words; and at last, dropping his voice, he confessed that he had one particularly deadly fear, a fear that haunted him and gave him no rest, that the wicked would not burn eternally but would freeze.
'Oh,' said I shrinking; for it was a bitter day, and the northeast wind was thundering among the hills.
'Great cold,' he said, fixing me with his hare's eyes, 'seems to me incomparably more terrible than great heat.'
'Oh, incomparably,' I agreed, edging nearer to the stove. 'Only listen to that wind.'
'So will it howl about us through eternity,' said he.
'Oh,' I shivered.
'Piercing one's unprotected—everything about us will be unprotected then—one's unprotected marrow, and turning it to ice within us.'
'But we won't have any marrows,' said I.
'No marrows? Fräulein Rose-Marie, we shall have everything that will hurt.'
'Oh weh' cried I, stopping up my ears.
'The thought frightens you?' said he.
'Terrifies me,' said I.
'How much more fearful, then, will be the reality.'
'Well, I'd like to—I'd like to give you some good advice,' said I, hesitating.
'Certainly; if one of your sex may with any efficacy advise one of ours.'
'Oh—efficacy,' murmured I with proper deprecation. 'But I'd like to suggest—I daren't advise, I'll just suggest—'
'Fear nothing. I am all ears and willingness to be guided,' said he, smiling with an indescribable graciousness.
'Well—don't go there.'
'Not go there?'
'And while you are here—still here, and alive, and in nice warm woolly clothes, do you know what you want?'
'What I want?'
'Very badly do you want a wife. Why not go and get one?'
His eyes at that grew more hare-like than at the thought of eternal ice. He seized his hat and scrambled to the door. He went through it hissing scorching things about moderne Mädchen, and from the safety of the passage I heard him call me unverschämt.
He hasn't been here since. I would like to go and shake him; shake him till his brains settle into their proper place, and say while I shake, 'Oh, little man, little man, come out of the fog! Why do you choose to die a thousand deaths rather than only one?'
Is that being unsympathetic? I think it is being quite kind.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
What I really meant to write to you about today was to tell you that I read your learned and technical and I am sure admirable denouncements of Walt Whitman with a respectful attention due to so much earnestness; and when I had done, and wondered awhile pleasantly at the amount of time for letter-writing the Foreign Office allows its young men, I stretched myself, and got my hat, and went down to the river; and I sat at the water's edge in the middle of a great many buttercups; and there was a little wind; and the little wind knocked the heads of the buttercups together; and it seemed to amuse them, or else something else did, for I do assure you I thought I heard them laugh.
XXXIII
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—You asked me about your successor in our house, and inquire why I have never mentioned him. Why should I mention him? Must I mention everything? I suppose I forgot him. His name is Collins, and some days he wears a pink shirt, and other days a blue shirt, and in his right cuff there is a pink silk handkerchief on the pink days, and a blue silk handkerchief on the blue days; and he has stuck up the pictures he likes to have about him on the walls of his room, and where your Luini used to be there is a young lady in a voluminous hat and short skirts, and where your Bellini Madonna sat and looked at you with austere, beautiful eyes there is the winner, complete with jockey, of last year's Derby.
'I made a pot of money over that,' said Mr. Collins to me the day he pinned it up and came to ask me for the pin.
'Did you?' said I.
But I think I am tired just now of Luinis and Bellinis and of the sort of spirit in a young man that clothes the walls of his room with them, each in some elaborately simple frame, and am not at all sure that the frank fleshliness of a Collins does not please me best. You see, one longs so much sometimes to get down to the soil, down to plain instincts, to rude nature, to, if you like, elemental savagery.
But I'll go on with Mr. Collins; you shall have a dose of him while I am about it. He has bought a canoe, and has won the cup for swimming, wresting it from the reluctant hands of the discomfited Jena young men. He paddles up to the weir, gets out, picks up his canoe, carries it round to the other side, gets in, and vanishes in the windings of the water and the folds of the hills, leaving the girls in the tennis-courts—you remember the courts are opposite the weir—uncertain whether to titter or to blush, for he wears I suppose the fewest clothes that it is possible to wear and still be called dressed, and no stockings at all.
'Nein, dieser Engländer!' gasp the girls, turning down decent eyes.
'Höllish practisch,' declare the young men, got up in as near an imitation of the flannels you used to wear that they can reach, even their hats bound about with a ribbon startlingly like your Oxford half blue; and before the summer is over I dare say they will all be playing tennis in the Collins canoe costume, stockingless, sleeveless, supposing it to be the latest cri in get-ups for each and every form of sport.