Professor Martens didn't care about teaching Mr. Collins, and insisted on handing him over to Papa. Papa doesn't care about teaching him, either, and says he is a dummer Bengel who pronounces Goethe as though it rhymed with dirty, and who the first time our great poet was mentioned vacantly asked, with every indication of a wandering mind, if he wasn't the joker who wrote the play for Irving with all the devils in it. Papa was so angry that be began a letter to Collins père telling him to remove his son to a city where there are fewer muses; but Collins père is a person who makes nails in Manchester with immense skill and application and is terrifyingly rich, and my step-mother's attitude toward the terrifyingly rich is one of large forgiveness; so she tore up Papa's letter just where it had got to the words erbärmlicher Esel, said he was a very decent boy, that he should stay as long as he wanted to, but that, since he seemed to be troublesome about learning, Papa must write and demand a higher scale of payment. Papa wouldn't; my step-mother did; and behold Joey—his Christian name is Joey—more lucrative to us by, I believe, just double than any one we have had yet.
'I say,' said Joey to me this morning, 'come over to England some day, and I'll romp you down to Epsom.'
'Divine,' said I, turning up my eyes.
'We'd have a rippin' time.'
'Rather.'
'I'd romp you down in the old man's motor.'
'Not really?'
'We'd be there before you could flutter an eyelash.'
'Are you serious?'
'Ain't I, though. It's a thirty-horse—'
'Can't you get them in London?'
'Get 'em in London? Get what in London?'
'Must one go every time all the way to Epsom?'
Joey ceased from speech and began to stare.
'Are we not talking about salts?' I inquired hastily, feeling that one of us was off the track.
'Salts?' echoed Joey, his mouth hanging open.
'You mentioned Epsom, surely?'
'Salts?'
'You did say Epsom, didn't you?'
'Salts?'
'Salts,' said I, becoming very distinct in the presence of what looked like deliberate wilfulness.
'What's it got to do with salts?' asked Joey, his underlip of a measureless vacancy.
'Hasn't it got everything?'
'Look here, what are you drivin' at? Is it goin' to be a game?'
'Certainly not. It's Sunday. Did you ever hear of Epsom salts?'
'Oh—ah—I see—Eno, and all that. Castor oil. Rhubarb and magnesia. Well, I'll forgive you as you're only German. Pretty weird, what bits of information you get hold of. Never the right bits, somehow. I'll tell you what, Miss Schmidt—'
'Oh, do.'
'Do what?'
'Tell me what.'
'Well, ain't I goin' to? You all seem to know everything in this house that's not worth knowin', and not a blessed thing that is.'
'Do you include Goethe?'
'Confound Gerty,' said Joey.
Such are my conversations with Joey. Is there anything more you want to know?
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXXIV
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—I am sorry not to have been able to answer your letters for so many weeks, and sorry that you should have been, as you say, uneasy, but my telegram in reply to yours will have explained what has been happening to us. My step-mother died a fortnight ago. Almost immediately after I wrote last to you she began to be very ill. My feelings toward her have undergone a complete upheaval. I cannot speak of her. She is revenging herself, as only the dead in their utter unresentfulness can revenge themselves, for every hard and scoffing thought I had of her in life. I think I told you once about her annuity. Now it is gone Papa and I must see to it that we live on my mother's money alone. It is a hundred pounds a year, so the living will have to be prudent; not so prudent, I hope, but that we shall have everything to enjoy that is worth enjoying, but quite prudent enough to force us to take thought. So we are leaving the flat, grown far too expensive for us, as soon as we can find some other home. We have almost decided on one already. Mr. Collins went to England when the illness grew evidently hopeless, and we shall not take him back again, for my father does not care, at least at present, to have strangers with us, and I myself do not feel as though I could cook for and look after a young man in the way my step-mother did. Not having one will make us poor, but I think we shall be able to manage quite well, for we do not want much.
Thank you for your kind letters since the telegram. The ones before that, coming into this serious house filled with the nearness of Death, and of Death in his sternest mood, his hands cruel with scourges, seemed to me so inexpressibly—well, I will not say it; it is not fair to blame you, who could not know in whose shadow we were sitting, for being preoccupied with the trivialities of living. But letters sent to friends a long way off do sometimes fall into their midst with a rather ghastly clang of discord. It is what yours did. I read them sometimes in the night, watching by my step-mother in the half-dark room during the moments when she had a little peace and was allowed to slip away from torture into sleep. By the side of that racked figure and all it meant and the tremendous sermons it was preaching me, wordless, voiceless sermons, more eloquent than any I shall hear again, how strange, how far-away your echoes from life and the world seemed! Distant tinklings of artificialness; not quite genuine writhings beneath not quite genuine burdens; idle questionings and self-criticisms; plaints, doubts, and complicated half-veiled reproaches of myself that I should be able to be pleased with a world so worm-eaten that I should still be able to chant my song of life in a major key in a world so manifestly minor and chromatic. These things fell oddly across the gravity of that room. Shadows in a place where everything was clear, cobwebs of unreality where everything was real. They made me sigh, and they made me smile, they were so very black and yet so very little. I used to wonder what that usually excellent housemaid Experience is about, that she has not yet been after you with her broom. You know her specialty is the pulling up of blinds and the letting in of the morning sun. But it is unfair to judge you. Your letters since you knew have been kindness itself. Thank you for them.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
It seemed so strange for any one to die in June; so strange to be lifeless in the midst of the wanton profusion of life, to grow cold in that quivering radiance of heat. The people below us have got boxes of calla-lilies on their balcony this year. Their hot, heavy scent used to come in at the open window in the afternoons when the sun was on them, the honey-sweet smell of life, intense, penetrating, filling every corner of the room with splendid, pagan summer. And on the bed tossed my step-mother, muttering ceaselessly to herself of Christ.
XXXV
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—Our new address is Galgenberg, Jena,—rather grim, but what's in a name? The thing itself is perfect. It is a tiny house, white, with green shutters, on the south slope of the hill among apple-trees. The garden is so steep that you can't sit down in it except on the north side of the house, where you can because the house is there to stop you from sliding farther. It is a strip of rough grass out of which I shall make haycocks, with three apple-trees in it. There is also a red currant bush, out of which I shall make jelly. At the bottom, below the fence—rotten in places, but I'm going to mend that—begins a real apple orchard, and through its leaves we can look down on the roof of another house, white like ours, but a little bigger, and with blue shutters instead of green. People take it for the summer, and once an Englishman came and made a beanfield there—but I think I told you about the beanfield. Behind us, right away up the slope, are pine trees that brush restlessly backward and forward all day long across the clouds, trying to sweep bits of clear blue in the sky, and at night spread themselves out stiff and motionless against the stars. I saw them last night from my window. We moved in yesterday. The moving in was not very easy, because of what Papa calls the precipitous nature of the district. He sat with his back propped against the wall of the house on the only side on which, as I have explained, you can sit, and worked with a pencil at his book about Goethe in Jena with perfect placidity while Johanna and I and the man who urged the furniture cart up the hill kept on stepping over his legs as we went in and out furnishing the house. There was not much to furnish, which was lucky, there not being much to furnish with. We have got rid of all superfluities, including the canary, which I presented, its cage beautifully tied up with the blue ribbons I wore at my first party, to the little girl with the flame-colored hair on the second floor. As much of the other things as any one could be induced to buy we sold, and we burnt what nobody would buy or endure having given them. And so, pared down, we fit in here quite nicely, and after a day or two conceded to the suavities of life, such as the tacking up in appropriate places of muslin curtains and the tying of them with bows, I intend to buy a spade and a watering-pot and see what I can do with the garden.