ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XLVIII
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—We are very happy here just now because Papa's new book, at which he has been working two years, is finished. I am copying it out, and until that is done we shall indulge in the pleasantest day-dreams. It is our time, this interval between the finishing of a book of his and its offer to a publisher, for being riotously happy. We build the most outrageous castles in the air. Nothing is certain, and everything is possible. The pains of composition are over, and the pains of rejection are not begun. Each time we suppose they never will, and that at last ears will be found respectfully ready to absorb his views. Few and far between have the ears been till now. His books have fallen as flat as books can fall. Nobody wanted to hear all, or even half, that he could tell them about Goethe. Jena shrugged its shoulders, the larger world was blank. The books have brought us no fame, no money, some tragic hours, but much interest and amusement. Always tragic hours have come when Papa clutched at his hair and raved rude things about the German public; and when the money didn't appear there have been uncomfortable moments. But these pass; Papa leaves his hair alone; and the balance remains on the side of nice things. We don't really want any more money, and Papa is kept busy and happy, and just to see him so eager, so full of his work, seems to warm the house with pleasant sunshine. Once, for one book, a check did come; and when we all rushed to look we found it was for two marks and thirty pfennings—' being the amount due,' said the accompanying stony letter, 'on royalties for the first year of publication.' Papa thought this much worse than no check at all, and took it round to the publisher in the molten frame of mind of one who has been insulted. The publisher put his thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat, leaned back in his chair, gazed with refreshing coolness at Papa who was very hot, and said that as trade went it was quite a good check and that he had sent one that very morning to another author—a Jena celebrity who employs his leisure writing books about the Universe—for ninety pfennings.
Papa came home beaming with the delicious feeling that money was flowing in and that he was having a boom. The universe man was a contemptuous acquaintance who had been heard to speak lightly of Papa's books. Papa felt all the sweetness of success, of triumph over a disagreeable rival; and since then we have looked upon that special book as his opus magnum.
While I copy he comes in and out to ask me where I have got to and if I like it. I assure him that I think it delightful, and so honestly I do in a way, but I don't think it will be the public's way. It begins by telling the reader, presumably a person in search of information about Goethe, that Jena is a town of twenty thousand inhabitants, of whom nineteen thousand are apparently professors. The town certainly does give you that impression as you walk about its little streets and at every corner meet the same battered-looking persons in black you met at the corner before, but what has that to do with Goethe? And the pages that follow have nothing to do with him either that I can see, being a disquisition on the origin and evolution of the felt hats the professors wear—dingy, slouchy things—winding up with an explanation of their symbolism and inevitableness, based on a carefully drawn parallel between them and the kind of brains they have to cover. From this point, the point of the head-wear of the learned in our present year, he has to work back all the way to Goethe in Jena a century ago. It takes him several chapters to get back, for he doesn't go straight, being constitutionally unable to resist turning aside down the green lanes of moralizing that branch so seductively off the main road and lead him at last very far afield; and when he does arrive he is rather breathless, and flutters for some time round the impassive giant waiting to be described, jerking out little anecdotes, very pleasant little anecdotes, but quite unconnected with his patient subject, before he has got his wind and can begin.
He is rosy with hope about this book. 'All Jena will read it,' he says, 'because they will like to hear about themselves'—I wonder if they will—'and all Germany will read it because it will like to hear about Goethe.'
'It has heard a good deal about him already, you know Papachen,' I say, trying gently to suggest certain possibilities.
'England might like to have it. There has been nothing since that man Lewes, and never anything really thorough. A good translation, Rose-Marie—what do you think of that as an agreeable task for you during the approaching winter evenings? It is a matter worthy of consideration. You will like a share in the work, a finger in the literary pie, will you not?'
'Of course I would. But let me copy now, darling. I'm not half through.'
He says that if those blind and prejudiced persons, publishers, won't risk bringing it out he'll bring it out at his own expense sooner than prevent the world's rightly knowing what Goethe said and did in Jena; so there's a serious eventuality ahead of us! We really will have to live on lettuces, and in grimmest earnest this time. I hope he won't want to keep race-horses next. Well, one thing has happened that will go a little way toward meeting new expenses,—I go down every day now and read English with Vicki, at the desire of her mother, for two hours, her mother having come to the conclusion that it is better to legalize, as it were, my relations with Vicki who flatly refused to keep away from us. So I am a bread-winner, and can do something to help Papa. It is true I can't help much, for what I earn is fifty pfennings each time, and as the reading of English on Sundays is not considered nice I can only altogether make three marks a week. But it is something, and it is easily earned, and last Sunday, which was the end of my first week, I bought the whole of the Sunday food with it, dinner and supper for us, and beer for Johanna's lover, who says he cannot love her unless the beer is a particular sort and has been kept for a fortnight properly cold in the coal-hole.