After all, you need not have told me you had left off loving her. I knew it. I knew it at the time, I knew it within a week of when it happened. And I have always hoped—I cannot tell you how sincerely—that it was only a mood, and that you would go back to her again and be happy.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
LI
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—This is a world, it seems to me, where everybody spends their time falling out of love and making their relations uncomfortable. I have only two friends, the rest of my friends being acquaintances, and both have done it or had it done to them. Is it then to be wondered at that I should argue that if it happens to both my friends in a set where there are only two, the entire world must be divided into those who give up and those who are given up, with a Greek chorus of lamenting and explanatory relatives as a finish? Really one might think that love, and its caprices, and its tantrums—you see I'm in my shrewish mood—makes up the whole of life. Here's Vicki groaning in the throes of a relapse because some one has written that she met her late lover at a party and that he ate only soup,—here she is overcome by this picture which she translates as a hankering in spite of everything after her, and wanting to write to him, and ready to console him and crying her eyes all red again, and no longer taking the remotest interest in Comus or in those frequent addresses of mine to her on Homely Subjects to which up to yesterday she listened with such flattering respect; and here are you writing me the most melancholy letters, longer and drearier than any letters ever were before, filled with yearnings after something that certainly is not Miss Cheriton—but beyond that certainty I can make out nothing. It is a strange and wonderful world. I stand bewildered, with you on one side and Vicki on the other, and fling exhortations at you in turn. I try scolding, to brace you, but neither of you will be braced. I try sympathy, to soothe you, but neither of you will be soothed. What am I to do? May I laugh? Will that give too deep offence? I'm afraid I did laugh over your father's cable from America when the news of your broken engagement reached him. You ask me what I think of a father who just cables 'Fool' to his son at a moment when his son is being horribly worried. Well, you must consider that cabling is expensive, and he didn't care to put more than one word, and if there had been two it might have made you still angrier. But seriously, I do see that it must have annoyed you, and I soon left off being so unkind as to laugh. It is odd how much older I feel than either of you lamenters; quite old, and quite settled, and so objective somehow. I hope being objective doesn't make one unsympathetic, but I expect it really rather tends that way; and yet if it were so, and I were as hard and husky as I sometimes dimly fear I may be growing, would you and Vicki want to tell me your sorrows? And other people do too. Think of it, Papa Lindeberg, hitherto a long narrow person buttoned up silently in black, mysterious simply because he held his tongue, a reader of rabid Conservative papers through black-rimmed glasses, and as numb in the fingers as Wordsworth when he shakes my respectful hand, has begun to unbend, to unfold, to expand like those Japanese dried flowers you fling into water; and having started with good mornings and weather comments and politics, and from them proceeded to the satisfactorily confused state of the British army, has gone on imperceptibly but surely to confidential criticisms of the mistakes made here at headquarters in invariably shelving the best officers at the very moment when they have arrived at what he describes as their prime, and has now reached the stage when he comes up through the orchard every morning at the hour I am due for my lesson to help me over the fence. He comes up with much stateliness and deliberation, but he does come up; and we walk down together, and every day the volume of his confidences increases and he more and more minutely describes his grievances. I listen and nod my head, which is easy and apparently all he wants. His wife stops him at once, if he begins to her, by telling him with as much roundness as is consistent with being born a Dammerlitz that the calamities that have overtaken them are entirely his fault. Why was he not as clever as those subordinates who were put over his head? she asks with dangerous tranquillity; and nobody can answer a question like that.
'It makes me twenty years younger,' he said yesterday as he handed me over the fence with the same politeness I have seen in the manner of old men handing large dowagers to their places in a set of quadrilles, 'to see your cheerful morning face.'
'If you had said shining morning face you'd have been quoting Shakespeare,' said I.
'Ah yes. I fear my Shakespeare days are done. I am now at the time of life when serious and practical considerations take up the entire attention of a man. Shakespeare is more suitable now for my daughter than for me.'
'But clever men do read him.'
'Ah yes.'
'Quite grown-up ones do.'
'Ah yes.'
'With beards.'
'Ah yes.'
'Real men.'
'Ah yes, yes. Professors. Theatre people. People of no family. People who have no serious responsibilities on their shoulders. People of the pen, not men of the sword. But officers—and who in our country of the well-born is not, was not, or will not be an officer?—have no time for general literature. Of course,' he added with a slight bow, for he regards me as personally responsible for everybody and everything English—'we have all heard of him.'
'Indeed?' said I.
'When I was a boy,' he said this morning, 'I read at school of a young woman—a mythological person—called Hebe.'
'She was the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce,' said I.
'It may be,' he said. 'The parentages of the mythological period are curiously intricate. But why is it, dear Fräulein Schmidt, that though I can recollect nothing of her but her name, whenever I see you you remind me of her?'
Now was not that very pleasant? Hebe, the restorer of youth to gods and men; Hebe, the vigorous and wholesome. Thoreau says she was probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and that whenever she came it was spring. No wonder I was pleased.
'Perhaps it's because I'm healthy,' said I.