'Is that it?' he said, obviously fumbling about in his brain for the reason. And when he got to the house he displayed the results of his fumbling by saying, 'But many people are healthy.'
'Yes,' said I; and left him to think it out alone.
So now there are two nice young women I've been compared to—you once said I was like Nausicaa, and here a year later, a year in which various rather salt and stinging waves have gone over my head, is somebody comparing me to Hebe. Evidently the waves did me no harm. It is true on the other hand that Papa Lindeberg is short-sighted. It is also true that last night I found a beautiful shining silvery hair insolently flaunting in the very front of my head. 'Yes, yes, my dear,' said Papa—my Papa—when I showed it him, 'we are growing old.'
'And settled. And objective,' said I, carefully pulling it out before the glass. 'And yet, Papachen, inside me I feel quite young.'
Papa chuckled. 'Insides are no safe criterion, my dear,' he said. 'It is the outside that tells.'
'Tells what?'
'A woman's age.'
Evidently I have not yet reminded my own Papa of Hebe.
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
LII
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—Well, yes, I do think you must get over it without much help from me. You have a great deal of my sympathy, I assure you; far more than you think. I don't put it into my letters because there's so much of it that it would make them overweight. Also it would want a great deal of explaining. You see it's a different sort from what you expect, and given for other reasons than those you have in your mind; and it is quite impossible to account for in any way you are likely to understand. But do consider what, as regards the broken-off engagement, you must look like from my point of view. Candidly, are you a fit object for my compassion? I see you wandering now through Italy in its golden autumn looking at all your dear Luinis and Bellinis and Botticellis and other delights of your first growing up, and from my bleak hill-top I watch you hungrily as you go. November is nearly upon us, and we shiver under leaden clouds and driving rain. The windows are loose, and all of them rattle. The wind screams through their chinks as though somebody had caught it by the toes and was pinching it. We can't see out for the raindrops on the panes. When I go to the door to get a breath of something fresher than house air I see only mists, and wreaths of clouds, and mists again, where a fortnight ago lay a little golden town in a cup of golden hills. Do you think that a person with this cheerless prospect can pity you down there in the sun? I trace your bright line of march on the map and merely feel envy. I am haunted by visions of the many beautiful places and climates there are in the world that I shall never see. The thought that there are people at this moment sitting under palm-trees or in the shadow of pyramids fanning themselves with their handkerchiefs while I am in my clammy room—the house gets clammy, I find, in persistent wet weather—not liking to light a lamp because it is only three o'clock, and yet hardly able to see because of the streaming panes and driving mist, the thought of these happy people makes me restive. I too want to be up and off, to run through the wet pall hanging over this terrible gray North down into places where sunshine would dry the fog out of my hair, and brown my face, and loosen my joints, and warm my poor frozen spirit. I would change places with you this minute if I could. Gladly would I take the burden of your worries on to my shoulders, and, carrying them like a knapsack, lay them at the feet of the first Bellini Madonna I met and leave them there for good. It would give me no trouble to lay them down, those worries produced by other people. One little shake, and they'd tumble off. Always things and places have been more to me than people. Perhaps it is often so with persons who live lonely lives. Anyhow don't at once cry out that I'm unnatural and inhuman, for things are after all only filtered out people,—their ideas crystallized into tangibleness, their spirit taking visible form; either they are that, or they are, I suppose, God's ideas—after all the same thing put into shapes we can see and touch. So that it's not so dreadful of me to like them best, to prefer their company, their silent teaching, although you will I know lecture me and perhaps tell me I am petrifying into a mere thing myself. Well, it is only fair that you should lecture me, who so often lecture you.
Yours quite meekly,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
LIII
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—I won't talk about it any more. Let us have done with it. Let us think of something else. I shall get tired of the duke if you are not careful, so please save me from an attitude so unbecoming. This is All Saints' Day: the feast of white chrysanthemums and dear memories. My mother used to keep it as a day apart, and made me feel something of its mysticalness. She had a table in her bedroom, the nearest approach that was possible to an altar, with one of those pictures hung above it of Christ on the Cross that always make me think of Swinburne's
do you remember?—and candles, and jars of flowers, and many little books; and she used on her knees to read in the little books, kneeling before the picture. She explained to me that the Lutheran whitewash starved her soul, and that she wanted, however clumsily, to keep some reminder with her of the manner of prayer in England. Did I ever tell you how pretty she was? She was so very pretty, and so adorably nimble of tongue. Quick, glancing, vivid, she twinkled in the heavy Jena firmament like some strange little star. She led Papa and me by the nose, and we loved it. I can see her now expounding her rebellious theories, sitting limply—for she was long and thin—in a low chair, but with nothing limp about her flower-like face and eyes shining with interest in what she was talking about. She was great on the necessity, a necessity she thought quite good for everybody but absolutely essential for a woman, of being stirred up thoroughly once a week at the very least to an enthusiasm for religion and the life of the world to come. She said there was nothing so good for one as being stirred up, that only the well stirred ever achieve great things, that stagnation never yet produced a soul that had shot up out of reach of fogs on to the clear heights from which alone you can call out directions for the guidance of those below. The cold, empty Lutheran churches were abhorrent to her. 'They are populated on Sundays,' she said, 'solely by stagnant women,—women so stagnant that you can almost see the duckweed growing on them.'
She could not endure, and I, taught to see through her eyes, cannot endure either, the chilly blend of whitewash and painted deal pews in the midst of which you are required here once a week to magnify the Lord. Our churches—all those I have seen—are either like vaults or barns, the vault variety being slightly better and also more scarce. Their aggressive ugliness, and cold, repellent service keeping the congealed sinner at arm's length, nearly drove my mother into the Roman Church, a place no previous Watson had ever wanted to go to. The churches in Jena made her think with the tenderest regard of the old picturesque pre-Lutheran days, of the light and color and emotions of the Catholic services, and each time she was forced into one she said she made a bigger stride toward Rome. 'Luther was a most mischievous person,' she would say, glancing half defiantly through long eyelashes at Papa. But he only chuckled. He doesn't mind about Luther. Yet in case he did, in case some national susceptibility should have been hurt, she would get up lazily—her movements were as lazy as her tongue was quick—and take him by the ears and kiss him.
She died when she was thirty-five: sweet and wonderful to the last. Nor did her beauty suffer in the least in the sudden illness that killed her. 'A lily in a linen-clout She looked when they had laid her out,' as your Meredith says; and on this day every year, this day of saints so dear to us, my spirit is all the time in those long ago happy years with her. I have no private altar in my room, no picture of a 'piteous Christ'—Papa took that—and no white flowers in this drenched autumnal place to show that I remember; nor do I read in the little books, except with gentle wonderment that she should have found nourishment in them, she who fed so constantly on the great poets. But I have gone each All Saints' Day for ten years past to church in Jena in memory of her, and tried by shutting my eyes to imagine I was in a beautiful place without whitewash, or hideous, almost brutal, stained glass.