I walked back through the soaking, sighing woods thinking of these things and of how unfairly the goods of life are distributed and of the odd tendency misfortunes have to collect themselves together in one place in a heap. Old thoughts, you'll say,—old thoughts as stale as life, thoughts that have drifted through countless heads, and after a while drifted out of them again, leaving no profit behind them. But one can't help thinking them and greatly marvelling. Make the most, you fortunate young man, of freedom, and Italy, and sunshine, and your six and twenty years. If I could only persuade you to let yourself go quite simply to being happy! Our friendship, in spite of its sincerity, has up to now been of so little use to you; and a friendship which is not helpful might just as well not exist. I wish I knew what words of mine would help you most. How gladly would I write them. How gladly would I see you in untroubled waters, forging straight ahead toward a full and fruitful life. But I am a foolish, ineffectual woman, and write you waspish letters when I might, if I had more insight, have found out what those words are that would set you tingling with the joy of life.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
I've been reading some of the very beautiful prayers in my mother's English Prayer Book to make up for not having prayed in church today. Its margins are thickly covered with pencilled comments. In parts like the Psalms and Canticles they overflow into the spaces between the verses. They are chiefly notes on the beauties of thought and language, and comparisons with similar passages in the Bible. Here and there between the pages are gummed little pictures of Madonnas and 'piteous Christs.' But when the Athanasian Creed is reached the tone of the comment changes. Over the top of it is written 'Some one has said there is a vein of dry humor running through this Creed that is very remarkable.' And at the end of each of those involved clauses that try quite vainly, yet with an air of defying criticism, to describe the undescribable, my mother has written with admirable caution 'Perhaps.'
LIV
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—So you are coming to Berlin next month. I thought you told me in one of your letters that Washington was probably going to be your first diplomatic post. Evidently you are glad it is not; but if I were going to be an attaché I'd much rather be it at Washington than Berlin, the reason being that I've not been to Washington and I have been to Berlin. Why are you so pleased—forgive me, I meant so much pleased, but it is strange how little instinct has to do with grammar—about Berlin? You didn't like it when you were here and went for two days to look at it. You said it was a hard white place, full of broad streets with nobody in them. You said it was barren, soulless, arid, pretentious, police-ridden; that everybody was an official, and that all the officials were rude. You were furious with a policeman who stared at you without answering when you asked him the way. You were scandalized by the behavior of the men in the local trains who sat and smoked in the faces of the standing women, and by those men who walked with their female relations in the streets and caused their parcels to be carried by them. You came home to us saying that Jena was best, and you were thankful to be with us again. I went to Berlin once, a little while before you came to Germany, and didn't like it either. But I didn't like it because it was so full, because those streets that seemed to you so empty were bewildering to me in their tumultuous traffic,—so you see how a place is what your own eye makes it, your Jena or your London eye; and I didn't like it besides because we spent a sulphuric night and morning with relations. The noise of the streets all day and the sulphur of the relations at night spoilt it for me. We went there for a jaunt, to look at the museums and things, and stay the night with Papa's brother who lives there. He is Papa's younger brother, and spends his days in a bank, handing out and raking in money through a hole in a kind of cage. He has a pen behind his ear—I know, because we were taken to gaze upon him between two museums—and wears a black coat on weekdays as well as on Sundays, which greatly dazzled my step-mother, who was with us. I believe he is eminently respectable, and the bank values him as an old and reliable servant, and has made him rich. His salary is eight thousand marks a year—four hundred pounds, sir; four times as much as what we have—and my step-mother used often and fervently to wish that Papa had been more like him. I thought him a terrifying old uncle, a parched, machine-like person, whose soul seemed withdrawn into unexplorable vague distances, reduced to a mere far-off flicker by the mechanical nature of his work. He is ten years younger than Papa, but infinitely more faded. He never laughs. He never even smiles. He is rude to his wife. He is withering to his daughters. He made me think of owls as he sat at supper that night in his prim clothes, with round gloomy eyes fixed on Papa, whom he was lecturing. Papa didn't mind. He had had a happy day, ending with two very glorious hours in the Royal Library, and Tante Else's herring salad was much to his taste. 'Hast thou no respect, Heinrich,' he cried at last when my uncle, warmed by beer, let his lecture slide over the line that had till then divided it from a rating, 'hast thou then no respect for the elder brother, and his white and reverend hairs?'