Vicki called out from her doorway—you could hear the least call this morning at an extraordinary distance—to ask if I were snowed up too much to come down as usual.
'I'm coming down, and I'm making the path to do it with,' I called back, shovelling with an energy that set my hair dancing about my ears.
She shouted back—her very shout was cheerful, and I did not need to see her face to know that today there would be no tears—that she too would make a path up to meet mine; and presently I heard the sounds of another joyful shovel.
Underneath, the ground was hard with frost; it had frozen violently for several hours before the snow came up on the huge purple wings of the north wind. The muddy roads, the soaked forest, the plaintive patter of the rain, were wiped out of existence between a sleeping and a waking. This was no world in which to lament. This was no place in which sighs were possible. The thought that a man's marrying one or not could make so much as the faintest smudge across the bright hopefulness of life made me laugh aloud with healthiest derision. Oh, how my shovel rang against the frozen stones! The feathery snow was scattered broadcast at each stroke. My body glowed and tingled. My hair grew damp about my forehead. The sun smiled broadly down upon my back. Papa flung up his window to cheer me on, but shut it again with a slam before he had well got out his words. Johanna came for an instant to the door, peeped out, gasped that it was cold—unheimlich kalt was her strange expression: unheimlich=dismal, uncanny; think of it!—and shut the door as hurriedly as Papa had shut the window. An hour later two hot and smiling young women met together on the path they had shovelled, and straightened themselves up, and looked proudly at the results of their work, and laughed at each other's scarlet faces and at the way their noses and chins were covered with tiny beads. 'As if it were August and we'd been reaping,' said Vicki; and the big girl laughed at this, and the small girl laughed at this, with an excessiveness that would have convinced a passer-by that somebody was being very droll.
But there was no passer-by. You don't pass by if snow lies on the roads three feet deep. We are cut off entirely from Jena and shops. This letter won't start for I haven't an idea how long. Milk cannot come to us, and we cannot go to where there is a cow. I have flour enough to bake bread with for about ten days unless the Lindebergs should have none, in which case it will last less than five. The coal-hole is stored with cabbages and carrots, buried, with cunning circumvention of decay, in sand. Potatoes abound in earth-covered heaps out of doors. Apples abound in Johanna's attic. We vegetarians come off well on occasions like this, for the absence of milk and butter does not afflict the already sorely afflicted, and of course the absence of meat leaves us completely cold.
Vicki and I have been mending a boy's sled we found in the lumber room of their house, I suppose the sled used in his happier days by the Assessor now chained to a desk in Berlin, and with this we are going out after coffee this afternoon when the sky turns pale green and stars come out and blink at us, to the top of the road where it joins the forest, dragging the sled up as best we can over the frozen snow, and then, tightly clutching each other, and I expect not altogether in silence, we intend to career down again as far as the thing will career, flashing, we hope, past her mother's gate at a speed that will prevent all interference. Perhaps we shall not be able to stop, and will be landed at last in the middle of the market-place in Jena. I'll take this letter with me in case that happens, because then I can post it. Good-by. It's going to be glorious. Don't you wish you had a sled and a mountain too?
Yours in a great hurry,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
LIX
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—We are still in sunshine and frost up here, and are all very happy, we three Schmidts—Johanna is the third—because Joey arrives to-morrow and we shall once more roll in money. I hasten to tell you this, for there were signs in your last two letters that you were taking our position to heart. It is wonderfully kind, I think, the way you are interested in our different little pains and pleasures. I am often more touched than I care to tell you by the sincerity of your sympathy with all we do, and feel very grateful for so true a friend. I was so glad you gave up coming to Jena on your way to Berlin, for it showed that you try to be reasonable, and then you know Professor Martens goes to Berlin himself every now and then to take sweet counsel with men like Harnack, so you will be sure to see him sooner or later, and see him comfortably, without a rush to catch a train. You say you did not come because I urged you not to, and that in all things you want to please me. Well, I would prefer to suppose you a follower of that plain-faced but excellent guide Common Sense. Still, being human, the less lofty and conscientious side of me does like to know there is some one who wishes to please me. I feel deliciously flattered—when I let myself think of it; nearly always I take care to think of something else—that a young man of your undoubted temporal and spiritual advantages should be desirous of pleasing an obscure person like me. What would Frau von Lindeberg say? Do you remember Shelley's wife's sister, the Miss Westbrook who brushed her hair so much, with her constant 'Gracious Heavens, what would Miss Warne say?' I feel inclined to exclaim the same thing about Frau von Lindeberg, but with an opposite meaning. And it is really very surprising that you should be so kind, for I have been a shrew to you often, and have been absorbed in my own affairs, and have not erred on the side of over-sympathy about yours. Some day, when we are both very old, perhaps you will get a few hours' leave from the dowager duchess you'll marry when you are forty, and will come and look at my pigs and my garden and sit with me before the fire and talk over our long friendship and all the long days of our life. And I, when I hear you are coming, shall be in a flutter, and will get out my best dress, and will fuss over things like asparagus and a salad, and tell the heated and awe-stricken maid that His Britannic Majesty's Ambassador at the Best Place to be an Ambassador in in the World is coming to supper; and we shall feel how sweet it is to be old dear friends.
Meanwhile we are both very busy with the days we have got to now. Today, for instance, has been so violently active that every bone I possess is aching. I'll tell you what happened, since you so earnestly assure me that all we do interests you. The snow is frozen so hard that far from being cut off as I had feared from shops and food there is the most glorious sledding road down to Jena; and at once on hearing of Joey's imminence Vicki and I coasted down on the sled and I bought the book Papa has been wanting and a gigantic piece of beef. Then we persuaded a small but strong boy, a boy of open countenance and superior manners whom we met in the market-place, to drag the sled with the beef and the book up the hill again for us; and so we set out homeward, walking gayly one on each side of him, encouraging him with loud admiration of his prowess. 'See,' said I, when I knew a specially steep bit was coming, 'see what a great thing it is to be able to draw so much so easily.'