LXVI
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—I couldn't write before, I've been too busy. The manuscript went this morning after real hard work day and night, and now I feel like a squeezed lemon that yet is cheerful, if you can conceive such a thing. Joey's father has been and gone. He arrived late one night, inspected the Lindebergs, gave his consent, and was off twenty-four hours later. The Lindebergs were much disconcerted by these quick methods, they who like to move slowly, think slowly, and sit hours over each meal; and they had not said half they wanted to say and he had not eaten half he was intended to eat before he was gone. Also he disconcerted them,—indeed it was more than that, he upset them utterly, by not looking like what they had made up their minds he would look like. The Galgenbergs expected to see some one who should be blatantly rich, and blatant riches, it dimly felt, would be expressed by much flesh and a thick watch chain. Instead the man had a head like Julius Cæsar, lean, thoughtful, shrewd, and a spare body that made Papa Lindeberg's seem strangely pulpy and as if it were held together only by the buttons of his clothes. We were staggered. Frau von Lindeberg couldn't understand why a man so rich should also be so thin,—' He is in a position to have the costliest cooking,' she said several times, looking at me with amazed eyebrows; nor could she understand why a man without ancestors should yet make her husband, whose past bristles with them, be the one to look as if he hadn't got any. She mused much, and aloud. While Vicki was being run breathlessly over the mountains by her nimble future father-in-law, with Joey, devoured by pride in them both, in attendance, I went down to ask if I could help in the cooking, and found her going about her kitchen like one in a dream. She let me tuck up my sleeves and help her, and while I did it she gave vent to many musings about England and its curious children. 'Strange, strange people,' she kept on saying helplessly.
But she is the happiest woman in Germany at this moment, happier far than Vicki, for she sees with her older eyes the immense advantages that are to be Vicki's who sees at present nothing at all but Joey. And then the deliciousness of being able to write to all those relations grown of late so supercilious, to Cousin Mienchen who came and played the rich, and tell them the glorious news. Vicki basks in the sunshine of a mother's love again, and never hears a cross word. Good things are showered down on her, presents, pettings, admiration, all those charming things that every girl should enjoy once before her pretty girlhood has gone. It is the most delightful experience to see a family in the very act of receiving a stroke of luck. Strokes of luck, especially of these dimensions, are so very rare. It is like being present at a pantomime that doesn't leave off, and watching the good fairy touching one gray dull unhappy thing after another into radiance and smiles. But I lose my friends, for they go to Berlin almost immediately, and from there to Manchester on a visit to Mr. Collins, a visit during which the business part of the marriage is to be settled. Also, and naturally, we lose Joey. This is rather a blow, just as we had begun so pleasantly to roll in his money, but where Vicki goes he goes too, and so Papa and I will soon be left again alone on our mountain, face to face with vegetarian economies.
Well, it has been a pleasant interlude, and I who first saw Vicki steeped in despair, red-eyed, piteous, slighted, talked about, shall see her at last departing down the hill arrayed in glory as with a garment. Then I shall turn back, when the last whisk of her shining skirts has gleamed round the bend of the road, to my own business, to the sober trudging along the row of days allotted me, to the making of economies, the reading of good books, the practice of abstract excellences, the pruning of my soul. My soul, I must say, has had some vigorous prunings. It ought by now to be of an admirable sturdiness. You yourself once lopped off a most luxuriant growth that was, I agree, best away, and now these buds of friendship, of easier circumstances, are going to be nipped off too, and when they are gone what will be left, I wonder, but the uncompromising and the rugged? Is it possible I am so base as to be envious? In spite of my real pleasure I can't shut out a certain wistfulness, a certain little pang, and exactly what kind of wistfulness it is and exactly what kind of pang I don't well know unless it is envy. Vicki's lot is the last one I would choose, yet it makes me wistful. It includes Joey, yet I feel a little pang. This is very odd; for Joey as a husband, a person from whom you cannot get away, would be rather more than I could suffer with any show of gladness. How then can I be envious? Of course if Joey knew what I am writing he would thrust an incredulous tongue in his cheek, wink a sceptical eye, and mutter some eternal truth about grapes; but I, on the other hand, would watch him doing it with the perfect calm of him who sticks unshakably to his point. What would his cheek, his tongue, and his winking eye be to me? They would leave me wholly unmoved, not a hair's breadth moved from my original point, which is that Joey is not a person you can marry. But certainly it is a good and delightful thing that Vicki thinks he is and thinks it with such conviction. I tell you the top of our mountain is in a perpetual rosy glow nowadays, as though the sun never left it; and the entire phenomenon is due solely to these two joyful young persons.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
LXVII
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—I did a silly thing today: I went and mourned in an empty house. I don't think I'm generally morbid, but today I indulged in a perfect orgy of morbidness. Write and scold me. It is your turn to scold, and by doing it thoroughly you will bring me back to my ordinary cheerful state. The Lindebergs are gone, and I am feeling it absurdly. I didn't realize how much I loved that little dear Vicki, nor in the least the interest Frau von Lindeberg's presence and doings gave life. The last three weeks have been so thrilling, there was so much warmth and brightness going about that it reached even onlookers like myself and warmed and lighted them; and now in the twinkling of an eye it is gone,—gone, wiped out, snuffed out, and Papa and I are alone again, and there is a northeast wind. These are the times when philosophy is so useful; but do explain why it is that one is only a philosopher so long as one is happy. When I am contented, and everything is just as I like it, I can philosophize beautifully, and do it with a hearty sincerity that convinces both myself and the person listening to me; but when the bad days come, the empty days, the disappointing, chilly days, behold Philosophy, that serene and dignified companion so long as the weather was fine, clutching her academic skirts hastily together and indulging in the form of rapid retreat known to the vulgar and the graphic as skedaddling. 'Do not all charms fly,' your Keats inquires, 'at the mere touch of cold Philosophy?' But I have found that nothing flies quite so fast as cold Philosophy herself; she would win in any race when the race is who shall run away quickest; she is of no use whatever—it is my deliberate conclusion—except to sit with in the sun on the south side of a sheltering wall on those calm afternoons of life when you've only got to open your mouth and ripe peaches drop into it. I used to think if I could love her enough she would, in her gratitude, chloroform me safely over all the less pleasant portions of life, see to it that I was unconscious during the passage, never let me be aware of anything but the beautiful and the good; but either she has no gratitude or I have little love, and the years have brought me the one conviction that she is an artist at leaving you in the lurch. The world is strewn with persons she has left in it, and out of the three inhabitants of a mountain to leave one there is surely an enormous percentage. Now what is your opinion of a woman with a healthy body, a warm room, and a sufficient dinner, who feels as though the soul within her were an echoing cavern, empty, cold, and dark? It is what I feel at this moment, and it is shameful. Isn't it shameful that the sight of leaden clouds—but they really are dreadful clouds, inky, ragged, harassed—scudding across the sky, and of furious brown beech-leaves on the little trees in front of the Lindebergs' deserted house being lashed and maddened by the wind, should make me suddenly catch my breath for pain? It is pain, quite sharp, unmistakable pain, and it is because I am alone, and my friends gone, and the dusk is falling. This afternoon I leaned against their gate and really suffered. Regret for the past, fear for the future,—vague, rather terrifying fears, not wholly unconnected with you—hurt so much that they positively succeeded in wringing a tear out of me. It was a very reluctant tear, and only came out after a world of wringing, and I had stood there a most morbid long time before it appeared; but it did appear, and the vicious wind screamed round the Lindebergs' blank house, rattled its staring naked windows, banged in wild gusts about the road where the puddles of half melted snow reflected the blackness of the sky, tore at my hair and dress, stung my cheeks, shook the gate I held on to, thundered over the hills. Dear young man, I don't want to afflict you with these tales of woe and weakness, but I must tell you what I did next. I went up and got the key from Johanna, in whose keeping Frau von Lindeberg had left it, and came down again, and unlocked the door of the house lately so full of light and life, and crept fearfully about the echoing rooms and up the dismal stairs, and let myself go, as I tell you, to a very orgy of morbidness. It was like a nightmare. Memories took the form of ghosts, and clutched at me through the balusters and from behind doors with thin cold fingers; and the happiest memories were those that clutched the coldest. I fled at last in a sudden panic, flying out of reach of them, slamming the door to, running for my life up the road and in at our gate. Johanna did not let me in at once, and I banged with my fists in a frenzy to get away from the black sky and the threatening thunder of the storm-stricken pines. 'Herr Gott' said Johanna when she saw me; so that I must have looked rather wild.