'Stop! Stop!' cried Frau Meyer desperately. 'I cannot see you throw away a good place with so little preliminary reflection. Have you considered that there would be no trudging to market, and consequently you will only require half the boots and stockings and skirts those poor girls have to buy who live up in the villas that look so grand and pretend to give such high wages?'
The girl paused.
'And no steep stairs to climb, laden with heavy baskets? And hardly any washing--hardly any washing, I tell you!' she almost shrieked in her anxiety. 'And no cooking to speak of? And every Sunday--mind, _every_ Sunday evening free? And I never scold, and my husband never scolds, and with a hundred and eighty marks a year there is nothing a clever girl cannot buy. Why, it is an ideal, a delightful place--one at which I would jump if I were a girl, and this lady'--indicating me--'would jump, too, would you not, Rose-Marie?'
The girl wavered. 'How many children are there?' she asked.
'Children? Children? Angels, you mean. They are perfect angels, so good and well-behaved--are they not, Rose-Marie? Fit to go at once to heaven--_unberufen_--without a day's more training, so little would they differ in manner when they got there from angels who have been used to it for years. You are fond of children, Fraulein, I am sure. Naturally you are. I see it in your nice face. No nice Fraulein is not. And these, I tell you, are such unusual--'
'How many are there?'
'_Ach Gott_, there are only six, and so small still that they can hardly be counted as six--six of the dearest--'
The girl turned on her heel. 'I cannot be fond of six,' she said; and went out with the heavy tread of finality.
Frau Meyer looked at me. 'There now,' she said, in tones of real despair.
'It is very tiresome,' said I, sympathizing the more acutely that I knew my turn was coming next.
'Tiresome? It is terrible. In two days I have my Coffee, and no--and no--and no--' She burst into tears, hiding her face from the dispassionate stare of the Fraulein at the desk in her handkerchief, and trying to conceal her sobs by a ceaseless blowing of her nose.
'I am so sorry,' I murmured, touched by this utter melting.
An impulse seized me on which I instantly acted. 'Take Johanna,' I cried. 'Take her for that day. She will at least get you over that. She is excellent at a party, and knows all about Coffees. I'll send her down early, and you keep her as late as you like. She would enjoy the outing, and we can manage quite well for one day without her.'
'Is that--is that the Johanna you had in the Rauchgasse?'
'Yes--trained by my step-mother--really good in an emergency.'
Frau Meyer flung her arms round my neck. '_Ach danke, danke, Du liebes, gutes Kind_!' she cried, embracing me with a warmth that showed me what heaps of people she must have asked to her party.
And I, after the first flush of doing a good deed was over and cool reflection had resumed its sway, which it did by the time I was toiling up the hill on the way home after having been unanimously rejected as mistress by the assembled maidens, I repented; for was not Johanna now my only hope? 'Frau Meyer,' whispered Reflection in my despondent ear, 'will engage her to go to her permanently on the 1st, and she will go because of the twenty marks more salary. You have been silly. Of course she would have stayed with you with a little persuasion rather than have to look for another place and spend her money at a registry-office. It is not likely, however, that she will refuse a situation costing her nothing.'
But see how true it sometimes is that virtue is rewarded. Johanna went down as I had promised, and worked all day for Frau Meyer. She was given a thaler as a present, as much cake and coffee as she could consume, and received the offer of a permanent engagement when she should leave us.
This she told me standing by my bedside late that night, the candle in her hand lighting up her heated, shining face, and hair dishevelled by exertion. 'But,' said she, 'Fraulein Rose-Marie, not for the world would I take the place. Such a restless lady, such a nervous gentleman, such numbers of spoilt and sprawling children. If I had not been there today and beheld it from the inside I would have engaged myself to go. But after this--' she waved the candle--'never.'
'What are you going to do, then, Johanna?' I asked, thinking wistfully of the four years we had passed together.
'Stay here,' she announced defiantly.
I put my arms round her neck and kissed her.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XLV
Galgenberg, Sept. 23d.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--Today I went down to Jena with the girl from next door who wanted to do such mild shopping as Jena is prepared for, mild shopping suited to mild purses, and there I drifted into the bookshop in the market-place where I so often used to drift, and there I found a book dealing with English poetry from Chaucer onward, with pictures of the poets who had written it. But before I go on about that--and you'll be surprised at the amount I have to say--I must explain the girl next door. I don't think I ever told you that there is one. The neighbor let his house just before he left, and let it unexpectedly well, the people taking the upper part of it for a whole year, and this is their daughter. The neighbor went off jubilant to his little inky boys. 'See,'
said he at parting, 'my life actually threatens to become rich without as well as within.'
'Don't,' I murmured, turning as hot as people do when they are reminded of past foolishness.
The new neighbors have been here ten days, and I made friends at once with the girl over the fence. She saw me gathering together into one miserable haycock the September grass Johanna and I had been hacking at in turns with a sickle for the last week, and stood watching me with so evident an interest that at last I couldn't help smiling at her. 'This is our crop for the winter,' I said, pointing to the haycock; I protest I have seen many a molehill bigger.
'It isn't much,' said the girl.
'No,' I agreed, raking busily.
'Have you a cow?' she asked.
'No.'
'A pig?'
'No.'
'No animals?'
'Bees.'
The girl was silent; then she said bees were not animals.
'But they're live-stock,' I said. 'They're the one link that connects us with farming.'
'What do you make hay for, then?'
'Only to keep the grass short, and then we try to imagine it's a lawn.'
Raking, I came a little nearer; and so I saw she had been, quite recently, crying.
I looked at her more attentively. She was pretty, with the prettiness of twenty; round and soft, fair and smooth. She had on an elaborately masculine shirt and high stiff collar and tie and pin and belt; and from under the edge of the hard straw hat tilted up at the back by masses of burnished coils of hair I saw a pulpy red mouth, the tip of an indeterminate nose, and two unhappy eyes, tired with crying.
'How early to begin,' I said.
'Begin what?'
'It's not nine yet. Do you always get your crying done by breakfast time?'
She flushed all over her face.
'Forgive me,' I said, industriously raking. 'I'm a rude person.'
The girl was silent for a few moments; considering, I suppose, whether she should turn her back on the impertinent stranger once and for all, or forgive the indiscretion and make friends.