Unlike your Miss Cheriton, who gently waves you aside and engages herself without the least difficulty to a duke, Vicki is a marked person, and will be avoided by our careful and calculating young men.
She is doomed never to spoil and tease those babies, never to spoil and worship that husband. Instead she will, for a year, continue to range the hills here with me, trying to listen politely to my admonishments while inwardly she shudders at the loneliness and vastness of the forests and of life, and then her parents' lease will be up, and they and she will drift down into some little town in the Harz where retired officers finish lives grown vegetable, and the years will pounce upon her and strip her one by one of her little stock of graces. Don't suppose I blame the man, because I don't; I only resent that he should have so much the best of it. There is no law obliging a man to marry because some lovesick girl wants him to--if I were a man I would never marry--but I do deplore the exceeding number of the girls who want him to. If each girl would say her prayers and go her own way, go about her business, her parents having seen to it that she should have a business to go about, what a cheerful, tearless place the world would be. And you must forgive my vociferousness, but really I have had a woeful morning with Vicki, who cried so bitterly into the pages of my Milton that the best part of _Samson Agonistes_ is stuck together, and all the red has come off the edges.
Papa Lindeberg came in at the end of the lesson to offer me his umbrella to go home with. 'It is a wet day, Fraulein Hebe,' said he, looking round.
'It is,' said I, gazing ruefully at my poor Milton.
'Even the daughters of the gods,' said he--thus mildly do we continue to joke together--'must sometimes use umbrellas.'
'Yes,' said I, smiling at this pleasant old man, this old man I thought at first so disagreeable; and he went with me to the door, and asked me in an anxious whisper what I thought of Vicki. 'It lasts long--it lasts long,' said he, helplessly.
'Yes,' said I, standing under the umbrella in the rain, while he in the porch rubbed one hand mechanically over the other and stared at me.
'You are a very fortunate young lady,' he said wistfully.
'I?'
'Our poor Vicki--if she were more like you--'
'Like me?'
'It is so clear that you have never known this terrible malady of love.
You have the face of a joyful _Backfisch_.'
'Oh,'--I began to laugh; and laughed, and laughed till the umbrella shook showers of raindrops off each of its points.
He stood watching me thoughtfully. 'It is true,' he said.
'Oh,' was all I could ejaculate; for indeed the idea made me very merry.
'No member of our sex,' said he, 'has ever even for a moment caught what is still a bright and untouched maiden fancy.'
'There was a young man once,' I began, 'in the Jena cake-shop--'
'_Ach_' he interrupted, waving the young man and his cakes away with an impatient movement of the hand.
'I didn't know,' said I, 'that you could read people's past.'
'Yours is easy enough to read. It is shining so clearly in your eyes, it is reflected so limpidly in your face--'
'How nice,' said I, interrupting in my turn, for my feet were getting grievously wet; and you note, I hope, with what industriousness I preserve and record anything of a flattering nature that any one ever says to me.
But you shall hear the other side too; for I turned away, and he turned away, and before I had gone a yard my shoelace came undone and I had to go back to the shelter of the porch to tie it up, and while I had my foot on the scraper and was bending down tying a bow and a knot that should last me till I got home I heard Frau von Lindeberg from the parlor off the passage make him the following speech:
'I am constantly surprised, Ludwig, at the amount of time and conversation I see you bestow on Fraulein Schmidt. I can hardly call it impertinence, but there is something indescribable about her manners,--an unbecoming freedom, an almost immodest frankness, an almost naked naturalness, that is perilously near impertinence. People of that class do not understand people of ours; and she will, if you are kinder than is absolutely necessary, certainly take advantage of it. Let me beg you to be careful.'
And Ludwig, beginning then and there, never answered a word.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
What do you think? Papa's book has been refused by the Jena publisher, by three Berlin publishers, by two in Stuttgart, and one in Leipzig. It is now journeying round Leipzig to the remaining publishers. The first time it came back we felt the blow and drooped; the second time we felt it but did not droop; the third time we felt nothing; the fourth time we laughed. 'Foolish men,' chuckled Papa, tickled by such blindness to their own interests, 'if none will have it we will translate it and send it to England, what?'
'Who is we, darling?' I asked anxiously.
'We is you, Rose-Marie,' said Papa, pulling my ear.
'Oh,' said I.
Scene closes.
LVII
Galgenberg, Dec. 1st.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--It is strange to address this letter to Berlin, and to know that by the time it gets there you will be there too. Well, let it welcome you very heartily back to the Fatherland. I think I know the street you are in; it is facing the Thiergarten, isn't it, and looks north? Quite close to the Brandenburg Thor? I remember it because we trudged, among other places, also about the Thiergarten on our memorable visit, and Papa's eye caught the name of your street and he stood for ten minutes in the rain giving us a spirited sketch of the man's life and claims to have a street called after him. My step-mother waited with a grim patience, her skirts firmly clutched in each hand. She had come to sight-see and to have things explained to her, so that it would be waste of a railway fare not to look and listen. Papa was in great splendor that day, so obviously superior, in the universatility of his knowledge, to either of us damp womenfolk. You won't get much sun there unless your rooms are at the back, but on the other hand it is undoubtedly a street for the exclusive and well-to-do, as even I could see to whom marble steps and wrought-iron gates convey the usual lesson.
I, however, would sooner live in a kennel facing south than in a palace where the sun never came; but then, as you know, my tendencies are incurably kennelwards.
Today I am humble and hanging my head, for I have discovered to my pain and horror that Papa and I are living well beyond our income. I expect we have bought too many books, and spent too much in stamps to be used by publishers; but it is certain that we've already consumed over seventy pounds of our yearly hundred, and that we only took five months to do it in. What do you think of that? We have been squandering money right and left somehow. There were no clothes to buy, for what we have will last us at least two years, and where it has all gone to I can't imagine. Indeed I am a useless person if I cannot even manage a tiny house like this and make such sufficient means do. Papa has written to Professor Martens to tell him he is willing to take in a young man again. Willing? He is eager, hungry for a young man, for he sees that without one things will go badly with us. And I, remembering the wealth we enjoyed while Mr. Collins was with us, have written to him to ask if he cares to come back and finish learning German. I don't know if he still wants to, or rather if his father still wants him to, for German to Joey was as the fly in the apothecary's ointment, in its extreme offensiveness, nor have I told Papa that I wrote, because of the peculiar horror with which he regards Joey; but I couldn't resist when I know that six months of Joey would deliver us for two whole years from all young men whatever, and I hope when the time comes, if it ever does, and Joey with it, to persuade Papa by judicious argument of the eminent desirability of this particular young man.
There are, however, certain difficulties in the way. Our house has two bedrooms, two sitting-rooms, an attic, a kitchen, and a coal-hole.
Johanna inhabits the attic. One sitting-room is sacred to Papa and his work. The other is a scrap room in which we have our meals and receive Frau von Lindeberg when she calls, and I write letters and read books and darn stockings. Where, then, will Joey sleep? The answer is as clear as daylight and very startling: Joey must sleep with Papa. Now that this truth has dawned upon me I spend hours lost in thoughts of things like screens and dividing curtains, besides preparing elaborate speeches for the bringing of Papa to reason. He himself was the first to declare we must positively take in a young man again, and he surely will see, when it is pointed out to him, that any one we have must sleep at the intervals appointed by nature. I'm afraid he'll see it in the case of every one except the fruitful Joey. It is most unfortunate that Joey should be so foolish about Goethe, for we really do want somebody who doesn't mind about money, and I remember several poor boys in the past who were so very poor that on the days when my step-mother demanded payment I used to have to go out early and wander among the hills till evening, unable to endure the sound of the thalers being wrung out of them. Oh, money is the most horrid of all necessities. I am ashamed to think of the many bright hours of life soiled by anxieties about it, by meannesses about it. Wherever even a question of it arises Love and the Graces fly affrighted, followed closely, by the entire troop of equally terrified Muses, out of the nearest window. I detest it. I do not want it. But with all my defiance of it I am crushed beneath the yoke of the penny as completely as everybody else. Well do I know that penny, and how much it is when there's one over, and what worlds away when there's one too few.
Here comes Johanna to lay the dinner. We are rankly vegetarian again, Papa leading the way with immense determination, for he has set his heart at this unfortunate juncture on a new biography of Goethe that must needs come out just now, a big thing in two volumes costing a terrible number of marks, very well done, full of the result of original digging among archives; but he dare not buy it, he says, in the present state of our affairs. 'Dost thou not think, Rose-Marie,' he said, his face in grievous puckers at the prospect, 'that a renewed and careful course of herbage may quickly-set the matter right?'
'Not quickly,' said I, shaking my head, and pondering privately what, exactly, he meant by the word renewed.
He looked crestfallen.
'But ultimately,' I said, wishing to cheer him.
'Ultimately--ultimately,' he echoed peevishly. 'The word has a knell-like sound about it that I do not like. When we have reached thy Ultimately I shall no longer be in a state to desire or appreciate Bielschowsky's _Goethe_. My brain, by then, will be clothed with grass, and my veins be streams of running water.'
'Well, darling,' said I, putting my arm through his, 'you'll be at least very nice and refreshing, and extraordinarily like a verse of the Psalms.'
And for two days he has held out undaunted, and here comes our lentil soup and roast apples, so good-by.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
LVIII
Galgenberg, Dec. 4th.