Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther

IV

Dearest of Living Creatures, the joy your dear, dear letters gave me! You should have seen me seize the postman. His very fingers seemed rosy-tipped as he gave me the precious things. Two of them—two love-letters all at once. I could hardly bear to open them, and put an end to the wonderful moment. The first one, from Frankfurt, was so sweet—oh, so unutterably sweet—that I did sit gloating over the unbroken envelope of the other for at least five minutes, luxuriating, purring. I found out exactly where your hand must have been, by the simple process of getting a pen and pretending to write the address where you had written it, and then spent another five minutes most profitably kissing the place. Perhaps I ought not to tell you this, but there shall be no so-called maidenly simperings between you and me, no pretences, no affectations. If it was silly to kiss that blessed envelope, and silly to tell you that I did, why then I was silly, and there's an end of it.

Do you know that my mother's maiden name was Watson? Well, it was. I feel bound to tell you this, for it seems to add to my ineligibleness, and my duty plainly is to take you all round that and expatiate on it from every point of view. What has the grandson of Lord Grasmere—you never told me of Lord G. before, by the way—to do with the granddaughter of Watson? I don't even rightly know what Watson was. He was always for me an obscure and rather awful figure, shrouded in mystery. Of course Papa could tell me about him, but as he never has, and my mother rarely mentioned him, I fancy he was not anything I should be proud of. Do not, then, require of me that I shall tear the veil from Watson.

And of course your mother was handsome. How dare you doubt it? Look in the glass and be grateful to her. You know, though you may only have come within the spell of what you so sweetly call my darling brown eyes during the last few weeks, I fell a victim to your darling blue ones in the first five minutes. And how great was my joy when I discovered that your soul so exactly matched your outside. Your mother had blue eyes, too, and was very tall, and had an extraordinarily thoughtful face. Look, I tell you, in the glass, and you'll see she had; for I refuse to believe that your father, a man who talks port wine and tomatoes the whole of the first meal he has with his only son after a year's separation, is the parent you are like. Heavens, how I shake when I think of what will happen when you tell him about me. 'Sir,' he'll say, in a voice of thunder—or don't angry English parents call their sons 'sir' any more? Anyhow, they still do in books—'Sir, you are far too young to marry. Young men of twenty-five do not do such things. The lady, I conclude, will provide the income?

Roger, rushing to the point: She hasn't a pfenning.

Incensed Parent: Pfenning, sir? What, am I to understand she's a German?

Roger, dreadfully frightened: Please.

I.P., forcing himself to be calm: Who is this young person?

Roger: Fräulein Schmidt, of Jena.

I.P., now of a horrible calmness: And who, pray, is Fräulein Schmidt, of Jena?

Roger, pale but brave: The daughter of old Schmidt, in whose house I boarded. Her mother was English. She was a Watson.

I.P.: Sir, oblige me by going to the—

Roger goes.

Seriously, I think something of the sort will happen. I don't see how it can help giving your father a dreadful shock; and suppose he gets ill, and his blood is on my head? I can't see how it is to be avoided. There is nothing to recommend me to him. He'll know I'm poor. He'll doubt if I'm respectable. He won't even think me pretty. You might tell him that I can cook, darn, manage as well as the thriftiest of Hausfraus, and I believe it would leave him cold. You might dwell on my riper age as an advantage, say I have lived down the first fevers of youth—I never had them—say, if he objects to it, that Eve was as old as Adam when they started life in their happy garden, and yet they got on very well, say that I'm beautiful as an angel, or so plain that I am of necessity sensible, and he'll only answer 'Fool.' Do you see anything to be done? I don't; but I'm too happy to bother.

Later.

I had to go and help get supper ready. Johanna had let the fire out, and it took rather ages. Why do you say you feel like screaming when you think of me wrestling with Johanna? I tell you I'm so happy that nothing any Johanna can do or leave undone in the least affects me. I go about the house on tiptoe; I am superstitious, and have an idea that all sorts of little envious Furies are lying about in dusty corners asleep, put to sleep by you, and that if I don't move very delicately I shall wake them—

That's not Goethe. By the way, poor Goethe. What an unforeseen result of a year in the City of the Muses, half an hour's journey from the Ilm Athens itself, that you should pronounce his poetry coarse, obvious, and commonplace. What would Papa say if he knew? Probably that young Anstruther is not the intelligent young man he took him for. But then Papa is soaked in Goethe, and the longer he soaks the more he adores him. In this faith, in this Goethe-worship, I have been brought up, and cannot, I'm afraid, get rid of it all at once. It is even possible that I never shall, in spite of London and you. Will you love me less if I don't? Always I have thought Goethe uninspired. The Muse never seized and shook him till divinenesses dropped off his pen without his knowing how or whence, divinenesses like those you find sometimes in the pages of lesser men, lesser all-round men, stamped with the unmistakable stamp of heavenly birth. Goethe knew very well, very exactly, where each of his sentences had come from. But I don't see that his poetry is either of the three things you say. I'm afraid it is not the last two, for the world would grow very interesting if thinking and writing as he did were so obvious that we all did it. As to its being coarse, I'm incurably incapable of seeing coarseness in things. To me

Everything is natural and everything is clean, except for the person who is afraid it isn't. Perhaps, dear Roger, you won't, as Papa says, quite apprehend my meaning; if you cannot, please console yourself with the reflection that probably I haven't got one.

What you say about the money you'll have dazzles me. Why, it's a fortune. We shall be richer than our Bürgermeister. You never told me you were so rich. Five hundred pounds a year is ten thousand marks; nearly double what we have always lived on, and we've really been quite comfortable, now haven't we? But think of our glory when my hundred pounds is added, and we have an income of twelve thousand marks. The Bürgermeister will be utterly eclipsed. And I'm such a good manager. You'll see how we'll live. You'll grow quite fat. I shall give you lovely food; and Papa says that lovely food is the one thing that ever really makes a man give himself the trouble to rise up and call his wife blessed.

It is so late. Good-night.

R.-M.

Don't take my Goethe-love from me. I know simply masses of him, and can't let him go. My mind is decked out with him as a garden is decked with flowers. Now isn't that pretty? Or is it only silly? Anyhow it's dreadfully late. Good-night.