Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther. Elizabeth von ArnimЧитать онлайн книгу.
by exquisite scents as it is extravagantly horrified by nasty ones. Why, a beautiful smell, if it is delicate, subtle, intermittent, can ruin a morning for me. It fills me with a quite unworthy rapture. Things that ought to be hard in me melt. Things that ought to be fixed are scattered heaven knows where. I go soft, ecstatic, basely idle. I forget that my business is to get dinner, and not to stand still and just sniff. In March I dare not pass the house Schiller used to live in on my way to market, because the people who live there now have planted violets along the railings. It is the shortest way, and it takes ten more minutes out of a busy morning to go round by the Post Office; but really for a grown woman to stand lost in what is mere voluptuous pleasure, leaning against somebody else's railing while the family dinner lies still unbought in the market-place, is conduct that I cannot justify. As for a beanfield—my dear Roger, did you ever come across a beanfield in flower? It is the divinest experience the nose can give us. Two years ago an Englishman came and spent a spring and summer in the little house in the apple orchard up on the road over the Galgenberg—the little house with the blue shutters—and he was a great gardener. And he dug a big patch, and planted a beanfield, and it was the first beanfield Jena had ever seen; for those beans called broad that you eat in England and are properly thankful for are only grown in Germany for the use of pigs, and there are no pigs in Jena. Sow-beans they are called here, mindful of their destiny. The Englishman, who possessed no visible sow, was a source of astonishment to us. The things came up, and were undoubtedly sow-beans. A great square patch of them grew up just over the fence on which Jena leaned and pondered. The man himself was seen in his shirt-sleeves weeding them on rainy afternoons. Jena could only suspect a pig concealed in the parlor, and was indulgent; and it was indulgent because no one, in its opinion, can be both English and sane. 'God made us all,' was its invariable helpless conclusion as it went, shaking its head, home down the hill. When in June the beanfield flowered I blessed that Englishman. No one hung over his fence more persistently than I. It was the first time I had smelt the like. It became an obsession. I wanted to be there at every sort of time and under every sort of weather-condition. At noon, when the sun shone straight down on it drawing up its perfume in hot breaths, I was there; in the morning, so early that it was still in the blue shadow of the Galgenberg and every gray leaf and white petal was drenched with dew, I was there; on wet afternoons, when the scent was crushed out of it by the beating of heavy rain, and the road for half a mile, the slippery clay road with its puddles and amazing mud, was turned into a bath of fragrance fit for the tenderest, most fastidious goddess to bare her darling little limbs in, I was there; and once after lying awake in my hot room so near the roof for hours thinking of it, out there on the hillside in the freshness under the stars, I got up and dressed, and crept with infinite caution past my step-mother's door, and stole the latchkey, and slunk, my heart in my mouth, through the stale streets, along all the railings and dusty front gardens, out into the open country, up on to the hill, to where it stood in straight and motionless rows sending out waves of fragrance into that wonderful clean air you find in all the places where men leave off and God begins. Did you ever know a woman before who risked her reputation for a beanfield? Well, it is what I did. And I'll tell you, I am so incurably honest that I can never for long pretend, why I write all this about it. It is that I am sick with anxiety—oh, sick, cold, shivering with it—about your exam. I didn't want you to know. I've tried to write of beanfields instead. I didn't want you to be bothered. The clamorings for news of the person not on the spot are always a worry, and I did not want to worry. But the letter I got from you this morning never mentions the exam, the thing on which, as you told me, everything depends for us. You talk about Clinches, about the people there, about the shooting, the long days in woods, the keen-wittedness of Nancy who goes with you, who understands before you have spoken, who sympathizes so kindly about me, who fits, you say, so strangely into the misty winter landscape in her paleness, her thinness, her spiritualness. There was one whole page—oh, I grudged it—about her loosely done dark hair, how softly dusky it is, how it makes you think of twilight, and her eyes beneath it of the first faint shining of stars. I wonder if these things really fill your thoughts, or whether you are only using them to drive away useless worry about Saturday. I know you are a poet, and a poet's pleasure in eyes and hair is not a very personal thing, so I do not mind that. But to-morrow is Saturday. Shall you send me a telegram, I wonder? A week ago I would not have wondered; I should have been so sure you would let me have one little word at once about how you felt it had gone off—one little word for the person so far away, so helpless, so dependent on your kindness for the very power to go on living. Oh, what stuff this is. Worse even than the beanfield. But I must be sentimental sometimes, now mustn't I? or I would not be a woman. But really, my darling, I am very anxious.
R.-M.
XIII
I have waited all day, and there has been no telegram. Well, on Monday I shall get a letter about it, and how much more satisfactory that is. Today after all is nearly over, and there is only Sunday to be got through first, and I shall be helped to endure that by the looking forward. Isn't it a mercy that we never get cured of being expectant? It makes life so bearable. However regularly we are disappointed and nothing whatever happens, after the first blow has fallen, after the first catch of the breath, the first gulp of misery, we turn our eyes with all their old eagerness to a point a little further along the road. I suppose in time the regular repetition of shocks does wear out hope, and then I imagine one's youth collapses like a house of cards. Real old age begins then, inward as well as outward; and one's soul, that kept so bravely young for years after one's face got its first wrinkles, suddenly shrivels up. Its light goes out. It is suddenly and irrecoverably old, blank, dark, indifferent.
Sunday Night.
I didn't finish my letter last night because, observing the strain I had got into, I thought it better for your comfort that I should go to bed. So I did. And while I went there I asked myself why I should burden you with the dull weight of my elementary reflections. You who are so clever and who think so much and so clearly, must laugh at their elementariness. They are green and immature, the acid juice of an imperfect fruit that has always hung in the shadow. And yet I don't think you must laugh, Roger. It would, after all, be as cruel as the laughter of a child watching a blind man ridiculously stumbling among the difficulties of the way.
The one Sunday post brought nothing from you. The day has been very long. I cannot tell you how glad I am night has come, and only sleep separates me now from Monday morning's letter. These Sundays now that you are gone are intolerable. Before you came they rather amused me,—the furious raging of Saturday, with its extra cleaning and feverish preparations till far into the night; Johanna more than usually slipshod all day, red of elbow, wispy of hair, shuffling about in her felt slippers, her skirt girded up very high, a moist mop and an overflowing pail dribbling soapy tracks behind her in her progress; my step-mother baking and not lightly to be approached; Papa fled from early morning till supper-time; and then the dead calm of Sunday, day of food and sleep. Cake for breakfast—such a bad beginning. Church in the University chapel, with my step-mother in her best hat with the black feathers and the pink rose—it sounds frivolous, but you must have noticed the awe-inspiring effect of it coming so unexpectedly on the top of her long respectable face and oiled-down hair. A fluffy person in that hat would have all the students offering to take her for a walk or share their umbrella with her. My step-mother stalks along panoplied in her excellences, and the feather waves and nods gayly at the passing student as he slinks away down by-streets. Once last spring a silly bee thought the rose must be something alive and honeyful, and went and smelt it. I think it must have been a very young bee; anyhow nobody else up to now has misjudged my step-mother like that. She sits near the door in church, and has never yet heard the last half of the sermon because she has to go out in time to put the goose or other Sunday succulence safely into the oven. I wish she would let me do that, for I don't care for sermons. When you were here and condescended to come with us at least we could criticize them comfortably on our way home; but alone with my step-mother I may do nothing but praise. It is the most tiring, tiresome of all attitudes, the one of undiscriminating admiration. To hear you pull the person who had preached to pieces, and laugh at the things he had said that would not bear examination, used to be like having a window thrown open in a stuffy room on a clear winter's morning. Shall you ever forget the elaborateness of the Sunday dinner? For that, chiefly, is Saturday sacrificed, a whole day that might be filled with lovely