ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
It seemed so strange for any one to die in June; so strange to be lifeless in the midst of the wanton profusion of life, to grow cold in that quivering radiance of heat. The people below us have got boxes of calla-lilies on their balcony this year. Their hot, heavy scent used to come in at the open window in the afternoons when the sun was on them, the honey-sweet smell of life, intense, penetrating, filling every corner of the room with splendid, pagan summer. And on the bed tossed my step-mother, muttering ceaselessly to herself of Christ.
XXXV
Jena, July 15th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—Our new address is Galgenberg, Jena,—rather grim, but what's in a name? The thing itself is perfect. It is a tiny house, white, with green shutters, on the south slope of the hill among apple-trees. The garden is so steep that you can't sit down in it except on the north side of the house, where you can because the house is there to stop you from sliding farther. It is a strip of rough grass out of which I shall make haycocks, with three apple-trees in it. There is also a red currant bush, out of which I shall make jelly. At the bottom, below the fence—rotten in places, but I'm going to mend that—begins a real apple orchard, and through its leaves we can look down on the roof of another house, white like ours, but a little bigger, and with blue shutters instead of green. People take it for the summer, and once an Englishman came and made a beanfield there—but I think I told you about the beanfield. Behind us, right away up the slope, are pine trees that brush restlessly backward and forward all day long across the clouds, trying to sweep bits of clear blue in the sky, and at night spread themselves out stiff and motionless against the stars. I saw them last night from my window. We moved in yesterday. The moving in was not very easy, because of what Papa calls the precipitous nature of the district. He sat with his back propped against the wall of the house on the only side on which, as I have explained, you can sit, and worked with a pencil at his book about Goethe in Jena with perfect placidity while Johanna and I and the man who urged the furniture cart up the hill kept on stepping over his legs as we went in and out furnishing the house. There was not much to furnish, which was lucky, there not being much to furnish with. We have got rid of all superfluities, including the canary, which I presented, its cage beautifully tied up with the blue ribbons I wore at my first party, to the little girl with the flame-colored hair on the second floor. As much of the other things as any one could be induced to buy we sold, and we burnt what nobody would buy or endure having given them. And so, pared down, we fit in here quite nicely, and after a day or two conceded to the suavities of life, such as the tacking up in appropriate places of muslin curtains and the tying of them with bows, I intend to buy a spade and a watering-pot and see what I can do with the garden.
I wish it were not quite so steep. If I'm not on the upper side of one of the apple-trees with my back firmly pressed against its trunk I don't yet see how I am to garden. It must be disturbing, and a great waste of time, to have to hold on to something with one hand while you garden with the other. And suppose the thing gives way, and you roll down on to the broken fence? And if that, too, gave way, there would be nothing but a few probably inadequate apple trunks between me and the roof of the house with the blue shutters. I should think it extremely likely that until I've got the mountain-side equivalent for what are known as one's sea-legs I shall very often be on that roof. I hope it is strong and new. Perhaps there are kind people inside who will not mind. Soon they'll get so much used to it that when they hear the preliminary rush among their apple-trees and the cracking of the branches followed by the thud over their heads, they won't even look up from their books, but just murmur to each other, 'There's Fräulein Schmidt on the roof again,' and go on with their studies.
Now I'm talking nonsense, and the sort of nonsense you like least; but I'm in a silly mood today, and you must take me as you find me. At any time when I have grown too unendurable you can stop my writing to you simply by not writing to me. Then I shall know you have at last had enough of me, of my moods, of my odious fits of bombastic eloquence, of my still more odious facetiousness, of my scoldings of you and of my complacency about myself. It is true you actually seem to like my scoldings. That is very abject of you. What you apparently resent are the letters with sturdy sentiments in them and a robust relish of life. It almost seems as though you didn't want me to be happy. That is very odd of you. And I sometimes wonder if it is possible for two persons to continue friends who have a different taste in what, for want of a nicer word, I must call jokes. My taste in them is so elementary that an apple-pie bed makes me laugh tears, and when I go to the play I love to see chairs pulled away just as people are going to sit down. You, of course, shudder at these things. They fill you with so great a dreariness that it amounts to pain. I am at least sensible enough to understand the attitude. But pleasantries quite high up, as I consider, in the scale of humor have not been able to make you smile. I have seen you sit unalterably grave while Papa was piping out the nicest little things, and I know you never liked even your adored Professor Martens when he began to bubble. Well, either I laugh too easily or you don't laugh enough. I can only repeat that if I set your teeth on edge the remedy is in your own hands.
We are going to be vegetarians this summer. Papa, who hasn't tried it yet, is perfectly willing, and if we live chiefly on nuts and lettuces we shall hardly want any money at all. I read Shelley's Vindication of Natural Diet aloud to him before we left the flat to prepare his mind, and he not only heartily agreed with every word, but went at once to the Free Library and dug out all the books he could find about muscles and brains and their surprising dependence on the kind of stuff you have eaten, and brought them home for me to study. I do love Papa. He falls in so sweetly with one's little plans, and lets me do what I want without the least waste of time in questionings or the giving of advice. I have read the books with profound interest. Only a person who cooks, who has to handle meat when it is raw, pick out the internals of geese, peel off the skins of rabbits, scrape away the scales of a fish that is still alive—my step-mother insisted on this, the flavor, she said, being so infinitely superior that way—can know with what a relief, what a feeling of personal purification and turning of the back on evil, one flings a cabbage into a pot of fair water or lets one's fingers linger lovingly among lentils. I brought a bag of lentils up the hill with us, and the cabbage, remnant of my last marketing, came up too in a net, and we had our dinner today of them: lentil soup, and cabbage with bread-and-butter—what could be purer? And for Johanna, who has not read Shelley, there was the last of the Rauchgasse sausage for the soothing of her more immature soul.
That was an hour ago, and Papa has just been in to say he is hungry.