Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther

by Elizabeth Von Arnim

Now I'll tell you why we have done it so quickly. It is not, as perhaps you know, my practice to fall easily on the stranger's neck. I am too lumbering, too slow, too acutely conscious of my shortcomings for that; really too dull and too awkward for anything but a life almost entirely solitary. But this girl has lately been in love. It is the common fate. It happens to us all. That in itself would not stir me to friendship. The man, however, in defiance of German custom, so strong on this point that the breaking of it makes a terrific noise, after being publicly engaged to her, after letting things go so far that the new flat was furnished, and the wedding-guests bidden, said he was afraid he didn't love her enough and gave her up.

When she told me that my heart went out to her with a rush. I shall not stop to explain why, but it did rush, and from that moment I felt that I must put my arms round her, I, the elder and quieter, take her by the hand, help her to dry her poor silly eyes, pet her and make her happy again. And really after six days there was no more crying, and for the last three she has been looking at life with something of the critical indifference that lifts one over so many tiresome bits of the road. Unfortunately her mother doesn't like me. Don't you think it's dreadful of her not to? She fears I am emancipated, and knows that I am Schmidt. If I were a Wedel, or an Alvensleben, or a Schulenburg, or of any other ancient noble family, even an obscure member of its remotest branch, she would consider my way of living and talking merely as a thing to be smiled at with kind indulgence. But she knows that I am Schmidt. Nothing I can say or do, however sweet and sane, can hide that horrid fact. And she knows that my father is a careless child of nature, lamentably unimpressible by birth and office; that my mother was an Englishwoman with a name inspiring little confidence; and that we let ourselves go to an indecent indifference to appearances, not even trying to conceal that we are poor. How useless it is to be pleasant and pretty—I really have been very pleasant to her, and the daughter kindly tells me I am pretty—if you are both Schmidt and poor. Though I speak with the tongues of angels and have no family it avails me nothing. If I had family and no charity I would get on much better in the world, in defiance of St. Paul. Frau von Lindeberg would take me to her heart, think me distinguished where now she thinks me odd, think me witty where now she thinks me bold, listen to my speeches, laugh at my sallies, be interested in my gardening and in my efforts to live without meat; but here I am, burning, I hope, with charity, with love for my neighbors, with ready sympathy, eager friendliness, desire to be of use, and it all avails me nothing because my name is Schmidt.

It is the first time I have been brought into daily contact with our nobility. In Jena there were very few: rare bright spots here and there on the sober background of academic middle-class; little stars whose shining even from a distance made us blink. Now I see them every day, and find them very chilly and not in the least dazzling. I no longer blink. Perhaps Frau von Lindeberg feels that I do not, and cannot forgive an unblinking Schmidt. But really, now, these pretensions are very absurd. The free blood of the Watsons surges within me at the sight of them. I think of things like Albion's daughters, and Britannia ruling waves, and I feel somehow that it is a proud thing to be partly Watson and to have had progenitors who lived in a house called The Acacias in a street called Plantagenet Road, which is what the Watsons did. What claims have these Lindebergs to the breathless, nay, sprawling respect they apparently demand? Here is a retired Colonel who was an officer all his life, and, not clever enough to go on to the higher military positions, was obliged to retire at fifty. He belongs to a good family, and married some one of slightly better birth than his own. She was a Freiin—Free Lady—von Dammerlitz, a family, says Papa, large, unpleasant, and mortgaged. It has given Germany no great warriors or statesmen. Its sons have all been officers who did not turn that corner round which the higher honors lie, and its daughters either did not marry at all, being portionless, or married impossible persons, said Papa, such as—

'Such as?' I inquired, expecting to hear they married postmen.

'Pastors, my dear,' said Papa smiling.

'Pastors?' I said, surprised, pastors having seemed to me, who view them from their own level, eminently respectable and desirable as husbands.

'But not from the Dammerlitz point of view, my dear,' said Papa.

'Oh,' said I, trying to imagine how pastors would look seen from that.

Well, here are these people freezing us into what they consider our proper place whenever we come across them, taking no pains to hide what undesirable beings we are in their sight, staring at Papa's hat in eloquent silence when it is more than usually tilted over one ear, running eyes that chill my blood over my fustian clothes—I'm not sure what fustian is, but I'm quite sure my clothes are made of it—oddly deaf when we say anything, oddly blind when we meet anywhere unless we actually run into them, here they are, doing all these things every day with a repeated gusto, and with no reason whatever that I can see to support their pretensions. Is it so wonderful to be a von? For that is all, look as I will, that I can see they have to go on. They are poor, as the retired officer invariably is, and they spend much time pretending they are not. They know nothing; he has spent his best years preoccupied with the routine of his calling, which leaves no room for anything approaching study or interest in other things, she in bringing up her son, also an officer, and in taking her daughter to those parties in Berlin that so closely resemble, I gather from the girl Vicki's talk, the parties in Jena—a little wider, a little more varied, with more cups and glasses, and with, of course, the chance we do not have in Jena of seeing some one quite new, but on the whole the same. He is a solemn elderly person in a black-rimmed pince-nez, dressed in clothes that give one the impression of always being black. He vegetates as completely as any one I have ever seen or dreamed of. Prolonged coffee in the morning, prolonged newspaper-reading, and a tortoise-like turn in the garden kill his mornings. Dinner, says Vicki, kills another hour and a half; then there is what we call the Dinner Sleep on the sofa in his darkened room, and that brings him to coffee time. They sit over the cups till Vicki wants to scream, at least she wants to since she has known me, she says; up to then, after her miserable affair, she sat as sluggishly as the others, but huddled while they were straight, and red-eyed, which they were not. After coffee the parents walk up the road to a certain point, and walk back again. Then comes the evening paper, which he reads till supper-time, and after supper he smokes till he goes to bed.

'Why, he's hardly alive at all,' I said to Vicki, when she described this existence.