'But for nothing more than for leaving you free to put forth such shoots as your nature demanded in whatever direction your instincts propelled you.' And he disappeared and shut the window.
Vicki looked at me doubtfully. 'You said beautiful things,' she said, 'and he said just the opposite. Which is true?'
'Both,' said I promptly, determined not to be outdone as a prophet by Papa.
Poor Vicki. It is so hard to have life turned into a smudge when one is only twenty. She adored this man, was so proud of him, so proud of herself for being chosen by him. She grew, in the year during which they were engaged, into a woman, and can never now retrace her steps back to that fairy place of sunshine and carelessness in which we so happily wander if we are left alone for years and years after we are supposed to be grown up. Do you realize what a blow in the face she has received, as well as in her unfortunate little heart? All her vanities, without which a girl is but a poor thing, shrivelled up, her self-respect gone, her conceit, if there was any, and I suppose there was because there always is, gone headlong after it. A betrothal here is almost as binding and quite as solemn as a marriage. It is announced in the papers. It is abundantly celebrated. And the parents on both sides fall on each other's necks and think highly of one another till the moment comes for making settlements. The Lindebergs spent all they had laid by and borrowed more to buy the trousseau and furnish the house. Vicki cried bitterly when she talked of her table-napkins. She says there were twelve dozen in twelve different patterns, and each twelve was tied up with a pink ribbon fastened by a buckle and a bow. They had to be sold again at a grievous loss, and the family fled from Berlin and the faces of their acquaintances, faces crooked with the effort to sympathize when what they really wanted to do, says Vicki, was to smile, and came to this cheap place where they can sit in obscurity darning up the holes in their damaged fortunes. Frau von Lindeberg, who has none of the torment of rejected love to occupy her feelings and all the bitterness of the social and financial blow, cannot help saying hard things to Vicki, things pointed and poisoned with reproaches that sometimes almost verge on taunts. The man was a good parti for Vicki; little money, but much promise for the future, a good deal older than herself and already brilliant as an officer; and during the engagement the satisfied mother overflowed, as mothers will, with love for the creditable daughter. 'It was so nice,' said Vicki-, dolefully sniffing. 'She seemed to love me almost as much as she loves my brother. I was so happy. I had so much. Then everything went at once. Mamma can't bear to think that no one will ever want to marry me now, because I have been engaged.'
Well, love is a cruel, horrible thing. Hardly ever do both the persons love with equal enthusiasm, and if they do what is the use? It is all bound to end in smoke and nothingness, put out by the steady drizzle of marriage. And for the others, for the masses of people who do not love equally, of whom one half is at a miserable disadvantage, at the mercy absolutely of the other half, what is there but pain in the end? And yet—and yet it is a pretty thing in its beginnings, a sweet, darling thing. But, like a kitten, all charm and delicious ways at first, innocent, soft, enchanting, it turns into a cat with appalling rapidity and cruelly claws you. I'd like to know if there's a single being on earth so happy and so indifferent that he has not got hidden away beneath a brave show of clothes and trimmings the mark of Love's claws. And I think most of the clawings are so ferocious that they are for a long time ghastly tears that open and bleed again; and when with years they slowly dry up there is always the scar, red and terrible, that makes you wince if by any chance it is touched. That is what I think. What do you think?
Good-by.
No, don't tell me what you think. I don't want to know.
XLVI
Galgenberg, Sept. 24th.