While I copy he comes in and out to ask me where I have got to and if I like it. I assure him that I think it delightful, and so honestly I do in a way, but I don't think it will be the public's way. It begins by telling the reader, presumably a person in search of information about Goethe, that Jena is a town of twenty thousand inhabitants, of whom nineteen thousand are apparently professors. The town certainly does give you that impression as you walk about its little streets and at every corner meet the same battered-looking persons in black you met at the corner before, but what has that to do with Goethe? And the pages that follow have nothing to do with him either that I can see, being a disquisition on the origin and evolution of the felt hats the professors wear—dingy, slouchy things—winding up with an explanation of their symbolism and inevitableness, based on a carefully drawn parallel between them and the kind of brains they have to cover. From this point, the point of the head-wear of the learned in our present year, he has to work back all the way to Goethe in Jena a century ago. It takes him several chapters to get back, for he doesn't go straight, being constitutionally unable to resist turning aside down the green lanes of moralizing that branch so seductively off the main road and lead him at last very far afield; and when he does arrive he is rather breathless, and flutters for some time round the impassive giant waiting to be described, jerking out little anecdotes, very pleasant little anecdotes, but quite unconnected with his patient subject, before he has got his wind and can begin.
He is rosy with hope about this book. 'All Jena will read it,' he says, 'because they will like to hear about themselves'—I wonder if they will—'and all Germany will read it because it will like to hear about Goethe.'
'It has heard a good deal about him already, you know Papachen,' I say, trying gently to suggest certain possibilities.
'England might like to have it. There has been nothing since that man Lewes, and never anything really thorough. A good translation, Rose-Marie—what do you think of that as an agreeable task for you during the approaching winter evenings? It is a matter worthy of consideration. You will like a share in the work, a finger in the literary pie, will you not?'
'Of course I would. But let me copy now, darling. I'm not half through.'
He says that if those blind and prejudiced persons, publishers, won't risk bringing it out he'll bring it out at his own expense sooner than prevent the world's rightly knowing what Goethe said and did in Jena; so there's a serious eventuality ahead of us! We really will have to live on lettuces, and in grimmest earnest this time. I hope he won't want to keep race-horses next. Well, one thing has happened that will go a little way toward meeting new expenses,—I go down every day now and read English with Vicki, at the desire of her mother, for two hours, her mother having come to the conclusion that it is better to legalize, as it were, my relations with Vicki who flatly refused to keep away from us. So I am a bread-winner, and can do something to help Papa. It is true I can't help much, for what I earn is fifty pfennings each time, and as the reading of English on Sundays is not considered nice I can only altogether make three marks a week. But it is something, and it is easily earned, and last Sunday, which was the end of my first week, I bought the whole of the Sunday food with it, dinner and supper for us, and beer for Johanna's lover, who says he cannot love her unless the beer is a particular sort and has been kept for a fortnight properly cold in the coal-hole.
Since I have read with Vicki Frau von Lindeberg is quite different. She is courteous with the careful courtesy decent people show their dependents; kindly, even gracious at times. She is present at the reading, darning socks and ancient sheets with her carefully kept fingers, and she treats me absolutely as though I were attached to her household as governess. She is no longer afraid we will want to be equals. She asks me quite often after the health of him she calls my good father. And when a cousin of hers came last week to stay a night, a female Dammerlitz on her way to a place where you drink waters and get rid of yourself, she presented me to her with pleasant condescension as the kleine Engländerin engaged as her daughter's companion. 'Eine recht Hebe Hausgenossin,' she was pleased to add, gently nodding her head at each word; and the cousin went away convinced I was a resident official and that the tales she had heard about the Lindeberg's poverty couldn't be true.
'It's not scriptural,' I complained to Vicki, stirred to honest indignation.
'You mean, to say things not quite—not quite?' said Vicki.
'Such big ones,' I fumed. 'I'm not little. I'm not English. I'm not a Hausgenossin. Why such unnecessary ones?'