ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
LIII
Galgenberg, Nov. 1st.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—I won't talk about it any more. Let us have done with it. Let us think of something else. I shall get tired of the duke if you are not careful, so please save me from an attitude so unbecoming. This is All Saints' Day: the feast of white chrysanthemums and dear memories. My mother used to keep it as a day apart, and made me feel something of its mysticalness. She had a table in her bedroom, the nearest approach that was possible to an altar, with one of those pictures hung above it of Christ on the Cross that always make me think of Swinburne's
God of this grievous people, wrought
After the likeness of their race—
do you remember?—and candles, and jars of flowers, and many little books; and she used on her knees to read in the little books, kneeling before the picture. She explained to me that the Lutheran whitewash starved her soul, and that she wanted, however clumsily, to keep some reminder with her of the manner of prayer in England. Did I ever tell you how pretty she was? She was so very pretty, and so adorably nimble of tongue. Quick, glancing, vivid, she twinkled in the heavy Jena firmament like some strange little star. She led Papa and me by the nose, and we loved it. I can see her now expounding her rebellious theories, sitting limply—for she was long and thin—in a low chair, but with nothing limp about her flower-like face and eyes shining with interest in what she was talking about. She was great on the necessity, a necessity she thought quite good for everybody but absolutely essential for a woman, of being stirred up thoroughly once a week at the very least to an enthusiasm for religion and the life of the world to come. She said there was nothing so good for one as being stirred up, that only the well stirred ever achieve great things, that stagnation never yet produced a soul that had shot up out of reach of fogs on to the clear heights from which alone you can call out directions for the guidance of those below. The cold, empty Lutheran churches were abhorrent to her. 'They are populated on Sundays,' she said, 'solely by stagnant women,—women so stagnant that you can almost see the duckweed growing on them.'
She could not endure, and I, taught to see through her eyes, cannot endure either, the chilly blend of whitewash and painted deal pews in the midst of which you are required here once a week to magnify the Lord. Our churches—all those I have seen—are either like vaults or barns, the vault variety being slightly better and also more scarce. Their aggressive ugliness, and cold, repellent service keeping the congealed sinner at arm's length, nearly drove my mother into the Roman Church, a place no previous Watson had ever wanted to go to. The churches in Jena made her think with the tenderest regard of the old picturesque pre-Lutheran days, of the light and color and emotions of the Catholic services, and each time she was forced into one she said she made a bigger stride toward Rome. 'Luther was a most mischievous person,' she would say, glancing half defiantly through long eyelashes at Papa. But he only chuckled. He doesn't mind about Luther. Yet in case he did, in case some national susceptibility should have been hurt, she would get up lazily—her movements were as lazy as her tongue was quick—and take him by the ears and kiss him.
She died when she was thirty-five: sweet and wonderful to the last. Nor did her beauty suffer in the least in the sudden illness that killed her. 'A lily in a linen-clout She looked when they had laid her out,' as your Meredith says; and on this day every year, this day of saints so dear to us, my spirit is all the time in those long ago happy years with her. I have no private altar in my room, no picture of a 'piteous Christ'—Papa took that—and no white flowers in this drenched autumnal place to show that I remember; nor do I read in the little books, except with gentle wonderment that she should have found nourishment in them, she who fed so constantly on the great poets. But I have gone each All Saints' Day for ten years past to church in Jena in memory of her, and tried by shutting my eyes to imagine I was in a beautiful place without whitewash, or hideous, almost brutal, stained glass.
This morning, knowing that if I went down into the town I would arrive spattered with mud up to my ears and so bedraggled that the pew-opener might conceivably refuse me admission on the ground that I would spoil her pews, I set out for the nearest village across the hills, hoping that a country congregation would be more used to mud. I found the church shut, and nobody with the least desire to have it opened. The rain beat dismally down on my umbrella as I stood before the blank locked door. A neglected fence divided the graves from the parson's front yard, protecting them, I suppose, as much as in it lay, from the depredations of wandering cows. On the other side of it was the parson's manure heap, on which stood wet fowls mournfully investigating its contents. His windows, shut and impenetrable, looked out on to the manure heap, the fowls, the churchyard, and myself. It is a very ancient church, picturesque, and with beautiful lancet windows with delicate traceries carefully bricked up. Not choosing to have walked five miles for nothing, and not wishing to break a habit ten years old of praying in a church for my darling mother's soul on this day of souls and darling saints, I gathered up my skirts and splashed across the parson's pools and knocked modestly at his door for the key. The instant I did it two dogs from nowhere, two infamous little dogs of that unpleasant breed from which I suppose Pomerania takes its name, rushed at me furiously barking. The noise was enough to wake the dead; and since nobody stirred in the house or showed other signs of being wakened it became plain to my deductive intelligence that its inmates couldn't be dead. So I knocked again. The dogs yelled again. I stood looking at them in deep disgust, quite ashamed of the way in which the dripping stillness was being rent because of me. A soothing umbrella shaken at them only increased their fury. They seemed, like myself, to grow more and more indignant the longer the door was kept shut. At last a servant opened it a few inches, eyed me with astonishment, and when she heard my innocent request eyed me with suspicion. She hesitated, half shut the door, hesitated again, and then saying she would go and see what the Herr Pastor had to say, shut the door quite. I do not remember ever having felt less respectable. The girl clearly thought I was not; the dogs clearly were sure I was not. Properly incensed by the shutting of the door and the expression on the girl's face I decided that the only dignified course was to go away; but I couldn't because of the dogs.