'That's true,' said I, struck by a truth I had not till then consciously observed.
He did not ask me to sit down, a careful eye, I suppose, having gauged the probable effect of my wet clothes on his dry chairs, so we stood facing each other on the strip of matting throwing questions and answers backward and forward like a ball. And I think I played quite skilfully, for at the end of the game he knew little more than when we began.
And so at last he gave me the key, and having with a great rattling of its handle concealed that he was unlocking the door, and further cloaked this process by a pleasant comment on the way doors stick in wet weather, which I met with the cold information that ours didn't, he whistled off the dogs, and I left him still with an inquiry in his eye.
The church is very ancient and dates from the thirteenth century. You would like its outside—I wonder if in your walks you ever came here—but its inside has been spoilt by the zealous Lutherans and turned into the usual barn. In its first state of beauty in those far-off Catholic days what a haven it must have been for all the women and most of the men of that lonely turnip-growing village; the one beauty spot, the one place of mystery and enthusiasm. No one, I thought, staring about me, could possibly have their depths stirred in the middle of so much whitewash. The inhabitants of these bald agricultural parishes are not sufficiently spiritual for the Lutheran faith. Black gowns and bareness may be enough for those whose piety is so exalted that ceremonies are only a hindrance to the purity of their devotions; but the ignorant and the dull, if they are to be stirred, and especially the women who have entered upon that long series of gray years that begins, for those worked gaunt and shapeless in the fields, somewhere about twenty-five and never leaves off again, if they are to be helped to be less forlorn need many ceremonies, many symbols, much show, and mystery, and awfulness. You will say that it is improbable that the female inhabitants of such a poor parish should know what it is to feel forlorn; but I know better. You will, turning some of my own words against me, tell me that one does not feel forlorn if one is worked hard enough; but I know better about that too,—and I said it only in reference to young men like yourself. It is true the tragedy of the faded face combined with the uncomfortably young heart, which is the tragedy that every woman who has had an easy life has to endure for quite a number of years, finds no place in the existence of a drudge; it is true too that I never yet saw, and I am sure you didn't, a woman of the laboring classes make efforts to appear younger than she is; and it is also true that I have seldom seen, and I am sure you haven't, women of the class that has little to do leave off making them. Ceaseless hard work and the care of many children do away very quickly with the youth both of face and heart of the poor man's wife, and with the youth of heart go the yearnings that rend her whose heart, whatever her face may be doing, is still without a wrinkle. But drudgery and a lost youth do not make your life less, but more dreary. These poor women have not, like their husbands, the solace of the public-house Schnapps. They go through the bitterness of the years wholly without anæsthetics. Really I don't think I can let you go on persisting that they feel nothing. Why, we shall soon have you believing that only you in this groaning and travailing creation suffer. Please divest yourself of these illusions. Read, my young friend, read the British poet Crabbe. Read him much; ponder him more. He knew all about peasants. He was a plain man, with a knack for rhyme and rhythm that sets your brain a-jingling for weeks, who saw peasants as they are. They must have been the very ones we have here. In his pages no honeysuckle clambers picturesquely about their path, no simple virtues shine in their faces. Their hearth is not snowy, their wife not neat and nimble. They do not gather round bright fires and tell artless tales on winter evenings. Their cheer is certainly homely, but that doesn't make them like it, and they never call down blessings upon it with moist uplifted eyes. Grandsires with venerable hair are rather at a discount; the young men's way of trudging cannot be described as elastic; and their talk, when there is any, does not consist of praise of the local landowner. Do you think they do not know that they are cold and underfed? And do not know they have grown old before their time through working in every sort of weather? And do not know where their rheumatism and fevers come from?
I walked back through the soaking, sighing woods thinking of these things and of how unfairly the goods of life are distributed and of the odd tendency misfortunes have to collect themselves together in one place in a heap. Old thoughts, you'll say,—old thoughts as stale as life, thoughts that have drifted through countless heads, and after a while drifted out of them again, leaving no profit behind them. But one can't help thinking them and greatly marvelling. Make the most, you fortunate young man, of freedom, and Italy, and sunshine, and your six and twenty years. If I could only persuade you to let yourself go quite simply to being happy! Our friendship, in spite of its sincerity, has up to now been of so little use to you; and a friendship which is not helpful might just as well not exist. I wish I knew what words of mine would help you most. How gladly would I write them. How gladly would I see you in untroubled waters, forging straight ahead toward a full and fruitful life. But I am a foolish, ineffectual woman, and write you waspish letters when I might, if I had more insight, have found out what those words are that would set you tingling with the joy of life.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
I've been reading some of the very beautiful prayers in my mother's English Prayer Book to make up for not having prayed in church today. Its margins are thickly covered with pencilled comments. In parts like the Psalms and Canticles they overflow into the spaces between the verses. They are chiefly notes on the beauties of thought and language, and comparisons with similar passages in the Bible. Here and there between the pages are gummed little pictures of Madonnas and 'piteous Christs.' But when the Athanasian Creed is reached the tone of the comment changes. Over the top of it is written 'Some one has said there is a vein of dry humor running through this Creed that is very remarkable.' And at the end of each of those involved clauses that try quite vainly, yet with an air of defying criticism, to describe the undescribable, my mother has written with admirable caution 'Perhaps.'