Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther

XI

I am glad you did not laugh at that silly letter of mine about scorching in the sun on rocks. Indeed I gather, my dear Roger, that you liked it. Make the most of it then, for there will be no more of the sort. A decent woman never gets on to rocks, and if she scorches she doesn't say so. And I believe that it is held to be generally desirable that she should not, even under really trying circumstances, part with her dignity. I rather think the principle was originally laid down by the husband of an attractive wife, but it is a good one, and so long as I am busy clinging to my dignity obviously I shall have no leisure for clinging to you, and then you will not be suffocated with the superabundance of my follies.

About those two sinners who are appalling us: how can I agree with you? To do so would cut away the ground from under my own feet. The woman plays such a losing game. She gives so much, and gets so little. So long as the man loves her I do see that he is worth the good opinion of neighbors and relations, which is one of the chilliest things in the world; but he never seems able to go on loving her once she has begun to wither. That is very odd. She does not mind his withering. And has she not a soul? And does not that grow always lovelier? But what, then, becomes of her? For wither she certainly will, and years rush past at such a terrific pace that almost before she has begun to be happy it is over. He goes back to his wife, a person who has been either patient or bitter according to the quantity of her vitality and the quality of her personal interests, and concludes, while he watches her sewing on his buttons in the corner she has probably been sitting in through all his vagrant years, that marriage has its uses, and that it is good to know there will be some one bound to take care of you up to the last, and who will shed decent tears when you are buried. She goes back—but where, and to what? They have gone long ago, her husband, her children, her friends. And she is old, and alone. You too, like everybody else, seem unable to remember how transient things are. Time goes, emotions wear out. You say these people are in the hands of Fate, and can no more get out of them and do differently than a fly in a web can walk away when it sees the hungry spider coming nearer. I don't believe in webs and spiders; at least, I don't today. Today I believe only in my unconquerable soul—

And you say that a person in the grip of a great feeling should not care a straw for circumstance, should defy it, trample it under foot. Heaven knows that I too am for love and laughter, for the snatching of flying opportunities, for all that makes the light and the glory of life; but what afterwards? The Afterwards haunts me like a weeping ghost. It is true there is still the wide world, the warm sun, seed-time and harvest, Shakespeare, the Book of Job, singing birds, flowers; but the soul that has transgressed the laws of man seems for ever afterwards unable to use the gifts of God. If supreme joy could be rounded off by death, death at the exact right moment, how easy things would be. Only death has a strange way of shunning those persons who want him most. To long to die seems to make you as nearly immortal as it is possible to become. Now just think what would have happened if Tristan had not been killed, had lived on quite healthily. King Mark, than whom I know no man in literature more polite, would have handed Isolde over to him as he declared himself ready to have done had he been aware of the unfortunately complicated state of things, and he would have done it with every expression of decent regret at the inconvenience he had caused. Isolde would have married Tristan. There would have been no philosophy, no divine hours in the garden, no acute, exquisite anguish of love and sorrow. But there would presently have been the Middle Ages equivalent for a perambulator, a contented Tristan coming to meet it, a faded Isolde who did not care for poetry, admonishing, perhaps with sharpness, a mediæval nursemaid, and quite quickly afterwards a Tristan grown too comfortable to move, and an Isolde with wrinkles. Would we not have lost a great deal if they had lived? It is certain that they themselves would have lost a great deal; for I don't see that contentment beaten out thin enough to cover a long life—and beat as thin as you will it never does cover quite across the years—is to be compared with one supreme contentment heaped in one heap on the highest, keenest point of living we reach. Now I am apparently arguing on your side, but I'm not really, because you, you know, think of love as a perpetual crescendo, and I, though I do hear the crescendo and follow it with a joyful clapping of hands up to the very top of its splendor, can never forget the drop on the other side, the inevitable diminuendo to the dead level—and then? Why, the rest is not even silence, but a querulous murmur, a querulous, confused whining, confused complaining, not very loud, not very definite, but always there till the last chord is reached a long time afterwards—that satisfactory common chord of death. My point is, that if you want to let yourself go to great emotions you ought to have the luck to die at an interesting moment. The alternative makes such a dreary picture; and it is the picture I always see when I hear of love at defiance with the law. The law wins; always, inevitably. Husbands are best; always, inevitably. Really, the most unsatisfactory husband is a person who should be clung to steadily from beginning to end, for did not one marry him of one's own free will? How ugly then, because one had been hasty, foolish, unacquainted with one's usually quite worthless mind, to punish him. The brilliant professor, the fascinating little lady, what are they but grossly selfish people, cruelly punishing the husband and wife who had the misfortune to marry them? Oh, it's a mercy most of us are homely, slow of wit, heavy of foot; for so at least we stay at home and find our peace in fearful innocence and household laws. (Please note my familiarity with the British poets.) But isn't that a picture of frugal happiness, of the happiness that comes from a daily simple obedience to the Stern Daughter of the Voice of God, beside which stormy, tremendous, brief things come off very badly? I don't believe you do in your heart side with the two sinners. Bother them. They have made me feel like a Lutheran pastor on a Sunday afternoon. But you know I love you.

R.-M.