Chapter 27
719 Words
Jena, April 20th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,-You tell me I do not answer your letters, but really I think I do quite often enough. I want to make the most of these weeks of idle getting strong again, and it is a sad waste of time writing. My step-mother has had such a dose of me sick and incapable, of doctor's bills and physic and beef-tea and night-lights, that she is prolonging the convalescent period quite beyond its just limits and will have me do nothing lest I should do too much. So I spend strange, glorious days, days strange and glorious to me, with nothing to do for anybody but myself and a clear conscience to do it with. The single sanction of my step-mother's approval has been enough to clear my conscience, from which you will see how illogically consciences can be cleared; for have I not always been sure she has no idea whatever of what is really good? Yet just her approval, a thing I know to be faulty and for ever in the wrong place, is sufficient to prop up my conscience and make it feel secure. How then, while I am busy reading Jane Austen and Fanny Burney and Maria Edgeworth-books foreordained from all time for the delight of persons getting well-shall I find time to write to you? And you must forgive me for a certain surprise that you should have time to write so much to me. What have I done to deserve these long letters? How many Foreign Office envelopes do you leave ungummed to write them? Es ist zu viel Ehre. It is very good of you. No, I will not make phrases like that, for I know you do not do it for any reason whatever but because you happen to want to.
You are going through one of those tiresome soul-sicknesses that periodically overtake the too comfortable, and you must, apparently, tell somebody about it. Well, it is a form of Weltschmerz, and only afflicts the well-fed. Pray do not suppose that I am insinuating that food is of undue interest to you; but it is true that if you did not have several meals a day and all of them too nice, if there were doubts about their regular recurrence, if, briefly, you were a washerwoman or a plough-boy, you would not have things the matter with your soul. Washerwomen and ploughboys do not have sick souls. Probably you will say they have no souls to be sick; but they have, you know. I imagine their souls thin and threadbare, stunted by cold and hunger, poor and pitiful, but certainly there. And I don't know that it is not a nicer sort of soul to have inside one's plodding body than an unwieldy, overgrown thing, chiefly water and air and lightly changeable stuff, so unsubstantial that it flops-forgive the word, but it does flop-on to other souls in search of sympathy and support and comfort and all the rest of the things washer-women waste no time looking for, because they know they wouldn't find them.
You are a poet, and I do not take a youthful poet seriously; but if you were not I would laugh derisively at your comparing the entrance of my letters into your room at the Foreign Office to the bringing in of a bunch of cottage flowers still fresh with dew. I don't know that my pride does not rather demand a comparison to a bunch of hot-house flowers-a bouquet it would become then, wouldn't it?-or my romantic sense to a bunch of field flowers, wild, graceful, easily wearied things, that would not care at all for Foreign Offices. But I expect cottage is really the word. My letters conjure up homely visions, and I am sure the bunch you see is a tight posy of
Sweet-Williams, with their homely cottage smell.
It was charming of Matthew Arnold to let Sweet-Williams have such a nice line, but I don't think they quite deserve it. They have a dear little name and a dear little smell, but the things themselves might have been manufactured in a Berlin furniture shop where upholstery in plush prevails, instead of made in that sweetest corner of heaven from whence all good flowers come.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
- Writer
