(_underscores_ denote italics)
Lutzowstrasse 49, Berlin, Thursday, May 28th, 1914.
My blessed little mother,
Here I am safe, and before I unpack or do a thing I'm writing you a
little line of love. I sent a telegram at the station, so that you'll
know at once that nobody has eaten me on the way, as you seemed rather
to fear. It is wonderful to be here, quite on my own, as if I were a
young man starting his career. I feel quite solemn, it's such a great
new adventure, Kloster can't see me till Saturday, but the moment I've
had a bath and tidied up I shall get out my fiddle and see if I've
forgotten how to play it between London and Berlin. If only I can be
sure you aren't going to be too lonely! Beloved mother, it will only
be a year, or even less if I work fearfully hard and really get on, and
once it is over a year is nothing. Oh, I know you'll write and tell me
you don't mind a bit and rather like it, but you see your Chris hasn't
lived with you all her life for nothing; she knows you very well
now,--at least, as much of your dear sacred self that you will show
her. Of course I know you're going to be brave and all that, but one
can be very unhappy while one is being brave, and besides, one isn't
brave unless one is suffering. The worst of it is that we're so poor,
or you could have come with me and we'd have taken a house and set up
housekeeping together for my year of study. Well, we won't be poor for
ever, little mother. I'm going to be your son, and husband, and
everything else that loves and is devoted, and I'm going to earn both
our livings for us, and take care of you forever. You've taken care of
me till now, and now it's my turn. You don't suppose I'm a great
hulking person of twenty two, and five foot ten high, and with this
lucky facility in fiddling, for nothing? It's a good thing it is
summer now, or soon will be, and you can work away in your garden, for
I know that is where you are happiest; and by the time it's winter
you'll be used to my not being there, and besides there'll be the
spring to look forward to, and in the spring I come home, finished.
Then I'll start playing and making money, and we'll have the little
house we've dreamed of in London, as well as our cottage, and we'll be
happy ever after. And after all, it is really a beautiful arrangement
that we only have each other in the world, because so we each get the
other's concentrated love. Else it would be spread out thin over a
dozen husbands and brothers and people. But for all that I do wish
dear Dad were still alive and with you.
This pension is the top fiat of a four-storied house, and there isn't a
lift, so I arrived breathless, besides being greatly battered and all
crooked after my night sitting up in the train; and Frau Berg came and
opened the door herself when I rang, and when she saw me she threw up
two immense hands and exclaimed, "_Herr Gott_!"
"_Nicht wahr_?" I said, agreeing with her, for I knew I must be looking
too awful.
She then said, while I stood holding on to my violin-case and umbrella
and coat and a paper bag of ginger biscuits I had been solacing myself
with in the watches of the night, that she hadn't known when exactly to
expect me, so she had decided not to expect me at all, for she had
observed that the things you do not expect come to you, and the things
you do expect do not; besides, she was a busy woman, and busy women
waste no time expecting anything in any case; and then she said, "Come
in."
"_Seien Sie willkommen, mein Fraulein_," she continued, with a sort of
stern cordiality, when I was over the threshold, holding out both her
hands in massive greeting; and as both mine were full she caught hold
of what she could, and it was the bag of biscuits, and it burst.
"_Herr Gott_!" cried Frau Berg again, as they rattled away over the
wooden floor of the passage, "_Herr Gott, die schonen Kakes_!" And she
started after them; so I put down my things on a chair and started
after them too, and would you believe it the biscuits came out of the
corners positively cleaner than when they went in. The floor cleaned
the biscuits instead of, as would have happened in London, the biscuits
cleaning the floor, so you can be quite happy about its being a clean
place.
It is a good thing I learned German in my youth, for even if it is so
rusty at present that I can only say things like _Nicht wahr_, I can
understand everything, and I'm sure I'll get along very nicely for at
least a week on the few words that somehow have stuck in my memory.
I've discovered they are:
Nicht wahr,
Wundervoll,
Naturlich,
Herrlich,
Ich gratuliere,
and
Doch.
And the only one with the faintest approach to contentiousness, or
acidity, or any of the qualities that don't endear the stranger to the
indigenous, is _doch_.
My bedroom looks very clean, and is roomy and comfortable, and I shall
be able to work very happily in it, I'm sure. I can't tell you how
much excited I am at getting here and going to study under the great
Kloster! You darling one, you beloved mother, stinting yourself,
scraping your own life bare, so as to give me this chance. _Won't_ I
work. And _work_. _And_ work. And in a year--no, we won't call it a
year, we'll say in a few months--I shall come back to you for good,
carrying my sheaves with me. Oh, I hope there will be sheaves,--big
ones, beautiful ones, to lay at your blessed feet! Now I'll run down
and post this. I saw a letter-box a few yards down the street. And
then I'll have a bath and go to bed for a few hours, I think. It is
still only nine o'clock in the morning, so I have hours and hours of
today before me, and can practise this afternoon and write to you again
this evening. So good-bye for a few hours, my precious mother.
Your happy Chris.
--
May 28th. Evening.
It's very funny here, but quite comfortable. You needn't give a
thought to my comforts, mother darling. There's a lot to eat, and if
I'm not in clover I'm certainly in feathers,--you should see the
immense sackful of them in a dark red sateen bag on my bed! As you
have been in Germany trying to get poor Dad well in all those
_Kurorten_, you'll understand how queer my bedroom looks, like a very
solemn and gloomy drawingroom into which it has suddenly occurred to
somebody to put a bed. It is a tall room: tall of ceiling, which is
painted at the corners with blue clouds and pink cherubim--unmistakable
Germans--and tall of door, of which there are three, and tall of
window, of which there are two. The windows have long dark curtains of
rep or something woolly, and long coffee-coloured lace curtains as
well; and there's a big green majolica stove in one corner; and there's
a dark brown wall-paper with gilt flowers on it; and an elaborate
chandelier hanging from a coloured plaster rosette in the middle of the
ceiling, all twisty and gilt, but it doesn't light,--Wanda, the maid of
all work, brings me a petroleum lamp with a green glass shade to it
when it gets dusk. I've got a very short bed with a dark red sateen
quilt on to which my sheet is buttoned a11 round, a pillow propped up
so high on a wedge stuck under the mattress that I shall sleep sitting
up almost straight, and then as a crowning glory the sack of feathers,
which will do beautifully for holding me down when I'm having a
nightmare. In a corner, with an even greater air of being an
afterthought than the bed, there's a very tiny washstand, and pinned on
the wall behind it over the part of the wallpaper I might splash on
Sunday mornings when I'm supposed really to wash, is a strip of grey
linen with a motto worked on it in blue wool:
Eigener Heerd
Ist Goldes Werth
which is a rhyme if you take it in the proper spirit, and isn't if you
don't. But I love the sentiment, don't you? It seems peculiarly sound
when one is in a room like this in a strange country. And what I'm
here for and am going to work for _is_ an _eigener Heerd_, with you and
me one each side of it warming our happy toes on our very own fender.
Oh, won't it be too lovely, mother darling, to be together again in our
very own home! Able to shut ourselves in, shut our front door in the
face of the world, and just say to the world, "There now."
There's a little looking-glass on a nail up above the _eigener Heerd_
motto, so high that if it hadn't found its match in me I'd only be able
to see my eyebrows in it. As it is, I do see as far as my chin. What
goes on below that I shall never know while I continue to dwell in the
Lutzowstrasse. Outside, a very long way down, for the house has high
rooms right through and I'm at the top, trams pass almost constantly
along the street, clanging their bells. They sound much more
aggressive than other trams I have heard, or else it is because my ears
are tired tonight. There are double windows, though, which will shut
out the noise while I'm practising--and also shut it in. I mean to
practise eight hours every day if Kloster will let me,--twelve if needs
be, so I've made up my mind only to write to you on Sundays; for if I
don't make a stern rule like that I shall be writing to you every day,
and then what would happen to the eight hours? I'm going to start them
tomorrow, and try and get as ready as I can for the great man on
Saturday. I'm fearfully nervous and afraid, for so much depends on it,
and in spite of knowing that somehow from somewhere I've got a kind of
gift for fiddling. Heaven knows where that little bit of luck came
from, seeing that up to now, though you're such a perfect listener, you
haven't developed any particular talent for playing anything, have you
mother darling; and poor Dad positively preferred to be in a room where
music wasn't. Do you remember how he used to say he couldn't think
which end of a violin the noises came out of, and whichever it was he
wished they wouldn't? But what a mercy, what a real mercy and solution
of our difficulties, that I've got this one thing that perhaps I shall
be able to do really well, I do thank God on my knees for this.
There are four other boarders here,--three Germans and one Swede, and
the Swede and two of the Germans are women; and five outside people
come in for the midday dinner every day, all Germans, and four of them
are men. They have what they call _Abonnementskarten_ for their
dinners, so much a month. Frau Berg keeps an Open Midday Table--it is
written up on a board on the street railing--and charges 1 mark 25
pfennigs a dinner if a month's worth of them is taken, and 1 mark 50
pfennigs if they're taken singly. So everybody takes the month's
worth, and it is going to be rather fun, I think. Today I was solemnly
presented to the diners, first collectively by Frau Berg as _Unser
junge englische Gast_, Mees--no, I can't write what she made of
Cholmondeley, but some day I'll pronounce it for you; and really it is
hard on her that her one English guest, who might so easily have been
Evans, or Dobbs, or something easy, should have a name that looks a
yard long and sounds an inch short--and then each of them to me singly
by name. They all made the most beautiful stiff bows. Some of them
are students, I gathered; some, I imagine, are staying here because
they have no homes,--wash-ups on the shores of life; some are clerks
who come in for dinner from their offices near by; and one, the oldest
of the men and the most deferred to, is a lawyer called Doctor
something. I suppose my being a stranger made them silent, for they
were all very silent and stiff, but they'll get used to me quite soon I
expect, for didn't you once rebuke me because everybody gets used to me
much too soon? Being the newest arrival I sat right at the end of the
table in the darkness near the door, and looking along it towards the
light it was really impressive, the concentration, the earnestness, the
thoroughness, the skill, with which the two rows of guests dealt with
things like gravy on their plates,--elusive, mobile things that are not
caught without a struggle. Why, if I can manage to apply myself to
fiddling with half that skill and patience I shall be back home again
in six months!
I'm so sleepy, I must leave off and go to bed. I did sleep this
morning, but only for an hour or two; I was too much excited, I think,
at having really got here to be able to sleep. Now my eyes are
shutting, but I do hate leaving off, for I'm not going to write again
till Sunday, and that is two whole days further ahead, and you know my
precious mother it's the only time I shall feel near you, when I'm
talking to you in letters. But I simply can't keep my eyes open any
longer, so goodnight and good-bye my own blessed one, till Sunday. All
my heart's love to you.
Your Chris.
We have supper at eight, and tonight it was cold herrings and fried
potatoes and tea. Do you think after a supper like that I shall be
able to dream of anybody like you?
--
Sunday, May 31st, 1914.
Precious mother,
I've been dying to write you at least six times a day since I posted my
letter to you the day before yesterday, but rules are rules, aren't
they, especially if one makes them oneself, because then the poor
little things are so very helpless, and have to be protected. I
couldn't have looked myself in the face if I'd started off by breaking
my own rule, but I've been thinking of you and loving you all the
time--oh, so much!
Well, I'm _very_ happy. I'll say that first, so as to relieve your
darling mind. I've seen Kloster, and played to him, and he was
fearfully kind and encouraging. He said very much what Ysaye said in
London, and Joachim when I was little and played my first piece to him
standing on the dining-room table in Eccleston Square and staring
fascinated, while I played, at the hairs of his beard, because I'd
never been as close as that to a beard before. So I've been walking on
clouds with my chin well in the air, as who wouldn't? Kloster is a
little round, red, bald man, the baldest man I've ever seen; quite
bald, with hardly any eyebrows, and clean-shaven as well. He's the
funniest little thing till you join him to a violin, and then--! A
year with him ought to do wonders for me. He says so too; and when I
had finished playing--it was the G minor Bach--you know,--the one with
the fugue beginning:
he solemnly shook hands with me and said--what do you think he
said?--"My Fraulein, when you came in I thought, 'Behold yet one more
well-washed, nice-looking, foolish, rich, nothing-at-all English Mees,
who is going to waste my time and her money with lessons.' I now
perceive that I have to do with an artist. My Fraulein _ich
gratuliere_." And he made me the funniest little solemn bow. I
thought I'd die of pride.
I don't know why he thought me rich, seeing how ancient all my clothes
are, and especially my blue jersey, which is what I put on because I
can play so comfortably in it; except that, as I've already noticed,
people here seem persuaded that everybody English is rich,--anyhow that
they have more money than is good for them. So I told him of our
regrettable financial situation, and said if he didn't mind looking at
my jersey it would convey to him without further words how very
necessary it is that I should make some money. And I told him I had a
mother in just such another jersey, only it is a black one, and
therefore somebody had to give her a new one before next winter, and
there wasn't anybody to do it except me.
He made me another little bow--(he talks English, so I could say a lot
of things)--and he said, "My Fraulein, you need be in no anxiety. Your
Frau Mamma will have her jersey. Those fingers of yours are full of
that which turns instantly into gold."
So now. What do you think of that, my precious one? He says I've got
to turn to and work like a slave, practise with a _sozusagen
verteufelte Unermudlichkeit_, as he put it, and if I rightly develop
what he calls my unusual gift,--(I'm telling you exactly, and you know
darling mother it isn't silly vainness makes me repeat these
things,--I'm past being vain; I'm just bewildered with gratitude that I
should happen to be able to fiddle)--at the end of a year, he declares,
I shall be playing all over Europe and earning enough to make both you
and me never have to think of money again. Which will be a very
blessed state to get to.
You can picture the frame of mind in which I walked down his stairs and
along the Potsdamerstrasse home. I felt I could defy everybody now.
Perhaps that remark will seem odd to you, but having given you such
glorious news and told you how happy I am, I'll not conceal from you
that I've been feeling a little forlorn at Frau Berg's. Lonely. Left
out. Darkly suspecting that they don't like me.
You see, Kloster hadn't been able to have me go to him till yesterday,
which was Saturday, and not then till the afternoon, so that I had had
all Friday and most of Saturday to be at a loose end in, except for
practising, and though I had got here prepared to find everybody very
charming and kind it was somehow gradually conveyed to me, though for
ages I thought it must be imagination, that Frau Berg and the other
boarders and the _Mittagsgaste_ dislike me. Well, I would have
accepted it with a depressed resignation as the natural result of being
unlikeable, and have tried by being pleasanter and pleasanter--wouldn't
it have been a dreadful sight to see me screwing myself up more and
more tightly to an awful pleasantness--to induce them to like me, but
the people in the streets don't seem to like me either. They're not
friendly. In fact they're rude. And the people in the streets can't
really personally dislike me, because they don't know me, so I can't
imagine why they're so horrid.
Of course one's ideal when one is in the streets is to be invisible,
not to be noticed at all. That's the best thing. And the next best is
to be behaved to kindly, with the patient politeness of the London
policemen, or indeed of anybody one asks one's way of in England or
Italy or France. The Berlin man as he passes mutters the word
_Englanderin_ as though it were a curse, or says into one's ear--they
seem fond of saying or rather hissing this, and seem to think it both
crushing and funny,--"_Ros bif_," and the women stare at one all over
and also say to each other _Englanderin_.
You never told me Germans were rude; or is it only in Berlin that they
are, I wonder. After my first expedition exploring through the
Thiergarten and down Unter den Linden to the museums last Friday
between my practisings, I preferred getting lost to asking anybody my
way. And as for the policemen, to whom I naturally turned when I
wanted help, having been used to turning to policemen ever since I can
remember for comfort and guidance, they simply never answered me at
all. They just stood and stared with a sort of mocking. And of course
they understood, for I got my question all ready beforehand. I longed
to hit them,--I who don't ever want to hit anybody, I whom you've so
often reprimanded for being too friendly. But the meekest lamb, a lamb
dripping with milk and honey, would turn into a lion if its polite
approaches were met with such wanton rudeness. I was so indignantly
certain that these people, any of them, policemen or policed, would
have answered the same question with the most extravagant politeness if
I had been an officer, or with an officer. They grovel if an officer
comes along; and a woman with an officer might walk on them if she
wanted to. They were rude simply because I was alone and a woman. And
that being so, though I spoke with the tongue of angels, as St. Paul
saith, and as I as a matter of fact did, if what that means is immense
mellifluousness, it would avail me nothing.
So when I was out, and being made so curiously to feel conspicuous and
disliked, the knowledge that the only alternative was to go back to the
muffled unfriendliness at Frau Berg's did make me feel a little
forlorn. I can tell you now, because of the joy I've had since. I
don't mind any more. I'm raised up and blessed now. Indeed I feel
I've got much more by a long way than my share of good things, and with
what Kloster said hugged secretly to my heart I'm placed outside the
ordinary toiling-moiling that life means for most women who have got to
wring a living out of it without having anything special to wring with.
It's the sheerest, wonderfullest, most radiant luck that I've got this.
Won't I just work. Won't this funny frowning bedroom of mine become a
temple of happiness. I'm going to play Bach to it till it turns
beautiful.
I don't know why I always think of Bach first when I write about music.
I think of him first as naturally when I think of music as I think of
Wordsworth first when I think of poetry. I know neither of them is the
greatest, though Bach is the equal of the greatest, but they are the
ones I love best. What a world it is, my sweetest little mother! It
is so full of beauty. And then there's the hard work that makes
everything taste so good. You have to have the hard work; I've found
that out. I do think it's a splendid world,--full of glory created in
the past and lighting us up while we create still greater glory. One
has only got to shut out the parts of the present one doesn't like, to
see this all clear and feel so happy. I shut myself up in this
bedroom, this ugly dingy bedroom with its silly heavy trappings, and
get out my violin, and instantly it becomes a place of light, a place
full of sound,--shivering with light and sound, the light and sound of
the beautiful gracious things great men felt and thought long ago. Who
cares then about Frau Berg's boarders not speaking to one, and the
Berlin streets and policemen being unkind? Actually I forget the long
miles and hours I am away from you, the endless long miles and hours
that reach from me here to you there, and am happy, oh happy,--so happy
that I could cry out for joy. And so I would, I daresay, if it
wouldn't spoil the music.
There's Wanda coming to tell me dinner is ready. She just bumps the
soup-tureen against my door as she carries it down the passage to the
diningroom, and calls out briefly, "_Essen_."
I'll finish this tonight.
--
Bedtime.
I just want to say goodnight, and tell you, in case you shouldn't have
noticed it, how much your daughter loves you. I mayn't practise on
Sundays, because of the _Hausruhe_, Frau Berg says, and so I have time
to think; and I'm astonished, mother darling, at the emptiness of life
without you. It is as though most of me had somehow got torn off, and
I have to manage as best I can with a fragment. What a good thing I
feel it so much, for so I shall work all the harder to shorten the
time. Hard work is the bridge across which I'll get back to you. You
see, you're the one human being I've got in the world who loves me, the
only one who is really, deeply, interested in me, who minds if I am
hurt and is pleased if I am happy. That's a watery word,--pleased; I
should have said exults. It is so wonderful, your happiness in my
being happy,--so touching. I'm all melted with love and gratitude when
I think of it, and of the dear way you let me do this, come away here
and realize my dream of studying with Kloster, when you knew it meant
for you such a long row of dreary months alone. Forgive me if I sound
sentimental. I know you will, so I needn't bother to ask. That's what
I so love about you,--you always understand, you never mind. I can
talk to you; and however idiotic I am, and whatever sort of a
fool,--blind, unkind, ridiculous, obstinate or wilful--take your
choice, little sweet mother, you'll remember occasions that were
fitted by each of these--you look at me with those shrewd sweet eyes
that always somehow have a laugh in them, and say some little thing
that shows you are brushing aside all the ugly froth of nonsense,
and are intelligently and with perfect detachment searching for the
reason. And having found the reason you understand and forgive; for
of course there always _is_ a reason when ordinary people, not born
fiends, are disagreeable. I'm sure that's why we've been so happy
together,--because you've never taken anything I've done or said that
was foolish or unkind personally. You've always known it was just so
much irrelevant rubbish, just an excrescence, a passing sickness;
never, never your real Chris who loves you.
Good-bye, my own blessed mother. It's long past bedtime. Tomorrow I'm
to have my first regular lesson with Kloster. And tomorrow I ought to
get a letter from you. You will take care of yourself, won't you? You
wouldn't like me to be anxious all this way off, would you? Anxious,
and not sure?
Your Chris.