Jena, May 27th.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—You asked me about your successor in our house, and inquire why I have never mentioned him. Why should I mention him? Must I mention everything? I suppose I forgot him. His name is Collins, and some days he wears a pink shirt, and other days a blue shirt, and in his right cuff there is a pink silk handkerchief on the pink days, and a blue silk handkerchief on the blue days; and he has stuck up the pictures he likes to have about him on the walls of his room, and where your Luini used to be there is a young lady in a voluminous hat and short skirts, and where your Bellini Madonna sat and looked at you with austere, beautiful eyes there is the winner, complete with jockey, of last year's Derby.
'I made a pot of money over that,' said Mr. Collins to me the day he pinned it up and came to ask me for the pin.
'Did you?' said I.
But I think I am tired just now of Luinis and Bellinis and of the sort of spirit in a young man that clothes the walls of his room with them, each in some elaborately simple frame, and am not at all sure that the frank fleshliness of a Collins does not please me best. You see, one longs so much sometimes to get down to the soil, down to plain instincts, to rude nature, to, if you like, elemental savagery.
But I'll go on with Mr. Collins; you shall have a dose of him while I am about it. He has bought a canoe, and has won the cup for swimming, wresting it from the reluctant hands of the discomfited Jena young men. He paddles up to the weir, gets out, picks up his canoe, carries it round to the other side, gets in, and vanishes in the windings of the water and the folds of the hills, leaving the girls in the tennis-courts—you remember the courts are opposite the weir—uncertain whether to titter or to blush, for he wears I suppose the fewest clothes that it is possible to wear and still be called dressed, and no stockings at all.
'Nein, dieser Engl鋘der!' gasp the girls, turning down decent eyes.
'H鰈lish practisch,' declare the young men, got up in as near an imitation of the flannels you used to wear that they can reach, even their hats bound about with a ribbon startlingly like your Oxford half blue; and before the summer is over I dare say they will all be playing tennis in the Collins canoe costume, stockingless, sleeveless, supposing it to be the latest cri in get-ups for each and every form of sport.
Professor Martens didn't care about teaching Mr. Collins, and insisted on handing him over to Papa. Papa doesn't care about teaching him, either, and says he is a dummer Bengel who pronounces Goethe as though it rhymed with dirty, and who the first time our great poet was mentioned vacantly asked, with every indication of a wandering mind, if he wasn't the joker who wrote the play for Irving with all the devils in it. Papa was so angry that be began a letter to Collins p鑢e telling him to remove his son to a city where there are fewer muses; but Collins p鑢e is a person who makes nails in Manchester with immense skill and application and is terrifyingly rich, and my step-mother's attitude toward the terrifyingly rich is one of large forgiveness; so she tore up Papa's letter just where it had got to the words erb鋜mlicher Esel, said he was a very decent boy, that he should stay as long as he wanted to, but that, since he seemed to be troublesome about learning, Papa must write and demand a higher scale of payment. Papa wouldn't; my step-mother did; and behold Joey—his Christian name is Joey—more lucrative to us by, I believe, just double than any one we have had yet.
'I say,' said Joey to me this morning, 'come over to England some day, and I'll romp you down to Epsom.'
'Divine,' said I, turning up my eyes.
'We'd have a rippin' time.'
'Rather.'
'I'd romp you down in the old man's motor.'
'Not really?'
'We'd be there before you could flutter an eyelash.'
'Are you serious?'
'Ain't I, though. It's a thirty-horse—'
'Can't you get them in London?'
'Get 'em in London? Get what in London?'
'Must one go every time all the way to Epsom?'
Joey ceased from speech and began to stare.
'Are we not talking about salts?' I inquired hastily, feeling that one of us was off the track.
'Salts?' echoed Joey, his mouth hanging open.
'You mentioned Epsom, surely?'
'Salts?'
'You did say Epsom, didn't you?'
'Salts?'
'Salts,' said I, becoming very distinct in the presence of what looked like deliberate wilfulness.
'What's it got to do with salts?' asked Joey, his underlip of a measureless vacancy.
'Hasn't it got everything?'
'Look here, what are you drivin' at? Is it goin' to be a game?'
'Certainly not. It's Sunday. Did you ever hear of Epsom salts?'
'Oh—ah—I see—Eno, and all that. Castor oil. Rhubarb and magnesia. Well, I'll forgive you as you're only German. Pretty weird, what bits of information you get hold of. Never the right bits, somehow. I'll tell you what, Miss Schmidt—'
'Oh, do.'
'Do what?'
'Tell me what.'
'Well, ain't I goin' to? You all seem to know everything in this house that's not worth knowin', and not a blessed thing that is.'
'Do you include Goethe?'
'Confound Gerty,' said Joey.
Such are my conversations with Joey. Is there anything more you want to know?
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.