Jena, July 3d.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,—I am sorry not to have been able to answer your letters for so many weeks, and sorry that you should have been, as you say, uneasy, but my telegram in reply to yours will have explained what has been happening to us. My step-mother died a fortnight ago. Almost immediately after I wrote last to you she began to be very ill. My feelings toward her have undergone a complete upheaval. I cannot speak of her. She is revenging herself, as only the dead in their utter unresentfulness can revenge themselves, for every hard and scoffing thought I had of her in life. I think I told you once about her annuity. Now it is gone Papa and I must see to it that we live on my mother's money alone. It is a hundred pounds a year, so the living will have to be prudent; not so prudent, I hope, but that we shall have everything to enjoy that is worth enjoying, but quite prudent enough to force us to take thought. So we are leaving the flat, grown far too expensive for us, as soon as we can find some other home. We have almost decided on one already. Mr. Collins went to England when the illness grew evidently hopeless, and we shall not take him back again, for my father does not care, at least at present, to have strangers with us, and I myself do not feel as though I could cook for and look after a young man in the way my step-mother did. Not having one will make us poor, but I think we shall be able to manage quite well, for we do not want much.
Thank you for your kind letters since the telegram. The ones before that, coming into this serious house filled with the nearness of Death, and of Death in his sternest mood, his hands cruel with scourges, seemed to me so inexpressibly—well, I will not say it; it is not fair to blame you, who could not know in whose shadow we were sitting, for being preoccupied with the trivialities of living. But letters sent to friends a long way off do sometimes fall into their midst with a rather ghastly clang of discord. It is what yours did. I read them sometimes in the night, watching by my step-mother in the half-dark room during the moments when she had a little peace and was allowed to slip away from torture into sleep. By the side of that racked figure and all it meant and the tremendous sermons it was preaching me, wordless, voiceless sermons, more eloquent than any I shall hear again, how strange, how far-away your echoes from life and the world seemed! Distant tinklings of artificialness; not quite genuine writhings beneath not quite genuine burdens; idle questionings and self-criticisms; plaints, doubts, and complicated half-veiled reproaches of myself that I should be able to be pleased with a world so worm-eaten that I should still be able to chant my song of life in a major key in a world so manifestly minor and chromatic. These things fell oddly across the gravity of that room. Shadows in a place where everything was clear, cobwebs of unreality where everything was real. They made me sigh, and they made me smile, they were so very black and yet so very little. I used to wonder what that usually excellent housemaid Experience is about, that she has not yet been after you with her broom. You know her specialty is the pulling up of blinds and the letting in of the morning sun. But it is unfair to judge you. Your letters since you knew have been kindness itself. Thank you for them.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
It seemed so strange for any one to die in June; so strange to be lifeless in the midst of the wanton profusion of life, to grow cold in that quivering radiance of heat. The people below us have got boxes of calla-lilies on their balcony this year. Their hot, heavy scent used to come in at the open window in the afternoons when the sun was on them, the honey-sweet smell of life, intense, penetrating, filling every corner of the room with splendid, pagan summer. And on the bed tossed my step-mother, muttering ceaselessly to herself of Christ.