A CHAT ON BOOKS.

Otago Witness, Issue 2817, 11 March 1908, Page 72

A CHAT ON BOOKS.

In resuming the Chats on Books which have always been so welcome to my country readers, I am not choosing to-day one of the very newest books, but rather one which, I am sure, will be much appreciated ; none other, indeed, thSn " Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther," by the author oi " Elizabeth and Her German Garden," "Tho Benefactress," and " Elizabeth in Rugen," all of which have been chosen as topics for my in_£prmal" book chat with you at different times. The present book is entirely different in theme and characters from any of its predecessors, though) of course, there is the same light touch, the same intimate atmosphere. The story is told in the letters of one -person — Fraulein Schmidt herself, — and they begin en the very dayafter the writer has parted from Mr Anstruther. They are love-letters of the first water, these preliminary ones ; the letters of a girl who has never been in love before, and who is writing to the man to whom she has only been engaged for a few hours nnd parted from almost as many. She writes from Jena, and the date is November 6. " Only to tell you that I love you, supposing you should ha\e forgotten it by the time you gob to London." She writes one hour after tho departure of her lover, because " you strictly charged me not to tell a soul yet — yet how can I keep altogether silent? You, then, my poor Roger, must be the one to listen.'* With lovely girlish ingenuousness she tells him that " Jena looks to-night the most dazzling place in the world, radiant with promise, shining and dancing with all sorts of little lovely lights that I know are only the lamps being lit in houses down the street, but that look to m» extraordinarily like stars of hope, come out in defiance of Nature and fog to give me a glorious welcome. ... I never saw a great many things before. I am amazed at the suddenness of my awaking. Love passed through this house to-day — ■ this honse that other people think is just the sajtie dull place it twas yesterday,— and behold — well, I won't grow magnificent, which la what you do if you begin a sentence with ' Behold.' But really there's a splendour . . ." There is an immense amount of cleverness in the easy and natural manner in which these letters explain -all that one desires to know without a moment's tedium. Writing next »i«ty, Rose Marie " wants to tell you all the important things I should have told you yesterday if there- had been time when you asked me in that amazing, sudden way if I'd marry you. . . . You couldn't have lived with us a year and not seen by the very puddings we have that we are poor. If we were not, my stepmother would never bother to take in young Englishmen who want to study German. . . . But you do not know how poor." And then Rose Marie emphasises with a proud humility the awesome truth that for dower " not a single towel even will she be able to add to your linen room, not a single pot to your kitchen!" Though her own mother was an Englishwoman, Rose Marie has been born and brought up in Germany, and feels the ignominy of such woverty in contrast to the fact that " when girls marry here their parents give them as a matter of course house linen enough to last them all their lives, furniture enough to furnish all their house, clothes enough for several generations, and so much a year beside." Presently she says in one of her letters : '■ If you have even a faint misgiving about what you really feel for me, tefl me— oh, tell me straight and plainly, and we

*rill both rub out that one weak hour with a sponge well soaked in common sense. It would not hurt so much now, I think, as it might later on." And presently one is aware of a little chill of doubt and fear creeping injo Rose Marie's warm glow of joy, for she saysx "Papa cannot stop my Believing that the Power in whose clutches we are is an amazing disciplinarian, a relentless grudger of joys. And what small joys they are after all! litiful little attempts of eouls doomed to eternal solitude to put out feelers in the dark, to get close to each other, to try to make each other warm." So the spiritual barometer goes up and down, and now Rose Marie is full of the hope and joy of first love, and now she is full of dire misgivings, for — " How strange and dreadful love is! Till you know it you are so sure the world is very good and pleasant up iri 1 those serene, frostbitten regions where you stand alone, breathing the thin air of family affection, shone upon gently by the mild and misty • sun of general esteem. Then conies love, and puts you down. Somehow, though it is so great a glory, it's a coming down as well — down from the pride of absolute independence of body and soul, down from the high-mightiness of indifference, to something fierce and hot and consuming." Then comes a letter m which the tall, bright-haired, swest-souled Rose Marie speaks of Roger's last letter, with its mention of a wee girl with " eyes a-tilt at the corners," to whom he had confided the secret of his engagement, thus : " I wish you had not told Nancy Cheriton about us— about me. It has profaned things so, dragged them out into the streets, cheapened them." Roger, it appears, is staying in the country, at a very beautiful place called Clinches, of which the splendour »nd high serene beauty breathing through his letters make Rose Marie feel small, remote, and nnconßidered. But Nancy is evidently a part of this pleasant life, kindi enough and intimate enough to sympathise with Roger's anxieties about that exam, which he should pass, and the very day and hour of which is weighted with anxiety for Rose Marie. In the long silence that ensues about this time, so far as Roger is concerned, the 'girl's letters go on, sometimes sad, sometimes petulant, but always full _of love. Sometimes she accounts for her depression by urging <c the cold terror of life which sits crouching on my heart," sometimes laughs at herself thus: — My stepmother looked at me and said: "Rose Marie, you look very odd. I hope you are not going to have anything expensive. Measles are in Jena, also the whooping coujjh." " WhicL of them is the cheapest? I inquired. ( "Both are beyond our means, said my • stepmother severely. On December 4 comes the letter that v changes " Roger," beloved and worshipped with all the sweetness of^a girl's first love, back once more to "Mr Anstruther." A few lines from Rose Marie's letter show clearly enough what has happened. In one word, it is "Nancy." "Do what .your father has set his heart on, since quite clearly your heart is set on the same thing. . . . Reason, expediency — all the prudences are on your side. You depend entirely on your father, you cannot maTry against his wish; his wish is that you marry Miss Cheriton." And then in "a passion of -contemptuous anger Rose Marie concludes: "You are not .worth remembrance; you are not worth anything, hardly. You are quite invertebrate; but you shall not cheat me of one chance of heaven : my life shall be splendid in spite of you." The next letter is -toted March. It is very short, and merely thanks Mr 'Anstruther for having remembered Rose Marie's birthday, and confesses, evidently in reply to a question — " Yes, I was ill ; but we had such a long winter that I was "lucky to escape it, tucked up comfortably in bed." It is evident that 'Anstruther loses no time in reply to this curt little note, and that presently his plea to be taken back into friendship and correspondence prevails, for Rose Marie begins one of her letters with, " No, I do not in the least mind your writing to me; do, whenever you feel you want to talk to a friend." Anstruther is now in the Foreign Office, where his principal employment seems to be gumming up envelopes. This leaves a large margin of time on his hands apparently/ a fair share of which he devotes to writing to Rose Marie. Apparently, also, the young man's letters are full of a good deal of sentimental self-pity, for the girl retorts— You are going through one of those tiresome soui sicknesses which periodically overtake the too comfortable, and you must, apparently tell somebody all about it. Such 4, malady only afflicts the well-fed. It 19 true that if you did not have several meals a day, and all of them too nice, if there were doubts about ftheir regulaii recurrence, if, briefly, you were a washerwoman <k a ploughboy, you would not have things the mutter with your soul. Another day, when she is well enough to sit on the balcony wrapped up in rugs and take her roll and coffee in the chilly sunshine that is so radiant, yet so elusive, Rose Marie writes thus : — It v ec strange how bad 1 things — things we call bad, bring forth good things — from the manure that brings forth roses, lovely in proportion to its manuriness, to the worst experiences that can overtake the soul. ' • - . , It is surely also true that good things bring forth bad ones. I cannot tell jou how life surprises me- I never get used to it — never tired of pondering and watching and wondering. The way in which eternal truths lurk along one's path, lie even among the potatoes in the cellar. , i Did you ever observe the conduct of potatoes in cellars? Their desperate determination to reach up to the light"? Their absolute concentration on that one distant gilinjxner? . , . If we choose to open our eyes to look and our ears to listen, now extraordinary it all is! Then the keen interest tiiere is to be got out of people, the joy to be won fronj common affeotions, the delight of b*Tinjf » fresh dejr before jou,

every morning — a fresh, long day, bare and empty, to be filled as you pass along it, with nothing but clean and noble hours. In reading these letters of Fraulein Schmidt it is cheerfully and! abundantly apparent that for her, at least, good , things have come out of bad, for her long illness is the grave in which she has buried a fruitless love and its bitter disappointment. Sadder, a little wiser, but full of whole-souled hope and courage, Rose Marie will presently face i the world. Meantime, in the enforced idleness of her convalescence, she stings and stimulates the weaker Anstruther with her common sense : j You write quite plaintively that some of the things I say hurfc you. I am sorrysorry, I mean, that you should be so soft. Can you not, then, bear anything? . . . You sighed for a, sister— you are always sighing for something,— and asked me to be one. Wed, I have apparently gone beyond the sister in decision and authority, and developed something of the acerbity oS an aunt. ] Again, after Teading a book sent her by j Anstruther, who, despite his engagement , to the charming heiress of Clinches, seems to be in a bad way sentimentally — j Persons who are everlastingly claiming pity, sympathy, condolences are very wear- 1 ing ' Surely all talk about one's death is belfish and bad. . . . When death really comes, is not what the ordinary decent dter wants, quiet? that he may leave himself j utterly in the hands of God. . . . Do you remember Walter Pater's strange feeling about death? Well, it runs through all his books . . . through exquisite descriptions of summer, of beautiful places, !

of heat and life and youth and all things lovely. It is like a misty_ black riband, j poor, n.ean, and rotten, that yet must j bind these gracious flowers of light at last together, bringing them into one piteous mass of corruption. . . . Give me Walt Whitman's brave attitude towards "cane and sacred death." The spirit that makes one brave and fearless, that inspires one to live beeutifully and well, that sends one marching straight ahead with limbs that do not tremble and with head held high. By the time Fraulein Schmidt is really well and strong again she has need of her strength, every atom of it, and her courage, every ounce of it ; for her stepmother's illness demands her constant nursing, her stepmother's death leaves the little household poorer by her annuity, and compelled to live on the modest sum of £100 per year. This represents the little fortune of Rose -Marie's English mother, and henceforth it is their all. But before I go any farther I must quote from the letter in which Rose Mane acknowledges Anstrut tier's letter of sympathy, for it expresses so truly an >eXperience through which I expect we have all passed. She is speaking of the letters received from him during her stepmother s illness—" Letters sent to friends a long way off do sometimes fall into their midst with a rather ghastly clang of discord. Yours did. I read them sometimes in the night, watching by my stepmother in the half -dark room when a fit tie peace from pain allowed her to slip into sleep. By the side of that ra.cl«>d figure, all it meant and the tremendous sermons it was preaching 1 to me, wor<lie=s, voiceless sermons, more eloquent than any I shall hear again, how strange, how far away your echoes from life and the world seemed! , , . Not quite genuine writhing-s under not quite genuine burdens ; idle questionings and self-criticisms, plaints, doubts . . • shadows in a place where everything was clear, cobwebs of unreality where all was so reall ... I used to wonder what that usually excellent housemaid, Experience, is about, that she has not yet beor. after you with her broom 1 . You know her specialty is tho pulling up of blinds and the letting in of the morning \Vhen the shrinkage of their small means, consequent on the death of Frau J

Schmidt, renders it necessary to move to the most economical house procurable, one is found on the south slope of the Galinberg hill. A tiny white house with green shutters. " The garden Is so steep that you can't sit down in it except on the north side of the house, where you can because the house is there to keep you from sliding further. , . , Behind us, right away up the elope, are pine trees that brush restlessly backwards and forwards all day long across the clouds, trying to sweep bits of clear blue in the sky, and at night spread themselves out ! stiff and motionless against the stars." I Here in the tiny house in the steep garden Rose Marie sets tip the few remaining household gods and devotes herself to her father, even to the point of I working night raid day to translate the I wonderful book which is to bring him fame and the little household food. Were it not for tHe devotion of her faithful : maid Johanna (who has refused to leave, and remains to alternately bully and pet JRose Marie) even the glories of the hilltop j might have failed to carry through the ! strenuous life of poverty and toil — toil j indoors and toil out of .doors — which is ' now the lot of Fraulein Schmidt. j There are neighbours below them on the hill, and friendly relations are soon established, which give the needful human interest to life. And always the letters ' of Mr Anstruther become more regular, frequent, and full of dependent friendship. His engagement is broken off ; he ' is, figuratively, once again at the feet of i Rose Marie ;" but she, taught by expe-

' rience, is obdurate. There is reason to I believe, reading between the lines, that j it is not without sadness that she makes j her decision, but she is wite enough and strong enough to render it irrevocable. Le; us consider the thing calmly. Let us try to say good-bye without too great clamour. . . . We have given each other many hours of pleasure, and shall we not be grateful rather than tragic? Here wo are, got at last to the point where we face the inevitable, and we may as well do it decently . . . Dear late friend and som« tinic? lover, do not want me to give you what 1 have not got. We are- both suffering just now ; but what about Time — that kindest soother, softener, healer, that final tidier up of ragged edges and 1 sweeper away of the broken fragments of the past? It is but a poor presentiment this, a mere suggestion oi the charm, the humour, the keen observation, the fanciful but wholesome reflection, and the clever character-drawing which render "Fraulein Schmidt and Mr Anstruther" a book to thoroughly enjoy.