I turned my head and gazed reproachfully at Charlotte. How pretty she used to be. ...

I turned my head and gazed reproachfully at Charlotte. How pretty she used to be. How prettily the corners of her mouth used to turn up, as though her soul were always smiling. And she had had the dearest chin with a dimple in it, and she had had clear, hopeful eyes, and all the lines of her body had been comely and gracious. These are solid advantages that should not lightly be allowed to go. Not a trace of them was left. Her face was thin, and its expression of determination made it look hard. There was a deep line straight down between her eyebrows, as tnough she frowned at life more than is needful. Angles had everywhere taken the place of curves. Her eyes were as bright and intelligent as ever, but seemed to have grown larger. Something had completely done for Charlotte as far as beauty of person goes; whether it was the six Bernhards, or her actual enthusiasms, or the unusual mixture of both, I could not at this stage discover; nor could I yet see if her soul had gained the beauty that her body had lost, which is undoubtedly what the rightly cared-for soul does do. Meanwhile any- thing more utterly unlike the wife of a famous professor I have never seen. The wife of an aged German celebrity should be, and is, calm, comfortable, large, and slow. She must be, and is, proud of her great man. She attends to his bodily wants, and does not presume to share his spiritual excitements. In their common life he is the brain, she the willing hands and feet. It is perfectly fair. If there are to be great men some one must be found to look after them — some one who shall be more patient, faithful, and admiring than a servant, and unable like a servant to throw up the situation on the least provocation. A wife is an admirable institution. She is the hedge set between the precious flowers of the male intellect and the sun and dust of sordid worries. She is the flannel that protects when the winds of routine are cold. She is the sheltering jam that makes the pills of life possible. She is buffer, comforter, and cook. And so long as she enjoys these various roles the arrangement is perfect. The difficulties begin when, defying Nature’s teaching, which on this point is luminous, she refuses to be the hedge, flannel, jam, buffer, comforter, and cook; and when she goes so far on the sulphuric path of rebellion as to insist on being clever on her own account and publicly, she has, in Germany at least, set every law of religion and decency at defiance. Charlotte had been doing this, if all I had heard was true, for the last three years; therefore her stern inquiry addressed to a wife of my sobriety struck me as singularly out of place. What had I been doing with my life? Looking back into it in search of an answer it seemed very spacious, and sunny, and quiet. There were children in it, and there was a garden, and a spouse in whose eyes I was precious; but I had not done anything. And if I could point to no pamphlets or lectures, neither need I point to a furrow between my eyebrows.

‘It is very odd,’ Charlotte went on, as I sat silent, ‘our meeting like this. I was on the verge of writing to ask if I might come and stay with you’


‘Oh were you?’

‘So often lately I have thought just you might be such a help to me if only I could wake you up.’

‘Wake me up, my dear Charlotte?’

‘Oh, I’ve heard about you. I know vou live stuffed away in the country in a sort or dream. You needn’t try to answer my question about what you have done. You can’t answer it. You have lived in a dream, entirely wrapped up in your family and your plants.’

‘Plants, my dear Charlotte?’

‘You do not see nor want to see farther than the ditch at the end of your garden. All that is going on outside, out in the great real world where people are in earnest, where they strive, and long, and suffer, where they unceasingly pursue their ideal of a wider life, a richer experience, a higher knowledge, is absolutely indifferent to you. Your existence — no one could call it life — is quite negative and unemotional. It is as negative and as unemotional as —’ She paused and looked at me with a faint, compassionate smile.

‘As what?’ I asked, anxious to hear the worst.

‘Frankly, as an oyster’s.’

‘Really, my dear Charlotte,’ I exclaimed, naturally upset. How very unfortunate that I should have hurried away from Göhren. Why had I not stayed there two or three days, as I had at first intended? It was such a safe place; you could get out of it so easily and so quickly. If I were an oyster — curious how much the word disconcerted me — at least I was a happy oyster, which was surely better than being miserable and not an oyster at all. Charlotte was certainly nearer being miserable than happy. People who are happy do not have the look she had in her eyes, nor is their expression so uninterruptedly determined. And why should I be lectured? When I am in the mood for a lecture, my habit is to buy a ticket and go and listen; and when I have not bought a ticket, it is a sign that I do not want a lecture. I did not like to explain this beautifully simple position to Charlotte, yet felt that at all costs I must nip her eloquence in the bud or she would keep me out till it was dark; so I got up, cleared my throat, and said in the balmy tone in which people on platforms begin their orations, ‘Geehrte Anwesende.’

‘Are you going to give me a lecture?’ she inquired with a surprised smile.

‘In return for yours.’

‘My dear soul, may I not talk to you about anything except plants?’

‘I really don’t know why you should think plants are the only things that interest me. I nave not yet mentioned them. And, as a matter of fact, you are the last person with whom I would share my vegetable griefs. But that isn’t what I wished to say. I was going to offer you, geehrte Anwesende, a few remarks about husbands.’

Charlotte frowned.
‘About husbands,’ I repeated blandly, in a voice of milk and honey. ‘Geehrte Anwesende, in the course of an uneventful existence I have had much leisure for reflection, and my reflections have led me to the conclusion, erroneous perhaps, but fixed, that having got a husband, taken him of one’s own free will, taken him sometimes even in the face of opposition, the least one can do is to stick to him? Now, Charlotte, where is yours? What have you done with him? Is he here? And if not, why is he not here, and where is he?’

Charlotte got up hastily and brushed the sand out of the folds of her dress. You haven’t changed a bit,’ she said with a slight laugh. ‘You are just as —’

‘Silly?’ I suggested.

‘Oh, I didn’t say that. And as for Bernhard, he is where he always was, marching triumphantly along the road to undying fame. But you know that. You only ask because your ideas of the duties of woman are mediaeval, and you are shocked. Well, I’m afraid you must be shocked then. I haven’t seen him for a whole year.’

Luckily at this moment, for I think we were going to quarrel, Gertrud came heaving through the sand towards us with a packet of letters. She had been to the post, and knowing I loved getting letters came out to look for me so that I might have them at once; and as I eagerly opened them and buried myself in them, Charlotte confined her occasional interjections to deprecating the obviously inferior shape of Gertrud’s head.

Dieses Kapitel ist Teil des Buches The Adventures of Elizabeth in Rügen