My cousin Charlotte was twenty when I saw her last. Now she was thirty, besides having had an india-rubber cap on. ...

My cousin Charlotte was twenty when I saw her last. Now she was thirty, besides having had an india-rubber cap on. Both these things make a difference to a woman, though she did not seem aware of it, and was lost in amazement that I should not have recognised her at once. I told her it was because of the cap. Then I expressed the astonishment I felt that she had not at once recognised me, and after hesitating a moment she said that I had been making too many faces; and so with infinite delicacy did we avoid all allusion to those ten unhideable years.

Charlotte had had a chequered career; at least, beside my placid life it seemed to have bristled with events. In her early youth, and to the dismay of her parents, she insisted on being educated at one of the English colleges for women — it was at Oxford, but I forget its name — a most unusual course for a young German girl of her class to take. She was so determined, and made her relations so uncomfortable during their period of opposition, that they gave in with what appeared to more distant relatives who were not with Charlotte all day long a criminal weakness. At Oxford she took everything there was to take in the way of honours and prizes, and was the joy and pride of her college. In her last year, a German savant of sixty, an exceedingly bright light in the firmament of European learning, came to Oxford and was feted. When Charlotte saw the great local beings she was accustomed to look upon as the most marvellous men of the age — the heads of colleges, professors, and other celebrities — vying with each other in honouring her countryman, her admiration for him was such that it took her breath away. At some function she was brought to his notice, and her family being well known in Germany and she herself then in the freshness of twenty-one, besides being very pretty, the great man was much interested, and beamed benevolently upon her, and chucked her under the chin. The head in whose house he was staying, a person equally exquisite in appearance and manners, who had had much to forgive that was less excellent in his guest and had done so freely for the sake of the known profundity of his knowledge, could not but remark this interest in Charlotte, and told him pleasantly of her promising career. The professor appeared to listen with attention, and looked pleased and approving; but when the head ceased, instead of commenting on her talents or the creditable manner in which she had developed them, what he said was, ‘A nice, round little girl. A very nice, round little girl. Colossal appetitlich.’ And this he repeated emphatically several times, to the distinct discomfort of the head, while his eyes followed her benignly into the distant corner placed at the disposal of the obscure.


Six months later she married the professor. Her family wept and implored in vain; told her in vain of the terrificness of marrying a widower with seven children all older than herself. Charlotte was blinded by the glory of having been chosen by the greatest man Oxford had ever seen. Oxford was everything to her. Her distant German home and its spiritless inhabitants were objects only of her good-natured shrugs. She wrote to me saying she was going to be the life companion of the finest thinker of the age; her people, so illiterate and so full of prejudices, could not, she supposed, be expected to appreciate the splendour of her prospects; she thanked heaven that her own education had saved her from such a laughable blindness; she could conceive nothing more glorious than marrying the man in all the world whom you most reverently admire, than being chosen as the sharer of his thoughts, and the partner of his intellectual joys. After that I seldom heard from her. She lived in the south of Germany, and her professor’s fame waxed vaster every year. Every year, too, she brought a potential professor into a world already so full of them, and every year death cut short its career after a period varying from ten days to a fortnight, and the Kreuzzeitung seemed perpetually to be announcing that Heute früh ist meine liebe Frau Charlotte von einem strammen Jungen leicht und glücklich entbunden worden, and Heute starb unser Sohn Bernhard im zarten Alter von zwei Wochen. None of the children lived long enough to meet the next brother, and they were steadily christened Bernhard, after a father apparently thirsting to perpetuate his name. It became at last quite uncomfortable. Charlotte seemed never to be out of the Kreuzzeitung. For six years she and the poor little Bernhards went on in this manner, haunting its birth and death columns, and then abruptly disappeared from them; and the next I heard of her was that she was in England, — in London, Oxford, and other intellectual centres, lecturing in the cause of Woman. The Kreuzzeitung began about her again, but on another page. The Kreuzzeitung was shocked, for Charlotte was emancipated. Charlotte’s family was so much shocked that it was hysterical. Charlotte, not content with lecturing, wrote pamphlets, — lofty, documents of a deadly earnestness, in German and English, and they might be seen any day in the bookshop windows Unter den Linden. Charlotte’s family nearly fainted when it had to walk Unter den Linden. The Radical papers, which were only read by Charlotte’s family when nobody was looking and were never allowed openly to darken their doors, took her under their wing and wrote articles in her praise. It was, they said, surprising and refreshing to find views and intelligence of the sort emerging from the suffocating ancestral atmosphere that hangs about the Landadel. The paralysing effect of too many ancestors was not as a rule to be lightly shaken off, especially by the female descendants. When it did get shaken off, as in this instance, it should be the subject of rejoicing to every person who had the advancement of civilisation at heart. The civilisation of a state could never be great so long as its women, etc. etc.

My uncle and aunt nearly died of this praise. Her brothers and sisters stayed in the country and refused invitations. Only the professor seemed as pleased as ever. ‘Charlotte is my cousin,’ I said to him at a party in Berlin where he was being lionised. ‘How proud you must be of such a clever wife!’ I had not met him before, and a more pleasant, rosy, nice little old man I have never seen.

He beamed at me through his spectacles. Almost could I see the narrow line that separated me from a chin-chucking. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘so they all tell me. The little Lotte is making a noise. Empty vessels do. But I daresay what she tells them is a very pretty little nonsense. One must not be too critical in these cases.’ And, seizing upon the cousinship, he began to call me Du.

I inquired how it was she was wandering about the world alone. He said he could not imagine. I asked him what he thought of the pamphlets. He said he had no time for light reading. I was so unfortunate as to remark, no doubt with enthusiasm, that I had read some of his simpler works to my great benefit and unbounded admiration. He looked more benign than ever, and said he had had no idea that anything of his was taught in elementary schools.

In a word, I was routed by the professor. I withdrew, feeling crushed, and wondering if I had deserved it. He came after me, called me his liebe kleine Cousine, and sitting down beside me patted my hand and inquired with solicitude how it was he had never seen me before. Renewed attempts on my part to feed like a bee on the honey of his learning were met only by pats. He would pat, but he would not impart wisdom; and the longer he patted the more perfect did his serenity seem to become. When people approached us and showed a tendency to hang on the great man’s lips, he looked up with a happy smile and said, ‘This is my little cousin — we have much to say to each other,’ and turned his back on them. And when I was asked whether I had not spent a memorable, an elevating evening, being talked to so much by the famous Nieberlein, I could only put on a solemn face and say that I should not soon forget it. ‘It will be something to tell your children of, in the days to come when he is a splendid memory,’ said the enthusiast.

‘Oh won’t it!’ I ejaculated, with the turned-up eyes of rapture.’

‘Tell me one thing,’ I said to Charlotte as we walked slowly along the sands towards the cliff and the beechwood; ‘why, since you took me for a stranger, were you so — well, so gracious to me in the water?’

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