Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. AnstrutherVon Arnim, Elizabeth
General
Fräulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther
Von Arnim, Elizabeth
British -- Germany -- Fiction; Epistolary fiction; Germany -- Fiction; Love stories; Young women -- Fiction
that ought to be fixed are scattered heaven knows where. I go soft,
ecstatic, basely idle. I forget that my business is to get dinner, and
not to stand still and just sniff. In March I dare not pass the house
Schiller used to live in on my way to market, because the people who
live there now have planted violets along the railings. It is the
shortest way, and it takes ten more minutes out of a busy morning to go
round by the Post Office; but really for a grown woman to stand lost in
what is mere voluptuous pleasure, leaning against somebody else's
railing while the family dinner lies still unbought in the market-place,
is conduct that I cannot justify. As for a beanfield--my dear Roger, did
you ever come across a beanfield in flower? It is the divinest
experience the nose can give us. Two years ago an Englishman came and
spent a spring and summer in the little house in the apple orchard up on
the road over the Galgenberg--the little house with the blue
shutters--and he was a great gardener. And he dug a big patch, and
planted a beanfield, and it was the first beanfield Jena had ever seen;
for those beans called broad that you eat in England and are properly
thankful for are only grown in Germany for the use of pigs, and there
are no pigs in Jena. Sow-beans they are called here, mindful of their
destiny. The Englishman, who possessed no visible sow, was a source of
astonishment to us. The things came up, and were undoubtedly sow-beans.
A great square patch of them grew up just over the fence on which Jena
leaned and pondered. The man himself was seen in his shirt-sleeves
weeding them on rainy afternoons. Jena could only suspect a pig
concealed in the parlor, and was indulgent; and it was indulgent because
no one, in its opinion, can be both English and sane. 'God made us all,'
was its invariable helpless conclusion as it went, shaking its head,
home down the hill. When in June the beanfield flowered I blessed that
Englishman. No one hung over his fence more persistently than I. It was
the first time I had smelt the like. It became an obsession. I wanted to
be there at every sort of time and under every sort of weather-condition.
At noon, when the sun shone straight down on it drawing up its perfume
in hot breaths, I was there; in the morning, so early that it was still
in the blue shadow of the Galgenberg and every gray leaf and white petal
was drenched with dew, I was there; on wet afternoons, when the scent
was crushed out of it by the beating of heavy rain, and the road for
half a mile, the slippery clay road with its puddles and amazing mud,
was turned into a bath of fragrance fit for the tenderest, most
fastidious goddess to bare her darling little limbs in, I was there; and
once after lying awake in my hot room so near the roof for hours
thinking of it, out there on the hillside in the freshness under the
stars, I got up and dressed, and crept with infinite caution past my
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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