Christine | Page 5

music fragment can be
found at the end of this e-text.]
he solemnly shook hands with me and said--what do you think he
said?--"My Fraulein, when you came in I thought, 'Behold yet one
more well-washed, nice-looking, foolish, rich, nothing-at-all English
Mees, who is going to waste my time and her money with lessons.' I
now perceive that I have to do with an artist. My Fraulein ich
gratuliere." And he made me the funniest little solemn bow. I thought
I'd die of pride.
I don't know why he thought me rich, seeing how ancient all my clothes
are, and especially my blue jersey, which is what I put on because I can

play so comfortably in it; except that, as I've already noticed, people
here seem persuaded that everybody English is rich,--anyhow that they
have more money than is good for them. So I told him of our
regrettable financial situation, and said if he didn't mind looking at my
jersey it would convey to him without further words how very
necessary it is that I should make some money. And I told him I had a
mother in just such another jersey, only it is a black one, and therefore
somebody had to give her a new one before next winter, and there
wasn't anybody to do it except me.
He made me another little bow--(he talks English, so I could say a lot
of things)--and he said, "My Fraulein, you need be in no anxiety. Your
Frau Mamma will have her jersey. Those fingers of yours are full of
that which turns instantly into gold."
So now. What do you think of that, my precious one? He says I've got
to turn to and work like a slave, practise with a sozusagen verteufelte
Unermudlichkeit, as he put it, and if I rightly develop what he calls my
unusual gift,--(I'm telling you exactly, and you know darling mother it
isn't silly vainness makes me repeat these things,--I'm past being vain;
I'm just bewildered with gratitude that I should happen to be able to
fiddle)--at the end of a year, he declares, I shall be playing all over
Europe and earning enough to make both you and me never have to
think of money again. Which will be a very blessed state to get to.
You can picture the frame of mind in which I walked down his stairs
and along the Potsdamerstrasse home. I felt I could defy everybody
now. Perhaps that remark will seem odd to you, but having given you
such glorious news and told you how happy I am, I'll not conceal from
you that I've been feeling a little forlorn at Frau Berg's. Lonely. Left out.
Darkly suspecting that they don't like me.
You see, Kloster hadn't been able to have me go to him till yesterday,
which was Saturday, and not then till the afternoon, so that I had had all
Friday and most of Saturday to be at a loose end in, except for
practising, and though I had got here prepared to find everybody very
charming and kind it was somehow gradually conveyed to me, though
for ages I thought it must be imagination, that Frau Berg and the other
boarders and the Mittagsgaste dislike me. Well, I would have accepted
it with a depressed resignation as the natural result of being unlikeable,
and have tried by being pleasanter and pleasanter--wouldn't it have

been a dreadful sight to see me screwing myself up more and more
tightly to an awful pleasantness--to induce them to like me, but the
people in the streets don't seem to like me either. They're not friendly.
In fact they're rude. And the people in the streets can't really personally
dislike me, because they don't know me, so I can't imagine why they're
so horrid.
Of course one's ideal when one is in the streets is to be invisible, not to
be noticed at all. That's the best thing. And the next best is to be
behaved to kindly, with the patient politeness of the London policemen,
or indeed of anybody one asks one's way of in England or Italy or
France. The Berlin man as he passes mutters the word Englanderin as
though it were a curse, or says into one's ear--they seem fond of saying
or rather hissing this, and seem to think it both crushing and
funny,--"Ros bif," and the women stare at one all over and also say to
each other Englanderin.
You never told me Germans were rude; or is it only in Berlin that they
are, I wonder. After my first expedition exploring through the
Thiergarten and down Unter den Linden to the museums last Friday
between my practisings, I preferred getting lost to asking anybody my
way. And as for the policemen,