Christine | Page 6

to whom I naturally turned when I
wanted help, having been used to turning to policemen ever since I can
remember for comfort and guidance, they simply never answered me at
all. They just stood and stared with a sort of mocking. And of course
they understood, for I got my question all ready beforehand. I longed to
hit them,--I who don't ever want to hit anybody, I whom you've so
often reprimanded for being too friendly. But the meekest lamb, a lamb
dripping with milk and honey, would turn into a lion if its polite
approaches were met with such wanton rudeness. I was so indignantly
certain that these people, any of them, policemen or policed, would
have answered the same question with the most extravagant politeness
if I had been an officer, or with an officer. They grovel if an officer
comes along; and a woman with an officer might walk on them if she
wanted to. They were rude simply because I was alone and a woman.
And that being so, though I spoke with the tongue of angels, as St. Paul
saith, and as I as a matter of fact did, if what that means is immense
mellifluousness, it would avail me nothing.
So when I was out, and being made so curiously to feel conspicuous

and disliked, the knowledge that the only alternative was to go back to
the muffled unfriendliness at Frau Berg's did make me feel a little
forlorn. I can tell you now, because of the joy I've had since. I don't
mind any more. I'm raised up and blessed now. Indeed I feel I've got
much more by a long way than my share of good things, and with what
Kloster said hugged secretly to my heart I'm placed outside the
ordinary toiling-moiling that life means for most women who have got
to wring a living out of it without having anything special to wring with.
It's the sheerest, wonderfullest, most radiant luck that I've got this.
Won't I just work. Won't this funny frowning bedroom of mine become
a temple of happiness. I'm going to play Bach to it till it turns beautiful.
I don't know why I always think of Bach first when I write about music.
I think of him first as naturally when I think of music as I think of
Wordsworth first when I think of poetry. I know neither of them is the
greatest, though Bach is the equal of the greatest, but they are the ones I
love best. What a world it is, my sweetest little mother! It is so full of
beauty. And then there's the hard work that makes everything taste so
good. You have to have the hard work; I've found that out. I do think
it's a splendid world,--full of glory created in the past and lighting us up
while we create still greater glory. One has only got to shut out the
parts of the present one doesn't like, to see this all clear and feel so
happy. I shut myself up in this bedroom, this ugly dingy bedroom with
its silly heavy trappings, and get out my violin, and instantly it becomes
a place of light, a place full of sound,--shivering with light and sound,
the light and sound of the beautiful gracious things great men felt and
thought long ago. Who cares then about Frau Berg's boarders not
speaking to one, and the Berlin streets and policemen being unkind?
Actually I forget the long miles and hours I am away from you, the
endless long miles and hours that reach from me here to you there, and
am happy, oh happy,--so happy that I could cry out for joy. And so I
would, I daresay, if it wouldn't spoil the music.
There's Wanda coming to tell me dinner is ready. She just bumps the
soup-tureen against my door as she carries it down the passage to the
diningroom, and calls out briefly, "Essen."
I'll finish this tonight.
Bedtime.

I just want to say goodnight, and tell you, in case you shouldn't have
noticed it, how much your daughter loves you. I mayn't practise on
Sundays, because of the Hausruhe, Frau Berg says, and so I have time
to think; and I'm astonished, mother darling, at the emptiness of life
without you. It is as though most of me had somehow got torn off, and
I have to manage as best I can with a fragment. What a good thing I
feel it so much, for so I shall work all the harder to shorten the time.
Hard work is the bridge across which I'll get back to you. You see,
you're the one human being I've got in the world who loves me, the
only one who is