The Princess Priscillas Fortnight | Page 4

on the subject of drawing from the Herr Geheimrath?" she said
one day, after a lesson during which she had been drowsily aware of
much talk.
"The Herr Geheimrath is most conscientious," said Priscilla in the
stately, it-has-nothing-to-do-with-you sort of tone she found most
effectual with the Countess; but she added a request under her breath
that the lieber Gott might forgive her, for she knew she had told a fib.
Indeed, the last thing that Fritzing was at this convulsed period of his
life was what his master would have called conscientious. Was he not
encouraging the strangest, wickedest, wildest ideas in the Princess?
Strange and wicked and wild that is from the grand ducal point of view,

for to Priscilla they seemed all sweetness and light. Fritzing had a
perfect horror of the Grand Duke. He was everything that Fritzing, lean
man of learning, most detested. The pleasantest fashion of describing
the Grand Duke will be simply to say that he was in all things, both of
mind and body, the exact opposite of Fritzing. Fritzing was a man who
spent his time ignoring his body and digging away at his mind. You
know the bony aspect of such men. Hardly ever is there much flesh on
them; and though they are often ugly enough, their spirit blazes at you
out of wonderful eyes. I call him old Fritzing, for he was sixty. To me
he seemed old; to Priscilla at twenty he seemed coeval with pyramids
and kindred hoarinesses; while to all those persons who were sixty-one
he did not seem old at all. Only two things could have kept this restless
soul chained to the service of the Grand Duke, and those two things
were the unique library and Priscilla. For the rest, his life at Kunitz
revolted him. He loathed the etiquette and the fuss and the intrigues of
the castle. He loathed each separate lady-in-waiting, and every one of
the male officials. He loathed the vulgar abundance and inordinate
length and frequency of the meals, when down in the town he knew
there were people a-hungered. He loathed the lacqueys with a quite
peculiar loathing, scowling at them from under angry eyebrows as he
passed from his apartment to the library; yet such is the power of an
independent and scornful spirit that though they had heard all about
Westphalia and the pig-days never once had they, who made insolence
their study, dared be rude to him.
Priscilla wanted to run away. This, I believe, is considered an awful
thing to do even if you are only a housemaid or somebody's wife. If it
were not considered awful, placed by the world high up on its list of
Utter Unforgivablenesses, there is, I suppose, not a woman who would
not at some time or other have run. She might come back, but she
would surely have gone. So bad is it held to be that even a housemaid
who runs is unfailingly pursued by maledictions more or less definite
according to the education of those she has run from; and a wife who
runs is pursued by social ruin, it being taken for granted that she did not
run alone. I know at least two wives who did run alone. Far from
wanting yet another burden added to them by adding to their lives yet
another man, they were anxiously endeavouring to get as far as might

be from the man they had got already. The world, foul hag with the
downcast eyes and lascivious lips, could not believe it possible, and
was quick to draw its dark mantle of disgrace over their shrinking
heads. One of them, unable to bear this, asked her husband's pardon.
She was a weak spirit, and now lives prostrate days, crushed beneath
the unchanging horror of a husband's free forgiveness. The other took a
cottage and laughed at the world. Was she not happy at last, and happy
in the right way? I go to see her sometimes, and we eat the cabbages
she has grown herself. Strange how the disillusioned find their peace in
cabbages.
Priscilla, then, wanted to run away. What is awful in a housemaid and
in anybody's wife became in her case stupendous. The spirit that could
resolve it, decide to do it without being dragged to it by such things as
love or passion, calmly looking the risks and losses in the face, and
daring everything to free itself, was, it must be conceded, at least
worthy of respect. Fritzing thought it worthy of adoration; the divinest
spirit that had ever burned within a woman. He did not say so. On the
contrary, he was frightened, and tried angrily, passionately, to dissuade.
Yet he knew that if she wavered he would never forgive her; she