Rue and Roses

INTRODUCTION

You will like Anna, the heroine of "Rue and Roses," when you get to know her. But perhaps it will take some time before she becomes familiar to you, partly because she is intensely Teutonic, partly, also, because the little history she gives about herself strikes the ordinary reader as fragmentary. She certainly is very German. You picture her to yourself with her large eyes and her, apparently, placid exterior. Very likely she is wearing a shawl round her shoulders and sits apart from other girls, for ever analyzing herself and her own states of consciousness. That is the characteristic thing about her. She is intensely self-analytic, and from the earliest moment when she began to think at all, she has ceaselessly occupied herself with her own soul-states and traversed one or


 two heart-crises. Having nothing much external to interest her, she is driven to introspection, and becomes, as a matter of course, a little priggish and pedantic, exaggerating the importance of conditions about which the normal healthy outdoor girl of another race never troubles herself.

Yet she is worth knowing for all that. She may be a little tiresome, but she is a good, honest girl, who has not had the best of luck, who, indeed, has come from a home where everything seems opposed to her own instincts and inclinations. Her father's business is perpetually on the down-grade, and his little commercial enterprises invariably fail, and leave him worse off than he was before. The mother, of course, is always on the verge of tears, because it is her painful duty to try and make both ends meet—a feat which she is eternally unable to accomplish. From one place they drift to another, and Anna's few friends of childhood are left


 behind, or if she sees them again they look at her askance, because her father has been in prison. And there is a brother, too, who would be a severe affliction even in the most favourable circumstances.

Meanwhile Anna pursues her own way, very humble, very insignificant, but always trying to do her best. She is a governess, and endures the usual fate of governesses, being either bullied or made love to—bullied by the mistress, and on one occasion compromisingly made love to by the master. One solace she has—the writing of poems. A characteristic German trait this! And so she sits and dreams, for she is the most sentimental little person you ever came across—sentimental to the full extent of Teutonic capacity, with her head full of Weltschmerz and Schwärmerei. Of course she sighs for the Prince Charming who is to come and redeem her from her servitude, a being of impossible virtues, noble and 


distinguished, and excessively handsome, the highborn husband for whom Cinderella dreams while she sweeps out the kitchen and cleans the pots and pans.

Nothing very significant so far. Indeed, Anna would seem to be the very best example of the ordinary German maiden, ruthlessly exploring her own limited soul and dreaming of the moon. Then suddenly an event occurs which changes her crude immaturity into something more real. She comes across a man of about thirty, who smokes his cigar, as she herself says, "with elegant ease," and who discourses about many things—about intoxication, about remorse, about books, about art, and about her poems. Gradually the intimacy grows, and Anna's whole life, and even her literary style, becomes eloquent because the love of her life has dawned on her horizon. "By-and-by I began to think of him whether I saw him or not; his face, his figure, rose like a blazing question from the


 midst of the strange, wistful dreams that I had dreamt all my life, and something that had lain within me, dull and senseless like a trance, woke, wondered, and trembled into joy."

She has now got something to occupy her mind apart from the analysis of her own soul. Her poems, naturally, become love poems. Her thoughts are no longer turned inward, but outward, craving for his presence and companionship. But the reader must not believe for a moment that he is going to peruse the ordinary love story. No, the nameless hero—a rather cryptic personage, suggesting now and again Manfred, certainly a little Byronic in his presentment, who calls himself "a wolf in sheep's clothing"—has no intention of making Anna either his mistress or his wife. It puzzles her a little what the man means, or what her life is henceforth to become. On one occasion she has a strange vision. She is in a graveyard at night-time. "And as I stood


 there staring into the darkness above and beyond the graves, I saw a vision—a circle of flames, growing into enormous size, embracing all the world except myself, leaving me outside and alone." Anna is like little Mowgli in Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book," who stands desolate and alone in the springtime when all the animal creation with whom he had consorted so amicably are inspired by that passionate feeling which comes to them in the opening year, but which leaves the little human boy untouched and forlorn. Anna, too, has realized her loneliness. She is doomed to be the Eternal Virgin, the predestinate spinster. In a world in which the feminine race largely predominates there are not lovers and husbands enough to go round, and she must remain outside that charmed circle—the leaping flames of love and passion, which seem to embrace all the world except herself.


Of course, she does not realize this at first. The truth only comes home to her after she has left her native land and lived, not too happily, in London. Because "he" had spoken enigmatically, always with a sense that there was something dangerous in their companionship, she had thought it best to leave him, he, too, assenting that that was the best course to adopt. Then, after some weary months of exile, the impulse comes upon her, too strong to be resisted, to write to her lover, not the ordinary letter, but one containing a strong, insistent question. "Do you think that I may come back?" she asked him. A long answer arrives: "If you had remained here, I do not know what might have happened; if you come back, I know what will happen. But the question is, may it come thus? You are not a girl of the ordinary type; you belong to the race of Asra, the people who die when they love.


 And, because I have known that from the first, I have done for you what I have never done for another woman yet—namely, got hold of the head of the beast within, turned it round sharply, and laughed at it."

That, then, is the end of it. A very different end from what the girl had imagined, but which she now recognizes as inevitable, and not otherwise than consolatory. For which is more glorious for a girl—that a man should make her his wife, or make her his most beautiful dream and his lasting desire? As for him, he will doubtless lead the man's life, never at peace with himself, tasting every pleasure and getting to know every disgust. "But above all pleasure and above all disgust there will be the one longing of his soul, which had denied itself the drink because of the dregs it knew to be at the goblet's bottom." This renunciation becomes Anna's ideal, and she smiles to herself


 that strange, wonderful smile "which only a woman knows who is willing to take upon herself the heaviest burden for the sweet sake of love."

Such is the life story of Anna, the heroine of "Rue and Roses." Very simple, very sentimental, but with a rare charm for those who have the wit to understand and the heart to feel, and written in a style of much tenderness and felicity. Do not put it down because the earlier portion may seem uninteresting. Read on to the finish, and you will be rewarded; for this is the story of one who realized her mission, a mission which falls to the lot of many women—a mission of loneliness with occasional moments of inspiration. It is the history, not of the eternal womanly, but of the eternal virginal. Anna is, like the daughter of Jephthah, a predestined virgin, who does not, like her Hebrew prototype, bewail her maidenhood among the


 mountains, but accepts it with grave resignation as her lot in life.