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George Santayana
Published by Good Press, 2021
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If this cohabitation of profound moral troubles with speculative earnestness was characteristically German, so was the cohabitation of both with childish simplicity. I was told one morning that that day was Fräulein Mathilde’s thirty-third birthday. Where should I go to get some flowers or bon-bons to offer her with my congratulations: embarrassed congratulations, because if she had completed another year of life and that were so much to the good, it was less so that she had already completed thirty-three of them. But no: it was Sunday, and all shops were closed. I was genuinely sorry, because I am naturally remiss at paying compliments and attentions and giving due presents, and when an occasion presents itself boldly, I am glad to be forced to do the right thing. “If you really want to give her a pleasant surprise, write her a birthday poem,” said Westenholz, seeing my perplexity. So I retired for an hour to my room and produced some verses, in which I congratulated the poor, the Baroness, Albert, and their friends on the prospect of having the good Mathilde (for she wasn’t beautiful) with them for another year. The verses were worthless, but they had enough foundation in truth to serve their purpose. Mathilde really was all goodness, as Albert was too, only that he had intellect and madness to complicate the goodness.
In the afternoon, after a solid early dinner at which the Baroness was wheeled in a hospital litter to the table (for she insisted that she was too ill to sit up), brother and sister put their heads together to decide how they should celebrate the occasion; and it was decided that we three should go to their old house in the city, and take the dolls and the doll-furniture out of the boxes, and arrange everything in the dolls’ house just as it used to be. Their old house was that of their maternal grandfather, who had been Burgomaster of Hamburg, belonging now to an uncle who wasn’t living there for the moment. It was in the old town, near one of the churches with a high green steeple, and itself lofty and gabled: but we hurried up many flights of stairs as if treading on forbidden ground: I should have liked to see the rooms, but foresaw difficulties in opening windows and conciliating caretakers that would be involved in a visit of inspection unauthorised by the owner: so that I too hurried guilty-like to the garret, under a vast pitched roof, where evidently we might forget that we were interlopers. The boxes were opened; the dolls, the furniture, the crockery, were all distributed among the rooms of the immense dolls’ house, each precisely where it belonged. The names of the various dolls were recalled, and in rapid German that I wasn’t expected to listen to sundry comic incidents of childhood were referred to and enjoyed for the hundredth time. Then, dutifully, everything was buried again in the boxes, to be resurrected perhaps when Fräulein’s thirty-three years should have become forty-five.
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