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Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, 1869
Jo March is the second of four sisters in a poor New England family, and the one who wanted to write. She turned down the rich, charming boy next door because she did not love him that way, and everyone thought she was a fool.
She went to New York to work as a governess in a boarding house. There she met Friedrich Bhaer, a German professor near forty, poor, kind, with his buttons always coming loose.
He told her, gently, that the lurid stories she was selling for money were beneath her. She burned them, went home, and did not hear from him.
At home the house went quiet. She began to call herself a spinster, and to believe it.
Then he came. He stayed a fortnight, walked out with her every afternoon, and said nothing about his feelings, because he had no money to offer a wife.
On the last day it rained. She was on a muddy road with her arms full of parcels, under his umbrella, and he finally spoke.
“Jo, I haf nothing but much love to gif you; I came to see if you could care for it, and I waited to be sure that I was something more than a friend. Am I? Can you make a little place in your heart for old Fritz?” he added, all in one breath.
“Oh, yes!” said Jo; and he was quite satisfied, for she folded both hands over his arm, and looked up at him with an expression that plainly showed how happy she would be to walk through life beside him, even though she had no better shelter than the old umbrella, if he carried it.
Look at the word much.
“Nothing but much love.” It is wrong English, Alcott left it wrong, and it is the most correct thing anyone says in the whole book.
He does not have the money, the house, the youth, the good coat. He does not even have the words, so he hands her the one thing he owns in broken grammar, and that is exactly how you know it is true.
Now listen to me. “I waited to be sure.”
A man of nearly forty, standing in the mud, telling a woman who had already written herself off that he had been waiting too. She thought the silence meant no.
We are told that if somebody wanted us, they would have said so by now. This book says that sometimes silence is not a lack of feeling. Sometimes it is a person waiting until they can offer something more than a feeling.
And look what she says back. Jo March, the writer, the girl who could talk her way out of anything.
“Oh, yes!” Two words, and not one of them clever.
She does not compose it. Somebody finally asked the right question, and she answered before she could make it pretty.
I need you to read his question properly. “Can you make a little place in your heart.”
He is not asking for all of it. He is asking for room.
That is what you have been carrying, I think. A small request, made quietly, and a belief that the season for asking it has closed.
It has not closed. A woman in a wet bonnet with parcels in both arms was asked, and she said yes, and the only shelter they had was an old umbrella.
The book tells you it was enough. Do not skim past that.
Almost everyone has seen one of the films. Almost nobody has stood under that umbrella on the page, and it is sitting there, free, waiting for you.
Underneath it I wrote
Today I answered something without arranging the words first.
Today. Copy his question, “Can you make a little place in your heart for old Fritz?”, by hand, slowly, the whole thing, broken English and all. Underneath it, write one line about a little place you are keeping open, or one you would like to be offered. Write it plainly. Wrong grammar is allowed.
From an old page
“I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart’s affections and the truth of Imagination.” John Keats, in a letter to his friend Benjamin Bailey, 1817.
When I copied it I underlined “nothing.” I thought it was a young man’s swagger.
I read it differently now. He is not claiming to be certain of much.
He is saying that when everything else came loose, this was still standing. He would rather keep that one thing than all the rest.
