Now I’m talking nonsense, and the sort of nonsense you like least; but I’m in a silly mood today, and you must take me as you find me. At any time when I have grown too unendurable you can stop my writing to you simply by not writing to me. Then I shall know you have at last had enough of me, of my moods, of my odious fits of bombastic eloquence, of my still more odious facetiousness, of my scoldings of you and of my complacency about myself. It is true you actually seem to like my scoldings. That is very abject of you. What you apparently resent are the letters with sturdy sentiments in them and a robust relish of life. It almost seems as though you didn’t want me to be happy. That is very odd of you. And I sometimes wonder if it is possible for two persons to continue friends who have a different taste in what, for want of a nicer word, I must call jokes. My taste in them is so elementary that an apple-pie bed makes me laugh tears, and when I go to the play I love to see chairs pulled away just as people are going to sit down. You, of course, shudder at these things. They fill you with so great a dreariness that it amounts to pain. I am at least sensible enough to understand the attitude. But pleasantries quite high up, as I consider, in the scale of humor have not been able to make you smile. I have seen you sit unalterably grave while Papa was piping out the nicest little things, and I know you never liked even your adored Professor Martens when he began to bubble. Well, either I laugh too easily or you don’t laugh enough. I can only repeat that if I set your teeth on edge the remedy is in your own hands.
We are going to be vegetarians this summer. Papa, who hasn’t tried it yet, is perfectly willing, and if we live chiefly on nuts and lettuces we shall hardly want any money at all. I read Shelley’s Vindication of Natural Diet aloud to him before we left the flat to prepare his mind, and he not only heartily agreed with every word, but went at once to the Free Library and dug out all the books he could find about muscles and brains and their surprising dependence on the kind of stuff you have eaten, and brought them home for me to study. I do love Papa. He falls in so sweetly with one’s little plans, and lets me do what I want without the least waste of time in questionings or the giving of advice. I have read the books with profound interest. Only a person who cooks, who has to handle meat when it is raw, pick out the internals of geese, peel off the skins of rabbits, scrape away the scales of a fish that is still alive — my step-mother insisted on this, the flavor, she said, being so infinitely superior that way — can know with what a relief, what a feeling of personal purification and turning of the back on evil, one flings a cabbage into a pot of fair water or lets one’s fingers linger lovingly among lentils. I brought a bag of lentils up the hill with us, and the cabbage, remnant of my last marketing, came up too in a net, and we had our dinner today of them: lentil soup, and cabbage with bread-and-butter — what could be purer? And for Johanna, who has not read Shelley, there was the last of the Rauchgasse sausage for the soothing of her more immature soul.
That was an hour ago, and Papa has just been in to say he is hungry.
‘Why, you’ve only just had dinner, Papachen,’ said I, surprised.
‘I know — I know,’ he said, looking vaguely troubled.
‘You can’t really be hungry. Perhaps it’s indigestion.’
‘Perhaps,’ agreed Papa; and drifted out again, still looking troubled.
Before we took this house it had stood empty for several years, and the man it belongs to was so glad to find somebody who would live in it and keep it warm that he lets us have it for hardly any rent at all. I expect what the impoverished want — and only the impoverished would live in a thing so small — is a garden flat enough to grow potatoes in, and to have fowls walking about it, and a pig in a nice level sty. You can’t have them here. At least, you couldn’t have a sty on such a slope. The poor pig would spend his days either anxiously hanging on with all his claws — or is it paws? I forget what pigs have; anyhow, with all his might — to the hillside, or huddled dismally down against the end planks, and never be of that sublime detachment of spirit necessary to him if he would end satisfactorily in really fat bacon. And the fowls, I suppose, would have to lay their eggs flying — they certainly couldn’t do it sitting down — and how disturbing that would be to a person engaged, as I often am, in staring up at the sky, for how can you stare up at the sky under an umbrella? I asked the landlord about the potatoes, and he said I must grow them as the last tenant did, a widow who lived and died here, in a strip against the north side of the house where there is a level space about two yards running from one end of the house to the other, representing a path and keeping the hill from tumbling in at our windows. It really is the only place, for I don’t see how Johanna and I, gifted and resourceful as we undoubtedly are, can make terraces with no tools but a spade and a watering-pot; but it will do away with our only path, and it does seem necessary to have a path up to one’s front door. Can one be respectable without a path up to one’s front door? Perhaps one can, and that too may be a superfluity to those who face life squarely. I am convinced that there must be potatoes, but I am not convinced, on reflection, that there need be a path. Have you ever felt the joy of getting rid of things? It is so great that it is almost ferocious. After each divestment, each casting off and away, there is such a gasp of relief, such a bounding upward, the satisfied soul, proud for once of its body, saying to it smilingly, ‘This, too, then, you have discovered you can do without and yet be happy.’ And I, just while writing these words to you, have discovered that I can and will do without paths.
Papa has been in again. ‘Is it not coffee-time?’ he asked.
I looked at him amazed. ‘Darling, coffee-time is never at half-past two,’ I said reproachfully.
‘Half-past two is it only? Der Teufel’ said Papa.
‘Isn’t your book getting on well?’ I inquired.
‘Yes, yes, — the book progresses. That is, it would progress if my attention did not continually wander.’
‘Wander? Whereto?’
‘Rose-Marie, there is a constant gnawing going on within me that will not permit me to believe that I have dined.’
‘Well, but, Papachen, you have. I saw you doing it.’
‘What you saw me doing was not dining,’ said Papa.
‘Not dining?’
Papa waved his arms round oddly and suddenly. ‘Grass — grass,’ he cried with a singular impatience.
‘Grass?’ I echoed, still more amazed.
‘Books of an enduring nature, works of any monumentalness, cannot, never were, and shall not be raised on a foundation of grass,’ said Papa, his face quite red.
‘I can’t think what you mean,’ said I. ‘Where is there any grass?’
‘Here,’ said Papa, quickly clasping his hands over that portion of him that we boldly talk about and call Magen, and you allude to sideways, by a variety of devious expressions. ‘I have been fed today,’ he said, looking at me quite severely, ‘on a diet appropriate only to the mountain goat, and probably only appropriate to him because he can procure nothing better.’
‘Why, you had a lentil soup — proved scientifically to contain all that is needed—’
‘I congratulate the lentil soup. I envy it. I wish I too contained all that is needed. But here’ — he clasped his hands again— ‘there is nothing.’
‘Yes there is. There is cabbage.’
‘Pooh,’ said Papa. ‘Green stuff. Herbage.’
‘Herbage?’
‘And scanty herbage, too — appropriate, I suppose, to the mountainous region in which we now find ourselves.’
‘Papa, don’t you want to be a vegetarian?’
‘I want my coffee,’ said Papa.
‘What, now?’
‘And why not now, Rose-Marie? Is there anything more rational than to eat when one is hungry? Let there, pray, be much — very much — bread-and-butter with it.’
‘But, Papa, we weren’t going to have coffee any more. Didn’t you agree that we would give up stimulants?’
Papa looked at me defia
ntly. ‘I did,’ he said.
‘Well, coffee is one.’
‘It is our only one.’
‘You said you would give it up.’
‘I said gradually. To do so today would not be doing so gradually. Nothing is good that is not done gradually.’
‘But one must begin.’
‘One must begin gradually.’
‘You were delighted with Shelley.’
‘It was after dinner.’
‘You were quite convinced.’
‘I was not hungry.’
‘You know he is all for pure water.’
‘He is all for many things that seem admirable to those who have lately dined.’
‘You know he says that if the populace of Paris at the time of the Revolution had drunk at the pure source of the Seine—’
‘There is no pure source of the Seine within reach of the populace of Paris. There would only be cats. Dead cats. And cats interspersed, no doubt, with a variety of objects of the nature of portions of crockery and empty tins.’
‘But he says pure source.’
‘Then he says pure nonsense.’
‘He says if they had done that and satisfied their hunger at the ever-furnished table of vegetable nature—’
‘Ever-furnished table? Holy Heaven — the good, the excellent young man.’
‘ — they would never have lent their brutal suffrage to the proscription list of Robespierre.’
‘Rose-Marie, today I care not what this young man says.’
‘He says — look, I’ve got the book in my pocket—’
‘I will not look.’
‘He says, could a set of men whose passions were not perverted by unnatural stimuli — that’s coffee, of course — gaze with coolness on an auto-da-fè?’
‘I engage to gaze with heat on any auto-da-fè I may encounter if only you will quickly—’
‘He says—’
‘Put down the book, Rose-Marie, and see to the getting of coffee.’
‘But he says—’
‘Let him say it, and see to the coffee.’
‘He says, is it to be believed that a being of gentle feelings rising from his meal of roots—’
‘Gott, Gott, — meal of roots!’
‘ — would take delight in sports of blood?’
‘Enough. I am not in the temper for Shelley.’
‘But you quite loved him a day or two ago.’
‘Except food, nobody loves anything — anything at all — while his stomach is empty.’
‘I don’t think that’s very pretty, Papachen.’
‘But it is a great truth. Remember it if you should marry. Shape your conduct by its light. Three times every day, Rose-Marie, — that is, before breakfast, before dinner, and before supper, — no husband loves any wife. She may be as beautiful as the stars, as wise as Pallas-Athene, as cultured as Goethe, as entertaining as a circus, as affectionate as you please — he cares nothing for her. She exists not. Go, my child, and prepare the coffee, and let the bread-and-butter be cut thick.’
Well, since then I have been cutting bread-and-butter and pouring out cups of coffee. I thought Papa would never leave off. If that is the effect of a vegetarian dinner I don’t think it can really be less expensive than meat. Papa ate half a pound of butter, which is sixty pfennings, and for sixty pfennings I could have bought him a Kalbsschnitzel so big that it would have lasted, under treatment, two days. I must go for a walk and think it out.
Yours sincerely,
ROSE-MARIE SCHMIDT.
XXXVI
Galgenberg, July 21st.
Dear Mr. Anstruther, — I assure you that we have all we want, so do not, please, go on feeling distressed about us. Why should you feel distressed? I am not certain that I do not resent it. Put baldly (you will say brutally), you have no right to be distressed, uneasy, anxious, and all the other things you say you are, about the private concerns of persons who are nothing to you. Even a lamb might conceivably feel nettled by persistent pity when it knows it has everything in the world it wants. Come now, if it is a question of pity, we will have it in the right place, and I will pity you. There is always, you know, a secret satisfaction in the soul of him who pities. He does hug himself, and whether he does it consciously or unconsciously depends on his aptitude for clear self-criticism. Compared with yours I deliberately consider my life glorious. And when will you see that there are kinds of gloriousness that cannot be measured in money or position? It is plain to me — and it would be so to you if you thought it over — that the less one has the more one enjoys. We want space, time, concentration, for getting at the true sweet root of life. And I think — and you probably do not — that the true sweet root of life is in any one thing, no matter what thing, on which your whole undisturbed attention is fixed. Once I read a little French story, years ago, with my mother, when I was a child, and I don’t know now who wrote it or what it was called. It was the story of a prisoner who found a plant growing between the flags of the court he might walk in, and I think it was a wallflower; and it, unfolding itself slowly and putting out one tender bit of green after the other in that gray and stony place, stretched out little hands of life and hope and interest to the man who had come there a lost soul. It was the one thing he had. It ended by being his passion. With nothing else to distract him, he could study all its wonders. From that single plant he learned more than the hurried passer-on, free of the treasures of the universe, learns in a life. It saved him from despair. It brought him back to the eager interest in the marvellous world that soul feels which is unencumbered by too heavy a weight of trappings. Why, I still have too much; and here are you pitying me because I have not more when I am distracted by all the claims on my attention. I can look at whole beds of wallflowers every spring, and pass on with nothing but a vague admiration for their massed beauty of scent and color. I get nothing out of them but just that transient glimpse and whiff. There are too many. There is no time for them all. But shut me up for weeks alone with one of them in a pot, and I too would get out of it the measure of the height and the depth and the wonder of life.
And then you exhort me not to live on vegetables. Is it because you live on meat? I don’t think I mind your eating meat, so why should you mind my eating vegetables? I have done it for a week now quite steadily, and mean to give it at least a fair trial. If what the books we have got about it say is true, health and sanity lie that way. And how delightful to have a pure kitchen into which ghastly dead things never come. I will not be a partaker of the nature of beasts. I will not become three parts pig, or goose, or foolish sheep. I turn with aversion from the reddened horror called gravy. I consider it a monstrous ugly thing to have particles of pig rioting up and down my veins, turning into brains, coloring my thoughts, becoming a very part of my body. Surely a body is a wonderful thing? So wonderful that it cannot be treated with too much care and respect? So wonderful that it cannot be too carefully guarded from corruption? And have you ever studied the appearance and habits of pigs?
But I do admit that being a vegetarian is bewildering. None of the books say a word about the odd feeling one has of not having had anything to eat. What Papa felt that first day I have felt every day since. I am perpetually hungry; and it is the unpleasant hunger that expresses itself in a dislike for food, in listlessness, inability to work, flabbiness, even faintness. At eight in the morning I begin with bread and plums. My entire being cries out while I am eating them for coffee with milk in it and butter on my bread. But coffee is a stimulant, and the books say that butter contains no nourishment whatever, and since what I most yearn for is to be nourished I will waste no time eating stuff that doesn’t do it. Instead, I eat heaps of bread and stacks of plums, not because I want to but because I’m afraid the gnawing feeling will follow sooner than ever if I don’t. Papa sits opposite me, breakfasting pleasantly on eggs, for he explains he is doing things gradually and is using the eggs to build wise bridges across the gulf between the end of meat and the begin
ning of what he persists in describing as herbage. At nine I feel as if I had had no breakfast. All the pains I took to get through the bread were of no real use. I struggle against this for as long as possible, because the books say you mustn’t have things between meals, and then I go and eat more plums. I am amazed when I remember that once I liked plums. No words can express my abhorrence of them now. But what is to be done? They are the only fruit we can get. Cherries are over. Apples have not begun. We buy the plums from the neighbor down the hill. To add to my horror of them I have discovered that hardly one is without a wriggly live thing inside it. I wonder how many of them I have eaten. Can they be brought into the category vegetarian? Papa says yes, because they have lived and moved and had their being in an atmosphere of pure plum. They are plum, says Papa, consoling me, — bits of plum that have acquired the power to walk about. But according to that beef must be vegetarian too, — so much grass grown able to walk about. It is very bewildering. One day the neighbor — he is a nice neighbor, interested in our experiment — sent us some raspberries, a basket of them, all glowing, and downy, and delicious with dew, and covered with a beautiful silvery cabbage leaf; but they were afflicted in just the same way, only more so. Papa says, why do I look? I must look now that I have seen the things once; and so the end of the raspberries was that most of them went out into the kitchen, and Johanna, who has no prejudices, stewed them into compote and ate them, including the inhabitants, for her supper.
Delphi Collected Works of Elizabeth von Arnim (Illustrated) Page 93
