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 beginning 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.
For dinner, by which time I am curiously shaky, quite indifferent to
food, and possessed of an immense longing to lie down on a sofa and do
nothing, we have salad and potatoes and fruit--of course plums--and
lentils because they are so good for us (it is a pity they are also so
nasty), and cheese because one book says (it is an extraordinarily
convincing book) that if a man shall eat beef steadily for a whole
morning from six to twelve without stopping, he will not at the end have
taken in half the nourishing matter that he would have absorbed after
two minutes laid out judiciously on cheese. Unfortunately I don't like
cheese. After dinner I shut myself up with the works of Mr. Eustace
Miles, which tell me in invigorating language of all the money, time,
and energy I have saved, of my increase of bodily health, of how active
I am getting, how skilful and of what a tough endurance, how my brains
have grown clear and nimble, my morals risen high above the average, and
how keen my enjoyment of everything has become, including, strange to
say, my food. I read lying down, too spiritless to sit up; and Johanna
in the kitchen, who has dined on pig and beer, washes up with the
clatter of exuberant energy, singing while she does so in a voice that
shakes the house that once she _liebte ein Student._
It is very bewildering. The advice one gets points in such opposite
directions. For instance, the neighbor made friends the very first
evening with Papa, who walked with injudicious inattention in our garden
and slipped down through a gap in the fence into his orchard and his
arms, he being engaged in picking up the fallen plums for his wife to
make jam of; and he told me when he came in one day at dinner and found
me struggling through what he considered dark ways and I thought were
cabbages, that my salvation lay in almonds. I went down to Jena that
afternoon and bought three pounds of them. They were dear, and
dreadfully heavy to carry up the hill, and when I was panting past the
neighbor's gate his wife, a friendly lady who reads right through the
advertisements in the paper every morning and spends her evenings with a
pencil working out the acrostics, was standing at it cool and
comfortable; and she asked me, with the simple inquisitiveness natural
to our nation, what I had got in my parcel; and I, glad to stop a moment
and get my breath, told her; and she immediately scoffed both at her
husband and at the almonds, and said if I ate them I would lay up for
myself an old age steeped in a dreadful thing called xanthin poison. I
went home and consulted the books. The neighbor's wife was right.
Johanna made macaroons of the almonds, and Papa, who loves macaroons,
chose to disbelieve the neighbor's wife and ate them.
But the books are not always so unanimous as they were about this. One
exhorted us to eat many peas and beans, which we were cheerfully
doing,--for are they not in summer pleasant things?--when I read in
another that we might as well eat poison, so full were they, too, of
qualities ending in xanthin poison. Lentils, recommended warmly by most
books, are discountenanced by two because they make you fat. Rice has
shared the same condemnation. Lettuces we may eat, but without the oil
that soothes and the vinegar that interests, and if you add salt to them
you will be thirsty, and you must never drink. An undressed lettuce--a
quite naked lettuce--is a very dull thing. Really, I would as soon eat
grass. We do refuse at present to follow this cruel advice, and have
salad every day in defiance of it, but my conscience forces me to put
less and less dressing in it each time, hoping that so shall we wean
ourselves from the craving for it--'gradually,' as Papa says. Carrots,
too, the books warn us against. I forget what it is they do to you that
is serious, but the neighbor told me they make your skin shine, and
since he told me that no carrot has crossed our threshold. Apples we may
eat, but we are not to suppose that they will nourish us; they are
useful only for preventing, by their bulk, the walls of our insides from
coming together. The walls of the vegetarian inside are very apt to come
together if the owner strikes out all the things he is warned against
from his menu, and then it is, when they are about to do that, that
fibrous bulk, most convenient in this form, should be applied; and, like
the roasted Sunday goose of our fleshlier days in Rauchgasse, the
vegetarian goes about stuffed with apples. Meanwhile there are no
apples, and I know not whither I must turn in search of bulk. Do you
think that in another week I shall be strong enough to write to you?
Yours sincerely,