You have the date quite right.
It is a year ago today--this very 8th of September--since I saw the
French soldiers march away across the hill, over what we call the
"Champs Madame"--no one knows why--on their way to the battle
behind Meaux.
By chance--you could not have planned it, since the time it takes a
letter to reach me depends on how interesting the censor finds it--
your celebration of that event reached me on its anniversary.
You are absolutely wrong, however, to pull such a long face over my
situation. You write as if I had passed through a year of misery. I have
not. I am sure you never got that impression from my letters, and I
assure you that I am writing exactly as I feel--I have no façade up for
you.
I own it has been a year of tension. It has been three hundred and
sixty-five days and a fourth, not one of which has been free from
anxiety of some sort or other. Sometimes I have been cold.
Sometimes I have been nervous. But all the same, it has been fifty-
two weeks of growing respect for the people among whom I live, and
of ever-mounting love of life, and never-failing conviction that the sum
of it is beauty. I have had to fight for the faith in that, but I have kept
it. Always "In the midst of life we are in Death," but not always is death
so fine and beautiful a thing as in these days. No one would choose
that such things as have come to pass in the last year should be, but
since they are, don't be so foolish as to pity me, who have the chance
to look on, near enough to feel and to understand, even though I am
far enough off to be absolutely safe,--alas! eternally a mere spectator.
And speaking of having been cold reminds me that it is beginning to
get cold again. We have had heavy hailstorms already, hail as big
and hard as dried peas, and I have not as yet been able to get fuel.
So I am looking forward to another trying winter. In the spring my
coal-dealer assured me that last winter's situation would not be
repeated, and I told him that I would take all the coal he could get me.
Having said that, I took no further thought of the matter. Up to date he
has not been able to get any. The railroad is too busy carrying war
material.
I was pained by the tone of your last letter. Evidently mine of the
Fourth of July did not please you. Evidently you don't like my politics
or my philosophy, or my "deadly parallels," or any of my thoughts
about the present and future of my native land. Destroy the letter.
Forget it, and we'll talk of other things, and, to take a big jump--
Did you ever keep cats?
There is a subject in which you can find no offence, and if it does not
appeal to you it is your own fault.
If you never have kept cats, you have missed lots of fun, you are not
half educated, you have not been disciplined at all. / A cat is a
wonderful animal, but he is not a bit like what, on first making his
acquaintance, you think he is going to be, and he never becomes it.
Now I have been living a year this September with one cat, and part
of the time, with two. I am wiser than I used to be. By fits and starts I
am more modest.
I used to think that a cat was a tame animal, who lapped milk, slept,
rolled up ornamentally on a rug, now and then chased his tail, and
now and then played gracefully with a ball, came and sat on your
knee when you invited him, and caught mice, if mice came where he
was.
All the cats I had seen in the homes of my friends surely did those
things. I thought them "so pretty," "so graceful," "so soft," and I
always said they "gave a cosy look to a room."
But I had never been intimate with a cat.
When the English soldiers were here a year ago, Amélie came one
morning bringing a kitten in her apron. You remember I told you of
this. He was probably three months old--so Amélie says, and she
knows all about cats. She said off-hand: "C'est un chat du mois de
juin." She seems to know what month well-behaved cats ought to be
born. So far as I know, they might be born in any old month. He was
like a little tiger, with a white face and shirt-front, white paws and
lovely green eyes.
He had to have a name, so, as he had a lot of brown, the color of the
English uniform, and came to me while the soldiers were here, I
named him Khaki. He accepted it, and answered to his name at
once. He got well rapidly. His fur began to grow, and so did he.
At first he lived up to my idea of what a kitten should be. He was
always ready to play, but he had much more originality than I knew
cats to have. He was so amusing that I gave lots of time to him. I had
corks, tied to strings, hanging to all the door knobs and posts in the
house, and, for hours at a time, he amused himself playing games
like basket-ball and football with these corks. I lost hours of my life
watching him, and calling Amélie to "come quick" and see him. His
ingenuity was remarkable. He would take the cork in his front paws,
turn over on his back, and try to rip it open with his hind paws. I
suppose that was the way his tiger ancestors ripped open their prey.
He would carry the cork, attached to the post at the foot of the
staircase, as far up the stairs as the string would allow him, lay it
down and touch it gently to make it roll down the stairs so that he
could spring after it and catch it before it reached the bottom. All this
was most satisfactory. That was what I expected a cat to do.
He lapped his milk all right. I did not know what else to give him. I
asked Amélie what she gave hers. She said "soup made out of bread
and drippings." That was a new idea. But Amélie's cats looked all
right. So I made the same kind of soup for Khaki. Not he! He turned
his back on it. Then Amélie suggested bread in his milk. I tried that.
He lapped the milk, but left the bread. I was rather in despair. He
looked too thin. Amélie suggested that he was a thin kind of a cat. I
did not want a thin kind of a cat. I wanted a roly-poly cat.
One day I was eating a dry biscuit at tea time. He came and stood
beside me, and I offered him a piece. He accepted it. So, after that, I
gave him biscuit and milk. He used to sit beside his saucer, lap up his
milk, and then pick up the pieces of biscuit with his paw and eat them.
This got to be his first show trick. Everyone came to see Khaki eat
"with his fingers."
All Amélie's efforts to induce him to adopt the diet of all the other cats
in Huiry failed. Finally I said: "What does he want, Amélie? What do
cats, who will not eat soup, eat?"