and go on with their studies.
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 defiantly. '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.'