In the Mountains. Elizabeth von Arnim

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      In none of his monthly letters did the word pig, cow, or chicken appear. He wrote agreeably of the weather: c'était magnifique, or c'était bien triste, according to the season. He wrote of the French and Belgian sick prisoners of war, interned in those places scattered about the mountains which used to be the haunts of parties catered for by Lunn. He wrote appreciatively of the usefulness and good conduct of the watch-dog, a splendid creature, much bigger than I am, with the lap-doggy name of Mou-Mou. He lengthily described unexciting objects like the whiskers of the cat: favoris superbes qui poussent toujours, malgré ces jours maigres de guerre; and though sometimes he expressed a little disappointment at the behaviour of Mrs. Antoine's estomac, qui lui fait beaucoup d'ennuis et paraît mal résister aux grands froids, he always ended up soothingly: Pour la maison tout va bien. Madame peut être entièrement tranquille.

      Never a word, you see, about the live-stock.

      So there in England was Madame being entièrement tranquille about her little house, and glad indeed that she could be; for whatever had happened to it or to the Antoines she wouldn't have been able to do anything. Tethered on the other side of the impassable barrier of war, if the house had caught fire she could only, over there in England, have wrung her hands; and if Mrs. Antoine's estomac had given out so completely that she and Antoine had had to abandon their post and take to the plains and doctors, she could only have sat still and cried. The soothing letters were her comfort for five years,—madame peût-être entièrement tranquille; how sweetly the words fell, month by month, on ears otherwise harassed and tormented!

      It wasn't till I had been here nearly a fortnight that I began to be aware of my breakfast. Surely it was very nice? Such a lot of milk; and every day a little jug of cream. And surprising butter,—surprising not only because it was so very fresh but because it was there at all. I had been told in England that there was no butter to be got here, not an ounce to be bought from one end of Switzerland to the other. Well, there it was; fresh every day, and in a singular abundance.

      Through the somnolence of my mind, of all the outward objects surrounding me I think it was the butter that got in first; and my awakening intelligence, after a period of slow feeling about and some relapses, did at last one morning hit on the conviction that at the other end of that butter was a cow.

      This, so far, was to be expected as the result of reasoning. But where I began to be pleased with myself, and feel as if Paley's Evidences had married Sherlock Holmes and I was the bright pledge of their loves, was when I proceeded from this, without moving from my chair, to discover by sheer thinking that the cow was very near the butter, because else the butter couldn't possibly be made fresh every day,—so near that it must be at that moment grazing on the bit of pasture belonging to me; and, if that were so, the conclusion was irresistible that it must be my cow.

      After that my thoughts leaped about the breakfast table with comparative nimbleness. I remembered that each morning there had been an egg, and that eggy puddings had appeared at the other meals. Before the war it was almost impossible to get eggs up here; clearly, then, I had chickens of my own. And the honey; I felt it would no longer surprise me to discover that I also had bees, for this honey was the real thing,—not your made-up stuff of the London shops. And strawberries; every morning a great cabbage leaf of strawberries had been on the table, real garden strawberries, over long ago down in the valley and never dreamed of as things worth growing by the peasants in the mountains. Obviously I counted these too among my possessions in some corner out of sight. The one object I couldn't proceed to by inductive reasoning from what was on the table was a pig. Antoine's courage had failed him over that. Too definitely must my repeated warning have echoed in his ears: Surtout pas de porcs.

      But how very intelligent he had been. It needs intelligence if one is conscientious to disobey orders at the right moment. And me so unaware all the time, and therefore so unworried!

      He passed along the terrace at that moment, a watering-pot in his hand.

      'Antoine,' I said.

      'Madame,' he said, stopping and taking off his cap.

      'This egg—' I said, pointing to the shell. I said it in French, but prefer not to put my French on paper.

      'Ah—madame a vu les poules.'

      'This butter—'

      'Ah—madame a visité la vache.'

      'The pig—?' I hesitated. 'Is there—is there also a pig?'

      'Si madame veut descendre à la cave—'

      'You never keep a pig in the cellar?' I exclaimed.

      'Comme jambon,' said Antoine—calm, perfect of manner, without a trace of emotion.

      And there sure enough I was presently proudly shown by Mrs. Antoine, whose feelings are less invisible than her husband's, hanging from the cellar ceiling on hooks that which had once been pig. Several pigs; though she talked as if there had never been more than one. It may be so, of course, but if it is so it must have had a great many legs.

      Un porc centipède, I remarked thoughtfully, gazing upwards at the forest of hams.

      Over the thin ice of this comment she slid, however, in a voluble description of how, when the armistice was signed, she and Antoine had instantly fallen upon and slain the pig—pig still in the singular—expecting Madame's arrival after that felicitous event at any minute, and comprehending that un porc vivant pourrait déranger madame, mais que mort il ne fait rien à personne que du plaisir. And she too gazed upwards, but with affection and pride.

      There remained then nothing to do but round off these various transactions by a graceful and grateful paying for them. Which I did to-day, Antoine presenting the bills, accompanied by complicated calculations and deductions of the market price of the milk and butter and eggs he and Mrs. Antoine would otherwise have consumed during the past years.

      I didn't look too closely into what the pig had cost,—his price, as my eye skimmed over it was obviously the price of something plural. But my eye only skimmed. It didn't dwell. Always Antoine and I have behaved to each other like gentlemen.

      I wonder why I write all this. Is it because it is so like talking to a friend at the end of the day, and telling him, who is interested and loves to hear, everything one has done? I suppose it is that; and that I want, besides, to pin down these queer days as they pass,—days so utterly unlike any I ever had before. I want to hold them a minute in my hand and look at them, before letting them drop away for ever. Then, perhaps, in lots of years, when I have half forgotten what brought me up here, and don't mind a bit about anything except to laugh—to laugh with the tenderness of a wise old thing at the misunderstandings, and mistakes, and failures that brought me so near shipwreck, and yet underneath were still somehow packed with love—I'll open this and read it, and I daresay quote that Psalm about going through the vale of misery and using it as a well, and be quite pleasantly entertained.

      If one sets one's face westwards and goes on and on along the side of the mountain, refusing either to climb higher or go lower, and having therefore to take things as they come and somehow get through—roaring torrents, sudden ravines, huge trees blown down in a forgotten blizzard and lying right across one's way; all the things that mountains have up their sleeve waiting for one—one comes, after two hours of walk so varied as to include scowling rocks and gloomy forests, bright stretches of delicious grass full of flowers, bits of hayfield, clusters of fruit-trees, wide sun-flooded spaces with nothing СКАЧАТЬ