Elizabeth von Arnim - In the Mountains

' 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.

August 12th.

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.

August 13th.

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 between one apparently and the great snowy mountains, narrow paths where it is hardly light enough to see, smells of resin and hot fir needles, smells of traveller's joy, smells of just cut grass, smells of just sawn wood, smells of water tumbling over stones, muddy smells where the peasants have turned some of the torrent away through shallow channels into their fields, honey smells, hot smells, cold smells,—after two hours of this walking, which would be tiring because of the constant difficulty of the ground if it weren't for the odd way the air has here of carrying you, of making you feel as though you were being lifted along, one comes at last to the edge of a steep slope where there is a little group of larches.

Then one sits down.

These larches are at the very end of a long tongue into which the mountain one started on has somehow separated, and it is under them that one eats one's dinner of hard boiled egg and bread and butter, and sits staring, while one does so, in much astonishment at the view. For it is an incredibly beautiful view from here, of an entirely different range of mountains from the one seen from my terrace; and the valley, with its twisting, tiny silver thread that I know is a great rushing river, has strange, abrupt, isolated hills scattered over it that appear each to have a light and colour of its own, with no relation to the light and colour of the mountains.

When first I happened on this place the building of my house had already been started, and it was too late to run to the architect and say: Here and here only will I live. But I did for a wild moment, so great was the beauty I had found, hope that perhaps Swiss houses might be like those Norwegian ones one reads about that take to pieces and can be put up again somewhere else when you've got bored, and I remember scrambling back hastily in heat and excitement to ask him whether this were so.

He said it wasn't; and seemed even a little ruffled, if so calm a man were capable of ruffling, that I should suppose he would build anything that could come undone.

'This house,' he said, pointing at the hopeless-looking mass that ultimately became so adorable, 'is built for posterity. It is on a rock, and will partake of the same immovability.'

And when I told him of the place I had found, the exquisite place, more beautiful than a dream and a hundred times more beautiful than the place we had started building on, he, being a native of the district, hardy on his legs on Sundays and accordingly acquainted with every inch of ground within twenty miles, told me that it was so remote from villages, so inaccessible by any road, that it was suited as a habitation only to goats.

'Only goats,' he said with finality, waving his hand, 'could dwell there, and for goats I do not build.'

So that my excitement cooled down before the inevitable, and I have lived to be very glad the house is where it is and not where, for a few wild hours, I wanted it; for now I can go to the other when I am in a beauty mood and see it every time with fresh wonder, while if I lived there I would have got used to it long ago, and my ardour been, like other ardours, turned by possession into complacency. Or, to put it a little differently, the house here is like an amiable wife to whom it is comfortable to come back for meals and sleeping purposes, and the other is a secret love, to be visited only on the crest of an ecstasy.

To-day I took a hard boiled egg and some bread and butter, and visited my secret love.

The hard boiled egg doesn't seem much like an ecstasy, but it is a very good foundation for one. There is great virtue in a hard boiled egg. It holds one down, yet not too heavily. It satisfies without inflaming. Sometimes, after days of living on fruit and bread, a slice of underdone meat put in a sandwich and eaten before I knew what I was doing, has gone straight to my head in exactly the way wine would, and I have seen the mountains double and treble themselves, besides not keeping still, in a very surprising and distressing way, utterly ruinous to raptures. So now I distrust sandwiches and will not take them; and all that goes with me is the hard boiled egg. Oh, and apricots, when I can get them. I forgot the apricots. I took a handful to-day,—big, beautiful rosy-golden ones, grown in the hot villages of the valley, a very apricotty place. And, that every part of me should have sustenance, I also took Law's Serious Call .

He went because he's the thinnest book I've got on my shelves that has at the same time been praised by Dr. Johnson. I've got several others that Dr. Johnson has praised, such as Ogden on Prayer , but their bulk, even if their insides were attractive, makes them have to stay at home. Johnson, I remembered, as I weighed Law thoughtfully in my hand and felt how thin he was, said of the Serious Call that he took it up expecting it to be a dull book, and perhaps to laugh at it—'but I found Law quite an overmatch for me.' He certainly would be an overmatch for me, I knew, should I try to stand up to him, but that was not my intention. What I wanted was a slender book that yet would have enough entertainment in it to nourish me all day; and opening the Serious Call I was caught at once by the story of Octavius, a learned and ingenious man who, feeling that he wasn't going to live much longer, told the friends hanging on his lips attentive to the wisdom that would, they were sure, drop out, that in the decay of nature in which he found himself he had left off all taverns and was now going to be nice in what he drank, so that he was resolved to furnish his cellar with a little of the very best whatever it might cost. And hardly had he delivered himself of this declaration than 'he fell ill, was committed to a nurse, and had his eyes closed by her before his fresh parcel of wine came in.'