YESTERDAY my friend Annabel Lee and I sat comfortably opposite each other at a small table, eating our luncheon. She was very fair and good-natured—and we had tiny broiled fish, and some tea with slices of lemon in it, and bread, and green lettuce sprinkled over with vinegar and oil and red pepper, and two mugs of ale.
"Food is a lovely thing, don't you think?" said I.
"One of the best ever invented," said my friend Annabel Lee. "Have you considered how much would be gone from life if there were no food, and if we had not to eat three times every day?"
"Yes, I've considered it," I replied, "and it's a pleasure that never palls."
"It is so much more than pleasure," said my friend Annabel Lee. "It is a necessity and an art and a relaxation and an unburdening—and, dear me, it brings one up to the level of kings or of the beasts that perish.
"I have fancied," said my friend Annabel Lee, "a deal table set three times every day under a beautiful yew-tree in a far country. The yew-tree would be in a pasture where cattle are grazing, and always when I sat eating at the deal table the cows would stand about watching me. Sometimes on the deal table there would be brown bread and honey; sometimes there would be salt and cantaloupe; sometimes there would be lettuce with vinegar and pepper and oil; sometimes there would be whole-wheat bread and curds and cream in a brown earthen dish; sometimes there would be walnuts and figs; sometimes there would be two little broiled fish; sometimes there would be peaches; sometimes there would be flat white biscuits and squares of brown fudge; sometimes there would be bread and cheese; sometimes there would be olives and Scotch bannocks; sometimes there would be a blue delft pot of chocolate and an egg; sometimes there would be tea and scones; sometimes there would be plum-cake; sometimes there would be bread and radishes; sometimes there would be wine and olives; sometimes there would be a strawberry tart.
"I should live over the hill from the yew-tree, and I should come there to eat at seven o'clock in the morning, and at one in the afternoon, and at seven in the evening. And meanwhile I should be busy at some work so that my eating would be as if I had earned it."
"What sort of work would you do?" I asked.
"I might wash fine bits of lace," said my friend Annabel Lee, "and lay them out upon a sunny grass-plot to bleach and dry. Or I might pick berries and take them to market. Or I might sit in a doorway making baskets—I should make beautiful little baskets. Or I might care for a small garden, or a flock of geese—to feed them with grains and keep them from straying away. 'So many hours must I tend my flock, so many hours must I sport myself, so many hours must I contemplate'—I should do all these things while tending my flock, and I should tend my flock well. I should do all my work well, so that the food on the deal table, under the yew-tree, would taste as if it had been earned.
"But would it not be strange," said my friend Annabel Lee, eating daintily of lettuce and fish, "after I had had this way of living in a country of always-summer for six months or seven months—oh, I should grow vastly weary of it! And not only should I grow weary of the garden or the geese or the baskets, and the deal table under the yew-tree, but I should grow weary of everything the fair green world could anyway offer. In the so many hours that I should contemplate I should arrive at this: there can be nothing better in the way of living than caring for a garden or a flock of geese, and going up a hill to a yew-tree to eat three times every day—nothing, if I do my work faithfully. So then when the gray dawn should break some morning and I should awaken and find an aching at my heart, I should know that the best had failed me, and I should see the Vast Weariness with me. 'Hast thou found me out, oh, mine enemy!' would run over and over in my mind. And all that day the tending of the flocks would be a hard thing, and the apples on the deal table under the yew-tree would turn to dust in my mouth."
My friend Annabel Lee laid down her small silver fork, and placed her hands one upon another on her knee, and sat silent.
Oh, she was a beautiful, brilliant person sitting there! I wondered hazily as I watched her how much of the day's gold sunshine she made up for me, and how much would vanish were she to vanish.
Presently she talked again.
"Much depends,' said my friend Annabel Lee, "upon the amount of contemplation that one does in one's way of living, and upon how one's contemplation runs. Contemplation is a thing that does a great deal of mischief. But I daresay that when it as an art is made perfect it is a rare good thing and a neat, obedient servant, and knows exactly when to enter the mind and when to leave it. And whosoever may have it, thus brought to a state of perfection, is a most fortunate possessor and must need go bravely down the world.
"Perhaps, now," said my friend Annabel Lee, "when one is a goose-girl and goes to eat at a deal table under a green yew-tree, one should contemplate only kings in gilded palaces. One should begin at the beginning of a king's life, it may be, and follow it step by step through heaviness and strife until one sees, in one's vivid goose-girl fancy, the king at last tottering and white-haired and forsaken toward his lonely grave.
"Or else one should contemplate the life of a laborer who must eat husks all his days, and is not worthy of his hire, and goes from bad to worse and becomes a beggar.
"Or else one should contemplate the being of a sweet maid whose life is a fair, round, rose garden, and the thorns safely hidden and the stems pruned, and all. And one should likewise follow her step by step to her grave, or, if one so fancies, to the culmination of all happiness and success.
"For the idea is that in all one's contemplation, when one is a goose-girl, one should contemplate anything and everything except the being and condition of a goose-girl.
"But a better idea still," said my friend Annabel Lee, "would be to not contemplate at all, you know, but eat the radishes and other things, under the yew-tree, and rejoice.
"At any rate," said my friend Annabel Lee, "we need not contemplate now—what with these two little fishes and these green, crisp leaves."
She picked up her small silver fork again and went to eating lettuce.
And presently we both lifted our mugs of good ale and drank to that which would be a better idea still.