Emboldened by this experiment, I gathered from the bushes some red berries that were very pleasing to the eye, but which gave me a sharp colic. Grandfather must be a bit of a sorcerer.
If ever we brought home from our hunt a handkerchief full of cryptogams, Aunt Deen, suspicious, would not fail to cry out:
“Those horrors again!”
She would look them over most carefully, keeping only those that were notoriously good to eat; she excelled in cooking them in butter, or preparing them as an hors-d’œuvre, with a sauce of wine, salt, pepper and herbs, and a dash of vinegar. Thus prepared the little balls, fresh, white and crisp, melted in the mouth. Now that I gathered them I, too, began to eat them.
I avenged myself of my hurtful berries by the strawberries and whortleberries that I found among the moss. I loved to fill my hand with them and then lick them up as goats do salt when it is given them. It is true that indigestible things had been forbidden me; the notion of duty was beginning to change in me, and I preferred to trust to that mother nature so much praised by grandfather, and whom he only had to invoke to be fed to heart’s content. Grandfather was constantly lauding her, offering to her litanies of eulogiums. And yet he ridiculed the chaplet that Aunt Deen and mother used to recite! And he took every opportunity to instil into me an aversion to towns and love for the delights of the fields. Cities, he said, were full of ferocious, greedy folk, who would murder you for a piece of money, whereas in a village men lived peaceful and happy, and loved one another with brotherly love.
One day a peasant invited us into his half ruined arbour to eat one of those white cheeses over which they pour sweet cream. A bowl of wood strawberries accompanied this frugal and innocent repast. They made so delicious a mixture that I was inclined to believe blindly in universal happiness, provided, indeed, that every one would consent to leave the plague and leprosy infected city. In the country every one was kind, obliging and free into the bargain. We would have no more enemies. Aunt Deen’s they existed only in her old-woman’s imagination. Her ideas were narrow, she did not, like grandfather, rise above petty, every-day cares. I was peaceful, devout, disarmed. And now I knew the flower of rural pleasure, of which I have never lost the flavour.
“Stuff yourselves,” said our host genially; “the doctor cured me of chills and fever.”
We owed his kindliness to my father, but we preferred to suppose it the usual thing by way of verification of our theories. Having stuffed myself only too well, in fact, I suffered from indigestion on the way home, aggravated by grandfather’s unkindly humour.
“You will not boast of this,” he observed, when I was relieved.
I understood the significance of his advice, and resolved to preserve a prudent silence which would shield us in any whim we might indulge in future excursions. We reached home late: the want of punctuality seemed to me an elegant indifference. Why dine at one hour rather than at another? One could even do without dinner entirely, if one’s stomach was full of white cheese and cream. Grandfather explained where we had been and extolled peasant hospitality in choice terms.