“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.