“She felt it, though,” said Jonathan. “It kept her awake.”
“I know. She had a poor night. But even she would hardly have maintained that she felt it as she would have done if the mattresses hadn’t been there.”
“Farm life is the pea without the mattresses—” I went on.
“Sounds a little cheerless,” said Jonathan.
“Well—of course, it isn’t really cheerless at all. But neither is it easy. It’s full of remorseless demands for immediate adjustment.”
“That was the way the princess felt about her pea.”
“The princess was a snippy little thing. But after all, probably her life was full of adjustments of other sorts. She couldn’t call her soul her own a minute, I suppose.”
“Perhaps that was why she ran away,” suggested Jonathan.
“Of course it was. She ran away to find the simple life and didn’t find it.”
“No. She found the pea—even with all those mattresses.”
“And we’ve run away, and found several peas, and fewer mattresses,” said Jonathan.
“Well, I shall be in a minute if I don’t look out. You can’t follow a parallel too far. What I mean is, that if you run away from one kind of complexity you run into another kind.”
“I’m going to like it all,” I answered, “and make believe I meant to do it.”
After that we were silent awhile. Then I tried again. “You know your trick of waltzing with a glass of water on your head?”
“Well, I wonder if we couldn’t do that with our souls.”
“That suggests to me a rather curious picture,” said Jonathan.
“Well—you know what I mean. When you do that, your body takes up all the jolts and jiggles before they get to the top of your head, so the glass stays quiet.”
“Well, I don’t see why—only, of course, our souls aren’t really anything like glasses of water, and it would be perfectly detestable to think of carrying them around carefully like that.”
“Perhaps you’d better back out of that figure of speech,” suggested Jonathan. “Go back to your princess. Say, ‘every man his own mattress.’ ”
“No. Any figure is wrong. The trouble with all of them is that as soon as you use one it begins to get in your way, and say all sorts of things for you that you never meant at all. And then if you notice it, it bothers you, and if you don’t notice it, you get drawn into crooked thinking.”