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2 Pathogenesis, Normativity and the 'Infidelity of the Milieu' 3 Pharmacology of Nuclear Fire, Generalized Autolnation and Total Proletarianization
Acknowledgements
The Publishers are grateful to the original publishers for permission to reproduce material (which runs in this edition froin Section 2 of Chapter 1 to Section 23 of Chapter 2) included on pages 294-310 of the collection Theory after 'Theory', edited by Jane Elliott and Derek Attridge and published by Taylor and Francis in 2011.
Sources for epigraphs are as follows: p. viii: Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Routledge, 1971), p. 87; p. viii: Marcel Proust, Days of Reading (London: Penguin, 2009); p. 7: Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegge1' and the Question (Chicago, IL, and London: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 3-4; p. 101: Sigmund Freud, 'The Uncanny', The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 17 (London: Hogarth Press, 1955), p. 226.
Do not be careless [me amelesete].
Socrates, in Plato, Phaedo 1I8a
Living itself [is a] therapy that Inakes sense.
Donald W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality
The suprerne effort of the writer as of the artist only succeeds in partially raising for us the veil of ugliness and insignificance that leaves us uncaring [incurieux] before the world. Then, he says to us:
'Look, look
'Fragrant with clover and artemesia
'Holding tight their quick, narrow streams
'The lands of the Aisne and the Oise.'
Marcel Proust, Days of Reading
Consumers consume consumptions.
Raymond Queneau
Introduction
The 10s8 of the feeling of exi8ting
A mother, according to Donald Winnicott, l by taking care of her infant, even before the child is old enough to speak, teaches it that life is worth living. She instils in the child the feeling that life is worth living.
MaternaI care, which obviously provides this feeling back to the mother herself, passes through the intermediary of what Winnicott called the 'transitional object'. This object enables and conditions the relatîon between mother and child and, as such, it is not a mere intermediary: it constitutes the mother as this mother, in her very way of being a mother, and this child as her chiid.
The transitional object has a distinct virtue: it does not exist. Certainly, something exists that enables it to appear - for example, a teddy bear or cuddly toy. But what makes this teddy bear or cuddly toy able to open up 'transitional space' - which Winnicott also called 'potential space' - in which the mother can encounter her chiId; what makes this teddy bear or cuddly toy able to becolne the transitional object, is that, beyond that part of the object that exists in external space, beyond or beneath this piece of cloth, there holds something that is precisely neither in exterior space, nor simply internaI to either the mother or the child.
In this beyond or beneath of both the exterior and the interior, there is something that holds between the mother and her child, and which nevertheless does not exist. What takes hold between
the mother and chi Id in not existing, but in passing through the transitional object, and which therefore finds itself constituted by it, links and attaches them to one another through a wonderful relationship: a relation of love, of amour fou.
What holds and is upheld as this link through which these two beings become incommensurable and infinite for one another, is what, by allowing a place for that which is infinite, consists precisely to the immeasutable extent [dans la nzesure et la démesure] that it does not exist - because the only things that exist are finite things.
This consistence, more than anything else, and before anything else, is what a mother protects when she protects her child. This protection, which is care par excellence, is grounded in the knowledge the mother has of the extra-ordinary character of the object - and that Winnicott caUs transitional precisely in order to designate this extra-ordinariness.
Such was Winnicott's great discovery: the fact that Inaternal knowledge is knowledge of that which, in the transitional object, consists, though it does not exist, and which gives to the child placed under this protection the feeling that 'life is 'worth living'. 2
l argue in this work that the transitional object is the first pharmakon.
The question of the pharmakon first arose in contemporary philosophy with Jacques Derrida's comn1entary on the Phaedrus . in 'Plato'sPhannacy,.3
Writing - as hypomnesis, hypomnenlaton, that is, artificial memory - is that pharmakon whose artificial and poisonous effects Plato combats by opposing theln to anamnesis, to thinking 'for oneself', that is, to the autonomy of thought. Derrida has however, that this autonomy nevertheless always has something to do with heteronomy - in this case, that of writing - and that: while Plato opposes autonomy and heteronomy, they in fact'constantly c01npose.
The transitional object is the first pharmakon because it is both an external object on which the n10ther and child are dependenl (losing it is enough to make this clear) and in relation to whicb they are thus heteronomous; and an object that, not existing bU1 consisting, provides (through this very consistence) sovereignty te
both mother and child: their serenity, their trust in life, their feeling that life is worth living, their autonomy.
The pharmakon that is the transitional object is the point of departure for the formation of a healthy psychic apparatus. And it is also, in particular through sublimation, a condition of keeping the psychic apparatus of the adult in good health.
But Winnicott shows that a bad relation to this abject and ta its heteronomy is just as possible as the care that it alone makes possible. Dependence then becames harmful, that is, destructive of autonomy and trust. The care that the lTIother must take of her child, then, necessarily includes the way she protects her child from this abject: from what it contains that is threatening. 4 And eventually she must teach her children ta detach themselves from it.
It is in this way that the mother must bring the child ta adopt - or not - its transitional situation, that is, its pharmacological situation, on the basis of which the child will be able ta attain, or not, the feeling that life is yvorth living. By bringing the child ta adopt the pharmakon, what Winnicott calls the good mother aiso teaches the child ta detach itself from the transition al abject sa as ta engage with other transitionai spaces, with which it will establish other relations, aH of which may distance the child from the mother herself - despite which she d6es not lose her infinite dimension. -
This is why the transitianal abject does not only concern the child and mother: it is also, as first pharmakon, the origin of works of art and, more generally, of the life of the mind or spirit in aIl its forms, and thus of adult life as such. It is, finally, the origin of al! objects, because an abject is always that which, once upon a time, appeared ta a mind that projected it.
We shaH see that, ultimately, things can constitute a world only insofar as they irreducibly proceed from the transitional character of the abject. Having become ordinary and everyday, and in this sense 'mundane' (or 'intramundane'), the transitional abject conserves its pharmacological dimension, even if this 'mundanity' tends ta canee al this dimension. As such, it can always engage not only curative projection processes but poisonous ones, becoming, for example, the support of an addiction, the screen of melanchoIy, and even a drive of destruction, of murderous madness, of
those dangerous states that result when the feeling that life is worth living has been lost.
To lose the feeling that life is worth living may drive one to furious madness.
Re-reading P laying and Reality over the last year in order to prepare a course which to sorne extent lies at the origin of the present work, 5 1 was astounded to discover that, according to Winnicott, the patients under his care had 'lost the feeling of existing'. 1 was astounded because 1 irnrnediately recalled that these were the exact words, 'lost the feeling of existing', that Richard Durn wrote in his diary when he admitted or forewarned, but a forewarning to no one in particular, that this loss was so abyssal and painful that it could welllead hün to con11nit a Inassacre. 6
The pharmakon is at once what enables care to be taken and that of which care must be taken - in the sense tha-t it is necessary to pay attention: its power is curative to the in1measurable extent [dans la mesure et la dén1esure] that it is also destructive.
This 'at once' characterizes what 1 caU a pharn1acology, on which and from which 1 shaH try to open perspectives in the pages which follow.
As far as 1 know, Derrida never envisaged the possibility of such a pharrnacology - that is, of a discourse on the pharmakon understood in the same gesture in its curative and toxie dimensions. And this can only be a source of regret for us, those who, in the twenty-first century, are trying to relnain non-inhuman beings, and for whom the question of the pharmakon is not merely an academic issue for learned philosophers: it obsesses each and every one of us.
This state of affairs [état de fait] requires a rule of law [état de droit], a thought that, even if it can no longer secure a clear separation between fact and right -a difference between heteronomy and autonomy that would be not only elear but absolutenevertheless learns to distinguish them in a new way, that is, without opposing them. The pharmacological question that now concerns each and every one of us thus becomes a primary question for the acade1nic world and for the world as a whole.
This pharmacological question haunts planetary consciousness and the planetary unconscious, just as it haunts the immense loss
of trust that inevitably results from the loss of care. This question thus characterizes the economic and spiritual crisis afflicting the 'earth-ark'? This cri sis is therefore unprecedented, which means that it is more critical than ever.
Krisis means 'decision'. We aU now know that it is the future of terrestriallife that is at stake with unprecedented urgency. We aIl 'know, whether we admit it or whether we prefer to know nothing about it, nor even to hear about it, that with the historical sequence that began to unfold in 2007, every step counts, and seems to be systemically overloaded with consequences that would be extremely difficult to reverse - if not absolutely irreversible. It is in this context that there arises, today, the question of care, and of its condition: the pharmakon.
Part 1
Pharmacology of Spirit
1s it not remarkable that this theme, spirit [ ] should have been disinherited [forclos No one wants anything to do with it any more, in the entire family of Heideggerians, be they the orthodox or the heretical, the neo- Heideggerians or the paraHeideggerians, the disciples or the experts. No one ever speaks of spirit in Heidegger. Not only this: even the anti-Heideggerian specialists take no interest in this thematics of spirit, not even to denounce it. Why?
Jacques .Derrida, Of Spil'it:Heidegger and the Question
1 Apocalypse Without God
1. Apocalyptic feeling and economic war
In 1919, Paul Valéry began 'La crise de fesprit' with the following words: 'We later civilizations ... we too now know that we are Inortal' ,1 We too, earthlings of the twenty-first century who have not been through a world war, and who form present-day humankind, now know that vve are capable of self-destruction. And if in the past the possibility of such an extinction of our kind was inconceivable other than as the consequence of God's anger - of original sin - today there is no longer any religious reference at the origin of this extreme global pessimisme
The cause of this mood, which became even Inore doyvnbeat in 2009 after the coHapse of the Copenhagen sUlnn1it, is an econolnic war without n1ercy: a concealed conflict, a bottomless hypocrisy, a constant struggle, exhausting the Earth and its inhabitants, and leaving a billion of them in abominable economic misery while ruining the whole of the human world ever more quickly and ever more irreversibly, such that, in this war disguised as peace, it will not be long before everyone loses.
The name of this war is globalization -a globalization in which industrial technologies have bec orne weapons that destroy ecosystems, social structures and psychic apparatuses. If the time has come for an armistice and, with it, for the negotiation of a new peace treaty, which would be a new contract, and not only a social
contract, but a scientific, technological and global contract; if tOO lnany ruins are being accun1ulated in the naIne of 'development' and economic competition, then this raises a prelüninary question: what relation to technics and tO technologies would enable us to think the reconstruction of a global future?
The economic crisis of 2007 and 2008 has exposed the profoundly destructive nature of the globalized industrial systeln. Everybody now knows that it is no longer feasible to continue pursuing the 'misgrowth' [mécroissance] that is a global econon1ic war disguised as a consumerist peace by the psycho-pO\iVer of n1arketing. 2 Yet nobody can see how to re-find the path capable of leading to peaceful growth and developlnent. It is this combination of knowledge and non-knowledge that leads to the spread of this ordinary, everyday apocalyptic feeling - the feeling and the knowledge that has come to an
2. 'So many horrors could not have been possible without so many virtues'
In what he analysed in 1919 as a crisis of n1ind or spirit, Valéry highlighted above aIl the fundan1ental of this spirit - of the science, reason, knowledge and ev en the moral elevation that lnade possible so Inuch ruination, death and devastation throughout Western Europe, beyond what any previous historical epoch could ever have imagined:
50 many horrors could not have been possible without so n1any virtues. Doubtless, much science was needed to kili so many, to waste so much property, annihilate so many cities in so short a time; but moral qualities in like number were also needed. Knowledge and Duty, then, are suspect. 3
Valéry, just like Husserl a little later, and like so ll1any thinkers who were overwhelmed between the wars, thus described the way in which the First World War revealed that spirit ü always composed of two contrary sides: it is a kind of - at once a good and an evil, at once a ren1edy and a poison, as Plato said about writing, which is the technology of the rationa: mind.
The evidence for this pharmacology, for this ambiguity and lence for this fragility of spirit, impressed itself on Valéry and his :ontemporaries in the form of a series of interconnected crisesnilitary, economic and spiritua1 4 - through which science is 'dislonoured,. 5 After the First World War,
everything essential in the world has been affected by the war [... ]. The Mind [or Spirit] itself has not been exempt (rom aU this damage. The mind is in fact cruelly stricken; it grieves in men of intellect, and looks sadly upon itself. It distrusts itself profoundly. 6
30 'Sciences of fact' and 'humanity of facts': the extinction of the Enlightenment
;ixteen years after Valéry, Husserl in turn spoke of a crisis of icience. This crisis proceeds from a 'change which set in at the :urn of the past century', which concerns 'the general evaluation )f the sciences', and which aims at 'what science in general has neant and could mean for human existence':
The exclusiveness with which the total world-view of modern Inan, in the second haH of the nineteenth century, let itself be determined by the positive sciences and blinded by the 'prosperity' they produced, meant an indifferent turning-away from the questions which are decisive for a genuine humanity. Mere sciences of fact create a lnere humanity of facts?
At the time Husserl was writing these lines, Hitler had already Jeen Chancellor for two years, and a plebiscite bestowing upon . lim the tide of Führer had received support from 92 per cent of :he German electorate.
The change in public evaluation was unavoidable, especially aiter the war, and we know that it has gradually become a feeling of hostility alTIOng the younger generation. In our vital need - so we are told - this science has nothing to say to us. It excludes in principle precisely the questions which man, given over in our unhappy times to the most portentous upheavals, finds the n10st burning:
questions of the Ineaning or Ineaninglessness of the whole of this hUlnan existence. 8
Reading these lines in 2010, how can we doubt that this Inalaise in relation to science has returned with even greater force? It is thus the spirit of the Enlightenment that seems to have been extinguishëd, writes Husserl. The Enlightenn1ent - that is:
the ardent des ire for learning, the zeal for a philosophical reform of education and of aIl of hUlnanity's social and forms of existence, which makes that much-abused Age of Enlightenlnent so admirable. 9
Having become 'positive sciences' and 'lnere sciences of fact', and forming a 'mere humanity of facts', the Enlightenment has been inverted into Darkness. It has its hymn: 'We possess an undying testimony to this spirit in the glorious "Hymn to Joy" of Schiller and Beethoven.' But this hymn (which has become that of the European Union) can 'only with painful feelings [be heard] today. A greater contrast with our present situation is unthinkable.'lO
40 Economy of spirit and organology
On the eve of the Second World War, four years after Husserl published The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, from which the above words are taken, Valéry returns in 'Freedoln of the Mind' to the state of the krisis of mind or spirit, and deplores ha ving to do so:
It is a sign of the times, and not a very good sign, that today it is not only necessary, but iInperative to interest people's minds in the fate of the Mind [or Spirit] - that is, in their own fate. ll '
Returning to the question of Spirit in 1939 was an attelnpt to interest minds in their own fate and in the fate of Spirit, above aIl b)' highlighting that this proceeds from a spiritual economy12 that cannot be considered in isolation from the material economy: 13 these two economies, which Inust be distinguished as that of the
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“Are we going, really?” said Meg. “You speak as if we were truly going; and it can’tbe.”
“Do you know what you said just now about believing human beings could do anything, if they set their minds to it? Let’s set our minds to it.”
“Well,” Meg answered, rather slowly, as if weighing the matter, “let’s!”
And she fell to helping to count the Treasure.
Afterwards, when they looked back upon that day, they knew that the thing had decided itself then, though neither of them had said so.
“The truth was,” Robin used to say, “we had both been thinking the same thing, as we always do, but we had been thinking it in the back part of our minds. We were afraid to let it come to the front at first, because it seemed such a big thing. But it went on thinking by itself. That time, when you said ‘We shall never see it,’ and I said, ‘How do you know?’ we were both thinking about it in one way; and I know I was thinking about it when I said, ‘We are not going to stay here always. That is the first step up the Hill of Difficulty.’”
“And that day when you said you would not let it go by you,” Meg would answer, “that was the day we reached the Wicket Gate.”
It seemed very like it, for from that day their strange, unchildish purpose grew and ripened, and never for an hour was absent from the mind of either. If they had been like other children, living happy lives, full of young interests and pleasures, it might have been crossed out by other and newer things; if they had been of a slighter mental build, and less strong, they might have
forgotten it; but they never did. When they had counted the Treasure, and had realized how small it was after all, they had sat and gazed at each other for a while with grave eyes, but they had only been grave, and not despairing.
“Twenty-five dollars,” said Robin. “Well, that’s not much after nearly six years; but we saved it nearly all by cents, you know, Meg.”
“And it takes a hundred cents to make a dollar,” said Meg; “and we were poor people’s children.”
“And we bought the chickens,” said Robin.
“And you have always given me a present at Christmas, Robin, even if it was only a little one. That’s six Christmases.”
“We have eight months to work in,” said Robin, calculating. “If you get four dollars a month, and I get four, that will be sixty-four dollars by next June. Twentyfive dollars and sixty-four dollars make eighty-nine. Eighty-nine dollars for us to live on and go to see all the things; because we must see them all, if we go. And I suppose we shall have to come back”—with a long breath.
“Oh, dear!” cried Meg, “how canwe come back?”
“I don’t know,” said Robin. “We shall hate it, but we have nowhere else to go.”
“Perhaps we are going to seek our fortunes, and perhaps we shall find them,” said Meg; “or perhaps Aunt Matilda won’t let us come back. Rob,” with some awe, “do you think she will be angry?”
“I’ve thought about that,” Robin answered contemplatively, “and I don’t think she will. She would be too busy to care much even if we ran away and said nothing. But I shall leave a letter, and tell her we have saved our money and gone somewhere for a holiday, and we’re all right, and she need not bother.”
“She won’t bother even if she is angry,” Meg said, with mournful eyes. “She doesn’t care about us enough.”
“If she loved us,” Rob said, “and was too poor to take us herself, we couldn’t go at all. We couldn’t run away, because it would worry her so. You can’t do a thing, however much you want to do it, if it is going to hurt somebody who is good to you, and cares.”
“Well, then, we needn’t stay here because of Aunt Matilda,” said Meggy. “That’s one sure thing. It wouldn’t interfere with her ploughing if we were both to die at once.”
“No,” said Rob, deliberately, “that’s just what it would not.” And he threw himself back on the straw and clasped his hands under his head, gazing up into the dark roof above him with very reflective eyes.
But they had reached the Wicket Gate, and from the hour they passed it there was no looking back. That in their utter friendlessness and loneliness they should take their twelve-year-old fates in their own strong little hands was, perhaps, a pathetic thing; that once having done so they moved towards their object as steadily as if they had been of the maturest years was remarkable, but no one ever knew or even suspected the first until the last.
The days went by, full of work, which left them little time to lie and talk in the Straw Parlor. They could only see each other in the leisure hours, which were so few, and only came when the day was waning. Finding them faithful and ready, those about them fell into the natural, easy, human unworthiness of imposing by no means infrequently on their inexperienced willingness and youth. So they were hard enough worked, but each felt that every day that passed brought them nearer to the end in view; and there was always something to think of, some detail to be worked out mentally, or to be discussed, in the valuable moments when they were together.
“It’s a great deal better than it used to be,” Meg said, “at all events. It’s better to feel tired by working than to be tired of doing nothing but think and think dreary things.”
As the weather grew colder it was hard enough to keep warm in their hiding-place. They used to sit and talk, huddled close together, bundled in their heaviest clothing, and with the straw heaped close around them and over them.
There were so many things to be thought of and talked over! Robin collected facts more sedulously than ever— facts about entrance fees, facts about prices of things to eat, facts about places to sleep.
“Going to the Fair yourself, sonny?” Jones said to him one day. Jones was fond of his joke. “You’re right to be inquirin’ round. Them hotel-keepers is given to tot up bills several stories higher than their hotels is themselves.”
“But I suppose a person needn’t go to a hotel,” said Robin. “There must be plenty of poor people who can’t go to hotels, and they’ll have to sleep somewhere.”
“Ah, there’s plenty of poor people,” responded Jones, cheerfully, “plenty of ’em. Always is. But they won’t go to Chicago while the Fair’s on. They’ll sleep at home— that’s where they’ll sleep.”
“That’s the worst of it,” Rob said to Meg afterwards; “you see, we have to sleep somewhere. We could live on bread and milk or crackers and cheese—or oatmeal— but we have to sleepsomewhere.”
“It will be warm weather,” Meg said, reflectively. “Perhaps we could sleep out of doors. Beggars do. We don’t mind.”
“I don’t think the police would let us,” Robin answered. “If they would—perhaps we might have to, some night; but we are going to that place, Meg—we are going.”
Yes, they believed they were going, and lived on the belief. This being decided, howsoever difficult to attain, it was like them both that they should dwell upon the dream, and revel in it in a way peculiarly their own. It was Meg whose imagination was the stronger, and it is true that it was always she who made pictures in words and told stories. But Robin was always as ready to enter into the spirit of her imaginings as she was to talk about them. There was a word he had once heard his father use which had caught his fancy, in fact, it had attracted them both, and they applied it to this favorite pleasure of theirs of romancing with everyday things. The word was “philander.”
“Now we have finished adding up and making plans,” he would say, putting his ten-cent account-book into his pocket, “let us philander about it.”
And then Meg would begin to talk about the City Beautiful—a City Beautiful which was a wonderful and curious mixture of the enchanted one the whole world was pouring its treasures into, one hundred miles away, and that City Beautiful of her own which she had founded upon the one towards which Christian had toiled through the Slough of Despond and up the Hill of Difficulty and past Doubting Castle. Somehow one could scarcely tell where one ended and the others began, they were so much alike, these three cities—Christian’s, Meg’s, and the fair, ephemeral one the ending of the nineteenth century had built upon the blue lake’s side.
“They must look alike,” said Meg. “I am sure they must. See what it says in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress.’ ‘Now just as the gates were opened to let in the men, I looked in after them, and behold, the City shone like the sun’— and then it says, ‘The talk they had with the Shining Ones was about the glory of the place; who told them that the beauty and glory of it were inexpressible.’ I always think of it, Robin, when I read about those places like white palaces and temples and towers that are being built. I am so glad they are white. Think how the City will ‘shine like the sun’ when it stands under the blue sky and by the blue water, on a sunshiny day.”
They had never read the dear old worn “Pilgrim’s Progress” as they did in those days. They kept it in the straw near the Treasure, and always had it at hand to refer to. In it they seemed to find parallels for everything.
“Aunt Matilda’s world is the City of Destruction,” they would say. “And our loneliness and poorness are like Christian’s ‘burden.’ We have to carry it like a heavy weight, and it holds us back.”
“What was it that Goodwill said to Christian about it?” Robin asked.
Meg turned over the pages. She knew all the places by heart. It was easy enough to find and read how “At last there came a grave person to the gate, named Goodwill,” and in the end he said, “As to thy burden, be content to bear it until thou comest to the place of deliverance; for there it will fall from thy back itself.”
“But out of the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress,’” Robin said, with his reflecting air, “burdens don’t fall off by themselves. If you are content with them they stick on and get bigger. Ours would, I know. You have to do something yourself to get them off. But—” with a little pause for thought, “I like that part, Meg. And I like Goodwill, because he told it to him. It encouraged him, you know. You see it says next, ‘Then Christian began to gird up his loins and address himself to his journey.’”
“Robin,” said Meg, suddenly shutting the book and giving it a little thump on the back, “it’s not only Christian’s City that is like our City. Weare like Christian. We are pilgrims, and our way to that place is our Pilgrims’ Progress.”
VII
And the cold days of hard work kept going by, and the City Beautiful grew, and, huddled close together in the straw, the children planned and dreamed, and read and re-read the “Pilgrim’s Progress,” following Christian step by step. And Aunt Matilda became busier every day, it seemed, and did not remember that they were alive except when she saw them. And nobody guessed and nobody knew.
Days so quickly grow to weeks, and weeks slip by so easily until they are months, and at last there came a time when Meg, going out in the morning, felt a softer air, and stopped a moment by a bare tree to breathe it in and feel its lovely touch upon her cheek. She turned her face upward with a half-involuntary movement, and found herself looking at such a limitless vault of tender blueness that her heart gave a quick throb, seemed to spring up to it, and carry her with it. For a moment it seemed as if she had left the earth far below, and was soaring in the soft depths of blueness themselves. And suddenly, even as she felt it, she heard on the topmost branch of the bare tree a brief little rapturous trill, and her heart gave a leap again, and she felt her cheeks grow warm.
“It is a bluebird,” she said; “it is a bluebird. And it is the spring, and that means that the time is quite near.”
She had a queer little smile on her face all day as she worked. She did not know it was there herself, but Mrs. Macartney saw it.
“What’s pleasing you so, Meggy, my girl?” she asked.
Meg wakened up with a sort of start.
“I don’t know—exactly,” she said.
“You don’t know,” said the woman, good-naturedly. “You look as if you were thinking over a secret, and it was a pleasant one.”
That evening it was not cold when they sat in the Straw Parlor, and Meg told Robin about the bluebird.
“It gave me a strange feeling to hear it,” she said. “It seemed as if it was speaking to me. It said, ‘You must get ready. It is quite near.’”
They had made up their minds that they would go in June, before the weather became so hot that they might suffer from it.
“Because we have to consider everything,” was Robin’s idea. “We shall be walking about all the time, and we have no cool clothes, and we shall have no money to buy cool things; and if we should be ill, it would be worse for us than for children who have some one with them.”
In the little account-book they had calculated all they should own on the day their pilgrimage began. They
had apportioned it all out: so much for the price of the railroad tickets, so much for entrance fees, and—not so much, but so little—oh, so little!—for their food and lodging.
“I have listened when Jones and the others were talking,” said Robin; “and they say that everybody who has room to spare, and wants to make money, is going to let every corner they have. So you see there will be sure to be people who have quite poor places that they would be obliged to rent cheap to people who are poor, like themselves. We will go through the small side streets and look.”
The first bluebird came again, day after day, and others came with it, until the swift dart of blue wings through the air and the delicious ripple of joyous sound were no longer rare things. The days grew warmer, and the men threw off their coats, and began to draw their shirtsleeves across their foreheads when they were at work.
One evening when Robin came up into the Straw Parlor he brought something with him. It was a battered old tin coffee-pot.
“What is that for?” asked Meg; for he seemed to carry it as if it was of some value.
“It’s old and rusty, but there are no holes in it,” Robin answered. “I saw it lying in a fence corner, where some one had thrown it—perhaps a tramp. And it put a new thought into my head. It will do to boil eggs in.”
“Eggs!” said Meg.
“There’s nothing much nicer than hard-boiled eggs,” said Robin, “and you can carry them about with you. It
just came into my mind that we could take some of our eggs, and go somewhere where no one would be likely to see us, and build a fire of sticks, and boil some eggs, and carry them with us to eat.”
“Robin,” cried Meg, with admiring ecstasy, “I wish I had thought of that!”
“It doesn’t matter which of us thought of it,” said Rob, “it’s all the same.”
So it was decided that when the time came they should boil their supply of eggs very hard, and roll them up in pieces of paper and tuck them away carefully in the one small bag which was to carry all their necessary belongings. These belongings would be very few—just enough to keep them decent and clean, and a brush and comb between them. They used to lie in bed at night, with beating hearts, thinking it all over, sometimes awakening in a cold perspiration from a dreadful dream, in which Aunt Matilda or Jones or some of the hands had discovered their secret and confronted them with it in all its daring. They were so full of it night and day that Meg used to wonder that the people about them did not see it in their faces.
“They are not thinking of us,” said Robin. “They are thinking about crops. I dare say Aunt Matilda would like to see the Agricultural Building, but she couldn’t waste the time to go through the others.”
Oh, what a day it was, what a thrilling, exciting, almost unbearably joyful day, when Robin gathered sticks and dried bits of branches, and piled them in a corner of a field far enough from the house and outbuildings to be
quite safe! He did it one noon hour, and as he passed Meg on his way back to his work, he whispered:
“I have got the sticks for the fire all ready.”
And after supper they crept out to the place, with matches, and the battered old coffee-pot, and the eggs.
As they made their preparations, they found themselves talking in whispers, though there was not the least chance of any one’s hearing them. Meg looked rather like a little witch as she stood over the bubbling old pot, with her strange, little dark face and shining eyes and black elf locks.
“It’s like making a kind of sacrifice on an altar,” she said.
“You always think queer things about everything, don’t you?” said Robin. “But they’re all right; I don’t think of them myself, but I like them.”
When the eggs were boiled hard enough they carried them to the barn and hid them in the Straw Parlor, near the Treasure. Then they sat and talked, in whispers still, almost trembling with joy.
“Somehow, do you know,” Meg said, “it feels as if we were going to do something more than just go to the Fair. When people in stories go to seek their fortunes, I’m sure they feel like this. Does it give you a kind of creeping in your stomach whenever you think of it, Rob?”
“Yes, it does,” Robin whispered back; “and when it comes into my mind suddenly something gives a queer jump inside me.”
“That’s your heart,” said Meg. “Robin, if anything should stop us, I believe I should drop dead.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” was Rob’s answer, “but it’s better not to let ourselves think about it. And I don’t believe anything as bad as that couldhappen. We’ve worked so hard, and we have nobody but ourselves, and it can’t do any one any harm—and we don’t want to do any one any harm. No, there must be something that wouldn’t let it be.”
