My Own Own Love: You have given me a spring day before the buds begin,
the weather I have been longing for! I had been quite sad at heart these
cold wet days, really down ; a treasonable sadness with you still
anywhere in the world (though where in the world have you been?). Spring
seemed such a long way off over the bend of it, with you unable to come;
and it seems now another letter of yours has got lost. (Write it again,
dearest, all that was in it, with any blots that happened to come: there
was a dear smudge in to-day's, with the whirlpool mark of your thumb quite
clear on it, delicious to rest my face against and feel you there.)
And so back to my spring weather: all in a moment you gave me a whole
week of the weather I had longed after. For you say the sun has been
shining on you: and I would rather have it there than here if it refuses
to be in two places at once. Also my letters have pleased you. When they
do, I feel such a proud mother to them! Here they fly quick out of the
nest; but I think sometimes they must come to you broken-winged, with
so much meant and all so badly put.
How can we ever, with our poor handful of senses, contrive to express
ourselves perfectly? Perhaps, I don't know: dearest, I love you! I
kiss you a hundred times to the minute. If everything in the world were
dark round us, could not kisses tell us quite well all that we wish to
know of each other? me that you were true and brave and so beautiful
that a woman must be afraid looking at you: and you that I was just my
very self, loving and no! just loving: I have no room for anything
more! You have swallowed up all my moral qualities, I have none left: I
am a beggar, where it is so sweet to beg. Give me back crumbs of
myself! I am so hungry, I cannot show it, only by kissing you a hundred
times.
Dear share of the world, what a wonderful large helping of it you are to
me! I alter Portia's complaint and swear that "my little body is
bursting with this great world." And now it is written and I look at it,
it seems a Budge and Toddy sort of complaint. I do thank Heaven that the
Godhead who rules in it for us does not forbid the recognition of the
ludicrous! C was telling me how long ago, in her own dull Protestant
household, she heard a riddle propounded by some indiscreet soul who did
not understand the prudish piety which reigned there: and saw such
shocked eyes opening all round on the sound of it. "What is it," was
asked, "that a common man can see every day but that God never sees?"
"His equal" is the correct answer: but even so demure and proper a
support to thistly theology was to the ears that heard it as the hand of
Uzzah stretched out intrusively and deserving to be smitten. As for
C , a twinkle of wickedness seized her, she hazarded "A joke" to be
the true answer, and was ordered into banishment by the head of that
God-fearing household for having so successfully diagnosed the family
skeleton.
As for skeletons, why your letter makes me so happy is that the one
which has been rubbing its ribs against you for so long seems to have
given itself a day off, or crumbled to dissolution. And you are yourself
again, as you have not been for many a long day. I suppose there has
been thunder, and the air is cleared: and I am not to know any of that
side of your discomforts?
Still I do know. You have been writing your letters with pressed lips
for a month past: and I have been a mere toy-thing, and no helpmate to
you at all at all. Oh, why will she not love me? I know I am lovable
except to a very hard heart, and hers is not: it is only like yours,
reserved in its expression. It is strange what pain her prejudice has
been able to drop into my cup of happiness; and into yours, dearest, I
fear, even more.
Oh, I love you, I love you! I am crying with it, having no words to
declare to you what I feel. My tears have wings in them: first
semi-detached, then detached. See, dearest, there is a rain-stain to
make this letter fruitful of meaning!
It is sheer convention and we, creatures of habit that tears don't
come kindly and easily to express where laughter leaves off and a
something better begins. Which is all very ungrammatical and entirely
me, as I am when I get off my hinges too suddenly.
Amen, amen! When we are both a hundred we shall remember all this very
peaceably; and the "sanguine flower" will not look back at us less
beautifully because in just one spot it was inscribed with woe. And if
we with all our aids cannot have patience, where in this midge-bitten
world is that virtue to find a standing?
I kiss you how? as if it were for the first or the last time? No, but
for all time, Beloved! every time I see you or think of you sums up my
world. Love me a little, too, and I will be as contented as I am your
loving.
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