Why, my Beloved: Since you put it to me as a point of conscience (it is
only lying on your back with one active leg doing nothing, and the other
dying to have done aching, which has made you take this new start of
inquiring within upon everything), since you call on me for a
conscientious answer, I say that it stands to reason that I love you more
than you love me, because there is so much more of you to love, let alone
fit for loving.
Do you imagine that you are going to be a cripple for life, and therefore
an indifferent dancer in the dances I shall always be leading you, that
you have started this fit of self-depreciation? Or is it because I have
thrown Meredith at your sick head that you doubt my tact and my affection,
and my power patiently to bear for your sake a good deal of cold shoulder?
Dearest, remember I am doctoring you from a distance: and am not yet
allowed to come and see my patient, so can only judge from your letters
how ill you are. That you have been concealing from me almost
treacherously: and only by a piece of abject waylaying did I receive word
to-day of your sleepless nights, and so get the key to your symptoms. Lay
by Meredith, then, for a while: I am sending you a cargo of Stevenson
instead. You have been truly unkind, trying to read what required effort,
when you were fit for nothing of the sort.
And lest even Stevenson should be too much for you, and wanting very much,
and perhaps a little bit jealously, to be your most successful nurse, I am
letting my last large bit of shyness of you go; and with a pleasant sort
of pain, because I know I have hit on a thing that will please you, I open
my hands and let you have these, and with them goes my last blush:
henceforth I am a woman without a secret, and all your interest in me may
evaporate. Yet I know well it will not.
As for this resurrection pie from love's dead-letter office, you will
find from it at least one thing how much I depended upon response from
you before I could become at all articulate. It is you, dearest, from
the beginning who have set my head and heart free and made me a woman. I
am something quite different from the sort of child I was less than a
year ago when I wrote that small prayer which stands sponsor for all
that follows. How abundantly it has been answered, dearest Beloved,
only I know: you do not!
Now my prayer is not that you should "come true," but that you should
get well. Do this one little thing for me, dearest! For you I will do
anything: my happiness waits for that. As yet I seem to have done
nothing. Oh, but, Beloved, I will! From a reading of the Fioretti, I
sign myself as I feel. Your glorious poor little one.
THE CASKET LETTERS.
A.
my dear Prince Wonderful,[1]
Pray God bless and make him come true for my sake. Amen.
R.S.V.P.
[Footnote 1: The MS. contained at first no name, but a blank; over it
this has been written afterwards in a small hand.]
B.
Dear Prince Wonderful: Now that I have met you I pray that you will be my
friend. I want just a little of your friendship, but that, so much, so
much! And even for that little I do not know how to ask.
Always to be your friend: of that you shall be quite sure.
C.
Dear Prince Wonderful: Long ago when I was still a child I told myself
of you: but thought of you only as in a fairy tale. Now I am afraid of
trusting my eyes or ears, for fear I should think too much of you before
I know you really to be true. Do not make me wish so much to be your
friend, unless you are also going to be true!
Please come true now, for mine and for all the world's sake: but for
mine especially, because I thought of you first! And if you are not able
to come true, don't make me see you any more. I shall always remember
you, and be glad that I have seen you just once.
D.
Dear Prince Wonderful: Has God blessed you yet and made you come true? I
have not seen you again, so how am I to know? Not that it is necessary for
me to know even if you do come true. I believe already that you are true.
If I were never to see you again I should be glad to think of you as
living, and shall always be your friend. I pray that you may come to
know that.
E.
Dear Highness: I do not know what to write to you: I only know how much I
wish to write. I have always written the things I thought about: it has
been easy to find words for them. Now I think about you, but have no
words: no words, dear Highness, for you! I could write at once if I knew
you were my friend. Come true for me: I will have so much to tell you
then!
F.
Dear Highness: If I believe in fairy tales coming true, it is because I am
superstitious. This is what I did to-day. I shut my eyes and took a book
from the shelf, opened it, and put my fingers down on a page. This is what
I came to:
"All I believed is true!
I am able yet
All I want to get
By a method as strange as new:
Dare I trust the same to you?"
Fate says, then, you are to be my friend. Fate has said I am yours
already. That is very certain. Only in real life where things come true
would a book have opened as this has done.
G.
Dear Highness: I am sure now, then, that I please you, and that you like
me, perhaps only a little: for you turned out of your way to ride with me
though you were going somewhere so fast. How much I wished it when I saw
you coming, but dared not believe it would come true!
"Come true": it is the word I have always been writing, and everything
has : you most of all! You are more true each time I see you. So true
that now I will write it down at last, the truth for you who have come
so true.
Dear Highness and Great Heart, I love you dearly, though you don't know
it, quite ever so much; and am going to love you ever so much more,
only please like me a little better first! You on your dear side must
do something: or, before I know, I may be wringing my hands all alone on
a desert island to a bare blue horizon, with nothing in it real or
fabulous.
If I am to love you, nothing but happiness is to be allowed to come of
it. So don't come true too fast without one little wee corresponding
wish for me to find that you are! I am quite happy thinking you out
slowly: it takes me all day long; the longer the better!
I wonder how often in my life I shall write down that I love you, having
once written it (I do: I love you! there [it] is for you, with more to
follow after!); and send you my love as I do now into the great
emptiness of chance, hoping somehow, known or unknown, it may bless you
and bring good to you.
Oh, but 'tis a windy world, and I a mere feather in it: how can I get
blown the way I would?
Still I have a superstition that some star is over me which I have not
seen yet, but shall, Heaven helping me.
And now good-night, and no more, no more at all! I send out an "I love
you" to be my celestial commercial traveler for me while I fold myself
up and become its sleeping partner.
Good-night: you are the best and truest that I ever dreamed yet.
H.
Dear Highness: I begin not to be able to name you anything, for there is
not a word for you that will do! "Highness" you are: but that leaves gaps
and coldnesses without end. "Royal," yet much more serene than royal:
though by that I don't mean any detraction from your royalty, for I never
saw a man carry his invisible crown with so level a head and no
haughtiness at all: and that is the finest royalty of look possible.
I look at you and wonder so how you have grown to this to have become
king so quietly without any coronation ceremony. You have thought more
than you should for happiness at your age; making me, by that one line
in your forehead, think you were three years older than you really are.
I wish if I dare wish you anything different that you were! It makes
me uncomfortable to remember that I am what? Almost half a year your
elder as time flies: not really, for your brain was born long before
mine began to rattle in its shell. You say quite old things, and
quietly, as if you had had them in your mind ten years already. When you
told me about your two old pensioners, the blind man and his wife, whom
you brought to so funny a reconciliation, I felt ("mir war, ich wuszte
nicht wie") that I would like very much to go blindfold led by you: it
struck me suddenly how happy would be a blindfoldness of perfect trust
such as one might have with your hands on one. I suppose that is what in
religion is called faith: I haven't it there, my dear; but I have it in
you now. I love you, beginning to understand why: at first I did not. I
am ashamed not to have discovered it earlier. The matter with you is
that you have goodness prevailing in you, an integrity of goodness, I
mean: a different thing from there being a whereabouts for goodness in
you; that we all have in some proportion or another. I was quite right
to love you: I know it now, I did not when I first did.
Yesterday I was turning over a silly "confession book" in which a rose was
everybody's favorite flower, manliness the finest quality for a man, and
womanliness for a woman (which is as much as to say that pig is the best
quality for pork, and pork for pig): till I came upon one different from
the others, and found myself saying "Yes" all down the page.
I turned over for the signature, and found my own mother's. Was it not a
strange sweet meeting? And only then did the memory of her handwriting
from far back come to me. She died, dear Highness, before I was seven
years old. I love her as I do my early memory of flowers, as something
very sweet, hardly as a real person.
I noticed she loved best in men and women what they lack most often: in a
man, a fair mind; in a woman, courage. "Brave women and fair men," she
wrote. Byron might have turned in his grave at having his dissolute
stiff-neck so wrung for him by misquotation. And she it must have been
before the eighties had started the popular craze for him chose Meredith,
my own dear Meredith, for her favorite author. How our tastes would have
run together had she lived!
Well, I know you fair, and believe myself brave constitutionally, so
that I can't help it: and this, therefore, is not self-praise. But
fairness in a man is a deadly hard acquirement, I begin now to discover.
You have it fixed fast in you.
You, I think, began to do just things consciously, as the burden of
manhood began in you. I love to think of you growing by degrees till you
could carry your head so and no other way; so that, looking at you, I
can promise myself you never did a mean thing, and never consciously an
unjust thing except to yourself. I can just fancy that fault in you.
But, whatever I love you for it more and more, and am proud knowing you
and finding that we are to become friends. For it is that, and no less
than that, now.
I love you; and me you like cordially: and that is enough. I need not
look behind it, for already I have no way to repay you for the happiness
this brings me.
I.
Oh, I think greatly of you, my dear; and it takes long thinking. Not
merely such a quantity of thought, but such a quality, makes so hard a
day's work that by the end of it I am quite drowsy. Bless me, dearest; all
to-day has belonged to you; and to-morrow, I know, waits to become yours
without the asking: just as without the asking I too am yours. I wish it
were more possible for us to give service to those we love. I am most glad
because I see you so often: but I come and go in your life empty-handed,
though I have so much to give away. Thoughts, the best I have, I give you:
I cannot empty my brain of them. Some day you shall think well of me. That
is a vow, dear friend, you whom I love so much!
J.
I have not had to alter any thought ever formed about you, Beloved; I have
only had to deepen it that is all. You grow, but you remain. I have heard
people talk about you, generally kindly; but what they think of you is
often wrong. I do not say anything, but I am glad, and so sure that I know
you better. If my mind is so clear about you, it shows that you are good
for me. Now for nearly three months I may not see you again; but all that
time you will be growing in my heart; and at the end without another word
from you I shall find that I know you better than before. Is that strange?
It is because I love you: love is knowledge blind knowledge, not wanting
eyes. I only hope that I shall keep in your memory the kind place you have
given me. You are almost my friend now, and I know it. You do not know
that I love you.
K.
Beloved: You love me! I know it now, and bless the sun and the moon and
the stars for the dear certainty of it. And I ask you now, O heart that
has opened to me, have I once been unhappy or impatient while this good
thing has been withheld from me? Indeed my love for you has occupied me
too completely: I have been so glad to find how much there is to learn in
a good heart deeply unconscious of its own goodness. You have employed me
as I wish I may be employed all the days of my life: and now my beloved
employer has given me the wages I did not ask.
You love me! Is it a question of little or much? Is it not rather an
entire new thought of me that has entered your life, as the thought of you
entered mine months that seem years ago? It was the seed then, and seemed
small; but the whole life was there; and it has grown and grown till now
it is I who have become small, and have hardly room in me for the roots:
and it seems to have gone so far up over my head that I wonder if the
stars know of my happiness.
They must know of yours too, then, my Beloved: they are no company for me
without you. Oh, to-day, to-day of all days! how in my heart I shall go on
kissing it till I die! You love me: that is wonderful! You love me: and
already it is not wonderful in the least! but belongs to Noah and the ark
and all the animals saved up for an earth washed clean and dried, and the
new beginnings of time which have ever since been twisting and turning
with us in safe keeping through all the history of the world.
"We came over at the Norman conquest," my dear, as people say trailing
their pedigree: but there was no ancestral pride about us it was all for
the love of the thing we did it: how clear it seems now! In the hall hangs
a portrait in a big wig, but otherwise the image of my father, of a man
who flouted the authority of James II. merely because he was so like my
father in character that he could do nothing else. I shall look for you
now in the Bayeux tapestries with a prong from your helmet down the middle
of your face of which that line on your forehead is the remainder. And
you love me! I wonder what the line has to do with that?
By such little things do great things seem to come about: not really. I
know it was not because I said just what I did say, and did what I did
yesterday, that your heart was bound to come for mine. But it was those
small things that brought you consciousness: and when we parted I knew
that I had all the world at my feet or all heaven over my head!
Ah, at last I may let the spirit of a kiss go to you from me, and not be
ashamed or think myself forward since I have your love. All this time you
are thinking of me: a certainty lying far outside what I can see.
Beloved, if great happiness may be set to any words, it is here! If
silence goes better with it, speak, silence, for me when I end now!
Good-night, and think greatly of me! I shall wake early.
L.
Dearest: Was my heart at all my own, was it my own to give, till you came
and made me aware of how much it contains? Truly, dear, it contained
nothing before, since now it contains you and nothing else. So I have a
brand-new heart to give away: and you, you want it and can't see that
there it is staring you in the face like a rose with all its petals ready
to drop.
I am quite sure that if I had not met you, I could have loved nobody as I
love you. Yet it is very likely that I should have loved sufficiently, as
the way of the world goes. It is not a romantic confession, but it is true
to life: I do so genuinely like most of my fellow-creatures, and am not
happy except where shoulders rub socially: that is to say, have not until
now been happy, except dependently on the company and smiles of others.
Now, Beloved, I have none of your company, and have had but few of your
smiles (I could count them all); yet I have become more happy filling up
my solitude with the understanding of you which has made me wise, than
all the rest of fate or fortune could make me. Down comes autumn's sad
heart and finds me gay; and the asters, which used to chill me at their
appearing, have come out like crocuses this year because it is the
beginning of a new world.
And all the winter will carry more than a suspicion of summer with it,
just as the longest days carry round light from northwest to northeast,
because so near the horizon, but out of sight, lies their sun. So you,
Beloved, so near to me now at last, though out of sight.
M.
Beloved: Whether I have sorry or glad things to think about, they are
accompanied and changed by thoughts of you. You are my diary: all goes to
you now. That you love me is the very light by which I see everything.
Also I learn so much through having you in my thoughts: I cannot say how
it is, for I have no more knowledge of life than I had before: yet I am
wiser, I believe, knowing much more what lives at the root of things and
what men have meant and felt in all they have done: because I love you,
dearest. Also I am quicker in my apprehensions, and have more joy and more
fear in me than I had before. And if this seems to be all about myself,
it is all about you really, Beloved!
Last week one of my dearest old friends, our Rector, died: a character you
too would have loved. He was a father to the whole village, rather stern
of speech, and no respecter of persons. Yet he made a very generous
allowance for those who did not go through the church door to find their
salvation. I often went only because I loved him: and he knew it.
I went for that reason alone last Sunday. The whole village was full of
closed blinds: and of all things over him Chopin's Funeral March was
played! a thing utterly unchristian in its meaning: wild pagan grief,
desolate over lost beauty. "Balder the beautiful is dead, is dead!" it
cried: and I thought of you suddenly; you, who are not Balder at all.
Too many thorns have been in your life, but not the mistletoe stroke
dealt by a blind god ignorantly. Yet in all great joy there is the
Balder element: and I feared lest something might slay it for me, and my
life become a cry like Chopin's march over mown-down unripened grass,
and youth slain in its high places.
After service a sort of processional instinct drew people up to the house:
they waited about till permission was given, and went in to look at their
old man, lying in high state among his books. I did not go. Beloved, I
have never yet seen death: you have, I know. Do you, I wonder, remember
your father better than I mine: or your brother? Are they more living
because you saw them once not living? I think death might open our eyes to
those we lived on ill terms with, but not to the familiar and dear. I do
not need you dead, to be certain that your heart has mine for its true
inmate and mine yours.
I love you, I love you: so let good-night bring you good-morning!
N.
At long intervals, dearest, I write to you a secret all about yourself for
my eyes to see: because, chiefly because, I have not you to look at. Thus
I bless myself with you.
Away over the world west of this and a little bit north is the city of
spires where you are now. Never having seen it I am the more free to
picture it as I like: and to me it is quite full of you: quite greedily
full, Beloved, when elsewhere you are so much wanted! I send my thoughts
there to pick up crumbs for me.
It is a strange blend of notions wisdom and ignorance combined: for
you I seem to know perfectly; but of your life nothing at all. And
yet nobody there knows so much about you as I. What you do matters so
much less than what you are. You, who are the clearest heart in all the
world, do what you will, you are so still to me, Beloved.
I take a happy armful of thoughts about you into all my dreams: and when
I wake they are there still, and have done nothing but remain true. What
better can I ask of them?
You do love me: you have not changed? Without change I remain yours so
long as I live.
O.
And you, Beloved, what are you thinking of me all this while? Think well
of me, I beg you: I deserve so much, loving you as truly as I do!
So often, dearest, I sit thinking my hands into yours again as when we
were saying good-by the last time. Then it was, under our laughter and
light words, that I saw suddenly how the thing too great to name had
become true, that from friends we were changed into lovers. It seemed the
most natural thing to be, and yet was wonderful for it was I who loved
you first: a thing I could never be ashamed of, and am now proud to
own for has it not proved me wise? My love for you is the best wisdom
that I have. Good-night, dearest! Sleep as well as I love you, and nobody
in the world will sleep so soundly.
P.
A few times in my life, Beloved, I have had the Blue-moon-hunger for
something which seemed too impossible and good ever to come true: prosaic
people call it being "in the blues"; I comfort myself with a prettier word
for it. To-day, not the Blue-moon itself, but the Man of it came down and
ate plum-porridge with me! Also, I do believe that it burnt his mouth, and
am quite reasonably happy thinking so, since it makes me know that you
love me as much as ever.
If I have had doubts, dearest, they have been of myself, lest I might be
unworthy of your friendship or love. Suspicions of you I never had.
Who wrote that suspicions among thoughts are like bats among birds, flying
only by twilight?
But even my doubts have been thoughts, Beloved, sure of you if not always
of myself. And if I have looked for you only with doubtful vision, yet I
have always seen you in as strong a light as my eyes could bear:
blue-moonlight. Beloved, is not twilight: and blue-moonlight has been the
light I saw you by: it is you alone who can make sunlight of it.
This I read yesterday has lain on my mind since as true and altogether
beautiful, with the beauty of major, not of minor poetry, though it was
a minor poet who wrote it. It is of a wood where Apollo has gone in
quest of his Beloved, and she is not yet to be found:
"Here each branch
Sway'd with a glitter all its crowded leaves,
And brushed the soft divine hair touching them
In ruffled clusters....
Suddenly the moon
Smoothed herself out of vapor-drift and made
The deep night full of pleasure in the eye
Of her sweet motion. Not alone she came
Leading the starlight with her like a song:
And not a bud of all that undergrowth
But crisped and tingled out an ardent edge
As the light steeped it: over whose massed leaves
The portals of illimitable sleep
Faded in heaven."
That is love in its moonrise, not its sunrise stage: yet you see.
Beloved, how it takes possession of its dark world, quite as fully as
the brighter sunlight could do. And if I speak of doubts, I mean no
twilight and no suspicions: nor by darkness do I mean any unhappiness.
My blue-moon has come, leading the starlight with her like a song. Am I
not happy enough to be patiently yours before you know it? Good things
which are to be, before they happen are already true. Nothing is so true
as you are, except my love for you and yours for me. Good-night,
good-night.
Sleep well, Beloved, and wake.
Q.
Beloved: I heard somebody yesterday speak of you as "charming"; and I
began wondering to myself was that the word which could ever have covered
my thoughts of you? I do not know whether you ever charmed me, except in
the sense of charming which means magic and spell-binding. That you did
from the beginning, dearest. But I think I held you at first in too much
awe to discover charm in you: and at last knew you too much to the depths
to name you by a word so lightly used for the surface of things. Yet now a
charm in you, which is not all you, but just a part of you, comes to
light, when I see you wondering whether you are really loved, or whether,
Beloved, I only like you rather well!
Well, if you will be so "charming," I am helpless: and can do nothing,
nothing, but pray for the blue-moon to rise, and love you a little better
because you have some of that divine foolishness which strikes the very
wise ones of earth, and makes them kin to weaker mortals who otherwise
might miss their "charm" altogether.
Truly, Beloved, if I am happy, it is because I am also your most patiently
loving.
R.
Beloved: The certainty which I have now that you love me so fills all my
thoughts, I cannot understand you being in any doubt on your side. What
must I do that I do not do, to show gladness when we meet and sorrow when
we have to part? I am sure that I make no pretense or disguise, except
that I do not stand and wring my hands before all the world, and cry
"Don't go!" which has sometimes been in my mind, to be kept not said!
Indeed, I think so much of you, my dear, that I believe some day, if you
do your part, you will only have to look up from your books to find me
standing. If you did, would you still be in doubt whether I loved you?
Oh, if any apparition of me ever goes to you, all my thoughts will surely
look truthfully out of its eyes; and even you will read what is there at
last!
Beloved, I kiss your blind eyes, and love them the better for all their
unreadiness to see that I am already their slave. Not a day now but I
think I may see you again: I am in a golden uncertainty from hour to hour.
I love you: you love me: a mist of blessing swims over my eyes as I write
the words, till they become one and the same thing: I can no longer divide
their meaning in my mind. Amen: there is no need that I should.
S.
Beloved: I have not written to you for quite a long time: ah, I could not.
I have nothing now to say! I think I could very easily die of this great
happiness, so certainly do you love me! Just a breath more of it and I
should be gone.
Good-by, dearest, and good-by, and good-by! If you want letters from me
now, you must ask for them! That the earth contains us both, and that we
love each other, is about all that I have mind enough to take in. I do not
think I can love you more than I do: you are no longer my dream but my
great waking thought. I am waiting for no blue-moonrise now: my heart has
not a wish which you do not fulfill. I owe you my whole life, and for any
good to you must pay it out to the last farthing, and still feel myself
your debtor.
Oh, Beloved, I am most poor and most rich when I think of your love.
Good-night; I can never let thought of you go!
Beloved: These are almost all of them, but not quite; a few here and there
have cried to be taken out, saying they were still too shy to be looked
at. I can't argue with them: they know their own minds best; and you know
mine.
See what a dignified historic name I have given this letter-box, or
chatterbox, or whatever you like to call it. But "Resurrection Pie" is
my name for it. Don't eat too much of it, prays your loving.
Continued below...
