london,
september 30, 19—.
it is because you know not what you do that i cannot forgive you. could you know that your letter with its catalogue of advantages and arrangements must offend me as much as it belies (let us hope) you and the woman of your love, i would pardon the affront of it upon us all, and ascribe the unseemly want of warmth to reserve or to the sadness which grips the heart when joy is too palpitant. but something warns me that you are unaware of the chill your words breathe, and that is a lapse which it is impossible to meet with indulgence.
"he does not love her," was barbara's quick decision, and she laid the open letter down with a definiteness which said that you, too, are laid out and laid low. your sister's very wrists can be articulate. however, i laughed at her and she soon joined me. we do not mean to be extravagant with our fears. who shall prescribe the letters of lovers to their sisters and foster-fathers? yet there are some things their letters should be incapable of saying, and amongst them that love is not a crisis and a rebirth, but that it is common as the commonplace, a hit or miss affair which "shuffling" could not affect.
barbara showed me your note to her. "had i written like this of myself and earl—"
"you could not," i objected.
"then herbert should have been as little able to do it," she deduced with emphasis. here i might have told her that men and women are races apart, but no one talks cant to barbara. so i did not console her, and it stands against you in our minds that on this critical occasion you have baffled us with coldness.
an absence of six years, broken into twice by a brief few months, must work changes. when barbara called your letter unnatural, she forgot how little she knows what is natural to you. she and i have been wont to predetermine you, your character, foothold, and outlook, by—say by the fact that you knew your wordsworth and that you knew him without being able to take for yourself his austere peace. youth which lives by hope is riven by unrest.
"i made no vows; vows were made for me,
bond unknown to me was given
that i should be, else sinning gently,
a dedicated spirit."
that pale sunrise seen from mt. tamalpais and your voice vibrant to fierceness on the "else sinning gently"—to me the splendour of rose on piled-up ridges of mist spoke all for you, so dear have you always been. it rested on the possible wonder of your life. it threw you into the scintillant dawn with an abandon meet to a son of waring.
tell me, do you still read your wordsworth on your knees? i am bent with regret for the time when your mind had no surprises for me, when the days were flushed halcyon with my hope in you. i resent your development if it is because of it that you speak prosaically of a prosaic marriage and of a honeymoon simultaneous with the degree. i think you are too well pleased with the simultaneousness.
yet the fact of the letter is fair. it cannot be that the soul of it is not. hester stebbins is a poet. i lean forward and think it out as i did some days ago when the news came. i conjure up the look of love. if the woman is content (how much more than content the feeling she bounds with in knowing you hers as she is yours), what better test that all is well? i conjure up the look of love. it is thus at meeting and thus at parting. even here, to-night, when all is chill and hard to understand, i catch the flash and the warmth, and what i see restores you to me, but how deep the plummet of my mind needed to sound before it reached you. it is because you permitted yourself to speak when silence had expressed you better.
show me the ideally real hester stebbins, the spark of fire which is she. the storms have not broken over her head. she will laugh and make poetry of her laughter. if before she met you she wept, that, too, will help the smiling. there is laughter which is the echo of a miserere sobbed by the ages. men chuckle in the irony of pain, and they smile cold, lessoned smiles in resignation; they laugh in forgetfulness and they laugh lest they die of sadness. a shrug of the shoulders, a widening of the lips, a heaving forth of sound, and the life is saved. the remedy is as drastic as are the drugs used for epilepsy, which in quelling the spasm bring idiocy to the patient. if we are made idiots by our laughter, we are paying dearly for the privilege of continuing in life.
hester shall laugh because she is glad and must tell her joy, and she will not lose it in the telling. greet her for me and hasten to prove yourself, for
"the poet, gentle creature that he is,
hath like the lover, his unruly times;
his fits when he is neither sick nor well,
though no distress be near him but his own
unmanageable thoughts."
you will judge by this letter that i am neither sick nor well, and that i reach for a distress which is not near. if i were merchant rather than poet, it would be otherwise with me.
dane.
