Chapter XXII: Letter XXII

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.