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Page 14
Dearest: Not having had a letter from you this morning, I have read over
some back ones, and find in one a bidding which I have never fulfilled, to
tell you what I _do_ all day. Was that to avoid the too great length of my
telling you what I _think_? Yet you get more of me this way than that.
What I do is every day so much the same: while what I think is always
different. However, since you want a woman of action rather than of brain,
here I start telling you.
I wake punctual and hungry at the sound of Nan-nan's drawing of the
blinds: wait till she is gone (the old darling potters and tattles: it
is her most possessive moment of me in the day, except when I sham
headaches, and let her put me to bed); then I have my hand under my
pillow and draw out your last for a reading that has lost count whether
it is the twenty-second or the fifty-second time;--discover new beauties
in it, and run to the glass to discover new beauties in myself,--find
them; Benjy comes up with the post's latest, and behold, my day is
begun!
Is that the sort of thing you want to know? My days are without an
action worth naming: I only think swelling thoughts, and write some of
them: if ever I do anything worth telling, be sure I run a pen-and-ink
race to tell you. No, it is man who _does_ things; a woman only diddles
(to adapt a word of diminutive sound for the occasion), unless, good,
fortunate, independent thing, she works for her own living: and that is
not me!
I feel sometimes as if a real bar were between me and a whole conception
of life; because I have carpets and curtains, and Nan-nan, and Benjy,
and last of all you--shutting me out from the realities of existence.
If you would all leave me just for one full moon, and come back to me
only when I am starving for you all--for my tea to be brought to me in
the morning, and all the paddings and cushionings which bolster me up
from morning till night--with what a sigh of wisdom I would drop back
into your arms, and would let you draw the rose-colored curtains round
me again!
Now I am afraid lest I have become too happy: I am leaning so far out of
window to welcome the dawn, I seem to be tempting a fall--heaven itself
to fall upon me.
What do I _know_ truly, who only know so much happiness?
Dearest, if there is anything else in love which I do not know, teach it
me quickly: I am utterly yours. If there is sorrow to give, give it me!
Only let me have with it the consciousness of your love.
Oh, my dear, I lose myself if I think of you so much. What would life
have without you in it? The sun would drop from my heavens. I see only
by you! you have kissed me on the eyes. You are more to me than my own
poor brain could ever have devised: had I started to invent Paradise, I
could not have invented _you_. But perhaps you have invented me: I am
something new to myself since I saw you first. God bless you for it!
Even if you were to shut your eyes at me now--though I might go blind,
you could not unmake me:--"The gods themselves cannot recall their
gifts." Also that I am yours is a gift of the gods, I will trust: and
so, not to be recalled!
Kiss me, dearest; here where I have written this! I am yours, Beloved. I
kiss you again and again.--Ever your own making.
LETTER XIX.
Dearest, Dearest: How long has this happened? You don't tell me the day or
the hour. Is it ever since you last wrote? Then you have been in pain and
grief for four days: and I not knowing anything about it! And you have no
hand in the house kind enough to let you dictate by it one small word to
poor me? What heartless merrymakings may I not have sent you to worry you,
when soothing was the one thing wanted? Well, I will not worry now, then;
neither at not being told, nor at not being allowed to come: but I will
come thus and thus, O my dear heart, and take you in my arms. And you will
be comforted, will you not be? when I tell you that even if you had no
legs at all, I would love you just the same. Indeed, dearest, so much of
you is a superfluity: just your heart against mine, and the sound of your
voice, would carry me up to more heavens than I could otherwise have
dreamed of. I may say now, now that I know it was not your choice, what a
void these last few days the lack of letters has been to me. I wondered,
truly, if you had found it well to put off such visible signs for a while
in order to appease one who, in other things more essential, sees you
rebellious. But the wonder is over now; and I don't want you to write--not
till a consultation of doctors orders it for the good of your health. I
will be so happy talking to you: also I am sending you books:--those I
wish you to read; and which now you _must_, since you have the leisure!
And I for my part will make time and read yours. Whose do you most want me
to read, that my education in your likings may become complete? What I
send you will not deprive me of anything: for I have the beautiful
complete set--your gift--and shall read side by side with you to realize
in imagination what the happiness of reading them for the first time ought
to be.
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