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Page 27
I think this is the least pleasant letter I have ever sent you: shall I
tell you why? It was not the sermon: he is quite a forgivable good man in
his way. But in the afternoon that same Mrs. P---- came, got me in a
corner, and wanted to unburden herself of invective against your mother,
believing that I should be glad, because her coldness to me has become
known! What mean things some people can think about one! I heard nothing:
but I am ruffled in all my plumage and want stroking. And my love to your
mother, please, if she will have it. It is only through her that I get
you.--Ever your very own.
LETTER XXVIII.
Dearest: Here comes a letter to you from me flying in the opposite
direction. I won't say I am not wishing to go; but oh, to be a bird in two
places at once! Give this letter, then, a special nesting-place, because I
am so much on the wing elsewhere.
I shut my eyes most of the time through France, and opened them on a
soup-tureen full of coffee which presented itself at the frontier: and
then realized that only a little way ahead lay Berne, with baths, buns,
bears, breakfast, and other nice things beginning with B, waiting to make
us clean, comfortable, contented, and other nice things beginning with C.
Through France I loved you sleepy fashion, with many dreams in between not
all about you. But now I am breathing thoughts of you out of a new
atmosphere--a great gulp of you, all clean-living and high-thinking
between these Alpine royal highnesses with snow-white crowns to their
heads: and no time for a word more about anything except you: you, and
double-you,--and treble-you if the alphabet only had grace to contain so
beautiful a symbol! Good-by: we meet next, perhaps, out of Lucerne: if
not,--Italy.
What a lot I have to go through before we meet again visibly! You will
find me world-worn, my Beloved! Write often.
LETTER XXIX.
Beloved: You know of the method for making a cat settle down in
a strange place by buttering her all over: the theory being that by the
time she has polished off the butter she feels herself at home? My
morning's work has been the buttering of the Mother-Aunt with such
things as will Lucerne her the most. When her instincts are appeased I
am the more free to indulge my own.
So after breakfast we went round the cloisters, very thick set with
tablets and family vaults, and crowded graves inclosed. It proved quite
"the best butter." To me the penance turned out interesting after a
period of natural repulsion. A most unpleasant addition to sepulchral
sentiment is here the fashion: photographs of the departed set into the
stone. You see an elegant and genteel marble cross: there on the
pedestal above the name is the photo:--a smug man with bourgeois
whiskers,--a militiaman with waxed mustaches well turned up,--a woman
well attired and conscious of it: you cannot think how indecent looked
the pretension of such types to the dignity of death and immortality.
But just one or two faces stood the test, and were justified: a young
man oppressed with the burden of youth; a sweet, toothless grandmother
in a bonnet, wearing old age like a flower; a woman not beautiful but
for her neck which carried indignation; her face had a thwarted look.
"Dead and rotten" one did not say of these in disgust and involuntarily
as one did of the others. And yet I don't suppose the eye picks out the
faces that kindled most kindness round them when living, or that one can
see well at all where one sees without sympathy. I think the
Mother-Aunt's face would not look dear to most people as it does to
me,--yet my sight of her is the truer: only I would not put it up on a
tombstone in order that it might look nothing to those that pass by.
I wrote this much, and then, leaving the M.-A. to glory in her
innumerable correspondence, Arthur and I went off to the lake, where we
have been for about seven hours. On it, I found it become infinitely
more beautiful, for everything was mystified by a lovely bloomy haze,
out of which the white peaks floated like dreams: and the mountains
change and change, and seem not all the same as going when returning.
Don't ask me to write landscape to you: one breathes it in, and it is
there ever after, but remains unset to words.
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