Chapter 19
Section 19 of an English woman's love letters. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. An English woman's love letters by Anonymous. Section 19, letters 79 through 86.
Letter 79. Dearest, I have not written to you for three weeks. At last I am better again. You seem to have been waiting for me here, always wondering when I would come back. I do come back, you see.
Dear heart, how are you? I kiss your feet. You are my one, only happiness, my great one. Words are too cold and cruel to write anything for me. Picture me, I am too weak to write more.
But I have written this, and I am so much better for it. Reward me some day by reading what is here. I kiss because of you this paper, which I am too tired to fill any more. Love, nothing but love, into every one of these dead words, my heart has been beating, trying to lay down its life and reach you.
Letter 80. A secret, dearest, that will be no secret soon. Before I am done with 23, I shall have passed my age. Beloved, it hurts me more than I can say that the news of it should come to you from anyone but me. For this, though I write it, is already a dead letter, lost like a predestined soul, even in the pains that gave it birth.
Yes, it does pain me, frightens me even that I must die all by myself, and feeling still so young. I thought I should look forward to it, but I do not, no, no, I would give much, to put it off for a time, until I could know what it will mean for me as regards you. Oh, if only you knew and cared what wild comfort I might have in the knowledge. It seems strange that if I were going away from the chance of a perfect life with you, I should feel it with less pain than I feel this. The dust and the ashes of life are all that I have to let fall, and it is bitterness itself to part with them.
How we grow to love sorrow! Joy is never so much a possession, it goes over us and closes us like air or sunlight. But sorrow goes into us and becomes part of our flesh and bone. So that I, holding my hand to the sunshine, see sorrow red and transparent like stained glass between me and the light of day, sorrow that has become inseparably mine, and is the very life I am wishing to keep. Dearest, will a world be more bearable to you when I am out of it? It is selfish of me not to wish so, since I can satisfy you in this so soon. Every day I will try to make it my wish, or wish that it may be so when the event comes, not a day before.
Till then let it be more bearable that I am still alive. Grant me, dearest, that one little grace while I live. Bearable. My sorrow is bearable, I suppose, because I do bear it from day to day. Otherwise I would declare it not to be. Don't suffer as I do, dearest, unless that will comfort you. One thing is strange, but I feel quite certain of it. When I heard that I carried death about in me, scarcely an arm's length away, I thought quickly to myself that it was not the solution of the mystery. Others might have thought that it was, that because I was to die so soon, therefore I was not fit to be your wife.
But I know it was not that. I know that whatever hopes death in me put an end to, you would have married me and loved me patiently, till I released you, as I am to, so soon. It is always this same woe that crops up. Nothing I can ever think can account for what has been decreed. That, too, is a secret. Mine comes to meet it. When it arrives, shall I know. And not a word, not a word of this can reach you ever. Its uses are wrung out and drained dry, to comfort me in my eternal solitude. Good night. Very soon it will have to be good-bye. I know that nothing is real of it all, even now under the full light of day. Yet I know you are not dead. Only it leaves me with a hope that, at the lesser cost of my own death, when it comes, happiness may break in, and that whichever of us has been the most in poor and needy ignorance will know the truth at last, the truth which is an inseparable need for all hearts that love rightly.
Even now to me the thought of you is a peace passing all understanding. Beloved, beloved, beloved, all the greetings I ever gave you gather here, and are hungry to belong to you by a better way than I have ever dreamed. I am yours till something more than death swallows me up. Letter 82 Dearest, if you will believe any word of mine, you must not believe that I have died of a broken heart, should science and the doctors bring about a fulfillment of their present prophesying concerning me. I think my heart has held me up for a long time, not letting me know that I was ill. I did not notice, and my body snaps on a stem that has grown too thin to hold up its weight. I am at the end of twenty-two years. They have been too many for me, and the last has seemed a useless waste of time. It is difficult not to believe that great happiness might have carried me over many more years and built up for me in the end a renewed youth. I ask that quite frankly, wishing to know, and was told not to think it.
So, dearest, whatever comes, whatever I may have written to fill up my worst loneliness, be sure, if you care to be, that though my life was wholly yours, my death was my own, and comes at its natural time. Pity me, but invent no blame to yourself. My heart has sung of you even in the darkest days. In the face of everything, the blankness of everything I mean, it has clung to an unreasoning belief that in spite of appearances all had some well in it, above all to a conviction that, perhaps, without knowing it, you still love me. Believing that, it could not break, could not, dearest. Any other part of me, but not that. Beloved, I kiss your face, I kiss your lips and eyes. My mind melts into kisses when I think of you. However weak the rest of me grows, my love shall remain strong and certain. If I look at you again, how in a moment you would fill up the past and the future, and turn even my grief into gold. Even my senses then would forget that they ever had been starved. Dear share of the world, you have been out of sight, but I have never let you go. Ha! If only the whole of me, the double, doubting part of me as well, could only be so certain as to be able to give wings to this and let it fly to you. Wish for it, and I think the knowledge will come to me. Good night. God brings you to me in my first dream. But the longing so keeps me awake that sometimes I am a whole night sleepless.
I am frightened, dearest. I am frightened at death. Not only for fear it should take me altogether away from you, instead of to you, but for other reasons besides. Instincts which I thought gone, am not rid of even yet. No healthy body or body with power of enjoyment in it wishes to die, I think, and no heart with any desire still living out of the past. We know nothing at all, really. We only think we believe, and hope we know, and how thin that sort of conviction gets, when in our extremity we come face to face with the one immovable fact of our own death waiting for us. That is what I have to go through, yet even the fear is a relief. I come upon something that I can meet at last, a challenge to my courage, whether it is still to be found here in this body I have worn so weak, with useless lamentations. If I had your hand, or even a word from you, I think I should not be afraid. But perhaps I should. It is all one. Good-bye. I am beginning at last to feel a meaning in that word which I wrote at your bidding so long ago. Hope, beloved, from face to feet, good-bye. God be with you, wherever you go, and I do not. Letter 84.
Dearest, I am to have news of you. Arthur came to me last night and told me that, if I wished, he would bring me word of you. He goes to-morrow. He put out the light that I might not see his face. I felt what was there. You should know this of him. He has been the dearest possible of human beings to me since I lost you. I am almost not unblessed when I have him to speak to. Yet we can say so little together. I guess all he means, an endless wish to give me comfort, and I stay selfish. The knowledge that he would stolidly die to serve me hardly touches me. Oh, look kindly in his eyes if you see him. Mine will be looking at you out of his. Letter 85. Good morning, beloved. There is sun shining. I wonder if Arthur is with you yet. If faith could still remove mountains, surely I would have seen you long ago. But if I were to see you now, I fear that it meant you were dead. That the same world should hold you and me living, and unseen by each other, is a great mystery. Will love ever explain it? I wish I could bid the sun stand still over your meeting with Arthur, so that I might know. We were so like each other once. Time has worn it off, but he is like what I was. Will you remember me well enough to recognize me in him, and to be a little pitiful to my weak longing for a word this one last time of all?
Beloved, I press my lips to yours and pray, speak. Letter 86. Dearest, to-day Arthur came and brought me your message. I have at my heart your profoundly grateful remembrances. Somewhere else, unanswered, lies your prayer for God to bless me. To answer that, dearest, is not in his hands, but in yours. And the form of your message tells me it will not be. Not for this body and spirit that have been bound together so long in truth to you. I sit down for you here, if you should ever, for love's sake, send and make claim for any message back from me. A profoundly grateful remembrance, and so much more. So much more that has never failed. Most dear, most beloved, you were to me and are. Now I can no longer hold together, but it is my body and not my love that has failed.
End of An English Woman's Love Letters by Anonymous. Read by Esther. Music composed and performed by Michael J. L.
