Never thought you were going to stir up so much trouble when you
did me that big favour of writing a “hello” to me across the
mountains, did you? Well, please let me write this time, and if
it’s too much, give me the teeny-weenyest bit of a hint, and I’ll
turn my pen into a sword and cut it all out.
Was it cheeky of you to write to me? My dear Miss Carrie, I don’t
know exactly what the unpardonable sin is, but if you hadn’t
written, I’d feel awfully anxious about your future.
Right here let me assure you that I’m not one of these confirmed
correspondents. Hand on my heart! I vow I haven’t written two
pages at a time to anybody in years and years. My closest friends
complain that I don’t even answer letters. But when I hear from—oh,
you forbade that, didn’t you.
Don’t chain up your impulses, dear friend; let ’em skallyhoot
around. We don’t live more than nine times; and bottles and chains
weren’t made for people to confine and tie up their good impulses
with.
So you shook your head when you read that I was thinking of you
last week? All right. Couldn’t expect you to believe. But please
turn to page 78 and page 131 of the book I sent you, and try to
think whose eyes I attempted to describe. Since I saw you last
I’ve seen only one pair of eyes like that; and they—well, they
only _resembled_.
Think I’m foolish? Oh, no, I’m not. One can have an ideal if one
wants to. I’ve had one for—years. All I’ve had since have busted
and gone up the flume. Please, Miss Carrie, lemme keep that one.
I ain’t going to bother you about it. You say those old days are
laid away between lavender scented sheets. I can understand that
for you. Mine are not. They are fresh and fragrant, dewy and
everlasting. I’m not going to insist upon your believing it—shake
your head if you want to and give the sun a chance to brighten his
rays. I’m superior to luck, fate, history, and time. If I choose
to stand under a certain window yet in Roseboro and sigh for the
unattainable, no one shall balk me. So, don’t you try to bulldoze
me, Miss Caroline Howard. If my spirit elects to wander there,
please you let it alone.
Do you know that over there in the Ridge of blue and gold you are
the most splendidly endowed of all the daughters of the gods? Why?
Because my memory tells me that you have (to my memorial eye and
mind) all that can be conferred of loveliness; and, according to
your boast, you have a new and delectable way of fixing tomatoes.
Now, I adore tomatters. I could die for ’em, I nearly have several
times. You can’t imagine how interested I was in your tomato
garden. In your tomato garden. Say—I believe you promulgated some
nonsense in your letter about whether I stood under Fifth Avenue
girls’ windows about midnight and sent up flowers and candies. Why,
lemme tell you, Miss Carrie, I’ve seen ’em and talked to ’em, and
had tea with ’em—and lemme tell you—I’d rather set (not sit) across
a little table with you and have a tomatter between us with ice
and——
Say—I don’t agree with you about the nuts. Why, I never saw a
tomatter in my life stuffed with nuts. Air they good? The ice
sounds all right. And lemme tell you—I think you’re wrong about
the Mayonnaise dressing. I have such a respect for tomatters that I
must challenge you. French dressing, with green peppers—so say I.
And yet it is no more than Cosmic and Natural Justice that you
should be woozy about the proper way to fix tomatters. Perfection
has never been attained by mortals. (Now my memory is at work
again.) If you could be as I remember you and an expert in
tomatters, too, why there would be double perfection, and that’s
an unknown quantity in mathematics. I prefer to retain my ideal;
therefore the deduction is: your tomatters are off their trolley.
Still, I’d like to try one. That’s constancy and faith. Will you
keep one on ice for me, on the chance that good Fortune may allow
me to drift down that way?
I sent up yesterday and got the Christmas _Leslies_. Why, I
remembered that story, though I didn’t recognize the name. It
was very sweet and tender. I can see that you like kids. I
congratulate you heartily on your work; I hope you will find it
profitable and a blessing. You have unquestioned sympathy and a
deep and true “humanness.” You ought to come to New York, where
you will be _in medias res_. There’s nothing like being on the
ground. You get artistic ideas and associations here that would
be invaluable to you. Writing is a bully game. You want to know
the dealers. I studied that fact out, and came here. To-day I get
five times more per word than when I came. Sister of the pen and
stamped-envelope-for-return, I speak wisdom to you. And here is
life. Beautiful are the mountains and the moon silvering their
tops; but here one learns the value of each upon each. And the
moonlight of the mind is the most beautiful. Here art teaches
Nature to conform. You could expand and rise here. I do not advise
you, but I speak with wisdom of the markets and the heart. Pardon
me if I am scornful of the Mayonnaise, and am dubious about the
nuts. I could overlook a stab at my heart with a poniard, but—the
tomatter and I have been friends. Yet I could—may I try one the way
you fix ’em?
Wish I could have accepted your invitation to sail down on the
big golden bubble of a moon, and drap under the cherry tree. Bet
a dollar I’d have lit on the rake and the hoe you left there in
the grass. Can’t you ever remember to put ’em behind the door in
the woodhouse when you are scratching around in the garden? I
haven’t ridden on the moon in a long time. It’s on the full now,
and I’m afraid I’d slide off. When it gets to look like a slice
of canteloupe again, so I can hold on to the ends, I’ll try to
make that trip. Please spread an armful of hay and an old piece of
carpet under the cherry tree so I won’t come down with such a jolt
when I jump off. Then I’d say something like this:
“Miss Howard, please excuse my intrusion into your section of
real estate devoted to domestic agriculture; but the object of
my somewhat precipitous descent is to ascertain the identity
of a certain youthful and pulchritudinous being with whom at a
considerably earlier period I sustained cognizance, and whose
identification is relatively dependent upon a tonsorial arrangement
in which her tresses retain the perpendicularity peculiar to
juvenility at the time referred to.”
And you would answer:
“Sir, regretting the futility of your rather incomprehensible
errand—which, had you been better versed in the more recent
dictates of fashion, might have been advantageously and
indefinitely postponed—I must inform you that none of the coiffures
that are worn this summer allow any such primitive and adolescent
arrangement of the capillary filaments as you refer to in your
preamble; and therefore, as far as the little girl whose hair was
in a plait is concerned, there is nothing doing.”
I’ll bet that’s what’d happen to me. And then I’d have to go down
to the road and sit on the fence and wait a month to catch the moon
back.
Miss Carrie, please, please send me that picture of yourself that
you mentioned, or another one. If your heart hadn’t been so hard
and cruel you’d have enclosed it before instead of talking about
it. How can you write those tender and kind little stories when
really you are so unfeeling and stony hearted? You knew I wanted
that picture. I’m going to tell all the editors I know that your
work is a fraud—that you don’t feel it at all.
No doubt there isn’t a single tear in your eye or the slightest
thawing of your heart when I remind you that in another two weeks I
shall be treading the pathless wilds of Maine. There in the dense
tropical forest an infuriated porcupine may spring upon me from
some lofty iceberg, or, becoming lost, I might perish in the snow
of sunstroke. Think, Miss Carrie, what an ad it would be for you
when the papers printed the news of a tourist found in the woods—an
unknown man wearing tennis shoes and a woollen comforter, with 30
cents in his pocket, a frozen tomato in one hand, and a picture of
the well-known and beautiful authoress C. H. in the other. It is no
less than your duty to your publishers to try and get that ad. So,
please send on the picture, will you?
Sincerely yours,
ROBERT HARALSON.
Is it because I live here on the edge of the world, outside of its
activity, that I read Bobby’s letter over and over? Is that the
reason I search page 78 and page 131 of the book? The eyes of Bobby’s
heroine are beautiful, and he says they are like mine. It was dear
of him to remember the colour of my eyes through all these years.
I couldn’t have told the colour of his eyes. And I fibbed when I
said those old memories were laid away in lavender scented sheets.
That’s the trouble with a spinster. She can be counted on to run to
sentiment with or without encouragement.
Oh, dear, I’m so tired. I want life different—not just to go in and
eat supper and look over the lessons for to-morrow and read something
and go to bed, as I have done all the nights of the past twelve
Octobers and am likely to continue for the next several dozen of
them. I fibbed when I wrote Bobby I had memories. I haven’t. And I
don’t want memories—memories that sigh of age. I want joys that dance
with youth. I want to sit at a little table and look across—not at
John.
_October 6th.
Friday._
When I came home this afternoon there was my letter. I could have
told Bobby that Marsville young women were hopelessly ancient at
twenty-five, that nobody ever looked at them after they were thirty.
Instead, I told him about the drummer who tried to flirt with me
on the train. In my effort to get rid of him I moved all over the
coach and finally took the last seat, to have him take the last seat
opposite. I wrote Bobby that I thought of moving into the Pullman,
but that the trip was short and my economic soul balked at the
suggestion.
Bobby answers:
_New York, October 4th._