Of course I do forgive you. It’s you really that must forgive me for
saying such awful things. I didn’t mean them. I knew really, deep down
in my heart, that you loved me all the time. Of course I couldn’t say
good-bye—it would kill me—— Yes, I meant that part of it.
But you do see now, don’t you, that we can’t take that way out. For my
sake, you say, darling, but, indeed, I could bear anything for
myself—only I don’t want to spoil the lovely thing we have made. We
will do just as you say, wait for a year and see if anything happens. It
may, if we only want it enough. God might make a miracle to help us.
Such things have happened before now. He might even die—“in him
Nature’s copy’s not eterne”—doesn’t somebody say that in a play
somewhere? We used to go and see Shakespeare sometimes when I was at
school, and do the plays in class, though I didn’t pay much attention to
them then. I didn’t understand what a difference art and poetry make to
one’s life. I was waiting for you to come and teach me, my dear.
I am going to do some really solid reading now, to try and be more
worthy of my darling when the happy time comes. (I must believe there
will be a happy time, or I should go mad.) This year of waiting shall be
a year of self-development. That will make the desolate days pass more
quickly. Goodness knows I shall have time enough, for He never lets me
go out anywhere or have any of my own friends to see me. The only people
I ever have to talk to are his friends from the office. They talk about
bridges and electrical plant interminably. I don’t know how people can
live with such petty, dull things taking up all their minds. Sometimes
one or two of them have the graciousness to ask me if I have seen the
latest play or film, but I never have, and I just have to sit and smile
while He says, “We’re quiet, domestic people, my wife and I; we don’t
care about this night life.” And if I ever suggest going out, he
pretends that I want to be “gadding round” in nightclubs at all hours. I
am ashamed of being so ignorant of the things everybody is talking
about. Other husbands take their wives out. But no—if I want to stir
out of doors, I’m a bad woman—“one of these modern wives who don’t care
for their homes.” What kind of place is my home, that I should care
about it?
I have got that book you were talking about, _Women in Love_. It is very
queer and coarse in parts, don’t you think, and rather bewildering, but
some of the descriptions are very beautiful. I don’t understand it all,
but it is thrilling, like music. That bit about the horse, for instance.
I can’t quite make out what he means, but it is terribly exciting. What
funny people Lawrence’s characters are! They don’t seem to have any
ordinary lives, or have to make money or run households or anything.
That woman who is a schoolmistress—she never seems to have to bother
about her work, one would think it was all holidays at her school. I
suppose the author means that the humdrum things don’t really count in
one’s life at all, and I expect that is true, only in actual life they
do seem to make a lot of difference.
Oh, I do hate this cramping life—always telling lies and smothering up
one’s feelings. But tyrants make liars. It is what somebody I read about
in the papers calls “slave-psychology.” I feel myself turning into a
cringing slave, lying and crawling to get one little scrap of precious
freedom—a book, a letter, a thought even—and carrying it off into a
corner to gloat over it in secret. That is the way in which I am
learning to build up an inner life for myself, a lovely, secret freedom,
so that the things He says and does can’t really hurt me any longer. The
real Me is free and happy, worshipping in my hidden temple with my
darling Idol, my own dear Petra darling.
How I do love you! My starved life is full when I think of you—brimmed
with joy and inward laughter. And one day, perhaps, we shall come out of
the dark catacombs and build our temple of Love in the glorious
sunlight, with the golden gates wide open for all the world to see and
marvel at our happiness.
Yours, beloved, yours utterly and completely,
LOLO
I love to write the name you call me by—the name that is only yours.
Such a silly name it would sound to people who didn’t know what it
means. _He_ uses the name other people use—just like an uncle or
something. That’s all he is—a sort of Wicked Uncle in a fairy-tale. I
can bear him better if I think of him just as that.