_August 6th._
Of course, the most battered, the most obstinately unhappy person
couldn't hold out for ever against the all-pervading benediction of this
place. I know there is just the same old wretchedness going on as usual
outside it,--cruelty, people wantonly making each other miserable, love
being thrown away or frightened into fits, the dreadful betrayal of
trust that is the blackest wretchedness of all,--I can almost imagine
that if I were to hang over my terrace-wall I would see these well-known
dreary horrors crawling about in the valley below, crawling and tumbling
about together in a ghastly tangle. But at least there isn't down there
now my own particular contribution to the general wretchedness. I
brought that up here; dragged it up with me, not because I wanted to,
but because it would come. Surely, though, I shall leave it here? Surely
there'll be a day when I'll be able to pack it away into a neat bundle
and take it up to the top of some, arid, never-again-to-be-visited rock,
and leave it there and say, 'Goodbye. I'm separate. I've cut the
umbilical cord. Goodbye old misery. Now for what comes next.'
I can't believe this won't happen. I can't believe I won't go back down
the mountain different from what I was when I came. Lighter, anyhow, and
more wholesome inside. Oh, I do so _want_ to be wholesome inside again!
Nicely aired, sunshiny; instead of all dark, and stuffed up with black
memories.
_August 7th._
But I am getting on. Every morning now when I wake and see the patch of
bright sunshine on the wall at the foot of my bed that means another
perfect day, my heart goes out in an eager prayer that I may not
disgrace so great a blessing by private gloom. And I do think each of
these last days has been a little less disgraced than its yesterday.
Hardly a smudge, for instance, has touched any part of this afternoon. I
have felt as though indeed I were at last sitting up and taking notice.
And the first thing I want to do, the first use I want to make of having
turned the corner, is to talk.
How feminine. But I love to talk. Again how feminine. Well, I also love
to listen. But chiefly I love to listen to a man; therefore once more,
how feminine. Well, I'm a woman, so naturally I'm feminine; and a man
does seem to have more to say that one wants to hear than a woman. I do
want to hear what a woman has to say too, but not for so long a time,
and not so often. Not nearly so often. What reason to give for this
reluctance I don't quite know, except that a woman when she talks seems
usually to have forgotten the salt. Also she is apt to go on talking;
sometimes for quite a little while after you have begun to wish she
would leave off.
One of the last people who stayed here with me alone in 1914, just
before the arrival of the gay holiday group of the final days, was a
woman of many gifts--_le trop est l'ennemi du bien_--who started,
therefore, being full of these gifts and having eloquently to let them
out, talking at the station in the valley where I met her, and didn't,
to my growing amazement and chagrin, for I too wanted to say some
things, leave off (except when night wrapped her up in blessed silence)
till ten days afterwards, when by the mercy of providence she swallowed
a crumb wrong, and so had to stop.
How eagerly, released for a moment, I rushed in with as much as I could
get out during the brief time I knew she would take to recover! But my
voice, hoarse with disuse, had hardly said three sentences--miserable
little short ones--when she did recover, and fixing impatient and
reproachful eyes on me said:
'Do you _always_ talk so much?'
Surely that was unjust?
_August 8th._
Now see what Henry James wrote to me--to _me_ if you please! I can't get
over it, such a feather in my cap. Why, I had almost forgotten I had a
cap to have a feather in, so profound has been my humbling since last I
was here.
In the odd, fairy-tale like way I keep on finding bits of the past, of
years ago, as though they were still of the present, even of the last
half hour, I found the letter this morning in a room I wandered into
after breakfast. It is the only room downstairs besides the hall, and I
used to take refuge in it from the other gay inhabitants of the house so
as to open and answer letters somewhere not too distractingly full of
cheerful talk; and there on the table, spotlessly kept clean by Antoine
but else not touched, were all the papers and odds and ends of five
years back exactly as I must have left them. Even some chocolate I had
apparently been eating, and some pennies, and a handful of cigarettes,
and actually a box of matches,--it was all there, all beautifully
dusted, all as it must have been when last I sat there at the table. If
it hadn't been for the silence, the complete, sunny emptiness and
silence of the house, I would certainly have thought I had only been
asleep and having a bad dream, and that not five years but one uneasy
night had gone since I nibbled that chocolate and wrote with those pens.
Fascinated and curious I sat down and began eating the chocolate again.
It was quite good; made of good, lasting stuff in that good, apparently
lasting age we used to live in. And while I ate it I turned over the
piles of papers, and there at the bottom of them was a letter from Henry
James.
I expect I kept it near me on the table because I so much loved it and
wanted to re-read it, and wanted, I daresay, at intervals proudly to
show it to my friends and make them envious, for it was written at
Christmas, 1913; months before I left for England.
Reading it now my feeling is just astonishment that I, _I_ should ever
have had such a letter. But then I am greatly humbled; I have been on
the rocks; and can't believe that such a collection of broken bits as I
am now could ever have been a trim bark with all its little sails puffed
out by the kindliness and affection of anybody as wonderful as Henry
James.
Here it is; and it isn't any more vain of me now in my lamed and bruised
condition to copy it out and hang on its charming compliments than it is
vain for a woman who once was lovely and is now grown old to talk about
how pretty she used to be: