Jena, July 3d.
Dear Mr. Anstruther,--I am sorry not to have been able to answer your
letters for so many weeks, and sorry that you should have been, as you
say, uneasy, but my telegram in reply to yours will have explained what
has been happening to us. My step-mother died a fortnight ago. Almost
immediately after I wrote last to you she began to be very ill. My
feelings toward her have undergone a complete upheaval. I cannot speak
of her. She is revenging herself, as only the dead in their utter
unresentfulness can revenge themselves, for every hard and scoffing
thought I had of her in life. I think I told you once about her annuity.
Now it is gone Papa and I must see to it that we live on my mother's
money alone. It is a hundred pounds a year, so the living will have to
be prudent; not so prudent, I hope, but that we shall have everything to
enjoy that is worth enjoying, but quite prudent enough to force us to
take thought. So we are leaving the flat, grown far too expensive for
us, as soon as we can find some other home. We have almost decided on
one already. Mr. Collins went to England when the illness grew evidently
hopeless, and we shall not take him back again, for my father does not
care, at least at present, to have strangers with us, and I myself do
not feel as though I could cook for and look after a young man in the
way my step-mother did. Not having one will make us poor, but I think we
shall be able to manage quite well, for we do not want much.
Thank you for your kind letters since the telegram. The ones before
that, coming into this serious house filled with the nearness of Death,
and of Death in his sternest mood, his hands cruel with scourges, seemed
to me so inexpressibly--well, I will not say it; it is not fair to blame
you, who could not know in whose shadow we were sitting, for being
preoccupied with the trivialities of living. But letters sent to friends
a long way off do sometimes fall into their midst with a rather ghastly
clang of discord. It is what yours did. I read them sometimes in the
night, watching by my step-mother in the half-dark room during the
moments when she had a little peace and was allowed to slip away from
torture into sleep. By the side of that racked figure and all it meant
and the tremendous sermons it was preaching me, wordless, voiceless
sermons, more eloquent than any I shall hear again, how strange, how
far-away your echoes from life and the world seemed! Distant tinklings
of artificialness; not quite genuine writhings beneath not quite genuine
burdens; idle questionings and self-criticisms; plaints, doubts, and
complicated half-veiled reproaches of myself that I should be able to be
pleased with a world so worm-eaten that I should still be able to chant
my song of life in a major key in a world so manifestly minor and
chromatic. These things fell oddly across the gravity of that room.
Shadows in a place where everything was clear, cobwebs of unreality
where everything was real. They made me sigh, and they made me smile,
they were so very black and yet so very little. I used to wonder what
that usually excellent housemaid Experience is about, that she has not
yet been after you with her broom. You know her specialty is the pulling
up of blinds and the letting in of the morning sun. But it is unfair to
judge you. Your letters since you knew have been kindness itself. Thank
you for them.
Yours sincerely,