LXVII

Galgenberg, Jan. 12th.

Dear Mr. Anstruther,--I did a silly thing today: I went and mourned in

an empty house. I don't think I'm generally morbid, but today I indulged

in a perfect orgy of morbidness. Write and scold me. It is your turn to

scold, and by doing it thoroughly you will bring me back to my ordinary

cheerful state. The Lindebergs are gone, and I am feeling it absurdly. I

didn't realize how much I loved that little dear Vicki, nor in the least

the interest Frau von Lindeberg's presence and doings gave life. The

last three weeks have been so thrilling, there was so much warmth and

brightness going about that it reached even onlookers like myself and

warmed and lighted them; and now in the twinkling of an eye it is

gone,--gone, wiped out, snuffed out, and Papa and I are alone again, and

there is a northeast wind. These are the times when philosophy is so

useful; but do explain why it is that one is only a philosopher so long

as one is happy. When I am contented, and everything is just as I like

it, I can philosophize beautifully, and do it with a hearty sincerity

that convinces both myself and the person listening to me; but when the

bad days come, the empty days, the disappointing, chilly days, behold

Philosophy, that serene and dignified companion so long as the weather

was fine, clutching her academic skirts hastily together and indulging

in the form of rapid retreat known to the vulgar and the graphic as

skedaddling. 'Do not all charms fly,' your Keats inquires, 'at the mere

touch of cold Philosophy?' But I have found that nothing flies quite so

fast as cold Philosophy herself; she would win in any race when the race

is who shall run away quickest; she is of no use whatever--it is my

deliberate conclusion--except to sit with in the sun on the south side

of a sheltering wall on those calm afternoons of life when you've only

got to open your mouth and ripe peaches drop into it. I used to think if

I could love her enough she would, in her gratitude, chloroform me

safely over all the less pleasant portions of life, see to it that I was

unconscious during the passage, never let me be aware of anything but

the beautiful and the good; but either she has no gratitude or I have

little love, and the years have brought me the one conviction that she

is an artist at leaving you in the lurch. The world is strewn with

persons she has left in it, and out of the three inhabitants of a

mountain to leave one there is surely an enormous percentage. Now what

is your opinion of a woman with a healthy body, a warm room, and a

sufficient dinner, who feels as though the soul within her were an

echoing cavern, empty, cold, and dark? It is what I feel at this moment,

and it is shameful. Isn't it shameful that the sight of leaden

clouds--but they really are dreadful clouds, inky, ragged,

harassed--scudding across the sky, and of furious brown beech-leaves on

the little trees in front of the Lindebergs' deserted house being lashed

and maddened by the wind, should make me suddenly catch my breath for

pain? It is pain, quite sharp, unmistakable pain, and it is because I am

alone, and my friends gone, and the dusk is falling. This afternoon I

leaned against their gate and really suffered. Regret for the past, fear

for the future,--vague, rather terrifying fears, not wholly unconnected

with you--hurt so much that they positively succeeded in wringing a tear

out of me. It was a very reluctant tear, and only came out after a world

of wringing, and I had stood there a most morbid long time before it

appeared; but it did appear, and the vicious wind screamed round the

Lindebergs' blank house, rattled its staring naked windows, banged in

wild gusts about the road where the puddles of half melted snow

reflected the blackness of the sky, tore at my hair and dress, stung my

cheeks, shook the gate I held on to, thundered over the hills. Dear

young man, I don't want to afflict you with these tales of woe and

weakness, but I must tell you what I did next. I went up and got the key

from Johanna, in whose keeping Frau von Lindeberg had left it, and came

down again, and unlocked the door of the house lately so full of light

and life, and crept fearfully about the echoing rooms and up the dismal

stairs, and let myself go, as I tell you, to a very orgy of morbidness.

It was like a nightmare. Memories took the form of ghosts, and clutched

at me through the balusters and from behind doors with thin cold

fingers; and the happiest memories were those that clutched the coldest.

I fled at last in a sudden panic, flying out of reach of them, slamming

the door to, running for my life up the road and in at our gate. Johanna

did not let me in at once, and I banged with my fists in a frenzy to get

away from the black sky and the threatening thunder of the

storm-stricken pines. '_Herr Gott_' said Johanna when she saw me; so

that I must have looked rather wild.

Well, I am weak, you see, just as weak and silly as the very weakest and

silliest in spite of my big words and brave face. I am writing now as

near the stove as possible in Papa's room, glad to be with him, glad to

be warm, grateful to sit with somebody alive after that hour with the

ghosts; and the result of deep considering has been to force me to face

the fact that there is much meanness in my nature. There is. Don't

bother to contradict; there is. All my forlornness since yesterday is

simply the outcome of a mixture of envy and self-pity. I do miss dear

Vicki whom I greatly loved, I do miss the cheery Joey, I miss Papa

Lindeberg who likened me to Hebe, I miss his wife who kept me in my

proper place--it is quite true that I miss these people, but that would

never of itself be a feeling strong enough to sweep me off my feet into

black pools of misery as I was swept this afternoon, and never, never

would make me, who have so fine a contempt for easy tears, cry. No, Mr.

Anstruther, bitter truths once seen have to be stared at squarely, and I

am simply comparing my lot with Vicki's and being sorry for myself. It

is amazing that it should be so, for have I not everything a reasonable

being needs, and am I not, then, a reasonable being? And the meanness of

it; for it does imply a grudging, an uneasiness in the presence of

somebody else's happiness. Well, I'm thoroughly ashamed, and that at

least is a good thing; and now that you know how badly I too need

lecturing and how I am torn by particularly ungenerous emotions perhaps

you'll see what a worthless person I am and will take me down from the

absurd high pinnacle on which you persist in keeping me and on which I

have felt so desperately uncomfortable for months past. It is infinitely

humiliating, I do assure you, to be--shall we say venerated? for

excellences one would like to possess but is most keenly aware one does

not. Persons with any tendency to be honest about themselves and with

even the smallest grain of a sense of humor should never be chosen as

idols and set up aloft in giddy places. They make shockingly bad idols.

They are divided by a desire to laugh and an immense pity for the

venerator.

I add these observations, dear friend, to the description of my real

nature that has gone before because your letters are turning more and

more into the sort of letters that ends a placid friendship. I want to

be placid. I love being placid. I insist on being placid. And the

thought of your letters with so little placidness about them, was with

me this afternoon in that terrible house, and it added to the fear of

the future that seized me by the throat and would not let me go. Is it,

then, so impossible to be friends, just friends with a man, in the same

dear frank way one is with another woman, or a man is with a man? I

hoped you and I were going to prove the possibility triumphantly. I

even, so keenly do I desire it, prayed that we were. But perhaps there

is little use in such praying.

Yours sincerely,