_August_, 1893.
MY DEAR COLVIN,—Quite impossible to write. Your letter is due to-day; a
nasty, rainy-like morning with huge blue clouds, and a huge indigo shadow
on the sea, and my lamp still burning at near 7. Let me humbly give you
news. Fanny seems on the whole the most, or the only, powerful member of
the family; for some days she has been the Flower of the Flock. Belle is
begging for quinine. Lloyd and Graham have both been down with ‘belly
belong him’ (Black Boy speech). As for me, I have to lay aside my lawn
tennis, having (as was to be expected) had a smart but eminently brief
hemorrhage. I am also on the quinine flask. I have been re-casting the
beginning of the _Hanging Judge_ or _Weir of Hermiston_; then I have been
cobbling on my grandfather, whose last chapter (there are only to be
four) is in the form of pieces of paper, a huge welter of inconsequence,
and that glimmer of faith (or hope) which one learns at this trade, that
somehow and some time, by perpetual staring and glowering and rewriting,
order will emerge. It is indeed a queer hope; there is one piece for
instance that I want in—I cannot put it one place for a good reason—I
cannot put it another for a better—and every time I look at it, I turn
sick and put the MS. away.
Well, your letter hasn’t come, and a number of others are missing. It
looks as if a mail-bag had gone on, so I’ll blame nobody, and proceed to
business.
It looks as if I was going to send you the first three chapters of my
Grandfather. . . . If they were set up, it would be that much anxiety
off my mind. I have a strange feeling of responsibility, as if I had my
ancestors’ _souls_ in my charge, and might miscarry with them.
There’s a lot of work gone into it, and a lot more is needed. Still
Chapter I. seems about right to me, and much of Chapter II. Chapter III.
I know nothing of, as I told you. And Chapter IV. is at present all ends
and beginnings; but it can be pulled together.
This is all I have been able to screw up to you for this month, and I may
add that it is not only more than you deserve, but just about more than I
was equal to. I have been and am entirely useless; just able to tinker
at my Grandfather. The three chapters—perhaps also a little of the
fourth—will come home to you next mail by the hand of my cousin Graham
Balfour, a very nice fellow whom I recommend to you warmly—and whom I
think you will like. This will give you time to consider my various and
distracted schemes.
All our wars are over in the meantime, to begin again as soon as the
war-ships leave. Adieu.
R. L. S.