_To W. E. Norris._
Lamb House, Rye,
September 26th, 1900.
My dear Norris,
Charming and "gracious" your letter, and welcome sign of your
restoration in more senses than one. Though I see you, alas, nowadays,
at such intervals, I feel this extremely individual little island to be
appreciably less its characteristic self when you are away from it, and
sensibly more so, and breathing the breath of relief, when it gets you
back and plumps you down with a fond "There!" on your high hilltop, a
beacon-like depository of traditions no one else so admirably embodies.
Your invitation to come and share for a few days your paradise with you
finds me, I am very sorry to say, in a hindered and helpless moment. I
am obliged to recognise the stern fact that I _can't_ leave home just
now. I have had a complicated and quite overwhelmed summer--agreeably,
interestingly, anxiously and worriedly, even; but inevitably and
logically--waves of family history, a real deluge, having rolled over my
bowed head and left me, as to the question of work, production, time,
ease and other matters, quite high and dry. I went on Saturday last to
Dover to see my sister-in-law off to the Continent--and as she took a
night boat had to stop there over Sunday, at the too-familiar (and too
other things) Lord Warden; after which I came back to bury (yes, bury!)
my precious, my admirable little Peter, whom I think you had met. (He
passed away on Sunday at St. Leonard's, fondly attended by the local
"canine specialist"--after three days of dreadful little dysentery.)
Thus is constituted the first moment of my being by myself for about
four months. It may last none too long, and is, already, to be tempered
by the palpable presence of Gosse from Saturday p.m. to Monday next.
So, with arrears untold, in every direction, with preoccupations but
just temporarily arranged, I feel that I absolutely _must_ sit close for
a good many weeks to come; in fact till the New Year--after which I
depart. I don't quite know what becomes of me then, but I don't,
distinctly, for a third year, hibernate here. My London rooms are as
probably as sordidly let for 1901 (though not to a certainty,) and it
will (my wretched fate--not _fat_--_fate_) depend more or less upon
that. My brother, ill, but thank God, better, wants me to come to Egypt
with him and his wife for 12 weeks--his health demanding it, but he only
going if I will accompany him. So the pistol is at my head. Will it
bring me down? I've a positive terror of it. The alternatives are Rome
(of which I've a still greater terror than of Egypt, for it's an equal
complication and less reward,) or De Vere Gardens, or a more squalid
perch in town if De V.G. are closed to me. The latter, the last-named,
doom is what I really want. If I should, clingingly, clutchingly, stick
to these shores, I might _then_, were it agreeable to you, be able to
put in three days of Underbank, which I've never seen in its tragic
winter mood. But these things are in the lap of the gods.
_Later, same night._
I broke off this a.m. to go over to Lydd, where I've had, all summer, a
friend in camp, and promised to pay him a visit. My amanuensis, who has
been taking at the Paris exhibition a week of joy refused to his
employer (and indeed wholly undesired by him--did your "slow" return
from Marienbad partly consist of the same?) comes back to-morrow, and my
friend's battalion departs on Saturday--so it was my one chance to
redeem my perpetually falsified vow. I went by train and bicycled
back--in the teeth of a gale now fully developed here and howling in my
old chimneys; which sounds the knell of this (to do it justice)
incomparable September. I don't quite know what Drury Lane military
drama effects I had counted on--but I trundled home with the depressed
sense of something that hadn't wholly come off (in the way of a romantic
appeal,) a dusty, scrubby plain in which dirty, baby soldiers pigged
about with nothing particular to do. However, I've performed my promise,
and I sit down to a pile of correspondence that, for many days past, has
refused visibly to shrink.... You excite, with your Scandinavian and
Austrian holidays and junketings, the envious amaze of poor motionless
and shillingless me. I've been thinking of appealing to your
"Suffrages," but I more and more feel that I could never afford you. My
watering place is Hastings, and my round tour is rounded by the
afternoon. But good-night; my servant has just deposited by my side the
glass of boiling water which constitutes his nightly admonition that
it's "high time" I went to bed--and constitutes my own inexpensive
emulation of Marienbad and Copenhagen--where I am sure Gosse drinks the
most exotic things. Please say to Miss Effie that I doubly regret having
to be deaf to any kind urgency of hers, and that I hope she will find
means to include me in some prayer for the conversion of the benighted.
But my hot water is cooling, and it takes me so long to let it gouge its
inward course that I will be first yours, my dear Norris, always--though
I'm afraid you will say always impracticably--