A letter! Do the charm and uncertainty of it ever fade? Who knows what
may be written upon the pages within!
Far back, in a dim, dream-haunted childhood, the first letter came to
me. It was "a really, truly letter," properly stamped and addressed,
and duly delivered by the postman. With what wonder the chubby fingers
broke the seal! It did not matter that there was an inclosure to one's
mother, and that the thing itself was written by an adoring relative;
it was a personal letter, of private and particular importance, and
that day the postman assumed his rightful place in one's affairs.
In the treasure box of many a grandmother is hidden a pathetic scrawl
that the baby made for her and called "a letter." To the alien eye,
it is a mere tangle of pencil marks, and the baby himself, grown
to manhood, with children of his own, would laugh at the yellowed
message, which is put away with his christening robe and his first
shoes, but to one, at least, it speaks with a deathless voice.
It is written in books and papers that some unhappy mortals are
swamped with mail. As a lady recently wrote to the President of the
United States: "I suppose you get so many letters that when you see
the postman coming down the street, you don't care whether he has
anything for you or not."
Indeed, the President might well think the universe had gone suddenly
wrong if the postman passed him by, but there are compensations in
everything. The First Gentleman of the Republic must inevitably miss
the pleasant emotions which letters bring to the most of us.
The clerks and carriers in the business centres may be pardoned if
they lose sight of the potentialities of the letters that pass
through their hands. When a skyscraper is a postal district in
itself, there is no time for the man in grey to think of the burden he
carries, save as so many pounds of dead weight, becoming appreciably
lighter at each stop. But outside the hum and bustle, on quiet streets
and secluded by-ways, there are faces at the windows, watching eagerly
for the mail.
The progress of the postman is akin to a Roman triumph, for in his
leathern pack lies Fate. Long experience has given him a sixth sense,
as if the letters breathed a hint of their contents through their
superscriptions.
The business letter, crisp and to the point, has an atmosphere of its
own, even where cross lines of typewriting do not show through the
envelope.
The long, rambling, friendly hand is distinctive, and if it has been
carried in the pocket a long time before mailing, the postman knows
that the writer is a married woman with a foolish trust in her
husband.
Circulars addressed mechanically, at so much a thousand, never
deceive the postman, though the recipient often opens them with
pleasurable sensations, which immediately sink to zero. And the
love-letters! The carrier is a veritable Sherlock Holmes when it comes
to them.
Gradually he becomes acquainted with the inmost secrets of those upon
his route. Friendship, love, and marriage, absence and return, death,
and one's financial condition, are all as an open book to the man
in grey. Invitations, cards, wedding announcements, forlorn little
letters from those to whom writing is not as easy as speech, childish
epistles with scrap pictures pasted on the outside, all give an
inkling of their contents to the man who delivers them.
When the same bill comes to the same house for a long and regular
period, then ceases, even the carrier must feel relieved to know that
it has been paid. When he isn't too busy, he takes a friendly look at
the postal cards, and sometimes saves a tenant in a third flat the
weariness of two flights of stairs by shouting the news up the tube!
If the dweller in a tenement has ingratiating manners, he may learn
how many papers, and letters are being stuffed into the letter-box, by
a polite inquiry down the tube when the bell rings. Through the subtle
freemasonry of the postman's voice a girl knows that her lover has not
forgotten her--and her credit is good for the "two cents due" if the
tender missive is overweight.
"All the world loves a lover," and even the busy postman takes a
fatherly interest in the havoc wrought by Cupid along his route. The
little blind god knows neither times nor seasons--all alike are his
own--but the man in grey, old and spectacled though he may be, is his
confidential messenger.
Love-letters are seemingly immortal. A clay tablet on which one of the
Pharaohs wrote, asking for the heart and hand of a beautiful foreign
princess, is now in the British Museum. But suppose the postman had
not been sure-footed, and all the clay letters had been smashed into
fragments in a single grand catastrophe! What a stir in high places,
what havoc in Church and State, and how many fond hearts broken, if
the postman had fallen down!
"Nothing feeds the flame like a letter," said Emerson; "it has intent,
personality, secrecy." Flimsy and frail as it is, so easily torn or
destroyed, the love-letter many times outlasts the love. Even the
Father of his Country, though he has been dead this hundred years or
more, has left behind him a love-letter, ragged and faded, but still
legible, beginning: "My Dearest Life and Love."
"Matter is indestructible," so the scientists say, but what of the
love-letter that is reduced to ashes? Does its passion live again in
some far-off violet flame, or, rising from its dust, bloom once more
in a fragrant rose, to touch the lips of another love?
In countless secret places, the tender missives are hidden, for the
lover must always keep his joy in tangible form, to be sure that it
was not a dream. They fly through the world by day and night, like
white-winged birds that can say, "I love you"--over mountain, hill,
stream, and plain; past sea and lake and river, through the desert's
fiery heat and amid the throbbing pulses of civilisation, with never
a mistake, to bring exquisite rapture to another heart and wings of
light to the loved one's soul.
Under the pillow of the maiden, her lover's letter brings visions of
happiness too great for the human heart to hold. Even in her dreams,
her fingers tighten upon his letter--the visible assurance of his
unchanging and unchangeable love.
When the bugle sounds the charge, and dimly through the flash and
flame the flag signals "Follow!" many a heart, leaping to answer with
the hot blood of youth, finds a sudden tenderness in the midst of its
high courage, from the loving letter which lies close to the soldier's
breast.
Bunker Hill and Gettysburg, Moscow and the Wilderness, Waterloo,
Mafeking, and San Juan--the old blood-stained fields and the modern
scenes of terror have all alike known the same message and the same
thrill. The faith and hope of the living, the kiss and prayer of the
dying, the cries of the wounded, and the hot tears of those who have
parted forever, are on the blood-stained pages of the love-letters
that have gone to war.
"_Ich liebe Dich_," "_Je t'aime_," or, in our dear English speech, "I
love you,"--it is all the same, for the heart knows the universal
language, the words of which are gold, bedewed with tears that shine
like precious stones.
Every attic counts old love-letters among its treasures, and when the
rain beats on the roof and grey swirls of water are blown against the
pane, one may sit among the old trunks and boxes and bring to light
the loves of days gone by.
The little hair-cloth trunk, with its rusty lock and broken hinges,
brings to mind a rosy-cheeked girl in a poke bonnet, who went
a-visiting in the stage-coach. Inside is the bonnet itself--white,
with a gorgeous trimming of pink "lute-string" ribbon, which has faded
into ashes of roses at the touch of the kindly years.
From the trunk comes a musty fragrance--lavender, sweet clover,
rosemary, thyme, and the dried petals of roses that have long since
crumbled to dust. Scraps of brocade and taffeta, yellowed lingerie,
and a quaint old wedding gown, daguerreotypes in ornate cases, and
then the letters, tied with faded ribbon, in a package by themselves.
The fingers unconsciously soften to their task, for the letters are
old and yellow, and the ink has faded to brown. Every one was cut open
with the scissors, not hastily torn according to our modern fashion,
but in a slow and seemly manner, as befits a solemn occasion.
Perhaps the sweet face of a great-grandmother grew much perplexed at
the sight of a letter in an unfamiliar hand, and perhaps, too, as is
the way of womankind, she studied the outside a long time before she
opened it. As the months passed by, the handwriting became familiar,
but a coquettish grandmother may have flirted a bit with the letter,
and put it aside--until she could be alone.
All the important letters are in the package, from the first formal
note asking permission to call, which a womanly instinct bade the
maiden put aside, to the last letter, written when twilight lay upon
the long road they had travelled together, but still beginning: "My
Dear and Honoured Wife."
Bits of rosemary and geranium, lemon verbena, tuberose, and
heliotrope, fragile and whitened, but still sweet, fall from the
opened letters and rustle softly as they fall.
Far away in the "peace which passeth all understanding," the writer of
the letters sleeps, but the old love keeps a fragrance that outlives
the heart in which it bloomed.
At night, when the fires below are lighted, and childish voices make
the old house ring with laughter, Memory steals into the attic to sing
softly of the past, as a mother croons her child to sleep.
Rocking in a quaint old attic chair, with the dear familiar things of
home gathered all about her, Memory's voice is sweet, like a harp
tuned in the minor mode when the south wind sweeps the strings.
Bunches of herbs swing from the rafters and fill the room with the
wholesome scent of an old-fashioned garden, where rue and heartsease
grew. With the fragrance comes the breath from that garden of
Mnemosyne, where the simples for heartache nod beside the River of
Forgetfulness.
In a flash the world is forgotten, and into the attic come dear faces
from that distant land of childhood, where a strange enchantment
glorified the commonplace, and made the dreams of night seem real.
Footsteps that have long been silent are heard upon the attic floor,
and voices, hushed for years, whisper from the shadows from the other
end of the room.
A moonbeam creeps into the attic and transfigures the haunted chamber
with a sheen of silver mist. From the spinning-wheel come a soft hum
and a delicate whir; then a long-lost voice breathes the first notes
of an old, old song. The melody changes to a minuet, and the lady in
the portrait moves, smiling, from the tarnished gilt frame that
surrounds her--then a childish voice says: "Mother, are you asleep?"
Down the street the postman passes, bearing his burden of joy and
pain: letters from far-off islands, where the Stars and Stripes gleam
against a forest of palms; from the snow-bound fastnesses of the
North, where men are searching for gold; from rose-scented valleys and
violet fields, where the sun forever shines, and from lands across the
sea, where men speak an alien tongue--single messages from one to
another; letters that plead for pardon cross the paths of those that
are meant to stab; letters written in jest too often find grim earnest
at the end of their journey, and letters written in all tenderness
meet misunderstandings and pain, when the postman brings them home;
letters that deal with affairs of state and shape the destiny of a
nation; tidings of happiness and sorrow, birth and death, love and
trust, and the thousand pangs of trust betrayed; an hundred joys and
as many griefs are all in the postman's hands.
No wonder, then, that there is a stir in the house, that eyes
brighten, hearts beat quickly, and eager steps hasten to the door of
destiny, when the postman rings the bell!