Dearest: Every day I am giving myself a little more pain than I need--for
the sake of you. I am giving myself your letters to read again day by day
as I received them. Only one a day, so that I have still something left to
look forward to to-morrow: and oh, dearest, what _unanswerable_ things
they have now become, those letters which I used to answer so easily!
There is hardly a word but the light of to-day stands before it like a
drawn sword, between the heart that then felt and wrote so, and mine as it
now feels and waits.
All your tenderness then seems to be cruelty now: only _seems_, dearest,
for I still say, I _do_ say that it is not so. I know it is not so: I,
who know nothing else, know that! So I look every day at one of these
monstrous contradictions, and press it to my heart till it becomes
reconciled with the pain that is there always.
Indeed you loved me: that I see now. Words which I took so much for
granted then have a strange force now that I look back at them. You did
love: and I who did not realize it enough then, realize it now when you
no longer do.
And the commentary on all this is that one letter of yours which I say
over and over to myself sometimes when I cannot pray: "There is no fault
in you: the fault is elsewhere; I can no longer love you as I did. All
that was between us must be at an end; for your good and mine the only
right thing is to say good-by without meeting. I know you will not
forget me, but you will forgive me, even because of the great pain I
cause you. You are the most generous woman I have known. If it would
comfort you to blame me for this I would beg you to do it: but I know
you better, and ask you to believe that it is my deep misfortune rather
than my fault that I can be no longer your lover, as, God knows, I was
once, I dare not say how short a time ago. To me you remain, what I
always found you, the best and most true-hearted woman a man could pray
to meet."
This, dearest, I say and say: and write down now lest you have forgotten
it. For your writing of it, and all the rest of you that I have, goes
with me to my grave. How superstitious we are of our own bodies after
death!--I, as if I believed that I should ever rise or open my ears to
any sound again! I do not, yet it comforts me to make sure that certain
things shall go with me to dissolution.
Truly, dearest, I believe grief is a great deceiver, and that no one
quite quite wishes not to exist. I have no belief in future existence;
yet I wish it so much--to exist again outside all this failure of my
life. For at present I have done you no good at all, only evil.
And I hope now and then, that writing thus to you I am not writing
altogether in vain. If I can see sufficiently at the last to say--Send
him these, it will be almost like living again: for surely you will love
me again when you see how much I have suffered,--and suffered because I
would not let thought of you go.
Could you dream, Beloved, reading _this_ that there is bright sunlight
streaming over my paper as I write?