Do you forgive me for coming into your life, Beloved? I do not know in
what way I can have hurt you, but I know that I have. Perhaps without
knowing it we exchange salves for the wounds we have given and received?
Dearest, I trust those I send reach you: I send them, wishing till I grow
weak. My arms strain and become tired trying to be wings to carry them to
you: and I am glad of that weariness--it seems to be some virtue that has
gone out of me. If all my body could go out in the effort, I think I
should get a glimpse of your face, and the meaning of everything then at
last.
I have brought in a wild rose to lay here in love's cenotaph, among all
my thoughts of you. It comes from a graveyard full of "little deaths." I
remember once sending you a flower from the same place when love was
still fortunate with us. I must have been reckless in my happiness to do
that!
Beloved, if I could speak or write out all my thoughts, till I had
emptied myself of them, I feel that I should rest. But there is no
_emptying_ the brain by thinking. Things thought come to be thought
again over and over, and more and fresh come in their train: children
and grandchildren, generations of them, sprung from the old stock. I
have many thoughts now, born of my love for you, that never came when we
were together,--grandchildren of our days of courtship. Some of them are
set down here, but others escape and will never see your face!
If (poor word, it has the sound but no hope of a future life): still,
IF you should ever come back to me and want, as you would want,
to know something of the life in between,--I could put these letters
that I keep into your hands and trust them to say for me that no day
have I been truly, that is to say _willingly_, out of your heart. When
Richard Feverel comes back to his wife, do you remember how she takes
him to see their child, which till then he had never seen--and its
likeness to him as it lies asleep? Dearest, have I not been as true to
you in all that I leave here written?
If, when I come to my finish, I get any truer glimpse of your mind, and
am sure of what you would wish, I will leave word that these shall be
sent to you. If not, I must suppose knowledge is still delayed, not that
it will not reach you.
Sometimes I try still not to wish to die. For my poor body's sake I
wish Well to have its last chance of coming to pass. It is the unhappy
unfulfilled clay of life, I think, which robbed of its share of things
set ghosts to walk: mists which rise out of a ground that has not worked
out its fruitfulness, to take the shape of old desires. If I leave a
ghost, it will take _your_ shape, not mine, dearest: for it will be "as
trees walking" that the "lovers of trees" will come back to earth.
Browning did not know that. Someone else, not Browning, has worded it
for us: a lover of trees far away sends his soul back to the country
that has lost him, and there "the traveler, marveling why, halts on the
bridge to hearken how soft the poplars sigh," not knowing that it is the
lover himself who sighs in the trees all night. That is how the ghosts
of real love come back into the world. The ghosts of love and the ghosts
of hatred must be quite different: these bring fear, and those none.
Come to me, dearest, in the blackest night, and I will not be afraid.
How strange that when one has suffered most, it is the poets (those who
are supposed to _sing_) who best express things for us. Yet singing is the
thing I feel least like. If ever a heart once woke up to find itself full
of tune, it was mine; now you have drawn all the song out of it, emptied
it dry: and I go to the poets to read epitaphs. I think it is their
cruelty that appeals to me:--they can sing of grief! O hard hearts!
Sitting here thinking of you, my ears have suddenly become wide open to
the night-sounds outside. A night-jar is making its beautiful burr in
the stillness, and there are things going away and away, telling me the
whereabouts of life like points on a map made for the ear. You, too, are
_somewhere_ outside, making no sound: and listening for you I heard
these. It seemed as if my brain had all at once opened and caught a new
sense. Are you there? This is one of those things which drop to us with
no present meaning: yet I know I am not to forget it as long as I live.
Good-night! At your head, at your feet, is there any room for me to-night,
Beloved?