I find, as you prophesied, much that’s interesting, but little that
helps the delicate question--the possibility of publication. Her diaries
are less systematic than I hoped; she only had a blessed habit of noting
and narrating. She summarised, she saved; she appears seldom indeed to
have let a good story pass without catching it on the wing. I allude of
course not so much to things she heard as to things she saw and felt.
She writes sometimes of herself, sometimes of others, sometimes of the
combination. It’s under this last rubric that she’s usually most vivid.
But it’s not, you will understand, when she’s most vivid that she’s
always most publish-able. To tell the truth she’s fearfully indiscreet,
or has at least all the material for making me so. Take as an instance
the fragment I send you, after dividing it for your convenience into
several small chapters. It is the contents of a thin blank-book which
I have had copied out and which has the merit of being nearly enough a
rounded thing, an intelligible whole. These pages evidently date from
years ago. I’ve read with the liveliest wonder the statement they so
circumstantially make and done my best to swallow the prodigy they leave
to be inferred. These things would be striking, wouldn’t they? to any
reader; but can you imagine for a moment my placing such a document
before the world, even though, as if she herself had desired the world
should have the benefit of it, she has given her friends neither name
nor initials? Have you any sort of clue to their identity? I leave her
the floor.
I
I know perfectly of course that I brought it upon myself; but that
doesn’t make it any better. I was the first to speak of her to him--he
had never even heard her mentioned. Even if I had happened not to speak
some one else would have made up for it: I tried afterwards to find
comfort in that reflection. But the comfort of reflections is thin: the
only comfort that counts in life is not to have been a fool. That’s a
beatitude I shall doubtless never enjoy. “Why, you ought to meet her
and talk it over,” is what I immediately said. “Birds of a feather flock
together.” I told him who she was and that they were birds of a feather
because if he had had in youth a strange adventure she had had about
the same time just such another. It was well known to her friends--an
incident she was constantly called on to describe. She was charming,
clever, pretty, unhappy; but it was none the less the thing to which she
had originally owed her reputation.
Being at the age of eighteen somewhere abroad with an aunt she had had
a vision of one of her parents at the moment of death. The parent was in
England, hundreds of miles away and so far as she knew neither dying nor
dead. It was by day, in the museum of some great foreign town. She had
passed alone, in advance of her companions, into a small room containing
some famous work of art and occupied at that moment by two other
persons. One of these was an old custodian; the second, before observing
him, she took for a stranger, a tourist. She was merely conscious that
he was bareheaded and seated on a bench. The instant her eyes rested on
him however she beheld to her amazement her father, who, as if he
had long waited for her, looked at her in singular distress, with
an impatience that was akin to reproach. She rushed to him with a
bewildered cry, “Papa, what _is_ it?” but this was followed by an
exhibition of still livelier feeling when on her movement he simply
vanished, leaving the custodian and her relations, who were at her
heels, to gather round her in dismay. These persons, the official, the
aunt, the cousins were therefore in a manner witnesses of the fact--the
fact at least of the impression made on her; and there was the further
testimony of a doctor who was attending one of the party and to whom
it was immediately afterwards communicated. He gave her a remedy for
hysterics but said to the aunt privately: “Wait and see if something
doesn’t happen at home.” Something _had_ happened--the poor father,
suddenly and violently seized, had died that morning. The aunt, the
mother’s sister, received before the day was out a telegram announcing
the event and requesting her to prepare her niece for it. Her niece was
already prepared, and the girl’s sense of this visitation remained of
course indelible. We had all as her friends had it conveyed to us and
had conveyed it creepily to each other. Twelve years had elapsed and
as a woman who had made an unhappy marriage and lived apart from her
husband she had become interesting from other sources; but since the
name she now bore was a name frequently borne, and since moreover her
judicial separation, as things were going, could hardly count as a
distinction, it was usual to qualify her as “the one, you know, who saw
her father’s ghost.”
As for him, dear man, he had seen his mother’s. I had never heard of
that till this occasion on which our closer, our pleasanter acquaintance
led him, through some turn of the subject of our talk, to mention it and
to inspire me in so doing with the impulse to let him know that he had a
rival in the field--a person with whom he could compare notes. Later
on his story became for him, perhaps because of my unduly repeating it,
likewise a convenient wordly label; but it had not a year before been
the ground on which he was introduced to me. He had other merits, just
as she, poor thing! had others. I can honestly say that I was quite
aware of them from the first--I discovered them sooner than he
discovered mine. I remember how it struck me even at the time that his
sense of mine was quickened by my having been able to match, though not
indeed straight from my own experience, his curious anecdote. It dated,
this anecdote, as hers did, from some dozen years before--a year in
which, at Oxford, he had for some reason of his own been staying on into
the “Long.” He had been in the August afternoon on the river. Coming
back into his room while it was still distinct daylight he found his
mother standing there as if her eyes had been fixed on the door. He had
had a letter from her that morning out of Wales, where she was staying
with her father. At the sight of him she smiled with extraordinary
radiance and extended her arms to him, and then as he sprang forward
and joyfully opened his own she vanished from the place. He wrote to her
that night, telling her what had happened; the letter had been carefully
preserved. The next morning he heard of her death. He was through this
chance of our talk extremely struck with the little prodigy I was able
to produce for him. He had never encountered another case. Certainly
they ought to meet, my friend and he; certainly they would have
something in common. I would arrange this, wouldn’t I?--if _she_ didn’t
mind; for himself he didn’t mind in the least. I had promised to speak
to her of the matter as soon as possible, and within the week I was able
to do so. She “minded” as little as he; she was perfectly willing to
see him. And yet no meeting was to occur--as meetings are commonly
understood.