Chapter XXVIII: Book III: The Victim Hesitates (1)

_They had opened a wooden box which lay beside them.

“Ten years!” she said. “How they have faded!”

“And the creases are tight,” said he; “they will be hard to read.”

“Letters! letters!” she exclaimed--“some of them sixty pages long! How much would they make?”

“Perhaps a quarter of a million words,” he said.

“What is to be done about it?”

“They must be selected, and then cut, and then trimmed and pruned.”

“And will that leave any idea of it?”

He answered with a simile. “You wish to convey to a man how it feels to pound stone for twelve hours in the sun. The only way you could really do it would be to take him and let him pound for twelve hours. But he wouldn’t stand for that.”

“So you let him pound for one hour,” said she, with a smile.

“I will put up a sign,” he said--_

‘HERE BEGINS THE STONE-POUNDING!’

_And then those who are interested will come in and try it; and the rest will peer through the fence and pass on.”

To which she responded, “I would make the sign read,_

‘ADMISSION TO LOVERS ONLY!’”

MY THYRSIS!

Oh, if I might only stay in a convent until you are ready to take me! Since I left you I find myself possessed of cravings, which, if I indulged them, might bring me the fate of the Maid of Neidpath!

Truly I have known some miserable moments. But I am trying very hard to cultivate a happy, confident activity. The people here are aggressive, and I am afraid I have been rude, which I never like to be. I just succeeded in getting away from a young man who wanted to walk to the village with me. Do you know, it would drive me absolutely mad to talk to anyone now!

My soul has only one cry, and I could sometimes go out on the mountain-side and scream it aloud to the winds. I fear I shall be a trifle wild, in fact utterly in pieces, until you come, with that wonderful recipe of yours for binding me together, and making me complete. I think of you in your house, and wish to God I were there, or out in the desert even, if you were with me.

When I passed through the city I felt exactly as if I were in Hades. The glaring lights and the fearful rattle, the lazy, lounging men--I had dinner in a restaurant, in which all the people seemed to be feeding demons! It has been distinctly shown me why so many people have thought you a rude unmannerly boy! I don’t know what people would think, if I had to be amongst them long.

I have begun so many letters to you in my mind, and oh, the times I have told myself how much I loved you! I have read your letters and slept with them under my pillow, like the veriest love-lorn maiden. But all my happy thoughts are gone at present. It is distracting to me to have to come into such close contact with people.

Oh, tell me, dearest one, what I shall have to do to control myself and preserve the peace of my soul, until I go to you forever? I must not long to see you, it prevents me from studying. If you might only come to me at one moment in the day, and give me one kiss, and then go away! You see, I am conducting myself in a very unwise manner--and it is necessary I should study! I should love to have an indomitable capacity for work, and eat only two meals a day, and never have to think about my body.

I want to tell you what I feel, how utterly and absolutely I am yours, and how any image that comes between you and me enrages me. If only you knew how I give myself up to you in thought, word, and deed!--My one reason for acting now, is that I may show you something I have done, my one thought is to be what you would wish me. No one, no one understands, or ever will, what is in your heart and in mine--to be locked there for ages. There I have placed all my power of love and religion and hope of the life that is to be. To you I give all my trust, all my worship, you are the one link that binds me to myself and to God. Without you I feel now that I should be a poor wanderer.

You give me my feeling of wholeness, of the possibility of completion, that I never had before. In my best and truest moments I know that with you I can be what I have hoped. With you before my eyes I have a grim resolution to conquer or die. The one thing I am sure of always is my love for you. It might be possible for you to stop loving me; but I, now that I have begun, shall continue to love you to the day I die--and after, I hope. I do not love you for what you can give me, I love you because you are you, I must love you now no matter what you are. I believe Shakespeare was right when he said that “love is not love which alters, when it alteration finds.” I do not believe that a person can really love more than once.

I must go to my German again and leave you. Do you love me? Do you love me? Do you love me?

II

My dearest Corydon:

I received a letter from you before dinner, and as usual had one of my flights of emotion, and thought of many things to write to you. Now I am up on the mountain-side, trying to recall them. Dearest, you are, as always, more precious to me. I am glad to see that you are suffering some, and I think that it is well that you have to be away from me for awhile, to fight some of your own soul’s battles. You see that I am in my stern humor; as convinced as ever that the soul is to be deepened only by effort, and that the great glory of life cannot be bought or stolen, or even given for love, but must be earned.

I will tell you what I have been doing since you left. I spent three whole days in the most unimaginable wretchedness; I had no hindrances like yours--only the most fearful burden of dullness and sloth, that had crept upon me and mastered me, during all the weeks that I had let myself be so upset and delayed. I cannot picture what I go through when I lose my self-command in that way, but it is like one who is tied down upon a railroad track and hears a train coming. He gets just as desperate as he pleases, and suffers anything you can imagine--but he does not get free. And always the book would be hanging before me, a kind of external conscience, to show me what I ought to have been.

Now I have gotten myself out of that, by an effort that has quite worn me out. When I found myself at work again, I felt a kind of savage joy of effort, a greater power than I ever knew before. In the reckless mood that I had got to, it seemed to me that I could keep so forever.

Now dearest, you must get the same unity in your life; you must concentrate all your faculties upon that--get for yourself that precious habit of being “instant in prayer”, and “strenuous for the bright reward”. As Wordsworth has it, “Brook no continuance of weak-mindedness!” Let it come to you with a pang that hurts you, that for one minute you have been idle, that you have admitted to yourself that life is a thing of no consequence, and that you do not care for it. I shall have to talk to you that way--perhaps not so often as I do to myself, because I do not think you are really in your heart such a very dull and sodden creature as I am.

I think the greatest trial we shall have will be our fondness for each other, and the possibility of being satisfied simply to hold each other in our arms. But we shall get the better of that, as of everything else; and that is not the problem now. You must learn to strive, learn to master yourself; you must prove your power so. Do not care how rude you have to be to those people; look upon the things about you as a kind of dream-world, and know that your own soul’s life is the one real thing for you. And don’t write any more about how circumstances hold you back. When you have got to work you will know that you are given your soul for no purpose but to fight circumstances; that they are the things to make you fight. When they are removed, as I know to my cost, there is still the same necessity of fighting; only it is like a horse who has to win a race without the spurs.

You must talk to yourself about this, night and day, until this desire is so awake in you that you can’t go idle many moments without its rushing into your mind, and giving you a kind of electric shock. And when that happens you fling aside every thing else, every idea but the work that you ought to be doing, and put all your faculties upon that; and every time that you catch them wandering, you do the same thing again, and again. Some times when I become very keenly aware of myself, and of what a shallow creature I really am, it seems to me that it is only by wearing myself out in that grim and savage way that I can make myself even tolerable.

I _must_ stop. Do you know that for five precious hours by my watch I have sat up here thinking about you and writing to you? Dear me--and I am tired, and frozen, for there is a cold wind. I shall have, I see, to prove some of _my_ powers, by not writing letters to you when I should be at the book.

I see that it takes four or five days for letters to come and go between us; and so if we write often, our letters will be crossing. Four or five days is time enough for us to change our moods a dozen times, so our correspondence will be apt to be complicated!

III

MY DEAREST THYRSIS:

It has worried me somewhat to-day that you might be utterly disappointed in the letter I wrote you. It was a wild jumble of words, but I was fighting all sorts of uncomfortable things within me. To-day I have been anything but despairing, and have “gone at” the German. In fact, I quite lost myself in it, and believe I understand thoroughly the construction of the first poem. Wonderful accomplishment!

Your words, as I read them again, dear heart, are full of a great beauty and fire and energy, and I only hope you may keep them always. I believe that the possibility of the marriage we both desire, depends greatly if not entirely on _your_ sternness. You must realize it.

I cannot tell with the proper conditions and training what energy I might be able to accumulate for myself, but in the meanwhile the thing that makes me most wretched is my utter incapacity at times, and my inability to share with you your work. In my weaker and more helpless moods, I ask myself with a pang, whether I ought to go with you at all, when I cannot help you. But I must stop fuming. I have come out of my mudpuddle for good and for all, and that is the main consideration. I don’t intend to go back.

We must not think of each other in any way but as co-workers in a great labor; we must simply know that our love is rooted deeply, and the harder we work the more firm it will be. There is no reason why we should not go to the altar with just this sternness, and from now on preserve this attitude until the day when we have earned the right to consider what love means. Can you do it? I will prove to you that I can.

IV

MY DEAR THYRSIS:

I am trying very dreadfully, and go away alone and pound at the German as if my life depended upon it. I go to bed every night with a tight feeling in my head, but I do not mind, as I take it for a guarantee that I have not rested.

And oh, my dearest, dearest and best, I am trying not to think of you too much--that is too much in a way that does not help me to study. But I love you really, yes, truly, and I know I would follow you anywhere. I am not particularly joyful, but then I do not expect to be for a great many years.

V

DEAR THYRSIS:

Only a few words. I have been hovering to-day between spurts of hopeful energy, and the most indescribable despair. It positively freezes my heart, and I have been on the point of writing to you and telling you to relieve yourself of the responsibility of me. The reason is because it seems a perfectly Herculean task to read “Egmont”. I have to look up words in the dictionary until I am absolutely so weary I care not about anything; and then I think of you, and what you are able to do, and at one word from you I would give up all idea of marrying you.

I tell you I am up and down in this mood. Great God, I could work all day and all night if I could do what you do, but to strain at iron fetters--a snail! Oh, I cannot tell you--I simply groan under it. At such times I have no more idea of marrying you than of journeying to the moon. I repeat to you, to be constantly choked back, while you are rapidly advancing, will kill me. I don’t know what you will say to this, but it is intolerable, unendurable, to me. When I think of your ability and mine, I simply laugh about it--Thyrsis, it is simply ridiculous. I do not ask you to take me with you, Thyrsis.

Do you wonder at my writing all this? You would not if you understood. It is so hard for me to keep any joy in my heart, and I get tired of repeated failures, that is all. I thought I must write you this, and have it over with. This is the style of letter I have always torn up, but this time it goes. I think I will practice the piano now, and try to get some gladness into my soul again.

VI

MY DEAR, DEAR THYRSIS:

There is a dreadful sort of letter which I wrote you last night which I haven’t sent you yet.

I have been studying, or trying to most of the day, and my mind has wandered most painfully. There were two days in which I seemed to have hold of myself, but with an effort that was a fearful strain. I must try so, that it almost kills me, if I wish to accomplish even a little of what I ought. The heat here is almost insupportable, it is stifling, and I spent an hour or so in the water this afternoon.

And the thought is always torture to me--that you are accomplishing so much more than I! I was thinking of your letters to-night, and I recalled some words that seemed to speak more of your love for me. Oh, Thyrsis, if your letters are fiery and passionate, is it for love of _me_ that they are? I’m almost afraid at times, when I read your letters--when you tell me of the kind of woman you _want_ to love.

I at present am certainly not she. And do you know that when we are married we shall be united forever? I don’t know why I write you these things, they are not at all inspiring thoughts to me.

And yet I was able to go in swimming this afternoon, and forget everything and frolic around as happily as any water-baby!

VII

MY DEAR CORYDON:

I came off to write my poem, but I have been thinking about you, and I must write a long letter. It is one of the kind that you do not like.

In the first place, you complain of the contradictions in my letters. I am sorry. I live so, struggling always with what is not best in me, and continually falling down. Also, in this matter I am an utter stranger, groping my way; and there is an element of passion in it, a dangerous element, which leads me continually astray.

I can only say that in my ideal of love, which is utter love and spiritual love, I think of living my life with you in entire nakedness of soul. Therefore, I shall always be before you exactly as I should be by myself. And I shall write you now exactly what I have been thinking, what is hard and unkind in it, as well as the rest. You will learn to know me as a man far from perfect, often going astray himself, often feeling wrong things, often leading you astray and making you wretched. But behind all this there is the thing often lost sight of, but always present--the iron duty that I have, and the force in me which drives me to it.

All this morning I have been thinking of my book, losing myself in it and filling myself with its glory. This afternoon I fell to thinking about us; and thoughts which have been lurking in my mind for a long time got the upper hand for the first time. They were that I did not love you as I ought to, that I could not; that the love which I felt was a thing from my own heart, and that it had carried me away because I was anxious to persuade myself I had found my ideal upon earth; that you _could_ not satisfy the demands upon life that I made, and that if I married you it would be to make you wretched, and myself as well; that you had absolutely nothing of the things that I needed, and that the life which your nature required was entirely different from mine; that you had no realization of the madness that was driving me, could find and give me none of the power I needed; and that I ought to write and tell you this, no matter what it cost--that I owed it to the sacred possibility of my own soul, to live alone if I could live better alone. And when I had said these words, I felt a sense of relief, because they were haunting me, and had been for a long time.

How they will affect you I cannot tell, it depends upon deep your love for me is; certainly they mean for me that _my_ love is not deep, that you have not made yourself necessary to me. I think that in that last phrase I put the whole matter in its essence--you have not _bound_ yourself to me; I am always struggling to keep my love firm and right, to hold myself to you. The result is that there is no food for my soul in the thought of our love, in my thought of you; and therefore, I am continually dissatisfied and doubting, continually feeling the difference between the love I have dreamed and our love.

I tried to think the matter out, and get to the very bottom of it. The first thing that came to me on the other side was your absolute _truth_; your absolute devotion to what was right and noble in our ideal. So that, as I was thinking, I suddenly stopped short with this statement--“If you cannot find right love with that girl, it must be because you do not honor love, or care for it.” And then I thought of your helplessness, of your lack of training and opportunity for growth; and I told myself how absurd it was of me to expect satisfying love from you--when all that I knew about in life, and thought of, was entirely unknown to you. I realized that I was a man who had tasted more or less of all knowledge, and had an infinite vision of knowledge yet before him, and an infinite hunger for it; and that you were a school-girl, with all of a school-girl’s tasks on your hands. So I said to myself that the reason for the dissatisfaction was a fault of my own, that it had come from my own blindness. I had gone wrong in my attitude to you; I had failed in my sternness and my high devotion to perfection; I had contented myself with lesser things, had come down from my best self, and had failed to make you see what a task was before you, if you ever meant to know my best self. You perceive that this is a return to my old-time attitude; I am sorry if it makes you wretched, but I cannot help it. It is a surgical operation that must be borne. I shall not make it necessary again, I hope.

Now, dear Corydon, I am not trying to choose pleasant words in this letter, this is the way I talk to _myself_. And if anything good comes from our love, it will be because of this letter. I challenge what is noblest in you to rise to meet the truth of it. I should not care to write to you if I did not feel that it would.

You have had a possibility offered to you, and because you are very hungry for life you have clasped it to you, placed all your happiness in it. The possibility is the love of a man whose heart has been filled with the fire of genius. There are few men whom life takes hold of as it does me, who sacrifice themselves for their duty as I do, who demand _experience_--knowledge, power, beauty--as I do. There are very few men who will wrest out of existence as much as I will, or know and have as much of life. I am a boy just now, and only beginning to live; but I have my purpose in hand, and I know that if I am given health and life, there is nothing that men have known that I shall not know, nothing that is done in the world that I shall not do, or try to. I have a strong physique, and I labor day and night, and always shall. I shall always be hungry and restless, always dissatisfied with myself, and with everything about me, and acting and feeling most of the time like a person haunted by a devil. I make no apologies to you for the conceit of what I am saying; it is what I think of myself, without caring what other people think. I know that I have a tremendous temperament, tremendous powers hidden within me, and they have got to come out. When they do, the world will know what I know now.

Now Corydon, as you understand, I dream love absolute, and would scorn any other kind. I can master my passion, if it be that upon earth there is no woman willing or able to go with me to the last inch of my journey. I dream a life-companion to follow wherever my duty drives me; to feel all the desperateness of desire that I feel, to be stern and remorseless as I must be, wild and savage as I must be; to race through knowledge with me and to share my passion for truth with me; a woman with whom I need have no shame in the duty of my genius! As I tell you, if I marry you, I expect to give myself to you as your own heart; and then I think of the gentle and mild existence you have led!

It is very hard for me even to tell about my life, or to explain this thing that drives me mad. But I am writing this letter to you for the purpose of making clear to you that there are two alternatives before you, and that you must choose one or the other and stick by it, and bear the consequences. It is painful to me to think that I have fascinated you by what opportunities I have, even by what power and passion and talents I have, and filled you with a hunger for me--when really you do not realize at all what I am, or what I must be, and when what I have to do will terrify you. I write in the thought of terrifying you _now_, and making you give up this red-hot iron that you are trying to hold on to; or else to show you my life so plainly that never afterwards can you blame me, or shrink back except by your own fault.

You must not blame me for writing these words, for wondering if a woman, if _any_ woman has power to stand what I need to do. And when I talk to you about giving me up, you must not think that is cold, but know that it is my faithfulness to my vision, which is the one thing to which I owe any duty in the world. Nor is it right that you should expect to be essential to me, when I have labored to be all to myself. You could become necessary to me in the years to come; if I marry you to-day I shall marry you for what you are to become, and for that _alone_--at any rate if I am true to myself.

If you are to be my wife you are to be my soul--to live my soul’s life and bear its pain. You are to understand that I talk to you as I talk to myself, call you the names I call myself, and if you cry, give you up in disgust; that I am to deny you all pleasure as I do myself, and what God knows will be ten thousand times harder, let you take pleasure, and then spring up in the very midst of it--you know what I mean! That I am to be ever dissatisfied with you, ever inconsiderate of your feelings, and ever declaring that you are failing! That however much I may love you, I am to be your conscience, and therefore keep you--just about as you are now, miserable! You told me that you would gladly be whipped to learn to live; and this can be the only thing to happen to you.

You must understand why I act in this way. I am a weak and struggling man, with a thousand temptations; and when I marry you, you will be the greatest temptation of all. You are a beautiful girl, and I love you, and every instinct of my nature drives me to you; for me to live with you without kissing you or putting my arms about you, will remain always difficult. It will be so for you, as for me, and it will always be our danger, and always make us wretched. Your soul rises in you as I write this, and you say (as you’ve said before) that if I offered to kiss you after it, it would be an insult. But only wait until we meet!

This is the one thing that has become clear to me: just as soon as there comes the least thought of satisfaction in our love, just so soon does it cease to satisfy my best self. You cannot satisfy my best self, you do not even know it; and if it were a question of that, I should never dream of marrying you! I love you for this and for this alone--because you are an undeveloped soul, the dream of whose infinite possibilities is my one delight in the matter. I think that you are _perfect_ in character, that you are truth itself; and therefore, no matter how helpless you may be, I have no fear of failing to make you “all the world to me”, provided only that I am not false to my ideal. You must know from what I have written before that I _can_ love, that I do know what love is, and that you may trust me. I am not trying to degrade passion--I simply see how passion throws the burden on the woman, and therefore it is utterly a crime with us--the least thought of it! I ought to consider you as a school-girl, really just that; and instead of that I write you love letters!

I tell you there is nothing more hateful for me to look back upon than that childish business of ours, that time when we went upstairs that we might kiss each other unseen. I tell you, it revolts my soul, from love and from you! I should be perfectly willing to take all the blame--I do; only I have led you to like that (or to act as if you did) and I must stop it. Can you not understand how hateful it is to me to think of making you anything that I should be disgusted with?

I expect you to read over this letter until you realize that it is, every word of it, completely true and noble, and until you can write me so. You and I are to feel ourselves two school-children and live just so. It is not usual for school-children to marry, but that we dare upon the strength of our purpose, and in defiance of all counsel, and of every precedent. We are to feel that we owe our duty to our ideal; and that simply _because_ of the strength and passion of our love for each other, we demand perfection, each of the other. My setting this stern challenge before you is nothing but my determination to give you my right love, to demand that you be a perfect woman.

I promise you therefore no quarter; I shall make no sacrifice of my ideal for your sake. As I wrote you, I mean to be absolutely one with you, and I expect you to be the same. You shall have (if you wish it) all of my soul--I shall live my life with you and think all my thoughts aloud--study to give you _everything_ that I have. And God only, who knows my heart, knows what utter love for you lies in those words, what utter trust of you--how I think of you as being purity and holiness itself. To offer to take any other being into my soul, to lay bare all the secret places of it to its gaze, all the weaknesses as well as all the strength, and all that is vain as well as all that is sacred! You cannot know how I feel about my heart, but this you may know, that no one else has had a glimpse of it, you are the first and the last; and so sure am I of you that I dare to say it, _all_ my life will I live in your presence, and trust to your sympathy and truth--and feel that I am false to love if I do not. If there were anything in my heart so foul that I feared to speak of it, I should give you that first, as the sacrifice of love; or any vanity or foible--such things are really hardest to have others know, so great is our conceit.

If I could talk to you to-night, I should do just as I did up on the hill in the moonlight--frighten you, and make you wonder if there was _any_ woman who wished to bear such a burden; and perhaps the saddest thing of all to me is that I do not bear it--instead I bear the gnawing of a conscience bitter and ashamed of itself. And could you bear _that_ burden? For Corydon, as I look at myself to-night, I am before God, a coward and a dastard! I have not done my work! I have not borne the pain He calls me to bear, I have not wrested out the strength He put in my secret heart! And here I am chattering, _talking_ about work to you! And these things are like a nightmare to me; they turn all my life’s happiness to gall. And you are taking upon yourself this same burden--coming to help me to get rid of it. Or if you do not wish to, for God’s sake, and mine, and yours, don’t come near me--you have come too near as it is! Can you not see that when I am face to face with these fearful things--and you come and ask me to give my life to you, to worship you with the best faculties I possess--that I have no right to say yes?

You once told me you were happy because I called you “mein guter Geist, mein bess’res Ich”; well, you are not in the least that. The name that I give you, and that you may keep, is “the beautiful possibility of a soul”. Remember a phrase I told you at the very beginning of our love, of the peril of “ceasing to love perfection and coming to love a woman.” And read Shelley’s sad note to “Epipsychidion”!

VIII

Dear Corydon:

You tell me in your last letter that you are leaving all who love you; and you ask “How do you know that because you love beauty, you will love _me_?”

I have been thinking a good deal about this; I do not believe, Corydon, that a man more haunted by the madness of desire ever lived upon earth than I. And when I get at the essence of myself, I do not believe that I am a kind man; I think that a person with less patience for human hearts never existed, perhaps with less feeling. There is only one thing in the world that I can be sure of, or that you can, my fidelity to my ideal! I know that however often I may fail or weaken, however many mistakes I may make, my hunger for the things of the soul will _never_ leave me, and that night and day I shall work for them. I do not believe I have the right to promise you anything else, I have no right to dream of anything else; this is not my pleasure, as I feel it, it is a frenzy, it is that to which some blind and nameless and merciless impulse drives me. And I may try to persuade myself all my life that I love you, Corydon, and nothing else, and want nothing else; and all the time in the depths of my heart I hear these words from my conscience--“You are a fool.” I love power, I love life, and seek them and strive for them, and care for nothing else and never have; and nothing else can satisfy me. And I cannot give any other love than this, any other promise.

IX

My dear Corydon:

I have been taking a walk this morning, thinking about us, and that I had treated you fearfully. The whole truth of it all is this--that I am so raw and so young and so helpless (and you are as much, if not more so) that I cannot, to save my life, be sure if my love for you is what it ought to be, or even if I could love any one as I ought. And I am so wretchedly dissatisfied! Do you know that for two weeks I have been trying to write a passage of my book--and before God, I _cannot!_ I have not the power, I have not the life!

Dear Corydon, it comes to me that you are _miserable_ to be in love with me--that I had no right to put this burden on your shoulders. I would say better things if I could, but I think that our marriage will be a setting out across a wild ocean in the dark! It is for you to be the heroine, to dare the voyage if you choose. These sound like wild words, but they are the truth of my life, and I dare not say any others. Can a girl who has been brought up in gentleness and sweetness, in innocence of life and of pain--can she say things, feel things like these?

X

Thyrsis:

God did not endow me with your tongue, or else it would not be the great effort it is to me to tell you some of the thoughts that have rushed through my mind in the last hour.

It is an hour since I began to read your letter of Horrible Truth. Now it seems to me it might have been in the last year, in the last century. Actually I feel like a stranger to myself; and my movements are very slow. First, I will tell you that I believe in God, oh, so implicitly--this thought gives me infinite hope. I long to let you know as much of my heart as I can, if I am to be your life-companion, as I firmly believe I am to be. I have such a strange calmness now, and I imagine that I must feel very much the way Rip Van Winkle did when he awoke. I want to try to show you my heart--it is right that I should try, is it not?

Know that I have placed much faith and trust in you, in anything that you did. If you opened one door to me and told me it led to the great and permanent truth, I believed you absolutely. If you hauled me back and put me through an opposite one, telling me that there my road lay, I believed you with equal faith. Now, now, at the end of an hour, I am, through you, convinced of one door, the only and true entrance; and I am as sure as I am that the sun is shining at this moment, that nothing in God’s world can ever again make me lose sight of it. I have found that _you_ can lose sight of it, Thyrsis,--something shows me that I have in the last month been more right than you. Yes, I have, Thyrsis, though you may not know it. And the reason I couldn’t stay right was because I am not strong enough to grasp my good impulses, and keep hold of them: because I have not enough faith in the soul within me.

I will try to tell you what I have felt since reading your letter. All is so disgustingly calm in me now. But listen, I believe I have had a little glimpse this afternoon of what it is to _feel_; and because of that knowledge I now am not afraid to tell you that I claim something of God and life--that I can get it if you can. This has been very strong in me at moments, but, as I tell you, I have not yet learned to hold my glimpses of truth--they seem to come to me, and as quickly disappear.

I began to read your letter, and I cannot describe to you the convulsion that came over me. It seemed that I had the feeling of an empty skull on a desert; such a feeling--you can never have it! All the horror and despair! I tried to form my thoughts and tell myself it was not true. I tried to pray, and I did pray--out loud--and asked God to give me strength to read the letter.

I tried to use all the penetration I was capable of, to find out one thing, whether you were purely and unreservedly sincere in it. I wondered whether you really wished to live your life alone, but could not find the courage to tell me so. I firmly believe that no failure in the future, no disgust or helplessness, could ever bring me the complete anguish of those moments.

Can you realize what such a thing meant to me, Thyrsis?

Last spring, I had succeeded in bringing myself into an almost complete state of coma--I saw that I could do nothing, and because I would not endure such profitless pain I drugged myself to sleep. And you, you fiend, waked me up; and may your soul be thrice cursed if you have only pulled the doll to pieces _to see what it was made of!_ Know, you that have a soul which says it lives and suffers--that I can’t go to sleep again! There is no joy for me in mother or father, in friends or admiration--I can tolerate nothing that I tolerated before you came with your cursed or blessed fire!

Also, if you do not marry me, or if I do not find some man who has your strength and desire for life, and who will take me and help me to learn, I shall die without having lived.--And I cried out in misery--only forty-two years, only forty-two little years, and I shall be an old woman of sixty! Only forty-two years in which to learn to live!

I believe if I had you here now I could almost strangle you. We may kill each other some day. I sometimes feel that there is nothing that will give me any relief, that I cannot breathe, I cannot support my body. But these are foolish and unprofitable feelings--and I believe I will yet be saved, if not by you, perhaps by myself. I think some heavenly aid came to me to-day. I asked for it, I simply said it _must_ come--and now I am able to bear myself and look around me, and say that the secret of my liberation is not death but life.

Please realize, Thyrsis, that I know you do not need me, that I cannot either entertain you or help you. My dear, do you not know that I have been conscious of this from the very beginning--and it has been this thought that has often made me worry, and doubt, and question. And then I have told myself that you had found _something_ in me to love; and that I also was very hungry to know about life and God; and that if you loved me enough to believe I was not dross, we might, with our untiring devotion--well, we might be right in going with each other. And now--would you rather I should tell you I will not marry you, be my desire, or effort, what it may? I do not know--even though I want to live so terribly. I have no word, no proof to give!

And now, Thyrsis, I have no more strength to write. I only wish I had some power to make you know what I have felt this afternoon--I think if I could, you would have no more doubt of me. And I believe it is my God-given right not to doubt myself.

I will write no more--I have written enough to make you answer one of two things. “Come with me,” or, “I would rather go alone.” I know which one it will be, even now in my wretchedness. The sky is so blue this evening, and everything is so beautiful--and I am trying so hard to be right, to feel strong and confident!

XI

Dear Thyrsis:

I have just arisen. I woke in the middle of the night, and there was a spectre sitting by my bedside to frighten me; he succeeded at first, but I managed finally to get rid of him, and to find some peace. Many of your sentences came to me, and I was able to get behind the words, and I saw plainly that the letters were just what you should have written, and that they could not but benefit me. They have accomplished their purpose, I believe--they are burned into my soul, and have placed me rightly in our relation. I shall simply never trust the permission you may give me, in the future, to rest or be satisfied. I shall only hate you, for the pain of some of your words I shall _never_ forget.

The memory of the first two pages of your letter will always put me in mortal terror of you. For the rest, I am very grateful, and I will try to show you how I love your ideal. I can never repay you as long as I live for letting me come with you. Oh Thyrsis, I am sure that I will never think or care whether you love me or not, if only I may go with you and learn how to strive!

I tore up all your love-letters this morning. I kept the last letter--though I do not think I could bear to read it over. I should be afraid of again going through with that despair. Oh, I beg for the time when I shall be obliged to waste none of my minutes--and when I shall have no opportunity of writing you! What _time_ I have spent over your letters and mine!

XII

Dear Thyrsis:

I am restlessly waiting for the supper-bell to ring, and my head is aching intensely, and I am generally topsy-turvy. Alas! alas! the distance that separates us and our understanding!

I received a letter to-day while I was studying--but said I would not open it for a week, that I wanted strength to study. Well, I studied all the afternoon and found it none too easy. When I came home, I thought perhaps it was better to read your letter, which I grimly did.

Do you know, you are keeping me on the rack, literally on the rack, and my flesh and blood do not seem to be able to stand it--my body seems to be the organ that first fails me, my brain is never so tired as my body. I love to think that you are not less merciful to me than you would be to yourself, I feel that you could not have used more cruel whips to yourself. Do you suppose that any disgust, scolding, or malediction to me could, as your wife, hurt me, as your doubt of me hurts me now?

And I just begin to read your letter again, and I tell you, you are a fool. You say you do not know whether you could love any one as you ought--well, I, with all my weakness, know whether _I_ can love, and I love you a thousand times more than you have given me cause to. And you are so _hungry!_ Will you always starve because you are blind? As to being _satisfied,_ how could you be? But you say you will love me as much as I deserve. How much do I deserve--do you know? I sometimes cry out against you and long to get hold of you. If you have genius, why doesn’t it give you some inkling whether you are a man with a heart, not only a stupid boy? And then I see it all plainly, or think I do, and know that you are trying so hard to be right towards us, because you think you love me the way other people love; and you know if I am weak, it would degrade your genius; and you cannot be sure of my character or strength. You cannot know whether I realize the life I am selecting--you have found it hard, and you have every reason to think that I will find it ten times harder; and you love me in a way that is not the highest,--but yet you love me enough, thank God, to tell me the whole truth!

I have come to a pass where I can say to myself with truth, that I do not care how much or how little you love me. That depends upon _you_, as well as myself. I believe the time will come, when you will love me as you ought, and I say this in perfect calm conviction, in all my weakness, and with all my maudlin habits clinging to me. Strangely enough your doubt of me has made me rise up in arms to champion my cause, or else I should lie down forever in the dust, and deny my God.

I wonder whether it is my love for you that makes me believe? I cling to you, as a mother might cling to her child; I cling to you as the embodiment, the promise, of all I will ever find true in life. I look to live in you, to fulfil all my possibilities in you, and if you die or forsake me, all my hope is gone, and I am dead. This is a letter in which I have no scorn or doubt, or ridicule of myself, as formerly.

And then you ask me, “Can a girl brought up in gentleness and sweetness, and innocence of life and of pain, can she say things, feel things like these?” It is the gentleness and sweetness and innocence that are galling to me. I can tolerate no more of them. They have warped me, they have given me no chance. But I have had some pain in my life, and since I have known you I have known more about pain and what it brings, and leaves.--And now I am feeling ill, and I cannot control that. Oh, God!

XIII

Dearest Corydon:

I have a chance to finish the first part of my book to-day, and save myself from Hades; and here I am writing to you--just a line. (Of course it turned out to be six pages!)

Your last letter was very noble; I can only say to you, that the treatment which makes you upbraid me is not done for _my_ sake; that the life which I live is not lived for _my_ sake. You say perhaps you are better than I; it is very possible--I often think so myself; but that is nothing to the point. I should be very wretched if I sat down to think what I am. Oblige me by being better than my ideal--if you can! You must understand, dearest, that behind all that I am doing, there is truth to the soul; and that truth to the soul is love, and the only love. I am seeking for nothing but the privilege of treating you as myself; and rest assured, that if I treat you any differently it will be better than I treat myself! There is no peril in our life except that!

Some day you will understand that I can sometimes feel about myself that I am utterly hateful, utterly false, utterly shallow and _bad_; and that to get away from myself would be all that I desire in life. I cannot imagine my having such opinion of you; but some dissatisfaction--just a little--I may have. Only let us love perfection, you and I, with all our souls, and I think our love for each other may safely be allowed to take care of itself. Remember the two ships in Clough’s poem, which parted, but sailed by the compass, and reached the same port.

I shall spend no more time comforting you about this.

And dear Corydon, when you are angry at my doubting your power, and say that I do not know you, I can only reply--Why of course I don’t, and neither do you. You find your own self out little by little--why get angry with me because I don’t know it until you tell me? You are a grown woman compared to what you were three months ago; and this character that you ask me to know--well, it takes years of hard labor to prove a character.

XIV

Dearest Corydon:

Do you ever realize how much _faith_ in you I have? As utterly different is your whole life, as if you had been in another world; and through all the wilderness that I have travelled, I hope to drag you. But I cannot carry you, or take you; I must trust in the frenzy of your grip upon me. There is nothing else you could have that I would trust. You might be wonderfully clever and wonderfully wise--and I could do nothing with you. Do you remember Beethoven’s saying, that he would like to take a certain woman, if he had time, and marry her and break her heart, so that she might be able to sing?