Chapter XVI: To Lady Wroxton, The Manor House, Stoke Magna, Oxon

91B HARLEY STREET, W.,
_May_ 23, 1910.

MY DEAR LADY WROXTON,

I was very glad, as were we all, to hear from you again after so long a silence, and gladder still to learn that the pleasant peacefulness of Stoke is doing its good work on your behalf so surely, if still a little slowly. For both from your own letter and that of Dr. Rochester I can see that the spirit of you is climbing back again towards the light, less lonely than you would have thought possible six months ago, and into an air as clear even as that which you and your husband breathed together before he was taken from you. I think that I know how hard must be the ascent, although in my own perhaps too peaceful life I have had little enough experience of these swift and terrible bereavements, that will come to me also, I must suppose, in their due time. And it is only from the share, sometimes completely professional, sometimes rather more intimate than this, that I have been called upon to take in such experiences of others that I seem to have learned a very little about the tides of grief.

Looking down upon the dead face, touching the cold hand, lifting up the leaden arm, one cannot help feeling how utterly dead a dead man looks, an impression enormously deepened, as a rule, by the circumstances of the last days. For in these his external, his spiritual activities have been, of necessity almost, set aside, and perhaps temporarily forgotten in the paramount appeals of his body itself. Now this organ, now that, must be attended to, supported, cleansed, stimulated, implored, as it were, to fulfil its duty towards the struggling economy of the whole. And as an almost inevitable result their slender responses, their final refusals, have obsessed both patient and friends to the exclusion of everything else. The bodily case, so long taken for granted, and now so fast giving way, has become no longer a subordinate, but the predominant factor in its owner's entity. So that when the body, _Imperator et Dux_ of these later hours, at length lays down its sceptre, it's a small wonder if all else has appeared to die with it. Nor for a time can the formulae of the churches seem anything but unreal, however humbly a schooled faith may try to accept their verity. The dead thing beneath the sheet seems to weigh down the balance with a fact too stark for disputation. Of the earth earthy, it is committed to the earth, resolving presently into its elements--and who shall tell its number any more?

Between mere friends, the friend taken and the friend left, this bodily dissolution has perhaps a less grim significance, or makes, at any rate, a smaller demand on faith. We loved our friend for his ways, his wit, his kindliness, his character, and not very particularly for his cast of feature or mould of physique. But where friendship has allied itself with passion, where the actual flesh has meant much, where souls have spoken, not only in sight and speech, but in touch and fast embrace, the death of the flesh must necessarily seem to involve so infinitely more--enough almost to justify mediaeval thought in demanding, for its consolation, a belief in the resurrection of the body. And as a result the well-meant advice of physicians and friends must appear at these times to be entirely inadequate--I was almost going to say impertinent--because it must necessarily be only half informed.

And yet I am not sure that we, standing at a distance (and perhaps even because of this), have not, after all, the real comfort in our hands. To you, from whose close touch the alabaster box has slipped, its breaking has seemed to mean the end of all things. You were so near to it. And how irreparable was its fracture no eyes but yours could tell. So what can we others say to you that can be of any value in your sorrow?

Well, we can at least say this--that its perfume is still upon the air, its real gift to us and our great and permanent possession. It may be easier for us--his mere friends--to declare thus that we haven't really lost him. But given a little time it will become possible even to you, who were heart of his heart. And if there's no older--and perhaps colder--truism than this, yet it has a very sound and, I believe, an actually physical basis. For if we grant, as we needs must, that the material body is ever changing, cell replacing cell by a continuous process of wasting and repair, so that the substance containing us to-day is by no means identical with that which contained us, as it were, yesterday, why then the cells that called out for the physical sight and touch of those other cells that surrounded him we loved must necessarily pass also upon their journey, and with them, to a very great extent, their anguish of unsatisfied desire. This is why, I think, nothing becomes more absolutely obliterated than a dead passion that has been merely bodily; and why also, in most other cases where passion has been a factor, the diminution of grief must be regarded as a completely natural process and one that implies no shadow of disloyalty. It merely means that the sense of loss has been transferred to another and more spiritual plane, where, lo! it even appears at times to have been scarcely a loss at all; but instead a withdrawal, so obviously transient as to be itself an evidence of some certain, if incomprehensible reunion. With his memories so thronging, with the visible and abiding evidences of his activities so implicit in the growth of his successors, how little, after all, has become the value of the vessel that contained him! Am I right? Isn't it going with you somehow in this fashion?

But, dear me, if your power of sleep were not returning to you so rapidly, you would be imagining this some subtle form of prescription by epistle.

And that was one of the best bits of news in your letter, besides being the chief reason why you mustn't, I think, come back to town just yet, even at the risk of disappointing Hilary and Norah. For Sleep's a fickle goddess when she once goes wandering, and the way to woo her home is not to woo her at all. Seek her not, and she will come stealing back to you round the corner to know the reason why. And there's no place like the country and some quiet garden therein in which to declare your war of independence.

For, as I told you before, sleeplessness _per se_ has never killed anybody yet; and where nothing but the rising and setting of stars, and the opening and closing of flowers need call for your attention, you can very comfortably afford to snap your fingers at it in defiance. But in town it would be different. Your days would become, in spite of yourself, so automatically exacting that you would of necessity demand respite from your nights--the very demand that, just at present, you mustn't be obliged to make. At Stoke, on the other hand, it doesn't matter (and the more you insist on this the better), it doesn't matter a bit where, when, or how much, you sleep. The very air of the place is a far too bewitching, and incidentally a quite adequate, substitute; while for dreams you have the whole cycle of field and garden husbandry spread out before your eyes, as little changing as the downs themselves, and like them pretty nearly "half as old as time." So watch it for a year, day in and day out, and leave the turmoils and telephones of London to such unfortunate and envious friends as P. H., of medicinal memory.

As regards the girl you sent up to me from the village last Friday, I have taken her into one of my wards at the Hospital, where I fancy a little careful dieting will soon set her right again. At the same time I may take the opportunity of examining the defaulting organ by means of a very ingenious instrument just devised by two of my junior colleagues. It's a toy--it's going to be much more than that--that would have delighted your husband's heart, and by its means, down a bent tube, inserted through her mouth, fitted with a tiny electric lamp and reflectors at the angles, I shall be able not only to peep into her stomach, but to survey it as thoroughly and particularly as I am now able to inspect her tongue. Even so do the youngsters show us the way!

Yes, you are quite right. Anaemia, dyspepsia, gastric ulcer seem to be the special afflictions of the under-housemaid. And it's the damnable habit of providing her with "kitchen" tea, and "kitchen" butter, and "kitchen" food of all sorts that is largely responsible for this, not only directly, but indirectly, in that it tempts her to indulge in various kinds of unhealthy in-between meals. Surely the servants who work for us, and feed us, and keep us clean, should be at least as well and as carefully fed as ourselves, even if they wouldn't be quite happy, perhaps, to sit at our own tables. And the careless (and I'm afraid doubtful) ladies who think otherwise should be made to undergo a spell of domestic dieting in their own establishments.

Esther and Molly, who are at home, join me in sending you their very best love and hopes for a near-at-hand complete recovery; and, if you can really put up with them, nothing will make Tom and Claire happier than to spend a week or two of their summer holidays at Stoke.

Your sincere friend,
PETER HARDING.

P.S.--You must try to forgive me for this rambling and rather inconsequent letter, but I have been both inflicting and enduring, for the last ten days, a superfluity of full-dress lectures. So I have been writing to you, as a result, in my mental shirtsleeves.