i sat with it in my hand for a moment or so before i opened it, hesitating as one hesitates before a door that may reveal a dramatic situation. then i pushed my chair a little back from the table and ripped the envelope.
it was a far longer letter than mary had ever written me in the old days, and in a handwriting as fine as ever but now rather smaller. i have it still, and here i open its worn folds and, except for a few trifling omissions, copy it out for you.... a few trifling omissions, i say,—just one there is that is not trifling, but that i must needs make....
you will never see any of these letters because i shall destroy them so soon as this copy is made. it has been difficult—or i should have destroyed them before. but some things can be too hard for us....
this first letter is on the martens note-paper; its very heading was familiar to me. the handwriting of the earlier sentences is a little stiff and disjointed, and there are one or two scribbled obliterations; it is like someone embarrassed in speaking; and then it passes into her usual and characteristic ease....
and as i read, slowly my long-cherished anger evaporated, and the real mary, outspoken and simple, whom i had obscured by a cloud of fancied infidelities, returned to me....
"my dear stephen," she begins, "about six weeks ago i saw in the times that you have a little daughter. it set me thinking, picturing you with a mite of a baby in your arms—what little things they are, stephen!—and your old face bent over it, so that presently i went to my room and cried. it set me thinking about you so that i have at last written you this letter.... i love to think of you with wife and children about you stephen,—i heard of your son for the first time about a year ago, but—don't mistake me,—something wrings me too....
"well, i too have children. have you ever thought of me as a mother? i am. i wonder how much you know about me now. i have two children and the youngest is just two years old. and somehow it seems to me that now that you and i have both given such earnests of our good behavior, such evidence that that side of life anyhow is effectually settled for us, there is no reason remaining why we shouldn't correspond. you are my brother, stephen, and my friend and my twin and the core of my imagination, fifty babies cannot alter that, we can live but once and then die, and, promise or no promise, i will not be dead any longer in your world when i'm not dead, nor will i have you, if i can help it, a cold unanswering corpse in mine....
"too much of my life and being, stephen, has been buried, and i am in rebellion. this is a breach of the tomb if you like, an irregular private premature resurrection from an interment in error. out of my alleged grave i poke my head and say hello! to you. stephen, old friend! dear friend! how are you getting on? what is it like to you? how do you feel? i want to know about you.... i'm not doing this at all furtively, and you can write back to me, stephen, as openly as your heart desires. i have told justin i should do this. i rise, you see, blowing my own trump. let the other graves do as they please....
"your letters will be respected, stephen.... if you choose to rise also and write me a letter.
"stephen, i've been wanting to do this for—for all the time. if there was thought-reading you would have had a thousand letters. but formerly i was content to submit, and latterly i've chafed more. i think that as what they call passion has faded, the immense friendliness has become more evident, and made the bar less and less justifiable. you and i have had so much between us beyond what somebody the other day—it was in a report in the times, i think—was calling materia matrimoniala. and of course i hear about you from all sorts of people, and in all sorts of ways—whatever you have done about me i've had a woman's sense of honor about you and i've managed to learn a great deal without asking forbidden questions. i've pricked up my ears at the faintest echo of your name.
"they say you have become a publisher with an american partner, a sort of harmsworth and nelson and times book club and hooper and jackson all rolled into one. that seems so extraordinary to me that for that alone i should have had to write to you. i want to know the truth of that. i never see any advertisement of stratton & co. or get any inkling of what it is you publish. are you the power behind the respectable murgatroyd and the honest milvain? i know them both and neither has the slightest appearance of being animated by you. and equally perplexing is your being mixed up with an american like that man gidding in peace conferences and social reform congresses and so forth. it's so—carnegieish. there i'm surer because i've seen your name in reports of meetings and i've read your last two papers in the fortnightly. i can't imagine you of all people, with your touch of reserve, launching into movements and rubbing shoulders with faddists. what does it mean, stephen? i had expected to find you coming back into english politics—speaking and writing on the lines of your old beginning, taking up that work you dropped—it's six years now ago. i've been accumulating disappointment for two years. mr. arthur, you see, on our side,"—this you will remember was in 1909—"still steers our devious party courses, and the tariff reformers have still to capture us. weston massinghay was comparing them the other night, at a dinner at the clynes', to a crowded piratical galley trying to get alongside a good seaman in rough weather. he was very funny about leo maxse in the poop, white and shrieking with passion and the motion, and all the capitalists armed to the teeth and hiding snug in the hold until the grappling-irons were fixed.... why haven't you come into the game? i'd hoped it if only for the sake of meeting you again. what are you doing out beyond there?
"we are in it so far as i can contrive. but i contrive very little. we are pillars of the conservative party—on that justin's mind is firmly settled—and every now and then i clamor urgently that we must do more for it. but justin's ideas go no further than writing cheques—doing more for the party means writing a bigger cheque—and there are moments when i feel we shall simply bring down a peerage upon our heads and bury my ancient courtesy title under the ignominy of a new creation. he would certainly accept it. he writes his cheque and turns back at the earliest opportunity to his miniature gardens and the odd little freaks of collecting that attract him. have you ever heard of chintz oil jars? 'no,' you will say. nor has anyone else yet except our immediate circle of friends and a few dealers who are no doubt industriously increasing the present scanty supply. we possess three. they are matronly shaped jars about two feet or a yard high, of a kind of terra-cotta with wooden tops surmounted by gilt acorns, and they have been covered with white paint and on this flowers and birds and figures from some very rich old chintz have been stuck very cunningly, and then everything has been varnished—and there you are. our first and best was bought for seven-and-sixpence, brought home in the car, put upon a console table on the second landing and worshipped. it's really a very pleasant mellow thing to see. nobody had ever seen the like. guests, sycophantic people of all sorts were taken to consider it. it was looked at with heads at every angle, one man even kept his head erect and one went a little upstairs and looked at it under his arm. also the most powerful lenses have been used for a minute examination, and one expert licked the varnish and looked extremely thoughtful and wise at me as he turned the booty over his gifted tongue. and now, god being with us, we mean to possess every specimen in existence—before the americans get hold of the idea. yesterday justin got up and motored sixty miles to look at an alleged fourth....
"oh my dear! i am writing chatter. you perceive i've reached the chattering stage. it is the fated end of the clever woman in a good social position nowadays, her mind beats against her conditions for the last time and breaks up into this carping talk, this spume of observation and comment, this anecdotal natural history of the restraining husband, as waves burst out their hearts in a foam upon a reef. but it isn't chatter i want to write to you.
"stephen, i'm intolerably wretched. no creature has ever been gladder to have been born than i was for the first five and twenty years of my life. i was full of hope and i was full, i suppose, of vanity and rash confidence. i thought i was walking on solid earth with my head reaching up to the clouds, and that sea and sky and all mankind were mine for the smiling. and i am nothing and worse than nothing, i am the ineffectual[pg 290] mother of two children, a daughter whom i adore—but of her i may not tell you—and a son,—a son who is too like his father for any fury of worship, a stolid little creature.... that is all i have done in the world, a mere blink of maternity, and my blue persian who is scarcely two years old, has already had nine kittens. my husband and i have never forgiven each other the indefinable wrong of not pleasing each other; that embitters more and more; to take it out of each other is our rôle; i have done my duty to the great new line of justin by giving it the heir it needed, and now a polite and silent separation has fallen between us. we hardly speak except in company. i have not been so much married, stephen, i find, as collected, and since our tragic misadventure—but there were beautiful moments, stephen, unforgettable glimpses of beauty in that—thank god, i say impenitently for that—the door of the expensively splendid cabinet that contains me, when it is not locked, is very discreetly—watched. i have no men friends, no social force, no freedom to take my line. my husband is my official obstacle. we barb the limitations of life for one another. a little while ago he sought to chasten me—to rouse me rather—through jealousy, and made me aware indirectly but a little defiantly of a young person of artistic gifts in whose dramatic career he was pretending a conspicuous interest. i was jealous and roused, but scarcely in the way he desired. 'this,' i said quite cheerfully, 'means freedom for me, justin,'—and the young woman vanished from the visible universe with an incredible celerity. i hope she was properly paid off and not simply made away with by a minion, but i become more and more aware of my ignorance of a great financier's methods as i become more and more aware of them....
"stephen, my dear, my brother, i am intolerably unhappy. i do not know what to do with myself, or what there is to hope for in life. i am like a prisoner in a magic cage and i do not know the word that will release me. how is it with you? are you unhappy beyond measure or are you not; and if you are not, what are you doing with life? have you found any secret that makes living tolerable and understandable? write to me, write to me at least and tell me that.... please write to me.
"do you remember how long ago you and i sat in the old park at burnmore, and how i kept pestering you and asking you what is all this for? and you looked at the question as an obstinate mule looks at a narrow bridge he could cross but doesn't want to. well, stephen, you've had nearly—how many years is it now?—to get an answer ready. what is it all for? what do you make of it? never mind my particular case, or the case of women with a capital w, tell me your solution. you are active, you keep doing things, you find life worth living. is publishing a way of peace for the heart? i am prepared to believe even that. but justify yourself. tell me what you have got there to keep your soul alive."
