What a walk, in what a wind, never-to-be-forgotten. The clashing together of our umbrella-spines as we leaned to speak, and their hopeless tangling; the rush of air carrying our wordsaway; the torn green leaves flying past, and on the brow of the hill the deer running and running against that labouring mounting mass of leaden cloud. Why do I tell you this, who saw it with me? To share the words too, as we shared the blast and the sudden silence when the wind briefly dropped. It was very much your world we walked in, your watery empire, with the meadows all drowned as the city of Is, and the trees all growing down from their roots as well as up - and the clouds swirling indifferently in both aerial and aquatic foliage -
What else can I say? I am copying Swammerdamyêr you again - a problematic labour as I keep discoveringsmall defects, some of which I mend and some of which merely make me anxious. You shall have him next week. Next week we shall walk again, shall we not, now it is very clear to you that I am no ogre, but only a mild and somewhat apprehensive gentleman?
And did you find - as I did - how curious, as well as very natural, it was that we should be so shy with each other, when in a papery way we knew each other so much better?I feel I have always known you, and yet I search for polite phrases and conventional enquiries - you are more mysterious in your presence (as I suppose most of us may be) than you seem to be in ink and scribbled symbols. (Perhaps we all are so. I cannot tell.)
I will not write more now. I have addressed this, as requested, to the Richmond Poste Restante. I do not wholly like this subterfuge - I do not like the imputed shady dealing of such a step - I find it inhibiting. Nor can you, with your quick moral discernment and yr proud sense of yr own moral autonomy, find it at all easy. Can we not think of something better? Will the urgency diminish? I am in your hands, but unquiet. Let me know, if you are able, that you have receivedthis first waiting-letter. Let me know how you are, and that we may meet again soon. My respects to Dog Tray -
My dear Friend,
Your letter came safely. Your word of- - subterfuge - hit home. I will think- there are Veils and Whirligigs of hindrances -I will think- and hope I may come up with more than - a headache.
I shall not easilyforget our shining progress across the wet earth. Nor any Word you said - not the most courteousNothing - nor yet the moments snatched to speak Truth andJustice about the Future Life. I hope you may be convincedthatMrs Lees' seances are worthy of your serious consideration. They bring such unspeakableComfort - to the deeply grieving. Last week a Mrs Tompkins held her dead infant on her knees for upward of ten minutes - his very weight, she said, his very curling fingers and toes - how can mother-love be mistaken? The Father too, was able to touch the soft curls of this briefly-returnedbeing. There was too, glancing unearthlylight - and a ghost of a sweet perfume.
It is most true as you say, that embodied - I had almost writ confrontation -conversation- unsettles the Letters. I know not - what to write. My pen is reluctant. I am overawed by your voice - in truth - by Presence- however taken. Shall we see each other again? Will it do good or harm? Dog Tray - who sends his respects - knows it will do good - and I know nothing - so let it be Tuesday - if you come not, I will look in the Poste Restante, where I stand beside seamen's wives, andfashionable Creatures, and a dour Tradesman whose face creases to thunder when nothing is producedfor him.
I long for Swammerdam.
Your true friend
My dear,
I was about to begin in this vein - "how can I apologise?" and so forth - "a moment's madness" - then I thought I might circumvent the whole happening, deny that Magnets rush towards each other, and deny it so steadily, the lie might become a kind of saving fiction that held a kind of truth. But the Laws of Nature deserve as much respect as any other, and there arehuman laws as strong as the magnetic field of iron and lodestone - if I deviate into lying, to you to whom I have never lied -I am lost.
I shall see you - as you were the moment before the madness - until the day I die. Your little face, with its pale candour, turned to me - and your hand out - in the watery sunshine, between the great trees. And I could have takenyour hand - or not takenyour hand - could I not? Either? But now only the one. Never have I felt such a concentration of my whole Being - on one object, in one place, at one time - a blessed eternity of momentariness that went on forever, it seemed. I felt you call me, though your voice said something different, something about the rainbow spectrum - but the whole of you, the depth of you called to me and I had to answer - and not with words - this wordless call. Now is this only my madness? With you in my arms (I tremble as I remember it to write it) I was sure it was not.
Now, away from you, I do not know what you think or feel.
But I must speak. I must say to you what is in my mind. The unforgivable embrace was no sudden impulse - no momentary excitation - but camefrom what is deepest in me, and I think also what is best. I must tell you - ever since that first meeting, I have known you were my fate, however from time to time I may have disguised that knowledge from myself.
I have dreamed nightly of your face and walked the streets of my daily life with the rhythms of your writing singing in my silent brain. I have called you my Muse, and so you are, or might be, a messengerfrom some urgent place of the spirit where essential poetry sings and sings. I could call you, with even greater truth - my Love - there, it is said-for I most certainly love you and in all ways possible to man and most fiercely. It is a love for which there is no place in this world - a love my diminished reason tells me can and will do neither of us any good, a love I tried to hide cunningly from, to protect you from, with all the ingenuity at my command. (Except completesilence, you will rightly say, which was out of my power.) We are rational nineteenth-century beings, we might leave the coup de foudre to the weavers of Romances - but I have certain evidence that you know what I speak of, thatyou acknowledged, however momently (that infinite moment) that at least what I claim is true.
And now, I write to ask, what are we to do? How shall this be the end, that is in its very nature a beginning? I knowfully thatthis letter will cross one from you which will say, wisely and rightly, that we must meet no more, no more see one another - that even the letters, that space of freedom, must be put an end to. And the plot which holds us, the conventions which bind us, declarethat I must, as a gentleman, acquiesce in that requirement, at leastfor a time, and hope that Fate, or the plotter who watches over our steps will decree some further meeting, some accidental re-opening…
But, my Dear, I cannot do this. It goes against nature - not my own particularly, but Dame Nature herself- - whothis morning smiles at me in and through you, so that everything is alight - -from the anemones on my desk to the motes of dust in the beam of sunlight through the window, to the words on the page in front of me (John Donne) with you, with you, with you. I am happy - as I have never been happy - who should be writing to you in who can say whatagony of mind full of guilt and horrified withdrawal.