JUNE
A worse day. The headache seized me and I lay all day in a darkened bedroom, betwixt asleep and wake. There are many bodily sensations that are indescribable yet immediately recognisable, as is the smell of baking bread or that of metal polish, which could never be conveyed to one who had no previous experience of them. Such is the way in which the preliminary dizziness or vanishing incapacitates the body and intimates the headache to come. It is curiously impossible-once entered into this state-to imagine ever issuing out of it-so that the Patience required to endure it seems to be a total eternal patience. Towards evening it lifted a little. Another letter from the mysterious and urgent lady. A matter of life and death, she writes. She is well-educated, and if hysterical, not frantically so. I put the letter by, feeling too low in spirits to decide about it. The headache introduces one to a curious twilight deathly world in which life and death seem no great matter.
JUNE
Worse still. Dr Pimlott came and prescribed laudanum, which I found some relief in. During the afternoon there was a hammering at the door, and a distracted Bertha let in a strange lady who demanded to see me. I was at that time up, and sipping broth. I told her she might come back when I was recovered and she accepted this postponement briskly and nervously. I took more laudanum and went back into my dark room. No writer has written well enough of the Bliss of sleep. Coleridge wrote of the pains of sleep, and Macbeth speaks of a sleep foregone-but not of the bliss of relaxing one's grip of the world and warmly and motionlessly moving into another. Folded in by curtains, closed in by the warmth of blankets, without weight, it seems-
JUNE
Half a bad day, and half, as may happen, a good clear day, one might say, renewed. The furniture-cleaning has gone on well during my somnolent absence and all that-the arm-chairs, the table covers, the lamps, the screen-seems also renewed. My importunate visitor came and we talked some time. That matter is now I hope quite at an end and wholly cleared up.
JUNE
A Poet is not a Divine being, with an angelic vision. Randolph has always denied that description. He likes to use Wm Wordsworth's phrase, "a man speaking to men" and is, dare I say it, acquainted with more of the variety and vagaries of human nature than ever Words-worth was, who looked customarily inward. Herbert Baulk came and spoke with great kindness to Bertha, who, as before with me, said nothing, and stood a red-faced block. We played chess. I won.
JULY
This morning Bertha was found to be slipped away during the night, with all her possessions and some also of Jenny's, she claims, including a carpet-bag and a woollen shawl. Nothing belonging to this house appears to have been taken, though all the silver is out or ranged accessibly in drawers and cabinets. It may be she mistook the shawl, or that Jenny herself is mistaken. Where can she have gone? What should best be done? Should I write to her Mother? There are arguments for and against this-she did not wish her Mother to be told of her condition, but may now simply have taken refuge there. I gave Jenny one of my own shawls and one of our own travelling-cases. She was much pleased. Perhaps Bertha is gone to the man who [passage crossed out illegibly] Should we pursue her? She cannot have taken to the streets, as she is. If we find her, shall we appear retributive? That would not be my intention. I have done wrong in her regard. I have behaved less than well. Herbert Baulk is not a tactful man. But I knew that when I em barked on this course. I should have
JULY
Another bad day. I lay all day in bed with the curtains open, for I became superstitiously afraid of spending so long in a house with drawn curtains. A dull sun shone through rolling mist and fog. At even it was replaced by a smaller duller moon on an inky sky. I was motionless all day, in one position. I had a haven of painlessness and torpor and every other twist and turn was agony. How many days do we spend lying still, waiting for them to end, so that we may sleep. I lay suspended almost as Snow White lay maybe, in the glass casket, alive but out of the weather, breathing but motionless. Outside, in the weather, men suffer heat and cold and fluctuating air. When he returns, I must be quick and lively. It must be so.
Maud said, "She could write. I didn't immediately see what you meant by baffling. And then, I think I did. On the evidence of that part of the journal-I couldn't form a very clear idea of what she was like. Or if I liked her. She tells things. Interesting things. But they don't make a whole picture."
"Which of us do?" asked Beatrice."What happened to Bertha?"We never find out. She doesn't tell. Or even if she went after her."
"It must have been terrible for Bertha. She-Ellen-doesn't seem to see…"
"Doesn't she?"
"Oh, I don't know. She describes her clearly. Poor Bertha."
"Dust and ashes," Beatrice surprisingly said. "Long ago. And the child, if it was born."
"How frustrating, though. Not to know."
"Professor Cropper found the jet brooch. The very one. It's in the Stant Collection. On sea-green moiré silk, he told me. I've seen a photograph."
Maud ignored the brooch. "Do you have any ideas about the hysterical letter-writer? Or does she vanish without trace, like Bertha?"
"There is not more about her. Nothing more."
"Did she keep her letters?"
"Not all. Most. In bundles, in shoe-boxes. I've got them. Mostly fan-letters for him, as she says."
"Could we look?"
"If you're interested. I have looked at them all, once or twice. I had an idea about writing an article about Victorian precursors of, as it were, fan clubs. But I found it rather sickly when I came to it."
"Could I really see?" Beatrice turned her impassive stare on Maud's eager ivory face, and read something there, if not precisely. "Why not, I suppose…" she murmured, not moving. "What reason why not?"
The shoe-box was made of tough black cardboard, cracking with dryness and bound with tape. Beatrice, sighing and sighing, undid this, and there they were, neatly bundled, letter upon letter. They sifted the dates, opened envelopes, pleas for charity, offers of secretarial help, flowing screeds of passionate admiration, written to Randolph and addressed to Ellen. Beatrice checked the date and came up with a screed at once agitated and artistically written, faintly Gothic. And there it was.
Dear Mrs Ash,
Pleaseforgive the intrusion upon your most valuable time and attention. I am a gentlewoman, and at present totally unknown to you, but I have something to impart to you which closely concerns both of us and is in my case no less than a matter of life and death. Believe me I speak the cold truth, no more.