I dare not write more. I cannot be sure that any further communication of yours will reach me—intact—or at all—
Your Poem is lost.
And shall I give up—so? I who have fought for my Autonomy against Family and Society? No, I will not. In the known risk of appearing—Inconsequential, Tergiversatory, infirm of purpose and feminine—I ask you—is it possible for you to walk in Richmond Park—when shall I say—you will be occupied—any day the next three days at about eleven in the morning. You will urge that the Weather is inclement. These last few days have been fearful. The Water has been so high—with each high Tide the Thames advances and runs in over foreshore and quay wall—climbing that, with watery ferocity—and laughing and slapping its way across the cobbled pavements on the bank—invading people’s gardens, paying no attention to wicket-gates or wooden fence—but creeping sinuously—and bubbling up—brown and strong—bringing with it a trail of such things—cotton waste, feathers, soaking garments, dead small creatures—overtopping pansy and Forget-me-nots—and aspiring to early Hollyhock. But I shall be there. I shall step out with Dog Tray—he at least will thank me wholeheartedly—in solid boots and armed with an umbrella—I shall enter by the Richmond Hill gate of the Park—and perambulate near there—if you should chuse to come.
I have an Apology to make that I wish to make in Person.
Here is your Olive-branch. Will you receive it?
Oh, the lost poem—
Your true friend
My dear friend,
I hope you got safe home. I watched till you were out of sight—two determined little booted feet and four loping grey clawed ones setting up small fountains as you went, without once looking back. You at least did not do so—but Dog Tray once or twice twisted his grey head, I hope regretfully. How could you deliberately mislead me so? There was I, looking diligently about me for a King Charles Spaniel, or a milky sharp small hound—and there were you, quite overwhelmed and half-hidden by a huge gaunt grey creature out of some Irish fairytale or Northern saga of wolf-hunting. What else have you so mischievously misrepresented to me? My idea of yr Bethany House revises itself daily now—eaves shift, windows laugh and lengthen, hedges advance and retreat—it is all a perpetual shape-shifting and adjustment—nowhere constant. Ah, but I saw your face, even if only in flashes under the dripping brim of a bonnet and the arching shadow of that huge and most purposeful umbrella. And I held your hand—at the beginning and the end—it rested in mine, with trust, I hope and believe.
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 words away; 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 Swammerdam for you again—a problematic labour as I keep discovering small 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 received this 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 easily forget our shining progress across the wet earth. Nor any Word you said—not the most courteous Nothing—nor yet the moments snatched to speak Truth and Justice about the Future Life. I hope you may be convinced that Mrs Lees’ seances are worthy of your serious consideration. They bring such unspeakable Comfort—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-returned being. There was too, glancing unearthly light—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, and fashionable Creatures, and a dour Tradesman whose face creases to thunder when nothing is produced for 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 are human 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 taken your hand—or not taken your 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 came from 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 messenger from 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 i
s 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 complete silence, 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, that you 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 know fully that this 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, declare that I must, as a gentleman, acquiesce in that requirement, at least for 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—who this 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 what agony of mind full of guilt and horrified withdrawal. I see your quizzical little mouth and I reread your riddling words about the Ants and Spiders—and I smile, to think you are all the time there, poised and watchful—and something more, that I know of, whether you will or no …
What do I ask? you will enquire in your precise and yet mocking way—cutting down my protestations to precise proposals. I do not know—how can I know? I only cast myself upon your mercy, not to be cut off, not scanted with a single famished kiss, not yet, not now. Can we not find a small space, for a limited time—in which to marvel that we have found each other?
Do you remember—no, of course you must remember—how we saw the Rainbow, from the brow of our hill, under our clump of trees—where light suffused the watery drops in the indrowned air—and the Flood was stayed—and we—we stood under the arch of it, as though the whole Earth were ours, by new Covenant—And from foot to distant foot of the rainbow is one bright, joined curve, though it shifts with our changing vision.
What a convoluted Missive, to lie and gather dust, maybe forever, in the Poste Restante. I shall walk, from time to time, in the Park, and wait even, under those same Trees—and trust you will forgive—and a little more
Your
R.H.A.
Oh Sir—things flicker and shift, they are indeed all spangle and sparks and flashes. I have sat by my fireside all this long evening—on my safe stool—turning my burning cheeks towards the Aspirations of the flame and the caving-in, the ruddy mutter, the crumbling of the consumed coals to—where am I leading myself—to lifeless dust—Sir.
And then—out there—when the Rainbow stood out on the dark air over a drowning world—no Lightning struck those Trees, nor trickled along their Wooden Limbs to earth—yet flame licked, flame enfolded, flame looped veins—burned up and utterly consumed—
Struck trees die black
Fire in the Air
Leaves not a Wrack
of bone or hair—
Our first Parents hid under such strong circling trees, I believe—but the Eye saw them—who had incautiously eaten knowledge which was death to them—
If the world shall not be drowned with water a second time—it is certain how we shall perish—it is told us—
And you also—in Ragnarök—matched Wordsworth’s fleet waters of a drowning world—with—the tongues of Surtur’s flames that lapped the shores—Of all the earth and drunk its solid crust—And spat it molten gold on the red heaven—
And after that—a rain—of Ash—
Ash the sheltering World-Tree, Ash the deadly Rain
So Dust to Dust and Ash to Ash again—
I see whole bevies of shooting stars—like gold arrows before my darkening eyes—they presage Headache—but before the black—and burning—I have a small light space to say—oh what? I cannot let you burn me up. I cannot. I should go up—not with the orderly peace of my beloved hearth here—with its miniature caverns of delight, its hot temporary jewel-gardens with their palisadoes and promontories—no—I shall go up—like Straw on a Dry Day—a rushing wind—a tremor on the air—a smell of burning—a blown smoke—and a deal of white fine powder that holds its spillikin shape only an infinitesimal moment and then is random specks—oh no I cannot—
You see, Sir, I say nothing of Honour, nor of Morality—though they are weighty matters—I go to the Core, which renders much disquisition on these matters superfluous. The core is my solitude, my solitude that is threatened, that you threaten, without which I am nothing—so how may honour, how may morality speak to me?
I read your Mind, my dear Mr Ash. You will argue now for a monitored and carefully limited combustion—a fire-grate with bars and formal boundaries and brassy finials—ne progredietur ultra—
But I say—your glowing salamander is a Firedrake. And there will be—Conflagration—
Before Migraine-headaches there is a moment of madness. This has extended from the burning in the clearing—until this minute—and now speaks.
No mere human can stand in a fire and not be consumed.
Not that I have not dreamed of walking in the furnace—as Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego—
But we latter-day Reasonable Beings have not the miracle-working Passion of the old believers—
I have known—Incandescence—and must decline to sample it further.
The headache proceeds apace. Half my head—is merely a gourd full of pain—
Jane will post this so it goes now. Forgive its faults. And forgive me.
Christabel
My dear,
What am I to make of your missive—I had almost writ missile—which as I foretold has crossed mine—but which as I had not the courage to foretell is not a cool denial but a most heated riddling, to take up your metaphor? You are a true poet—when you are agitated, or discomposed, or unusually interested in any matter—you express your ideas in metaphor. So what am I to make of all this scintillation? I will tell you—a Pyre from which you, my Phoenix, shall fly up renewed and unchanged—the gold more burnished, the eye brighter—semper eadem.
And is it an effect of Love—to set beside each of us, like a manifest emanation some mythic monstrous and inhuman self? So that it becomes easy and natural for you to write as a Creature of the burning fiery furnace, a hearth-salamander turned Firedrake of the air, and easy and natural for you to see me in both mythic readings at once of my pliable name—the World-Tree consumed to its papery remnants. You feel—as I feel—elemental in this force. All creation rushed round us out there—earth, air, fire, water, and there we were, I beg you to remember, warm and human and safe, in the circle of the trees, in each other’s arms, under the arch of the sky.
The most important thing to make clear to you is this. I make no threat to your solitude. How should I? How may I? Is not your blessed desire to be alone the only thing which makes possible what would else in very truth harm someone?
This agreed—may we not, in some circumscribed way—briefly, perhaps, probably—though it is Love’s Nature to know itself eternal—and in confined spaces too—may we not steal some—I almost wrote small, but it will never be that—some great happiness? We must come to grief and regret anyway—and I for one would rather regret the reality than its phantasm, knowledge than hope, the deed than the hesitation, true life and not mere sickly potentialities. All of which casuistry is only to say, my very dear, come back to the Park, let me touch your hand again, let us walk in our decorous storm together. There may well come a moment when this will be impossible, for many good reasons—bu
t you know, and feel, as I know and feel that this moment of impossibility is not yet, is not now?
I am reluctant to take my pen from the paper and fold up this letter—for as long as I write to you, I have the illusion that we are in touch, that is, blessed. Did you know, speaking of dragons as we were, and of conflagration and intemperate burning—that the Chinese dragon, who in Mandarin is Lung—is a creature not of the fiery but exclusively of the watery element? And thus a cousin of your mysterious Melusina in her marble tub? Which is to say, there may be cooler dragons, who may take more temperate pleasures. He appears, blue and winding, on Chinese dishes, with a sprinkling mane and accompanied by what I once took to be little flakes of fire, and now know to be curlings of water.
What a page of prose to lie like some bomb in the Poste Restante. I am become, in the last two days, a restless Anarchist.
I shall wait under the trees—from day to day, at your time—and look out for a woman like a steady upright flame and a grey hound poured along the ground like smoke—
I know you will come. All along, what I have known, has been. It is not a state of affairs I normally experience, nor one I ever required—but I am an honest man, and recognise what is, when it is … So you will come. (Not peremptory but quiet, this knowing—)
Your R.H.A.
Dear Sir
I am too proud—to say I knew, I should not have come—and yet came. I acknowledge my Acts—of which all that trepidant walk was one—from Mount Ararat Road to the Tempting Knoll—with Dog Tray circling and growling—He loves you not, Sir—and the end of that sentence could be—“and nor do I” as well as the more expected ending “whatever I may feel.” Were you happy I came? Were we godlike as you promised? Two earnest pacers, pointing diligent toes in the dust. Did you remark—setting Electrical Powers and Galvanic Impulses aside for the moment—how shy we are one with another? Mere acquaintances, if not on paper. We pass the time of day—and the Time of the Universe has a brief stop at our fingers’ touch—who are we? who?—would you not rather have the freedom of the white page? Is it alas too late? Is our primaeval innocence gone?