9th January
Do you wish to do something, Daddy, that will ensure your eternalsalvation? There is a family here who are in awfully desperatestraits. A mother and father and four visible children--the two olderboys have disappeared into the world to make their fortune and have notsent any of it back. The father worked in a glass factory and gotconsumption--it's awfully unhealthy work--and now has been sent away toa hospital. That took all their savings, and the support of the familyfalls upon the oldest daughter, who is twenty-four. She dressmakes for$1.50 a day (when she can get it) and embroiders centrepieces in theevening. The mother isn't very strong and is extremely ineffectual andpious. She sits with her hands folded, a picture of patientresignation, while the daughter kills herself with overwork andresponsibility and worry; she doesn't see how they are going to getthrough the rest of the winter--and I don't either. One hundreddollars would buy some coal and some shoes for three children so thatthey could go to school, and give a little margin so that she needn'tworry herself to death when a few days pass and she doesn't get work.
You are the richest man I know. Don't you suppose you could spare onehundred dollars? That girl deserves help a lot more than I ever did.I wouldn't ask it except for the girl; I don't care much what happensto the mother--she is such a jelly-fish.
The way people are for ever rolling their eyes to heaven and saying,'Perhaps it's all for the best,' when they are perfectly dead sure it'snot, makes me enraged. Humility or resignation or whatever you chooseto call it, is simply impotent inertia. I'm for a more militantreligion!
We are getting the most dreadful lessons in philosophy--all ofSchopenhauer for tomorrow. The professor doesn't seem to realize thatwe are taking any other subject. He's a queer old duck; he goes aboutwith his head in the clouds and blinks dazedly when occasionally hestrikes solid earth. He tries to lighten his lectures with anoccasional witticism--and we do our best to smile, but I assure you hisjokes are no laughing matter. He spends his entire time betweenclasses in trying to figure out whether matter really exists or whetherhe only thinks it exists.
I'm sure my sewing girl hasn't any doubt but that it exists!
Where do you think my new novel is? In the waste-basket. I can seemyself that it's no good on earth, and when a loving author realizesthat, what WOULD be the judgment of a critical public?
Later
I address you, Daddy, from a bed of pain. For two days I've been laidup with swollen tonsils; I can just swallow hot milk, and that is all.'What were your parents thinking of not to have those tonsils out whenyou were a baby?' the doctor wished to know. I'm sure I haven't anidea, but I doubt if they were thinking much about me.
Yours, J. A.