CHAPTER IX
A LETTER TO LINCOLN
Reaching this point in my narrative I lean back in my chair—the coals are dying down in the fireplace, Harriet long ago went to bed, and the house is silent with a silence that one can hear—I lean back and think again of that moment in Anthy's life.
I have before me an open letter, a letter so often opened and so often folded again that the creases are worn thin. I keep it in the drawer of my desk with a packet labelled, "Archives of the Star." There are several of the old Captain's editorials, including the one entitled "Fudge," and of course the one about Roosevelt, a number of Nort's early manuscripts, Fergus's version of Mark Twain, and five letters in Anthy's firm handwriting.
This is a very curious document, this letter I have before me. The outside of the envelope bears the name of Abraham Lincoln, and the letter itself begins: "Dear Mr. Lincoln." It is in Anthy's hand.
Ever since I began writing this narrative I have been impatient to reach this moment, but now that I am here, I hesitate. It is no common matter to put down the secret imaginings of a woman's soul.
We all lead double lives: that which our friends and neighbours know, and that which is invisible within us. Acquaintance gives us the outward aspects of our neighbours, with friendship we penetrate a little way into the deeper life, but when we love there is no glen too secret for us, no upland too elusive, and we worship at the altars of the eternal woods. Long before I knew Anthy well I knew something of her deeper life, something more than that which looked out of her still eyes or marked her quiet countenance. The quality of Anthy's silences were a sign: and I surprised once the look she had when walking alone in a country road. People who are shallow, or whose inner lives are harassed by forms of fear ("most men," as Thoreau says, "live lives of quiet desperation") rarely care to be silent, rarely wish to be alone with themselves; but it is the sign of a noble nature that it has made terms with itself.
One of the tragedies of life, perhaps the supreme tragedy, is that we should be unable to follow those we love to their serenest heights. I once knew a man who had lived for twenty years with a woman, and never got beyond what he could see with the eyes of the flesh. The gate to the uplands of the soul long stood open to him (and stands open now no more); he passed that way, too, but he never went in.