[By hand]
Dearest Richard—Just a line to say goodbye and to thank you for coming down. It is monstrous to ask you to come so far for such a short time. I feel much more serene and shall now be brave again. I hope you will have an easy journey.
I have been wondering most of the night if it was not very unfair to force so much thinking upon you, when you are, I am sure, busy enough. And I don’t want to be unfair. If I did, I should just leave all my money to you, with an intimation that you were my Grand Almoner, and die in peace. But I can’t do that, partly because you might die too and there is no one in the world but you who is really to be trusted. Do believe I am truly grateful for your daily letters and your persistence in what must often be an irksome task.—Yours always,
V.
LX
Richard Haven to Verena Raby
My Poor Dear, “irksome” be d—d! There is nothing irksome in talking to you on paper for a little while every day. Indeed, a lot of it is pure luxurious pleasure, because I can indulge in the rapture of (so to speak) hearing my own platitudinous cocksure voice.
It was a long journey, but I am safely back. It was splendid to find you looking so little pulled down and to see all those nice faces round you. I pride myself on being able to pick a Reader against any man!
While the train was stopping—much too long—just outside some country station, I watched three farm-labourers hoeing, and all three were smoking cigarettes. Now, before the War you never saw a farm-labourer with a cigarette and you rarely saw him smoking during work. I am quite certain also that you can’t smoke a cigarette and hoe without doing injustice either to the tobacco or to the crop. No farmer to-day would, however, I am sure, have the courage to protest.
“But,” I said to a man the other week when he was blaming one of his messengers for an unpardonable delay, “if he behaves like that, it is your business as an employer to sack him.”