LXXIV
Nicholas Devose to Verena Raby
My Dear Serena,—If I may call you again by that name, which to me, in spite of everything, is sacred still—I have only just had, from my sister, the news of your illness, having in this far spot few letters from home, and I write at once to say that I am deeply grieved and hope that already you are better.
If you can bring yourself to write, or to send a message by another hand, I implore you to do so. You may think it hard that it needed a serious injury to occur to you before I wrote again, but that would not necessarily convict me of callousness. I swear to you, Serena, that not a day has passed without my thinking of you—and always with the tenderest devotion to you and always with self-reproach and regret that, so largely through my fault, or, even more, my own impossible temperament, your life may have been circumscribed and rendered less happy.
I know, through various channels, certain things about your life to-day, but of course only externals. I know, for instance, that you have not married; but whether that is because of me (as my own singleness is certainly associated with you, or rather with us), I do not know. I know by how many years you are my junior, and I am forty-nine next week. If you are conscious of loneliness and it is my influence that has kept you from marrying, I am sorry; but there are worse things than celibacy and it is probable that both of us are best suited to that state. I certainly am. The common notion that every one ought to marry is as wrong-headed as that every one ought to be an employer of labour. Very few persons are really fitted to live intimately with others; and the senseless heroic way in which the effort is made or the compromise sustained is among the chief of those human tragedies which must most entertain the ironical gods peering through the opera-glasses of Heaven.
I must not suggest too much melancholy. I don’t pretend that life has nothing in it but wistful memories and regrets. On the contrary, I taste many moments of pleasure. But—even while enjoying my own somewhat anti-social nature—I should, were I asked to stand as fairy godfather beside cradles, wish for no child a sufficient income to indulge impulses, nor too emphatic a desire to be sincere, nor, above all, any hypertrophied fastidiousness. In a world constructed not for units but for millions, such gifts must necessarily isolate their possessor.
When the War broke out I was in Korea. Since last we met I have been all over the world and at the present moment am in Fez. I have thousands of sketches stored away, some of which might be worth showing, but I can’t bring myself to the task of selection and all the other arrangements; I can’t sometimes bear the thought that anyone else should see them, so you will gather that I am very little more reasonable than of old and probably even less fitted to take a place in the daily world.
If it would be any kind of pleasure to you to see me—if I could help you in any way—you have but to let me know. I shall be in Madrid, at the Grand Hotel, till the end of next month and will do as you tell me.
N. D.