I am longing to be regularly at work again—and now feel as if at last I can do so....
More and more absolutely, in one sense, are W. S. and F. M. becoming two persons—often married in mind and one nature, but often absolutely distinct. I am filled with a passion of dream and work....
Friendship, deepening into serene and beautiful flame, is one of the most ennobling and lovely influences the world has....
Wilfion.
P. S. Again some more good tidings. Constables have accepted my giving up The Lily Leven indefinitely—and instead have agreed to my proposal to write a child’s book (dealing with the Celtic Wonderworld) to be called The Laughter of Peterkin....
From Paris I went to St. Remy for a short visit to our friends the Janviers, and my birthday found me still there. My husband had been considerably perplexed how he was to celebrate the day for me from a distance. On the early morning of the 17th of May the waiter brought me my coffee and my letters to my room as usual, and told me gravely that a large packet had arrived for me, during the night, with orders that it should not be delivered to me till the morning. Should it be brought up stairs? The next moment the door was pushed open and in came the radiant smiling unexpected apparition of my Poet! In a little town an event of this sort is soon known to everyone, and that evening when he and I went for a walk, and sauntered through the little boulevards, we found we were watched for and greeted by everyone, and heads were popped out of windows just to see “les amants.”
After his equally rapid return to town he wrote to me:
“It seems very strange to be here and at work again—or rather it is the interlude that seems so strange and dreamlike. This time last week it was not quite certain if I could get away, as it depended partly upon finishing the Maeterlinck Essay and partly upon the postponement of due date for the monograph on Orchardson. Then Richard Whiteing came in. Then at last I said that since fortune wouldn’t hurry up it could go to the devil—and I would just go to my dear wife: and so I went. And all is well. Only a week ago today since I left! How dramatic it all is—that hurried journey, the long afternoon and night journey from Paris, the long afternoon and night journey to Tarascon—the drive at dawn and sunrise through beautiful Provence—the meeting you—the seeing our dear friends there again. And then that restful Sunday, that lovely birthday!”
And again a few days later:
“Herewith my typed copy of your Wilfion’s last writing. Called ‘The Wayfarer’ though possibly, afterwards, ‘Where God is, there is Light,’ it is one of the three Spiritual Moralities of which you know two already, ‘The Fisher of Men’ and ‘The Last Supper.’ In another way, the same profound truth is emphasised as in the other two—that Love is the basic law of spiritual life. ‘The Redeemer liveth’ in these three: Compassion, Beauty, Love—the three chords on which these three harmonies of Fiona’s inner life have been born....”