There’s not a soul up here yet but ourselves; so you’ll doubtless be inflicted with another letter in a day or two. I must go and read to Bertie. He is swinging in a hammock on the front veranda in the sun and does seem so much better. The mornings and nights are cold, but for several hours during the day the sun is heavenly, and one feels so close to it up here. You, too, are a lone figure, not on a mountain but on a moor, and dreadfully ennuyée, I fear; so relieve your loneliness after my fashion and write to me often. I know that you have some one else to write to—alas! that I have not—but heaven knows you must have time for us both. What a thousand pities Freddy could not have died a glorious death rescuing some one from the lions when they were walking the streets of Umtali, or trying to assassinate Mr. Kruger. I am not blood-thirsty, but we all have to die some time, and Freddy is so wicked, and has made you so unhappy, and there is such a chance of happiness for you, and I do so hate to think of you in a divorce court with all the world reading the hateful particulars. Well, it is all on the knees of the gods.
Bertie sends you his love, and I send you all of mine you have not already.
Helen.
Letter II
From the Lady Helen Pole to the Countess of Edge and Ross.
Boulder Lake,
June 18th
I WISH you were up here with me, Polly; I am sure you would forget all your troubles. It is such an extraordinary experience to be in a primeval wilderness, where one never hears a church bell, never comes suddenly upon a wayside calvary, never passes a peasant in costume, nor a picturesque hovel. The civilisations and the arts that have made Europe such an inexhaustible wonder never have ventured here. It is Nature, virgin and ignorant, and it often gives me the most unaccountable sensation. Perhaps when I am more familiar with it, I shall be more successful in defining it. I have not grasped the spirit of the place yet. There is nothing of the frowning majestic awesomeness of wild mountain regions that I have read of and often imagined, and, as surely, there is nothing of the peace of England—that peace that must pervade any perfected civilisation just as repose comes to the truly cultivated mind of middle years. It is something between the two, beauty without tameness, solitude without calm, yet with none of the feverish restlessness of the young civilisation at its feet, primeval wildness without its terrors; for scarcely a living thing that harms, human or brute, but has been exterminated; noble heights that never frown. There you have the Adirondacks as I am able to interpret them to you at present. They give me an intense pleasure, that is all I can add. As we approached the mountains on the day of our arrival I thought I should be disappointed, the foliage looked so soft. From a distance one could not define a single tree; they are so densely limbed and leafed, their branches grow so low, and they crowd so closely, that the mountains looked as if covered by a thick shrubbery, through which a path never had been cut, and out of which not a tree projected. But after we were in the mountains all was changed, we drove through the very heart of the woods, thick with high trees and full of a pleasant gloom; and once in approaching them we passed a hill that looked to be set close with green church spires, so thick were the spruce among the maples.
The trees about the lake grow down to the edge of the brown water, almost out of it, and so densely, that in rowing past, one rarely has a glimpse into the woods. When one does, it is to see the great boulders that have given the lake its name. They, too, are on the edge of the lake, covered with moss that sometimes is green, sometimes a mingling of the most delicate tints, pink and green and pearl and blue. Rioting everywhere along the edge of the lake is the wild honeysuckle, pink and intoxicatingly fragrant. By the Club House is an open field where they raise hay. Just now it looks like a wild lawn full of buttercups and daisies, almost as much of an anomaly up here in this wilderness as these comfortable houses and gaily painted boats.
And the perfumes and the silence! how can I describe them? The fresh primitive smell of earth that never has been turned, the sensuous sweetness of the honeysuckle, the strong resinous vitalising odour of the balsam tree. And the silence just misses being oppressive. The birds sing one at a time. I have not yet heard a duet, much less a chorus. Once in a while, there is the tinkle of a cow-bell, and the wind is always playing gently with the tree-tops.
For a few days I greatly feared that Bertie would hate it, but he lies for hours in the hammock, a balsam pillow beside him, either sleeping or listening while Agatha or I read to him. He vows that he will shoot deer with Mr. Rogers in September. That gives him two months and a half—I wonder! I think I should be so happy I should quite go off my head. But he is so young, and only a few of our ancestors have died of consumption. Agatha, dear old mother, is conscious-stricken, because the disease did not attack her instead of Bertie, and, although she never would admit it, I think my aggressive health annoys her. I believe that if I had rosy cheeks she would have left me behind; but if I am white instead of pink, I have the deep vitality that I know Bertie ought to have. I expect he often wonders, poor darling, why his sisters of forty and six-and-twenty should have long superfluous lives before them, while he, at barely eight and twenty, is stricken and miserable. Agatha says it is the will of God, but I am afraid it was going the pace and wet feet. Agatha frowns sternly when I suggest that it was more Bertie’s fault than the Almighty’s, for although she will admit that wet feet might have something to do with it, she will not even listen to a hint of Bertie’s well-known delinquencies, will not admit, dear austere nun-like soul, that such things exist in the world. She is still inexorably opposed to your divorce, Polly; says that it is the duty of a wife to accept her fate, etc., and when I try to explain, she tells me I have no right to know anything about such shocking things that do not really exist (God save her blessed inconsistent soul), and walks austerely out of the room.