Dearest Edith,
I am in receipt of endless bounties from you and dazzling revelations about you: item: 1st: the grapes of Paradise that arrived yesterday in a bloom of purple and a burst of sweetness that made me—while they cast their Tyrian glamour about—ask more ruefully than ever what porridge poor non-convalescent John Keats mustn't have had: 2d: your exquisite appeal and approach to the good—the really admirable Skinner, who has now wrung tears of emotion from my eyes by bringing them to my knowledge: 3d: your gentle "holograph" letter, just to hand—which treats my stupid reflections on your own patience with such heavenly gentleness. When one is still sickish and shaky (though that, thank goodness, is steadily ebbing) one tumbles wrong—even when one has wanted to make the most delicate geste in life. But the great thing is that we always tumble together—more and more never apart; and that for that happy exercise and sweet coincidence of agility we may trust ourselves and each other to the end of time. So I gratefully grovel for everything—and for your beautiful and generous inquiry of Skinner ... more than even anything else. The purple clusters are, none the less, of a prime magnificence and of an inexpressible relevance to my state. This is steadily bettering—thanks above all to three successive morning motor-rides that Skinner has taken me, of an hour and a half each (to-day in fact nearly two hours), while he goes his rounds in a fairly far circuit over the country-side. I sit at cottage and farmhouse doors while he warns and comforts and commands within, and, these days having been mild and grey and convenient, the effect has been of the last benignity. I am thus exceedingly sustained. And also by the knowledge that you are not being wrenched from your hard-bought foyer and your neighbourhood to your best of brothers. Cramponnez-vous-y. I don't ask you about poor great Paris—I make out as I can by Morton's playing flashlight. And I read Walkley on Chantecler—which sounds rather like a glittering void. I have now dealt with Alfred and Aimée—unprofitable pair. What a strange and compromising French document—in this sense that it affects one as giving so many people and things away, by the simple fact of springing so characteristically and almost squalidly out of them. The letter in which Alf. arranges for her to come into his dirty bedroom at 8 a.m., while his mother and brother and others unknowingly grouillent on the other side of the cloison that shall make their nid d'amour, and la façon dont elle y vole react back even upon dear old George rather fatally—àpropos of dirty bedrooms, thin cloisons and the usual state of things, one surmises, at that hour. What an Aimée and what a Paul and what a Mme Jaubert and what an everything!
Ever your
H. J.
To Miss Jessie Allen.
The plan here projected of looking for a house in Eaton Terrace, where Miss Allen lived, was not carried further.
Lamb House, Rye.
February 20th, 1910.
My dear eternally martyred and murdered Goody,
I am horribly ashamed to have my poor hand forced (you see what it is and what it's reduced to) into piling up on your poor burdened consciousness the added load of my base woes (as if you weren't lying stretched flat beneath the pressure of your own and those of some special dozen or two of your most favourite and fatal vampires.) I proposed you should know nothing of mine till they were all over—if they ever should be (which they are not quite yet:) and that if one had to speak of them to you at all, it might thus be in the most pluperfect of all past tenses and twiddling one's fingers on the tip of one's nose, quite vulgarly, as to intimate that you were a day after the fair.... But why do I unfold this gruesome tale when just what I most want is not to wring your insanely generous heart or work upon your perversely exquisite sensibility? I am pulling through, and though I've been so often somewhat better only to find myself topple back into black despair—with bad, vilely bad, days after good ones, and not a very famous one to-day—I do feel that I have definitely turned the corner and got the fiend down, even though he still kicks as viciously as he can yet manage. I am "up" and dressed, and in short I eat—after a fashion, and have regained considerable weight (oh I had become the loveliest sylph,) and even, I am told, a certain charm of appearance. My good nephew Harry James, priceless youth, my elder brother's eldest son, sailed from N.Y. yesterday to come out and see me—and that alone lifts up my heart—for I have felt a very lonesome and stranded old idiot. My conditions (of circumstance, house and care, &c) have on the other hand been excellent—my servants angels of affection and devotion. (I have indeed been all in Doctor's and Nurse's hands.) So don't take it hard now; take it utterly easy and allow your charity to stray a little by way of a change into your own personal premises. Take a look in there and let it even make you linger. To hear you are doing that will do me more good than anything else....
I yearn unutterably to get on far enough to begin to plan to come up to town for a while. I have of late reacted intensely against this exile from some of the resources of civilization in winter—and deliriously dream of some future footing in London again (other than my club) for the space of time between Xmas or so and June. What is the rent of a house—unfurnished of course (a little good inside one)—in your Terrace?—and are there any with 2 or 3 servants' bedrooms?