Letters to a daughter

by Hubert Bland

You are “not exactly engaged, but ...” I will not quote the end of your sentence, for I know how irritating it is to have one’s words given back to one. Well, it is good of you to refer the final word on the matter to me. Even the most unconventional woman does wisely at great crises to respect the established conventions. Her life is made easier, less stormy so. But there! It was unjust of me to say that. I will—no, will has nothing to do with it—I do believe that in leaving this, to you so intensely personal, matter still open, so that I may have my say on it, you have not been motived by a desire to do the right, the correct thing in such cases, but by a real belief and trust in me. You have done it not because it is always done, but because you are you, and I am I, and we are to each other what we are.

But because you and I and this Third, this Third to me so shadowy, yet so portentous, to you, so substantial, are going to do all the usual things, there is no reason why I should write them to you, is there? So I will not express my gratification and my hopes, and end with a stuffy little lecture inculcating a prudential course of conduct. I will practise up the heavy-father style so as to have it all perfect by the time he (no, I will not give him a capital “h,” though I note that you do) comes to see me. How I hope that at the first glimpse of him I shall feel that I may drop it. Does he expect a heavy father, I wonder. Well, if he does, he shall have one; be sure of that.

The first glimpse of him! And I haven’t had it yet! It is that which has given me this queer indescribable sensation of unreality from which I have been suffering ever since I opened your letter this morning. By the way I posted your other letter to your mother on to her at once; she is staying at Richmond until Friday. One always has that curious, empty feeling when one part of one’s mind fails to realise what another part of one’s mind tells one is a fact. It is thus we feel for the first few moments in the presence of death. We know that it has happened, but we can’t adjust our minds to the knowledge. So to-day with me. I know, or almost know, that your life, the life of all others ... but there, I will not be sentimental, so you fill in the rest ... but your life is to be dominated—well, if not dominated exactly, at anyrate directed for good or ill or half of each, by a man of whom I have never so much as caught sight, of whose very name I am ignorant.

Do you know that you forgot to mention his name? Not that it matters so long as it isn’t anything very distressing. I am not afraid of that, for you know the names to which I object, and which I would rather die than have my name connected with, and I remember that you share my prejudices. We both agreed, didn’t we, that Walter Pater was justified when he refused to vote a Fellowship at Oxford to a man named Juggins or something. So I take it for granted that your future name will be beyond the reach of æsthetic criticism. It ought to be a single syllable name, of course, so as to go rightly with Alexa. Christian names of two or three syllables should always be followed by a surname of one.

But I take it you have seen to that. You could not, I am sure, contemplate a life in which you would suffer from a spasm of artistic horror every time you signed your name.

Whatever he is you know well enough that I shall not be glad of him, don’t you? You know that I shall wish every time I see or think about him that he had never been born. You won’t mind that, because if it were not so you would feel that your father was not one of the right sort of men. Truly, I don’t believe that the right sort of men ever look forward to their daughter’s marriages with anything but fierce distaste. When it comes to the point, I mean. They wouldn’t like them not to be married, and they hate it when they are. From which you will gather what a mistake it is to be the right sort of man, and what supreme folly it is to beget daughters, anyway.

It is rum though, rum and inexplicable, that feeling of savage resentment one has against every other man who aspires to any sort of intimacy with any woman for whom one cares even a little. Of course, one says to oneself that it is because one feels that no other man is half good enough for her. It is quite astonishing how one can lie to oneself. I know, for instance, when I can get myself for a second or two into a reasonable mood, that there must be at least a hundred thousand or so of men in England, not to mention the rest of the world, who are quite half good enough for you, and yet I hate with an incandescent hatred the mere idea, the tenuous probability that you will some day be married. If he, the unnamed and unnamable, were to come into this room now I should, or at least should try to, break him up with my bare hands and send the fragments of him home in a cab.

It was Nero or Caligula, wasn’t it, who expressed the genial wish that humanity had only one head that he might cut it off? Well, I believe that at the bottom of every right-minded man’s heart there is a lurking wish that all femininity were compact and personified in one woman and that she might belong to him. “Turkish?” you smile. Oh, much more than Turkish; primitive rather.

I shall not kill him, Alexa. I shall probably be tremendously nice to him if he wears the right necktie. You might give him a hint about that. One never does do the things one most passionately desires to do—they are always so outrageous those passionately desired things.

Haven’t you often, when sitting at dinner, say, with a lot of depressingly correct people, ached and ached to rip out some hideous, impossible, unspeakable expression, just to watch their shocked, flabbergasted faces; and then to disappear for ever from the cognisance of man? I am sure you have; we all have. But you have never done it, thank heaven, and you know you never will. It is almost irresistible that impulse, isn’t it?