And what was there in the letter? I am not ashamed to answer, only word after word, like footprint after footprint on a muddy path. The written sheets contain hardly more than the blank ones. But I did not expect that they would, how could I expect it?
For you I am simply one among many. No, perhaps a little more, a tiny bit more. You said the first time we were alone together ... not to me ... that my nature was congenial to you. That meant you liked to be in my neighbourhood—my poor little neighbourhood. I feel such pity for myself when we are together. It is like being two people, one of whom has to do and say the very opposite of what the other would like to say and do.... Only when I go away from you and your glance follows me like a living shadow, that doesn’t belong to me, I feel frightened and ashamed as a child. I am nervous about my walk, my figure, my movements, lest they should jar on you, and then I try to appear nonchalant. I talk and laugh, and am two people at once, one of whom watches the gaucheries of the other with sad eyes; the other who is quite at sea how she shall act to please you. And that is I myself, I, who in every one else’s society, feel as free as the pollen of the buttercups as it flies over the fields. I talk on and on as if I must fill space with my words, fearful that the embarrassment of silence will turn my features to stone, fearful, too, of discovering a glint of boredom in your glance. Your glance! It is like a dark, slowly flowing river that bears your soul towards me.
When you look at me, a new world is born within and around me. It is as on that day when the Lord said, “Let there be light, and there was light.” Your glance has divided me inwardly into light and darkness, which are a greater contrast than night and sun.
Your glance penetrates every drop of blood in my veins, as the sunshine soaks into the sleeping earth, and awakes to life its slumbering powers.
I know when your glance is resting on me like a tired hand on the arm of a chair. When you contemplate me without seeing me, because you are thinking of those cares which I divine, though I know nothing about them, something cries out within me, not from one place but from a thousand. Then warm founts of pity and grief overflow my inward being.
But don’t be afraid, my friend, that I shall speak of what I suspect. If you would rather no one should know, I will be silent—like a flower at evening I will close my eyes, compelled by the darkness in which you envelop yourself.
And I will go on seeming to understand nothing, nothing at all. But your mouth, beloved, your mouth, and your dear, beautiful hands betray you.
There is a quiver and trembling round the corners of your mouth as if the unspoken words lay there in ambush—and your hands look so helpless.
Your hands, whose grasp can be so majestically firm and strong, hang limply down, but you are not aware of it. At times your hands appear to me so full of “sin, sorrow, and peril,” that I feel as if my soul were responsible for yours.