I may know soon. How very strange if at the last I forget to think of you!
LETTER LXVI.
Dearest: Every day I am giving myself a little more pain than I need—for the sake of you. I am giving myself your letters to read again day by day as I received them. Only one a day, so that I have still something left to look forward to to-morrow: and oh, dearest, what unanswerable things they have now become, those letters which I used to answer so easily! There is hardly a word but the light of to-day stands before it like a drawn sword, between the heart that then felt and wrote so, and mine as it now feels and waits.
All your tenderness then seems to be cruelty now: only seems, dearest, for I still say, I do say that it is not so. I know it is not so: I, who know nothing else, know that! So I look every day at one of these monstrous contradictions, and press it to my heart till it becomes reconciled with the pain that is there always.
Indeed you loved me: that I see now. Words which I took so much for granted then have a strange force now that I look back at them. You did love: and I who did not realize it enough then, realize it now when you no longer do.
And the commentary on all this is that one letter of yours which I say over and over to myself sometimes when I cannot pray: "There is no fault in you: the fault is elsewhere; I can no longer love you as I did. All that was between us must be at an end; for your good and mine the only right thing is to say good-by without meeting. I know you will not forget me, but you will forgive me, even because of the great pain I cause you. You are the most generous woman I have known. If it would comfort you to blame me for this I would beg you to do it: but I know you better, and ask you to believe that it is my deep misfortune rather than my fault that I can be no longer your lover, as, God knows, I was once, I dare not say how short a time ago. To me you remain, what I always found you, the best and most true-hearted woman a man could pray to meet."
This, dearest, I say and say: and write down now lest you have forgotten it. For your writing of it, and all the rest of you that I have, goes with me to my grave. How superstitious we are of our own bodies after death!—I, as if I believed that I should ever rise or open my ears to any sound again! I do not, yet it comforts me to make sure that certain things shall go with me to dissolution.