To-morrow
THIS morning came a letter from a half-forgot friend in London. She is in vaudeville and has been booked for two months in the Music Halls. Her letter is of a tenor productive of a letter in turn. But I am somehow not free to write letters to friends while I’m living in my two plain dresses. So I wrote this letter to God instead:
19th November.
Dear God:
I know you won’t answer this letter. I’m not sure you will get it. But I have the feeling to write you a letter, though it should only blow down the whistling winds.
I haven’t a thing to ask of you: no prayer to make. I am not suppliant nor humble nor contrite. Nor would I justify myself as a person in your eyes. I scorn to try to justify myself. What I am I am. If I am a bad actor I take the results of it without plaint. I comment on it—why not?—since cats may look at kings and each person inherits four-and-twenty hours a day. But I am bewildered and distraught and sad.
The best you do for me, God, when I think of you—you personally—is to make me bewildered and distraught and sad.
But I’ve imagined I could put myself to you as a proposition to take or to leave as you like: on my terms since I do not know yours.
There are some verses—the Rubaiyat—in which you are upbraided as if you might be the dealer in some gambling game who had the long end of all the wagers and still so protected his money that he could not lose however the cards turned.—‘from his helpless creature be repaid pure Gold for what he lent him dross-allayed.’—‘thou who didst with pitfall and with gin beset the Road I was to wander in—.’
But to me that seems a cheap attitude toward you, God. I admit you are fair. If I thought you weren’t my mind would not vex itself with you at all. I can not make you out a crooked dealer nor one who lends out bad money and demands good money in repayment.