David mio:
You love me: you have always loved me, or you could not have hated me so. It is in your blood. I loved you and I love you, or I could never have done the thing I did. Que voulez vous? We are made as we are made. Why struggle, and what is your victory worth?
Come back to me. You will find me changed in all but one thing. Yes, I am a little pagan: I am good and bad: I am capricious, changing, cruel, but I love you! Tu te souviens? What is all the rest worth? Viens, pour un jour or pour toujours! A ton plaisir, mon roi!
You will not believe me? I sign my name in full.
Letty de Tinquerville Littledale.
A woman who dares to do that must love you!
Letty.
We struggle on and we say to ourselves that we can struggle just so far. Yet we go on struggling until there comes a moment of utter defeat, a moment of terrible weakness, of crushing moral fatigue, when the will cries out that too much has been asked of it and we are ready to throw over everything. Up to such a breaking point we can contend: that reached, everything crumbles and the rest is panic. I know. I have been there.
* * * * *
Thank God I was not in the Paris of Letty at that moment, when I was saying to myself, “Why be tormented by a conscience—why deny one’s self for an ideal—when all it means is this dead loneliness, this blank ache of denial, this laying bare of a hundred nerves to daily pain!”
A sudden hatred swept over me against myself, a scorn and a bitter rebellion. Why couldn’t I be like other men, who close up their hearts, cease dreaming, and avoid the price of great emotions? To take life in little measures, to play in the shallows and avoid the tempestuous depths: other men, most men, live in this tranquil, tolerant attitude; why not I? They may never know the exaltation of a moment but they will not bear the dead despair of years.
Yes, just for that moment—the bitterest in my life—everything in me rebelled against myself. I cursed myself: I ridiculed my compunctions and my sickly conscience, my oversensitive imagination, and my groping after futility. I hated everything I was and everything I had done that had brought me to this living bankruptcy. I broke into a laugh—a laugh of contempt and derision at myself—flung into my things and went riotously into the night, seeking some befuddling oblivion,—some sudden end of this martyrdom of discipline—and, after a quarter of an hour’s blind wandering, I turned abruptly into an open chapel and down on my knees, there to remain inertly until the frenzy had spent itself! But—if it had been Paris—and Letty’s shadowy eyes at my side—
* * * * *
This was two days ago. The storm has passed. Somehow, the struggle has been met anew. I take no credit. That moment of weakness was too real. A man who looks back honestly over his own life is terrified at the things that did not happen,—and not by the strength of his own will, but by the saving quality of circumstance or accident. Few women can understand this: every man will.
* * * * *