The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance

by Paul Elmer More; Corra Harris

I need not tell you that I read the letters to me which you wrote to Jack. But the sequel of your story is wrong, dear knight. After a long famine, out of a very wilderness of sorrows, it is I who return to you. And I wonder if you will recognise in the poor little bedraggled vixen that I now am, the gay lady dryad with whom you walked that day in the forest when we met the witch. You may be shocked to learn, however, that I hold you more than half accountable for the misfortunes that have befallen me since! You should have saved me instead of attempting to slay the witch. But you allowed me to depart, a dejected fiction of filial piety, to become the victim of a fanatical father’s ethics. Why did you consent to this sacrilege? For, indeed, I hold it as much a sacrilege to change a Jessica into a deaconess as it would be to turn a Christian into a Hottentot,—provided either were possible.

I admit that it was I who ended our engagement and forbade you to come here; but that was only a part of my delusion, not yours! But why did you not rescue me from these delusions? Are they not more terrible than the beasts at Ephesus? Really I know not which of us has showed less wisdom,—you who stayed to slay a metaphorical witch created of your own heated imagination, or I, with all my hopes unfulfilled, turning aside to follow one whose prophecies carry him out of the world rather than into it. And I do not know what has been the result of your mistake, but with me it has been war. I have been like a small province in rebellion, burning and slaying all within my borders. I am a heathen Hittite in father’s vineyard. I have profaned all his scriptures and confounded all his doctrines, until I think now the only boon he prays for is deliverance.

But one thing I have learned, dear knight of my heart,—submitting to a paternal edict does not change the course of nature, although true love often runs less smoothly on that account. You cannot make a wren out of a redbird, even if you are the God of both. And not all the prayers in heaven can save a little white moth from her candle, once she has felt it shining upon her wings. Just so, some charm of light in you, some clear illumination of things that reaches far beyond all the doctrines I know, draws me like a destiny. It does not appear whether I shall live in a gay rhythm around it or drop dead in the flame, and it no longer matters. Like the poor moth, all I know is that I can neither live nor die apart from it.

And this brings me to the point of telling you why I have the courage to break my promise and to write again. I have had what father calls a “revelation,” when he is about to construe life for me according to the prayers he has said. But in no sense does my revelation resemble the Christian shrewdness of his. It has all the grace of a heathen oracle, and, father would say, all the earthly fallacies of one! For, indeed, my life is so near and kin to Pan’s that my vision never goes far beyond the green edges of this present world. So! draw near, then, while I tell your fortune according to the shadows of my own destiny!—as near as you were that day when we read the old Latin poet together under the trees in our forest,—for in some ways your fortune resembles the scriptures of Catullus. They are dual, and the ethics they prove are romantic, too, rather than ascetic.

I have a mind to begin at the beginning and to run again over the long fairy trail of our love, so that we may see more clearly where our good stars agree. And oh, dear Philip, my heart craves to talk with you. Silence to you is the rare atmosphere where your wings expand and bear you swiftly upward and ever upward. But I—I cannot soar, I cannot breathe in that silence. I am writing, writing, to save my heart from the madness of this long restraint. I am comforting myself with this story of our love—until you come, for you will come, Philip. Well, the beginning was when a certain poor little Eve escaped from her garden in the South, which was not according to the record in such matters, and brazened her way into the office of a certain literary editor in New York. As well as I can remember she was in search of fame, and she found,—ah, dear Heart,—she found both love and knowledge. But do you know how terrifying you are to a primitive original woman such as I was then? I had nothing in my whole experience by which to interpret the broad white silence of the brow you lifted to greet me, nor the grave knowledge of your eyes that comprehended me altogether without once sharpening into a penetrating gaze. I had a judgment-day sensation, through which I did not know if I should endure! I was divided between one impulse to flee for my life and the more natural one to stand and contend for my secrets. Did you know, dear Philip, that every woman is born with a secret? I did not until that revealing day when first you encompassed me about with the wisdom of your eyes. Then, all in a moment, I longed to clasp both hands over my heart to hide it from you. You talked by rote of literature, but I could not tell of what you were really thinking. And I answered in little frightened chirups, like a small winged thing that is blown far out of its course by the gale.

All this happened to me one year ago to-day, dear Philip. But this year with you I have come a longer distance than in all the years of my life before. After that desperate visit to New York, I returned to Morningtown, a delightful mystery to myself, made rich with an unaccountable joy, and with an inexplicable rainbow arched in my heart’s heavens. I did not know for what I hoped, but suddenly I understood that life’s dearest fulfilment was before me.

After that I do not know how the charm of love worked within my heart, only that I had always the happy animation of some one newly blessed. And I had the divine sensation of being recreated, fashioned for some happier destiny. I lost father’s boundary lines of prayer and creed. Some limitation of my own mind passed away and I entered into a sort of heathen fellowship with the very spirits of the air. And always I thought only of you. The very reviews I wrote were, in a sense, remote love letters, foreign prayers to your strange soul. I even banished distance by some miracle of love and often sat in spirit upon the perilous ledge of your window sill.

This feat was not so easy to do at first, for I was much afraid of you. Your mind seemed alien to me in the anti-humanitarian attitude which you assumed to life. Yet it was this very power in you to surpass in philosophy all mere mortal conditions that fascinated my attention, compelled my allegiance. And for a long while I stood in jealous awe of your “upper chamber.” I resented that cold expression of your spirituality. Then suddenly I was like a white moth beating my wings against your high windows.

In those days, Philip, I felt that I could be forever contented if only I knew that you loved me, and that your loving included all the strange altitudes of your mind. Nor can I ever forget the happiness I felt in the first assurances of your tenderness. They seemed to justify and set me free. I danced many a pagan rhythm through my forest, and dared every bird with a song. I had that liberty of being which comes of perfect peace,—the same I have heard father’s repentant sinners profess. And I was resolved, oh, so firmly! never to compromise it with any sacrifice of romance to reality.

But, alas! now I know that if a man loves a woman, this is only the beginning of a long negotiation, carried forward in poetic terms; and that his love is a sort of fi. fa., which he will some day serve upon her heart.