Ba.
R.B. to E.B.B.
Friday.
[Post-mark, April 17, 1846.]
No, my own dearest, I did not see you sit in your chair, nor in mine, yesterday—did I write nothing about your walking with me by the garden wall, and on the hill, and looking down on London? And afterwards you went with me, indeed, to Talfourd’s (last night was that purgatorial business,—how could I make you think it related to Monday?) If I have to put the least thing into words, so I put it always! Being just like the family of somebody—‘who were one and all so stupid’ said he—‘that if you bade them spell A B they answered B A——’ Nay, I spell Happiness, and Blessing, and all other good words if ever so many letters by that same Ba! But I want to go on and say you kept me from such an undiluted evening of misery (because I saw you through it all)—oh, such an evening!—it shall be the last, I think—and the going out is so near,—the bonnet is bought! And you pretend not to know I would walk barefoot till I dropped, if so I might attain to the sight of you, and it. Do let me say, for gratitude’s sake—it is like the sign of spring in Shelley’s ‘Prometheus’—
When ‘mild winds shake the elder-brake,
And the wandering herdsmen know
That the white thorn soon will blow’:
—that the flower of my life will blow! Now let me try and answer everything in Ba’s darling letters and so not be ‘vexed’ afterward,—recollecting how she asked this, or bade me be sure to reply to that, and how I answered, spelling A B for B A! First, there is a famous contrivance against fly tormentors, a genuine canopy, gnat-repelling enclosure of muslin which covers your bed wholly, and into which once introduce yourself dexterously (because the plagues try to follow slily) and lo, you are in a syren’s isle within the isle, a world cut off from the outer one by that fine hazy cloudish gauze—a delight it is! Only, if you let one persisting critic of a buzzer lie perdue, he will have you at a glorious advantage—(not that one ever bit me, in England or elsewhere). And now—your letters,—Miss Bennet’s letter that you received ‘just after I had gone’—will you be edified if I tell you what I received the moment I got home? (once, beforehand—my experience or yours, which would you rather not have?) My sister pointed with immense solemnity to a packet,—then delivered a message, and then—but hear the message—a ‘Mrs. George Sharp’ (unless I mistake the name) lives next door to Dickens and awfully respects him—she asks one aunt of mine, to ask another, to ask my sister, to ask me ... who have never seen or heard of this Mrs. George,—me, who am, she has understood, a friend of Dickens,—to get inserted in the Daily News some paragraph of a reasonable length in recommendation of the accompanying packet of cough-drops, (lozenges, or pills—for I was not rightly instructed which)—my fee, I suppose, being the said packet of pills! All comment is beyond me.
Well, but your Mrs. Bennet—what a wretched, disgusting sfacciataccia! I would not be accessory to keeping those soapy bubbles of stupid vanity from bursting, by sparing a rough finger, certainly not. How ‘ought you to be grateful, perhaps?’ For what on earth?