[IV]
To Colonel R. F. Morris, C.B., 7th Division, Meerut, India.
91b Harley Street, W.,
March 15, 1910.
My dear Rupert,
It gave me real joy to see your hand-writing again this morning on the breakfast-table. Only last week I had been thinking that one of your rare letters was about due. So you have just had the time of your life, have you, during your last shoot in Kashmir, and find Meerut, as a result, pretty deadly—and oh to be in England now that April's nearly there? A pestilent thing, isn't it, this divine discontent? Only last week I had a letter from old Bob Lynn. You remember Bob. You were his fag, I think, for half a term. London, London, London—that was the burden of his desire; and he with a trout stream, by turns cavernous and romantic and sheerly lyrical, splashing his very doorstep!
And now here are you, too, sighing for Pall Mall and the Park, whereas I, who have them both, would hold six months at Meerut as a cheap price indeed for those seven weeks of Kashmir forests. Is it racial, or universal, or merely temperamental, I wonder, this passionate yearning to be elsewhere—some uncrushable remnant of Romance? I give it up. I am sure that it is a nuisance; and equally certain that it is in reality the very salt of life.
Coming home sometimes in a tube railway-carriage—the latest invention of the modern impersonal Devil—I glance down the long line of returning City faces. There they are, sleek, absorbed, consciously prosperous. And I wonder if they are to be read as indications of an absolute content; or do they conceal, by some stern effort of will, a restless desire for snow mountains, forests, moors, streams, sunshine, anything in fact that is the antithesis of Oxford Circus? It is hard to believe it; and yet I am not so sure that it is even unlikely. For as Matthews, the alienist, said to me the other day, the only really contented people are usually to be found in lunatic asylums. So we must give them the benefit of the doubt. But it's news that you want and not surmise.
And first of all let me reassure you, and with no shadow of professional reserve, about your aunt—I was almost going to write your mother—Lady Wroxton. For a month or two, it is true, I was really in anxiety about her. Sir Hugh's death was a literal dividing in twain of every interest of her life, and the very breadth and diversity of these was the consequent measure of her suffering. But, as you know, that fine, deep-founded will of hers could never really fail her. And even in the darkest days of her first grief and almost complete insomnia it was there for us inadequate physicians to work upon—our stay and hers. Since then she has been resting down at Stoke, and has been progressing slowly but steadily. I saw her last month for half an hour, and Rochester, one of the best of G.P.'s, has written to me with increasing confidence in each letter; so that I hope, when you return in the autumn, you will find her again the strong, serene woman whom we both love so well.