My dear Mary,—Your kind letter about poor Alice came today, and makes me do what I have long been on the point of doing—write a friendly word to you. Yes, Alice's death is a great release to her; she longed for it; and it is in a sense a release to all of us. In spite of its terrific frustrations her life was a triumph all the same, as I now see it. Her particular burden was borne well. She never whimpered or complained of her sickness, and never seemed to turn her face towards it, but up to the very limit of her allowance attended to outer things. When I went to London in September to bid her good-bye, she altogether refused to waste a minute in talking about her disease, and conversed only of the English people and Harry's play. So her soul was not subdued! I wish that mine might ever be as little so! Poor Harry is left rather disconsolate. He habitually stored up all sorts of things to tell her, and now he has no ear into which to pour their like. He says her talk was better than anyone's he knew in London. Strange to say, altho' practically bedridden for years, her mental atmosphere, barring a little over-vehemence, was altogether that of the grand monde, and the information about both people and public affairs which she had the art of absorbing from the air was astonishing.
We are probably all going to Europe on the 25th of May—[SS.] Friesland [to] Antwerp. Both Alice and I need a "year off," and I hope we shall get it. Our winter abode is yet unknown. I wish you were going to stay and we could be near you. I wish anyhow we might meet this summer and talk things over. It doesn't pay in this short life for good old friends to be non-existent for each other; and how can one write letters of friendship when letters of business fill every chink of time? I do hope we shall meet, my dear Mary. Both of us send you lots of love, and plenty to Ellen too. Yours ever,
W.J.
James sailed for Antwerp with his family on May 25, and escaped not only from college duties but from the postman and from his writing-table. He spent the summer in the Black Forest and Switzerland before moving down to Florence in September. It happened that a few weeks were passed in a pension at Vers-chez-les-Blanc above the Lake of Geneva, in which Professor Theodore Flournoy of the University of Geneva, to whom the next letter but one is addressed, was also spending his vacation with his family. Flournoy had reviewed the "Principles" in the "Journal de Genève," and there had already been some correspondence between the two men. At Vers-chez-les-Blanc a real friendship sprang up quickly. It grew deeper and closer as the years slipped by, for in temperament and mental outlook the Swiss and the American were close kin.
To Miss Grace Ashburner.
Gryon, Switzerland, July 13, 1892.
My dear Miss Grace, or rather, let me say, My dear Grace,—since what avails such long friendship and affection, if not that privilege of familiarity? I have thought of you often and of the quiet place that harbors you, but have been too distracted as yet to write any letters but necessary ones on business. We have been in Europe five and a half weeks and are only just beginning to see a ray of daylight on our path. How could Arthur, how could Madame Lucy,[100] see us go off and not raise a more solemn word of warning? It seems to me that the most solemn duty I can have in what remains to me of life will be to save my inexperienced fellow beings from ignorantly taking their little ones abroad when they go for their own refreshment. To combine novel anxieties of the most agonizing kind about your children's education, nocturnal and diurnal contact of the most intimate sort with their shrieks, their quarrels, their questions, their rollings-about and tears, in short with all their emotional, intellectual and bodily functions, in what practically in these close quarters amounts to one room—to combine these things (I say) with a holiday for oneself is an idea worthy to emanate from a lunatic asylum. The wear and tear of a professorship for a year is not equal to one week of this sort of thing. But let me not complain! Since I am responsible for their being, I will launch them worthily upon life; and if a foreign education is required, they shall have it. Only why talk of "sabbatical" years?—there is the hideous mockery! Alice, if she writes to you, will (after her feminine fashion) gloze over this aspect of our existence, because she has been more or less accustomed to it all these years and on the whole does not dislike it (!!), but I for once will speak frankly and not disguise my sufferings. Here in this precipitous Alpine village we occupy rooms in an empty house with a yellow-plastered front and an iron balcony above the street. Up and down that street the cows, the goats, the natives, and the tourists pass. The church-roof and the pastor's house are across the way, dropped as it were twenty feet down the slope. Close beside us are populous houses either way, and others beside them. Yet on that iron balcony all the innermost mysteries of the James family are blazoned and bruited to the entire village. Things are dried there, quarrels, screams and squeals rise incessantly to Heaven, dressing and undressing are performed, punishments take place—recriminations, arguments, execrations—with a publicity after which, if there were reporters, we should never be able to show our faces again. And when I think of that cool, spacious and quiet mansion lying untenanted in Irving Street, with a place in it for everything, and everything in its place when we are there, I could almost weep for "the pity of it." But we may get used to this as other travelers do—only Arthur and Lucy ought to have dropped some word of warning ere we came away!
Our destiny seems relentlessly driving us towards Paris, which on the whole I rather hate than otherwise, only the educational problem promises a better solution there. The boys meanwhile have got started on French lessons here, and though we must soon "move on" like a family of wandering Jews, we shall probably leave one behind in the pastor's family hard-by. The other boy we shall get into a family somewhere else, and then have none but Peg and the baby to cope with. Perhaps strength will be given us for that.
Switzerland meanwhile is an unmitigated blessing, from the mountains down to the bread and butter and the beds. The people, the arrangements, the earth, the air and the sky, are satisfactory to a degree hard to imagine beforehand. There is an extraordinary absence of feminine beauty, but great kindliness, absolute honesty, fixed tariffs and prices for everything, etc., etc., and of course absolutely clean hotels at prices which, though not the "dirt cheap" ones of former times, are yet very cheap compared with the American standard. We stayed for ten days at a pension on the Lake of Lucerne which was in all respects as beautiful and ideal as any scene on the operatic stage, yet we paid just about what the Childs pay at Nickerson's vile and filthy hotel at Chocorua. Of course we made the acquaintance of Cambridge people there whose acquaintance we had not made before—I mean the family of Joseph Henry Thayer of the Divinity School, whose daughter Miriam, with her splendid playing and general grace and amiability, was a proof of how much hidden wealth Cambridge contains.
But I have talked too much about ourselves and ought to talk about you. What can I do, however, my dear Grace, except express hopes? I know that you have had a hot summer, but I know little else. Have you borne it well? Have you had any relief from your miserable suffering state? or have you gone on as badly or worse than ever? Of course you can't answer these questions, but some day Theodora will. I devoutly trust that things have gone well and that you may even have been able to see some friends, and in that way get a little change. Your sister, to whom pray give the best love of both of us, is I suppose holding her own as bravely as ever; only I should like to know the fact, and that too Theodora will doubtless ere long acquaint us with. To that last-named exemplary and delightful Being give also our best love; and with any amount of it of the tenderest quality for yourself, believe me, always your affectionate,