Dear Corydon, it comes to me that you are miserable
to be in love with me—that I had no right
to put this burden on your shoulders. I would
say better things if I could, but I think that our
marriage will be a setting out across a wild ocean
in the dark! It is for you to be the heroine,
to dare the voyage if you choose. These sound
like wild words, but they are the truth of my life,
and I dare not say any others. Can a girl who
has been brought up in gentleness and sweetness, in
innocence of life and of pain—can she say
things, feel things like these?
Thyrsis:
God did not endow me with your tongue, or else it
would not be the great effort it is to me to tell
you some of the thoughts that have rushed through
my mind in the last hour.
It is an hour since I began to read your letter of
Horrible Truth. Now it seems to me it might have
been in the last year, in the last century. Actually
I feel like a stranger to myself; and my movements
are very slow. First, I will tell you that I believe
in God, oh, so implicitly—this thought
gives me infinite hope. I long to let you know
as much of my heart as I can, if I am to be your life-companion,
as I firmly believe I am to be. I have such a
strange calmness now, and I imagine that I must feel
very much the way Rip Van Winkle did when he awoke.
I want to try to show you my heart—it is
right that I should try, is it not?
Know that I have placed much faith and trust in you,
in anything that you did. If you opened one door
to me and told me it led to the great and permanent
truth, I believed you absolutely. If you hauled
me back and put me through an opposite one, telling
me that there my road lay, I believed you with equal
faith. Now, now, at the end of an hour, I am,
through you, convinced of one door, the only and true
entrance; and I am as sure as I am that the sun is
shining at this moment, that nothing in God’s
world can ever again make me lose sight of it.
I have found that you can lose sight of it,
Thyrsis,—something shows me that I have
in the last month been more right than you. Yes,
I have, Thyrsis, though you may not know it.
And the reason I couldn’t stay right was because
I am not strong enough to grasp my good impulses,
and keep hold of them: because I have not enough
faith in the soul within me.
I will try to tell you what I have felt since reading
your letter. All is so disgustingly calm in me
now. But listen, I believe I have had a little
glimpse this afternoon of what it is to feel;
and because of that knowledge I now am not afraid
to tell you that I claim something of God and life—that
I can get it if you can. This has been very strong
in me at moments, but, as I tell you, I have not yet
learned to hold my glimpses of truth—they
seem to come to me, and as quickly disappear.
I began to read your letter, and I cannot describe
to you the convulsion that came over me. It seemed
that I had the feeling of an empty skull on a desert;
such a feeling—you can never have it!
All the horror and despair! I tried to form my
thoughts and tell myself it was not true. I tried
to pray, and I did pray—out loud—and
asked God to give me strength to read the letter.
