Love's Pilgrimage eBook

And I just begin to read your letter again, and I tell you, you are a fool.  You say you do not know whether you could love any one as you ought—­well, I, with all my weakness, know whether I can love, and I love you a thousand times more than you have given me cause to.  And you are so hungry! Will you always starve because you are blind?  As to being satisfied, how could you be?  But you say you will love me as much as I deserve.  How much do I deserve—­do you know?  I sometimes cry out against you and long to get hold of you.  If you have genius, why doesn’t it give you some inkling whether you are a man with a heart, not only a stupid boy?  And then I see it all plainly, or think I do, and know that you are trying so hard to be right towards us, because you think you love me the way other people love; and you know if I am weak, it would degrade your genius; and you cannot be sure of my character or strength.  You cannot know whether I realize the life I am selecting—­you have found it hard, and you have every reason to think that I will find it ten times harder; and you love me in a way that is not the highest,—­but yet you love me enough, thank God, to tell me the whole truth!

I have come to a pass where I can say to myself with truth, that I do not care how much or how little you love me.  That depends upon you, as well as myself.  I believe the time will come, when you will love me as you ought, and I say this in perfect calm conviction, in all my weakness, and with all my maudlin habits clinging to me.  Strangely enough your doubt of me has made me rise up in arms to champion my cause, or else I should lie down forever in the dust, and deny my God.

I wonder whether it is my love for you that makes me believe?  I cling to you, as a mother might cling to her child; I cling to you as the embodiment, the promise, of all I will ever find true in life.  I look to live in you, to fulfil all my possibilities in you, and if you die or forsake me, all my hope is gone, and I am dead.  This is a letter in which I have no scorn or doubt, or ridicule of myself, as formerly.

And then you ask me, “Can a girl brought up in gentleness and sweetness, and innocence of life and of pain, can she say things, feel things like these?” It is the gentleness and sweetness and innocence that are galling to me.  I can tolerate no more of them.  They have warped me, they have given me no chance.  But I have had some pain in my life, and since I have known you I have known more about pain and what it brings, and leaves.—­And now I am feeling ill, and I cannot control that.  Oh, God!

XIII

Dearest Corydon: 

I have a chance to finish the first part of my book to-day, and save myself from Hades; and here I am writing to you—­just a line. (Of course it turned out to be six pages!)