IN A FIT OF BOREDOM (APPARENTLY I HAVE NO APPEAL TO THE Midland mind) I have been rereading George Sand’s journal. I just came to an entry where, after being jilted—again!—by Alfred de Musset, she hacks off her hair dramatically and sends it to him. I could have told her not to bother. A bit later she confides, At least I should regain my looks if I could stop crying. Isn’t that typically French!
Since my beloved sailed, I have lost track of the date. Days pass, then weeks, alike as peas in a pod. In a long letter from South Carolina, Katherine describes the sanitarium, its amenities, and the invalids themselves. How curious of fate to send us both to spa towns four thousand miles apart (ironically, in my case, as I am considered too feeble to take the waters of the famous Royal Leamington Spa). Her letters tell of Southern ladies prone to fantastic feminine vapors who refer to the Civil War as the War of Northern Aggression. Being a Northern Aggressor myself, I simply pretend to be intermittently deaf. Such a pity the proper climate for consumption should lie so far below the Mason–Dixon line. Her sweet references to our happier times get me through the next fortnight and her letter becomes quite dog-eared.
Winter has descended. My windows are sealed tight against the cold, and the horses in the lane become mired in a thick mud-paste some days. A few virtuous matrons have come to nibble at me but no one worth recording; they all seem like the tamest of tame Boston. I tried to explain this in a letter to William, but gave up the attempt. How can he imagine what it is like to live shut up in Nurse’s little centimeter of mind?
It is almost a relief to fall into a faint around noon, as is my custom. This is usually preceded by an “aura” in which the paintings on my wall glow with an inner light and beckon me into another world. More than once, Nurse, tall and narrow like a Fra Angelico madonna, has appeared to me stretched like taffy, words streaming out of her mouth in a Gothic script. Naturally, I don’t confide these visions, which might lead her to suspect me of witchcraft or insanity. When I come to, I generally ask her to read to me. She has a pleasant reading voice, almost musical. Sometimes we take up a novel; at other times I ask her to read to me from A Short History of the English People by J. R. Green, my favorite historian, whose widow attended my salon in London. Everything Nurse reads astonishes her (“War for a Hundred Years, Miss? That is too awful!”).
This afternoon I ask her to read to me from the Standard. “You know the kind of thing I like, Nurse.”
“Certainly, Miss. Tragic stories, debates in parliament, and news about Ireland.” She begins several articles that do not prove interesting enough to continue. Then she reads the following gem:
An inquest was held on Thursday at Hull, touching on the death of Miss Amy Cullen, aged thirty-three. Miss Cullen, who resided by herself, was found dead in bed on Wednesday morning, having poisoned herself with vermin killer. It appeared that the deceased had been engaged to be married to a clerk named John Aston. On Wednesday he had requested her by letter to break off the engagement. On Thursday morning he received a letter from her—
“Shall I read the whole letter, Miss?”
“Please do, Nurse. I would be interested in hearing her reasons. If we are ever fully ourselves, surely it is in a suicide note.”
Nurse reads on, in her high, clear voice:
Dear Jack,—you have done right in letting me know the truth. You cannot gauge the depth and intensity of that love which you thus carelessly fling away as a thing not worth keeping. Pride would forbid me saying this to you if I had not made up my mind not to live; but what I could not say living I can say dying, for, oh, my darling, I cannot live without you. After the one glimpse of heaven that you have shown me I dare not face life with the prospect of never seeing you again. By the time you have received this I shall be no more; but don’t reproach yourself, dear . . .
And the letter continues in that vein, full of love and forgiveness toward “Jack,” to whom the suicide bequeaths her grand piano. “What a beautiful sincerity and dignity,” I say when Nurse reaches the end.
Nurse gasps. “But, Miss, he jilted this lady for another. Now the other lady will get her piano, too. That’s not right!”
“I mean, Nurse, how happy and wise of her to go in the illusion of her sorrow and never learn that ‘Jack’ is a figment of her fancy, born simply of her rich and generous possibilities.”
“I can’t fathom what you mean, Miss. How could she be happy or wise and take rat poison?”
You cannot gauge the depth and intensity of that love which you thus carelessly fling away as a thing not worth keeping. No one means to carelessly fling love away, no one means to die from it either; they simply can’t help it.
HENRY JAMES
34, DE VERE GARDENS, KENSINGTON W.
LONDON
SEPTEMBER 6TH 1887
TO WILLIAM JAMES
The manner in which Alice bears the dullness, isolation & solitude of Leamington is almost beyond my comprehension. She is very political and very sure of certain things—the baseness of the Unionists, &c. I don’t think she likes England or the English very much. This is owing in large part to her isolation and the fact that she sees only women.
WILLIAM JAMES
18 GARDEN ST., CAMBRIDGE, MASS.
OCTOBER 7, 1887
TO HENRY JAMES
I am reading The Bostonians now. One can easily imagine the story cut and made into a bright short sparkling thing of 100 pages . . . you have worked it up by dint of descriptions and psychologic commentaries into nearly 500—charmingly done for those who have the leisure and the peculiar mood to enjoy that amount of miniature work—but perilously near to turning away the great majority of readers who crave more matter & less art.
WILLIAM JAMES
CAMBR. MASS.
JANUARY 13, 1888
TO HENRY JAMES
The only experiment I should feel like seeing Alice try would be some mesmeric experiment or other, if a good operator can be got—if Edmund Gurney, for example, could recommend someone as a magnetizer.