It

has remade my soul.

All true love, I suppose, is regenerative and

creative in a sense: if it wins no response in the few years at its

disposal, it wakes at least some ghost of a desire of response; it

makes its recipient aware of emptiness which, being the first shamed

consciousness of unworthiness, holds, perhaps, some ghostly seedling of

desire. Why cannot I love?— stirs faintly in the heart.

Again and again, at any rate, this bitter question

had made itself audible within me, until the failure to give of my very

best in return woke a positive, though then a despairing, hunger.

Looking back upon the short time we had together, and her great

offering, it is a fact that I was aware of this dim hope, almost a

belief, that one day it must come, that her unstinted passion must eventually win a similarly great response.

The death-scene talk I cannot explain. This is not a

novel, but a transcript from actual life. Nor do I care to speculate

whether those strange words were uttered out of some memory of a former

life in which, as a Singer in the Temple, she had contracted a debt

towards me that she sought to pay—a ‘.-, memory awakened in the

act of death. ; Was this love a restitution dating from some

long-forgotten platform where our souls had stood together, and had

she, untrue then to her vocation, used her power to undo the souls of

men, my own among them? Were we, indeed, washed down the ages by the

waves of our own acts? Who knows? It was sweet enough to think that I

had brought repentance to her at the close of some forgotten life, and

so earned the benefit of love she offered. The idea was logical as well

as picturesque, while our strange mood of passion needed, I think, an

explanation that did not offer….

As for the memories that I said revived in me, and

with an absence now of pain that soon passed into actual happiness, I

began to recall in particular two definite items. The accident, for all

its dreadful vividness, I seemed unable to reconstruct—the one touch

of horror and ugliness we had known together. This ghastly thing was

somehow blurred and veiled, so that I recalled only the sweetness of

the autumn sky, the soft wind in the poplars, the fresh grass whereon

she lay, and the dumb sympathy of the doctor who was a stranger to us

both. Of our mild happiness together—the drives by the sea, the walks,

the laughter in theatres and gatherings of friends, the talks and

reading over the fire those chill September nights, the scenes in

sunshine and… in the darkness, that might have been so sweet yet

remained so barren: of these, as a whole, no picture came back sharply.

But two items in the brief panorama revived in me as though of

yesterday—her singing to the accompaniment of the harp she loved, and

her last sentences the wind took off into the evening sky:

“I need your forgiveness, born of love, but love lies

unawakened in you still,” and the final phrase of all: “I have

failed… but I shall try again….”

VI

I RETURNED to England with an expectant hunger born of this love of

beauty that was now ingrained in me. I came home with the belief that

my yearning would be satisfied in a deeper measure; and more—that,

somehow, it would be justified and explained. I may put it plainly, if

only to show how difficult this confession would have been to any one

but yourself; it sounds so visionary from a mere soldier and man of

action such as I am. For my belief included a singular dream that, in

the familiar scenes I now revisited, some link, already half

established, would be strengthened, and might probably be realized,

even proved.

In Africa, as you know, I had been set upon the clue at home in

England. Among the places and conditions where this link had been first

established in the flesh, must surely come a fuller revelation. Beauty,

the channel of my inspiration, but this time the old sweet English

beauty, so intimate, so woven through with the fresh wonder of earliest

childhood days, would reveal the cause of my first failure to respond,

and so, perhaps, the intention of those final pathetic sentences that

still haunted me with their freight of undelivered meaning. In England,

T believed, my “thrill” must bring authentic revelation.

I came back, that precarious entity, a successful man. I was to be

that thing we used to laugh about together in your Cambridge days, a

distinguished personality; I should belong to the breed of little

lions. Yet, during the long, tedious voyage, I realized that this held

no meaning for me; I did not feel myself a little lion, the idea only

proved that the boy in me was not yet dead. My one desire, though

inarticulate until this moment of confessing it, was to renew the

thrills, and so to gather from an intenser, sweeter beauty some measure

of greater understanding they seemed to promise. It was a personal

hope, a personal desire; and, deep at the heart of it, Memory,

passionate though elusive, flashed her strange signal of a personal

love. In this dream that mocked at time, this yearning that forgot the

intervening years, I nursed the impossible illusion that, somehow or

other, I should become aware of Marion.

Now, I have treated you in this letter as though you were a woman

who reads a novel, for in my first pages I have let you turn to the end

and see that the climax is a happy one, lest you should faint by the

way and close my story with a yawn. You need not do that, however,

since you already know this in advance. You will bear with me, too,

when I tell you that my return to England was in the nature of a

failure that, at first, involved sharpest disappointment. I was

unaware, as a whole, of the thrills I had anticipated with such

longing. The sweet picture of English loveliness I had cherished with

sentimental passion during my long exile hardly materialized.

That I was not a lion, but an insignificant quasi-colonial

adventurer among many others, may have sprinkled acid upon my daily

diet of sensation, but you will do me the justice to believe that this

wounded vanity was the smallest item in my disenchantment. Ten years,

especially in primitive, godforsaken Africa, is a considerable interval

; I found the relationship between myself and my beloved homeland

changed, and in an unexpected way.

I was not missed for one thing, I had been forgotten. Except from

our mother and yourself, I had no welcome. But, apart from this

immediate circle, and apart from the deep, comfortable glow experienced

at the first sight of the “old country,” I found England and the

English dull, conventional, and uninspired. There was no poignancy.