The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn Volume I Part 40

TO ----

NEW YORK, November, 1889.

Oh! you splendid girl!--will it really give you some short pleasure to see this old humbug's writing again?... I was very sorry not to have been able to see you: I should have wished to be able to give you a few bits of advice about precautions to take during the tropical part of your trip. But I have faith in your superb const.i.tution and youth,--and trust this will reach eyes undimmed by fever, and brightened more than ever by the glow of all the strange suns that will have shone upon you.

So that is my dream that I wrote you about: it was you, not I, that were to run away. But I did not help you to do your packing, as I imagined.

I wonder if you went away in black silk, or black cashmere: I dreamed of you all in black that time. And when I saw the charming notice about you in the _Tribune_, there suddenly came back to me the same vague sense of unhappiness I had dreamed of feeling,--an absurd sense of absolute loneliness.

For seldom as I saw you, I must tell you that I looked forward to such visits as to something very delightful, that helped me to forget the great iron-whirling world and everything in it but yourself. You made a little circle of magnetic suns.h.i.+ne for me; and you know I liked to bask in it so much that I used to be quite selfish about it. I feel now as though, each night I sat up so late in your little parlour, I was taking from you so much rest,--which means life and strength,--acted, in short, the part of a psychical cannibal! And I am remorseful at not being able to feel more remorseful than I do; it was so nice to be there that I can't be properly sorry, as I should.

I and my friends have been wagering upon you, hoping for you, praying for you to win your race,--so that every one may admire you still more, and your name be flashed round the world quicker than the suns.h.i.+ne, and your portrait--in spite of you--appear in some French journal where they know how to engrave portraits properly. I thought I might be able to coax one from you; but as you never are the same person two minutes in succession, I am partly consoled: it could only be one small phase of you,--Proteus, Circe, Undine, Djineeyeh!

--And you found the loose bar at last, and shook it out, and flew! I much doubt if they will ever get you well into the cage again,--that was so irksome to you. But perhaps the world itself will seem a cage to you hereafter:--it will have grown so much smaller in that blue-flas.h.i.+ng circuit of yours about it. Perhaps when human society shall have become infinitely more fluid and electric than at present,--which it is sure to do with the expansion and increasing complexity of intercommunication by steam and wire,--this little half-dead planet will seem too small to mankind. One will feel upon it, in the light of a larger knowledge, constrained almost as much as Simon on the top of his pillar,--and long, like him, for birth into a larger mode of being. Even now there is no more fleeing into strange countries,--because there are no strange countries: everything is being interbound and interspersed with steel rails and lightning wires;--there are no more mysteries,--except what are called hearts, those points at which individualities rarely touch each other, only to feel as sudden a thrill of surprise as at meeting a ghost, and then to wonder in vain, for the rest of life, what lies out of soul-sight.

--Did you often wish to stop somewhere, and feel hearts beating about you, and see the faces of G.o.ds and dancing-girls? Or were you petted like the _Lady of the Aroostook_ by officers and crew,--and British dignitaries eager to win one Circe-smile,--and superb Indian Colonels of princely houses returning home,--that you had no chance to regret anything? I have been so afraid of never seeing you again, that I have been hating splendid imaginary foreigners in dreams,--which would have been quite wickedly selfish if I had been awake!...

With every true good wish and sincere affection,

Your friend, LAFCADIO HEARN.

TO ----

March 7-8, 1890.

I must write you a line or two, before I finish packing,--though it is the hour of ghosts, when writing is a grave imprudence. Something makes me write you nevertheless.

I could not go to see Mr. M----: there was too much ice and snow. But you can forgive _that_.

I shall be very sorry not to see you again,--and this time, you are not sorry to know I am going away as you were when I went South. Perhaps you are quite right....

--But that is nothing. What I want to say is, that after looking at your portrait, I must tell you how sweet and infinitely good you ... can be, and how much I like you, and how I like you,--or at least _some_ of those many who are one in you.

I might say love you,--as we love those who are dead--(the dead who still shape lives);--but which, or how many, of you I cannot say. One looks at me from your picture; but I have seen others, equally pleasing and less mysterious.

... Not when you were in evening dress, because you were then too beautiful; and what is thus beautiful is not that which is most charming in you. It only dazzles one, and constrains.... I like you best in the simple dark dress, when I can forget everything except all the souls of you. Turn by turn one or other floats up from the depth within and rushes to your face and transfigures it;--and that one which made you smile with pleasure like a child at something pretty we were both admiring is simply divine.... I do not think you really know how sacred you are; and yet you ought to know: it is because you do not know what is in you, _who_ are in you, that you say such strangely material things. And you yourself, by being, utterly contradict them all.

It seems to me that all those mysterious lives within you--all the Me's that were--keep asking the Me that is, for something always refused;--that you keep saying to them: "But you are dead and cannot see--you can only feel; and _I_ can see,--and I will not open to you, because the world is all changed. You would not know it, and you would be angry with me were I to grant your wish. Go to your places, and sleep and wait and leave me in peace with myself." But they continue to wake up betimes, and quiver into momentary visibility to make you divine in spite of yourself,--and as suddenly flit away again. I wish one would come--and stay: the one I saw that night when we were looking at ...

what was it?

Really, I can't remember what it was: the smile effaced the memory of it,--just as a sun-ray blots the image from a dry-plate suddenly exposed. There was such a child-beauty in that smile.... Will you ever be _like that always_ for any one being?

--I hope you will get my book before you go: it will be sent you Tuesday at latest, I think. I don't know whether you will like the paper; but you will only look for the "gnat of a soul" that belongs to me between the leaves.

--Forgive all my horrid ways, my dear, sweet, ghostly sister.

Good-bye, LAFCADIO HEARN.

END OF VOLUME I