I sat with it in my hand for a moment or so before I opened it, hesitating as one hesitates before a door that may reveal a dramatic situation. Then I pushed my chair a little back from the table and ripped the envelope.
It was a far longer letter than Mary had ever written me in the old days, and in a handwriting as fine as ever but now rather smaller. I have it still, and here I open its worn folds and, except for a few , copy it out for you.... A few trifling omissions, I say,—just one there is that is not trifling, but that I must needs make....
You will never see any of these letters because I shall destroy them so soon as this copy is made. It has been difficult—or I should have destroyed them before. But some things can be too hard for us....
This first letter is on the Martens note-paper; its very heading was familiar to me. The handwriting of the earlier sentences is a little stiff and disjointed, and there are one or two obliterations; it is like someone embarrassed in speaking; and then it passes into her usual and characteristic ease....
And as I read, slowly my long-cherished anger evaporated, and the real Mary, and simple, whom I had obscured by a cloud of fancied infidelities, returned to me....
"My dear Stephen," she begins, "About six weeks ago I saw in the Times that you have a little daughter. It set me thinking, picturing you with a of a baby in your arms—what little things they are, Stephen!—and your old face over it, so that presently I went to my room and cried. It set me thinking about you so that I have at last written you this letter.... I love to think of you with wife and children about you Stephen,—I heard of your son for the first time about a year ago, but—don't mistake me,—something me too....
"Well, I too have children. Have you ever thought of me as a mother? I am. I wonder how much you know about me now. I have two children and the youngest is just two years old. And somehow it seems to me that now that you and I have both given such earnests of our good behavior, such evidence that that side of life anyhow is effectually settled for us, there is no reason remaining why we shouldn't correspond. You are my brother, Stephen, and my friend and my twin and the core of my imagination, fifty babies cannot alter that, we can live but once and then die, and, promise or no promise, I will not be dead any longer in your world when I'm not dead, nor will I have you, if I can help it, a cold unanswering in mine....
"Too much of my life and being, Stephen, has been buried, and I am in rebellion. This is a of the tomb if you like, an irregular private resurrection from an interment in error. Out of my grave I my head and say Hello! to you. Stephen, old friend! dear friend! how are you getting on? What is it like to you? How do you feel? I want to know about you.... I'm not doing this at all , and you can write back to me, Stephen, as openly as your heart desires. I have told Justin I should do this. I rise, you see, blowing my own . Let the other graves do as they please....
"Your letters will be respected, Stephen.... If you choose to rise also and write me a letter.
"Stephen, I've been wanting to do this for—for all the time. If there was thought-reading you would have had a thousand letters. But I was content to submit, and latterly I've more. I think that as what they call passion has faded, the immense has become more evident, and made the bar less and less . You and I have had so much between us beyond what somebody the other day—it was in a report in the Times, I think—was calling Materia Matrimoniala. And of course I hear about you from all sorts of people, and in all sorts of ways—whatever you have done about me I've had a woman's sense of honor about you and I've managed to learn a great deal without asking forbidden questions. I've up my ears at the faintest echo of your name.
"They say you have become a publisher with an American partner, a sort of Harmsworth and Nelson and Times Book Club and Hooper and Jackson all rolled into one. That seems so extraordinary to me that for that alone I should have had to write to you. I want to know the truth of that. I never see any advertisement of Stratton & Co. or get any inkling of what it is you publish. Are you the power behind the respectable Murgatroyd and the honest Milvain? I know them both and neither has the slightest appearance of being by you. And equally perplexing is your being mixed up with an American like that man Gidding in Peace Conferences and Social Reform Congresses and so . It's so—Carnegieish. There I'm surer because I've seen your name in reports of meetings and I've read your last two papers in the Fortnightly. I can't imagine you of all people, with your touch of reserve, launching into movements and rubbing shoulders with faddists. What does it mean, Stephen? I had expected to find you coming back into English politics—speaking and writing on the lines of your old beginning, taking up that work you dropped—it's six years now ago. I've been accumulating disappointment for two years. Mr. Arthur, you see, on our side,"—this you will remember was in 1909—"still our party courses, and the Reformers have still to capture us. Weston Massinghay was comparing them the other night, at a dinner at the Clynes', to a crowded piratical trying to get alongside a good in rough weather. He was very funny about Leo Maxse in the poop, white and with passion and the motion, and all the capitalists armed to the teeth and hiding in the hold until the grappling-irons were .... Why haven't you come into the game? I'd hoped it if only for the sake of meeting you again. What are you doing out beyond there?
&nb............