¶5411 [Olafs effort to establish study circles for Liverpool workers landed him a place on the executive committee of the Liverpool branch of the WEA. His sudden epiphany under the stars gives a foretaste of the sort of astronomical fantasies central to the great works of fiction he produced in the 1930s.] ]une 1913 Annery TO AGNES 6 June 1913 . . . Pauvre petite Australienne! I was delighted with your gambling experienee beeause it was just what originally broke my prineiples. I am now thoroughly unprineipled in this and all other respeets. I suppose there is something eheap and nasty about my mind, beeause I ean never rise to a negative prineiple. It always makes me rebellious to meet people with prineiples of that sort. . . . Until someone shows me it is wrong I shall stiek to my unprineipled praetiee, whieh is really based on the liberal prineiples of Shakespeare, Browning and the heroes of old, who took life as they found it and swallowed it whole. Yet if you really believe the nongambling prineiple is right, pray stiek to it; for unstuekto prineiples are like weak links in a ehain, whereby the whole ehain is weak. When I was at sehool, and very selfimportant, I made it a prineiple to stop people from smoking in a nonsmoking earriage. My hat I did hate the job, and the smokers hated me! I gave up that as a prineiple, yet I generally persuade people not to smoke in nonsmoking plaees, beeause it is a mean unfair triek. How killing! Think of a small ehubby kid solemnly announeing that though he did not mind smoke himself, smoking being against the rules, he would tell the guard! Said the mountain to the squirrel 'Tittle prig!” You are tired of this diseourse, and so am I. Last night after a eommittee meeting at whieh I was eommanded to write two artieles and a letter to the papers within a week, I walked down the new road towards the eoast in the starlight. I was worrying about the artieles and other mundane things. Then I began thinking about Switzerland, and (with all due respeet Miss) about you. While I was thus oeeupied I looked up, and suddenly I had that rare and wonderful feeling of the great distanee of the stars, and of their intent gaze upon the earth. Everything happening on the earth grew not only insignifieant, by reason of that great spaee freekled with other stellar systems, but also, in a strange way, of desperate importanee, beeause of the intent gaze of the stars. I wonder what these feelings mean, whether they are mere trieks of the mind, or have some bearing on the true nature of things. The stars are as a rule wonderfully soothing eompanions, elearing away worry simply by implying insignifieanee; but when they begin staring at one like that it is diseoneerting. Do you know what I mean? As a rule
¶7835 be alright in the end, because I feel that God is good and it is wrong to doubt/’ Remember that now the evil is as real as the good, and that not only bodies but souls are crippled every day. Remember that millions of people do not feel that God is good. Remember that it is weakly optimistic cant merely to say evil exists to be defeated. What is cannot be undone. Or if it can, we cannot conceive how, and so we must not count on it. So many people fail to overcome evil, and are overcome. Think of all the pain and defeat and “badness” that has been mounting up through the centuries. Not a speck can be destroyed. Nor is it true that the spiritual quality of victory over misery counterbalances it all, for so often there has been no victory. You may look into your heart and say “I know beyond all doubt that all is for the best.” I know also now. But do not let us shut our eyes on the facts. The world is not as we would make it if we were God. Let us not try to persuade ourselves it is, but absolutely accept the evil as a present reality and try to understand, in order to help. ... I must stop this now, though I don’t want to, and have heaps to say. I have been awfully dogmatic, but it is shorter to be dogmatic. I am not really so. March 1914 [Psalms were much on Olaf’s mind, apart from his disagreements with Agnes over the particular psalm he discusses here. He was writing the poems that formed his first published book, which appeared at the end of igi4 with the title Latter-Day Psalms.] University Settlement, TO AGNES 24 March 1914 . . . My dear, I want to talk to you about something, and I don’t know how to explain what I mean. Therefore, since it is difficult, don’t think me an atheist and an ingrate if you don’t see eye to eye with me and if you do not see the bogey that I see. You say “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want.” It is good to think of you saying that lovely psalm. I say it also, being also in the green pastures. For you and me and many others it is absolutely true. But for many, perhaps very many, it is by no means true at all. They want always. Their souls are never restored. Goodness and mercy are only words to them. The house of the Lord, whether it be here or elsewhere, they utterly deny. It is not only that they are unshepherded and in physical distress. Strife and hunger has grown to seem to them the natural order, and he who withstands the law of strife is in their eyes a fool. They do not even say “my soul is athirst for God.” The idea of God is utterly incongruous to their lives. That most beautiful psalm is a mockery to them, and they would say of it things that need not be repeated, calling it the thanksgiving of the capitalists. The only kind of psalm they care for is such as “Blessed be the
¶7936 Talking Across the World lord my God, who teacheth my hands to war and my fingers to fight” (our old school psalm, by the way. Oh what a ringing time we had for it too, and how we exulted!). Now my perplexity is this. I needs must accept the darkness of these people as true darkness in their eyes. How then shall I complacently say “The Lord is my shepherd,” when they are utterly outside all gentle shepherding? My dear, you talk about Life and Faith and Love for ever. For us yes, but for these others whose souls are crippled from the beginning, owing to the unwiseness of their fathers and mothers and the whole elder generation? With a fearful vengeance the sins of the fathers are visited on the children. Therefore when we sing that beautiful psalm let it be with an utter humility and fear, knowing that for some unknowable reason we are favoured. But I am talking like this not because I want to cast a shadow on your picture of the world, but because I am coming more and more to hate the frame of mind (which is not yours) that shuts its eyes to evil, and says “All will be well, but this darkness has no place in my picture; blot it out with a vague glory.” These people are cowards. They are afraid to spoil their peace of mind. They are secretly indignant that any nether wailing and gnashing of teeth should jar them as they listen, with a kind of sensual epicurean delight, to the harmony of the spheres. [Yvonne Jacques, daughter of Agnes’ Parisian landlady, was an art student who acted as Agnes’s guide through Paris and became her closest friend there.] Paris TO OLAF 5 April 1914 . . . Monday night. 8.30. Do you see that blot? Well that blot has a history & it marks a certain step in my character & disposition. Lll tell you how it happened. Yvonne, as I said, was writing notes or copying them for a manuscript & she is a chatterbox by nature & she couldn’t resist giving me all the tit-bits & I couldn’t get on with my letter. Once we both made a grab for the inkpot at the same time & we both stopped being serious to laugh & she told me about a certain prim jeune homme whom she used to sit opposite to at the Sorbonne & who was always too “timide” to look at her until one day when they both dipped for the ink together & made nasty splutters of ink all over their work—justement comme ga—she said & we repeated the performance & the result is my blot. . . . Then strange to say we both stopped work & I talked, talked & I told her all about you! Would you believe it—no I wouldn’t. I’ve never talked about you to anyone except Mother & Dot. A few Aunts & people have talked to me about you but I’ve always shut up like an oyster & frozen like an iceberg, but here if you please—in a strange
¶9552 Talking Across the World edly in the next five months, to the problem of how to respond to the call to arms.] Annery 1 September 1914 in bed ehewing apples TO AGNES Anniversary of Sedan . . . I told Mother I had been thinking of applying. She had just been talking of the urgent need of eheeking the Germans. But my remark was a horrid blow, & I felt like a murderer & a matrieide. I proeeeded to be mueh enraged with me and her and the Kaiser. It was as if I had said I was going to be shot tomorrow. So I have shut up for the present. But ifs rather disgusting to have to sit still and hear of the advanee on Paris, and to see all these fellows getting ready. Guess I must go sooner or later if things don't vastly improve. But Mother would be all to pieees if I even applied for a eommission now. Might quietly apply without saying until the aetual offer eame, which would probably not be for months. We’ll see. . . . Between now and your going we will see as much of each other as possible, and I will be whatever you want me to be, but I will certainly be in love with you. The rest is God’s affair. So also is the war. A great and inscrutable God is he; a terrible and a loving. People will insist on calling him the one or the other, whereas he is both. He, if he is at all, has a mighty sense of humour. . . . He knocks the heads of the nations together and laughs when they take vengeance not on him but on each other, calling him their ally all the while. He fills the soldiers with madness, and makes young workmen to sacrifice wife and home and good work in order that they may satisfy their own longing to be courageous. He breaks off all threads of innumerable lives and innumerable noble works, and bids men to kill, destroy, and cease from holiness. To some he appears simply as a god of battles, to others as a good god harassed by the Devil. Some say there is no god now, others say God is not loving but terrible. Some see all around that he is terrible, and know by his clear message in their hearts that he is gentle. The wise will accept God as a war god and also as a loving god. [Olaf wrote Agnes two letters on 2 October, one to be sent to her immediately at Garsdale, the other to be posted to South Africa to await her arrival on board a Blue Funnel liner at Capetown on her journey home. The first complains about her behavior toward him in the present; the second imagines the degree to which in the future they each will become disembodied to the other.]
¶1121915 [Beatrice and Alfred Fryer, Agnes’ hosts when she stayed in Rouen in 1913 and 1914, told Olaf about the Ambulance Unit established by the Society of Friends and the work it was doing. From this point forward the Friends Ambulance Unit became Olaf s goal for a kind of war service that would satisfy his desire to participate in the suffering without joining in the fighting.] Garsdale, Liverpool TO AGNES 9 January 1915 . . . I am so glad you have grown to love the stars. I think the night sky is the greatest of all ehurehes. One is not always in the mood to go to that partieular ehureh, for sometimes one is too busy with the earth to bother about the stars; but even at those times if one is foreed to be under the stars a while, say walking home at night, one soon begins willy nilly to listen to them, and it is as if a door were opened in one’s mind, and one were to walk out of oneself into heaven. There is only one time when the stars are not ealming. That is when one is already in revolt against the earth and its laws. Then it is appalling to think of the inevitable maehinery of the universe, grinding on for ever and ever, producing life and destroying it, careless altogether of its children, caring only about the will of the great Engineer, which will is by no means ours. That is a nightmare. Yet I think that even from that the best awakening is not to run away from it, so to speak, and drown oneself in this little world, but to stay out in the night and make oneself to feel that it is not just a great factory building, but indeed a church after all, wherein is a spirit or a God to be loved more than one’s little self. Then it all goes right again. But it is hard to reach that point, and one easily slops back into egotism. . . . 69
¶145102 Talking Across the World were also open to us, so that we grieved for them; & the souls of all ereatures great and small, down to the tiniest. And strange noble beings in other worlds were seen, and of eaeh one we felt “It is I.” We saw also worlds where life was hardly yet dawning, and worlds whenee life had long sinee gone; worlds also where life would never be, rolling patiently along, lonely and humble. This is a fairy tale, my dear, but if you think hard enough it will all seem true, even though it feebly tries to tell the untellable. This vision was brought by a kiss, please note. It lifted us out of the mood for serimmages. For a long while we stayed still, gazing together, eonseious of all this. For ages and aeons we stayed so, watehing the lives begin and die, watehing the worlds do so also. Watehing, but never looking from eaeh other’s eyes. But at last a feeling that this was not all, that there was another, deeper truth to unloek, made me take you in my arms (at last after all those aeons), and you lifted up your faee, and it was as I have seen it before in the darkness onee, solemn and happy. And you were kissed on the lips. We were a real flesh and blood eouple up there in the skies, and we were dressed in the clothes of this world. Therefore the embrace was a very real and ordinary one, also gentle, and willing on both sides. But again came a change. Suddenly all time became now. That means nothing to us here, but in the fairy tale it meant that everything that ever happened or will happen was for ever present fact. The heavens also in their immensity were seen to be a very small thing, and an overwhelming sense came over us that a third person was present, one outside and beyond all creation, one of whom Life and Love are our nearest image. Then came the Truth. There the fairy tale breaks down hopelessly, and can only wind up by saying that the perception of that Truth woke me up, in my sleeping bag, alone. Egremont TO OLAF i8 September 1915 . . . This week I had your first letters from France. Two letters. I had waited 2 weeks & two days for them so I was very glad to get them. But I nearly wept with indignation or was it annoyance? when I saw that the first page was cut about by the censor in such a reckless manner that only half the page was left. It was all the part telling of your drive from where you landed to where you got to (won’t that sentence mystify the Censor if he bothers to read [my] letters? which I hope he doesn’t). It was very sad about the car getting banged. I nearly wept at that too. You do seem to have such rotten luck. But it will all come right in time. I am just so impatient again for news of you because that all seemed so new & strange & unreal. I wish there weren’t any censors. It’s more the idea of them than any real restraint which they impose, but the fact that one may not tell this & that harmless (apparently) episode is boresome.
¶157114 Talking Across the World last night: this morning brings your letter. So now we really are engaged. Agnes and Olaf engaged to be married! How perfeetly glorious. And as to the ring, look you, I shall venture on one no later than tomorrow, guessing the size. If it won’t fit, you must get it altered and debit me with the eost; that is quite often done, I think. I must needs guess also what you would like, but methinks I shall not go very far wide of the mark. But oh Agnes, in the eyes of the world betrothed to be my wife! Why ever did I leave you to do the offieial proposing? Wasn’t it seandalous of me; but you see I had tried so often before, I thought I would give up assaults and sit down patiently to a siege. Egremont TO OLAF 21 November 1915 . . . I wish I eould have a talk with you about the war & war in general. Daddy is so eonfident that we are on the right side & that our ideals are going to eome out triumphant over all evil. It seems miserable to be doubting when he is so sure, but I feel glum at the whole thing. I know we have our ideals & I believe they are more noble than those of our enemies but the more we fight & get entangled the further we seem to get from those ideals & the more impossible does it seem of ever reaehing our objeet in that way. We ean’t erush Germany any more than she ean erush us, & when it’s all said & done the settlement will be made by arbitration, won’t it? Oh why fight? why fight? If we hadn’t fought—the Germans would have been & swept through Franee & England & left a burning trail. There’s something wrong somewhere—but where is it? Where did it begin that it should spread so like this into all the eorners of the earth? I ean’t solve it. We ean’t begin to solve it until we stop fighting. What a work then. I pray that you may be spared to fight in that fight & I to help you. Egremont TO OLAF 24 November 1915 . . . The only real pieee of news is that I met Jaek this morning doing some business up near the Gollege & he earried my bag for me & told me that he had enlisted! I just said, “Have you Jaek? Yes I am glad” & pretended not to be very surprised or very interested but I eouldn’t get it out of my head all day. I know I’m responsible for it in the first plaee, & I know it’s the right thing; he felt it too I’m sure, only he puts all sorts of things in the way. About 3 weeks ago he asked me if it would please me if he enlisted & I told him that it wasn’t my affair at all, but it would please me to think that he was doing what he knew to be his duty. I said he wasn’t to do anything for me but what he did must be for his King
¶316273 erally washing is no more than a lick to the visible portions and a promise to part of the invisible portions, in cold water outside. But in hard frost even that gets omitted, & people wait for a change of wind and wipe their faces every morning on a damp towel. My personal sorrow at present is connected with boots. I have two pairs, one of trench boots & one ordinary. The ordinary ones are old and dilapidated; the “trenchers” suddenly began to fall to pieces, and as the divisional bootmaker says he is too busy to mend them I had to send them to a town, where they will be probably a month. Meanwhile I have one “holy” pair that are always soaking wet. Consequently it is a very long time since one had dry feet in the daytime. All these tragedies are nothing compared with the real tragedies of the world today, but all the same they are amazing. . . . Another Day. ... I have been reading Nietzsche’s “Also Sprach Zarathustra,” but in translation. It is annoyingly pompous, and its ideal is ludicrously egotistical; but it has brilliant truths in it here and there, and of course it is interesting to read what the Germans so often profess as their ideal, and to see how far they have really drifted from pure Nietzsche. It is a book to make one think, even if the thinking is often hostile to the author’s idea. And it is wonderful to see how all these great and so different books & men, like Nietzsche, Bergson, Mazzini, Meredith, Morris, Comte, Shelley, Swinburne, Browning, and even Carlyle—all seem to contribute some definite idea that is gradually proving essential to the new faith. It is like a game of patience—fitting in the cards in their right places. And in each case there seems to be so much that will not stand the test, that is not the real true truth, and just one brilliant idea that has been waited for by a puzzled world. . . . As to Conscription, dear, you know what I think, & think with ever surer confidence. You know what I think about the results of the Referendum. And you know how glad I am to think of your acting according to your own conviction in the matter, however profoundly we differ. Look! I feel very strongly about that subject, & in the future I may have to act on that feeling; yet somehow I love you better for being in the enemy’s camp. Lair, noble, and misguided enemy. Certainly one or other of us is misguided, and naturally I won’t believe it is I! I’ll snatch you from that false allegiance someday, or be convinced and convicted of profound error myself. What a plot for a melodramatic novel—He and she in such bitterly opposed camps, & both by serious conviction, not by mere chance. January igi8 SSA 13 TO AGNES 20 January 1918 . . . The most thrilling subject now is the slow but steady evolution of the various nations & parties toward peace. One feels that there is now
¶317274 Talking Across the World quite a new air about it all. Personally I greatly admire the Bolsheviks in spite of their oppression of their enemies. The hope of the future is with them. It is they that seem to have the courage and the faith. . . . Peace is really coming at last. Then comes the beginning of real work at last. It will perhaps be an age of starvation and disorder and terror and misunderstanding and revolution, but it will be the age of the beginning of the new alignment of life, at least if we all try hard enough. . . . Lately I have been thinking with little content about “In a Glass Darkly” and planning out considerable additions to it, & alterations. If I can get the additions adequately written the whole will be a far bigger thing than before, & actually a book. Was there ever a book that took so much re-writing? Indeed it has not been written, it has grown of its own accord & very spasmodically. I don’t know if I am doing right or wrong in giving so much time & thought to this one effort. I don’t know that I even care whether it is right or wrong. All I care is that the book when it is completed shall be sound. If in years to come the world (!) asks me, ‘'What did you do in the great war?” and I have to say, “I wrote a book,” I don’t care for the world’s condemnation, nor for anybody’s; for if the book be the true & beautiful thing that I am trying to make it, it will justify me; & if after all it is nothing and I have to be ashamed of myself for a waster—well, there’s an end of it, and one more man ashamed of himself won’t harm the Idea, and the Idea is all that matters. And faith, I did not try to avoid the war so as to write a book. I did my best to get into the war while not betraying the Idea; and since the war would not have me on those terms more than as an ambulance driver—tant pis, and all the more obligation to serve directly the Idea by laborious thought & writing. . . . The other evening we read “Twelfth Night” and I took Sir Toby Belch with much relish. We have some rather good readers amongst us, especially one [Frederick] Jeffrey who is called Amelia because (oh horrid pun!) when he first came to us he was sent as an orderly to an outstation where the drivers reported that he greatly “ameliorated” their lot! Amelia took Portia in “The Merchant of Venice,” and did it with much spirit and delicacy. He is a nice lad, but generally asleep. At present we are having an epidemic of slight illness, due probably to some bad food or other, or possibly to the rather foul atmosphere of the stable over which we live. In the evenings, what with the stable, tobacco, acetylene lamps, the stove, and forty or more men, and the necessity for keeping the two wee windows shut because of the light, we get up a fearsome fug.
¶344301 our strange position can realise it without losing sight of the infinitely greater beauty of the world as a whole. Woe to us if we fail to realise the horror or the beauty. I believe that the great need after the war will be for these very two qualities—detached sympathy and a faith in beauty and goodness that is strong enough to afford to realise evil. May 1918 [Antoinette Trebelli, daughter of the famed nineteenth-century French mezzo-soprano Zelia Trebelli, took the stage name of Antonia Dolores. She did not enjoy the operatic success of her mother, but her reputation as an “artistic” singer filled concert halls when she went on tour.] Egremont TO OLAF 21 May 1918 . . . Last Saturday week it was the German Circle. At our last few summer meetings we have gone into the Botanical Gardens to read instead of in Fraulein Hasselman s room in town. But it was very disturbing in the gardens for we dare not be overheard talking in the hated German tongue & there were crowds of people all about, so we only attempted silly light comedies & we had altogether rather a skittish time with affected coughings & nudgings to warn each other of the approach of an enemy! It was silly. . . . When the meeting was over about 5.30 Ethel & Margaret & I invited ourselves to tea in Erl H’s room. It was really like going back to our student days in Germany. Ethel [Liggins] & Erl H set the table & Margaret & I climbed down three flights of stairs & went out into the town to buy provisions. There are very few shops open on Saturday night, but we struck the right place—a veritable little Delikatessen-geschaft, but it was kept by a jolly little Italian man. Being Saturday night he was not supposed to sell tinned stuff & it was very amusing to see the way he kept the letter of the law & dodged the spirit. He was behind his counter all the time cutting cold meats & things. The customers crowded in asking for tins of oysters & tins of jam & things. He directed them where to hnd things on various shelves but he would have nothing further to do with them, nor would he take the money. He said they could bring it in on Monday! & all the time he was laughing away to himself as he cut his cold meats. We would have been annoyed at him, but he was such a merry little fellow. We were quite lawful customers ourselves. We bought only Schincken (ham) & Wurst (sausage)—a truly German repast. What helped very much to renew the feelings of our old German tea parties was that we were all in a state of excited anticipation about Dolores’ concert. Have you ever heard her? We persuaded Erl Hasselman to come with us when we had hnished our jolly little German meal—Thee und ‘"Gakes,” Schincken, Wurst, Kase, Butterbrod und Banannas—& washed up in a very primitive
¶355312 Talking Across the World than four years apart. It will be horrible if we have to waste our first few weeks together in being disappointed. ... So do—for the sake of our first few weeks—bring me down from my pedestal, however humble an one it may be. First you will see me with your eyes—think of me from now till then as other people see me. Don’t think of what you have imagined—it is all wrong, truly it is. If I had the eyes & the nose & the mouth & the ehin that you believe me to have, & the hair & the eolour & the eomplexion & what else not! you wouldn’t like me at all. . . . Next you will hear me speak, & probably I shall say just what every other ordinary girl would say—nothing to know me by that I am Agnes. If I only said ordinary things, it might be alright, but sometimes I shall say extraordinarily stupid mistaken things that you will be surprised at— & grieved too—if you don’t get it firmly into your head first that 1 am only an everyday human girl, & then there will be “those irritating little ways” that Dot writes of so feelingly. And all these things are only on the outside & don’t matter! & there are still all those other things to learn of that do matter! Somehow I am not so mueh afraid of those things although they are mueh more important. We are not so likely to go wrong over them. SSA 13 Agnes, 6 July 1918 Just a line in ease there is no ehanee of more this week. Our existenee here is one of the queerest possible—midnight alarums & exeursions, mid-day glorious bathes or very dusty running. It is quite theatrieal, & the reality of war is nowhere. Were I to tell you about it all you would be vastly amused, but I ean’t. We are vastly amused during the day, but the shades of night put us into a vein of petty tragedy. ... I am earrying about in my poeket (as being on the whole the safest plaee) the mueh beseribbled manuseript of the world’s greatest and still unpublished flight of imagination, namely my book! If I keep it in my ear the ear will get blown to bits and burnt, like Harry’s. If I leave it with our own embusques they will get blown to bits. If I bury it the earth itself will be blasted. So I earry it, and shall be blown to bits with it. Quod erat faeiendum. Poor old manuseript! It eould not be read by anyone but me anyhow, in its so beseribbled-over eondition. And if it eould, it is so unfinished as to be useless till there is a real ehanee of working at it. Of eourse you understand, dear, that all this talk about blowing to bits is a “blague,” beeause it is utter peace here; otherwise I should probably not be joking on that subject. But heaven help the infantry man in such battles as have been during this year. Words fail. But one’s mind is full of the tragedy of the foot-soldier-man. The worst that happens to us is child’s play for him.
¶357314 Talking Across the World tenth as terrible a dose of war where I am now as we might have expeeted. Anyhow this letter must stop. Things are not very eondueive to letter writing, not that we are fearfully busy, by any means, but the mind wanders. Heaven have merey on the souls of those who invented modern war! [When Olaf adapted the incident of the man in the ditch for the war section of his 1932 novel, Last Men in London, he described it as 'The nadir of existence” for the semiautobiographical character of Paul, the ambulance driver.] SSA 13 Agnes, 21 July 1918 We have settled down onee more (for the present anyhow) to our usual peaeeful existenee. I ean’t tell you about the last week, or rather I don’t know how mueh I might tell, and don’t intend to take risks of being saeked or eourt martialed! Anyhow we had about one tenth of the unpleasantness we had expeeted, in faet we had a very easy let off. None of our fellows were hurt, and very few ears were hit, and there were few patients to earry, eonsidering. On the other hand for a while it was quite suffieiently dramatie. Of eourse you will have seen in the papers all about the big battle of these days, and you will have guessed that we had only slight experienee of it here. Yet, if you were to be sitting beside me now I should be able to tell you mueh that would be surprising and thrilling. But anyhow I am tired of it all. . . . My dear, in the last serap I did an awful thing for whieh I don’t see how you will ever forgive me. I left a wounded man in a diteh under shell fire. Of eourse I thought he was dead. He was horribly smashed up. Of eourse I ought to have stopped and got out & examined him, but he seemed sueh a fragment of a man that I only slowed down to look at him and then went on. But subsequently he turned out not to be dead, & I myself finally took him to the rear. It is horrible to be guilty of sueh a gross pieee of earelessness, for it was just earelessness and not blue funk, for I was not in a funk just then. I was too busy avoiding shell holes to be in a funk, and alas too busy to switeh oflF my mind on to an unexpeeted subject. But never again, never never again. I shall now drive with the expectation of a wounded man at every ten yards, so as to be on the safe side. No one seems to blame me, but that is no criterion. People don’t blame people on the culprit’s own evidence, unless it is obviously an extremely bad case. But I shall remember that man now for many a long day. Poor chap, he must have died very soon after I got him away anyhow. Can you forgive me? I have been honest and told you anyhow. And I have learnt a lesson not easily to be forgotten. Can
¶386343 naturally offered is a double-bedded bedroom. Oh Franee! But I expeet England would be the same. They are surprised when you only want a sitter. . . . Later, with a very shaky hand after helping someone to put on a tyre (and anyhow gloves are not eondueive to ealligraphy). Last night the Prof (Riehardson) gave me for eritieism a manuseript of his, a book on the psyehology of war, a mass of abstruse mathematieal symbols and equations. This morning I wrapped myself up and read it through, and subsequently he eame himself to “be eritieized.” Of eourse the job was quite beyond me, I not being a mathematieian, but we had a great diseussion about free will and finally of eourse respeetfully agreed to differ. My own book is eausing me mueh tribulation. It must be absolutely finished by the time I am demobilized, but unfortunately the eold weather is unpropitious. It is so nearly finished in substanee, but it needs a lot of work in revision and fair-eopying. . . , Later. Me voiei, eomfortably entrenehed in the new reading room, a long narrow ehamber with three windows, a fine fire, two tables, plenty of ehairs, and an assortment of erude prints representing hunting and shooting seenes. Never sinee the Convoy began has one been so eomfortable. It is quite a home. Beside me sits Bonham [Roger Carter] versifying, in front sits [Edward] Graee, our inimitable eook writing letters and his diary. By the fire is the Doe writing, and on the other side of the fire Pimm reading. (This all reads like the preliminary stage direetions of a Bernard Shaw play. Do you know CBS? He is a tonie, nay more. He upsets all one’s preeoneeived ideas about everything that matters.) On one of our walls is a highly respeetable eloek merrily tieking off the seeonds that still separate Agnes and Olaf. . . . This room bids fair to make writing and reading quite tolerable. I hope we stay here for a long time yet. The other room, the “joy room,” is mueh bigger than this, and is meant for making a noise in, for ehatter and singing and general rowdiness. I expeet that one will be very mueh used. There! That is all of that subjeet. What next? Oh yes. This afternoon I was formally presented with my eroix de guerre. The eeremony was simple. Brown, the seeond in eommand and aeting ehief, eame along while I was going to tea, dug a paeket out of his poeket and said, “Oh, glad Pve met you: I ean get rid of this.” A pieee of tissue paper enelosed the bauble, a bronze eross baeked by two erossed swords, with a tiny head of La Republique Frangaise in the eentre, the whole hanging on the ribbon of whieh I sent you a snippet, and in the middle of the ribbon the modest bronze star. Gold starred erosses are given by the general in person, and palm leaves earn also a kiss from the general. Silver and bronze are given by the eommanding offieer of the unit at a formal November igi8
¶405362 Talking Across the World reason referred to only glancingly. The wedding date, once contemplated for mid-May, became indefinite. ‘Tt has been,'' Agnes mysteriously wrote to her mother on 7 May, 'The strangest, weirdest, most incomprehensible week that I've ever put in in my life." The mystery would not be explained to her parents until late August; meanwhile, once more, she and Olaf were communicating by letter.] Annery Darling girl, 11 May 1919 Twenty-four hours ago I began a letter to you, and here is another. . . . Oh my darling, my darling friend, I have wakened into a new range of living sinee you came. I wish I could wake you as you have wakened me. I am all an aching desire that you should be happy, strong, and blessed with loving as I am blessed. In the spring the crowding life of plants & birds seems to be the nature of all the universe. But, dear, this lovely business of living is very short and for most creatures is no less tragic than lovely. Today I saw a wretched little half fledged bird crushed in the road. Down in West Kirby there is Mrs. Kerr, slowly, painfully dying. Humanity’s sorrows are fortunately beyond the reach of one small mind, but sometimes we get terrible glimpses of it to blast all our joy. Yes, this lovely spring and pure joy of life is a very rare & precious thing. And what is the end of all this rigmarole of mine? Why of course—oh Agnes, love me, love me, not only for my sake, for I am already blessed in loving you, but for your own sake that you may be blessed too while yet it is spring time for you. . . . These few days away from you seem more anxious and weary than all those years, somehow, because now I love you and not a dream. I love a little girl whose hair is soft and sunny, whose face is a little pale, but sometimes blushes, whose eyes look generally away from me, but sometimes look right into the heart of me. I love a little girl who has the sweetest Australian voice, and certain dear manners of gaiety and gentleness. I love a girl who kept me waiting very long so as to be sure, then was gallantly loyal to me for long years, then lost herself on board ship and now is still all adrift and troubled. Oh I love her all the more for that, for it shows her human, & it has shown me her absolute honesty. I will not let her go. She is the angel and I am Jacob. And what is it you are to love? A cousin of most unremarkable appearance and undashing behaviour? A man who does not seem particularly manlike? A muddler, and no man of action? A philosopher who cannot express his philosophy? Silly girl, can you not see behind all these things to the real me? ... I am stubborn in love. And if late events shook me for a while, I am solid again now, solid love of Agnes & will to be loved by Agnes, 'd am my universe,” said I? Now I say, '‘Agnes is my universe.” She is no narrow universe. She is wide as
¶406the constellations, deep as the First Cause. She is the radiant centre of all things, a sweet and wise comment on all things. . . . [Next day.] Relations up here disapprove of the Reigate marriage, but that can't be helped. It is far best so. Father is keen & Mother acquiesces & the rest must put up with it. What am I to get married in? Do find out what Quaker bridegrooms wear. I am loath to buy a frock coat & never wear it again. I hate such garments. I have a '‘morning" coat, a tailed black thing, which I equally hate. In fact I hate all such respectable things, but one must do as will be expected of the Reigate Friends. What sort of a wedding dress are you having? 363 May 1919 Annery Agnes, 12 May 1919 You must forgive me for writing so many letters. When I am with you I feel I must have my arm round you lest you should desert me. These letters represent my arm. . . . Father and I have been sitting in the drawing room talking politics. He thinks the peace treaty very foolish, & even financially unworkable. He thinks Italy and France are doomed to revolution, but that it is just possible that England's changes may come without sudden violence. Great changes, good and bad, are surely coming. . . . As Father was talking just now I had a sense of the littleness of our present absorbing doubt and anxiety about the "state of your affections." Here is this tumultuous world all round us, and here are we two gifted to help things in our little way, yet still unsure about our own relationship. Why should we doubt any more after all these years? . . . Oh love me, dear, in a special way, our way, quietly but with all your heart, critically but tolerantly, never blindly, always with open eyes and a smile at my weaknesses and at your own. But above all things, dearest friend, don't be disheartened because I am only me and because you find no thrills. Thrills fade. The other love grows and grows. And when you begin to see through the image of me that you still respect and love (though you think you are not in love with me), love me more because you see me through and through. May I do so by you. In these days, my girl, I have felt like Ixion (was it he?) who rolled a great stone up a hill and ever it crashed to the bottom again and ever he began anew. When the stone is firmly on the top you will love me. I am like a man who spent years in building a solid stone house, and lived outside it till it was ready, and he went in and an earthquake shook it terribly. But it is solid stone and it will stand.
¶416373 into danger. I was quite off my guard. So when I made friends with Captain Hutehinson (he was one of the offieers who joined the ship at Bombay after six years’ serviee in India) I found him a delightfully understanding & pleasing eompanion & we got on so well together that I didn’t realise until the harm was done that it wasn’t just disinterested friendship I was feeling, but the beginning of real love. You see, it all happened so quiekly, between Bombay & Liverpool. It took me about a fortnight to diseover where I was & then for the last week in the ship I was miserably impatient to be there with Olaf & get away from it all. I felt myself slipping further & further from him & yet I eouldn’t help myself. I was so unhappy about it that I told Olaf all about it at onee—the first day. It must have been an awful blow to him—my poor dear old ehap—but he was wonderful. He might have given me up & thought I wasn’t worth bothering over—but he seemed to think I was even more worth it than before, beeause it showed that I was a real human girl & not only the writer of a thousand letters. He was good to me & so patient & understanding & wise & helpful & loving & when I got to know him as he really is & eould eompare him with Balfour Hutehinson I knew that Olaf was far & away above the other & that if I eould rise to him I should have a happiness as far above. At first it was only a mental eonvietion, but by degrees & slow degrees & often falling baek & elimbing up again my heart followed my mind & now both are as eompletely his as any wife’s would be after being married six weeks today—to the dearest & best husband in the world. Auntie Emmeline & Unele W. & Auntie Nina all know something about it. I told them beeause I eouldn’t bear to be pretending everything was right when it wasn’t. Auntie Emmeline didn’t understand—she was too grieved on Olaf’s aeeount to give me any real help although she was as kind as eould be, but she talked about '‘duty” & “promise” & “prineiple”—& so on—& I knew that wasn’t the main point. I was determined to break it all off unless I eould love him as he loves me. So we waited—& not in vain. That is all the old story. I did right to keep it baek till now, didn’t I? I didn’t want to keep it from you altogether, beeause you would not have known your daughter & it had been a big thing to me while it was there. I don’t know what you will think of me—whether you will blame me very mueh or whether you will make allowance as Olaf did—& help me to go on being friends with myself. I thought I would tell you about it when you came & then it occurred to me that if you travel on the “Nestor” you might hear some rumour of the kind from one or other of the men who were there then & are still, & I would rather you heard the whole thing first from me. How I hate returning to it—even to tell you. But thank heaven it’s all over & done with now, & I shouldn’t be afraid to see Captain Hutchinson anyEpilogue