BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, [24 SEPT. 1916]
BRACERS 19043. ALS. McMaster.
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

<letterhead>
57 Gordon Square
W.C.1
Sunday night late2

What a happiness my dear one to find your letter3 when I got home just now. You do write wonderfully — Yes, it can mean a great great deal to me. I wrote this morning hardly knowing what thoughts the morning might have brought you, and not daring to count on their being what I hoped. I am still shy of saying much — but that will wear off soon. I long to know you really — so far, it is only the knowledge of intuition, I long to say and hear so many things. I have had a long long day — Committee4 till 3, then helping Miss Marshall,5 and talking to her to keep her from a fit of melancholy due to overwork. Tomorrow not a moment — Tuesday evening I am free unless something quite unforeseen turns up, such as my having to go to Manchester, which is possible. Would you be free Tuesday evening? I should love^a to hear music with you — I never hear music now-a-days.

I am packed too full — I cannot begin anywhere with all I want to say — I feel you do not know me, and perhaps you will hate me when you do — I feel you are all gentleness, but in me many things are rough and harsh, and these are old scars that are not beautiful.

I believe in your reserve of joy and success and courage — I believe you can be boundless in all of them. Strange how one longs to have opportunity for what one feels is in one — I have always longed for a chance to exercise courage — I couldn’t over the war, because I didn’t believe in it — often I have wished I had lived in the French Revolution. But these times call for a good deal, because one achieves so little — if more were accomplished, it would be no test at all. I am utterly ashamed on an occasion like the meeting last night,6 when I think how utterly infinitesimal is the courage I have needed compared to what millions of men have shown. One longs for something great and glorious to do, but one finds so little. Perhaps it is still to come. You can do and be great things, and you will — it will be an immeasurable joy if I can have a part in that. Dearest there is much much more in my heart than I can tell you yet. Goodnight, goodnight.

B.

• 1

  [document] Document 200006. There is also a typed copy of this letter, document 201102, numbered 2.

• 2

  [date] Colette wrote “24 Sept. 1916” on the letter.

• 3

  your letter Her first extant letter to him, 25 September 1916, BRACERS 112930, was written in response to the first two letters he wrote to her. Thus the letter that is mentioned here must not have survived.

• 4

  Committee The National Committee of the No-Conscription Fellowship, founded by Fenner Brockway and Clifford Allen in November 1914. BR was involved in the NCF as an Associate Member.

• 5

  Miss Marshall Catherine Elizabeth Marshall (1880–1961), suffragist and internationalist who after August 1914 quickly moved from campaigning for women’s votes to protesting the war. An Associate Member of the No-Conscription Fellowship, she collaborated closely with BR during 1917 especially, when she was the organization’s Acting Hon. Secretary and he its Acting Chairman. Physically broken by a year of intense political work on behalf of the C.O. community, Marshall then spent several months convalescing with the NCF’s founding chairman, Clifford Allen, after he was released from prison on health grounds late in 1917. According to Jo Vellacott, Marshall was in love with Allen and “suffered deeply when he was imprisoned”. During his own imprisonment BR heard rumours that Marshall was to marry Allen, and Vellacott further suggests that the couple lived together during 1918 “in what seems to have been a trial marriage; Marshall was devastated when the relationship ended” (“Marshall, Catherine Elizabeth”, Oxford DNB). Throughout the interwar period Marshall was active in the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. Biography: Vellacott, From Liberal to Labour with Women’s Suffrage: the Story of Catherine Marshall (Montreal: McGill-Queen's U. P., 1993).

• 6

  meeting last night The London Division of the No-Conscription Fellowship held a convention on Saturday, 23 September. It was addressed by BR and others. See “N.-C.F. Conventions”, The Tribunal, no. 28 (28 Sept. 1916): 3.

• a

  love This word has six continuous strokes underneath it.