BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, [26 OCT. 1916]
BRACERS 19065. ALS. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

<letterhead>
57 Gordon Square,1
London. W.C.
Thursday.2

My Beloved

Your letter has come3 — I have only one moment before dentist. Yes, I will come after the lecture tonight. I shan’t be tired — I have nothing to do till Monday Manchr.4 so I shall feel as free as a bird. My Darling, let us have a wonderful wonderful time — I am full of new life struggling up, breaking the crust.

The “Cat and Fiddle”5 sounds too delicious. I want to be the dish. How I long for it.

Memorial Hall, 8.6 And after that, let us have joy — My dearest loved one, I love you, I love you.

B

Notes

• 1

  [document] Document 200031.

• 2

  [date] Colette wrote “26 Oct. 1916” on the letter.

• 3

  Your letter has come Her letter is not extant.

• 4

  Monday Manchr. BR was delivering a series of lectures “The World as It Can Be Made” at the Onward Hall in Manchester every Monday. The series began on 16 October and ended on 20 November.

• 5

  “Cat and Fiddle” An isolated pub on the moors near Buxton, Derbyshire, where they stayed from 14 to 17 November 1916. BR remembered their time there as a “three days’ honeymoon.… It was bitterly cold and the water in my jug was frozen in the morning. But the bleak moors suited our mood. They were stark, but gave a sense of vast freedom. We spent our days in long walks and our nights in an emotion that held all the pain of the world in solution, but distilled from it an ecstasy that seemed almost more than human” (Auto. 2: 27). They would return in April 1918. See S. Turcon, “Then and Now: Bertie and Colette’s Escapes to the Peak District and Welsh Borderlands” , Russell 34 (2014): 117–30.

• 6

  Memorial Hall, 8 BR spoke on “National Dependence and International Relations” at an NCF meeting at Memorial Hall in Farringdon Street, London, on 26 October 1916. The lecture may well have been “The World as It Can Be Made” lecture of similar title, “National Independence and Internationalism” (B&R C17.24, A24).