BRACERS Record Detail for 19306
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"My Heart's Comrade ... this time together ... long enough for me to have a share in your work. Our times at the cottage have been divine."
There is typed transcription of this letter, document .052380b, record 116225, p. 3.
BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, 30 APR. 1918
BRACERS 19306. ALS. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell
My Heart’s Comrade3
I cannot tell you the hundredth part of what this time together has meant to me — I am glad, infinitely glad, that it went on long enough for me to have a share in your work.4 Our times at the cottage5 have been divine.
All the bogies are gone, and solitude has no terrors for me now — I shall feel you with me in spirit. Your lovely tender protective ways are a wonderful joy to me. They make me know how great your love is. And they make me gentle in return. It is fear of the bogies that has made me exacting; and now I haven’t got that fear and I don’t feel tyrannical any more —
You have been so divinely gentle all this time. And now I love to think your career is started,6 and that you will have a chance for self-expression — and I see a splendid life ahead for you, as well as for me. And I think we can go on loving one another and helping each other to live fully and freely — I shan’t want to keep you in a cage — future Maurice’s7 will not mean earthquakes because I understand now.
My lovely Darling, I am happy all through and through in the knowledge of your love — it is the best and most wonderful thing that has ever come to me. Dear Heart, you must think of me in prison8 with my heart full of all the beauty of the spring and all the great glory of stars and sea, because of you, because of your arms, because of the depths of your spirit that I have looked into. And because of that, nothing that they can do to me will touch me. Goodbye, Beloved. My home is on your heart, and I live there always and there only.
B.
Notes
- 1
[document] Document 200296.
- 2
[envelope] The Lady Constance Malleson | 6 Mecklenburgh Square | W.C.1. Pmk: LONDON. W.C. | 6.15 PM | MAY 1 18B. The letter was left at 57 Gordon Square for Frank Russell’s servant Ada to mail. See BRACERS 46913.
- 3
Heart’s Comrade For the history of the use of this term, see BRACERS 19145, n.12.
- 4
have a share in your work The nature of BR’s share is unknown.
- 5
at the cottage Presumably they had spent some time at her cottage, “Nimmy Not”, in Bellingdon near Chesham, Bucks.
- 6
career is started Colette had work in a touring theatrical company.
- 7
Maurice’s Maurice Elvey (1887–1967), film director. For more information on him, see BRACERS 19056, n.5.
- 8
in prison BR had been sentenced on 9 February 1918 to six months in prison for the writing of “The German Peace Offer” (B&R C18.01; 92 in Papers 14).