BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, 24 OCT. 1919
BRACERS 19583. ALS. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

<letterhead>
70, Overstrand Mansions,
Prince of Wales Road,
Battersea, S.W.1^, 2
24 October 1919.

My Heart’s Comrade3

This is the fourth of your birthdays since we have known each other — and I want you to know how much nearer I feel to you, and how much more deeply I love you, than ever before. I was taken utterly by surprise when you wrote the other day4 to say you thought I no longer loved you, because what was wrong in me was utterly superficial — merely the itch to get to work after a long holiday. You said I did not “respect” you — but all that sort of way of thinking and feeling is so much from the outside that it has no longer any meaning for me. I love you in a simple human way that has nothing to do with such outside things — in the indissoluble way one would love one’s child if one had one. The only thing, now, that could end my love would be if there was no longer any way in which I could be of any importance to your life — if you ceased to care for me and became at the same time prosperous and successful. So long as there is any way in which I can give you anything that is of any value to you, I shall go on caring for you — and if that were to cease, I cannot imagine that anything else in life would have any interest or value to me. I have been very happy just this last 10 days or so, because it seems that by merely being kind I can really be of some use to you. I do understand much more than I did what you have been enduring — it used to hurt me by making me feel powerless to help, but now I feel I can help, so everything is easier.

I wish I could make you know how I feel towards you, and how love seems to me. When I hear Allen5 talk about men and women, or almost any one else, and have a feeling that all they say does not touch the fringe of love as I feel it. Equality or inequality, pity or admiration — all those things seem external. Real love loves the essential human spirit, the striving lonely child lost in the night, rising in strange flashes of glory to domination over fear and pain. So one should love all mankind, but my heart and spirit are not great enough for that. And my love for you would not be what it is without your beauty. Beauty everywhere rouses one’s tenderness, one’s sense of the search after perfection, one’s passion and hope and despair — and all these you rouse in me. You cannot know what it is to me to touch you:  the strange blending of religion and passion, all the tenderness that makes me hate war and cruelty, all the fierceness that makes me tear the veils from reality in the hope of reaching naked truth, frightful or splendid, but never trivial — All this I feel when I touch you, all together in turmoil and conflict, till my skin tingles all over and I grow dizzy.

You have become the vehicle both for my tenderness towards mankind and for my search after the hidden splendour — one gentle, the other fierce. Gentleness and fierceness are equally expressions of my love. But while you are unhappy it is only the gentleness that is any use to you — the other must bide its time.

Do not ever doubt my love, Beloved. It is a difficult feeling to fit into this petty world of dates and duties — it wants the desert and the sea and the stars, and night-winds restless as my own soul, and you beside me vibrating to the wonder and dark passion of the world. In this prison-house of trivial things, my spirit frets and inspiration abandons me for the moment. But it is always ready to flame up as soon as it can find scope.

Goodbye, Beloved, for the moment. The flame of my being envelops you, and reaches through you to the uttermost stars —

B

• 1

  [document] Document 200563.

• 2

  [envelope] The Lady Constance Malleson | 6 Mecklenburgh Square | W.C.1. Pmk: PADDINGTON W.2 | 2.45 PM | 24 OCT 19A

• 3

  Heart’s Comrade For information on the use of this term, see BRACERS 19145, n.12.

• 4

  you wrote the other day The letter is not extant.

• 5

  Allen (Reginald) Clifford Allen (1889–1939). For information on him, see BRACERS 19217, n.4.