BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, 8 JULY 1921
BRACERS 19739. ALS. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

<Beijing>
<letterhead>
Grand Hôtel de Pékin
Pékin1
8 juillet 1921
 

My Darling

This willa letter will arrive not long before me; if all goes well I shall be home on August 30. I have had a cable from you2 saying “Ignore letters posted June 8” — but the letters haven’t arrived yet and will very likely miss me altogether. I hope nothing is the matter — My house was sold up yesterday, and the furniture put up to auction. I am in bed from the combined fatigue of that and packing and a farewell lecture and a farewell Chinese feast, but it is only a slight digestive upset. We go from Tientsin to Kobe by boat, spend 13 days in Japan, and then come straight home, with perhaps 2 days in the Canadian Rockies. I am still rather feeble, but I am sure the sea will set me up. The journey is rather a worry, because if it is rough it may upset Dora in her present condition.3

We are both longing to be home. The heat here is dreadful. Dear Love I long to see you again and to know what you have thought and felt while your letters have been so silent. Goodbye till then.

B

• 1

  [document] Document 200745.

• 2

  a cable from you Not extant. A letter she wrote on 5 June 1921 (BRACERS 98386) took a circuitous route to reach him. She mailed it to Shanghai where he had planned on being before his illness. From there it was forwarded to Japan and then on to Overstrand Mansions, where BR had shared a flat with Allen in Battersea, before he left for China. In her letter of 12 June 1921 (BRACERS 116451), she announced from Bellingdon that: “This will join the other poor letters waiting here for you. They look such forlorn things with nowhere to go.”

• 3

  in her present condition Dora Black was pregnant. She and BR were married later that year on 27 September. They divorced in 1935. For information on her, see BRACERS 19506, n.3.

Textual Notes

• a

  will sic.