BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, 6 OCT. 1919
BRACERS 19569. ALS. McMaster. SLBR 2: #330
Edited by S. Turcon and N. Griffin. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

<Battersea>
Sunday Oct 6, 1919.1^,2

My Beloved

It made me very unhappy last night to find that you think I no longer care for you as much as I did. I don’t think you know the deep tenderness I have for you, or the way that everything in me that is vivid and passionate is bound up with you. I know I have not been very sympathetic with your depressions, but I doubt how far one ought to be: we are liable to moods of that kind, but I think they can only be dispelled by activity, not by sympathy. If I thought I could make them better by sympathy, or if you really think I can, I will try to alter. And in any case I will, if otherwise you feel it is no good being together when you are depressed, because I do want most intensely to share as much of your life as you will let me, whether it is happy or unhappy. My Darling, it is not only for your beauty that I love you — beauty alone would never have held me so long or so deeply. I love you in so many ways — because you are the only human being with whom I feel at one among beautiful things — you turn the ache of beauty into a profound joy — because of your passionate heart, and the pain of life in the roots of your being — because of the tragic quality in your feeling — because my heart yearns to you, and I long to protect you from trouble, and keep away from you all the harms that I see your unwisdom bringing. I feel to you so often as if I were your mother — but I have to avoid expressing that feeling because you would find it an interference with your freedom — And so the ache goes on in my heart, and the more I long for your happiness the more powerless I feel —

My dear one, I know that if I lost you all that is deepest in me would go dead. I have learnt — or at least I thought I had — to trust your love, and to know that when you are depressed it is only obscured, not dead. Can you learn to trust my love? The thing that obscures mine is very like the thing that obscures yours — worry about work, feeling that I am wasting my time, and giving to you what I ought to give to the world in the way of time and energy and thought — But I cannot live or work without you — it would be a maimed existence, and my work would suffer as much as I should. — You were very dear and kind last night, and you were angelic in the way you took the things I said — I will call you up tomorrow morning. Goodbye till then my Heart’s Life — I love you with all my being, now and always, as long as I live, even if I never saw you.

B.

• 1

  [document] Document 200557.

• 2

  [envelope] The Lady Constance Malleson | 6 Mecklenburgh Square | W.C.1. Pmk: BATTERSEA S.W. | 11 45 PM | 5 OCT 19