BR TO CONSTANCE MALLESON, 21 MAR. 1920
BRACERS 19637. ALS. McMaster
Edited by S. Turcon. Reviewed by K. Blackwell

<letterhead>
70, Overstrand Mansions,
Prince of Wales Road,
Battersea, S.W.1
21 March 1920
Sunday night

Beloved

I have just come back from the Albert Hall — It was a grand meeting full of enthusiasm and I loved Lansbury.2 I did long for you. I thought of the great meeting you and I were at together there in 1917,3 and of the wonderful happiness your love brought me in those days, and how that is all gone — It is bitter to me not to see you before I go — I wish I could think it would be some slight disappointment to you too. My chief reason for wanting to go abroad is your coldness4 — I know you can’t help it and I don’t want to reproach you foolishly, but the light is gone out of my life, and I must have movement, and be away from the galling evidence of your indifference. Although I am expecting to be away for something like six months, and in really dangerous circumstances, you have not been willing to make the slightest effort to see me5 — and of course it hurts, quite terribly — When you wrote from Cambridge6 I thought your love was reviving but it seems to have come to nothing — I do try not to feel as a lover towards you but it is no good — old times come back into my thoughts, and old joys — I feel that so long as you will not let me kiss your breasts the world is empty of deep emotion for me, and I must live on feelings that don’t go to the bottom — It is odd to feel a physical thing so important, but I do. And so I find the strain unbearable, and I feel I must be away from you until either you or I can feel differently. Nothing can ever take your place, but I may learn to remember less often —

Goodnight my dear Love.

B —

I start Wed. before the 1st post comes. Address Poste Restante, Barcelona, Spain.

• 1

  [document] Document 200630.

• 2

  Lansbury George Lansbury, recently returned from Russia, spoke to a packed Albert Hall on 21 March 1920. He had been away for nine weeks from January until March. In his speech Lansbury praised Lenin, whom he spoke with while in Russia, and Bolshevism (“Mr. Lansbury on Russia”, The Times, 22 March 1920, p. 7). He wrote about his time there in What I Saw in Russia (London: Leonard Parsons, 1920).

• 3

  great meeting ... 1917 On 31 March 1917 to welcome the end of Czarist rule in Russia.

• 4

  your coldness Colette’s refusal to be physically intimate with BR.

• 5

  the slightest effort to see me Colette was touring with a theatre company.

• 6

  wrote from Cambridge Colette had written one letter from Cambridge on 18 March 1920. Included was the sentiment: “Deadness, you see, can never be a lasting thing between us”  (BRACERS 113201).