Darling, I’m not thinking of myself—I’m thinking of you and our love. I don’t want a single spot to touch it. It would be better to suffer all our lives as we are suffering now—as I am suffering, for sometimes, Petra, I don’t think you suffer at all—rather than to look at each other with the shadow of an ugly scandal between us. You don’t understand. You don’t realise what a difference these things make to a woman. It does not make any difference to a man, but even you would see the stain on me forever afterwards, and would turn against me.
Tell me you don’t really mean it, darling. There must be some other way out. Let us think very hard and find out. Or if you really think so little of me, tell me so, and we will say goodbye again—for always, this time. I expect I was wrong to stick to our agreement before. You wanted to be released then, and you wouldn’t have asked it if you hadn’t been tired of me already in your heart. Let’s end it all, Petra. Perhaps I shall die, and then you will be free. I feel unhappy enough to die—and if I’m too strong for wretchedness to kill me, there are always easy ways out of it all.
41
The Same to the Same
15, Whittington Terrace
Darling, dear Petra, my dearest,
Of course I do forgive you. It’s you really that must forgive me for saying such awful things. I didn’t mean them. I knew really, deep down in my heart, that you loved me all the time. Of course I couldn’t say goodbye—it would kill me—Yes, I meant that part of it.
But you do see now, don’t you, that we can’t take that way out. For my sake, you say, darling, but, indeed, I could bear anything for myself—only I don’t want to spoil the lovely thing we have made. We will do just as you say, wait for a year and see if anything happens. It may, if we only want it enough. God might make a miracle to help us. Such things have happened before now. He might even die—“in him Nature’s copy’s not eterne”—doesn’t somebody say that in a play somewhere? We used to go and see Shakespeare sometimes when I was at school, and do the plays in class, though I didn’t pay much attention to them then. I didn’t understand what a difference art and poetry make to one’s life. I was waiting for you to come and teach me, my dear.
I am going to do some really solid reading now, to try and be more worthy of my darling when the happy time comes. (I must believe there will be a happy time, or I should go mad.) This year of waiting shall be a year of self-development. That will make the desolate days pass more quickly. Goodness knows I shall have time enough, for He never lets me go out anywhere or have any of my own friends to see me. The only people I ever have to talk to are his friends from the office. They talk about bridges and electrical plant interminably. I don’t know how people can live with such petty, dull things taking up all their minds. Sometimes one or two of them have the graciousness to ask me if I have seen the latest play or film, but I never have, and I just have to sit and smile while He says, “We’re quiet, domestic people, my wife and I; we don’t care about this night life.” And if I ever suggest going out, he pretends that I want to be “gadding round” in nightclubs at all hours. I am ashamed of being so ignorant of the things everybody is talking about. Other husbands take their wives out. But no—if I want to stir out of doors, I’m a bad woman—“one of these modern wives who don’t care for their homes.” What kind of place is my home, that I should care about it?
I have got that book you were talking about, Women in Love. It is very queer and coarse in parts, don’t you think, and rather bewildering, but some of the descriptions are very beautiful. I don’t understand it all, but it is thrilling, like music. That bit about the horse, for instance. I can’t quite make out what he means, but it is terribly exciting. What funny people Lawrence’s characters are! They don’t seem to have any ordinary lives, or have to make money or run households or anything. That woman who is a schoolmistress—she never seems to have to bother about her work, one would think it was all holidays at her school. I suppose the author means that the humdrum things don’t really count in one’s life at all, and I expect that is true, only in actual life they do seem to make a lot of difference.
Oh, I do hate this cramping life—always telling lies and smothering up one’s feelings. But tyrants make liars. It is what somebody I read about in the papers calls “slave-psychology.” I feel myself turning into a cringing slave, lying and crawling to get one little scrap of precious freedom—a book, a letter, a thought even—and carrying it off into a corner to gloat over it in secret. That is the way in which I am learning to build up an inner life for myself, a lovely, secret freedom, so that the things He says and does can’t really hurt me any longer. The real Me is free and happy, worshipping in my hidden temple with my darling Idol, my own dear Petra darling.
How I do love you! My starved life is full when I think of you—brimmed with joy and
