August First | Page 9

AUGUST FIRST.
WARCHESTER, St. Andrew's Parish House, August 12th.
Yesterday it rained. And then the telephone rang, and some incoherent
person mumbled an address out in the furthest suburb. It was North
Baxter Court. You never saw that--a row of yellow houses with the
door-sills level to the mud and ashes of the alley, and swarms of
children who stare and whisper, "Here's the 'Father.'" Number 7 1/2
was marked with a membraneous croup sign--the usual lie to avoid
strict quarantine and still get anti-toxin at the free dispensary; the room
was unspeakable--shut windows and a crowd of people. A woman,
young, sat rocking back and forth, half smothering a baby in her arms.
Nobody spoke. It took time to get the windows open and persuade the
woman to lay the child on the bed in the corner. There wasn't anything
else to use, so I fanned the baby with my straw hat--until, finally, it got
away from North Baxter Court forever. Which was as it should be.
Then tumult. Probably you are not in a position to know that few
spectacles are more hideous than the unrestrained grief of the poor. The
things they said and did--it was unhuman, indecent. I can't describe it.
As I was leaving, after a pretty bad half hour, I met the doctor at the
door--one of these half-drunken quacks who live on the ignorant. That
child died of diphtheria. I knew it, and he admitted it. The funeral was
this breathless morning, with details that may not be written down.
LATER.
Somebody interrupted. And now it's long past midnight. I must try to
send you some answer to your letter. I have been thinking--the
combination may strike you as odd--of North Baxter Court and you.
Not that the happenings of yesterday were unusual. That is just it--they
come almost every day, things like that. And you, with your birds and
rustling trees and your lake--you keep a shiny pistol in the drawer of
your dressing-table, and write me the sort of letter that came from you
this morning. When all these people need you--these blind, dumb
animals, stumbling through the sordid, hopeless years--need you,

because, in spite of everything, you are still so much further along than
they, because you are capable of seeing where their eyes are shut,
because you and your kind can help them, and put the germ of life into
the deadness of their days, because of all that makes you what you are,
and gives you the chance to become infinitely more--you, in the face of
all that, can sit down in the fragrance of a garden-scented breeze and
write as you have done about God and the things that matter.
You said that it was not flippancy. Your whole point of view is wrong.
Do not ask me how I "know"--some conclusions do not need to be
analyzed. I wonder if you realize, for instance, what you said about
faith? I haven't the charity to call it even childish. Have you ever got
below the surface of anything at all? Do you want to know what it is
that has brought you to the verge of suicide? It is not your horror of
illness, nor your oddly concluded determination to marry a man whom
you do not love. Suicide is an ugly word--I notice that you avoid it--and
love is a big word; I am using them understandingly and soberly. You
came to the edge of this thing for the reason that there is not an element
of bigness in your life, and there never has been. You lack the balance
of large ideas. This man of whom you tell me--of course you do not
love him--you have not yet the capacity for understanding the meaning
of the word. You like to ride and you like to dance and you are fond of
the things that please, but you do not love anybody or even any thing.
You are living, yes, but you are asleep. And it is because you are
ignorant.
If your letter had been designedly flippant, it would merely have
annoyed. It is the unconscious flippancy in it that is so discouraging.
You do not know what you believe because you believe nothing. Your
most coherent conception of God is likely a hazy vision of a majestic
figure seated on a cloud--a long-bearded patriarch, wearing a golden
crown--the composite of famous pictures that you have seen. You have
been taught to believe in a personal God, and you have never taken the
trouble to get beyond the notion that personality--God's or
anybody's--is mainly a matter of the possession of such things as hands
and feet. What can be the meaning to one like you of the truth that we
are made in the image of