One day, during that last month, she went upstairs, her two letters, open and unopened, in her pocket, and looked through his desk. This filled her with a superstitious bodily fear. His workroom had a cold light, in the daytime, because of a skylight, which now at night showed a few stars and a running smoky cloud, but on that day had been clear blue and blank.
So many scraps of poetry. So many heaps of ends of leaves of paper. She pushed away the thought that she would be responsible for all this. She was not, now. Not yet.
When she found the unfinished letter, it was as though she had been guided to it. It was tucked away, at the back of a drawer full of bills and invitations, and should have taken hours to find and not the few minutes in fact needed.
My dear,
I write each year, round about All Souls, because I must, although I know -I was about to say, although I know that you will not answer, although I know no such thing with certainty; I must hope; you may remember, orforget, it is all one, enough to feel able to write to me, to enlighten me a little, to take awaysome of the black weight I labour under.
I askyourforgiveness freely for some things, of which I stand accused, both byyour silence, your obdurate silence, and by my own conscience. I ask f orgiveness for my rashness andprecipitance in hurrying to Kernemet, on the suppositions chance that you might bethere, and without ascertaining whether or not I had your permission to go there. I ask yourforgiveness, above all, f or the degree of duplicity with which, on my return, I insinuated myself into the confidence of Mrs Lees, and so disastrously surprised you. You have punished me since, as you must know, I am punished daily.
But have you sufficiently considered the state of mind which drove me to these actions? I feel I stand accused, also, by your actions, of having loved you at all, as though my love was an act of brutalforcing, as though I were a heartless ravisher out of some trumpery Romance, from whom you had to f lee, despoiled and ruined. Yet if you examine your memories truthfully - if you can be truthful - you must know that it was not so - think overwhat we did together and ask, where was the cruelty, where the coercion, where, Christabel, the lack of love and respectfor you, alike as woman and as intellectual being? That we could not honourably continue as lovers after that summer was, I think, agreed by both - but was this a reason for a sudden pulling down of a dark blanket, nay, a curtain of sheet steel, between one day and the next? I loved you entirely then; I will not say now, I love you, f or that would indeed be romance, and a matter at best of hope - we are both psychologists of no mean order - love goes out, you know, like a candle in one of Humphry Davy's jars, if notfed with air to breathe,ifdeliberately starved and stifled. Yet
Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life, thou might'st him yet recover.
And perhaps I say that only for the pleasure of the aptness in quoting. That would have made you smile. Ah, Christabel, Christabel, I force out these carefulsentences,asking for your consideration, and rememberthat we heard each other's thoughts, so quick, so quick, that there was no need of ending speeches -
There is something I must know and you know what that is. I say "I must know" and sound peremptory. But I am in your hands and must beg you to tell me. What became of my child? Did he live? How can I ask, not knowing? How can I not ask, not knowing? I spoke at length to your cousin Sabine who told me what all at Kernemet knew - which was the fact only - no certainty of outcome -
You must know I went there, to Brittany, in love, and care, andanxiety, for you, for your health -I went eager to care for you, to make all well a sfar as could be - Why did you turn away from me? Out of pride, out of fear, out of independence, out of sudden hatred, at the injustice of the different fates of men and women?
Yet a man who knows he has or had a child and does not know more deserves a little pity.
How can I say this? Whatever became of that child, I say in advance, whatever it is, I shall understand, if I may only know, the worst is already imagined and put behind me - so to speak -
You see, I cannot write it, so I cannot post you these letters, I end by writing others, less direct, more glancing, which you do not answer, my dear demon, my tormentor… I am prohibited.
How can I ever forget that terrible sentence cried out at the ghastly spirit-summoning. "You have made a murderess of me," was said, blaming me, and cannot be unsaid; I hear it daily.
"There is no child" came through that silly woman's mouth, in a great groan, in what mixture of cunning, involuntaryexclamation, genuine telepathy, how can I tell? I tell you, Christabel - you who will never read this letter, like so many others, for it haspassed the limit ofpossible communication -I tell you, what with disgust, and terror, and responsibility, and the coiling vestiges of love gripping my heart, I was like to have made a murderer of myself in good earnest -
She took this letter gingerly by its corner, now, as though it were a stunned biting creature, wasp or scorpion. She made a little fire in Randolph 's attic gate, and burned the letter, turning it with the poker until it was black flakes. She took the sealed letter and turned it over, thinking of adding it, but allowed the flames to die down. She was quite sure that neither he nor she would have wanted his own letter to persist; nor would Christabel LaMotte, with its implicit accusations-of what? Better not to think.
She made a little fire, for warmth, with wood and a few coals, and huddled over it in her nightgown, waiting for the light to catch and the warmth to rise.
My life, she thought, has been built round a lie, a house to hold a lie.
She had always believed, stolidly, doggedly, that her avoidances, her approximations, her whole charade as she at times saw it, were, if not justified, at least held in check, neutralised, by her rigorous requirement that she be truthful with herself.
Randolph had been complicit. She had no idea how the story of their lives looked to him. It was not a matter they discussed.
But if she did not know, and occasionally look at, the truth, she had a sense that she was standing on shifting shale, sliding down into some pit.
She thought of her sense of the unspoken truths of things in terms of a most beautiful passage from Sir Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology, which she had read out one evening to Randolph, who had been excited by the passage immediately preceding it, about the Plutonian theory of the formation of rocks.
She had written it down.
It is the total distinctness, therefore, of crystalline formations, such as granite, hornblende-schist, and the rest, from every substance of which the origin is familiar to us, that constitutes their claim to be regarded as the effects of causes now in action in the subterranean regions. They belong not to an order which has passed away; they are not the monuments of a primeval period, bearing inscribed upon them in obsolete characters the words and phrases of a dead language; but they teach us that part of the living language of nature, which we cannot learn by our daily intercourse with what passes on the habitable surface.
Ellen liked the idea of these hard, crystalline things, which were formed in intense heat beneath the "habitable surface" of the earth, and were not primeval monuments but "part of the living language of nature."
I am no ordinary or hysterical self-deceiver, she more or less said to herself. I keep faith with the fire and the crystals, I do not pretend the habitable surface is all and so I am not a destroyer nor cast into outer darkness.