Читать книгу Memories of a Hostess: A Chronicle of Eminent Friendships - Annie 1834-1915 Fields - Страница 7

LOUIS AGASSIZ

With two letters from Dr. Holmes this rambling chronicle of his friendship with Mr. and Mrs. Fields must end. The first of the communications is a mere fragment of his everyday humor:

Beverly-Farms-by-the-Depot

July 18th, 1878

Dear Mr. Fields:—

The Corner sends me a book directed to me here, but on opening the outside wrapper I read “James T. Fields, Esq., Jamaica Plain, Boston, Mass.” The book, which is sealed up (or stuck up, like many authors), measures 7 × 5, nearly, and is presumably idiotic, like most books which are sent us without being ordered.

Perhaps you have received a similar package which on opening you found directed to O. W. Holmes, Esq., Peak of Teneriffe, Boston. If so, when the weather grows cool again and we can make up our minds to face the title page of the dreaded volume, we will make an exchange.

Always truly yours,

O. W. Holmes

The second letter, written ten years after Dr. Holmes, in moving from Charles to Beacon Street, had made the last of his “justifiable domicides,” strikes a more serious note, revealing that quality of true sympathy so closely joined in abundant natures with true humor. Mr. Fields had died in April of 1881, and Mrs. Fields had applied herself at once to the preparation of her volume, “James T. Fields: Biographical Notes and Personal Sketches,” drawing freely upon the diaries from which many of the foregoing pages, then passed over, are now taken. The performance of this loving labor must have done much towards the first filling of a life so grievously emptied. Already the intimate and beloved companionship of Miss Jewett had come into it.

294 Beacon St., November 16, 1881

My dear Mrs. Fields:—

I feel sure there will be but one voice with regard to your beautiful memorial volume. If I had any misgivings that you might find the delicate task too difficult—that you might be discouraged between the wish to draw a life-like picture and the fear of saying more than the public had a right to, these misgivings have all vanished, and I am sure your finished task leaves nothing to be regretted. As he was in life, he is in your loving but not overwrought story. I do not see how a life so full of wholesome activity and genuine human feeling could have been better pictured than it is in your pages. Long before I had finished reading your memoir in the proofs I had learned to trust you entirely as to the whole management of the work on which you had entered. All I feared was that your feelings might be overtasked, and that the dread of coming before the public when your whole heart was in the pages opened to its calm judgment might be more than you could bear.

And now, my dear Mrs. Fields, there must come a period of depression, almost of collapse, after the labor and the solace of this tender, tearful, yet blessed occupation. I think you need the kind thoughts and soothing words—if words have any virtue in them—of those who love you more than while each day had its busy hours in which the memory of so much that was delightful to recall kept the ever-returning pangs of grief a little while in abeyance. It must be so. But before long, quietly, almost imperceptibly, there will, I hope and trust, return to you the quieting sense of all that you have done and all that you have been for that life which for so many happy years you were privileged to share. How few women have so perfectly fulfilled, not only every duty, but every ideal that a husband could think of as going to make a happy home! This must be and will be an ever-growing source of consolation.

Forgive me for saying what many others must have said to you, but none more sincerely than myself.

I do not know how to express to you the feeling with which Mrs. Holmes looks upon you in your bereavement. I should do it injustice if I attempted to give it expression, for she lives so largely in her sympathies and her endeavors to help others that she could not but sorrow deeply with you in your affliction and wish there were any word of consolation she could add to the love she sends you.

Believe me, dear Mrs. Fields,

Affectionately yours,

O. W. Holmes

For thirteen years longer, till his death in 1894 at the age of eighty-five, Dr. Holmes was a prolific writer of notes, more often than letters, to Mrs. Fields. The sympathy of tried and ripened friendship runs through them all. In the Charles Street house the younger friends might see from time to time this oldest friend of their hostess. When he came no more, it was well for those of a later day that his memory was so securely held in the retrospect and the record of Mrs. Fields.