Читать книгу The Letters of Henry James. Vol. II - Генри Джеймс, Henry Foss James - Страница 51

Lamb House, Rye.

Dec. 21st, 1908.

My dear dear George—

How I wish I might for a while be with you, or that you were here a little with me! I am deeply touched by your letter, which makes me feel all your desolation. Clearly you have lived for long years in a union so close and unbroken that what has happened is like a violent and unnatural mutilation and as if a part of your very self had been cut off, leaving you to go through the movements of life without it—movements for which it had become to you indispensable. Your case is rare and wonderful—the suppression of the other relations and complications and contacts of our common condition, for the most part—and such as no example of seems possible in this more infringing and insisting world, over here—which creates all sorts of inevitabilities of life round about one; perhaps for props and crutches when the great thing falls—perhaps rather toward making any one and absorbing relation less intense—I don't pretend to say! But you sound to me so lonely—and I wish I could read more human furniture, as it were, into your void. And I can't even speak as if I might plan for seeing you—or dream of it with any confidence. The roaring, rushing world seems to me myself—with its brutal and vulgar racket—all the while a less and less enticing place for moving about in—and I ask myself how one can think of your turning to it at this late hour, and after the long luxury, as it were, of your so united and protected independence. Still, what those we so love have done for us doesn't wholly fail us with their presence—isn't that true? and you are feeling it at times, I'm sure, even while your ache is keenest. In fact their so making us ache is one way for us of their being with us, of our holding on to them after a fashion. But I talk, my dear George, for mere tenderness—and so I say vain words—with only the fact of my tenderness a small thing to touch you. I have known you from so far back—and your image is vivid and charming to me through everything—through everything. Things abide—good things—for that time: and we hold together even across the grey wintry sea, near which perhaps we both of us are to-night. I should have a lonely Christmas here were not a young nephew just come to me from his Oxford tutor's. You don't seem to have even that. But you have the affectionate thought of yours always,

HENRY JAMES.