Читать книгу Harmer John - Hugh Walpole - Страница 7

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January 3, 1907.

Darling Father—I am coming home. Podge and I can endure being away from you no longer. I think I could have held out a while more but for your last letter, which, for all its pretended cheeriness, gave the whole show away. If you miss me so much and I miss you so much, aren’t we sillies, when life is so short, to keep away from one another? And all for what? All for a lot of chattering old women about whose opinion we neither of us care a scrap. More serious than that is the one that if I come back to live with you I may damage your congregation. They may stay away because of me. Well, if they do I can but go away again. But why should they? It isn’t as though they didn’t know all about it and haven’t known for the last five years. And it isn’t as though I were going to make myself prominent in any way. They’ll never see either Podge or myself if they don’t want to. You shall give them their tea and listen to their outpourings just as you have always done. I shan’t expect to be asked to any of their houses, and you must go to them just as you have always done. I shall make that quite plain as soon as I arrive. They’ll be used to me in no time, and only pity you and love you the more because you have such a heavy burden to bear! (Isn’t that the phrase?) And meanwhile, oh meanwhile, darling Daddy, we shall have one another! Just think of that! Morning, noon and night we shall be together and shall be wondering all the time what we have been doing to have wasted five precious years of our lives away from one another!

It is true that I have Podge, and that he is everything a mother can want in a son, but he isn’t you—and I need you both. I do indeed. And so it shall be.

As to finances, we shall manage quite well. I’m becoming quite an authority on Housing questions, the Way the Poor Live (or Don’t Live), Women’s Suffrage and anything else you like. My articles are the astonishment of economic London!

After all this you will expect to see your daughter with ink (instead of vine-leaves) in her hair and holes in her cotton frocks. Wait! Only you wait! And you shan’t wait very long either. Whether you like it or no, I am coming—so Prepare! Your always loving