Читать книгу Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters - Оскар Уайльд, Merlin Holland, F. H. Cornish - Страница 87

[Postmark 22 January 1884] Royal Victoria Hotel, Sheffield

Yes! my dear Waldino, yes! Amazing of course—that was necessary.

Naturally 1 did not write—the winds carry tidings over the Apennines better than the 2 1/2d post: of course it accounts for the splendid sunsets about which science was so puzzled. Hurrah! You had no sunsets when you were engaged—only moonlights. Well, we are to be married in April, as you were, and then go to Paris, and perhaps to Rome—what do you think? Will Rome be nice in May? I mean, will you and Mrs Waldo be there, and the Pope, and the Peruginos? If so we will arrive.

Her name is Constance and she is quite young, very grave, and mystical, with wonderful eyes, and dark brown coils of hair: quite perfect except that she does not think Jimmy the only painter that ever really existed: she would like to bring Titian or somebody in by the back door. However, she knows I am the greatest poet, so in literature she is all right: and I have explained to her that you are the greatest sculptor: art instruction can not go further.

We are of course desperately in love. I have been obliged to be away nearly all the time since our engagement, civilising the provinces by my remarkable lectures, but we telegraph to each other twice a day, and the telegraph clerks have become quite romantic in consequence. I hand in my messages, however, very sternly, and try to look as if ‘love’ was a cryptogram for ‘buy Grand Trunks’ and ‘darling’ a cypher for ‘sell out at par’. I am sure it succeeds.

Dear Waldo, I am perfectly happy, and I hope that you and Mrs Waldo will be very fond of my wife. I have spoken to her so much about you both that she knows you quite well already, and of course I can not imagine anyone seeing her and not loving her.

Please give my love to Uncle Sam and the young robust transcendentalist from Boston, Mass. whose novels we all delight in. And remember me most kindly to your wife, and tell her how much I look forward to introducing Constance to her. Addio

OSCAR

Oscar and Constance were married on 29 May 1884 and spent their honeymoon in Dieppe and Paris. They took a lease on a house at 16 Tite Street in Chelsea and commissioned the architect and theatre designer E, W. Godwin to make internal changes and decorate it. In the meantime they moved back into Oscar’s old lodgings in Charles Street until the work was finished in January of the following year.