Читать книгу Oscar Wilde: A Life in Letters - Оскар Уайльд, Merlin Holland, F. H. Cornish - Страница 90

Tuesday [Postmark 16 December 1884] The Balmoral, Edinburgh

Dear and Beloved, Here am I, and you at the Antipodes. O execrable facts, that keep our lips from kissing, though our souls are one.

What can I tell you by letter? Alas! nothing that I would tell you. The messages of the gods to each other travel not by pen and ink and indeed your bodily presence here would not make you more real: for I feel your fingers in my hair, and your cheek brushing mine. The air is full of the music of your voice, my soul and body seem no longer mine, but mingled in some exquisite ecstasy with yours. I feel incomplete without you. Ever and ever yours

OSCAR

Here I stay till Sunday.

Apart from two perfunctory notes shortly before and during his trials, this is the only letter of Oscar’s to his wife which is known to have survived. The rest were probably destroyed by her family after her death. It is unlikely that Constance destroyed them, as in her own correspondence after the trials she still writes of him with affection, if with regular exasperation.