Lieut. Wilfred Sheridan, Rifle Brigade, fell in action at Loos, September 25, 1915.
Lieut. Wilfred Sheridan, Rifle Brigade, fell in action at Loos, September 25, 1915.
21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.October 4th, 1915.
Dearest, dearest Clare,
I have heard twice from your kindest of Fathers, and yet this goes to you (for poor baffling personal reasons) with a dreadful belatedness. The thought of coming into your presence, and into Mrs. Sheridan's, with such wretched empty and helpless hands is in itself paralysing; and yet, even as I say that, the sense of how my whole soul is full, even to its being racked and torn, of Wilfred's belovedest image and the splendour and devotion in which he is all radiantly wrapped andenshrined, [makes me] ask myself if I don't really bring you something, of a sort, in thus giving you the assurance of how absolutely I adored him! Yet who can give you anything that approaches your incomparable sense that he was yours, and you his, to the last possessed and possessing radiance of him? I can't pretend to utter to you words of "consolation"—vainest of dreams: for what is your suffering but the measure of his virtue, his charm and his beauty?—everything we so loved him for. But I see you marked with his glory too, and so intimately associated with his noble legend, with the light of it about you, and about his children, always, and the precious privilege of making him live again whenever one approaches you; convinced as I am that you will rise, in spite of the unspeakable laceration, to the greatness of all this and feel it carry you in a state of sublime privilege. I had sight and some sound of him during an hour of that last leave, just before he went off again; and what he made me then feel, and what his face seemed to say, amid that cluster of relatives in which I was the sole outsider (of which too I was extraordinarily proud,) is beyond all expression. I don't know why I presume to say such things—I mean poor things only ofmine, to you, all stricken and shaken as you are—and then again I know how any touch of his noble humanity must be unspeakably dear to you, and that you'll go on getting the fragrance of them wherever he passed. I think with unutterable tenderness of those days of late last autumn when you were in the little house off the Edgware Road, and the humour and gaiety and vivid sympathy of his talk (about his then beginnings and conditions) made me hang spellbound on his lips. But what memories are these not to you, and how can one speak to you at all without stirring up the deeps? Well we are all in themwithyou, and with his mother—andmay I speak of his father?—and with his children, and we cling to you and cherish you as never before. I live with you in thought every step of the long way, and am yours, dearest Clare, all devotedly and sharingly,
HENRYJAMES.
21 Carlyle Mansions,Cheyne Walk, S.W.Nov. 13th, 1915.
...I take to my heart these blest Cornish words from you and thank you for them as articulately as my poor old impaired state permits. It will be an immense thing to see you when your own conditions permit of it, and in that fond vision I hang on. I have been having a regular hell of a summer and autumn (that is more particularly from the end of July:) through the effect of a bad—an aggravated—heart-crisis, during the first weeks of which I lost valuable time by attributing (under wrong advice) my condition to mistaken causes; but I am in the best hands now and apparently responding very well to very helpful treatment. But the past year has made me feel twenty years older, and, frankly, as if my knell had rung. Still, I cultivate, I at least attempt, a brazen front. I shall not let that mask drop till I have heardyourthrilling story. Do intensely believe that I respond clutchingly to your every grasp of me, every touch, and would so gratefully be a re-connecting link with you here—where I don't wonder that you're bewildered. (It will be indeed, as far as I am concerned, the bewildered leading the bewildered.) I have "seen" very few people—I see as few as possible, I can't stand them, and all theirpromiscuous prattle, mostly; so that those who have reported of me to you must have been peculiarly vociferous. I deplore with all my heart your plague of boils and of insomnia; I haven't known the former, but the latter, alas, is my own actual portion. I think I shall know your rattle of the telephone as soon as ever I shall hear it. Heaven speed it, dearest Hugh, and keep me all fondestly yours,
HENRYJAMES.
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