ANTIDOTE TO SORROW -- 1/? WIP.
I want to write him a letter, for when I am dead.
But I keep scratching out My dear and then nothing else comes and that is not enough.
Where am I to leave it, where he will not find it too soon? How ridiculous if he were to read it before I am gone. Worse than ridiculous, of course. No, I have no more plans to make and nothing more to do, and this last thing must go right.
If I don’t do it soon I shall be too weak to write him anything at all. I can’t even read for very long at a time now.
That letter Mr. Holmes left for him by the Falls did comfort him, I think - it was something to know that in his last moments his friend was calm and proud and thinking of him. I don’t know how many times John read it. Perhaps he still takes it out and reads it now, downstairs where I cannot see it. It is no secret that he still thinks of him-what spare moments he has are spent paying out line after line of ink across page after page, like telegraph wires into the past towards his friend. But now he never shows me any pain except that of watching me suffer --and even that he is very careful to soften and smooth over, as far as he can. He will not burden me, he will not hurt me with his own grief, as far he can help it. I almost wish that he would, that I did not know there is part of him that he will never willingly show me again.
And I can’t write a letter like Mr Holmes did, telling John I have accomplished everything I ever meant to and don’t mind dying now - although it’s true I don’t mind, any more. I am too tired, and too sick of pain to care. But I did. While I was still myself I minded very much.
John is asleep now, on our bed for once, though still in his clothes. For now, the scratching, struggling, barking thing in my lungs is quiet, and I feel strong enough to lurch across the room with the lamp to try to write here. There is always pen and ink about, neat stacks of finished manuscript on the floor by John’s chair and notebooks and abandoned jottings roosting among the medicine bottles. I like to watch John write - I always did; I love that beautiful intent, distant look that nothing else brings to his face, and it still comes even now. I am glad he has something of his own, somewhere to escape, though I wish it were not always into the past. Besides, his stories have allowed him to stay by my side and still earn money, and God knows how else we would have managed, considering how much he has wasted on treatments and trips to the coast, and lost in time away from his surgery.
He has been writing a tale he says he will probably call The Crooked Man. I know the story very well, and it is a sad one. But he has not got to the sad part yet: so far it is all of Mr Holmes after arriving on the doorstep at midnight, like a djinni in a fairy-tale, reading our daily life from John’s shoes and a scrape on the wainscoting, bringing a mystery like a present to be unwrapped in our sitting room. And John sits and listens as he talks and talks, while I am upstairs, getting ready for bed - all three of us under one roof. I remember hearing their voices, rumbling softly through the floor, before I fell asleep. I remember coming down the next day and running into Mr Holmes on the landing. It was strange how such a forceful and uncompromising man could suffer attacks of such shyness. But I was determined that we should be friends, and if I can’t absolutely say I managed it I think I came as close as anyone could have. It is not only from John that I know of cruel Colonel Barclay’s wife and the unhappy man she loved.
“I apologise for the intrusion,” Mr Holmes said woodenly that morning as we descended the stairs. In the awkward contest for the bathroom that morning, John had come last.
“Mr Holmes,” I said, “I am always glad to see you, and proud to have you here. Especially when I am sure you are engaged on important work -”
“Oh,” he said, rather bitterly, “My interest is no proof of a problem’s importance, is it? I only require rarity and complexity, and it is possible for something to meet both conditions and yet be quite meaningless to anyone else.”
“That is not a fair self-portrait at all,” I said. He lifted his eyebrows a little, not quite rudely, but certainly implying I could know nothing of his motives. “No,” I insisted, “do you mean you only care for amusing yourself - that it is mere accident that you do so much good? But you might have spent your life doing algebra or - or playing jigsaw puzzles. Besides, you must have thought John would think this case mattered, or you wouldn’t be hurrying him off to Aldershot with you.”
“I have put the poor fellow to worse trouble than that,” Mr Holmes murmured, yet he relaxed a little and conceded, “Well, indeed - a man is dead and a woman may hang for it.”
I laughed, and then thought myself very dreadful, but the admission did sound funny after such sombre talk of meaninglessness. Mr Holmes’ lips twitched faintly in response. And then I coaxed out of him everything he had told John already. And in the evening he came back with John, both of them very pleased with themselves and each other despite the grim story they had heard. Mr Holmes flung himself carelessly into an armchair, and between them they told me the rest without being asked. And for a little while it was as if it had always been so and always would be, we three, knowing things nobody else did and drinking wine together.
I am writing this sitting at the dressing table. I hate looking at myself now, but I couldn’t help seeing my own face when I sat down. Yesterday John carried me into the bathroom and washed my hair but already it is lank and plastered to my head again with sweat. But even fresh from the bath I can’t ever really feel clean; I feel the decay festering in my lungs and taste the reek of it on my own breath. But here in their little box are the pearls - always bright and pure and lovely, like bubbles of sea-foam in moonlight.
I wanted to look at them again. They are not quite identical, though unless you look very closely they appear so: there are tiny differences in shape and size, and they shade very subtly from the cold blue-white to glistening, blondish ivory, as if a fine transparent film of gold were laid over snow. I can still recognise the very first of them to arrive, shining out of the plain cardboard box that day at Mrs Forrester’s when I was twenty-one. I was shocked and rather frightened, for it confirmed that intentions I knew nothing of were fixed upon me, and it wakened all my grief and doubts about my father. But all the same - the excitement, at the beauty and the mystery of it. I hold that one in my hand now and think, as I did then, of it growing in a shell under a glittering blue sea , and of those sunlit fragments of India I can only just remember - the monkeys on the garden wall, the taste of mango lassi.
What will happen to my pearls? I don’t want them to go- out of the family, I was about to say, but there isn’t a family, there won’t be any family, there will only be John. They led me to him, and it was such a happy day when they came back from the jewellers on their gold chain, and he first put them about my neck. I truly do hope he will marry again, but I can’t pretend I like the thought of him giving them to any other woman. He won’t, though- I know he won’t. And what second wife would want them, in the circumstances? They will rest in their box for years, I suppose, until John is dead too and someone digs them out by accident, a surprise and a mystery all over again.
The pearls are always there in John’s story. What they meant to us can’t be quite lost.
But I wish for both our sakes we had had children. I wish I had a little girl. I could give her the pearls and John would tell her their story, and then neither they nor our marriage would be wasted.
Mrs Forrester came to see me today. She has been so busy with preparations for the wedding - it is hard to believe that little Elisabeth can possibly be getting married - I remember her chewing her pigtails and groaning over her arithmetic. I wish I could have seen her once more, and yet I wouldn’t want her to come - I don’t want her to see me. Mrs Forrester tried to hide it, but she was very shocked at how I have changed. In a way I was just as shocked to see her -- for the sight of her, just as bright and vigorous as ever, her kind, handsome face scarcely altered since I left her house five years ago, -- made me realise just how utterly worn out John is. And I thought I already knew what I had done to him.
Soon I must throw these pages on the fire; John must never read them, but knowing now that no one will ever see, I can say it: I could not tell Mrs Forrester, I cannot tell anyone how tired I am of worrying about him. For God’s sake, is it not enough that I’m so ill and wretched, must I still be trying and trying to think of some way of making it a little better for him when I know nothing can? I don’t want to care any more, and that disgusts me even more than the wreck my body has become. But almost everything else has gone, why not that too?
Once I wanted to learn German well enough to read Schiller in the original. A week ago I made Alice drag down the book and I tried and tried to remember what those lines meant and why I once loved them so much.
Hört ihr jene Brandung stürmen,
Die sich an den Felsen bricht?
Asien riß sie von Europen;
Doch die Liebe schreckt sie nicht.
But I can’t care about German or Schiller any more. I don’t want to go on writing, I don’t want to do anything except curl up on my side and I cannot even do that any more without awful pain and smothering in my chest. Oh God, why does it take so long to die when there’s already nothing of me left? How can John go on loving the hideous, useless, bloody rag of a creature this illness has made of me? And yet he does. He does.
I used always to stop myself whenever I felt I was in danger of getting a little envious of Mr Holmes. I owed him so much. But I shall let myself envy him the manner of his death - one last adventure and then to plunge over a waterfall, all over in an instant, and always completely himself.
_____
September 16th, 1893
My wife died just before four in the morning.
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