BR
Saturday
My dearest Bettina
Here am I resorting to letter – writing again because i) I should like to have you here to talk to now and am writing instead; ii) We shan’t have over much time for conversation on Monday; iii) After all, writing is in some cases easier than talking.
I am seated in the garden after tea and am in solitary charge of the house. I am praying that if the bell rings, I shall hear it, and thinking of you making ready to receive that thrice-blest brother and sister-in-law of yours.
I am sorry we parted so hastily and brusquely yesterday. I have been very dissatisfied and savage with myself all this term – and feel very guilty about the way I have behaved to you – I don’t know what it is, but I have been cross and scratchy, selfish, unsympathetic, hard somehow – I have felt that I have been hurting you, and not behaving as your worse half ought to behave and would like to behave, and I have hated myself and yet not been able to help it. I can’t explain it, I just want to ask you to forgive me and take it all cum magno grano, and still believe in the love which makes you [?] to me – I’m afraid I’ve been taking all this affair in the wrong way, and letting it upset me and make me hard and crabby. I have been trying so hard to repress it – the longing and the ache that is – and to hide the gloominess and depression that more often than not fastens on me and makes me like a bear with a sore head, a nuisance to myself and everybody near me, that just now I feel as if I have so to speak made all my other feelings and emotions into a lid to keep that one [?], whatever you call it, shut up – [?] – I don’t know how to explain it.
It sort of feels as if all my real self, my deepest, truest, best feelings were tightly shut up in a box which I with too much zeal have made for myself, and can’t undo – and that my silliest, superficialist, spitefulest, jealousest, selfishest, unkindest, vainest, emptiest, flippantest self is sitting on top to make doubly sure that the other won’t pop up. I feel as if I consist of 2 parts only – love for JM with all its usual attendant emotions and pains, and a hard crust all round it.
It’s horrid and beastly, and cowardly and unworthy of me, I know; but there it is. And I feel better now I’ve told you, and I hope you’ll understand and forgive me, though you may quite rightly blame me. You have all the more right to reprove me because I am sure you would never get like this yourself. You have a far more real religion – more definite and perhaps higher ideals, and years of daily practice of unselfishness and sympathy and struggle behind you, where I have been lazily and slackly drifting.
I am ashamed, especially when I have so much to be thankful for, and so very, very much more love showered on me than I deserve. As I was thinking the other day, who and what am I that I should expect to have from anyone that most wonderful and divine thing in the world – real true love? I don’t deserve it – I’m not worthy to inspire it in anyone – all I seem to do is to turn round and hurt those I love best, and who love me best. I don’t mean Jock – I’m horrid to Daddy and to you and Dor. Even if Jock is perhaps a bit in the wrong over this business (and so am I, very much so, as I am in danger of forgetting sometimes) – it would possibly have come sooner or later – when he found out how little there really is in my vain and empty head or mind or heart, whatever it is. He couldn’t have gone on loving me as he ought to love the woman he marries. I should think if he really and truly loved a woman he’d absolutely worship her, and how could he or anyone for that matter, worship a creature like me? If I go on like this, it’ll be a jolly good thing that I do remain a spinster, even if a [?] and crabbed one.
Well, the lid of the box just opened, an inch for a bit, but now I can feel it shutting up again. When I see you on Monday I shall be as nasty and flippant as ever, and shall probably wish I’d never written this letter, and I may be – I hope I shan’t, I shall try not to – horrid and cross to you, my best of friends. Oh Betty, I don’t know what I should have done without you during all this time – I can never tell you all I owe you, and this is the way I go repay it.
It is when things like this happen, and one wins in some inexplicable way, friendship and love help so far beyond one’s deserving, that one becomes quite sure that God is Love, and not merely a God of stern justice and right, and that it isn’t, as I sometimes thought in my most misguided moments, a mere sort of personified Fate or Destiny or [?] that rules the world.
Well, I must do some work now. Good-by darling, God bless you for all your goodness and sweetness and saneness.
Your ever-loving Peg
