  "Les Solitudes, "Dear Mr. Jardine,—How very, very kind of you. I could hardly believe it when Mrs. Talcott told me that a box was here for me. I could think of nothing to explain it. Then when we opened it and saw, row upon row, those beautiful things like pearls in a casket—it made me feel quite dazed. Nectarines are not things that you expect to have, in rows, all to yourself. Mrs. Talcott and I ate two at once, standing there in the hall where we opened them; we couldn't wait for chairs and plates and silver knives; things taste best of all when eaten greedily, I think, and I think that these will all be eaten greedily. It is so kind of you. I thank you very much.—Yours sincerely, "Karen Woodruff." "Les Solitudes, "Dear Mr. Jardine,—It is most kind of you to write me this nice note and to send me these reviews. I often have to miss the things that come out in the reviews about my guardian, for the press-cuttings go to her. Mr. Drew says many clever things, does he not; he understands music and he understands—at least almost—what my guardian is to music; but he does not, of course, understand her. He only sees the greatness and sees it made out of great things. When one knows a great person intimately one sees all the little things that make them great; often such very little things; things that Mr. Drew could not know. That is why his article is, to me, rather pretentious; nor will you like it, I think. He fills up with subtleties the gaps in his knowledge, and that makes it all so artificial. But I am most glad to have, it.—Sincerely yours, "Karen Woodruff." "Les Solitudes, "Dear Mr. Jardine,—The beautiful great box of fruit arrived to-day. It is too good and kind of you. I am wondering now whether muscatel grapes are not even more my favourites than nectarines! This is a day of rain and wind, soft rain blowing in gusts and the wind almost warm. Victor and I have come in very wet and now we are both before the large wood fire. London seems so far away that New York hardly seems further. You heard of the great ovation that my guardian had. I had a note from her yesterday and two of the New York papers. If you care to read them I will gladly send them; they tell in full about the first great concert she has given and the criticism is good. I will ask you to let me have them back when you have read them.—With many, many thanks.—Sincerely yours, "Karen Woodruff." "Les Solitudes, "Dear Mr. Jardine,—I am glad that you liked the box of snowdrops and that they reached you safely, packed in their moss. I got them in a little copse a few miles from here. The primroses will soon be coming now and, if you like, I will send you some of them. I know one gets them early in London; but don't you like best to open yourself a box from the country and see them lying in bunches with their leaves. I like even the slight flatness they have; but mine are very little flattened; I am good at packing flowers! My guardian always tells me so! You are probably right in not caring to see the papers; they are always much alike in what they say. It was only the glimpse of the great enthusiasm they gave that I thought might have interested you. Next week she goes to Chicago. I am afraid she will be very tired. But Miss Scrotton will take care of her.—Sincerely yours, "Karen Woodruff." "Les Solitudes, "Dear Mr. Jardine,—I have taken up my pen for only two purposes since I left London—to write my weekly letter to my guardian—and to thank you over and over again. Only now you have quite spoiled Mrs. Talcott and me for our stewed dried fruit that we used to think so nice before we lived on grapes and nectarines. Indeed I have not forgotten the primroses and I shall be so delighted to pick them for you when the time comes, though I suspect it is sheer kindness in you that gives me the pleasure of sending you something. Your nice letter interested me very much. Yes, we have 'Dominique' in the library here, and I will perhaps soon read it; I say perhaps, because I am reading 'Wilhelm Meister'—my guardian was quite horrified with me when she found I had never read it—and must finish that first, and it is very long. Is 'Dominique' indeed your favourite French novel? My guardian places Stendahl and Flaubert first. For myself I do not care much for French novels. I like the Russians best.—Sincerely yours, "Karen Woodruff." "Les Solitudes, "Dear Mr. Jardine,—You make a charming picture of the primroses in the blue and white bowls for me. And of your view over the park. London can be so beautiful; I, too, care for it very much. It is beautiful here now; the hedges all white with blackthorn and the woods full of primroses. My guardian must now be in San Francisco! She is back in New York in May, and is to give three more great concerts there. I am impatiently waiting for my next letter from her. I am so glad you like the primroses. Many, many thanks for the fruit.—Yours sincerely, "Karen Woodruff." "Les Solitudes, "Dear Mr. Jardine,—What you say makes me feel quite troubled. I know you write playfully, yet sometimes one can dire la vÉritÉ en riant, and it is as if you had found my letters very empty and unresponsive. I did not mean them to be that of course; but I am not at all in the habit of writing letters except to people I am very intimate with. Indeed, I am in the habit only of writing to my guardian, and it is difficult for me to think that other people will be interested in the things I am doing. And in one way I do so little here. Nothing that I could believe interesting to you; nothing really but have walks and practise my music and read; and talk sometimes with Mrs. Talcott. About once in two months the vicar's wife has tea with us, and about once in two months we have tea with her; that is all. And I am sure you cannot like descriptions of landscapes. I love to look at landscapes and dislike reading what other people have to say about them; and is not that the same with you? It is quite different that you should write to me of things and people; for you see so many and you do so much and you know that to someone in the depths of the country all this must be very interesting. So do not punish me for my dullness by ceasing to write to me.—Sincerely yours, "Karen Woodruff." "Les Solitudes, "Dear Mr. Jardine,—Of course I will write you descriptions of landscapes!—and of all my daily routine, if you really care to hear. No; I am not lonely, though of course I miss my guardian very much. I have the long, long walks with Victor, in wet weather over the inland moors along the roads, and in fine weather along the high cliff paths; sometimes we walk ten miles in an afternoon and come back very tired for tea. In the evenings I sit with Mrs. Talcott over the fire. You ask me to describe Mrs. Talcott to you, and to tell you all about her. She is with me now, and we are in the morning room, where we always sit; for the great music-room that opens on the verandah and fronts the sea is shut when my guardian is not here. This room looks over the sea, too, but from the side of the house and through an arabesque of trees. The walls are filled with books and flowering bulbs stand in the windows. We have had our tea and the sunlight slants in over the white freesia and white hyacinths. There are primroses everywhere, too, and they make the room seem more full of sunlight. You could hardly see a more beautiful room. Mrs. Talcott sits before the fire with her skirt turned up and her feet in square-toed shoes on the fender and looks into the fire. She is short and thick and very old, but she does not seem old; she is hard; not soft and withered. She has a large, calm face with very yellow skin, and very light blue eyes set deeply under white eyebrows. Her hair is white and drawn up tightly to a knot at the top of her head. She wears no cap and dresses always in black; very plain, with, in the daytime, a collar of white lawn turning over a black silk stock and bow, such as young girls wear, and, in the evening, a little fichu of white net, very often washed, and thin and starchy. And since her skirts are always very short, and her figure so square, she makes one think of a funny little girl as well as of an old woman. She comes from the State of Maine, and she remembers a striving, rough existence in a little town on the edge of wildernesses. She is a very distant relation of my guardian's. My guardian's maternal grandparents were Spanish and lived in New Orleans, and a sister of SeÑor Bastida's (Bastida was the name of my guardian's grandfather)—married a New Englander, from Vermont—and that New Englander was an uncle of Mrs. Talcott's—do you follow!—her uncle married my guardian's aunt, you see. Mrs. Talcott, in her youth, stayed sometimes in New Orleans, and dearly loved the beautiful Dolores Bastida who left her home to follow Pavelek Okraska. Poor Dolores Okraska had many sorrows. Her husband was not a good husband and her parents died. She was very unhappy and before her baby came—she was in Poland then,—she sent for Mrs. Talcott. Mrs. Talcott had been married, too, and had lost her husband and was very poor. But she left everything and crossed to Europe in the steerage—and what it must have been in those days!—imagine!—to join her unfortunate relative. My guardian has told me of it; she calls Mrs. Talcott: 'Un coeur d'or dans un corps de bois.' She stayed with Dolores Okraska until she died a little time after. She brought up her child. They were in great want; my guardian remembers that she had sometimes not enough to eat. When she was older and had already become famous, some relatives of the Bastidas heard of her and helped; but those were years of great struggle for Mrs. Talcott; and it is so strange to think of that provincial, simple American woman with her rustic ways and accent, living in Cracow and Warsaw, and Vienna, and steadily doing what she had set herself to do. She speaks French with a most funny accent even yet, though she spent so many years abroad, so many in Paris. I do not know what would have become of my guardian if it had not been for her. Her father loved her, but was very erratic and undisciplined. Mrs. Talcott has been with my guardian for almost all the time ever since. It is a great and silent devotion. She is very reticent. She never speaks of herself. She talks to me sometimes in the evenings about her youth in Maine, and the long white winters and the sleigh-rides; and the tapping of the maple-trees in Spring; and the nutting parties in the fall of the year. I think that she likes to remember all this; and I love to hear her, for it reminds me of what my father used to tell me of his youth; and I love especially to hear of the trailing arbutus, that lovely little flower that grows beneath the snow; how one brushes back the snow in early Spring and finds the waxen, sweet, pink flowers and dark, shining leaves under it. And I always imagine that it is a doubled nostalgia that I feel and that my mother's Norway in Spring was like it, with snow and wet woods. There is a line that brings it all over me: 'In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes.' It is by Emerson. The Spring here is very lovely, too, but it has not the sweetness that arises from snow and a long winter. Through the whole winter the fuchsias keep their green against the white walls of the little village, huddled in between the headlands at the edge of the sea beneath us. You know this country, don't you? The cliffs are so beautiful. I love best the great headlands towards the Lizard, black rock or grey, all spotted with rosettes of orange lichen with sweeps of grey-green sward sloping to them. Victor becomes quite intoxicated with the wind on these heights and goes in circles round and round, like a puppy. Later on, all the slopes are veiled in the delicate little pink thrift, and the stone walls are festooned with white campion. "Then Mrs. Talcott and I have a great deal to do about the little farm. Mrs. Talcott is so clever at this. She makes it pay besides giving my guardian all the milk and eggs and bacon, too, she needs. There is a farmer and his wife, and a gardener and a boy; but with the beautiful garden we have here it takes most of the day to see to everything. The farmer's wife is a stern looking woman, but really very gentle, and she sings hymns all the day long while she works. She has a very good voice, so that it is sweet to hear her. Yes; I do play. I have a piano here in the morning-room, and I am very fond of my music. And, as I have told you, I read a good deal, too. So there you have all the descriptions and the details. I liked so much what you told me of the home of your boyhood. When I saw you, I knew that you were a person who cared for all these things, even if you were not an artist. What you tell me, too, of the law-courts and the strange people you see there, and the ugly, funny side of human life amused me, though it seems to me more sorrowful than you perhaps feel it. People amuse me very much sometimes, too; but I have not your eye for their foibles. You draw them rather as Forain does; I should do it, I suspect, with more sentimentality. The fruit comes regularly once a week, and punctual thanks seem inappropriate for what has become an institution. But you know how grateful I am. And for the weekly Punch;—so gemÜtlich and bien pensant and, often, very, very funny, with a funniness that the Continental papers never give one; their jests are never the jests of the bien pensant. It is the acrid atmosphere of the cafÉ they bring, not that of the dinner party, or, better still, for Punch, the picnic. The reviews, too, are very interesting. Mrs. Talcott reads them a good deal, she who seldom reads. She says sometimes very acute and amusing things about politics. My guardian has a horror of politics; but they rather interest Mrs. Talcott. I know nothing of them; but I do not think that my guardian would agree with what you say; I think that she would belong more to your party of freedom and progress. What a long letter I have written to you! I have never written such a long one in my life before, except to my guardian.—Sincerely yours, "Karen Woodruff." "Les Solitudes, "Dear Mr. Jardine,—How very nice to hear that you are coming to Cornwall for Easter and will be near us—at least Falmouth is quite near with a motor. It is beautiful country there, too; I have driven there with my guardian, and it is a beautiful town to see, lying in a wide curve around its blue bay. It is softer and milder than here. A bend of the coast makes so much difference. But why am I telling you all this, when of course you know it! I forget that anyone knows Cornwall but Mrs. Talcott and my guardian and me. But you have not seen this bit of the coast, and it excites me to think that I shall introduce you to our cliffs and to Les Solitudes. If only my guardian were here! It is not itself, this place, without her. It is not to see Les Solitudes if you do not see the great music-room opening its four long windows on the sea and sky; and my guardian sitting in the shade of the verandah looking over the sea. But Mrs. Talcott and I will do the honours as best we may and tell you everything about my guardian that you will wish to know. Let us hear beforehand the day you are coming; for the cook makes excellent cakes, and we will have some baked specially for you. How very nice to see you again.—Sincerely yours, "Karen Woodruff." |
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