IF that is irrevocable—why, then, no more. You can only decide, and while I would not have you consider me, I do ask you to think of yourself. I have no title to be considered, not the remotest; if I had, it might be different. Possibly, even, I had better not write now, and yet I must, though you say “Don’t.” It cannot matter for this once, and after—well, there may be no after. We are curiously inconsistent and very hard to understand; even when we think we know each other well, we speak to conceal our thoughts; and, when we write (and it is often easier to write what we mean than to say it) I wonder whether it occurs to us how marvellously contradictory we can be, and what difficult riddles we can frame, in two or three pages of a letter that comes straight from the heart and cries to be understood. Verily we are the slaves of circumstance; but whilst we accept that position, whilst we make sacrifices that can be absolutely heroic, and dumbly suffer the crucifixion of a lifetime, we want one other heart to know and understand. There are few things harder to bear than to stifle every strongest inclination, every dearest hope, to shut the gate of life, to lock it and throw away the key, with a determination to accept existence and make the best of it. God knows how bitter is that renunciation, but, if it be for another, and that other misunderstands, then the cruelty of it all seems almost beyond endurance.

If I may write no more to you, you may never understand. If I saw you, later, under other circumstances, I could not speak; so there can be no explanation for me. I do not plead, I may not. Not once, but often you have heard my profession of faith—a gift is good, because it is given freely. The greatest good, the most priceless gift, is love. It is valuable because it is free. You cannot buy it or compel it; even when given, you cannot lock it up, or chain it down, and say, “It is mine for ever.” It comes, and it is the joy of life; it goes, and it is pity, misery, despair. It is as useless to rave against the loss, as to shake one’s fist at Zeus and his thunderbolts. If I ever had, then I was thrice-blessed. If I have no longer, the fault is probably mine, and I have still the knowledge of what was. Not God Himself can deprive me of that. I would have liked that you should know all I yearn to say, but because you are not here to tell me, “Say it, say it all,” therefore I must keep silence. Perhaps I do not read aright all you mean; but some at least I know, and that is what you would have me understand without any shadow of doubt. That I realise, down to the very lowest depths of the suffering which is dumb for sheer pain; and I can say nothing, absolutely nothing, because I have no right; nay, more, you tell me to be silent. Surely you know, you know, what I would say? You remember how one evening we rode out by the rocks, and we talked of a story of faith and high resolve, and you said you did not think I was capable of a like devotion. That was a fairy tale; but what I said then, I repeat, with greater confidence, now; with hope, yes, I could stand and wait—with none, perhaps not.

That is all of me. What your letters have been you know, or at least you can guess, for I have answered them, and in those answers you could read all I might not say. “There must be an end, and it is not because of the trouble, but it is because of the pleasure.” You could not tell me that and think, because you bid me, I would not answer? Nor does one forget—fortunately—though if to forget be fortunate, I suppose to remember must be unfortunate, only it does not seem so to me. “Silence is a great barrier”—yes, death is silence, and the greatest barrier of all, and the silence of the living is, in a way, harder to bear, for it seems so needlessly unkind. Silence, determined, unbroken silence, will, I think, kill all feeling. I will not accept that as your last word, not yet; but if, when you receive this, you make that the beginning of silence, then I shall know, and I will not break it. Only I beg of you not to do so hard a thing as this, for I will gladly accept any less cruel sentence if you will not make yourself as dead to me. I have not done anything that need drive you to issue such an edict. Will not some less hopeless judgment, something short of eternal silence, serve until I bring on myself this ghastly doom? You are thinking that it was I who said, “All or nothing,” I who said friendship was too hard a road to tread. That was before—before I had tried; before I knew all I know now. You hid your heart far out of sight, and I never dared to guess—I do not now. But you went, and I, remembering how you went, catch at straws; for, as the Eastern says, I am drowning in the deepest sea. Do not think that is extravagant; it is because I have learned to count the unattainable at its true value that I also realise the immensity of the loss. We stood on either side of a wall, and because the wall was near to me I looked over it and almost forgot its existence. You, standing farther off, saw always the wall, and it shut me out. Then I, thinking it could be nothing to you, tried to get across the intervening space, and so fell, hurting myself, as those who fall must do. It was not a caprice, not an impulse that took me, it was the victory of the uncontrollable. So, doubting me, and to do right for both, you said, “I will build a wall too, stronger and higher, and then we can sometimes look over and talk to each other, and everything will be well.” But it is not well. Only you have vowed yourself to the work, and, if it seems hard, you say that all things are hard, and this must be good because it costs so much. To suffer is bad enough; to give suffering where you would strain every nerve to give only joy is so hard that, to help the other, seems worth any conceivable pain to oneself. What can it matter how it affects me, if I can do some little good for you; something that may save you a little pain, win you a little joy? Believe me, I have no wish but this. Whatever my selfishness would suggest is not really me, for “Thy law is my delight”; nay more, it is my delight to try to anticipate your wish. I have no fear except that you should misunderstand me, that I should misunderstand you. I am my own to offer, yours to accept—equally if, by effacement, I can save you the smallest regret, help you for a few yards over the stony path of life by keeping silence, you will neither see nor hear from me again. I would you did not doubt, perhaps you do not now; at least you cannot distrust, and in this I shall not fail. I shall not say farewell. I will never say that; but through the silence, if so it must be, sometimes, on a day in spring, perhaps, will come the echo of a past that you can recall with nothing more than regret. And that is what I do not quite understand. You say, “In all the years to come I shall not regret.” Not regret what has been, what might have been, or what will be then? Therein lies all the difference, and therein lies the riddle, there and in those words, “I am sometimes—” How am I to supply the rest? It might be any one of so many things. Could it ever be that you are sometimes driven to wonder whether everything I could offer is worth anything you would give? “Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it; if a man would give all the substance of his house for love, it would be utterly contemned.” If that be true, and it has high authority, then in that one sentence is contained the conclusion of the whole matter. It tells you all that you can wish to know for yourself and myself and even for others. I have done; an accident drew from me an acknowledgment of my own hurt when it seemed unlikely that the fact should interest you. Now I am so unfortunate that, hurt myself, I have made you suffer as well. I have nothing to offer to help you, for all I had is yours already. And so the end: if so you deem it best. “Si j’Étais Dieu,” I would use what power I had to spare you a moment’s pain and give you such happiness that you should forget the meaning of the word “suffering.” How utterly powerless we are, how impotent to save those we love, when no offer of the best we have, no devotion, no self-effacement, will secure the happiness of one other being, whose every pulse throbs in unison with ours, yet between whom and us there is fixed the great gulf of our own conventions. Is the end of all human hopes, all human sorrows, described in these two lines?—

“Let me say it whilst I have the courage.” Suppose you had the greater courage to write, “I will never say it.” Let me rather cry with Saul, “Farewell to others, but never we part.” And yet I know that we have already parted to meet no more.