The Home Magazine, Indianapolis, published by the Reader Co., recently accepted a short story to be paid for on publication. This is a new place for me.
The Blue Book, Chicago, paid $20 for a short story. The editor also asked me to write a 12,000 word serial of mystery and adventure but I told him I couldn’t. I haven’t the knack of such stories so it’s no use my wasting time over them.
I got my check—for $35—from Gunters at last. They have another of my stories in their April number and I presume I shall have a hard time to get my cash also. I don’t intend to send them any more.
There, that’s enough about me and my doings. Now for your letter.
I nearly had a fit over the wanderings of my last letter. Guess I’d better typewrite the address on this if the western mail clerks are so badly afflicted with myopia.
You ask if I am ever troubled with friends I like not liking each other. Yes and yes and yes! I should think I know all about it. It is terrible, isn’t it? Sometimes my spirit fairly cringes within me at the horror of it. I have two friends in especial whom I love and who hate each other and we are all three constantly being thrown together and my friendship with each is more or less spoiled and embittered by their antagonism.
Have you heard from Miss C. lately? I had a letter from her saying she was ill and answered at once. This was some time ago and I have not had a line from her since so I fear she is no better and perhaps worse. I am so sorry for I liked her personality very much. If I were sure her address was still the same I would write again but I do not know if it is. I suppose you never hear from Mrs. Watrous? Or do you?
Yes, I’ve read Trench’s Study of Words—studied it at college in fact. I liked the book tremendously—although as you say I was amused at some of his orthodox biases. Words and languages are the most fascinating things in the world. It’s marvellous how a language grows and develops along natural and unvarying lines. The development of its grammatical structure seems like a miracle to me. I read the other day in a magazine whose assertions carry weight that some of the most degraded and savage tribes possess languages which have a complicated and involved syntax. How did they get it? Well, I suppose it grew just as grew their bodily structure which is likewise as wonderful as that of more civilized peoples.
I congratulate you on discovering the—Bible! I did it a year ago, though and have been reading it—really, reading it—ever since; but as my rate of progression is slower than yours you will soon outstrip me. I can’t get over much more than seven chapters a Sunday—I’m just beginning the Psalms now. It is a wonderful book—the crystallized wisdom and philosophy and experience of the most deeply religious people who ever existed. Could anything be more vital and truer to our own experience than this: “Hope deferred maketh the heart sick”? Could anything express a more majestic conception of God than, “Thou who inhabitest the halls of Eternity”? What more beautiful than the sentence about the rainbow, “the hands of the Most High have bended it”—what more pathetic than “the heart knoweth its own bitterness and a stranger intermeddleth not with its joy”? Job is a magnificent thing. Fancy the stinging irony of “Ye are the people and wisdom will die with you”!! When I was a child a school teacher gave me a whipping because I used the expression “by the skin of my teeth.” He said it was slang. If I had but known then what I know now!!! It is in Job—those very words. Ruth is a delightful thing: “Where thou goest I will go: thy people shall be my people and thy God my God: the Lord judge between us if aught but death part thee and me.” Was ever the loving self-sacrifice and self-effacement of womanhood better or more exquisitely expressed?
I received your “buffalo” postal. I forget whether I sent one in return. If I did not it was because I was—and am—out of them. I can’t get any nearer than Ch’Town twenty-five miles away, so I can’t always return one promptly.
Fourteen pages isn’t bad for a girl who has been housecleaning all day! I wonder if it’s absolutely necessary to houseclean? I wonder if nine-tenths of the things we think so necessary really are so! But I shall go on housecleaning and wondering! I may have given up belief in fore-ordination and election and the Virgin Birth; but I have not and never shall be guilty of the heresy of asserting that it is not vital to existence that the house should be torn up once a year and scrubbed! Perish the thought.
Yours sincerely,
L. M. Montgomery.
Cavendish, P.E.I.,
Sunday Afternoon,
Nov. 10, 1907.
My dear Mr. W.:—
I did not dream when I received your letter that I should be this long in answering it—but time has slipped away so fast. October is my busiest month—full of bulb planting (delicious), housecleaning (ugh-urr-gru-u), sewing (non-excitably nice), etc., etc., etc. This rainy Sunday afternoon I am going to write some letters.
Though raining now it was fine this forenoon—oh! so fine—sunny and mild as a day in June. I hied me away to the woods—away back into sun-washed alleys carpeted with fallen gold and glades where the moss is green and vivid yet. The woods are getting ready to sleep—they are not yet asleep but they are disrobing and are having all sorts of little bed-time conferences and whisperings and good-nights. I can more nearly expect to come face to face with a dryad at this time of the year than any other. They are lurking behind every tree trunk—a dozen times I wheeled sharply around convinced that if I could only turn quick enough I should catch one peeping after me. Oh, keep your great vast prairies where never a wood-nymph could hide. I am content with my bosky lanes and the purple peopled shadows under my firs.
Three evenings ago I went to the shore. We had a wild storm of wind and rain the day before but this evening was clear, cold, with an air of marvellous purity. The sunset was lovely beyond words. I drank its beauty in as I walked down the old shore lane and my soul was filled with a nameless exhilaration. I seemed borne on the wings of a rapturous ecstasy into the seventh heaven. I had left the world and the cares of the world so far behind me that they seemed like a forgotten dream.
The shore was clean-washed after the storm and not a wind stirred but there was a silver surf on, dashing on the sands in a splendid white turmoil. Oh, the glory of that far gaze across the tossing waters, which were the only restless thing in all that vast stillness and peace. It was a moment worth living through weeks of storm and stress for.
There is a great solitude about such a shore. The woods are never solitary—they are full of whispering, beckoning friendly life. But the sea is a mighty soul forever moaning of some great unshareable sorrow that shuts it up into itself for all eternity. You can never pierce into its great mystery—you can only wander, awed and spellbound on the outer fringe of it. The woods call to you with a hundred voices but the sea has only one—a mighty voice that drowns your soul in its majestic music. The woods are human but the sea is of the company of the archangels.
I thought of Emerson’s lines as I stood there that wonderful night.
The gods talk in the breath of the wold
They talk in the shaken pine
And they fill the long reach of the old seashore
With a dialogue divine.
And the poet who overhears
Some random word they say
Is the fated man of men
Whom the ages must obey.
I shall never hear that random word—my ear is not attuned to its lofty thunder. But I can always listen and haply by times I shall catch the faint far-off echo of it and even that will flood my soul with its supernal joy.
You spoke of death in your letter. When I said my friend had had a hard time I did not mean the actual dying—which came to her suddenly and easily—but the long weeks of horrible suffering preceding it. That is the real tragedy of death. I, too, hope that death will come to me suddenly. I don’t