Violet to Vita- Letter No. 2

Dambatenne, Ceylon
January 2, 1911

I am in a strange mood today, Vita mia, I cannot make up my mind whether I am freak in every possible respect, or just simply- an unnatural child. Enlighten me by your wisdom and tell me my future, oh phythoness!
I have had every conceivable thing in the way of adventures this last two years. Shall I disclose some of the more thrilling for your benefit? You ask nothing better, do you? And it’s exactly because I comprehend your curiosity- quite natural really- that I’m determined not to tell.
I have more memories than if I were a thousand years old. A great chest whose drawers are crammed with balanced sheets, verses, love letters, with law suits, novels, with locks of hair rolled up amid the receipts- hides fewer memories than my sad brain. It’s a pyramid, an immense vault containing more dead than common grave. I am a cemetery detested by the moon where, as with remorse, drag out long verses, which fasten themselves to my most sacred deaths.
--- et patati patat, I could go on reciting for half an hour if this would help to solace my spleen.
Your last missive told me much about your present state. Shall I admit it, not hiding anything, that I’ve been given much cord to twist again. What a bitch you are! Excuse my language. I employ it on certain occasions to bury my feelings which are apt to prove too much for me at times.
Well here’s something which I think will make you laugh: imagine, chere amie, that I’ve brought back an alligator from my jungle expedition- an enormous one such as no longer exists in our times, enormous as the step of a staircase!
This takes your breath away really for once. (I see your scandalized face from here: “What a vulgar outburst!”)
I killed it with my little rifle and if you are very good (as you would say), you shall have a purse made out of it for your birthday present!
Do you know that you have ceased to be a reality for me? You are so far away that it seems to me you have never existed outside of my dreams. You are a mirage which recedes to the degree that one approaches to it. Speaking about mirages, I saw a very beautiful one in the Sues Canal at the mouth of the Red Sea. I was gazing with distracted eye at the desert which stretches out to infinity, the intense implacable sun gleaming as a furnace, a camel marching with great unequal steps towards the south- when suddenly I recall letting out a loud cry: “See over there, the trees, the water?”
One looks: it seems then that a lake encircled by date trees and leafy shrubs, incredibly blue and seductive, had passed unobserved. Immediately we rush to the maps, snatch up the spectacles, then all together to the Captain, who, high up in his cabin is stretched out in a sultry posture. “What is that lake which glitters in the distance, so blue, so solitary?”
The Captain descends, grumbling, directs his telescope towards the Egyptian shore: “That, ladies, that is quite simple a mirage!” and he returns to his quarters, still shaking with his habitual healthy and vulgar laughter.
Myself, I remain for a long time leaning on the balustrade with dreaming eyes. I seemed to see so many things in this reality which, after all, was only a mirage.