Violet to Vita- Letter No. 5

August 14, 1918

Oh Mitya, I want to see you. I want to hear your voice. I want to put my hand on your shoulder and cry my heart out. Mitya, Mitya, I have never told you the whole truth. You shall have it now: I have loved you all my life, a long time without knowing, 5 years knowing it as irrevocably as I know it now, loved you as my ideal, my inspiration, my perfection.
Ah, Mitya, and you think it is a flirting fickle thing. And I am telling you the truth, as though I only had another hour of life in which to tell it to you. And the supreme truth is this: I can never be happy without you. I am nothing without you. Ah, I want you, my Mitya, my own. I would be quite content to live on terms of purely platonic friendship with you- provided we were alone and together- for the rest of my days. Now you know everything. You are the grande passion of my life. How gladly would I sacrifice everything to you- family, friends, fortune, everything. What could I care as long as we could be together?

Violet to Vita- Letter No. 4

June 5, 1918

Mer Dmitri,

I adored the letter you write me “from the woods” – the only long letter I have ever had from you. Don’t you think you might make a habit of such letters? I treasured it up till yesterday afternoon, then “deguste”1 it slowly and voluptuously.

The description of Julian I thought most adequate2. You say it’s not like you! It is you, word for word, trait for trait. I laughed long and uproariously over the part where you said, all people worshipped him without his being conscious. Signiferait-il que tu commences a t’ apprecier?3 Let me think you do, at all events, and I shall not have lived in vain.

I must say I should like either a more detailed description of Julian’s appearance whereas hitherto you have confided yourself more to the impression it produced on other people. “Julian was tall,” let us say, and “flawlessly proportioned.” The proposed height of the Greek athlete is alleged to have been 5ft 10in, but Julian surpassed this by at least two inches. Julian’s hair was black and silky. Eve found herself wondering what it would feel like to stroke, and promptly did so; she was amazed to feel a sensation akin to pain shoot up her fingers and lodge itself definitely in the region of her heart. However she was determined to analyse Julian’s beauty, feature by feature, and as he lay stretched full-length in the grass, thinking- what! We wondered uneasily- here was an opportunity not to be neglected.

“How graceful he was, how young, how strong! Eve studied the recumbent figure with eyes in which lay something like a grudging caress. Yet she hated herself for finding him beautiful, for beautiful he undoubtedly was. How resentful she probed those heavily lidded eyes, green in repose, black in anger, even smouldering with some fettered impulse. She wondered: will Julian ever let himself go? Will he ever fling all reticence to the winds? Will he know what it is to experience the soul-scarring emotions of love and hatred? Then, abruptly, her gaze fastened itself on his mouth. She was conscious of a slight tremor: - that mouth, nothing if not classical- with its rather full underlip, was not the mouth of austerity, of abstention. No, it was a sensual mouth, and its sensuality was enhanced, not diminished, by the strongly moulded chin, with its cleft in it.

“Eve, often to tease Julian, told him he looked like a Gypsy, but she was later to admit that his wonderful ‘apricot’ colouring was one of his chief merits. How like a young Hermes he was, pagan, impersonal, indifferent… and a wave of unaccountable despondency swept over her. She felt very futile and inexperienced.”

How will that do? I haven’t written carefully, but it’s more or less what I want to convey. I’ll write it over again properly, if you like. It’s too wonderful, writing about you… Darling, I adore you. You’re getting too exciting for words.

1. Tasted
2. Julian is Vita in the novel Challenge.
3. Does this signify that you are beginning to appreciate yourself?