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Verena in the Midst: A Kind of a Story

Chapter 102: XCI Verena Raby to Richard Haven
By E. V. Lucas
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Essays, Letters & Speeches

About This Book

Presented as a sequence of letters, the work follows the responses of friends and relatives when a woman at her country home sustains a spinal injury and must remain flat for a long recovery. Correspondence records medical opinions, practical arrangements for nursing and household care, visitors and neighborhood support, and small domestic consolations such as reading aloud, recorded music, and an adapted form of solitaire. Through exchanges of news, requests, and observations, the letters map family connections and local characters while illustrating how community, resourcefulness, and affectionate concern reshape daily life during enforced convalescence.

XCI
Verena Raby to Richard Haven

My Dear Friend and Philosopher,—How wise you are! On paper. When I meet you and see your dear old face I know you are capable of quite as many incautious impulses as most of us; but when I read your cool counsels and generalizations you seem to assume a white beard of immense proportions and to be superior to all human temptations or foibles.

Now, tell me, don’t you think there is any way in which a little money might help to get England back to a sense of orderliness and responsibility again? Nesta and I have been wondering if lecturers could be employed, perhaps with cinema films, to excite people about England—the idea of England as the country that ought to set a good example, that always has led and should lead again. A kind of pictorial pageant of its greatness. Or there might be illustrated lives of its greatest men, to stimulate the ambition of the young and their parents. It is all very vague in my mind, but don’t you think there is something in it? The Rector, I confess, is very cold. He says that what is needed is more faith, more piety, and anything that I could do to that end would be the best thing of all; but when I ask him how, all he can suggest is a new peal of bells here and a handsome donation to the spire fund of the church at Bournemouth where he was before he came here, which was left unfinished. Nesta says that, according to her recollection, Bournemouth has too many spires as it is. I know you are usually sarcastic about the Church, but do tell me candidly what you think.

In exchange for all yours, I must give you the last verse of a consolatory poem written for me by a young sympathizer aged nine:—

How we watch the feeble flicker,
Watch the face so wan!
Day by day she groweth weaker,
Soon she will be gone.

Apropos of children—Nesta’s Lobbie said a rather nice thing the other day. There was a wonderful sunset and she went out into the garden to see it. Then she said—“Mother, I can’t think how God made the sky. I can understand His making nuts”—here she rubbed her thumb and finger together as though moulding something—“and even flowers. But the sky—no!”—Your grateful

V.