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Verena in the Midst: A Kind of a Story

Chapter 62: LX Richard Haven to Verena Raby
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.

LX
Richard Haven to Verena Raby

My Poor Dear, “irksome” be d—d! There is nothing irksome in talking to you on paper for a little while every day. Indeed, a lot of it is pure luxurious pleasure, because I can indulge in the rapture of (so to speak) hearing my own platitudinous cocksure voice.

It was a long journey, but I am safely back. It was splendid to find you looking so little pulled down and to see all those nice faces round you. I pride myself on being able to pick a Reader against any man!

While the train was stopping—much too long—just outside some country station, I watched three farm-labourers hoeing, and all three were smoking cigarettes. Now, before the War you never saw a farm-labourer with a cigarette and you rarely saw him smoking during work. I am quite certain also that you can’t smoke a cigarette and hoe without doing injustice either to the tobacco or to the crop. No farmer to-day would, however, I am sure, have the courage to protest.

“But,” I said to a man the other week when he was blaming one of his messengers for an unpardonable delay, “if he behaves like that, it is your business as an employer to sack him.”

“Sack him!” he replied blankly. “Employers don’t give the sack any more; they get it.”

And this is true.

But a change must come, and the interesting thing to see will be how complete that change is. One thing is certain, and that is that Capital and Labour will never resume their old relations; Labour has tasted too much blood. And you can’t put servants into khaki and tell them they are our saviours and then expect them to return to the status of servitude—at any rate not the same ones. The process of grinding the working classes back to their old position of subjection is going to be impossible; and the statesmen will find that reconstruction must be based on foundations which are set on a higher level than the old.

A man in the train gave me a new definition of the extreme of meanness: Saving a rose from Queen Alexandra’s Day for use again next year.

Here is the poem:—

Since all that I can ever do for thee
Is to do nothing, this my prayer must be:
That thou may’st never guess nor ever see
The all-endured this nothing-done costs me.

Good night.

R. H.