Letter from M. Carey Thomas to Mary Elizabeth Garrett, February 2, 1888

Dearest Mary, The last mail went out last week without my letter. I thought you were to reach Cairo March 15th, I knew Cairo was 10 days easy travelling from Paris, so I was finishing my letter at leisure and when I went to see Henry Mrs. Hardy told me it had gone two hours before and you could not be reached for another six weeks. I was as much disappointed as if it had been I (not you) that had missed a letter. I went home and tore it up to begin again, and now at the last moment just as I have a miserable hour and a half before mail time I find on my table a note from Mrs. Hardy saying another mail leaves Baltimore tomorrow morning early for Cairo. I will try a special delivery to catch you but if I miss this mail I want you to know why. You must think I have changed your plans and intend to reach Cairo sooner and perhaps that means you can go further up the Nile for it will be cooler. I am very glad. You will I know be glad to hear that I found Henry looking so very much better than when I saw him in the Summer or rather in the Autumn. He knew me, and talked about you, said he had been out driving on Tuesday and Thursday. Mrs. Hardy, as she of course writes, says he often speaks of you. I have stupidly thought of him as being at Montebello until it occurred to me that he might be in town. No words can say what your house is like without you. I had intended to take a look at the pictures if the gallery was open, but they seemed to me too lonely without their mistress, so I did not make the attempt. Perhaps after all it was well I missed the first mail for I had just gone through another crisis and now at a weeks distance I will tell you about it in better form. You know or perhaps you do not know, that I have always thought Harry something like Ralph Fouchett only of course without the marvellous cleverness (for of all persons Ralph is to me the cleverest). There is something in HarryGÇÖs humourous way of taking things, a quiet undertone of joking seriousness, an amiable fashion of putting himself out, while seeming not to do it, for other people that makes him very lovable in a Ralph like way. Next to Nellie he is my most companionable sister or brother. Why have we not a word like geschwister? Well since Thanksgiving he has been unwearried in promoting MotherGÇÖs comfort and to me personally was a great help. All this winter he has been hard at work out at Bay View with Welsh performing autopsies on consumptive patients and hunting for bacilli or the little microscopic animals they think now cause the disease. One day Welsh said harry you have a cough, let me examine your phlegm. That afternoon Welsh wrote to Father saying that both he and Councilman (for he had not dared to trust himself alone) agreed in finding these basic bacilli in HarryGÇÖs lungs. Father sent Harry off the next day to New York to consult Delafield and Loomis. They both said his lungs were seriously affected and both said he must go to the Adirondacks for a year and that, without the delay of a week; they said he would die in the South and if he went to California could not return under three years. Well my Ralph although he privately told me his heart was broken to leave Mother and his work that he was just beginning and Zoe - went off as bravely as a hero all alone by himself to Saranac Lake where the thermometer is often 20 below zero. Father gave him his choice of marrying Zoe and going with her but he of course refused. So there he is - and if anything could make things worse it is his absence just when he could be such a help in nursing Mother. Now in a few words about her and then I will write about other things. She is very sick, and ever since I wrote has led the life of an invalid, she has been out four times but after each attempt the pains in her back and shoulders have been much worse. She cannot use her right arm at all without bringing on the pain - we let her do nothing for herself and every few hours she lies down. Her stiffness is such that getting up and down is very painful and lately her breast has been painful but not very. She is just as sweet and natural and brave as any one can be. No one would know that anything as the matter except by seeing her complete helplessness and her exhaustion after a half hour of conversation. It is as you said these last two months have been worth everything to me. I have devoted myself to her for the miserable three days of the week I can command and have been able to fill her room with my favorite pictures LeonardoGÇÖs last supper, his head of Christ, TitianGÇÖs Entombment, RembrandtGÇÖs supper at Emares with Havens, and down cushions and books - things she never used to care for as I did (the down cushions seem in incongruous company) but that now she does care for. One of the carms of a life of books as opposed to that of action is the greater sensitiveness one grows to have for such things. I have reminded myself of you, Mary, for I have read aloud to her incessantly - all sorts of things. JamesGÇÖ novels, all Miss Phelps novels about heaven, Vernon LeeGÇÖs Countess of Albany, Miss RobinsonGÇÖs Emily Bronte, St. Francis little flowers, theology and bible history, story and legend till I often think the books I cannot take up without a heartache in the future will be sadly numerous. And now I am remembering all my poetry to say to her in the twilight or rather firelight. She is much better in the daytime when outside things make her forget her uncomfortableness, and I hope if she gets worse (which if is I suppose a when) she will let me put her to sleep with poetry. I did it for 2 nights at Thanksgiving when she suffered very much. I do not think she can live till Summer but if she should not suffer and if we could know that the suffering was not coming, should like to have it possible. There are just 14 weeks till June and now I wonder how those 14 weeks will be filled for you. Japan I know but all the rest is a blank. I know they will be pleasant and profitable. Remember it all and some day you shall sit map in hand and describe the lands of story and romance you have visited. Books of travel are to me (not as they are to Bessie) little good, but if I know my traveller well I can picture the impressions she reproduces. Bessie is miserable, unable for the first time at Aiken, to walk much. She is too low to write much or cheerfully and for the first time I feel that I have failed her in her need. I found I was so unable to write as usual that I had to tell her very briefly of my trouble. I wish she could pass a summer in the Adirondacks. Did I tell you I have subdued one intractable spirit - my grad. Student from the Annex came disgusted with the English teaching at Harvard and when she reached here was inclined to doubt the value of study, aims everything and above all womanGÇÖs capacity for anything but childbearing and marriage. I felt little stomach for the task but I tried to talk with her and tell her from my own experience how I knew the delight of the very things she denied. I really wasted a great deal of time on her and now she seems, within the last week, converted. I gave her Anglo Saxon work and literature and as a great piece of self denial took up the study of Browning with her, but of course it has been its own reward. Not only is she delighted with her, but in re-reading him as attentively as I must (for she expects to have the obscure lines explained) I am once more carried away and out of myself. It has been a long time since I took him poem by poem. For the rest I am busy hammering away on my college and talking to my English class. We have been as I told you going carefully over Norse mythology and Northern and Anglo Saxon sagas. Like the poet of Pauline I find that I GÇ£old lore love for itself, and all it shows the king treading the purple calmly to his deathGÇ¥. It is I often think in seeing how unreal literary realities are to these students, a great consolation to have like him GÇ£an imagination which has been an angel to me coming not in fitful visions but beside me ever and never failing me; so though my mind forgets not, not a shred of life forgets, yet I can take a secret pride in calling the dark past up to quell it regally.GÇ¥ So you can imagine me dear Mary regally or imperfectly quelling my present unhappiness with old time stories of Sigrid and soon Chaucer and the Arthurian romances. You must excuse this hastily [written] letter. It would have been many times more interesting and well considered if I had had more time. After this I will try to write more regularly now that I feel that mails can reach you. It happens by chance to be the date of your visit last year and the year before. I wonGÇÖt say that I wish you were here instead of in Japan or China but I will say that I hope you may not be so immensely far off next February. This is some of my Leipzig paper that has just come to light. Perhaps it may be a good omen for the opening of a more satisfactory letter writing than we have had since then. I should like to begin the New Year and my 31st year also by returning to hold habits. Goodbye - reading those miserably sentimental Anglo Saxon poems (how thankful we should be for our Norman blood) makes one inclined to melancholy but I am much more cheerful than this letter sounds. Lovingly yours Minnie C Thomas