Джин Вебстер - Daddy-Long-Legs

This is a very abstruse letter — does your head ache, Daddy? I think we’ll stop now and make some fudge. I’m sorry I can’t send you a piece; it will be unusually good, for we’re going to make it with real cream and three butter balls.

Yours affectionately,

Judy

PS. We’re having fancy dancing in gymnasium class. You can see by the accompanying picture how much we look like a real ballet. The one at the end accomplishing a graceful pirouette is me — I mean I.

My Dear, Dear, Daddy,

Haven’t you any sense? Don’t you KNOW that you mustn’t give one girl seventeen Christmas presents? I’m a Socialist, please remember; do you wish to turn me into a Plutocrat?

Think how embarrassing it would be if we should ever quarrel! I should have to engage a moving-van to return your gifts.

I am sorry that the necktie I sent was so wobbly; I knit it with my own hands (as you doubtless discovered from internal evidence). You will have to wear it on cold days and keep your coat buttoned up tight.

Thank you, Daddy, a thousand times. I think you’re the sweetest man that ever lived — and the foolishest!

Judy

Here’s a four-leaf clover from Camp McBride to bring you good luck for the New Year.

Do you wish to do something, Daddy, that will ensure your eternal salvation? There is a family here who are in awfully desperate straits. A mother and father and four visible children — the two older boys have disappeared into the world to make their fortune and have not sent any of it back. The father worked in a glass factory and got consumption — it’s awfully unhealthy work — and now has been sent away to a hospital. That took all their savings, and the support of the family falls upon the oldest daughter, who is twenty-four. She dressmakes for $1.50 a day (when she can get it) and embroiders centrepieces in the evening. The mother isn’t very strong and is extremely ineffectual and pious. She sits with her hands folded, a picture of patient resignation, while the daughter kills herself with overwork and responsibility and worry; she doesn’t see how they are going to get through the rest of the winter — and I don’t either. One hundred dollars would buy some coal and some shoes for three children so that they could go to school, and give a little margin so that she needn’t worry herself to death when a few days pass and she doesn’t get work.

You are the richest man I know. Don’t you suppose you could spare one hundred dollars? That girl deserves help a lot more than I ever did. I wouldn’t ask it except for the girl; I don’t care much what happens to the mother — she is such a jelly-fish.

The way people are for ever rolling their eyes to heaven and saying, ‘Perhaps it’s all for the best,’ when they are perfectly dead sure it’s not, makes me enraged. Humility or resignation or whatever you choose to call it, is simply impotent inertia. I’m for a more militant religion!

We are getting the most dreadful lessons in philosophy — all of Schopenhauer for tomorrow. The professor doesn’t seem to realize that we are taking any other subject. He’s a queer old duck; he goes about with his head in the clouds and blinks dazedly when occasionally he strikes solid earth. He tries to lighten his lectures with an occasional witticism — and we do our best to smile, but I assure you his jokes are no laughing matter. He spends his entire time between classes in trying to figure out whether matter really exists or whether he only thinks it exists.

I’m sure my sewing girl hasn’t any doubt but that it exists!

Where do you think my new novel is? In the waste-basket. I can see myself that it’s no good on earth, and when a loving author realizes that, what WOULD be the judgment of a critical public?

Later

I address you, Daddy, from a bed of pain. For two days I’ve been laid up with swollen tonsils; I can just swallow hot milk, and that is all. ‘What were your parents thinking of not to have those tonsils out when you were a baby?’ the doctor wished to know. I’m sure I haven’t an idea, but I doubt if they were thinking much about me.

Yours,

J. A.

I just read this over before sealing it. I don’t know WHY I cast such a misty atmosphere over life. I hasten to assure you that I am young and happy and exuberant; and I trust you are the same. Youth has nothing to do with birthdays, only with ALIVEDNESS of spirit, so even if your hair is grey, Daddy, you can still be a boy.

Affectionately,

Judy

Dear Mr. Philanthropist,

Your cheque for my family came yesterday. Thank you so much! I cut gymnasium and took it down to them right after luncheon, and you should have seen the girl’s face! She was so surprised and happy and relieved that she looked almost young; and she’s only twenty-four. Isn’t it pitiful?

Anyway, she feels now as though all the good things were coming together. She has steady work ahead for two months — someone’s getting married, and there’s a trousseau to make.

‘Thank the good Lord!’ cried the mother, when she grasped the fact that that small piece of paper was one hundred dollars.

‘It wasn’t the good Lord at all,’ said I, ‘it was Daddy-Long-Legs.’ (Mr. Smith, I called you.)

‘But it was the good Lord who put it in his mind,’ said she.

‘Not at all! I put it in his mind myself,’ said I.

But anyway, Daddy, I trust the good Lord will reward you suitably. You deserve ten thousand years out of purgatory.

Yours most gratefully,

Judy Abbott

May it please Your Most Excellent Majesty:

This morning I did eat my breakfast upon a cold turkey pie and a goose, and I did send for a cup of tee (a china drink) of which I had never drank before.

Don’t be nervous, Daddy — I haven’t lost my mind; I’m merely quoting Sam’l Pepys. We’re reading him in connection with English History, original sources. Sallie and Julia and I converse now in the language of 1660. Listen to this:

‘I went to Charing Cross to see Major Harrison hanged, drawn and quartered: he looking as cheerful as any man could do in that condition.’ And this: ‘Dined with my lady who is in handsome mourning for her brother who died yesterday of spotted fever.’

Seems a little early to commence entertaining, doesn’t it? A friend of Pepys devised a very cunning manner whereby the king might pay his debts out of the sale to poor people of old decayed provisions. What do you, a reformer, think of that? I don’t believe we’re so bad today as the newspapers make out.

Samuel was as excited about his clothes as any girl; he spent five times as much on dress as his wife — that appears to have been the Golden Age of husbands. Isn’t this a touching entry? You see he really was honest. ‘Today came home my fine Camlett cloak with gold buttons, which cost me much money, and I pray God to make me able to pay for it.’

Excuse me for being so full of Pepys; I’m writing a special topic on him.

What do you think, Daddy? The Self-Government Association has abolished the ten o’clock rule. We can keep our lights all night if we choose, the only requirement being that we do not disturb others — we are not supposed to entertain on a large scale. The result is a beautiful commentary on human nature. Now that we may stay up as long as we choose, we no longer choose. Our heads begin to nod at nine o’clock, and by nine-thirty the pen drops from our nerveless grasp. It’s nine-thirty now. Good night.

Just back from church — preacher from Georgia. We must take care, he says, not to develop our intellects at the expense of our emotional natures — but methought it was a poor, dry sermon (Pepys again). It doesn’t matter what part of the United States or Canada they come from, or what denomination they are, we always get the same sermon. Why on earth don’t they go to men’s colleges and urge the students not to allow their manly natures to be crushed out by too much mental application?