Olga Rudge & Ezra Pound: "What Thou Lovest Well..."

43 Lost Loves
maladie,’’ in the names of John Edgar Rudge, Edgar Marie Rudge, and
Mademoiselle Olga Rudge. ‘‘Ted and I were alone at Mother’s. We did
what she wanted, though we had no authority and went against what we
knew would have been Father’s wishes,’’ she recalled later. Without consulting
their father in Youngstown, they had the body cremated, though
cremation was a sin in the eyes of the Roman Catholic Church, and John
Edgar Rudge was a devout believer. (Later, they would scatter the ashes
on Arthur’s gravesite near Courrières, France.)
Olga undertook the sad task of emptying out Julia’s desk. ‘‘My mother
left her desk in order. Father asked me about his letters to her—destroyed.
A few letters to Auntie Lou [Baynes] were marked ‘destroy,’ [but] I had
curiosity to look at them, nothing of a private nature.’’ (Misunderstandings
were covered up in the best of families.) A forgotten find was a copy
of The Elfin Artists and Other Poems, by Alfred Noyes, a gift from Auntie
Lou purchased from the Old Corner Bookstore in Boston. ‘‘He [Noyes]
said what World War I families were feeling, and [it] must have given
comfort to many.’’
Soon after Julia’s death, Olga broke o√ the relationship with Egerton.
The letter she wrote has not survived, but with the perspective of years,
Olga considered her actions ‘‘too brutal, too abrupt.’’ She preserved the
passionate love letters Egerton had sent to her from Emmanuel College,
including his reply to her farewell letter:
I do not believe you do not love me. . . . nights I have prayed to
you, and I have never lost faith since first you played to me and I
secretly loved you. . . . Seven years of hope, and your brutal, awful
answer. . . . The contract [of marriage] I signed years ago—for
[which] I have been continuously in torture since I was 25—was a
purely legal contract. . . . There never was a religious or sacred
significance to the act, it never was . . . a barrier between us in any
ethical sense.
You must remember . . . you have vowed to be mine forever and
ever. You gave me your soul . . . love itself is immortal, you cannot
kill it, even if you will. Your soul is mine, and when this world
ends, you will come back to me.