4 December 1933 – 10 December 1933

I was walking through Leicester Square—how far from China—just now when I read “Death of Noted Novelist” on the posters. And I thought of Hugh Walpole. But it is Stella Benson. Then why write anything, immediately? I did not know her; but have a sense of those fine patient eyes: the weak voice; the cough; the sense of oppression. She sat on the terrace with me at Rodmell. And now, so quickly, it is gone, what might have been a friendship. Trusty and patient and very sincere—I think of her; trying to cut through, in one of those difficult evenings, to some deeper layer—certainly we could have reached it, given the chance. I’m glad I stopped her at the door as she got into her little car and asked her to call me Virginia—to write to me. And she said: “There’s nothing I should like better.” But it’s like the quenching of something—her death out there in China; and I sitting here and writing about her and so fugitive and yet so true; and no more to come. How mournful the afternoon seems, with the newspaper carts(?) dashing up Kingsway, “Death of Noted Novelist” on the placard. A very fine steady mind: much suffering; suppressed;—there seems to be some sort of reproach to me in her death, as in K. M.’s. I go on; and they cease. Why? Why not my name on the posters? And I have a feeling of the protest each might make: gone with their work unfinished—each so suddenly. Stella was 41. “I am going to send you my book” and so on. A dreary island she lived on, talking to colonels. A curious feeling, when a writer like S. B. dies, that one’s response is diminished: Here and Now won’t be lit up by her: it’s life lessened. My effusion—what I send out—less porous and radiant—as if the thinking stuff were a web that were fertilised only by other people’s (her that is) thinking it too: now lacks life.