CHAPTER XXXVII: WAY OF A SHIP IN THE MIDST OF THE SEA
Villebecq Mademoiselle, who would play melodrama, was achieving much less in her chosen way of business than still slumbering Bear Lawn Mary, who had played at life. And now, in these last days (as they were to prove) of the Villebecq existence as I had known it, she was to shew herself quite unequal to a rôle of garish prominence she was suddenly called upon to play. She quitted the stage, unaccompanied by plaudits or pity, and died of an empty heart.
The circumstances were these.
The first day or so after I left my bedroom I spent in writing up my Diary: making the notes on which the last three chapters are based.
The Countess' arrangements as to de Fouquier's successor were completed; the gentleman in question, a Monsieur de Beaurepaire, was ready to take up his duties in three days' time. De Fouquier knew nothing.
The day before the morning fixed upon for his dismissal I was sitting alone in the library, writing in my Diary. The door opened, I drew the blotting-paper protectively over the page. It was Monsieur de Fouquier, and he knew: knew everything. There was a look in his eyes—a look I have only seen once besides, many years later, on the face of a Russian nobleman, the night before he shot himself in the bedroom of a St. Petersburgh hotel—of wolfish desperation; desperate and wolfish as only the eyes of a selfish luxurious well-fed man can become. His voice, however, was still suave, unpleasantly suave.
"Ah, good day, Mademoiselle. I have come to say Good-bye. I am glad to have had the pleasure of knowing you so well."
"I am sorry," I replied (I think sincerely), "though, despite the long time I have been here, I could hardly agree with you that we have known each other well. We have so little to do with each other."
"Directly, perhaps," he said meaningly. "De vive voix, it is true, you have given me but sparingly of your thoughts and views. I have been able to learn to appreciate them, nevertheless, thanks to an occasional perusal of that charming book before you now. Oh, I read your language if I do not speak it. Vot vud Jesus do? Vot vud Jesus do?"—in mocking horrible English.
Shame flooded me, and hate. This monster, who for months had been peering into the secret places of my soul!
"Vat vud Jesus do?" he was repeating, with a sneer again and again.
"Stop!" I cried. "I will not listen to blasphemy."
"You will listen awhile to me," and he stood against the door, barring possible egress. "You have had a large share in the filthy campaign of lies and intrigues which has at last succeeded in turning me out of this house. I shall at least make sure that you are bundled out yourself. Before I go, this very day, I am going to supply this amiable and grateful family with a brief account of yourself and who you really are,—your dirty little shopkeeper relations in England, your common sailor of a grandfather, your vulgar canting old grandmother, your boozing aunt. Then a few words about your dear father, and your frankness with Madame la Comtesse on the subject of his recent visit: how odd that he did not live with your mother, how odd the little hints Monsieur Greeber was so good as to give me as to whether he was your dear father at all, how odd the charm of bastardy—"
"Monsieur," I broke in, "if ever I have a husband, he shall exact full payment for this. Go on insulting me, however. It will achieve nothing, it leaves me cold."
"A husband, ah yes—dear 'R'! How tender your many references to him. Strange though it should seem, this world is small, and suppose so seemingly irrelevant an event as my forced departure from this house in France should have some effect on dear 'R' in England? There is my dear friend Monsieur Greeber. Don't alarm yourself, there's a brave girl—"
"Get out!" I cried.
"When I have done. There are still other results of your handiwork to consider. The family's name, for instance? It will benefit, you think, from my departure? Monsieur le Comte—his honourable doings. Mademoiselle Elise—her passion for her sister—so pure, so natural, so sisterly—"
"Ten seconds, and if you're not gone, I shall shriek for help." I rose, pale with anger.
He came forward, seized me, glued his mouth to mine.
It was no stage-play now. In a strange flooding moment Mary the lover of Robbie reconquered the fortress of my soul. Thirty years later I can summon the odd physical-spiritual sensation as the selves did battle within me. Mine eyes beheld love, and this nightmare moment was its negation.
I only record the moment, shutting the spirit's memory as I write; think of it I will not, cannot. I struggled, for a second or two, without avail, wild with a nameless sickening fear; prayed in shame and desperation "Lord, deliver me: Robbie, forgive!" Then with a desperate movement I freed my face from the foul impact, and gave as heartrending a shriek as was ever achieved by virgin in distress.
He made swiftly to free himself, but now I held him tight, clipped him to me with such a new savagery and strength that although he knee'd and wriggled brutally he could not struggle free. Footsteps were approaching—I knew whose—and I managed, during one more second of supreme endeavour and complex anticipatory delight, to hold on.
Lord Tawborough entered, took him by the scruff of the neck, wrenched him away from me, and flung him out of the room.
I liked Lord Tawborough.
"Les hommes!" commented Elise. "So that's the end of friend Fouquier."
It was. That same day he disappeared from the Château for ever.
It seemed as though the house had been cleansed of a foul atmosphere. The Countess, though already worrying about troubles and dangers ahead, seemed for the first time mistress in her own house.
"Let him do his worst," said Elise, "it isn't very much."
Only Suzanne was nowhere about, seen by none of us. At dinner that night she was not present. Her bedroom door was locked, and she would reply to no one, admit no one. Next day we burst open the door, found the room empty.
Suzanne had fled.
* * * * * * *
It was the end.
It was the end of the Château Villebecq I had known, the end of the easeful days of bright comfort shot through with gay melodrama, the end of the Interlude. For two other women, mother and sister, it was the end for ever of this world's happiness; for the other herself too, as I learned long afterwards.
Madame de Florian crumpled up under the blow. All she had lived for—the honour of her name, the worldly success of her daughters—was lost. All her employment—the day-to-day strivings towards these two ends—was gone. In one night she seemed to shrivel up; to become at a stroke five times more wizened, more futile, more plaintive than before. Life, perhaps, had never had much to give her; now it held nothing. Her days were divided between regrets and self-reproachings, complaints, servant-scoldings and tears.
To me alone she confided her woe. I was the one kind soul she had ever known; Heaven had meant me to be her daughter! I gave her nothing from my soul—except pity, poor pity, and even this soon lost its first spontaneity; became conscious, conscientious—yet always I could see she was getting what I did not give: a sense of boundless sympathy and affection. In every mood and every mope she came to me for comfort, and—though I knew full well in my actress-heart that I was giving her nothing at all, no real love, no healing sympathy, only the shams and simulacra of these, served up with pity, luxurious self-comforting pity—always I saw that my shadow was her substance. She returned me a boundless gratitude; pathetic, delicious to my palate, cruelly undeserved.
"Ah Mademoiselle, there are not many like you! My life is over. I am a poor old woman alone. Only you understand. Stay with me, dear Mademoiselle."
And I did.
Elise took to her room, asked no comfort, refused what I proffered, railed at me for being the real cause of her losing her dear one, spent long days alone in her bedroom weeping, and would not be comforted. After a few weeks, when no news came of Suzanne, she took really ill. When sufficiently recovered to travel, she went for a long stay in the South of France, Gabrielle accompanying her. At leaving she refused to see me, even to say Good-bye.
The new steward did not live in the house, now a deserted place, damp and cold in the long winter that followed, inhabited by memories, haunted by fugitive joys. Through the long days and nights, echoes of happiness would ring aloud through the emptiness, and sometimes I heard Suzanne's laugh on the staircase or the quick feet of friendly approaches in the corridor. Now that joy had taken flight, the great house became, like Bear Lawn of old, an atmosphere I understood and responded to. It is thus that I have chiefly remembered it ever since, it is thus that I remember it now.
I had no plans except—vaguely "soon"—to go back to Devonshire for good. When I mooted this to the Countess, her pleadings were so pitiful, so flattering, that I registered then and there the vow that I would stay as long as she wanted me. It was the one return I could give for the kindness I had received, the one way I could display loyalty to the good past of yesterday: quite a good way also, maybe, of laying up for myself treasure in Heaven.
So for many long and lonely months I stayed. Except the Countess I saw no one. I was as lonely as in the far-away days of my childhood, and soon it was to my childhood that I returned. Imperceptibly, just as a year or two back the Bear Lawn life had vanished, the present glory of Villebecq taking its place, so now it was Villebecq (though my body remained there) that vanished, and Bear Lawn again that took its place. In bed at night, if my soul was thinking of Mary, the old dining-room or the cold blue attic formed the physical setting in which, as a person detached, I always saw her. In the darkness my bed would always revert to the Bear Lawn position, with the wall facing me as I lay on my right side, although in reality in the Villebecq room it was behind me. Even awake and in the day-time, the articles of furniture in my boudoir often changed as I watched them to the furniture of the old dining-room, the sense came over me that Villebecq was but a dream I had dreamt one night at Tawborough, a dream from which I was at this moment waking up, a dream that already I could not properly remember.... But—Bear Lawn too was a dream—I had only dreamt that I was Mary. Who was I? Was I any one? Oh, terror, was I God Himself? With a cry I fell on to my knees.... The fear passed, it was the Villebecq boudoir, I was rising awkwardly to my feet. (Had anybody seen?)
Even in normal and placid moods, the first two years of my life in France soon appeared as a faded memory, the remembrance of something I had been told rather than something I had lived myself. The whole mosaic of new glittering impressions, storm and stage-play, ease and luxury and chatter and intrigue, seemed something insubstantial and unlived: something very distant, too, for—by a puzzling experience not usual in the young—I could only see clearly the days that lay farther away. The Villebecq life had been a thin shadow of life, the Villebecq drama a puppet drama, the Villebecq Me a pale and partial Me. There was a slow battle spread over weeks in which Bear-Lawn Mary fought her way back to chief place within me. I remember the odd physical moment—sitting on my bed at three o'clock one morning, still undressed—in which she won the victory and in which Mary the gossiper, Mary the worldling, Mary the Fouquier-fighter faded like a wraith into the tomb of my sub-conscious self.
The older habits of mind returned. Now that there was no one to talk to, I talked, as of old, to myself. There was no present to occupy me, so I returned to my pasts and my futures. There were differences, of course, and developments: I was older, a little farther away from madness (which is sanity), a little nearer the world, a little farther from the Lord. My past was seen in worldlier, if not truer, perspective; my ambitions were more concrete. The old habits were fainter, and the old fears. Hope had gained appreciably on Despair. At ten I had dwelt morbidly on my few happinesses, knowing that they would be paid for: God gets even. Now, at twenty, happier days had tilted the balance; I dwelt cheerfully on the manifold unhappinesses of my life, feeling sure they would all be recompensed me: Christ gets even.
Not but what Gloom made a good fight for his old supremacy. After all, Eternity was on his side.
And the Rapture never returned. I would pray sometimes for hours, beg for one instant's flowing through my heart of Taw-water and the Holy Ghost. HE did not come.
There was a reason. I knew the reason, though for a long time I dared not formulate it, even in prayer, even alone with myself, or more utterly alone—with God.
Coming from the innermost place of my being, gaining at last my conscious brain and soul, and soon possessing them utterly, was the knowledge that my only way to ultimate happiness lay not through religion, but through ROBBIE.
For many days and nights the agonized struggle fought itself out within me: God's love revealing Itself directly, God Immanent, versus God's Love revealing itself in human shape, God-in-Robbie: memories of Jordan Morning, my honeymoon with God, versus hopes of earthly ecstacy, my honeymoon with him.
I have never wished, even if I were able, to fit in this story of my life with wise men's theories of human conduct and development. But the psychologist or the modern novelist would I think label this struggle in my soul as the turning-battle between Environment and Heredity, in which the massed beliefs of my holy upbringing contended against the call of my woman's blood and the needs of my woman's heart.
At last—when I had given God His last chance, telling Him in an agony of passionate prayer that if He would send me but once again the perfect miracle-moment of Jordan it would quench for ever within me all need of human love—and when no answer came—I knew that the battle was over. Robbie had won.
Had won in my heart. But what were the chances that I should taste the fruits of his victory, that the love I had declared for would, in this actual physical world, one day be mine?
I faced the whole question, "dispassionately."
What were the facts? Years ago, a sentimental and unhappy child had, in a moment of crude (though not contemptible) romantic fervour, grown morbidly fond of another child, and he of her. They had vowed together to seek to perpetuate their experience when away from each other by mutual self-suggestion, especially on that particular night of every year when the childish emotion had culminated. It was all very pretty, quite pathetic too in its way, but what else?
What else? Everything. These were the cowardly picturings of Common-Sense: Heart put them swiftly to flight. The only realities are the realities of the spirit, and Robbie in the visions I now had, not only every Christmas, but every day—near every hour—was a warm divine reality in my soul. He was with me, kissing my face. Where the human body of the living twenty-one-year-old Robbie might be I did not know—though I constructed for myself a hundred different stories as to his whereabouts and doings—but that his spirit was with me whenever mine was with him I knew in the authentic uttermost way, beyond all knowledge and reason, in which I had once known God. Sometimes the whole night through his Presence enveloped me, his face was mirrored in my soul. Yet always the ultimate Rapture evaded me; I would reach the mystical moment when the lips of the vision-Robbie upon mine were changing into the dear desired lips of the real-life Robbie, when vision-reality and this-world-reality were merging magically into one—then always, on the threshold of realization, the Vision faded, and I was left empty and desolate and cold.
The mere physical longing, though less intense than the spiritual, was newer and more baffling: for I understood my body much less well than my soul. Oh for him to put his arms around me, crush me tenderly to him, while I should clasp him to my breast and pour out my heart upon him! I would kiss the miserable pillow (and say it was his throat) and clasp it and cover it with tears. When bearing-point was passed, I would burst into half-hysterical prayer: Send him now, oh Lord Jesus, or banish the tormenting vision from my eyes!—the while I would savagely stop the eyes and ears of my spirit, until God's answer came, and for a space the hunger passed away.
Doubt trod hard upon Desire. Fool-Mary as always! You loved the little boy then, and he you. It was a child's moment, gracious for the child's sorrow that it eased, but over at once and for ever. Love comes not back again. All the rest, all these fantastic years of mystical repeatal are but the wraiths of your own disordered imagination. The Presence is a phantom presence of your own creating.
"It is no phantom," I replied. "If anything in God's universe is real, that is real."
"Real to him? For if not, the presence is not real at all."
"It is real to him."
"Are you so sure? You are quite, quite certain: that at the same moment in which you possess his Presence, he is possessing yours?"
"Yes, I know it. God tells me so."
"But where is real Robbie? Why does he not come to you?"
"He is coming soon."
And with valiant words I chased Doubt away, knowing him for the destroyer of everything that he encompasses, who can make things that are true untrue, just as Faith, his enemy, can make of things that are not things that are. Faith makes facts, not facts faith. If you believe that Robbie is with you, he is with you. If you doubt his presence, you destroy it.
If the Sun and Moon should doubt
They'd immediately go out.
Balked of his actual physical presence in one way I would seek it in another. Memory would essay where Visualization had at the ultimate instant always failed, and would guide me moment by moment through the whole of the old Torribridge time, from the first glimpse, and Uncle Simeon's introduction, through egg-day and fight-day to the supreme midnight hour; at last I found I could reconstruct our happiness together so vividly that it was actually happening again. Eternity had turned backwards, the past had become the living present, I was sore from the cruel flogging, I was twelve-year-old Mary again, and Robbie's arms were around me. Then Memory in his turn failed me; in a swift physical way I felt inside me the years scuttling back into their place: it was the old eternal present, and the ideal unconsummated, and the loneliness.
Then doubt and fear and need would all together assail me, pressing in unison the chief question. When he is real to you, are you as real to him? The answer was always Yes, and the answer was always No. In either case I fell to sorrowing for him: if he wanted me, because of his need; if he did not know he wanted me, because of his need also. And I would forget myself altogether, and think only of his need of love. How could I give him most, give myself to him most? How could I discover and lay at his feet the wild unimagined sacrifices for which my heart was aching? I knew I could give him everything, live for him only, destroy my own happiness for him, give him my heart, my life, my hope of everlasting death. Ah, for his sake I would take God's nameless gift of immortality, if He would but set Robbie free, grant him the eternal sleep. I would do the far greater thing than die for him; for him I would live for ever.
Ah, no, no, no!—Robbie asleep for ever, and me for ever alive. Ah, no, oh loving Heavenly Father, that alone I could not bear.
In two months I filled three large new volumes of Diary: all with Robbie.
Much of it was in the form of a series of letters between us. The first letter was addressed from me to him: a tremulous self-conscious composition, asking him to excuse my taking the liberty of writing, feeling certain that he would doubtless remember who I was, recalling that we had been rather good friends, n'est-ce-pas?, in that short period when we had been together as children, etc., etc. I tortured myself for a whole fortnight awaiting, in fear and delicious hope, his reply. This I composed—as I wanted to compose it: friendly, enthusiastically reminiscent, but not (being his first letter) so affectionate as to damage my scheme of a long crescendo of ever more affectionate letters to come. Then my reply, and his reply, till soon the floodgates were opened.
"Oh, Robbie (at last I wrote), Tell me you are the same Robbie; that now, as a man, you are not some strange man I should not know, but that you have the same loving heart, only more passionate and tender than before; the same loving arms, only manlier and even more ready to embrace me; the same loving boy's face, only transfigured, developed, ennobled by the long lonely years of the love you have given me. Tell me that in body as well as spirit you are coming soon, to love me for ever as I do you."
He replied:
"Post haste I write, because I must speak back to you. I got your letter this morning, and ever since then have been full of it, and full of joy. Never in all the letters you have written me have I felt so much of you in it, never have I felt you so near, so completely in sympathy and understanding, so exquisitely, so utterly in love. (I cannot restrain myself from uttering this.) As I read and re-read your letter, I feel, at this very moment as I write, that we are alone, alone and together; I can hear you crying out and I send back the echo; but it is no echo now, for we are so near: only distances echo, my Mary dear. Tonight I am fuller than I have ever been before, full because of your inspiration, of your influence; but not this alone, because I am my own influence, and it is this which sways me now. The outer world is a great silence, a mere waste of towns and cities, empty and desolate as a city of the dead, a place of graves. All the people around me are shadows, are only for themselves, but we are for each other, and all all else is dead.
"The Christmas promise has come true for ever. Now it is a great joy to live, and not to live has no terrors. Everything is at the highest point of its change; all is changed by this thing we know, this secret we have discovered, and I am glad. We alone are its guardian, but it needs no guardian, because Mary and Robbie before discovered it, and have guarded it ever since.
"I shall come very soon now. But do not fret: this long absence in form has meant a more palpable presence in spirit. For the soul needs space: it flies, like a kite, and you hold the line; the line is of interminable distance, the kite of immeasurable power. It flies happy, among the life-giving, high breezes; and it makes you happy, a child at the other end, a child with a kite—the child whom I loved that night long ago and who loved me, the dear Mary whom I will love and who will love me for ever. She is the child who has not changed—it is the same face, though a woman's now, and it is with me by day and by night...."
"Robin," I answered, "your letter is the goodliest yet: it has given me a day and a waking night of celestial happiness—for I had it yesterday only, and like you I reply 'post-haste.' You bring me to the house of happiness, and your banner over me is Love: but when will your left hand be under my head and your right hand embrace me? My letters bring you happiness too: but when will you read them with the eyes of the flesh as well as the eyes of the spirit? You say you will come to me 'very soon:' but you will come before the ink on these pages has faded? (If it can ever fade, for it is the blood of my aching heart.)
"Now dear, I kiss your brow, your dear eyes, your mouth; I place my lips upon your dear glorious little heart. All the love that was in the beginning of the world, that is in the universe now, that will people Paradise through all the everlasting years, is in me now; I assemble and concentrate it into this moment, into the kiss that I am giving you at this moment as I write. From face to feet, my heart's beloved, Good-night!"
At last, after two or three months of these imaginary letters, I wrote the real one which was the necessary condition of their ever becoming real: I wrote to Aunt Martha. I always wrote to her on her birthday: it was near birthday-time, so no other pretext was needed. I made my letter rather longer than usual, introducing the one thing that mattered with appropriately naïve and casual abruptness. "By-the-way," I asked, as careful after-thought, "do you ever hear anything now of Robert Grove. He was a nice boy, and I have often wondered what became of him?" And I made a Special Temporary Resolution to shut the door of my spirit as far as possible (weak proviso) till Aunt Martha should have given me some news.
It was only a day or two after writing this letter that a letter I received—from Lord Tawborough, now back in England—ushered in a new phase of spiritual trouble. Robbie had vanquished Almighty God: was he to be vanquished now by a mere peer of England? Very vividly the Stranger re-entered my imagination. He had thought it discreet and kinder to leave the Château almost immediately after the Fouquier crisis and Suzanne's flight, and in the turmoil of those days and of Elise's bitterness and then in the long loneliness and the following period of return to religion and to Robbie, he had been very little in my thoughts. This letter brought him gladly, warmly back. My heart brightened as I mused upon the well-loved features, the manifold gentleness, the secret sympathy, the goodness he had shown me, the delight I knew he found when near me. And this was no kindly benefactor's letter, no tenderest of distant cousin's letter, no 7th of the Title's letter. It was but a Best Friend's letter. For a moment my heart recoiled from immediate irrepressible "Is it a Lover's letter?" Some one said "No": it was the Mary who wrote the mad missives to Robbie and the mad missives from Robbie to herself. Some one else said "Yes": it was the this-world Mary whom every one (save Mary) knew.
At that instant of time, I think, more surely and more strangely than at any other time in my life, I knew and in spiritual-physical fashion felt and understood that there was no such thing as "I": that there were many living and disparate beings inside me. As I mused pleasurably and lovingly on Tawborough (Quick! What was his Christian name?—I had never heard it, I must learn it, or invent it, find swiftly some endearing name to give him in my thoughts), not only Robbie, but the Mary who loved him beyond all heaven and earth, was some one far away, some one I had been, should be yet again, but was not now; some one else whom the present-moment "I" could contemplate from the outside, but from the inside not at all.
Thus there was no sense of conflict or contradiction. Simple souls say: You cannot love two people at once. Shrewder souls add: Not in the same way. Both miss the point, ignore the real mystery: that you is two folks and not one, a divine self and a human self: with two loves accordingly, a human love and a divine love. At the selfsame moment of time the two selves cannot both be in possession, and the two loves cannot be felt together. There is no clash and no conflict.
I reasoned out my hope. That the real Robbie, when I met him, would conquer utterly the human me, win all my liking, answer all my needs. Real Robbie and Dream Robbie would become one: real Mary and dream Mary would become one. Love would be everywhere, the two selves would mingle and make at last one Mary, the world would be revealed—God was in me, around me—I am the Universe—. There are no words....
But if chance—I dared not say Death—decreed that in this world I should never see Robbie? Then the human liking and earthly possibility could never merge into the divine romance. The quest my soul was created for would be over: Eternity would not be Love. Yet, I was a woman—and I loved the word "marry"—and the Stranger was my chief human liking and earthly possibility—and this world's happiness was worth possessing even though emptiness lay beyond.
So if Robbie is not given to you, said Reason, the Stranger will be a glorious second-best. "Glorious Second-Best." dinned Reason in my heart, and a whole crowd took up the echo: snobbery and sanity, and pride and probability, and intellectual sympathy and physical delight.
But first I would search the world for Robbie.
* * * * * * *
Suddenly my heart learned that Robbie, wherever he was, knew that I was musing thus: knew that I was toying with notions of Tawborough, and over his deathbed was meditating eventual treason. Suddenly my heart understood how his own was aching. The magnitude of my vileness sickened me. I could find no sleep, nor heart to sleep. All night I heard him crying out, saw his dear face wistful with doubt. I told him it was not true, that I loved him and him only. He did not hear me; I could not make him hear me; I knew that his heart was still aching.
I got out of bed, wrapped my dressing-gown around me, went through into the boudoir, and wrote in my Diary this following letter. (The inkpot was empty, and even if I had had the courage to take my candle and to go through the long dark corridor and down the stairs in search of ink, I should not have gone. For time was precious. I knew that, magically, each word as I wrote it would bring ease and comfort to Robbie somewhere far away, and my heart could not abide that his own should suffer for one moment longer. So I snatched a pencil, glad for Robbie's sake to mar the neat inky well-beloved uniformity of my eight years' diaries, and scrawled feverishly at the frantic dictation of my passionate heart. Today, as I copy, the pencil is faded, and the page the hardest to decipher in all the record):
To Robert Grove,
Wheresoever You Are, my Dear!—How sorrowful you are tonight, how evil am I since I am the cause! But I write post-haste to send you tidings of comfort, to tell you there is no other in my heart but you, to send you my everlasting love. You came to me Christmas Night, and you came for ever. There has been no other, nor ever can. What can the man do that cometh after the king?
My friend who is causing you such grief, you know who he is—tho' 'tis nine years now since the moment I knew you—tho' you have never seen him nor (in earthly way) even heard his name—I know that you know. He is Lord Tawborough, my cousin and my benefactor, and my very dear friend, tho' much older and cleverer than I. But do understand, dear Robbie, that the respect and affection in which I hold him are only the reflection of his generosity and loving kindness to me. It is he who gave me my education, gave me my good fortune, who has always been far, far too kind to me. And now that, here in this land, I have met with him again, I like him better than ever. How could I not?
There is "like" for him and for you my whole girl's aching LOVE. Even when I am looking at my kind friend's face, suddenly I will stop the working of my mind and will turn to look for you, trying to grope out where in this world at the exact moment you are; and God always helps me to make a picture which I know is near reality. At this moment I can see you—vaguely—dreamily—in a bright city whose name I do not know, but where often I have sojourned in dreams. I cannot actually touch you now: for our meeting-place is not in cities or houses or streets or fields; rather we go to meet each other in the skies and oh! Robbie! my spirit! my soul! what a meeting we have, how happy, how jubilant, how full of the glory which is not of the earth, unutterable, something I cannot speak, or say, or write; something only which tears my heart into a thousand particles of agony, which is the divinest, wildest, fiercest, holiest, sweetest joy of all. The agony of love, Robbie, how it wounds! The moments when, in vision, I cannot invoke your face, how cruelly long they seem! Then betimes your dear face forms among the mists of all my wildness and restlessness and smiles upon me in a peace that is infinite, and passeth all men's understanding. Now, Robbie, know that this is no earthly thing I have, you have, but a thing entirely of the soul, a gift entirely of God. It should leave us tolerant and truthful, ever knowing that no other friends (however dear) can ever endanger it, even conceive of its meaning; and ever waiting for its supreme fulfilment.
Can I have this for any but you? Can any but you have this for me? Why, my Robbie, can you ask?
I stretch out my arms through the unknown to reach you. I would comfort you, cover you with eternal kisses. Stretch your dear arms out too, put them around me, crush me against your breast.
Come to me now, and come to me soon for the time that will be for ever.
Mary of Christmas Night.