If this era of diaries and resolutions saw the two-persons idea for a while less distinct, all the other mysteries of my earlier days remained. I still, for instance, put everything I did to the test of reason and instinct, obeying always the latter. I believed more than ever in my private magic and was persuaded that there were special acts, gestures and words which would enable me to perform miracles, if only I could discover them. Dreaming away during Breaking of Bread at the Room, I would be assailed by the desire to turn the wine in the two glass decanters into water; Lord's Day after Lord's Day I sought the magic gesture in vain. I knew there was a word that, if cried aloud, just once, would enable me to soar upward to the sky and fly about angel-like among the stars. I never found it, though a hundred times it was on the tip of my tongue, till I was half wild with hope. Another well-cherished notion was this: that if my mother came to me again, and we could achieve a complete embrace, she would be able to take me away with her to heaven for a space, till a moment when she kissed me again, before the very face of God, and I would swiftly return to earth.
The only magic with which I actually succeeded, or believed I did (which is the same) was Numbers. 1, 10, 17, 437, 777 were magic: 7 and 237 were big magic; 37 was arch-magic, the Holy Number. In every need I called upon them. If Aunt Jael were flogging me, what I had to do was to count a perfectly even 37, timing it to finish at the same moment as her last stroke. I believed positively that it eased my hurt, and I believe so still, for my attention was concentrated not on Aunt Jael's blows but on my magic: so far, if no farther, is faith-healing a fact. Or I would jump out of bed in the morning, and begin to count, always evenly. If when I finished dressing, I was at a magic number (the correct moment was when I shut the bedroom door behind me, though for a second chance I allowed reaching the bottom stair) then the whole day would be lucky. Or out in the street, the amount of house frontage I could cover in thirty-seven strides I believed positively would be the same as the frontage of the big house I should one day possess. So, like the peasant in Count Tolstoi's tale, I strode mightily.
A big house was one of my few material ambitions at this time, with money to spend on grand furniture for it ("Riches," vide Resolution of 19|2|62). Even here my need was chiefly a spiritual one. I thought that in a vast house, utterly alone, I should have a perfect place for practising echoes, one of the means by which I hoped to solve the riddle of my existence. In the midst of a deathly silence I should stand in the great marble hall and shout.
"Mary Lee, what are you? What are you?"
A hundred echoes would swiftly call back through the silence, and I was on the brink of understanding——
A different method of solving the haunting riddle was to whisper my own name quite suddenly in a silent room, when alone with myself. Sometimes the physical effect was so curious that I was certain of success. Fervent praying to the point of ecstasy, more often to the point of exhaustion, was another way. Sometimes I was able, it seemed, to disembody myself; my soul left my body (at which it could look back as though it belonged to some one else) and wandered nowhere, everywhere, becoming in some half-realized fashion a part of everything in space, and an inhabitant of all periods of time. I remembered, in the fleeting fashion of dreams, things I had done before I was born, in some hitherto unremembered life. Then, again, things I had done still earlier, in distant lives and far-away centuries; till, at last, I remembered myself for ever and for ever in the past, and my soul fled back into my body to hide from the new terror: Eternity behind as well as before me, the unpitying everlastingness of the past as of the future.
The latter was still the unappeasable fear which hung like an evil menace over every moment of my life. If I thought it out and lived through the mad blinding moment of terror as my brain battered itself against Infinity, I gained nothing; the terror flung me back. If I was wise, and refused to think of it, I knew myself for an ostrich with my head in the sand. If I dared not face it, it was there beholding me just the same, unconquered, unconquerable.
Was there no escape? The only notion I could conceive, and which I cherished with most desperate hope, was that Love, if ever it could possess my whole soul and being, would slay the King of Terrors once for all. How could Love so come to me? Sometimes I thought it would be God. I knew that my Grandmother had a joy, a serene and fearless delight in the love of the Lord, which I did not share. I prayed fervently for this: that I might know the peace of God, which is perfect understanding; that I might possess this divine love, which I could see in her but did not feel in myself; that it might free me from the Fear which darkened my soul. And sometimes I thought it would be Robbie. In his kind embrace, not in foolish echoes or magical tricks, might I find a perfect happiness which would transform and transfigure me, till I could turn a laughing face upon the Terror. Then would I long for Eternity; an Eternity of Love. And my body and soul would fly back to Christmas Night. Ah tender arms around me, ah dear little boy beside me, ah tears, ah joy, ah Robbie!