I attained this state chiefly by passionate prayer. Sometimes, however, the trance came upon me quite involuntarily. Some notion or idea or word threw me before I knew into a transport of delight. Chalcedony, Jerusalem, rosemary, tribulation: the sound of these words filled me with exquisite and supernatural sensations. I would clasp my breasts, close my eyes, and open my heart passionately to the presence of God.
On a lower plane were my trick-methods of attaining mystical sensation: staring at myself or kissing myself in the mirror, crooning an everlasting "I—I—I" or calling aloud my own name for echoes. Different again—a superstitious offshoot of intuition—were my signs, omens, fetishes, lucky numbers. If I could walk to Meeting in exactly a lucky number of paces, I knew the service would be specially blessed to me; and inevitably it was. The distance I could cover in running across a field and counting say seventy-seven was the exact measure, thus magically conveyed to me, of a property or estate which would one day be mine. If a lucky number came my way of its own initiative, it was an omen of unusual import. Thus when I learnt that the Paris house of my French family was No. 77 Rue St. Eloy, I was certain of high times thereat.
In all Mrs. Cheese's superstitions, ranging from West Country witchcraft to the happiness of horseshoes or lucklessness of ladders, I believed without reserve. I practised Bible-opening, which was about the only superstition of my Grandmother's. The first verse that caught the eye—or, in my rite, the most heavily red-chalked passage, or, failing that, a verse seven or thirty-seven—had a special God-sent message for the moment's need.
Having discovered the (for me) supernatural nature of the world, my mistake was to press my discovery too far. I was in danger of believing that I could do anything, however omnipotent or divine, if I only knew the trick; conjure up any supreme sensation, open the door of all power and mystery and pleasure, if I but found the Open Sesame. I sought for the catchword which would destroy all Existence; am seeking it still.
* * * * * * *
Real things that happened did not approach the reality of my supernatural experience until they had been brooded upon a while in my heart, until my thoughts and passions had imbued them with life. At the actual moment of great occurrences—Uncle Simeon's threats, Aunt Jael's curses, Lord Tawborough's great proposal—I deliberately prevented myself receiving the full emotional effect. Later, alone with myself, I re-lived the scene, and took my fill of rage, bitterness, pride, delight. Thus any event affected me much more after it had happened than at the time. The instant anger with which Aunt Jael's blow filled me was nothing to the brooding rage and revengefulness of the next day. The pang of unavoidable shame with which Conscience smote me when I did a mean or cowardly deed was as nothing to the agony of self-scorn I underwent when some long-past meanness of mine returned to my memory—as new and naked as the meanness of some one else. This whole childhood of mine is more vivid than when I lived it.
If past events were more real than present ones, future ones were the most vivid of all. The past is imagination and memory working together. The future is imagination pure. The past was Aunt Jael, floggings, dreariness, tears; Uncle Simeon, terror, cruelty; a childhood cowering, loveless. The future was joy, in a hundred wonderful shapes—Robbie, somehow, some time; noble ladies, châteaux of France; visions of history, splendour and romance; a fairy land of fame, pleasure and glory—peopled, permeated, queened by Mary Lee. For the last few weeks at home my soul lived at Bear Lawn no longer. Morning, noon and night, sleeping and waking, I dwelt in the imaginary land.
Four days before I left I closed my diary and handed it, a sealing-waxed parcel of exercise-books, to my Grandmother. This was the last entry:—
During the past year or two the Lord has been exceeding good to me. Fortune has been unusual—for any one. When I started this volume of my Diary, I was at the Misses Primps', with no prospects at all of anything high; no hope. And now, I am becoming a lady (almost); and I am going to France, la belle France! Life is mysterious, and God is good.... In my inward life, too, I started this book in the throes of the fiercest fear I have even known. Terror, appallment, awe of the Lord God and His eternal years; all these assailed me so that I thought I should never stand free. Am happier now: slowly yet surely, the fullness of earthly life, the new hopes springing in my heart, the final though hard acceptance of the truth that it is useless for me (finite Mary) to measure the length and breadth and age of God, and most of all that precious memory of His Holy Spirit, that I can ever invoke in all sorrowful times,—all these have brought me to be able to do what my Grandmother does, and to Trust in the Lord.
Life moves mysteriously. It is that walk near Torribridge years ago, when I met the Stranger, that is taking me to France now. And somehow, some time—I don't know how, but I know—France will take me back to Torribridge—to R. Shall I meet him in the foreign land? I do not know. But he is coming. All my love is poured out on the only boy-image that has ever interested me; all my passion I have bestowed on one shape only, on my Image, my R.—tenderness and tears, and meeting lips and bodies; and he takes me in his arms. How I long to see him! that I may know his identity with my Image of him, to know for always and ever that the Robbie I live with and live for is the real eighteen-year-old Robbie who—God make it so!—lives for me.
Now Bear Lawn is behind me, and all is new and wonderful ahead: happiness is coming. Good bye Grandmother dear! This is the end of my girlhood's book; one day I may find joy—and sadness—in reading it.
Mary Lee.
April, 1865.