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?