"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.