"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....