"Mary, what are you, who are you?" I cried to the face in the mirror.
My own voice sounded strange and far away, belonged to some one else, proved that I had no voice, that there was no real me, that I was Another's dream.
"What are you? What are you?"
The exhilaration and the expectancy grew. I was on the brink of solving the mystery of all life: my child's mind would find what the universe was, what I was.... The exaltation was almost more than I could bear. I kissed wildly the reflection of my own mouth in the mirror. Suddenly, imperceptibly, elusively, the great hope vanished. There was a swift reaction in my mind and body, and I half swooned away on to a chair.
In other moods my picturings were completely black. I saw my future as an unbroken series of savage triumphs for Aunt Jael. She discovered new and horrible beatings. I should be left quite alone with her: Grandmother would die. She would flog me from morn till night, always brutally, always unjustly. Or I would think of love as a thing I should never, never know. I pictured myself a lonely old woman, loved by none, loving none. Or, if I thought of hell, I doubted my salvation, and suffered in imagination all its pains. Or, with eternity, the fiction that I was not alive failed me dismally. I pictured myself sitting for ever on a throne near God, bearded and omnipotent. A billion years rolled away, I was still no nearer the end, no nearer escape from my soul, from life, from me. Sometimes I shrieked. My cries rent heaven. God motioned the golden harps to cease and consigned me to the torments of hell. I was borne downwards at incredible speed by two bright angels who, as we got lower and lower, took on the shape of devils. They cast me shrieking into the lake of fire and brimstone. Sometimes in heaven I could keep my agony mute. This was no better. Amid the angels' psalmody there rang in my heart like a beaten bell: For ever, for ever, for ever!—taunting me into a supreme feverish effort to think For ever out. Then came the last moment, the crisis of hypnotized fear, as my finite mind flung itself against the iron door of the Infinite. The struggle lasted but a few seconds, or I should have gone mad. Then the warm back-rush of physical relief as the blood poured back into my brain.
I came to believe there were two persons in myself, two distinct souls in my body. It was my way of accounting for the two strangely different manners of thought I experienced. I thought and felt things in an ordinary, conscious, methodical way—the self-argumentative, cunning, careful little girl that most often I was. At other times, ideas, promptings, wishes, beliefs came to me in quite different fashion—or not so much to me as from within me, from some inner source of my being. They coursed through my blood and stormed my brain; they were blind, warm, intuitive; supernatural, sudden. There is no one word in my vocabulary, still less was there in those seven-year-old days, to define or explain this distinction. It was no matter of Reason with Common-sense on the one hand, and Conscience or Instinct on the other. Conscience—"God knocking at your heart's door," Grandmother called it—is a very incomplete description; at most it could apply only to the good promptings of the other Self. For the reverse reason Instinct will not suffice. It was no question of two modes of thought or feeling, but of two persons inhabiting my body. The Mary Lee every one saw and knew was the two of them taken together. I called them Me and the Other Me. I felt the difference between them in a physical way. With the more usual self, my blood flowed gently, my pulse was normal. The other self marched through my flesh like an army with banners; the hand of this more mysterious me literally knocked at my heart; she came from some deep inmost place and vanished as swiftly as she came. She went; my pulse flagged.
My loneliness too encouraged the sociable idea that there were two people inside me—Two's company, one's none! In bed or blue attic, duologues were better than monologues: but as a rule I could not arrange these, because Other Me blew where she listed; I could never fix her for a talk as I chose. She came with some sudden word or warning, prompting or precept—and was gone. When I was bent on some moment's peccadillo, she—he?—would come, whisper "It is wrong"; for one moment the whispering voice was my voice, the voice of another Me, a new person and soul whose being seemed to flood my veins. She fled, and I was alone again. The way I tried to formulate the experience was this: One is my normal human sinful Self, is Me, Mary; Two is the Spirit of God possessing me, the movement in me of the divine, the indwelling spirit, the Holy Ghost made manifest in my flesh. I saw it all as a special privilege, a new proof that the Lord had set me apart.
Sometimes the two selves battled for mastery. I thought that one thing was the right course to follow, and felt that another was. I knew it was the feeling I ought to obey, though sometimes I was not positive of its divine, Other Me, Apostolic quality. In such cases my plan was to count thirty-seven—aloud as a rule—and if at the end of my count the impulse was still in me, I obeyed it. The test itself was of course of Other origin. "In cases of doubt, count thirty-seven" came to me one day with a warm lilt of authority I did not question. I adopted it as my sacred number for all emergencies. When Aunt Jael was flogging me—I remember well how it helped me in that rope-end beating after I had sucked the sweets—I would shut my eyes and see if I could count thirty-seven between each stroke. Success depended on my rate—and hers; in any case the mere endeavour seemed to lessen the pain.
Note, too, that there were thirty-seven acid drops in the fatal bottle, and that my favourite psalm, number 137, was on page 537 of my old Bible:—Heavenly proofs of the pure metal of my golden number.
(Note: This chapter in my notes fills exactly 37 pages!-M. L.)