So why not another French plum? Only just one,—or two. Before fixing the cover on the jar, it was natural enough just to taste. I knelt down to open the cupboard. I tilted the heavy jar to look down into it and make my choice. In a second I dropped it with a wild frenzied shriek, wrung from the depths of my heart. Staring at me from inside the jar, painted there in great letters of shining fire, lay the Sign:
THOU GOD SEEST ME.
The King of Terrors had got hold of me, and I shrieked and shrieked again. I writhed on the floor like a wild thing, clasping now my side, now my knees and again my forehead in all the pitiful gestures of terror. I cut my hand against the broken fragments of the jar that lay scattered on the floor. I licked at the blood. Now the air seemed filled with those awful letters, in blood-red capitals everywhere. I shut my eyes: against the blackness the letters stood forth more bright and terrible than ever: THOU GOD SEEST ME. He saw, the Almighty saw. God had given me rope and I had hanged myself. It had needed this miracle to bring me to a sense of my sins: this Sign whereby the Lord God wrote with His own finger in letters of fire in the plum-jar; the earthen vessel of my sin. This was but the beginning of terrors. "Tis the End o' the World, I tell 'ee, the End o' the World," rang my brain. I waited the next sign: a stealthy sound—the door, the door!—then again that face, leering, mocking, horrible. It was Aunt Jael—no, it was Benamuckee—it changed again, it was the Devil himself! I fainted away.
In the "mental illness" that followed I came near to losing my life and nearer still to losing my reason. For many days I was unconscious, and then for long weeks I lay in bed under my Grandmother's loving care. In my delirium I must have told her everything. Sometimes I can recall that fevered time; it comes back to me in the swift evanescent way that one remembers a dream long afterwards, and it is one long hideous nightmare. I live again those dark delirious days when I knew myself for a lost soul flying in terror from God, the Devil, the Pope, Aunt Jael, Benamuckee and Eternity, who menaced me in turn with their various and particular terrors, in all the formless frightfulness of dreams. The pursuit was everlasting. An evil black shadow prowled close at my heels with pitiless, unbroken stride. The face, which kept forcing me against my will to turn round to look at it as I ran, changed from time to time. First I thought my pursuer was Aunt Jael, brandishing a huge stick studded with thorns and spikes of inhuman size. As I looked, hate of the coarse old face rose within me: then the face changed, I thought, into God's; stern, just and terrible, seeking me out to stifle the wicked hate in my heart. Now again it was the Pope, horned and horrible, seeking to avenge my sacrilege in his temple, and now Benamuckee, hastening to devour me for having repented of my idolatry and deserted his shrine. I ran, it seemed, for ever. I had no strength left, and fear alone worked my weary limbs. Now the face was formless: a black shapeless mass without limbs or features was pursuing me. He was the grimmest of them all, and followed for ever and ever. I knew the formless face; it was the last worst terror, Eternity Himself! Sometimes, as my Grandmother told me long afterwards, I shrieked in my delirium till my voice failed me and I could shriek no more.
Perhaps it was at such moments that the dream changed. I thought that I was God, with all the labour and responsibility of creation upon my soul. Every clod of earth that went to make the world I had to go and fetch from some far-away corner in utmost Space; I staggered with them, in it seemed a million journeys, to the central place where with infinite labour I had to piece them all together one by one. When I came to making the first man, my conscience—God's conscience—smote me: "Think and ponder well: if you fashion but one man, it is you who must bear the guilt for all the awful sorrows and wretchedness of the millions of men who will come after, it is you who will be responsible for all the agony of eternal life you are conferring upon a new race." I shut my ears to the voice (Who is God's conscience?—the Devil?), hardened my heart, and created mankind. Then as I beheld his fall, and all the unhurrying centuries of woe and pain and cruelty and sorrow that followed, and knew that every one of those creatures I had called forth was damned into everlastingness without hope of happiness or death; suddenly on me too, on me the Lord God, there fell the terror of the Everlasting. All the fear I knew so well as Mary Lee was now a hundred times intensified when I was God. I too, the Almighty, was a victim on the wheel of Space and Time; and as my brain pictured the awful horrible loneliness that would face me for ever watching the birth and death of all the stars and half-a-million worlds, and knowing there was no escape, I made a wild despairing attempt to fling myself headlong over the edge of Space and commit soul-murder if I could. I flung myself over what seemed to be the margin of the universe; I was falling, falling—then arms restored me;—and Grandmother saved me just in time, and put poor delirious brain-sick little God back into bed.
I was in bed for many weeks; it was three or four months before I went back to school. The permanent effect of my illness was an increased nervousness I have never shaken off. To this day, whenever a door opens suddenly without warning, my heart stands still, and try as I may not to see it, the vision of a cruel mocking face comes back. The most immediate effect was that I became a "better" child. My Grandmother's daily gentleness and sacrifice during those long long days, made me resolve to be more like her; and I prayed God fervently to make me so. I saw too, for all Aunt Jael's provocations and harsh treatment, that I had been wrong and wicked. I numbered my sins one by one and repented of each and all. A miracle had been wrought to save me: the finger of the Almighty had sketched in letters of flame the reminder that HE SAW ME. He had intervened miraculously and directly, to secure my spiritual state. I determined to be worthy of this signal proof of God's special favour. By a sacrifice not easy to exaggerate I managed to see that Aunt Jael might have been God's "instrument" throughout: perhaps the idea was more possible since now, during my recovery, she treated me far better than at any time before: kept a sharp hold on her tongue, indulged in no recriminations or abuse, and bought me a bottle of barley-sugar. I saw nothing more of that curious mocking smile that had helped to haunt me into delirium. Once or twice I thought she had a guilty look, especially once when Grandmother made some reference to the plum-jar. Was it possible? Never. For if so, how? No; it was the Lord's doing.
Mrs. Cheese had left. I gathered from Grandmother that there had been a stormy scene, Mrs. Cheese accusing Aunt Jael of directly and deliberately causing my illness, and Aunt Jael ordering Mrs. Cheese out of the house then and there. She refused to go till she had helped my Grandmother to see me through the worst days.
In the stead of Mrs. Cheese arose a dim unapostolic succession of fickle and fleeting bondswomen. Most of them were Saints. All of them quarrelled with Aunt Jael. Their average sojourn with us was perhaps ten months, which in those stable and old-fashioned days would equal (say) two weeks in this era of quick-change kitchen-maids and kaleidoscopic cooks.
There was Prudence, rightly so-called, for although she skimmed each morning the milk the dairyman had left overnight, she cautiously concealed her jugful of cream in the remotest corner of the least-used scullery cupboard. Aunt Jael, however, was on the watch. She thought the milk woefully thin, and Prudence's explanations still thinner. Then one morning she found the prudent one busy at early dawn, spoon in hand, her little jug half-full; caught in the very act.
There were Charlotte, Annie, Miriam, Ethel, May, Jane, Sarah, Bessie, Ann, Mary, the Elizas (two), Kate, Keturah, Deborah, Selina, and Sukie: I am not sure of their strict order of precedence. Nor do I remember their life with us half so well as the manner of their leaving it. The climax came variously. Charlotte told me what I now know to have been dirty stories. Annie told Aunt Jael herself a very dirty story indeed—precisely what she thought of her (Aunt Jael); Miriam spat in her (Aunt Jael's) porridge, Kate when attacked with a shovel hit back with a floury rolling-pin, Bessie stole a shilling, Ann (Anglican) giggled during prayers, Jane—or may be this was Sarah—brought unsaved "followers" into the house, Selina did no work; one of the Elizas swore and the other was a Baptist. May and Keturah were fetched away by indignant parents. Deborah disappeared. One only died a natural death—Mary, my namesake, who left us to get married.