16
VALLEY ROAD GIRL
The Valley Road Girl, who gave us the title, and helped us to see how the New Race will become in due time the planetary hive, asked not to appear in this book. A letter this morning asks it again. She is in the stress and heat of a series of ordeals, learning what it means suddenly to be parted from friends and the centre of her work. A wise and sensitive young woman—I rather thrill over her sufferings. We don't commiserate; we congratulate, when one is called to a stretch of particularly stiff and solitary going. We know that one must be passionately worthy to take the big-calibred ordeals. There is pain to all births—pain, the precursor of greater joys. Pain is not the expansion of the flower to the sun; that is joy, that comes afterward. Pain is the necessary rupturing of the bud-sheaths before the final unfolding into the new dimension. Pain is within, inarticulate—merely finds a correspondence in some outer cause.
Part of the Valley Road Girl's letter follows:
... It hurt to let that last Lamentation go to you. I thought of the times when I had put up a braver fight, bolstered only with pride. But pride is low now, and still dwindling in the glass. Even the gods withdraw from the pathetic. They love us more when we challenge with doubt than when we implore. The many are God-fearing. They must have some divine power to shift their responsibility upon. They can ask the Flame to cleanse them, but quail at working out their own salvation. I have done some crying out to God, but I am finished. The one good path I have is Work—self-expression every day.
I made another mistake—in looking back. Regret identifies us with the past and impedes progress. Youth is smileless, inclined to regard to-day's struggles as ultimate evil, but gradually we learn that all things pass. To consider everything as in transition, we place ourselves in the very current of growth.... For rapid journeying, we must travel light. We can only carry along the spirit of things—the essence of our joys and lessons. That's what I have from Chapel days.
I blush for many hours since. Sometimes I have felt as if I were on a vast plain and there was no God nor earth nor the quality of love anywhere, but only I—deathless—in long, hideous travail, all life to be tested against this Me!...