Part 11 (1/2)
January 10th.--I must be still. I have learned this lesson before--that speech even to myself does harm. If I admit no conversation nor debate with myself, I certainly will not admit the chatter of outsiders. Mr.
Maxwell called again to-day. ”Not a syllable on that subject,” said I when he began in the usual strain. He then suggested that as this house was too large for me, and must have what he called ”melancholy a.s.sociations,” I should move. He had suggested this before, when my husband died. How can I leave the home to which I was brought as a bride? how can I endure the thought that strangers are in our room, or in that other room where Sophy lay? Mr. Maxwell would think it sacrilege to turn his church into an inn, and it is a worse sacrilege to me to permit the profanation of the sanctuary which has been consecrated by Love and Death. I do not know what might happen to me if I were to leave. I have been what I am through shadowy nothings which other people despise. To me they are realities and a law. I shall stay where I am. ”A villa,” forsooth, on the outskirts of the town! My existence would be fractured: it will at least preserve its continuity here.
Across the square I can see the house in which I was born, and I can watch the shadow of the church in the afternoon slowly crossing the churchyard. The townsfolk stand in the street and go up and down it just as they did forty years ago--not the same persons, but in a sense the same people. My brother will call me extravagant if I remain here.
He buys a horse and does not consider it extravagant, and my money is not wasted if I spend it in the only way in which it is of any value to me.
January 12th.--I had thought I could be dumb, but I cannot. My sorrow comes in rushes. I lift up my head above the waves for an instant, and immediately I am overwhelmed--”all Thy waves and Thy billows have gone over me.” My nights are a terror to me, and I fear for my reason. That last grip of Sophy's hand is distinctly on mine now, palpable as the pressure of a fleshly hand could be. It is strange that without any external circ.u.mstances to account for it, she and I often thought the same things at the same moment. She seemed to know instinctively what was pa.s.sing in my mind, so that I was afraid to harbour any unworthy thought, feeling sure that she would detect it. Blood of my blood was she. She said ”goodbye” to me with perfect clearness, and in a quarter of an hour she had gone. In that quarter of an hour there could not be the extinction of so much. Such a creature as Sophy could not instantaneously NOT BE. I cannot believe it, but still the volume of my life here is closed, the story is at an end; what remains will be nothing but a few notes on what has gone before.
January 21st.--I went to church to-day for the first time since the funeral. Mr. Maxwell preached a dull, doctrinal sermon. Whilst my husband and Sophy lived, I was a regular attendant at church, and never thought of disputing anything I heard. It did not make much impression on me, but I accepted it, and if I had been asked whether I believed it, I should have said, ”Certainly.” But now a new standard of belief has been set up in me, and the word ”belief” has a different meaning.
February 3rd.--Whenever I saw anything beautiful I always asked Tom or Sophy to look. Now I ask n.o.body. Early this morning, after the storm in the night, the sky cleared, and I went out about dawn through the garden up to the top of the orchard and watched the disappearance of the night in the west. The loveliness of that silent conquest was unsurpa.s.sable. Eighteen months ago I should have run indoors and have dragged Tom and Sophy back with me. I saw it alone now, and although the promise in the slow transformation of darkness to azure moved me to tears, I felt it was no promise for me.
March 1st.--Nothing that is PRESCRIBED does me any good. I cannot leave off going to church, but the support I want I must find out for myself.
Perhaps if I had been born two hundred years ago, I might have been caught by some strong enthusiastic organisation and have been a private in a great army. A miserable time is this when each man has to grope his way una.s.sisted, and all the incalculable toil of founders of churches goes for little or nothing. . . . I do not pray for any more pleasure: I ask only for strength to endure, till I can lie down and rest. I have had more rapture in a day than my neighbours and relations have had in all their lives. Tom once said to me that he would sooner have had twenty-four hours with me as his wife than youth and manhood with any other woman he ever knew. He said that, not when we were first married, but a score of years afterwards. I remember the place and the hour. It was in the garden one morning in July, just before breakfast.
It was a burning day, and ma.s.sive white clouds were forming themselves on the horizon. The storm on that day was the heaviest I recollect, and the lightning struck one of our chimneys and dashed it through the roof.
His pa.s.sion was informed with intellect, and his intellect glowed with pa.s.sion. There was nothing in him merely animal or merely rational. . .
. To endure, to endure! Can there be any endurance without a motive?
I have no motive.
March 10th.--My sister and my brother-in-law came to-day and I wished them away. Now that my husband is dead I discover that the frequent visitors to our house came to see him and not me. There must be something in me which prevents people, especially women, from being really intimate with me. To be able to make friends is a talent which I do not possess, and if those who call on me are prompted by kindness only, I would rather be without them. The only attraction towards me which I value is that which is irresistible. Perhaps I am wrong, and ought to accept with thankfulness whatever is left to me if it has any savour of goodness in it. I have no right to compare and to reject. . .
I provide myself with little maxims, and a breath comes and sweeps them away. What is permanent behind these little flickerings is black night: that is the real background of my life.
April 24th.--I have been to London, and on Easter Sunday I went to High Ma.s.s at a Roman Catholic Church. I was obliged to leave, for I was overpowered and hysterical. Were I to go often my reason might be drowned, and I might become a devotee. And yet I do not think I should.
If I could prostrate myself at a shrine I should want an answer. When I came out into the open air I saw again the PLAINNESS of the world: the skies, the sea, the fields are not in accord with incense or gorgeous ceremonies. Incense and ceremonies are beyond the facts, and to the facts we must cleave, no matter how poor and thin they may be.
May 5th.--If I am ill, I shall depend entirely on paid service. G.o.d grant I may die suddenly and not linger in imbecility. So much of me is dead that what is left is not worth preserving. Nearly everything I have done all my life has been done for love. I shall now have to act for duty's sake. It is an entire reconstruction of myself, the insertion of a new motive. I do not much believe in duty, nor, if I read my New Testament aright, did the Apostle Paul. For Jesus he would do anything. That sacred face would have drawn me whither the Law would never have driven me.
May 7th.--It is painful to me to be so completely set aside. When Tom was alive I was in the midst of the current of affairs. Few men, except Maxwell, come to the house now. My property is in the hands of trustees. Tom continually consulted me in business matters. I have nothing to look after except my house, and I sit at my window and see the stream of life pa.s.s without touching me. I cannot take up work merely for the sake of taking it up. n.o.body would value it, nor would it content me. How I used to pity my husband's uncle, Captain Charteris! He had been a sailor; he had fought the French; he had been in imminent danger of s.h.i.+pwreck, and from his youth upwards perpetual demands had been made upon his resources and courage. At fifty he retired, a strong, active man; and having a religious turn, he helped the curate with school-treats and visiting. He pined away and died in five years. The bank goes on. I have my dividends, but not a word reaches me about it.
October 10th.--Five months, I see, have pa.s.sed since I made an entry in my diary. What a day this is! The turf is once more soft, the trees and hedges are washed, the leaves are turning yellow and are ready to fall. I have been sitting in the garden alone, reading the forty-ninth chapter of Genesis. I must copy the closing verses. It does me good to write them.
”And Jacob charged them, and said unto them, I am to be gathered unto my people: bury me with my fathers in the cave that is in the field of Ephron the Hitt.i.te, in the cave that is in the field of Machpelah, which is before Mamre, in the land of Canaan, which Abraham bought with the field of Ephron the Hitt.i.te for a possession of a burying-place. There they buried Abraham and Sarah his wife; there they buried Isaac and Rebekah his wife; and there I buried Leah. The purchase of the field and of the cave that is therein was from the children of Heth. And when Jacob had made an end of commanding his sons, he gathered up his feet into the bed, and yielded up the ghost, and was gathered unto his people.” There is no distress here: he gathers up his feet and departs. Perhaps our wild longings are unnatural, and yet it seems but nature NOT to be content with what contented the patriarch. Anyhow, wherever and whatever my husband and Sophy are I shall be. This at least is beyond dispute.
October 12th.--I do not wish to forget past joys, but I must simply remember them and not try to paint them. I must cut short any yearning for them.
October 20th.--We do not say the same things to ourselves with sufficient frequency. In these days of book-reading fifty fine thoughts come into our heads in a day, and the next morning are forgotten. Not one of them becomes a religion. In the Bible how few the thoughts are, and how incessantly they are repeated! If my life could be controlled by two or three divine ideas, I would burn my library. I often feel that I would sooner be a Levitical priest, supposing I believed in my office, than be familiar with all these great men whose works are stacked around me.
October 22nd.--Sometimes, especially at night, the thought not only that I personally have lost Tom and Sophy, but that the exquisite fabric of these relations.h.i.+ps, so intricate, so delicate, so highly organised, could be cast aside, to all appearance so wastefully, is almost unendurable. . . . I went up to the moor on the top of the hill this morning, where I could see, far away, the river broaden and lose itself in the Atlantic. I lay on the heather looking through it and listening to it.