All night I did not sleep. Conscience busy with the day past and fear
anxious for the day ahead gave me quite enough to think about, and I
was feverish and overwrought. As soon after daylight as I dared I set
forth downstairs. It was early enough for me to retrieve the tell-tale
object before Aunt Jael was astir and light enough for me to brave Lord
Benamuckee. At the foot of the stairs I met Aunt Jael, fully dressed,
nearly two hours before ordinary time; smiling.
"Good morning, child. You're up betimes."
I did not dare a _tu quoque_, but uttered a feeble tale about helping
Mrs. Cheese to clean the boots, Friday being her busiest day.
Aunt Jael, by a singular coincidence, had risen in the same helping
spirit, and the two of us burst upon the astonished Mrs. Cheese in
the midst of her first matutinal movements. Though I was by now quite
certain that the face at the door had been Aunt Jael's, this did not
prevent my wishing to restore the jar-cover to its place. It was
preparing for the best, so to speak, on the faint off-chance that I
was deluded. Meanwhile her smile prepared me for the worst. It was
more complex than a blow, for it portended blows to come and added to
their evil charm by heralding them afar off. Aunt Jael's floggings had
at least this merit, that as a rule they came suddenly; the stick was
across my back before I knew where I was.
I walked out of the kitchen, straight through to the front room door.
Before touching the handle, I took a glance down the length of the
hall. Yes, there she stood at the kitchen door, watching me like a
hawk. At breakfast, hope pointed out one more chance. I would gobble
down my food, and essay a dash for my objective just as I was leaving
for school. I ate as fast as I could; she at once ate faster. I got
up, she got up too. There was no chance, and she even saw me to the
house-door as I set out for school. In the game we were playing, no
word was spoken. Her weapon was her smile, which was the proof too that
she was winning.
On my way to school, as I thought now of this latest menace, now of
yesterday's deeds, I admitted that here at last was a case when I
_deserved_ punishment. "I hate you"--entering a House of Sin, and
approving it almost--breach of the third commandment--common theft--a
white lie to Grandmother as to where I had been--what an awful record
for one day! Truly I was a queen of sinners. Perhaps God saw fit to
humble me in the exaltation of my sin by scorning direct vengeance
Himself (three times I had waited for the sign), and had chosen as the
vehicle of His vengeance Aunt Jael, my every-day inglamorous tyrant. In
any case vengeance was certain; the sultry thunder-weather of the new
day seemed to announce it.
Soon after I got to school, it began to grow dark, then very dark. It
was one of those rare occasions when the pitch-black of utter darkness
falls in the day-time; I only remember one other in nearly fifty years.
Miss Glory wondered; Miss Salvation exclaimed; we children cowered. I
alone had an inkling of what the portent really betokened. It was the
Sign. Now that I felt certain once again that the moment of my doom was
at hand, all the exquisite extreme fear of yesterday came back.
It was swiftly too dark to read. Panic set in. All the children, from
both classes, clustered round Glory. She, not Salvation, was the refuge
and strength which instinct pointed out on this Last Day. The situation
was worthy of her prophet's soul: to her was assigned the awful honour
of ushering in Eternity, and announcing the sure signs of the beginning
of the end. She stood up, gaunt, prophetic, towering far above the
children who clustered round her, waved one hand towards the heavens,
and chanted forth:
"The End, little children, is here! Fear not! Repent! 'And the fourth
angel sounded and the third part o' the sun was smitten, and the third
part o' the moon and the third part o' the stars; so as the third part
o' them was darkened, and the day shone not for a third part uv it, and
the night likewise.' The End is here! The bottomless pit is opened,
then cometh forth smoke out o' the pit, and the sun and the air are
darkened. Out o' the smoke come great locusts upon the earth, great
locusts--" Some of the children shrieked.
Now at one stride came utter darkness. Salvation fell on her knees in
a corner apart, yelling and howling to the Lord to save her. "O Lord,
Lord, remember us as is chosen, remember, Lord. Smite the ungodly,
Lord, smite 'em all, but spare the righteous, spare the righteous!
Strike the goats with thy angur, but zave the pore sheep; smite the
zinners, but zave Thy own Zaints! Oh, aw, ow! Zave, Lord, zave!"
While this pitiable object yelled away, and the children cried, Miss
Glory's solemn voice chanted on, awaiting God's stroke. I the Papist,
the idolater, the liar, the thief--this visitation was for _me_. And if
it was the end of the whole world too, as I believed, I was the cause,
and I should be the first victim.
"Plagues, locusts, scorpions, the pit, the great tribulation! Life is
death, me children: _'tis one long prercession o' death beds_. Listen,
hearken. First the darkness, now 'tis the thunders and lightin's that
is at hand. Watch, oh, my children, watch; pray and fear not. 'Tis the
end o' the Worrld, I tell 'ee, the end o' the Worrld." And all the
children clutched at her in a frightened desperate ring, so that they
should all go to heaven or hell together. I could just distinguish the
group a few feet away; it looked in the darkness like a swarm of giant
insects. Miss Salvation was pleading and howling away for a heaven to
herself, and hell for all folk else. Still I waited; the slowness of
God's stroke was half its terror. It was too hard to bear.
Then, far more suddenly than it came, the darkness lifted. With
returning light came confidence. I breathed freely. Once again respite.
Fear, prime instigator of goodness, lost his hold as the shadows faded.
I began to _expect_ escape; to think, after so many favours, that I was
privileged, and could take the risk of wrongdoing. I was a chartered
libertine.
When I got back to Bear Lawn before dinner, no sign of Aunt Jael. There
was still a chance then to put things right if it was not too late. I
stole into the front room. There, in the middle of the floor, just as
I had seemed to see it in bed, lay the stone jar-cover. Good fortune
once again. After all Aunt Jael could know nothing. Those smiles were
innocent; their menace must have been born of my disordered mind.
Anyway, here was yet another stroke of luck. But, alas, these perpetual
escapes emboldened me. Fear is the guardian of virtue, safety the
guide to sin. God's repeated forgivenesses for my sins inspired in me
security rather than gratitude: a feeling that I could sin safely.
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.