I left the Misses Primps' at the end of the summer term of 1865; I was
in my eighteenth year.
My Grandmother told me that Lord Tawborough was looking around for
"a good opening" for me. The interval of waiting was to be spent
perfecting my French and music, and I was to begin Italian with Miss
le Mesurier. Uncertainty sent my fancies and ambitions in disorderly
riot through the whole gamut of possibilities and impossibilities;
transported me to every county in turn, from Cornwall to Caithness,
to every manner of dwelling, from palaces to pagodas. Sometimes
I saw myself with a tyrant for taskmistress--Aunt Jael to the
_n_th--sometimes employed by Fairy Godmother or Lady Bountiful.
Somewhere about New Year of 1866, Lord Tawborough wrote. He had
obtained, he thought, an excellent opening for me, and would visit us
at once to communicate it. This news brought me to a high pitch of
excitement, which culminated on the day he came.
I was to go to France!--as companion rather than governess to a French
girl a year or two younger than myself; to perfect her English, and
talk English also with an elder sister who was about my own age. The
two girls lived with their widowed mother in a big château in Normandy,
though part of the year was spent in the family house in Paris. Lord
Tawborough and his father before him had had friendly relations with
the family, which was old, illustrious and wealthy. I should meet the
best type of French people, and have the opportunity of perfecting my
own French. I should be kept, of course, and receive a salary of four
hundred francs (sixteen pounds) a year.
As he unfolded this gorgeous prospect I was ravished with delight.
Foreign Lands! Normandy! Châteaux! Paris! But Grandmother--why was she
looking doubtful, unmoved?
"Papists?" she asked him, keenly.
"They are Roman Catholics." This as though somehow a palliative.
My heart stopped. I scented battle. Lord Tawborough counter-attacked
before the forces of objection could muster.
"Yes, Mrs. Lee: Papists, of course, like nearly all French people. But
what an opportunity for Mary! If she could help them to a better way,
it would be achieving more than to convert a hundred heathen!"
His tongue was in his cheek. Conscience called: Denounce his lies!
Ambition urged furiously: Keep silence! My heart was throbbing, as
the battle of selves raged within. I saw that Grandmother took his
false words in good faith: Ambition was the winning-side and stifled
Conscience utterly.
"True," said my Grandmother, and accepted with sober gratitude. Aunt
Jael grunted warmer approval. I thanked him with tears of pleasure.
Details were arranged. I was to go in April, a few weeks after my
eighteenth birthday. There was never any direct correspondence;
Lord Tawborough made all arrangements. Towards my expenses he gave
five pounds, which Grandmother most furiously spent in "a new shuit
of clothes." In all I had three new dresses, the finest I had ever
possessed; I had no suspicion of how dowdy they might look in my new
surroundings. Lord Tawborough, however, to whom Aunt Jael proudly
displayed them, must have had the gravest suspicions, for in spite of
resistance he sent me to the best dressmaker in the town for a white
silk "evening" dress, and to the ladies' tailor in Boutport Street for
a smart new riding-habit. For parting-present Aunt Jael gave me a set
of bone-backed hair-brushes; Glory and Salvation a pair of kid gloves
and a silk scarf; Pentecost Dodderidge a New Testament with an original
hymn inscribed in the title page; Mrs. Cheese a plain gold brooch
and green parasol, the Meeting a magnificent French Bible in limp
red morocco, which was presented to me publicly at my last Breaking
of Bread; Brother Browning a Scotch travelling rug; my Grandmother
a photograph of my mother I had often begged for and cried over and
kissed.
* * * * * * *
Let me put down what I was like at this moment of leaving the old life.
I was of average height, but slight build: a frail inconspicuous
figure, with small limbs, neatly made perhaps, if too thin for
shapeliness. I looked so young for my age that when only a day or two
before my departure I first put my hair up, there was a ridiculous
contrast between the adult austere bun--Victorian fashion, at the back,
lumpy, far-protruding--and the fifteen-year-old face. Or so I thought,
laughing into the mirror. My appearance was one of the few things I was
not vain of--not yet--or I should have wept rather than laughed: ugly
straight rebellious hair; eyes between green and grey-green, weak and
often sore; a short pointed and unpleasant nose. On the other hand, a
shapely well-cut mouth, and my mother's delicate complexion. When not
tearful and sulky, my habitual expression was one of Quakerish meekness
and demureness, wholly natural and wholly unconscious: at any rate
now, and until the Serpent showed me that in this quakerishness lay a
species of attraction.
On the whole I kept a silent tongue in my head; was voluble only
before an audience: Lord Tawborough, or the girls at school whom
I regaled with Aunt Jael, or (most important) myself, my oldest
audience. My manners were of a piece with my appearance: meek,
nervous, old-fashioned, though very "grown-up," in odd contrast with
my appearance. Here also I discovered later there lurked an asset, an
attracting quality.
Perhaps I was clever. It was a woman's cleverness, sureness not of
intellect but of intuition, coupled with an uncanny judgment in matters
where my own emotions were at stake or in the motives and actions of
others. No. 8 Bear Lawn and No. 1 The Quay were my forcing-beds. I
was incapable of connected thought as opposed to connected emotion,
and I had no haziest notion of science or logic or business affairs.
My two possessions were an imagination so vivid that I saw, at once,
_physically_ and with a perfect clearness of outline, whatever I
thought of, and a memory so retentive, alike for facts and faces, that
I can fairly describe it as one of the two or three best I have ever
known.
There was a good deal of knowledge in my head: a lob-sided mass. What
I knew, if usual for my age, was much less remarkable than what I did
not know. My three special acquirements were: first, an intimate
acquaintance with the Word of God that is hardly conceivable today and
was rare even fifty years ago. Second, excellent French: the new life
would give me the practice to make perfect. Third, the knowledge of
history I had picked up in my French reading. Novels, romances, poetry,
were all forbidden; except therefore for Huguenot works, devotional and
doctrinal, with which Miss le Mesurier had bravely persevered, we were
forced to fall back exclusively on history.
I re-produced the drama of history on a gigantic stage, as wide as
Time, and cast myself for all the leading rôles. Here again the old
handicap of sex enraged me: even though it was all make-believe,
yet for me, a woman, to live again the deeds of _men_, was but
make-believe. Almost all the best parts had been taken by men; women
were slaves, nobodies; unwanted, oppressed; man's victim--or audience.
I delighted all the more to read of those few women who, at moments
throughout the centuries, had held the stage: Joan of Arc, Isabella of
Castile, Elizabeth Tudor, Elizabeth Farnese. I took a pleasure no man
could understand in reflecting that among the monarchs of England, no
less than five were queens-regnant. The most extreme delight lay in
the deeds of tyrant women. When I read of Queen Cleopatra or Empress
Catherine lording it over their subjects--_men_--dealing out sensual
cruelties and senseless barbarities to _men_--riding roughshod over
the pride and power of _men_--I exulted, breathed hard for joy. It
was an instinct stronger than will, some atavistic legacy; against
my own tastes, too, for in my experience--wide in imagination if
pitifully narrow in fact--I liked men better than women; against my
religion also. This I discovered at the Misses Primps', when we were
doing English history. I found that the great Marian burnings of
the Protestants, with whom alike as Plymouth Sister and human being
I sympathized, gave me at one and the same time a feeling of evil
exaltation, inasmuch as it was a _woman_, albeit Bloody Mary, who had
the power to send hundreds of _men_ to the stake. In the great Malagasy
persecution of my own day, my burning sympathy with the Christian
martyrs hurled over the vulture-haunted rock of Ambohipotsy was stifled
by a brutal lilting pleasure that the persecutor was a queen, a woman.
Cleopatra, Catherine, Mary Tudor, Ranavalona, all these, however bad
and cruel, had striven to redress the balance of wrong which was at all
times weighted against their sex and mine.
The Bible, Brethren Theology, French, some history; that was the
sum-total of what I knew. What I did not know was much more remarkable.
Nothing of art, fiction, poetry, romance; never a word of Shakespeare,
Scott, Milton; nothing of contemporary books or events or persons; not
even the names of Palmerston, Bright, Disraeli, Dickens, Thackeray,
Tennyson. I did just know that the Duke of Wellington was dead, that a
war somehow concerned with negro slaves was raging across the Atlantic,
and that a new Napoleon reigned in France. I had never been to any form
of lecture, concert, or entertainment, nor into any normal household
of healthy young people. Fireside games, the ordinary interests of
girlhood, the hundred happinesses of family life were all unknown. I
had never seen a newspaper, touched a pack of cards, nor smelt tobacco.
My character was what these twenty-three chapters should have
displayed. If it had not shown the steady development of a normal life,
still less of a novelist's creation, it was because my circumstances
and surroundings did not change or enlarge in ordinarily gradual
fashion. My life was a stringing-together of certain special events and
outstanding memories--Beetle, Benamuckee, fear that the world would
end, knowledge of how life began, the terrible epoch of Torribridge,
Baptism, Brandy--each of which had brought suddenly a new series of
emotions. Fundamentally I changed little. At eighteen I was as at
eight, only "more so"; my hates and hopes were vivider. On the whole I
was less unhappy than in my early childhood. The reason was that I had
come to visualize and daydream more in the future than in the past; to
hope more than to regret. But always I was lonely.
The experience of divine companionship had not made me want human
love less. Self-absorbed to mania, I yet wanted nothing so much as to
merge my individuality and dissolve my self in a loved being. Loving
myself, my supreme hope was some one I could love more. The some one
was ordained unalterably, and day and night alike my thoughts were
of Robbie--my Robbie; i. e., the real Robbie up to seven years ago,
and a creation of my own fashioning since. On Christmas Nights, I
had him about as near and as physical as ever, though never near nor
real enough for my need, never the comfort of flesh and blood and of
perfect spiritual contact for which I hungered and waited. I feared the
waiting might be long. Instinct left no doubt that one day we should
meet, and mate, and marry; but forbade that I should try to force the
event or seek to discover where he might be or how I might come upon
him. Temptation overcame me during one rare visit of Aunt Martha's;
she knew, however, nothing. Yet why need I worry? As sure as heaven or
hell he would come to me. I had earned love; for all my long unhappy
motherless young life Robbie was my requital. So much did I believe
also in the complementary doctrine of an Envious Power that I was
half-frightened at the success and pleasure the new life abroad seemed
to promise. Surely I should have to pay for it, perhaps by losing
Robbie. God gets even.
Other doubts assailed. Might it not all be a mad vision? Did Robbie
still remember me as I him, live for me as I for him? Was it he
himself--in his own bed, wherever it was--who came to me, to be with
me, on the anniversaries of our embrace; or was it my own intense
longing and imagination that created the appearance of his presence,
which might exist in my mind only and not in his? No! the experience
was too magical not to be real. He remembered me, visited me, and
one day in plain reality would come to claim me. But again--when he
came--would love be a complete and perfect thing? Was perfect love
possible? Should I be able to mingle my tired and fearful soul for ever
and utterly in his, confide in him the utmost secret of my being, lose
myself--my Self--in him; and, one soul in two bodies, affront together
the terrors of Eternity? "It is not possible," leered Doubt. "Your soul
must stand alone; no love can break down the barrier of its eternal
isolation. _You are alone for ever._"
Then Doubt gave place to Hope, and I fell to enjoying the security
and peace of giving myself to him, all my love, my fears: one soul in
two bodies, clasped in each other's arms. Pride would second Hope.
Robbie would be great, famous, honoured: a warrior, poet, statesman--I
favoured each in turn. I would shine in his reflected glory. I felt no
discontent at this secondary rôle, and reverting to the true type of
a woman's megalomania, built not for myself but for my boy a hundred
splendid futures.
I had other ambitions: to see the world, live in new houses, meet
wonderful people; to do well in life, become powerful, famous; somehow,
anyhow--through fame as Robbie's wife, as ambassadress perhaps or, in
madder moments, queen. Then there was the old desert-island business,
in which as a female Robinson Crewjoe I was to burst with _panache_
of ostrich feathers and panoply of fame on an astonished world. Or I
would see myself Tzarina--Mary the Great, Empress and Autocrat of All
the Russias, Queen of Poland, Grand Duchess of Finland, etc., etc.,
etc.; or Queen of Spain; or Anywhere. Never, mind you, the mere idle
castle-in-the-air builder! Every detail of the steps by which I was
to scale these megalomanic heights was worked out in my mind; every
moment of agony, labour, deception, experienced in my heart. My first
gesture in success--I sometimes tried to deceive myself it was my chief
object--was to do good, succour the poor, spread the Gospel, lead poor
darkened Russia or poor heathen Spain from the false gods of Byzantium
or Rome to my own true God of Plymouth--and the Taw. A sop to God for
letting me succeed.
If I could not change this natural bent of egotism in my imaginings, I
was able by prayer and Resolutions to curb my selfishness in the things
of daily life. My Grandmother's example helped. Whenever she did an
unselfish deed I should have thought to do myself, I flushed quickly
with shame, and was readier for the next occasion. In every written
Resolution "Do unto others" came to figure first.
Nor did Ambition fill all my visualizings. As often as creating these
mad fantastic events that _might_ happen, I was creating the exact
shape and setting of various events that _had_ to happen. My arrival
at the Château, how Madame la Comtesse and her daughter would greet
me, my bedroom, the details of my daily work: all these were envisaged
a hundred times with a hundred variations. Aunt Jael's death; when,
how, why?--Should I be summoned from France for the funeral, if it
happened while I was abroad?--My feelings, my anticipated sentimental
looking-back as though she was dead already: "Poor Aunt Jael, she was
hard and cruel at times, _but still_--" My softening towards her for a
few days. (It is no bad plan, indeed, always to treat our fellow-beings
with the same respect living as we should give them dead.) Or
Grandmother's death: and my far-off return to England; or my own death,
and the first few moments after death.
The three things I pictured and lived through more often than any
others were three meetings that I knew lay somewhere before me in the
path of real life. Two would be meetings-again, the other a first
encounter.
Robbie. Uncle Simeon. My Father.
Dramatic scenes of these three encounters I worked out a hundred times
with the fullest details of time, place and setting: the luxury of
first moments, the splendour or scorn of the respective dénouements. I
knew what I should say first. I framed every word of the conversation
that followed, experienced every phase of joy, melodrama and hate. How
far the realities resembled the anticipations; and how far Instinct was
right in telling me--against all appearance--that I was approaching
these three inevitable events by going to France, the sequel will show.
* * * * * * *
I have called myself worldly. It is true, except that the one reality
to which through all agonies I held was not of this world at all. At
moments when my mood could summon no happiness from the past nor hope
from the future, I had always a last refuge-place in the ineffable Love
of God, as I had felt it once and for all in one miraculous instant. I
knew it was more real than the world around me or than the fears of my
own mind; as the supernatural was more real than the natural, the thing
intuitively felt than the fact ascertained, magic than reason. I could
seek refuge from trouble in a state of magical divine consciousness, in
which, at perfect moments, I lost all sense of time and space and self,
all physical sensation, all power to think--everything but Love. I was
a soul only, the soul of all the world. I ceased to be anything. I was
everything. I was God and God was I.
I attained this state chiefly by passionate prayer. Sometimes, however,
the trance came upon me quite involuntarily. Some notion or idea or
word threw me before I knew into a transport of delight. Chalcedony,
Jerusalem, rosemary, tribulation: the sound of these words filled me
with exquisite and supernatural sensations. I would clasp my breasts,
close my eyes, and open my heart passionately to the presence of God.
On a lower plane were my trick-methods of attaining mystical
sensation: staring at myself or kissing myself in the mirror, crooning
an everlasting "I--I--I" or calling aloud my own name for echoes.
Different again--a superstitious offshoot of intuition--were my signs,
omens, fetishes, lucky numbers. If I could walk to Meeting in exactly a
lucky number of paces, I knew the service would be specially blessed to
me; and inevitably it was. The distance I could cover in running across
a field and counting say seventy-seven was the exact measure, thus
magically conveyed to me, of a property or estate which would one day
be mine. If a lucky number came my way of its own initiative, it was
an omen of unusual import. Thus when I learnt that the Paris house of
my French family was No. 77 Rue St. Eloy, I was certain of high times
thereat.
In all Mrs. Cheese's superstitions, ranging from West Country
witchcraft to the happiness of horseshoes or lucklessness of ladders,
I believed without reserve. I practised Bible-opening, which was about
the only superstition of my Grandmother's. The first verse that caught
the eye--or, in my rite, the most heavily red-chalked passage, or,
failing that, a verse seven or thirty-seven--had a special God-sent
message for the moment's need.
Having discovered the (for me) supernatural nature of the world, my
mistake was to press my discovery too far. I was in danger of believing
that I could do anything, however omnipotent or divine, if I only knew
the trick; conjure up any supreme sensation, open the door of all power
and mystery and pleasure, if I but found the Open Sesame. I sought for
the catchword which would destroy all Existence; am seeking it still.
* * * * * * *
Real things that happened did not approach the reality of my
supernatural experience until they had been brooded upon a while in
my heart, until my thoughts and passions had imbued them with life.
At the actual moment of great occurrences--Uncle Simeon's threats,
Aunt Jael's curses, Lord Tawborough's great proposal--I deliberately
prevented myself receiving the full emotional effect. Later, alone with
myself, I re-lived the scene, and took my fill of rage, bitterness,
pride, delight. Thus any event affected me much more after it had
happened than at the time. The instant anger with which Aunt Jael's
blow filled me was nothing to the brooding rage and revengefulness of
the next day. The pang of unavoidable shame with which Conscience smote
me when I did a mean or cowardly deed was as nothing to the agony of
self-scorn I underwent when some long-past meanness of mine returned
to my memory--as new and naked as the meanness of some one else. This
whole childhood of mine is more vivid than when I lived it.
If past events were more real than present ones, future ones were the
most vivid of all. The past is imagination and memory working together.
The future is imagination pure. The past was Aunt Jael, floggings,
dreariness, tears; Uncle Simeon, terror, cruelty; a childhood cowering,
loveless. The future was joy, in a hundred wonderful shapes--Robbie,
somehow, some time; noble ladies, châteaux of France; visions of
history, splendour and romance; a fairy land of fame, pleasure and
glory--peopled, permeated, queened by Mary Lee. For the last few weeks
at home my soul lived at Bear Lawn no longer. Morning, noon and night,
sleeping and waking, I dwelt in the imaginary land.
Four days before I left I closed my diary and handed it, a
sealing-waxed parcel of exercise-books, to my Grandmother. This was the
last entry:--
During the past year or two the Lord has been exceeding good to
me. Fortune has been unusual--for any one. When I started this
volume of my Diary, I was at the Misses Primps', with no prospects
at all of anything _high_; no hope. And now, I am becoming a lady
(almost); and I am going to France, la belle France! Life is
mysterious, and God is good.... In my inward life, too, I started
this book in the throes of the fiercest fear I have even known.
Terror, appallment, awe of the Lord God and His eternal years; all
these assailed me so that I thought I should never stand free. Am
happier now: slowly yet surely, the fullness of earthly life, the
new hopes springing in my heart, the final though hard acceptance
of the truth that it is useless for me (finite Mary) to measure
the length and breadth and age of God, and most of all that
precious memory of His Holy Spirit, that I can ever invoke in all
sorrowful times,--all these have brought me to be able to do what
my Grandmother does, and to _Trust in the Lord_.
Life moves mysteriously. It is that walk near Torribridge years
ago, when I met the Stranger, that is taking me to France now. And
somehow, some time--I don't know how, but I _know_--France will
take me back to Torribridge--to R. Shall I meet him in the foreign
land? I do not know. But he is coming. All my love is poured out on
the only boy-image that has ever interested me; all my passion I
have bestowed on one shape only, on my Image, my R.--tenderness and
tears, and meeting lips and bodies; and he takes me in his arms.
How I long to see him! that I may know his identity with my Image
of him, to know for always and ever that the Robbie I live with
and live for is the real eighteen-year-old Robbie who--God make it
so!--lives for me.
Now Bear Lawn is behind me, and all is new and wonderful ahead:
_happiness is coming_. Good bye Grandmother dear! This is the end
of my girlhood's book; one day I may find joy--and sadness--in
reading it.
MARY LEE.
April, 1865.