Before writing to Aunt Martha I waited for the moment in my aged
kinswomen's increasing weakness when Conscience told me it was for
their sakes only I was summoning her, and not for my own.
It was the second night after she had come. The hour was late, as
Grandmother and Aunt Jael had been long in getting to sleep. Aunt
Martha and I were sitting down to a bite of supper in the lamp-lit
dining-room. All day I had been praying for boldness of heart and
steadiness of voice that I might ask her my question. I stared now
at her listless faded face. I was already moistening my lips for my
introductory "I say, Aunt Martha--" or "By the way--."
Telepathy is true, or Coincidence longer-armed than Fate. I had not
spoken the words; she took them out of my mouth.
"Oh, young Robert Grove: I forgot. Simeon heard he was dead--died nine
years ago, I believe. Poor young fellow, how soon gone! How one longs
to know that all was well with him before he died--."
I sat, staring.
For moments maybe. For Eternity perhaps. I do not know.
My heart was cold, my brain numb. My body and mind were gripped as in
a vice; I could not move my head to one side or the other, I could not
remove my unseeing eyes from a fixed point in emptiness straight before
me; my brain could not work, could seek no details of where or when
or why, could not move from one cramped corner of agony, in which it
must listen ceaselessly to a far-away voice repeating "Robbie is dead.
Robbie is dead. Robbie is dead."
I was nearly unconscious: there was no me left to be conscious. As
in a dream I remember Aunt Martha being kind, being fussy, pleading,
advising, exhorting, appealing. I would not, could not move. I sat
in the same chair, in the same posture, staring, staring at nothing;
speaking, speaking to no one. "Robbie is dead. Robbie is dead."
After a while Aunt Martha seemed to have gone. The lamp was still
burning. Very slowly, through the hours of that eternal night, the
meaning of what had happened entered my heart; broke my heart.
Grey morning light was entering the room. I got up from the chair,
stiff and cramped after my long unmoving vigil, went up to my bedroom,
discovered my diary in its secret haunt, brought the _Times_-wrapped
exercise-book downstairs again with me, blew out the lamp, and in the
dim light of the autumn dawn, sat down amid the uncleared supper things
to pen my last entry:--
"I am writing this at five o'clock on Lord's Day morning at the
most miserable moment of my life. I have been up all night. I
have not slept. I don't know how it happened: unless God, in His
cruelty, heard the unspoken question in my heart and answered
it through Aunt Martha's witless mouth. 'Oh, young Robert' she
began--my heart stopped beating--'I forgot'! I could not have
guessed what was coming, have guessed that his presence all these
years was a lie, a vanity of my own creating. _Dead._ It was
so terrible that I could not feel it soon, did not understand
for a long time what it meant. My heart was broken; but did not
understand. It is here, alone in the long night, that I have found
out what it is. I can hardly see to write for my tears. What I
feel, I cannot write. It is the cruellest thing (save creating me)
that God has done to me; God who damned me into the world, hated,
loveless. I have lived a life such as few girls--cowering, haunted,
passionate; utterly unloving, unloved utterly. Then I loved this
dark-haired boy on that Christmas Night when--more surely even than
on Thy Jordan morning with me, O Lord God!--in tears and happiness
I was BORN AGAIN. And ever since, in endless vision, with my soul
and brain and body, I have been faint with loving him, and memory
has kindled hope and hope excelled memory, and I have thanked the
Lord God even for His nameless gift of immortality,--for it would
be immortality with Robbie. God, I thought, had paid me for the
unhappiness in which He had created me: He had given me Robbie.
Year after year his heart was with me. I was gladder and more
radiant than the ordinary happy woman could be. My heart sang aloud
with my love.
"And now it is gone. It burns my heart as salt tears are burning my
lashes. I understand. Love was never meant for me. I was conceived
in hate. I shall die in hate. God gave me the wildest-loving soul
He could fashion, and I kept it for my dear one only. And now my
beloved is gone, gone to his long home, and the light is gone out
of my life. For him there is no immortality: immortality is only
for the damned. Sorrow is older than laughter, and sorrow alone
lives. My lovely boy is dead for ever; I thank God only for this,
that he has spared him Eternity. And I, who loved him, must
live on for ever alone: alone through all the merciless eternal
years--oh, Christ Jesus on the Cross, strike me dead now, abolish
the universe, abolish Thyself--ah Robbie, Robbie, come back.
"No, it is no good. A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to
mourn, and a time to dance. For me it shall be weeping-time and
mourning-time for ever. Joy and laughter are for other folk. I
shall go, as I knew I must, the way of all my people, the way of
bitterness and loneliness, the way of my Mother. (Mother dear, will
God strive to keep us apart in Eternity?) I shall find no happiness
under the sun; nor in heaven--nor hell--afterwards. The visions of
the past can comfort me no more; for they were but phantoms of my
own creating. This past year when night after night he has come to
my body and soul, it was not he who came at all--his bright body
was rotting in the grave (where? since when?)--but a cruel sham
of Christ's, a silly clockwork presence born of my own love and
hunger, a cowardly trick God played upon me.
"My beloved, there is Eternity and the grave between us. I cannot,
dare not, conjure up your vision. In memory only, I will go back
once, for the last time, to Christmas of long ago, feel your gentle
dead arms around me, and kiss you Good-night and Good-bye.
MARY LEE."