"And you mean to go on praying?"
"Yes."
"Do you think it"s the slightest use?"
"Yes."
He smiled unnaturally, as if the muscles of his mouth were not perfectly obedient.
"Well, I have warned you," he said.
Then he turned, went back to his couch, and this time lay down on it flat, turning over on his side, away from her, as if to sleep. He settled himself there like a dog. She looked at him a moment; then closed her eyes and began again.
Five minutes later she understood.
The first symptom of which she was aware was a powerlessness to formulate her prayers. Up to that point she had leaned, as has been said, on an enormous Power external to herself, yet approached by an interior way. Now it required an effort of the will to hold to that Power at all. In terms of s.p.a.ce, let it be said that she had rested, like a child in the dark, upon Something that sustained her: now she was aware that it no longer sustained her; but that it needed a strong continuous effort to apprehend it at all. There was still the dark about her; but it was of a different quality--it cannot be expressed otherwise--it was as the darkness of an unknown gulf compared to the darkness of a familiar room. It was of such a nature that s.p.a.ce and form seemed meaningless....
The next symptom was a sense of terror, comparable only to that which she had succeeded in crushing down as she stood on the stairs four or five hours before. That, however, had been external to her; she had entered it. Now it had entered her, and lay, heavy as pitch, upon the very springs of her interior life. It was terror of something to come.
That which it heralded was not yet come: but it was approaching.
The third symptom was the approach itself--swift and silent, like the running of a bear; so swift that it was upon her through the dark before she could stir or act. It came upon her, in a flash at the last; and she understood the whole secret.
It is possible only to describe it as, afterwards, she described it herself. The powerlessness and the terror were no more than the far-off effect of its approach; the Thing itself was the center.
Of that realm of being from which it came she had no previous conception: she had known evil only in its effects--in sins of herself and others--known it as a man pa.s.sing through a hospital ward sees flushed or pale faces, or bandaged wounds. Now she caught some glimpse of its essence, in the atmosphere of this bear-like thing that was upon her. As aches and pains are to Death, so were sins to this Personality--symptoms, premonitions, causes, but not Itself. And she was aware that the Thing had come from a spiritual distance so unthinkable and immeasurable, that the very word distance meant little.
Of the Presence itself and its mode she could use nothing better than metaphors. But those to whom she spoke were given to understand that it was not this or that faculty of her being that, so to speak, pushed against it; but that her entire being was saturated so entirely, that it was but just possible to distinguish her inmost self from it. The understanding no longer moved; the emotions no longer rebelled; memory simply ceased. Yet through the worst there remained one minute, infinitesimally small spark of ident.i.ty that maintained "I am I; and I am not that." There was no a.n.a.lysis or consideration; scarcely even a sense of disgust. In fact for a while there was a period when to that tiny spot of ident.i.ty it appeared that it would be an incalculable relief to cease from striving, and to let self itself be merged in that Personality so amazingly strong and compelling, that had precipitated itself upon the rest.... Relief? Certainly. For though emotion as most men know it was crushed out--that emotion stirred by human love or hatred--there remained an instinct which strove, which, by one long continuous tension, maintained itself in being.
For the malignity of the thing was overwhelming. It was not mere pressure; it had a character of its own for which the girl afterwards had no words. She could only say that, so far from being negation, or emptiness, or non-being, it had an air, hot as flame, black as pitch, and hard as iron.
That then was the situation for a time which she could only afterwards reckon by guesswork; there was no development or movement--no measurable incidents; there was but the state that remained poised; below all those comparatively superficial faculties with which men in general carry on their affairs--that state in which two Personalities faced one another, welded together in a grip that lay on the very brink of fusion....
_Chapter XVIII_
I
The c.o.c.ks were crowing from the yards behind the village when Maggie opened her eyes, clear shrill music, answered from the hill as by their echoes, and the yews outside were alive with the dawn-chirping of the sparrows.
She lay there quite quietly, watching under her tired eyelids, through the still unshuttered windows, the splendid glow, seen behind the twisted stems in front and the slender fairy forest of birches on the further side of the garden. Immediately outside the window lay the path, deep in yew-needles, the ground-ivy beyond, and the wet lawn glistening in the strange mystical light of morning.
She had no need to remember or consider. She knew every step and process of the night. That was Laurie who lay opposite in a deep sleep, his head on his arm, breathing deeply and regularly; and this was the little smoking-room where she had seen the cigarettes laid ready against his coming, last night.
There was still a log just alight on the hearth, she noticed. She got out of her chair, softly and stiffly, for she felt intolerably languid and tired. Besides, she must not disturb the boy. So she went down on her knees, and, with infinite craft, picked out a coal or two from the fender and dropped them neatly into the core of red-heat that still smoldered. But a fragment of wood detached itself and fell with a sharp sound; and she knew, even without turning her head, that the boy had awakened. There was a faint inarticulate murmur, a rustle and a long sigh.
Then she turned round.
Laurie was lying on his back, his arms clasped behind his head, looking at her with a quiet meditative air. He appeared no more astonished or perplexed than herself. He was a little white-looking and tired in the light of dawn, but his eyes were bright and sure.
She rose from her knees again, still silent, and stood looking down on him, and he looked back at her. There was no need of speech. It was one of those moments in which one does not even say that there are no words to use; one just regards the thing, like a stretch of open country. It is contemplation, not comment, that is needed.
Her eyes wandered away presently, with the same tranquility, to the brightening garden outside; and her slowly awakening mind, expanding within, sent up a little sc.r.a.p of quotation to be answered.
"While it was yet early ... there came to the sepulcher." How did it run? "Mary..." Then she spoke.
"It is Easter Day, Laurie."
The boy nodded gently; and she saw his eyes slowly closing once more; he was not yet half awake. So she went past him on tiptoe to the window, turned the handle, and opened the white tall framework-like door. A gush of air, sweet as wine, laden with the smell of dew and spring flowers and wet lawns, stole in to meet her; and a blackbird, in the shrubbery across the garden, broke into song, interrupted himself, chattered melodiously, and scurried out to vanish in a long curve behind the yews. The very world itself of beast and bird was still but half awake, and from the hamlet outside the fence, beyond the trees, rose as yet no skein of smoke and no sound of feet upon the cobbles.
For the time no future presented itself to her. The minutes that pa.s.sed were enough. She regarded indeed the fact of the old man asleep in the inn, of the old lady upstairs, but she rehea.r.s.ed nothing of what should be said to them by and by. She did not even think of the hour, or whether she should go to bed presently for a while. She traced no sequence of thought; she scarcely gave a glance at what was past; it was the present only that absorbed her; and even of the present not more than a fraction lay before her attention--the wet lawn, the brightening east, the cool air--those with the joy that had come with the morning were enough.
Again came the long sigh behind her; and a moment afterwards there was a step upon the floor, and Laurie himself stood by her. She glanced at him sideways, wondering for an instant whether his mood was as hers; and his grave, tired, boyish face was answer enough. He met her eyes, and then again let his own stray out to the garden.
He was the first to speak.
"Maggie," he said, "I think we had best never speak of this again to one another." She nodded, but he went on--
"I understand very little. I wish to understand no more. I shall ask no questions, and nothing need be said to anybody. You agree?"
"I agree perfectly," she said.
"And not a word to my mother, of course."
"Of course not."
The two were silent again.
And now reality--or rather, the faculties of memory and consideration by which reality is apprehended--were once more coming back to the girl and beginning to stir in her mind. She began, gently now, and without perturbation, to recall what had pa.s.sed, the long crescendo of the previous months, the gathering mutter of the spiritual storm that had burst last night--even the roar and flare of the storm itself, and the mad instinctive fight for the conscious life and ident.i.ty of herself through which she had struggled. And it seemed to her as if the storm, like others in the material plane, had washed things clean again, and discharged an oppression of which she had been but half conscious. Neither was it herself alone who had emerged into this "clear shining after rain"; but the boy that stood by her seemed to her to share in her joy. They stood here together now in a spiritual garden, of which this lovely morning was no more than a clumsy translation into another tongue. There stirred an air about them which was as wine to the soul, a coolness and clearness that was beyond thought, in a radiance that shone through all that was bathed within it, as sunlight that filtered through water. She perceived then that the experience had been an initiation for them both, that here they stood, one by the other, each transparent to the other, or, at least, he transparent to her; and she wondered, not whether he would see it as she did, for of that she was confident, but when. For this s.p.a.ce of silence she perceived him through and through, and understood that perception was everything. She saw the flaws in him as plainly as in herself, the cracks in the crystal; yet these did not matter, for the crystal was crystal....
So she waited, confident, until he should understand it too.
"But that is only one fraction of what is in my mind--" He broke off.
Then for the first time since she had opened her eyes just now her heart began to beat. That which had lain hidden for so long--that which she had crushed down under stone and seal and bidden lie still--yet that which had held her resolute, all unknown to herself, through the night that was gone--once more a.s.serted itself and waited for liberation.
"Yet how dare I--" began Laurie.
Again she glanced at him, terrified lest that which was in her heart should declare itself too plainly by eyes and lips; and she saw how he still looked across the garden, yet seeing nothing but his own thought written there against the glory of sky and leaf and gra.s.s. His face caught the splendor from the east, and she saw in it the lines that would tell always of the anguish through which he was come; and again the terror in her heart leapt to the other side, in spite of her confidence, and bade her fear lest through some mistake, some conventional shame, he should say no more.