  The notion came to me one warm autumn afternoon, as I was reading "Grace Abounding." From the first page I struck up a living friendship with the Bedford tinker, though he had been in heaven for near two hundred years. I understood him as he talked aloud to himself and peered within to discover who and what was this John Bunyan inside him. I liked too—the more so as it was so new in print and from the mind of some-one-else—the careful detail with which he told of his earthly outward life: his descent, his lowly parentage, his school, his early days, though I could have wished for details of his Aunt Jaels and Uncle Simeons. These did not lack when he talked of his "inside" life, and told me (who knew) of his childhood's "fearful dreams" and "dreadful visions" and "thoughts of the fearful Torments of Hell fire," because of which "in the midst of my many Sports and Childish Vanities, amidst my vain Companions, I was often much cast down and afflicted." Why should not I tell a like story of my soul day by day, detail by detail? The notion rolled through me like a tide. I closed the book, sprang up, shut my eyes, and walked round and round the room in my excitement. Today, this moment, I would begin. Then as I turned my mind to practical details—the book I should write it in, the hiding-place for the book—hesitations appeared. Wasn't it a bit funny? Did other people do it? Why, yes: John Bunyan was "other people" right enough, and a good Christian too. And I remembered that I had heard somewhere before of a man who wrote down the story of his life. In a few seconds I placed my man. Poor old Robinson Crewjoe. I ran into the kitchen. "Mrs. Cheese, you know Robinson Crewjoe you told me about, didn't you say you could read about it all in a book he'd written himself?" "'E wrote it pon a bit buke 'e vound on the Wreck, so's 'e shidden virget it, I reckon, or so's ither volk cude rade it arterwards—" "Yes, but when did he write it?" "Ivry day, avore goin' to bed nights. Ivrythin' 'e'd been doin' that day. Leastways that's what my ol' Uncle Zam ollers did, who kep' a buke of the zame zort." "What was it like? Please tell me about Uncle Sam's book." "Wull, my Uncle Zam, over to Exmoor, was very aiddicayted he was, a turrable 'and vur raidin' and writin'. So long as 'twas a buke 'e'd love'n and spell over'n vur hours and as 'appy as a king, as the zayin' is, but 'e liked best writin' down in this lil buke uv 'is own—a dairy they caals un. Why fer I don't knaw, 'cause tizzen much to do wi' the milk, so far as I can see, and I ain't blind neither. Wull, in this lil buke, and there was eight or nine uv them avore 'e died, 'e put down ivry blimmin' thing 'e did, 'tis true's I zit yer. Wull, when the funeral was over and all the cryin', 'is widder—my ol' Aunty Sary that was, bein' curyus like bein' a lil bit like you—thought she'd be findin' zummat tasty in these ol' dairies, and tuke it into 'er 'ead to try to rade all the eight bukesful, or mebbe 'twas nine. But 'er cud'n 'ardly du it, not bein' aiddicayted like 'im, and when 'er vound it tuke 'er 'alf the day to spell over 'alf wan page, 'er got 'erself into a turrable upset, an threw un all pon the vire, 'ollern' out 'Burn un all, burn un all, burn un all! Then 'er bangs out uv the rume. I was up vrom me zeat avore you cude say Bo, and rescued the bettermos' part uv them avore they was burnt. Aw my dear days, I niver did rade zuch stuff. 'E'd put 'pon they bukes ivry drimpy lil thing e'd done and zeen and zed they vorty years: 'ow many calves the ol' cow 'ad 'ad, how much butter an' crame 'e zold to Markit, all mixed up wi' stuff about the pixies 'e zaw, or thort 'e zeed, top uv Exmoor o' nights; and a lot o' religyus writin,' for 'e was a gude Christyen for all 'is pixies and goblins, wi' plenty 'o sound stuff 'bout 'Eaven and 'Ell, and a middlin' gude dale about 'is sowl...." These were valuable hints. My resolve was confirmed. I That day, October the Twelfth 1860 (thirty-seven years ago come Tuesday), in the unused half of an old blue-covered exercise book, I began. With what a sense of pride, of importance, of creativeness, of high adventure, I scrawled in great flourishing capitals my heading: THE LIFE OF MARY LEE My opening sentence was this: "I was born at Tawborough on March the Second, 1848." I have put it also on the first page of this present record, which from now, my thirteenth year onwards, is but a matured, shortened and bowdlerized version of the diary, eked out—more often for atmosphere than detail—by memory. The keeping of the diary, however, weakened my memory; which, though of its old photographic accuracy in what it held, yet held far less. I did not need to remember things, I said to myself: I could always find them in the book. Certainly for the first few years, I could have found there everything that was worth reading, as well as everything that wasn't; in later years, alas, I have succumbed to the fatal habit of compact little paragraphs epitomizing whole weeks, and even months, as fatal as the Sundries habit in a household account-book. Indeed, despite the pathetic leniency we show towards the trivial when it is the trivial in our own life, I find the earlier pages of my diary tiresomely full; far too fond of "What we had for dinner" or "Aunt Jael's scripture at this evening's worship." As I told my diary everything, it began to take the place of my other self, and it is in this sense that I mean that the feeling of dual personality was weakened. The self-to-self talks became fewer; the sense of a person telling and a person told was blurred. Unspoken notes in a grimy exercise book took their place; although at first, and always in exciting passages, I would talk aloud, and take down, so to say, from my own dictation. This early diary is morbid, precocious, shrewd, petty, priggish, and comically, pitifully sincere. Religion looms large,
Like Uncle Zam on Aunt Sary, I indulged in a good deal of "plain-spaikin" on Aunt Jael. The diary thus became invested with a halo of danger. Suppose she found it in one of its many (and changing) hiding-places! She would beat me utterly, burn the diary, and mock cruelly at its contents. Yet it was from my Grandmother that I hid it with my most ardent cunning. She would neither beat, nor burn, nor mock, but I knew she would condemn it as "morbid" (the word is a later acquisition), and search me with her kind common-sense eyes; and I should be covered with shame. Not guilty shame, rather the shame a man feels when his naked soul is shown to the world; the shame I always felt when caught red-handed
All through my life these books of revelation have dogged me with the daily fear that through them I should be found out; now that they have served their purpose in helping me to compile this more permanent record, I have decided, like Aunt Sary, to "burn un all." (Or nearly decided; it is hard for a woman to destroy memorials of the past.) The precautions I took, beyond subtle hiding, were: prayer, magic, and the etching in red ink on each exercise-book-cover of this Device:— PRIVATE Whether in the worst of us, e. g. Aunt Jael, curiosity is not a stronger passion than fear, and whether therefore this curiosity-tempting cover might not do more harm than good, was a problem and a worry that continually assailed me. In connection with the diary, I must speak of the Resolves or Resolutions I began to make. These were a result, on one side of my growing sense of sin (egotism, ambition, triumph, revenge, hate, greed, dirt, doubt), and on another side of an exactly opposite desire to realize my imagined ambitions by equipping myself to achieve them (wide knowledge, better health, nicer looks). They were written on half-sheets of note-paper, which I immediately put in an envelope. This was sealed and hidden in between the pages of that day in the diary on which the resolution was formed. The moment the least part of the current resolve was broken—I knew it always by heart—I had to break open the envelope and begin afresh. The old unkept resolve I placed in the page of the day on which it was broken. Thus an enveloped, sealed, still-in-action Resolve was kept with the day in which it was formed, a
For any one to whom this absurd document is absurd only, comment would be but adding insult to injury. Here is another:—
This magnificent resolve seems not to have been specific enough, alas, for my frail endeavours; under a date but six or seven weeks later I find this:—
AND HE WOULD NEVER (5) Have sinful thoughts like
(6) Say sinful words, like
(7) Like sinful things, like
If this era of diaries and resolutions saw the two-persons idea for a while less distinct, all the other mysteries of my earlier days remained. I still, for instance, put everything I did to the test of reason and instinct, obeying always the latter. I believed more than ever in my private magic and was The only magic with which I actually succeeded, or believed I did (which is the same) was Numbers. 1, 10, 17, 437, 777 were magic: 7 and 237 were big magic; 37 was arch-magic, the Holy Number. In every need I called upon them. If Aunt Jael were flogging me, what I had to do was to count a perfectly even 37, timing it to finish at the same moment as her last stroke. I believed positively that it eased my hurt, and I believe so still, for my attention was concentrated not on Aunt Jael's blows but on my magic: so far, if no farther, is faith-healing a fact. Or I would jump out of bed in the morning, and begin to count, always evenly. If when I finished dressing, I was at a magic number (the correct moment was when I shut the bedroom door behind me, though for a second chance I allowed reaching the bottom stair) then the whole day would be lucky. Or out in the street, the amount of house frontage I could cover in thirty-seven strides I believed positively would be the same as the frontage of the big house I should one day possess. So, like the peasant in Count Tolstoi's tale, I strode mightily. A big house was one of my few material ambitions at this time, with money to spend on grand furniture for it ("Riches," vide Resolution of 19"2"62). Even here my need was chiefly a spiritual one. I thought that in a vast house, utterly alone, I should have a perfect place for practising echoes, one of the means by which I hoped to solve the riddle of my existence. "Mary Lee, what are you? What are you?" A hundred echoes would swiftly call back through the silence, and I was on the brink of understanding—— A different method of solving the haunting riddle was to whisper my own name quite suddenly in a silent room, when alone with myself. Sometimes the physical effect was so curious that I was certain of success. Fervent praying to the point of ecstasy, more often to the point of exhaustion, was another way. Sometimes I was able, it seemed, to disembody myself; my soul left my body (at which it could look back as though it belonged to some one else) and wandered nowhere, everywhere, becoming in some half-realized fashion a part of everything in space, and an inhabitant of all periods of time. I remembered, in the fleeting fashion of dreams, things I had done before I was born, in some hitherto unremembered life. Then, again, things I had done still earlier, in distant lives and far-away centuries; till, at last, I remembered myself for ever and for ever in the past, and my soul fled back into my body to hide from the new terror: Eternity behind as well as before me, the unpitying everlastingness of the past as of the future. The latter was still the unappeasable fear which hung like an evil menace over every moment of my life. If I thought it out and lived through the mad blinding moment of terror as my brain battered itself against Infinity, I gained nothing; the terror flung me back. If I was wise, and refused to think of it, I knew myself for an ostrich with my head in the sand. If I dared not face it, it was there beholding me just the same, unconquered, unconquerable. Was there no escape? The only notion I could conceive, and which I cherished with most desperate hope, was that Love, if ever it could possess my whole soul and being, would slay the King of Terrors once for all. How could Love so come to me? Sometimes I thought it would be God. I knew that my Grandmother had a joy, a serene and fearless delight in the love of the Lord, which I did not share. I prayed fervently for this: that I might know the peace of God, which is perfect understanding; that I might possess this divine love, which I could see in her but did not feel in myself; that it might free |
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