*
Let us suppose that the first effort one makes in life — later on, when the impatient and half-blind will comes in to help, nothing will be as thoroughly and well done — is to learn a few or one or two things by heart. Love at first sight or hearing or touch. In me, always deaf (under my acute hearing) and awkward, sight. Thus they are never lost; possibly they are all we came to look for and take away. Although now I cannot look at them with eyes which reflect them directly, not distorted by greed or the fear of loss, on to my young spirit (not even then clear), I know that with the help of my body — was it indispensable? — I have given them a second chance of life. And how much gentleness and strength even a child has at its disposal. Nothing can rob me of these things: the lighted windows, few and modest, a handful fallen together in the softly immense darkness, of my town; the shadowy arm of the coast at night, consoling; the moor road, imagined between scarcely seen lights of two farms, the last on those bare hills; the rays of the sun embracing, when it has fallen to exactly their level in the opposite quarter of the sky, the Parish Church and, round it, leaning over, bleached by the sea wind, all those dumb stones; the blazing whiteness of marguerites entering the eyes at their height of the child buried in the long grass. Night, evening, noonday. In what order will they leave me, last of all carefully-formed realities, last of all images — and my body the link between them? …
I have been living alone in a village farther up the estuary, at the foot of the hills. After a day of trying, with great effort, to write, I went out to walk in the dusk, which here in August lasts so long and changes so slowly into night that at no moment can you feel it is the end of the day. The sky was still blue, with white vaporous clouds, yet there were stars. The light not clear — and by that all the more noticeable. Where it clung to things it could be seen.
I walked at the side of the estuary. Slowly, that resistance I put up, always, all my life, and without, perhaps, willing it, against being taken possession of was gone, and all I could see entered into me: the trees took strange shapes and entered in, and the mountains on either side, the river, the ambiguous light it reflected and gave back changed, the remote clouds, the wind stroking my face — all these blew into me and through me. And if these, I thought, can, why not the dead? Why cannot I see walking with me that young woman, in her haste leaning a little forward, as I do, and the young airman, still a boy, with the blue clouded eyes, and that old captain, shabby, awkward, he whose voyages have eaten into him with the strictness of salt, and that woman, with her remote gaze, who reappears in me again and again, to tell me — and at times I have the strength to disobey her — what to feel and how I must act? Why don’t they come? What must I do to be more defenceless, to be less, than I was in these moments?
As I walked I said: Look, I give myself to you.
But what good is that when at once I take myself back again? When, in me, someone, a child, always begins again.
THE END
This electronic edition published in 2011 by Bloomsbury Reader
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The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell Page 27
