Oh, and the bliss, the bliss! She could scarcely tear herself
away to go to school. The little noses nuzzling at the udder,
the little bodies so glad and sure, the little black legs,
crooked, the mother standing still, yielding herself to their
quivering attraction--then the mother walked calmly
away.
Jesus--the vision world--the everyday
world--all mixed inextricably in a confusion of pain and
bliss. It was almost agony, the confusion, the inextricability.
Jesus, the vision, speaking to her, who was non-visionary! And
she would take his words of the spirit and make them to pander
to her own carnality.
This was a shame to her. The confusing of the spirit world
with the material world, in her own soul, degraded her. She
answered the call of the spirit in terms of immediate, everyday
desire.
"Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy-laden, and I
will give you rest."
It was the temporal answer she gave. She leapt with sensuous
yearning to respond to Christ. If she could go to him really,
and lay her head on his breast, to have comfort, to be made much
of, caressed like a child!
All the time she walked in a confused heat of religious
yearning. She wanted Jesus to love her deliciously, to take her
sensuous offering, to give her sensuous response. For weeks she
went in a muse of enjoyment.
And all the time she knew underneath that she was playing
false, accepting the passion of Jesus for her own physical
satisfaction. But she was in such a daze, such a tangle. How
could she get free?
She hated herself, she wanted to trample on herself, destroy
herself. How could one become free? She hated religion, because
it lent itself to her confusion. She abused everything. She
wanted to become hard, indifferent, brutally callous to
everything but just the immediate need, the immediate
satisfaction. To have a yearning towards Jesus, only that she
might use him to pander to her own soft sensation, use him as a
means of reacting upon herself, maddened her in the end. There
was then no Jesus, no sentimentality. With all the bitter hatred
of helplessness she hated sentimentality.
At this period came the young Skrebensky. She was nearly
sixteen years old, a slim, smouldering girl, deeply reticent,
yet lapsing into unreserved expansiveness now and then, when she
seemed to give away her whole soul, but when in fact she only
made another counterfeit of her soul for outward presentation.
She was sensitive in the extreme, always tortured, always
affecting a callous indifference to screen herself.
She was at this time a nuisance on the face of the earth,
with her spasmodic passion and her slumberous torment. She
seemed to go with all her soul in her hands, yearning, to the
other person. Yet all the while, deep at the bottom of her was a
childish antagonism of distrust. She thought she loved everybody
and believed in everybody. But because she could not love
herself nor believe in herself, she mistrusted everybody with
the mistrust of a serpent or a captured bird. Her starts of
revulsion and hatred were more inevitable than her impulses of
love.