at he had indeed been flung headlong into hell. Of
this gnawing solicitude she never spoke to me, never, and for her diary
also she could find no phrases. But on a loose half-sheet of notepaper
between its pages I find this passage that follows, written very
carefully. I do not know whose lines they are nor how she came upon
them. They run:--

"And if there be no meeting past the grave;
If all is darkness, silence, yet 'tis rest.
Be not afraid ye waiting hearts that weep,
For God still giveth His beloved sleep,
And if an endless sleep He wills, so best."

That scrap of verse amazed me when I read it. I could even wonder if my
mother really grasped the import of what she had copied out. It affected
me as if a stone-deaf person had suddenly turned and joined in a
whispered conversation. It set me thinking how far a mind in its general
effect quite hopelessly limited, might range. After that I went through
all her diaries, trying to find something more than a conventional term
of tenderness for my father. But I found nothing. And yet somehow there
grew upon me the realisation that there had been love.... Her love for
me, on the other hand, was abundantly expressed.

I knew nothing of that secret life of feeling at the time; such
expression as it found was all beyond my schoolboy range. I did not know
when I pleased her and I did not know when I distressed her. Chiefly
I was aware of my mother as rather dull company, as a mind thorny with
irrational conclusions and incapable of explication, as one believing
quite wilfully and irritatingly in impossible things. So I suppose it
had to be; life was coming to me in new forms and with new requirements.
It was essential to our situation that we should fail to understand.
After this space of years I have come to realisations and attitudes that
dissolve my estrangement from her, I can pierce these barriers, I
can see her and feel her as a loving and feeling and desiring and
muddle-headed person. There are times when I would have her alive again,
if only that I might be kind to her for a little while and give her
some return for the narrow intense affection, the tender desires, she
evidently lavished so abundantly on me. But then again I ask how I
could make that return? And I realise the futility of such dreaming. Her
demand was rigid, and to meet it I should need to act and lie.

So she whose blood fed me, whose body made me, lies in my memory as I