The Rainbow

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.