She put down her pen, and looking out through the open window at the starry sky she tried to think of him, tried to think of death. But it was difficult to think of death. It was difficult, she found, to keep the mind uninterruptedly on the idea of extinction, of non-life instead of life, of nothingness. In books one reads about sages meditating. She herself had often tried to meditate. But somehow it never seemed to come to much. All sorts of little irrelevant thoughts kept coming into her head. There was no focussing death, no keeping it steadily under the mind’s eye. In the end she found herself reading through what she had written, putting in a stop here and there, correcting slips in the style, where it seemed to be too formal, too made-up, insufficiently spontaneous and unsuitable to the secret diary. At the end of the last paragraph she added another “darling Jim,” and she repeated the words to herself, aloud, again and again. The exercise produced its usual effect; she felt the tears coming into her eyes. The Quakers pray as the spirit moves them; but to let oneself be moved by the spirit is an arduous business. Kindlier and more worldly churches, with a feeling for human weakness, provide their worshippers with rituals, litanies, beads and prayer wheels. “Darling Jim, darling Jim.” Miss Thriplow had found the form of words for her worship. “Darling Jim.” The tears did her good; she felt better, kinder, softer. And then, suddenly, she seemed to be listening to herself from outside. “Darling Jim.” But did she really care at all? Wasn’t it all a comedy, all a pretence? He had died so long ago; he had nothing to do with her now. Why should she care or remember? And all this systematic thinking about him, this writing of things in a secret diary devoted to his memory—wasn’t all that merely for the sake of keeping her emotions in training? Wasn’t she deliberately scratching her heart to make it bleed, and then writing stories with the red fluid? Miss Thriplow put away the thoughts as soon as they occurred to her: put them aside indignantly. They were monstrous thoughts, lying thoughts. She picked up her pen again and wrote, very quickly, as though she were writing an exorcising spell and the sooner it had been put on paper the sooner the evil thoughts would vanish. “Do you remember, Jim, that time we went out in the canoe together and nearly got drowned?...” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PART II: FRAGMENTS FROM THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF FRANCIS CHELIFER ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PART II: Fragments from the Autobiography of Francis Chelifer CHAPTER I