'Save me! You must save me, for I am in despair and only you can rescue me. I am alone, I am in love, I am terrified out of my wits. Everything is in a conspiracy against me, everything menaces me, everything is new and unknown and terrifying, for love has changed it, and changed me too, so that I can do nothing to save myself, I can only whirl to and fro among my fears. Oh, save me, you ought to save me, for I am yours, I have given myself to you, I am not my own any longer. And yet I don't feel as thought you had got me. I am like a ghost, I don't know myself any longer. I am like a dream. The sight of my own hand is enough to startle me, it seems strange and not mine. I am like your dream, and you may wake up and forget me, and I shall never be able to find my way to you any more.'
Orphan Sukey Bond is placed as a servant with a family on a small farm in the marshes of England. By the members of the family there she is either ignored or condescended to, with one exception: a mysterious young man named Eric, who the brothers of the family insist is not their relation at all. One day, Eric leads Sukey to a secret and abandoned orchard full of fruit, where he kisses her for the first time. Eric is pure and good-hearted--perhaps, you might suspect, a little too pure, as when he suggests they climb through the window of an empty church and get married. Later, he has a convulsive fit when Sukey is compelled to slaughter a chicken for dinner. Eric, the family explains, is "an idiot"--and soon his haughty and ashamed mother has spirited him away from the house where she has hidden him away, leaving Sukey alone.
The True Heart is the story of Sukey's long quest to find Eric and bring their promise of marriage to each other to fruition. Townsend Warner gives the impression that Sukey, too, doesn't quite have full possession of her faculties: entreating Eric's mother, she confesses an unshakable belief that she is pregnant, though all the pair has done is smooch in an orchard. But Sukey's naivete is not permanent, but the product of youth and inexperience, which finds in Eric a kind of familiar companion. The True Heart believes that there is a wonder in the simplicity of childhood and its imaginative power, which is lost in the process of aging. See how, by contrast, a slightly older Sukey veers toward cynicism and despair:
One day, in the midst of stilling the outcries of little Louise, who had stuffed her nostrils with soap, it flashed upon her with an extraordinary unreality that she had once believed herself to be pregnant. It seemed the delusion of a child. Just so, in the old days at Notting Dale, she had awoken one morning firmly convinced that she could fly, and had launched herself down a flight of stairs, to roll bewildered and howling into a clothes-basket. Perhaps her very love had been a delusion too. It had seemed like love, but so had it seemed to her that she would bear a child. One was untrue, so might the other be. For what did she know about love? Nothing. A farm-servant, very young, very ignorant, who had been kissed by a boy who was not quite in his right mind.
But Eric acts like a lifeline for Sukey's youthfulness, keeping it alive even in his absence. It's this youthful imagination that gives Sukey the boldness to abandon three different placements to renew her search for Eric, and to traipse around the English countryside, relying on the kindness of tramps and madams. She develops a ridiculous notion that if she can procure a signed Bible from Queen Victoria and present it to Eric's mother, she will see the light and permit the marriage. It seems impossible, but Sukey's firm belief makes it possible, and in the end, she really does meet the Queen, she really does get the Bible. Things don't quite work as she expects, but that doesn't seem to matter; what matters is that Sukey believes in the dream of her youth at all costs.
The True Heart is very charming; it's the kind of heartwarming and optimistic--but not shallow or didactic--book that I needed at this difficult moment. As in Lolly Willowes and Mr. Fortune, Townsend Warner creates characters that are appealing and convincing, sympathetic even in their follies and mistakes.
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