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I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

by Mary MacLane · English · Gutenberg #43556 · 376,594 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days

Author: Mary MacLane


        
Release date: August 25, 2013 [eBook #43556]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK I, MARY MACLANE: A DIARY OF HUMAN DAYS ***

  [Photograph: Author’s portrait]
  [Signature: Mary MacLane]




  I, MARY MACLANE

  _A DIARY OF HUMAN DAYS_


  BY
  MARY MACLANE
  AUTHOR OF “THE STORY OF MARY MACLANE”


  [Illustration: Publisher’s logo]


  NEW YORK
  FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
  PUBLISHERS




  _Copyright, 1917, by_
  FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY


_All rights reserved, including that of translation into
foreign languages._




_To M-- T--_


  _these Live Fruits
  from the Withered Garden_




I, MARY MACLANE




_A crucible of my own making_


                                                        To-day

It is the edge of a somber July night in this Butte-Montana.

The sky is overcast. The nearer mountains are gray-melancholy.

And at this point I meet Me face to face.

I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and
dearly and damnably important to Me.

Face to face I look at Me with some hatred, with despair and with
great intentness.

I put Me in a crucible of my own making and set it in the flaming
trivial Inferno of my mind. And I assay thus:

I am rare--I am in some ways exquisite.

I am pagan within and without.

I am vain and shallow and false.

I am a specialized being, deeply myself.

I am of woman-sex and most things that go with that, with some other
_pointes_.

I am dynamic but devasted, laid waste in spirit.

I’m like a leopard and I’m like a poet and I’m like a religieuse and
I’m like an outlaw.

I have a potent weird sense of humor--a saving and a demoralizing
grace.

I have brain, cerebration--not powerful but fine and of a remarkable
quality.

I am scornful-tempered and I am brave.

I am slender in body and someway fragile and firm-fleshed and sweet.

I am oddly a fool and a strange complex liar and a spiritual vagabond.

I am strong, individual in my falseness: wavering, faint, fanciful in
my truth.

I am eternally self-conscious but sincere in it.

I am ultra-modern, very old-fashioned: savagely incongruous.

I am young, but not very young.

I am wistful--I am infamous.

In brief, I am a human being.

I am presciently and analytically egotistic, with some arresting
dead-feeling genius.

And were I not so tensely tiredly sane I would say that I am mad.

So assayed I begin to write this book of myself, to show to myself in
detail the woman who is inside me. It may or it mayn’t show also a
type, a universal Eve-old woman. If it is so it is not my purport. I
sing only the Ego and the individual.

So does in secret each man and woman and child who breathes, but is
afraid to sing it aloud. And mostly none knows it is that he does
sing. But it is the only strength of each. A bishop serving truly
and tirelessly the poor of his diocese serves a strong vanity and
ideal of the Ego in himself. A starving sculptor who lives in and for
his own dreams is an Egotist equally with the bishop. And both are
Egotists equally with me.

Egotist, not egoist, is my word: it and not the idealized one is the
‘winged word.’

It is made of glow and gleam and splendor, that Ego. I would be its
votary.

So I write me this book of Me--my Soul, my Heart, my sentient Body,
my magic Mind: their potentialities and contradictions.

--there is a Self in each human one which lives and has its sweet
vain someway-frightful being not in depths and not in surfaces but
Just Beneath The Skin. It is the Self one keeps for oneself alone.
It is the Essence of soul and bones. It is the slyest subtlest thing
in human scope. It is the loneliest: tragically lonely. It is long,
long isolation--beautiful, terrifying, barbarous, shameful, trivial
to points of madness, ever-present, infinitely intriguing to oneself,
passionately hidden: hidden forever and forever--

It is my aim to write out that in the pages of this Me-book: no
depths save as they come up and touch that, no surfaces save as they
sink skin-deep. Only the flat unglowing bloody Self Just Beneath My
Skin.

I shall fail in it, partly because my writing skill is unequal to
some nicenesses in the task, but mostly because I am not very honest
even with myself.

I’ll come someway near it.




_Half inevitably, half by choice_


                                                        To-morrow

Half inevitably, half by choice, I write this book now.

I am at a lowering impatient shoulder-shrugging life-point where I
must express myself or lose myself or break.

And I am quite alone as I live my life.

And I am unhappy--a scornful unhappiness not of bitter positive grief
which admits of engulfing luxuries of sorrow, but of muffled unrests
and tortures of knowing I fit in nowhere, that I drift--drift--and it
brings an unbearable dread, always more and more dread, into days and
into wakeful nights.

And writing it turns the brunt of it a little away from me.

And to write is the thing I most love to do.

And I myself am the most immediate potent topic I can find in my
knowledge to write on: the biggest, the littlest, the broadest, the
narrowest, the loveliest, the hatefulest, the most colorful, the most
drab, the most mystic, the most obvious, and the one that takes me
farthest as a writer and as a person.

I write myself when I write the thoughts smouldering in me whether
they be of Death, of Roses, of Christ’s Mother, of Ten-penny Nails.

One’s thoughts are one’s most crucial adventures. Seriously and
strongly and intently to contemplate doing murder is everyway more
exciting, more romantic, more profoundly tragic than the murder done.

I unfold myself in accursed and precious written thoughts. I cast the
reflections of my inner selves on the paper from the insolent mirror
of my Mind.

--my Mind--it is so free--

My Soul is not free: God hung a string of curses, like a little
manacling chain, round its neck long and long ago. Always I feel it.
My Heart is not free for it is dead: in a listless way and a trivial
way, dead. And my Body--it is free but has a seeming of something
wasted and useless like a dinner spread out on a table uneaten and
growing cold.

--but my free Mind--

Though I were shut fast in a prison: though I were strapped in an
electric chair: though I were gnawed and decayed by leprosy: I
still could _think_, with thoughts free as gold-drenched outer air,
thoughts delicate-luminous as young dawn, thoughts facile, seductive,
speculative, artful, evil, sly, sublime.

You might cut off my two hands: but you could not keep me from
remembering the Sad Gray Loveliness of the Sea when the Rain beats,
beats, beats upon it.

You might admonish me by driving a red-hot spike between my two white
shoulders: but you could not by that influence my Thoughts--you could
not so much as change their current.

I am intently aware of my Mind from moment to moment--all the passing
life-moments. The awareness is a troubled power, a heavy burden and a
wild enchantment.--

Also what I feel I write.

I am my own law, my own oracle, my own one intimate friend, my own
guide though I guide me to dead-walls, my own mentor, my own foe, my
own lover.

I am in age one-and-thirty, a smouldering-flamed period which
feels the wings of the Youth-bird beating strong and violent for
flight--half-ready to fly away.

I am not a charming person. Quite seventy singly-used adjectives
would better fit me.

But I have some charm of youth, and a charm of sex, and a charm of
intellect and intuition, and some charms of personality.

I have a perfervid appreciation of those things in other persons. And
my steel has sometime struck fire from their flint.

But always my steel has turned back drearily yet strongly to itself.




_A twisted moral_


                                                        To-morrow

If I should meet God to know and speak to the first thing but one I
should ask him would be, ‘What was your idea, God, in making me?’

I can believe he had some Purpose in it.

I’m in most ways a devilish person. There’s sevenfold more evil
than good in me. It is evil of a mixed and menacing kind, the kind
that goes dressed in brave and beauty-tinted clothes and is sane
and sound. While the good in me is ill and forlorn and nervously
afraid--a something of tear-blurred eyes and trembling fingers.

Yet God has made many things less plausible than me. He has made
sharks in the ocean, and people who hire children to work in their
mills and mines, and poison ivy and zebras--

--and he has made besides a Wonder of things: Thin Pink Mountain
Dawns, Young English Poets, Hydrangeas in the sudden Blue of their
first Bloom, human Singing Voices,--more things, always more--

When I think of them all a joyous thrill breaks over me like a little
frenzied wave. It is delirium-of-bliss to feel oneself living though
shadows be pitch-black.

God has a Purpose in making everything, I think.

I am half-curious about the Purpose that goes with me. He might have
made me for his own amusement. He might have made me to discipline
my Soul with some blights and goads or to punish it for bacchanalian
ease and pleasure in the long-distant centuries-old past. He might
have made me to season or scourge other lives, as I may touch them,
with Mary-Mac-Lane-ness. He might have made me to point a twisted
moral.

I muse about it with doubts.

But if I knew my Purpose I belike would not swerve a hair’s-breadth
from my own course which is an unhallowedly selfish one.

If I could myself see a way of truth I would walk in it. I have it in
me to worship. I long to worship. And I am game, wearily and coldly
game: when I start I go on through to the end.

But I see no way of truth--none for me. And God is eternally absent
and reticent. So I go on in the way where I find myself. And muse
about it. And damn it faintly as I make nothing of it.




_Everyday and to-morrow_


                                                        To-morrow

Aloofly I live in this Butte in the outward rôle of a family daughter
with no responsibilities.

This Butte is an incongruous living-place for me.

And I have not one human friend in it--no kindliness. And Nature in
her perplexingest mood would not of herself have cast me as a family
daughter. Three things have kept me thus for four years past: that
nothing has called me out of it: a slight family pressure like a tiny
needle-point which pierces only if one moves: and to stay thus is
presently the line of least resistance.

Unless impelled to violent action by a violent reason--like love
or hatred or jealousy or a baby or humiliated pride or rowelling
ambition--a woman follows the physical line of least resistance. I
have followed it these years with outward acquiescence and inward
rages--languid rages which lay me waste.

The years and acquiescences and rages have built up a mood which
compasses me, drives me, damns me and lifts me up.

It is a forceful mood, though I am not myself forceful.

This mood is this book.--

I live an immoral life. It is immoral because it is deadly futile.
All my Tissues of body, soul, mind and heart are wasting, decaying,
wearing down, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day: with no
return to me or to my life, nor to anything human or divine.

It makes me dread my life and myself.

I do not quite know why.

But to be an ardent pickpocket or an eager harlot would feel honester.

My Everyday goes like this: I waken in the morning and lie listless
some minutes with drooping eyelids. I look at a gilt-and-blue bar
of morning light which slants palely in at one window and at a
melting-gold triangle of sun which shows at the other window on the
red brick wall of the house next to this. Then I say ‘another day,’
and I kick off bed-covers with one foot and slide out of my narrow
bed, and into blue slippers, and out of a thin nightgown, and into
peignoir or bathrobe. I twist and flatten and gather up my tangled
hair and push some amber pins through it. And I go into a respectable
green-and-gray bathroom and draw a bath and get into it. I splash in
brief swift soapsuds, and go under a sudden heroic icy cold shower,
and dry me with a scourging towel. Then I go back into the blue-white
bed-room and get into clothes, feminine thin under-garments and a
nunlike frock.

I look in my mirror. Some days I’m a delicately beautiful girl.
Other days I’m a very plain woman.

One’s physical attractiveness is a matter of one’s mental chemistry.

I say to Me in the mirror, ‘It’s you-and-me, Mary MacLane, and
another wasting damning To-morrow.

  “To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
   Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.”’

A haunting decadence is in that To-morrow thought. And always the
To-morrow thought comes out of my morning mirror. I dwell on it
awhile, till my gray eyes and my lips and my teeth and my forehead
are tired of it, and make nothing new of it.

I jerk the flat scollop of hair at one side of my forehead and
turn away. I open door and windows wider for the blowing-through
of breezes. And I wander down-stairs. It is half-after nine or
half-after ten. I go into the clean empty clock-ticking kitchen
and cook my breakfast. It is a task full of hungry plaisance and
pleasantness. I make a British-feeling breakfast of tea and marmalade
and little squares of toast and pink-and-tan rashers of bacon and two
delightful eggs. Up to the moment of broaching the eggs the morning
has an ancient sameness with other mornings. But eggs, though I’ve
eaten them every day for quite five-and-twenty years, are always a
fascinating novelty.

They are delicious in my breakfast. So are the squares of toast and
the bacon-rashers and the tea and marmalade. When I’ve done with them
I lay down my napkin by my cup, light a cigarette, breathe a puff
or two from it and feel contentedly aware that my brain has gone to
rest in sweet tranquillity with my breakfast. When my brain is in my
head it analyzes the soul out of my body, the gleam out of my gray
eyes, the savor out of my life, the human taste off my tongue. That
post-breakfast moment is the only peace-moment I know in my day and
in my life.

Having puffed away the cigarette and read bits of a morning paper
I then prove me arrantly middle-class by contemplating washing my
breakfast dishes.

I am middle-class, quite, from the Soul outward. But it is not
specially apparent--one’s tastes and aspirations flit garbledly far
and wide. But a tendency to wash one’s dishes after eating one’s
breakfast feels conclusively and pleasantly middle-class. Not that I
do always wash them, but always I think of it with the inclination to
do it.

I sit on the shaded front veranda in the summer noon-day and look
away south at the blue Highlands, ever snow-peaked: or east at the
near towering splendid grim wall of the arid Rockies which separates
this Butte from New York, from London,--the Spain-castles--the
Pyramids--the Isle of Lesbos: or south-west beyond house-tops at some
foothills above which hangs a fairy veil made by melting together a
Lump of Gold and an Apricot and spreading it thin.

Then restlessly I go into the house and up to my room. I put it in
order--in prim, prim immaculate order. One marked phase of mine
is of some wanton creature--a mænad, a mental Amazon, a she-imp.
But playing opposite to that is another--that of a New-England
spinster steel-riveted to certain neat ferociously-orderly habits.
A stray thread on my blue rug hurts, _hurts_ me until I pick it
up. Dust around my room gives me a nervous pain, a piteous gnawing
grief-of-the-senses, until I’ve removed it. And my chastened-looking
bed--after I’ve turned over its tufted mattress and ‘made’ it, smooth
and white and crisp and soft--how the fibers of me would writhe
should anyone sit on it. But no one sits on it. And I myself sooner
than press one finger-tip down into its perfectness would sell my
body to a Balkan soldier for four dimes: it is that way I feel about
it. My bed _must_ be kept perfect till the moment I slip into it at
night to float under the dream-worlds.

Then maybe I pull a soft black hat down over my hair and draw on
gloves and go out into the gray-paved streets for a longish walk.
Or maybe the day is humidly hot. Then I don’t go but stay in the
blue-white room and mend a bit of torn lingerie or a handkerchief
or a silk stocking or a petticoat. Or I take books and dig out some
Greek--Homer or a Sapphic fragment--very laboriously but marvelling
that I can do it at all: the first things one forgets being the
last things one learned at school. Or I read an English or a French
philosopher, or a translated Tolstoi, or a bit of Balzac novel, or
some bits of Dickens-books with which latter I am long familiar and
long enamored for the restful falseness of their sentiment and the
pungent appetizing charm of their villains.

And betweenwhiles I think and think.

Then it’s dinnertime and I perhaps change into the other nunlike
dress, and nibble some dinner with no appetite, and talk with the
assembled small family in a vein and tone of life-long insincerity.
When in family-circle-ness I’ve had to hide my true self as if behind
a hundred black veils since the age of two years. It would be a
poignant effort now to show any of it at the family dinners, which
is the only meeting-time. The one easy way is to be comprehensively
insincere at the dinners where with no appetite I nibble. None
there wants my sincerity, and so in my Soul’s accounting now it is
eternally and determinedly No Matter. It is a little bell which
stopped ringing long and long ago. If it rang now it would ring only
No-Matter, No-Matter.

Then it’s night and I go to take the walk I didn’t take in the
afternoon. I walk down long lonely streets. Long lonely thoughts
pile into me and through me and wrap me in a nebula that I can feel
around me like a mantle. I walk two or three miles of paved streets
till I’m very tired. I am lithe but fragile from constant involuntary
self-analysis. One may analyze one’s life-experience and life-emotion
till physical tissues at times grow frail, gossamer-thin. It is then
as if--at a word, a whispered thought, a beat of the heart--one’s
Soul might flutter through the Veil, join light hands with the
death-angel and flee away.

--but I love my life even while I analyze it bit by bit and so hate
it. I love it in its grating monotones and its moments of glow and
its days of shadow and storm and bitterish lowering passion--

I walk back beneath a night sky of dusky velvet-blue decked with
jewels of moon and star and flying bright-edged cloud. The night has
a subdued preciousness, like an illicitly pregnant woman’s. It is big
with the bastard-exquisite To-morrow. The night air kisses my lips
and throat. I pull off my gloves to feel it on my hands. It gives me
a charmed and unexciting feeling of being caressed without being
loved.

I come back to my blue-white room, take off my hat, ruffle my fingers
through my hair, look at Me in the mirror and smile the melancholy
wicked smile which I keep for Me-alone. It’s an intimate moment of
greeting--a recognition of my Familiar on coming back to her. Often
when I walk I go without Me, and wander far from Me, and forget Me.

Then I sit at my flat black desk and write desultorily for two or
three or four hours. Sometimes a letter, sometimes some verses or a
hectic fancy in staid prose. But now mostly this.

Then I go downstairs to a refrigerator or a cellar-way to find
food--a slice off an affable cold joint, some chaste-looking slices
of bread, a slim innocent onion. And I eat them, not relishingly but
voraciously, reminding myself of a lean foraging furtive coyote. It
is two or three or four in the morning. I smoke a quiet cigarette in
a cool night doorway and count the nervous gray-velvet moths outside
the screen.

And all the while I think and think.

Then I come up to my room and sit on the floor by my low bookcase and
read some last-century English poets--the Brownings and Shelley and
the unspeakable John Keats. The Poets make me a space of incalescent
magic and loveliness. They are the beings blest of a flaming Heaven.
In the midst of soddenest earthiness their fiery wings ‘pierce the
night.’

Then I’m thrilledly tired. I close the books and make ready for
my bed in a lyric-feeling languor. A soft soothing unsnapping of
whalebone stays: a muffled rhythmic undoing of metal-and-silk-rubber
garters: a pushing down and sliding out of daytime clothes
and into a thin pale cool silk nightgown: a hurried brushing
of hair: an anointing of hands and throat with faint-scented
cream: a goodnight to Me in the mirror: a last wave of a fateful
thing--my life-essence--casual and determined and contemptuous and
menacing--sweeping down over me in an invisible shower: and I’m
betwixt smooth linen sheets.

In twenty seconds blest, blest sleep.

Of such wide littleness is my day made. One day will differ from
another in this or that volcanic molehill. And some days I not only
wash a great many dishes but do a deal of housework neatly and
self-satisfactorily and like a devilish scullery maid.

And some days as I move in the petty pace thoughts and feelings sweet
or barbarous come and change my world’s face in a moment.

Also a casual human being of rabbitish brain and chipmunkish
sensibility may stray across my path and gently bore me and
accentuate my own paganness.

But always the same days in restless dubious To-morrowness.

Always immorally futile.

And eerily alone.




_A mathematic dead-wall_


                                                        To-morrow

I’m put to it to decide whether God loves me or hates me when he sets
me down alone.

There are times when my Loneliness is a charmed and scintillant and
resourceful Loneliness with a strange and ecstatic gleam in it. The
miracle of being a person rushes upon and about and into me ‘with
lightning and with music.’

One loses that in a day of many friendships.

But oftener are times when the tired, tired heart and the weary,
weary brain beat-beat, beat-beat to anguished torturing self-rhythms.
The spirit of me closes its eyes in turbulent dusks of wondering
and wishing and leans its forehead against a mathematic dead-wall.
And it prays--blind useless unhumble prayers which leave it dry and
destitute, arid, unspeakably lacking. But when it lifts its head
and opens its eyes there are the melting mauves and maroons of a
dead sun across the evening sky, and the small far wistful flames of
always-hopeful stars.

--they make it matter less whether God loves or hates me, but I still
wish I knew.




_My neat blue chair_


                                                        To-morrow

I suppose there’s nothing quite peculiar to even my inmost self in
what I ponder and what I experience and what I feel.

My only elemental ‘differentness’ is that I find it and write it.

But I used to think at eighteen--those thrice-fired adolescent
moments--that only I suffered, only I reached achingly out into the
mists, only I tasted new-bloomed life-petals intolerably sweet and
bitter on my lips.

The egotism of youth is merciless, measureless, endlessly vulnerable.
Youth plays on itself as one plays on a little dulcimer, with music
as sweet, but with a crude cruel recklessness which jerks and breaks
the strings.

I have got by that stage of egotism. But I’ve entered on another
wilder, more lawless--farther-seeing if less be-visioned.

While I sit here this midnight in a Neat Blue Chair in this
Butte-Montana for what I know a legion-women of my psychic breed
may be sitting lonely in neat red or neat blue or neat gray or neat
any-colored chairs--in Wichita-Kansas and South Bend-Indiana and
Red Wing-Minnesota and Portland-Maine and Rochester-New York and
Waco-Texas and La Crosse-Wisconsin and Bowling Green-Kentucky:
each feeling Herself set in a wrong niche, caught in a tangle of
little vapidish cross-purpose: each waiting, waiting always--waiting
all her life--not hopeful and passionate like Eighteen but patient
or blasphemous or scornful or volcanic like Early-Thirty: the
waiting-sense giving to each a personal quality big and suggestive
and nurturing--and with it a long-accustomed feeling like a thin
bright blade stuck deep in her breast: each more or less roundly
hating Waco-Texas and Portland-Maine and Red Wing-Minnesota and the
other places: and each beset by hot unquiet humannesses inside her
and an old yearn of sex and the blood warring with myriad minute
tenets dating from civilization’s dawn-times.

But though I am of that psychic breed no little tenets war in me.

It’s as if a prelate and a wood-nymph had fathered and mothered
me: making me of a ridiculous poignant conscience and of no human
traditions.

I am free of innate conventionalities, free as a wildcat on a
twilight hill. I am free of them as I sit here, quiet-looking in my
plain black dress. The virile Scotch-Canadian curl is brushed and
brushed out of my hair to make it lie smooth and discreet over my
ears and forehead. My feet are shod daintily like a charming girl’s.
My nails are pinkly polishedly pointed. My narrow black eyebrows
look nearly patrician in their sereneness. My lips are stilly sad.
My eyelids droop like the sucking dove’s. But my gray eyes beneath
the lids--when I raise them to the glass, my own Essence looks out
of them, tiredly vivid. It seems made of languor and barbaricness
and despair: and vague guiltiness, and some pure disastrous heathen
religion, and lust: and lurid consciousness of everyday things and
smouldering melancholy and blazing loving hatred of life.

My gray eyes out-look the wildcat’s on a twilight hill.

But--so far as the Sitting goes--I sit here in my Neat Blue Chair
the same as they all sit in any-colored chairs in their Wichitas and
La Crosses.




_A lost person_


                                                        To-morrow

I am wandering about, a Lost Person, wandering and lost.

Not magnificently lost in wide Gothic forest closes, with strong
great blackish green trunks and branches all around overwhelming and
thrilling me.

Not dramatically lost on desert reefs with breakers riding up like
menacing hosts and joyously drowning me.

But lost surprisingly in a small clump of shoulder-high hazel-brush.
In it are some wood-ticks, and a few caterpillars, and a few wan
spiders which spin little desultory webs from twig to twig and then
abandon them for other twigs. Underfoot are unexpected wet places at
intervals that my high hard heels sink into exasperatingly.

I walk round and round and across in the hazel-brush groping and
knowing I’m lost in it but knowing little else of it: knowing no way
out of it.

The bushes bear green leaves--rather small ones and warped because
the clump is in a half-shaded place back of a hill. And they bear
hazel-nuts, but not very good ones--mostly shell.




_A thin damnedness_


                                                        To-morrow

I own Two plain black Dresses and none besides.

And I need no more.

In which two sentences I touch the crux and the keynote and the thin
damnedness of my life as it is set: of my life, not of myself, for
myself lives naked inside the circle of my life.

But my outer life is spaced by my Two plain Dresses. My Two Dresses
measure how far removed I presently am from the wide world of things.

In the world of things a woman is judged not specifically by her
morals: not invariably by her reputation: not absolutely by her
money: not indubitably by her social prestige: only relatively by her
beauty: and as to her brain or lack of it--la-la-la! She is judged in
the matter-world simply, completely, entirely by her clothes. It is
tacitly so agreed and decreed all over the earth--wherever women are
of the female sex and men pursue them.

It is no injustice to any woman. It is the fairest fiat in the
unwritten code.

Only a few women, the few specialized breeds, can express the fire
or the humanness in them by play-acting or suffragetting or singing
or painting or writing or trained-nursing or house-keeping. But
there’s not one--from a wandering Romany gypsy, red-blooded and
strong-hearted, to an over-guarded overbred British princess--who
doesn’t express what she is in the clothes she wears and the way she
wears them.

Her clothes conceal and reveal, artfully and contradictorily and
endlessly.

It is all a limitless field.

No actor could act Hamlet without that perfect Hamletesque black
costume.

A nun’s staid beautiful habit interprets her own meanings within and
without.

A woman naked may look markedly pure: the same woman clothed
conventionally and demurely may achieve a meanly ghoulishly foul
seeming.

One either is made or marred by one’s habiliments.

A woman by her raiment’s make and manner can express more of her wit,
her ego, her temper, her humor, her plastic pulsating personality
than she could by throwing a bomb, by making a good or bad pudding,
by losing her chastity or by traducing her neighbor. The germ and
shadow and likelihood of each of those acts is in the fashion and
line and detail of her garments.

A jury thinks it tries a woman for a crime. Some of the twelve good
and true may admit each to himself that they are trying the color of
her eyes or the shape of her chin or the droop of her shoulders. But
it’s only her clothes they unwittingly try for murder or theft or
forgery, or whatever has tripped her. It may be an alluringly shabby
little dress that saves her from the gallows. It may be a hat worn at
the wrong angle that is found guilty and sentenced to death. A glove
in her lap, a fluttering veil, a little white handkerchief dropped to
the floor by her chair--those are what the court tries for life or
liberty.--

But it is I I tell about, I and my Two plain Dresses.

In me a smart frock or an unbecoming one makes a surprising
difference. I impress my costume with my mixed temperament and it
retaliates in kind.

One day I looked a beautiful young creature--one August Saturday in
New York it was--in a tailored gown of embroidered linen. With it I
wore such a good hat: its color was pale olive: its texture was soft
Milan straw: its price was forty dollars. My shoes were gray silk. I
so fancied myself that day that I feared lest my writing talent had
gone away from me. For God takes away the beer if he gives you the
skittles. And in ill-conditioned clothes--some days the weather, the
devil, the soddenness of life get into one’s garments and make even
fair ones look ill-conditioned--I am plain-faced, plain all over--so
plain that the villainies of my nature feel doubtful and I half-think
I may be a good woman.

In a life full of people I would own varied delicate beautiful
clothes since it is by them one is judged, and since I am quite
vain. But no people are in my life. I feel deadlocked. I am caught in
a vise made by my own analytic ratiocination. I am not free to live a
world-life till I’ve someway expressed Me and learned if not whither
I go at least where I stand.

So it’s Two plain Dresses I own and none besides.

It may be I shall not ever again need more.

The Two Dresses are at present of serge and voile. Their identity
changes with change of fashion and with wearing out. They are cut
well and fit me well. But the Two does not change, nor the plainness.
I change only from one Frock to the other and from the other to the
one again.

I have various other clothes. A woman--whatever her traits and
tempers--garners what she can of handmade under-linens and dainty
nightgowns and silk hose and all such private panoply. They are the
apparel of her sex rather than her individuality. The uncognizant
world is unable to judge her by them. But the woman herself judges
and respects herself by the goodness of her intimate garments.

My sex is to me a mystic gift. I marvel over it and clothe it
silkenly.

Also I own a healthful-looking percale house-gown or two in which I
do housework.

But my passing life, my eerie lonely life, is lived in my Two Dresses
and none besides, and I need no more.




_A prison of self_


                                                        To-morrow

My Two Dresses tell me the scope of my present Mary-Mac-Lane-ness.

Every day they tell me things about myself.

They tell me I’m living in a prison of self, invisible and ascetic
and somberly just.

They tell me I’m living an outer life narrow and broodingly
companionless and that if I were not self-reliant by long habit a
leprous morbidness would rot me in body and spirit.

They tell me because of outer solitude an inner fever of emotion and
egotism and a fervid analytic light are on all my phases of self:
mental, physical, psychical and sexual.

They tell me my way of thought is at once meditative and
cave-womanish.

They tell me I’m all ways the Unmarried Woman and profoundly
loverless.

They tell me I’m like a child and like a sequestered savage.

They tell me I am having no restful unrealities of social life with
chattering women and no monotonous casually bloodthirsty flirtations
with men.

They tell me I walk daily to the edges of myself and stare into
horrible-sweet egotistic abysses.

They tell me I’m grave-eyed and coldly melancholy.

They tell me there’s a bereftness in the curves of my breasts and an
unfulfillment in my loose-girt loins.

They tell me I am barren of sensation and fertile in feeling.

They tell me God has taken away the beer and also the skittles and
left me only pieces of bread and drinks of water.




_A winding sheet_


                                                        To-morrow

The least important thing in my life is its tangibleness.

The only things that matter lastingly are the things that happen
inside me.

If I do a cruel act and feel no cruelty in my Soul it is nothing. If
I feel cruelty in my Soul though I do no cruel act I’m guilty of a
sort of butchery and my spirit-hands are bloody with it.

The adventures of my spirit are realer than the outer things that
befall me.

To dwell on the self that is known only to me--the self that is
intricate and versatile, tinted, demi-tinted, deep-dyed, luminous,
gives me an intimate delectation, a mental inflorescence and
sometimes an exaltation. It is not always so but it can be so. But
always to look back on the mass of outer events that have made my
tangible life darkens my day.

Introspection throws a witching spell around me, though it may be a
black one.

But retrospection wraps me in a Winding Sheet.

When the day is already dark from low-hanging clouds--and often when
the sun is bright, bright, bright--I walk my floor and think of my
scattered life-flotsam with a frown at the eyebrows: a coarse and
heavy and twisted frown.

To-day was a leaden day. The air held a quality like the infernal
breath of dead people. I leaned elbows on my dull window-sill and
looked off at green and purple mountains. I tried to think of some
reason--some reason tangible or poetic--for living.

I wore my brocade Chinese coat fastened down the left side with
round flashing glass buttons and embroidered with blue bats and
gardenias: and with it a crinkly crêpe-silk petticoat: and silk
shoes and respectable white silk stockings. I felt righteous because
in the forenoon I had done much housework. I worked thoroughly and
well, swearing and repeating poetry softly to lend me impetus. And
afterward I felt useful and good.

But having changed from Dutch cap and apron and domesticness to
scented silk and my sad window I grew suddenly frail and vulnerable.
Shadows stormed my wall and scaled it and entered in and sacked my
castle. I lounged away from my window, folded my arms in my loose
blue sleeves and slowly walked my floor. I had no strength within to
combat shadows.

I picked up two alien shreds, of lint and paper respectively, from
the rug, but inside me undigested and indigestible memories had their
own way.

They brought close an unsatisfying and dissatisfying vista of Mary
MacLanes.

There was a stubborn baby in Winnipeg-Canada, as I’ve heard, a baby
with a white skin, coldly pensive dark-blue eyes, no hair, no voice,
hand-worked muslin frocks and a fat lumpish mien.

It was this Mary MacLane.

There was a three-year-old child, as I dimly remember, still in
Canada and still stubborn, with a stout keg-like pink-and-white body,
baffling blue eyes, a tiny voice, thick sun-colored curls, cambric
frocks and short white socks and a morose temper. She had one love,
a yellow tortoise-shell kitten which she hugged and hugged with
violence until one day it died surprisingly in her arms.

It was this Mary MacLane.

There was a seven-year-old child in Minnesota, as I well remember,
still stubborn and still often morose, with a thin bony little body,
conscious gray eyes, a tanned face, weather-beaten hands, untidy
frocks, beautiful fluffy golden hair, a tendency to secretiveness and
lies, a speculative mind, fantastic day-dreams and a free hoydenish
way of life. She had playmates but no loves except an objective love
for quiet greenwoods and sweet meadows and windy hills and hay-filled
barns, and for the surface details of life. She had subjective
hatreds for being fussed over, for being teased and for relatives.

It was this Mary MacLane.

There was a thirteen-year-old person, as I well remember, in a
windy Montana town, who was neither girl, child nor savage but
was a mixture of the three. She had a devilish contrary will and
temper, the unenlightened inexpressive wholly unattractive face and
features of early adolescence, a self-love that had not the dignity
of egotism and a devouring appetite for reading. She read everything
she happened on--from Voltaire to Nick Carter: from ‘Lady Audley’s
Secret’ to Fox’s Book of Martyrs. She read Alexander Pope and Victor
Hugo and John Stuart Mill. She read ‘Lena Rivers’ by Mary J. Holmes:
also Confucius: and the Brothers Grimm. She had a long-legged lanky
frame, conscious gray eyes, lovely coppery-gold dark hair and a silly
headful of tangled irrational thoughts. She had pathetic impossible
day-dreams. She had few companions and no loves but much hatred for
most things sane, sensible and honest.

It was this Mary MacLane.

There was an eighteen-year-old girl in this Butte, as I well
remember, with the outward savagery tamed out of her by studiousness.
She was slim but no longer lanky and owned a white-hot aliveness
and a grace. She had repelling gray eyes and the beautiful coppery
hair, and about her an isolation, a complete aloofness. Her spirit
fed itself on wonderful and exquisite dreams alternated by moods
of young passionate woe, analyzed and torn to shreds: all of it hid
beneath a very quiet surface. She had outwardly a tense markedly
virginal quality but was inwardly insolently demi-vierge. She had no
companions, no friendships. She absorbed herself in digging knowledge
out of her high school text-books, studying and imagining over it,
and wandering in the fascinating highways which it opened to her. She
was at her moment of brain-awakening, soul-awakening, sex-awakening,
life-awakening, world-awakening: it uncurtained windows of magic
old sorrow for her to look from. She had no characteristic
weaknesses--she was strongly and scornfully courageous. It and the
need of self-expression, born of her teeming spirit and life-long
suppression of it, led her to write herself out in a book, which was
published. It was a poetic book and had insight and vision and a riot
of color with youth as its keynote. And it was human and figuratively
and literally full of the devil. The far-and-wide public in England
and America read it, and the newspapers made a loud noise about it
and the lonely girl who wrote it found herself oddly notorious. It
brought money which made her free of Butte and it brought human
things into her life which changed her life forever. And it brought
her no inner or outer excitement or elation.

It was this Mary MacLane.

There was a girl of six-and-twenty in Boston and in New York who had
half-forgot her long-familiar Ego for several years. She lived and
moved in folly and triviality and falseness. From having had too
few companions she had too many who did her no good and no harm but
helped her waste passing days and dissipate her moods and mental
tissues. She had grown worldly in taste, weak in manner of thought,
fragile in body from a mad irregularity of food and sleep, and in
every attribute uncertain of herself. Her Soul lay sleeping: her
Heart because it felt too keenly worked overtime: nothing engaged her
Mind. But her analytic trend stayed by and with it she pulled to bits
the varied fragmentary things she encountered. She learned New York
town in human sordid enlightening disciplining ways. She learned
people of many kinds in many ways. She learned other young women,
which depressed and exhilarated and perplexed her. She learned men--a
race whose make and motive toward women bears no analysis. She had
not the usual defensive armor of the normal woman, for she was not a
normal woman but certain trends of varying individuals gathered into
one sensitive woman-envelope. She was careless toward men in their
crude sex-rapacity in ways no ‘regular’ woman would dare or care to
be. No man could wring one tear from her, nor cause a quickening of
her foolish Heart, nor any emotion in her save mirth. And there were
women friends-- There were some friendships whose ill effects she
will never recover from, from having bestowed too much of herself on
them in the headlong newness of knowing and owning friendship after
her long young loneliness.

--she could not cherish anything sanely. She couldn’t stand in her
doorway and watch a pretty bird flying above a green hedge, and
admire it for the gleam of its brilliant wings in the sun, and let
it go. She must needs run out--leaving her door standing open and
tea-and-cakes untasted within--and follow where the bird flew,
through mire and brier, round the world--

From the odd notoriety were many letters and experiences and
adventures. She met some famous persons--writers, actors, artists--of
agreeable philosophic plaisances. She saw her book of youth
burlesqued with artistic piquance in the Weber-and-Fields show of
its season (with one Collier, adroitest of comedians, cast as her
long-lost Devil). There was a hasty voyage to the edge of Europe--a
voyage of terrific seasickness lying in her stateroom: a half-glimpse
of Paris all gray and green in the rain: a whole glimpse of London,
mystic, Dickensesque and roundly British in its yellow-brown fog: and
back again within ten days with more berth-ridden seasickness lasting
from Cherbourg to New York harbor: the whole adventure grown from a
Spring morning impulse. There were winters in Florida at sun-flooded
resort towns full of gaudiness and gambling and surprising
winter-resort people. Those were mongrel wastrel years empty of
every realness, every purpose, every vantage: they filled her with a
bastard wisdom.

It was this Mary MacLane.

There was a girl of seven-and-twenty worn to psychic fragments and
returned on a winter’s day in a mood of indifference to this Butte.
It was her first return since she and her book had gone forth eight
years before. She celebrated it by being brought low with a baleful
blood-sucking demon of illness, what is called scarlet fever. Borne
upon by the mountain altitude after sea-levels and getting in the
way of epidemic germs, she had no chance. A strong feverish serpent
wound itself around her, consuming and destroying. There were
tortured dying weeks. She had never been ill before in all her life.
This was the most crucial bodily adventure she had known. It opened
a new and dreadful world. There was no passing of time in those
long, long weeks, no rational thinking, no day, no night, no dark,
no morning, no memory. There was pain, and utter weariness, and a
feeling of being hurried to her grave. There was an air of hurry
in the stillness around, as if she and Death had made a date which
she would be late in keeping unless she were urged on. There was a
doctor, and a crisp white starched nurse, and there were interminable
bitter drugs and tall narrow glasses of monotonous milk. She was
endlessly disturbed by milk and medicine, and by cold spongings
and changings of feverish bed-linens, and anointings with olive
oil, and takings of her temperature, and sprayings of her throat:
when she wanted only to sink down, down, forever and forever to the
underworld. She almost sank. But God capriciously decided he had
other plans for her--insomuch as decreeing she was not to be let
go then. After seven weeks she tiredly rose from her bed and took
stock of herself. Her rôle then was of a horrible yellow skeleton
with negative gray eyes, a wreck of tissue and vitality such as only
scarlet fever can achieve, and her beautiful thick coppery hair
changed to a strange short mouse-colored tangle. She was a long time
recovering. The scarlet demon changed her life and its meanings and
energies and outlooks more effectually than if she had been trapped
by a game-at-law and gaols and courts had had their toll of her.
But after months, a year and a half of months, her health came back
perfect if not vigorous, and her good looks--the few she ever had,
and even the humanizing incongruous curls, though changed, grew long
and covered her head again in a heathen frivol. A so magnificent
mystery is this blood-and-flesh. It grows up again out of its ashes.
Burn all of it but one cell in the scorchingest sickness and so that
bones are still whole it will renew itself from that, perfect as the
sweet-bay. But this mind, less magnificent and less mysterious and
more delicate and dubious, rallies only by aid of the heart beneath
it and the soul beyond it. Her mind came slowly out of darkened
apathy. It lived in a high-walled cloister telling its languid beads
by rote. But as if it sensed the sweet aura of her renewed body it at
last woke strong and cold overnight and was aware again of itself and
the mourning magic of being.

It was this Mary MacLane.

And after a year or two more it is this Mary MacLane.

It is I myself.

I walk my floor in leaden retrospect-days with a feel in my throat of
damned and damning unfulfillment and at my eyebrows the twisted frown.

In it is dread and anguish and worriment: in it is hideous altering
breaking prepollence of death.

--if my hair, just my hair, had not come back after that red fever
I’d have decided--not capriciously like God but determinedly like
myself--to have died by my own hand one night. It is no brave
thought and it would have been no brave deed. Though it wants a
lowering courage to leave life when, despite all, one loves its very
textureless _color_, its bodiless air: not to speak of the yellow hot
deathless sunshine that can not reach one in her dark grave--

But the look and feel of my hair are the look and feel of positive
life, opposed to death.

To live up to my hair would keep me brave.

But the retrospects, which I can’t escape, come and wrap me in the
Winding Sheet.




_The Dover road_


                                                        To-morrow

I lay down at noonday on my green couch and I had a quaint dream.
I have just awakened from it in a flush of languor and comfort.
And the dream is vivid in my mind. I dreamed I was married and it
was pink-and-pearl dawn in my married bed-room. And in the bed one
inch away from mine was not my married husband but ‘another man.’
It was no man I can recall having seen. As I look back into the
dream he seems of the nowhere, a stranger. But in the dream he was
no stranger. I had crudely admitted him to my night. And I had just
awakened in the pink-and-white dawn and was sitting silk-gowned and
ruffle-haired in my bed, cross-legged like a tailor with my elbows
on my knees and my chin on my palms, idly contemplating him. And
he was lying in the other narrow bed contemplating me and smiling
a little. He had nice teeth and yellowish hair. The crux of the
dream was the sound ‘off-stage’ of the approaching footsteps of
monsieur-the-husband. As it always is in the psychology of dreams
the insistent thing in the situation was not the footsteps, nor even
that they were approaching, but the sound: the elusive threat of
their sound. He would presently discover us. Nobody appeared to care:
not ‘another man’ smiling so tranquilly: not I sitting musingly
overlooking him who had overnight ‘enjoyed me’: not the husband,
because he never knew it--before he could open the guilty door I
awoke.

A short-cut gently headlong dream. I was at once married, mixed
adulterantly with an imperfect stranger and awaiting in pleasant mild
anticipation, to match the pink-and-pearl of the summer dawn, the
climax in the approaching sound of my husband’s footsteps. It was
humorous and artistic. Unseemly preliminaries were done away with in
that dream. I was given at once the one exciting worthwhile moment
in it.

Having no data as to what were my husband’s temper and tenor, what
he looked like or who he was, I could not in the dream or out of it
surmise what he would say or how he would act when he opened the door.

--a theme for idling speculation in a summer’s day--

Also I wonder whence came that dream: so Unexpected: so Irrelevant to
any thought in me: so Artistically Right: so Disgusting: so Dramatic:
so quaintly Vulgar.

A question: to which the one answer is that unanswerable answer to
all questions, propounded by Mr. F.’s Aunt--‘There’s milestones on
the Dover road.’




_The harp of worn strings_


                                                        To-morrow

May I own no unleavened egotism.

May I own no egotism that is not sensitive and poignant and vibrant:
a harp of Worn Strings.

The surprising world is full of non-analytic persons of ox-eyed
vision and hen-headed mental caliber whose egotism is a stupendous
impregnable armor: those who burned the Maid of Orleans: those who
crucified the prophet of Nazareth: those who killed John Keats.

They inherit the earth, which is a Golden-Green earth, but never look
at it.

They accept this life, which is Intoxicating life, but never feel its
texture with their fingers.

They gather a Blue iris by a marsh-edge and let it die in their
sweating hands, or let it fall to the ground as they walk, or throw
it away when the Blue petals droop: without looking at it and
breathing it and knowing it: without sensing the tremulous Blue to be
lovelier in its wilting.

Theirs is the thick fat solidly-fierce egotism of an emperor or an
infant whose main metaphysic concept is that _he_ is alive, and will
remain alive, and must be alive, though all around him bleed drop by
drop to their death.

I have analyzed mine, and it is not so with me.

If I say I am enchanting or false or despicable it is because I know
it’s true. Not because I say it but because I have tested and proved
it. I feel the textures of my life with the tips of my fingers. I
turn my senses outward and let the old winds blow over them--icy,
balmy, harsh, gentle, scorching, cooling. I suffer for it but I know
those winds: songs of seas and stars and of little pebbles are in
their thunderous-dim wailing: life is in the soft stinging perfume of
their wings.

No breath of poetry and beauty comes to me that I do not pay for with
the beating ache of my Heart, the nervous tensions of my Body, the
fraying and shredding of my Soul. If any beauty or poet-thing comes
easily and gives me pleasure and not pain, I know I have not yet got
it and that it will come again.

It will come again: with the pain.

I can’t eat cake and have it.

I can’t make silk purses out of sows’ ears.

Those things I learn nearly perfectly from playing on my harp with
the Worn Strings.




_A strongly-windy Saturday_


                                                        To-morrow

It is a strongly-windy Saturday.

A thought achieves itself in my roiled-and-placid brain: that one
half of me is Mad, but the other half is doubly Sane and someway
over-Sane, so that in it all I break a little better than even.




_A someway separate individual_


                                                        To-morrow

This Body I live in is familiar and mysterious.

It is like a book of poetry to read and read again.

It has the owned sentientness of bone-and-flesh, and with it tremors
fine as spirit-emotions.

My Body is more chaste than my Mind, my Heart and my Soul. My Body if
fragile is healthful, and is one with the woman-race: it moves with
the sunlit cosmos. My Mind wanders in sex-chaos and muses on piquant
impure things, enchanting villainies, odd inversions, whatnot. My
Soul--a sweet and an exquisite Thing--its tired wings have borne it
languidly down the dim stairways of many centuries, some leading in
wilful perverted ways. And my Heart is a pagan Heart. Its essence is
flavored with the day and lyric trail of the Sapphic students.

Bodily I am also pagan in the freedom of my owned sex feelings--as
are all women. Most of them do not know it and those who do hide it
in a tomb-like silence, except the brazen, the headlongly honest and
the artlessly frank. I come under none of those heads. I am myself. I
live and ponder alone.

And my Body feels consciously aloof and as a someway separate
individual: with inner organs as eternal hopes, smooth skin as
emotion and drops of blood as thoughts--little drops of sparkling red
virile sweet blood for its thoughts.

I so _love_ my Body as it lives and breathes and moves about, with me
and close to me. It is my so constant companion. It is an attractive
girl, a human being of some charm. I love it for the priceless air
it breathes and the long jewel-days of sunshine it has known: for
the tiny wears and tears of its daily life--the rending of its
magic tissues with each going-up-or-down-stairs, each crossing of
a door-sill. I love it for that it must lie at last pale, pale and
still--still--still--in its grave.

I love my Body for its woman-complexities of sex. I love it for the
lonely lyric poetry of its cell-adventures.

I love my Body for this long journey of woe and loveliness which
it goes, from Birthday to Death-day, in wilding passions of subtle
nervousness: each day a day of bodily beauty and intolerableness and
fear and utter mystery: because life _is_, and because I own a white
smooth-skinned Body, and because the strange, strange Air of Everyday
breathes on it--touches it--always!




_Sincerity and despair_


                                                        To-morrow

I am a true Artist, not as a writer but as a writing-person.

I try to feel myself literarily a poet--finer-made than a god. But I
fail as a poet-litterateur as I fail as a poet-person. A poet flies
always on wings of fiery gold though it might be waywardly. But often
I walk with my feet in odd gutters, and have some plaisance in them,
and analyze their gutteriness absorbedly and own them as part of my
portion.

--poet or no poet, it is best to be myself. In heights and murks and
widths and trivial horrors, _myself_--

But as an Artist I am in the true. As a painter of words and maker of
paragraphs which picture my phases and emotions, and in my conscious
feeling anent it, I realize the artist _flair_, the artist temper. It
is not a literary but a personal art.

I have what goes with all artist-matter--long periods of dry-rot when
having nothing ripe to write I write nothing. My Artist-spirit proves
itself, justifies itself in my times of stagnation and reaction. Out
of it something human and sad and lustrous grows in me, something
which is half worldly but awaits its ripe time of expression with
someway-divine scorn.

I once thought me destined to be a ‘writer’ in the ordinary sense.
And many good people visioned a writing career for me. It has a vapid
taste, just to recall it. My flawed life has that to felicitate
upon--that I have not spent it in fat lumps of writing, magazine
tales and sex-novels. In the days, and later, when my demi-vierge
book made its success I was besought by publishers to write
others--to go on, to reap and garner. I pushed all that away with a
preoccupied hand, not as part and parcel of my wastrel living but in
my assured Artist-temper. I should feel more true-to-form to earn
my living by making linen roses in a shop, along with rows of pale
women, than by my writing.

My writing is to me a precious thing--and a rare bird--and a
Babylonish jade. It demands gold in exchange for itself. But though
it is my talent it is not my living. It is too myself, like my
earlobes and my throat, to commercialize by the day.

But I can not think of me as an Artist without thinking of me as a
Liar. The two are someway related. I am an appalling, an encompassing
Liar. I am a Liar by the clock. My life ticks out silent lies as my
little clock ticks out seconds. It is a phase hard to put my finger
on. I feel it on me the way I feel a headache. I write this book
with seriousness and earnestness. It is all a mood of sincerity and
despair. But except I give it some backgrounding of lies, though
each thing in it is fair fact, I fail as an Artist.

It is strange about lies--any lies, all lies. They are muscularly
stronger than truths. They come more readily to human tongues. They
fit more easily into the games of this life. And in me they seem
needful to my Artist mind.

I mean not the lies I may tell but the lies I think.

I mean not my falseness. That is a different thing, one I feel
someway responsible for. But the thinking lies feel to be a heritage
from ancient evil selves.

I lie to myself, to the air around me--I blow lies into space from my
quiet lips. And one half of me knows them for lies and the other half
of me _believes_ them.

Those half-known lies, the _need_ of the lies half-believed, are the
realization of an essential Artist-spirit.

The oblique belief in them and the recognition of them as lies
proclaim me to myself, as a writing-person: Liar and Artist.




_It’s not death_


                                                        To-morrow

It’s not Death I fear, nor Life.

I horridly fear something this side of Death but out-pacing Life a
little: a nervousness in my Stomach--a very Muddy Street--a Lonely
Hotel Room.




_A human prerogative_


                                                        To-morrow

It is a quiet deep of night. A bell has just tolled two.

I am clothed in cool bedroom negligées and a softening sweetness of
cold cream, from head to foot.

I am tranquil for to-day I had a walk that made me feel Sincere and
Safe.

It is a comforting feeling: it is like a beef-sandwich.

It was a long walk south-east of Butte along an outskirting road
where I used often to walk when I was sixteen--a broad gray desert.
It was the same sand and barrenness. It was bare and withered as if a
giant coyote had picked its rocky ribs.

The day was windy and dusty. The sunshine was thick and sweet and
heavy like floating honey. The dust that blew against the white of my
neck was like ground glass.

My feet ached as I walked.

My shoes were Cuban-heeled thick-soled pumps of corded silk, a kind
easy to walk in. But the same feet which once readily bore me seven
miles along that road ache now at three. All of me ached as I walked
along. I cursed desultorily with a smooth whispered flow of curses,
because the circumstances seemed to demand it. But I loved the
walk--even the more for my tired feet and my aching knees and my
irking drooping shoulders and the hot glazed sand against my throat.

My Soul tasted realness in it.

Quite close to me, in immense sad beauty, were the deep high heavy
silent somber hills of Montana. To-day the nearer ones were a stately
enchanted Blue: a Blue of all ages: a Blue of infinitude: a Blue with
a feel of life and death in its Blueness. Above it the sky was not
blue but a pale glimmering shimmering silver hung across with gray
silk clouds soft as doves’ plumage.

I sat on a flat rock and looked at all of it and at the desert
around, and at my dusty shoes.

All of it felt overwhelmingly sincere: at one with the wide worn used
earth.

My dusty shoes looked to be at one with it and could interpret it.

I felt my shoes could claim their human prerogative of getting dusty
in any of this world’s roads.

It gave me a feeling of human Sincerity: good-and-evil Safeness.

It is on me now, along with cold cream and strong memory of Desert
and Sun and Blue.

It is as good as a beef-sandwich.

Better: I don’t like beef-sandwich.




_The merciless beauty_


                                                        To-morrow

Sometimes the dusk is full of fire.

Some dusks I sit by my window looking out and hotly and coldly want a
Lover: hotly with my Body and coldly with my Mind.

A dusk has just gone. I sat looking out at it.

A mist of dark cream tinged with heated violet came from nowhere and
hung above the ground.

Suddenly came on me a sense of bewildering mysterious beauty.

In it was a feel of rippling warmth that crept into my bone-and-flesh
from forehead to heel, from temples to soles, from crown to toe-tips.

It crept slow and suffocating like magic chloroform.

I leaned elbows on window-sill and chin on palms and sunk my gaze
in the violet shades outside and straightway knew I wanted a Lover:
not in delicate moonlit culmination like Juliet in her balcony: not
denyingly like the timid young nun in her cloister assailed unaware
by faint forbidden emotions.

I wanted a Lover like the jungle leopard leaping through the
Springtime covert at nightfall to find her mate.

It is a subtle and an obvious feeling, made of a merciless beauty.

It is the tired urge of sex-tissues and nerve-cells: positive,
furious, fiery as the bloodiest sun.

It is the same which the heated leopard feels in her sharp immaculate
lust. It is quite the same--but it could not move me as I sat alone
loverless to the knitting of an eyebrow, to a change of posture, a
movement of elbows on the window-sill or of palms beneath my chin.
Nor could it, though the potential Lover had stood outside my window.

For any woman of any charm the world is full of Lovers: each and
all to be had by the flutter of her finger, the droop of her white
eyelids, the trembling of her pink-bowed lips. The world is full of
them--facile Lovers, craven, potent and pinchbeck. And it’s that kind
I want hotly with my Body, coldly with my Mind in dusks of rippling
warmth--rippling, rippling warmth--

I want the Lover as the leopard wants hers. But I’m not a leopard:
instead, a woman-person of keen sentientness and wild wistful
imagination. So I wouldn’t so much as crook a finger to call a Lover
to me: a curious nervous inertia.

It’s only I _want_ the Lover with frantic blind cosmic ardors
inside me.

I analyze it in my magic Mind and find I would call no Lover.
I analyze farther and find I’d reject all but an impossible
one-in-ten-thousand. But remains the desire, hot as live embers,
cold as hail.

Sex is an odd attribute. It has been to me like a blest impediment
and a celestial incumbrance and a radiant curse.--

When I was seventeen I stood on a threshold and peered curiously into
a dim-lit strange-scented Room.

It was unknown to me then. My mind alone bespoke it. As I stood at
its doorway the air it wafted out touched my sense with only the
lightest frayed-cobweb contact, unintelligible and unenlightening. I
had lived an emptily alone girlhood. I was icily virginal.

At five-and-twenty I crossed the Room’s threshold. I breathed
lightly the odd fragrance. I looked curiously around. I touched some
amorous-looking grapes and some love-promising apples that lay about:
I bit into one and burst a grape with my finger and thumb. I gathered
a weak-petaled flower or two. I gauged the Room and its furnishments
and was unthrilled by anything in it. Even bodily it left me
unthrilled.

Those two memory-mists do not keep me in the now-dusk and in the
strength and terror and fire of top-most youth from wanting a sudden
Lover with all that’s in my Body.

Love has naught to do with it. Love is a flame-winged Bird. I know
it. I know the values of my life and of me. I do not mistake tapers
for torches, ducats for louis d’ors, vicarious nepenthe for dreamless
death.

In dusk-moments my bone-and-flesh is all of me I’m sure of. It begins
and ends in this earth. It answers the violent summonses of this
earth and its dusks.

In the just-gone dusk I felt the prickling blood flow to my
finger-ends. A flood-tide, blinding red, surged and seethed and
bubbled and pounded at my heart.

‘I want a Lover--some Lover’--I murmured to the shadows beyond my
window.

I grew breathless.

The spirit of my flesh rose like a wind-blown flame.

A loud cry rang in my nerve-wilderness.

That moment the variant analysis which always rides with me stopped
dead.

There came instead sheer feeling--the merciless beauty.

--a man-person, maybe--the man of happy unanalytic brutality--to be
suddenly there with me: to flash into my shadowy solitude like a
lightning bolt and burst and break me.

--a quarter-hour of exquisite wildness--restlessness, made of
Star-flame and Lily-petal and Cloud-burst on Mountain-summits and
Sea-waves purple in a Stormy Dawn--an intolerable hunger and ecstasy--

But just gone and I sit writing it in the pale cast of thought.

But breathlessly I recall the breathlessness of it.




_My shoes_


                                                        To-morrow

I love my Shoes.

I love them because they so guard my feet.

I walk many a mile along the stone pavements and into distant odd
streets and on open roads at the outskirts of this Butte.

And while I walk I think.

I think things of a great many kinds--potent and magic and mad.
The act of walking starts an engine in my sparkling infernal mind.
And the weight and the sting and the hurt and the fascination of
my walking thoughts bear down on my slim feet as they carry me
along. And the hard-beaten world beneath them feels resentful and
uncomplaisant to my soles.

And then I look down at my Shoes with their trim tailored vamps and
their walk-worthy soles and instantly my feet feel secure against
evil, smartly protected from my thoughts and from the world’s
surface: my thoughts which shoot down on them out of my devilish
brain and the world-hardness beneath them.

To-day I was walking along the road that leads up the ever-wonderful
Anaconda Hill--a place of stones and sand-wastes and hoists and
scaffoldings and mines with ten thousand digging men thousands
of feet down in their metallic bowels. Close by were melancholy
mulberry-toned mountains at the north-east. They were tragic,
triumphant, grief-stricken, terrifyingly beautiful. Purple clouds
hung around them like mourning veils. I can’t look enough at
those--it is as if there weren’t enough looking-power in my human
gray eyes.

Presently I came to a small open space as I walked, a toy desert. A
toy desert is more like a desert than is a real one. The sand in it
is grayer sand. The stones are abrupter. The sun is flatter-looking.
The air is less willing to furnish breath to a human being. The best
that could be said of this one is that it was intolerably desolate. I
looked about and about it. And suddenly I was afraid. Afraid of many
things: afraid of grief-stricken mountains: afraid of my life and
of Me.

I leaned against a yellow ledge of rock with a subtle sickening
faintish feeling. ‘I am afraid,’ I said inside me, ‘of this world and
this life, and of all things little and large--nerves and Christmas
days and poetry: toy deserts and all. How can I cope with it--I
alone?’

Then I looked down at my Shoes of black soft dull leather and cloth,
buttoned snugly around my ankles and with tough supple soles fit to
take me to Jericho and back. Thus neatly armored I felt suddenly my
blue-veined feet need fear nothing from sand and stone and hardness
of ground. And if my feet are not afraid--my feet which bear weights
of all-of-me--why should afraidness touch my spirit which is proud?

There will be always Shoes in the world: stout stylish serviceable
boots, and pale delicate rat-skin pumps, and satin mule-slippers.

And always I shall have Shoes: in toy deserts I shall have black
strong snug-buttoned ones.

I looked at them in this toy-desert and straightway I wasn’t afraid.

It has been often like that.

So I love my Shoes.




_An eerie quality_


                                                        To-morrow

When I was Ten years old I played marbles ‘for keeps,’ smoked
little pieces of rattan buggywhip in the hay-scented barn and slid
‘belly-buster’ down long winter hills on my sled. And I hammered and
sawed ruinously with grownup tools, whistling happily. And I played
with dolls absorbedly for hours on end.

I was not boyish and not girlish.

I was not childish except for an oddly hungry child-heart.

I was myself.

So long ago and longer I consciously owned an eerie quality which
toppled over the edge of my humanness.

And still own it.




_A helliad_


                                                        To-morrow

This noonday as I sat on the veranda two young lads stopped by the
stone coping which borders this front yard, and conversed. One was
eager-looking and about eleven years old. The other was perhaps
thirteen and morose and he had a small rifle which he polished with a
bit of waste, not lifting his gaze as they talked.

Said the younger boy: ‘Say-Frank, I could ’a’ had that old shot-gun
off my dad if I’d ’a’ went after it to Rocker that time.’

‘Like hell you could,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank, you know that Winchester o’ Billy O’Rourke’s?--he made
six bull’s-eyes and one inside ring with it day ’fore yesterday.’

‘Like hell he did,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank, Mexicans and Indians can get a guy ev’ry time with a
long-distance rifle without taking aim through the sight.’

‘Like hell they can,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank, there’s a kid down on South Arizona that’s got a Colt
automatic that’ll hit without him aiming at all.’

‘Like hell there is,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank, you know them little brass machine-guns the militia’s
got?--the bores o’ them things ’re rifled just like this.’

‘Like hell they are,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank, my grandfather in Illinois ’s got a bullet in him he got
at the battle o’ Fredericksburg in the Civil War.’

‘Like hell he has,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank, it costs a hundred-thousand dollars to make a Krupp gun
and eighty dollars ev’ry time you fire it.’

‘Like hell it does,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank, it ain’t a felony to croak a burglar with a gun even if
he’s only breakin’ into somebody else’s house.’

‘Like hell it ain’t,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank, my mother goes huntin’, too--she can shoot rabbits and
ducks on the wing and once she got a deer with that big old .44 o’ my
Uncle Walt’s.’

‘Like hell she did,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank--listen, will you gimme your gun for my bicycle, both my
catcher’s gloves and four dollars when I get paid?’

‘Like hell I will,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank--listen, will you gimme it for my bicycle, my two
catcher’s gloves, four dollars when I get paid and my shepherd pup?’

‘Like hell I will,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank--listen,--and my artificial snake?’

‘Like hell,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank--listen,--and my half o’ Ernest’s camera?’

‘Like hell,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank--listen,--and my last year’s shin-guards?’

‘Like hell,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank--_listen_,--and my _this_ year’s shin-guards?’

‘Like _hell_,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank, come right down to it I don’t want a .22. If I get a gun
this year it’ll be a .32.’

‘Like he--’--

       *       *       *       *       *

Which point I felt to be the too-note of the helliad, so I rose and
came into the house.

I felt replete with rhythm and with a sense of surprising human
attitudes remote from my own.




_Swift go my days_


                                                        To-morrow

Swift, Swift go my days.

By rights I think time should drag with me, for I am wasting my
portion of life as I live it.

But my days pass Swift--Swift, Swift.

They come, they fly away--before I know.

I’m thinking it is Tuesday: but while I’m thinking--Wednesday has
come: and gone: and Thursday is rushing in. Tuesday, blue-and-gold or
gray-and-silver, with its mornings and nights and bits of food and
openings of doors and thinkings: Wednesday with the same equipment:
Thursday the same.

Each day comes and goes like a flash of filmed silvered garbled light.

But there is time in each for me to touch the enchanted Everydayness:
time for the turbulent sly delight of tasting, smelling, feeling the
eternal humors and romances in each small thing near me--my Clock, my
Window, my Jar of Cold Cream, my Two Thumbs. There is time in each
day for it to make me pay a wearing glimmering feverish homage to the
mystic daily godhead.

My life exacts terrific homages from me.

I am wearing out--frailly, tiredly, from a desolate uneasy love of
living.

It is why my days go Swift when by rights time should drag leadenly
in punishment for barbarous futileness.

There is not time-space enough in any of the days sufficient to love
the virile green and the murderous red and the sweet pale surprising
purple in the sunset above the west desert: nor space to love the
smell of a sudden August rain: nor the flaming delicate Idea of the
poet John Keats.

While I’m starting to love each of those to its height of
love-worthiness--the to-day is gone: and the to-morrow, which must
see a new love-game started for each Thing, is come.

But while I say ‘is come’: it’s gone.

So Swift go my days--oh Swift, Swift!




_By the blood of dead Americans_


                                                        To-morrow

Since I wrote the beginning of this there has come the war in Europe:
a war full of suffering brave women and dead children: full of
German greed and cruelty and stupidity and of French gameness and
cheerfulness, French splendor of valor.

It has an effect of some kind on each person who reads so much as its
‘headlines.’

It has the effect on me of making me a jealously patriotic American.

It makes me think of Lexington and Gettysburg with an odd furious
personal shame.

We are Americans not by accident but by the blood of dead Americans.
But we assume it is by accident.

We lie down like a nation of bastards to let the pig-hearted Hun
trample by proxy on our neck.

It was for America to declare war in the same hour the _Lusitania_
passengers met murder.

We were not ‘too proud’ but afraid. Afraid and not ready.

Not ready has no right thing to do with it.

They were not ready at Lexington.

I long with some passion to exchange my two black dresses for two
white ones with red crosses on the sleeves: to serve my country in a
day of death and honor.

It too is all the time under my skin though I write along but in this
flawed song of myself.




_To express me_


                                                        To-morrow

I suppose I’m very lonely.

It is luck--luck from the stars--not to be beset by clusters of
people, people who do their thinking outside their heads, ‘cheerful’
people, people who say ‘pardon me’: all the damning sorts scattered
about obstructing one’s view of the horizons.

But for want of--other, _other_ people--I am intensely lonely.

When I was eighteen I thought I must be the most lonely creature in
this world. I analyzed my life then as now and it by itself had set
me apart. But I stood then as it’s given Youth to stand--on High
Ground. I was strong to endure loneliness while viciously hating
it. There was unaware a hope-colored bliss in my inexperience which
companioned me. I felt it then without knowing I felt it. I can see
that plainly now.

Now also I see plainly and feel plainly that I stand on lower ground,
at poorer vantage. As my bodily strength which was then robust is
now slight. The metaphysic life-shadows reach me more easily. They
have a feel of fatally shutting down, fatefully closing in. They are
the mirages on the dun-colored worldly air near me of my own useless
untoward selves. There is no more the hope-colored bliss.

At eighteen I said to me: ‘I’m lonely but some day I may be happily
friendshiped and apprehended and it will be like paradise.’

Now I say to me: ‘I’m lonely by fate and by nature and temperament. I’ve
known some friendships of vivid alluringness and informingness--they
await me now in the offing. And others. There _is_ paradise in it--an
odd sweet dubious paradise. But what’s the use--?’

It’s that what’s-the-use, born of the lower vantage-ground and
the closing-in shadows, that chiefly makes me lonely--lonely to a
desperateness and on through to a ruinous calm.

It is this metaphysic loneliness which breeds in me one constant
reasonless restless urgent motif: to Express me: not of-the-past
except desultorily, not of-the-future save indifferently: but of
my low-toned, low-echoing now. Until I’ve Expressed me there’s no
setting open the gates of my spirit to a passer-by, though the
passer-by should be a poet-in-the-flesh, a god, an angel with a torch.

Four-and-twenty turbulent moods may break over me in a day, or
four-and-twenty passive ones, or four-and-twenty someway joyous ones.
But like the theme in a fugue this loud tranquil recurrent need to
Express me transcends them all.

It is a big voracious part-human bird of prey. Of it too I say
what’s-the-use. But it is a need without a use, a need scornful of
use. It springs unconceived, unsourced from inside me. It rises from
the ashes of blightingest moods and beats its bruising strong wings
against my face.

It says: ‘Know me, defer to me, Slim-woman. Serve me, follow me,
gather-in all your answers for me. Do this though I undo you, though
I rend you, tear you with my sharp teeth so like a wolf’s. When
you’ve answered me I may let you go. Until then, turn to me. Tell me:
tell me again and again. Utter yourself. Interpret. Unfold.’

It makes my life-space someway sweet, someway heartbreaking, someway
frightful--strewn with dust of broken stars.

I live long hours of nervous profound passionate self-communion. I
discover strange lovely age-worn facets of my Soul. I discover the
subtle panting Ego--the wonderful thing that lives and waits in its
garbled radiance just beneath my skin.

To ask oneself and make answer out of oneself is the most delicious
of this life’s mental delectations. I might have missed it but for
those beating bruising wings against my face, now and years ago: for
expressing breeds the last Expressions.

I might have gone on through years and decades and lumps of months
knowing at best a little of some rare person, a little less or
more of another rare person, a little of a musician’s soul in a
nocturne, a little of a dead poet’s splendors. But to Me and my own
fine spirit-relationships to those things I could remain, but for my
radiant flawed egotistic interpreting, eternally strange.

But for it I’d not have the wit to perceive the one human being in
the world I may know with vitalness: my own Self. I should drop into
my grave at last without a good-by to the glowing one who was locked
just inside, whose hand I’d never clasped, whose sad prescient eyes
I’d never looked in, who was then flitting out and on and away.

It is a being cruel and transfiguring and terrifying: terribly worth
clasping close and breathing with.

And some days it sleeps, sleeps like the dead: it is delicater than
rose-vapors before the dawn: a sun-blown faëry thing.

When it sleeps I’m left alone. Then comes a doubtful dreadful quiet,
a hell of dumbness that only God could reach.

It is as if neither God nor I attempts to cope with it.




_Bastard lacy valentines_


                                                        To-morrow

The thing I admire most is strength. The thing I most hate is
Weakness, of each and every kind.

All the reassuring things in the world are in and of the strong deeds
done in it. All the mischief and despair come from human Weakness.

I would better strongly murder my foe than forgive him Weakly for
my seeming advantage. I would be happier in my mind as a careful
charwoman than as a loose-jointed poet. I would rather have a
farthing’s value as a faithful concubine than no value as a slattern
housewife.

Strength repays itself with strength--and with magnificence.

Truth is strength nearly always: and _not_ always.

To cheat strongly in the life-game gets me more than does Weak easy
honesty. By being a strong man Napoleon brought home the bacon. Being
an honest one would have got him not one rasher of the bacon of _his_
desire. The race is too ridden with ‘temperament’ to let truth be
its prevailing force. But strength plows its scornful way through
temperament like a steam-shovel. The bacon Napoleon brought home he
took from other people, causing them misery. They were Weak and let
him take it, or they were strong and got killed trying to keep it.
To get killed trying to keep your bacon is to be even stronger than
the Napoleon who lives and takes it from you. Those who sit still and
_let_ Napoleon get their bacon are fit only to be themselves made
into bacon.

Truth belongs with love, with friendship, with charity, with psychic
lovingkindness: with all the altruistic graces and tendernesses.

But in the mere grinding livingness of things it is to be strong. I
say to Me, ‘Mary MacLane, be strong: whether you’re living joyous on
a hill or mournful in a valley, make shift to be strong.’

In which paragraphs I make an apologetic preamble to Me when about to
dwell on my odd ironic element of Weakness. My Weakness is not an art
nor a science nor a gift nor a trait but is a sort of ruinous trade
touched with all of those, a trade at which I work and lose heavily
from a viewpoint of personal economy.

In Atlanta-Georgia lives a man with whom I exchange semi-occasional
letters. He is thirty-nine and clever and what is called a business
man. He is a business man not only by circumstance but by nature.
At a glance one would picture him in the setting of an office in
a steel-and-brick building with a roll-top desk, a swivel chair,
a cabinet full of files, a stenographer with an unregenerate
vocabulary, and stationery neatly engraved with his name, his
business, his cable address and his telephone number. The look of the
neat letterhead and the fibrous feel of the bond paper give one the
idea that whoever went into a business venture with him would come
out of it disadvantageously.

After another glance at himself one would infer that his leisure
hours might be fancifully spent. In hours of ease some business men
follow baseball, others golf, ‘tired’ ones musical comedy. Others
take up curio collecting or some personal phantasm. In the latter
category is my acquaintance of Atlanta. He affects Mary MacLane and
musings of her in his leisure hours. But what I am to him does not
concern nor much interest me. What he is to me concerns me, for
he--his letters--are a present source of my elaborated Weakness.

I feel a wave of conscious Weakness washing over me as I write about
it. His letters make a soft buffer, a foolish pretty window, a tinted
veil between me and my too-harsh actualities.

I met him when I lived in New York. He had read the book I wrote
in the early nineteen-hundreds and at meeting me he conceived a
thinly insistent admiration which someway went to his head. He has
at intervals since then written me letters full of charmed and
salubrious flattery and of appreciation and praise for traits and
gifts and qualities which I do not possess. They appeal and cater
remarkably to my vanity--and are pleasant and unreal and vain and
fatuous and fond and piquant.

He is a clever man and does not make love to me. A butcher’s-boy may
write love-letters--and I’d prefer those of a butcher’s-boy to those
of a business man: they would be more sincere and less hopelessly
discreet. But this business man is discerning and intuitive and
writes me no love. His wife--a business man always has a wife--could
not rationally object to what is in the letters, though she would
irrationally and naturally object to the letters themselves. She
is unloving and unloved--they always are--but whatever may be her
caste (I know only that she is tall and blonde and named Bertha)
she doubtless would find something superfluous in the idea of her
husband’s letters to me.

A letter comes from him in Georgia after I have written him a brief
disquieting one with a latent human appeal in it to make him think
the chief thing I need in life is his appreciation, his attitude
toward me, to brace my spirit. Then his comes, written in his small
slanting commercial hand. It is arresting from any angle and well
thought, well couched.

In it he tells me that my brain, scintillantly brilliant though it
is, needs the dim twilights of other brains such as his to catch the
sparks it throws off.

Which is a lie. My brain is not scintillantly brilliant and it
‘needs’ nothing. But the lie is agreeable to read. There is a gentle
caressingness in its untruth which feels someway soothinger than any
flattering fact.

And he tells me my chief attraction as an individual is my ability
accurately to gauge another individual and to breathe myself
graciously out to it and upon it while pretending to be immersed in
my own ego.

Which is another lie. Immersed in my own ego is never a pretense
with me, and I have not gauged--in the sense of weighing and
measuring--another individuality except to hate it. But it is
piquantly restful to hear that I am thus benign.

And he tells me that though several years have passed since he and I
took leave of one another he has never forgotten that last parting
because it was like the passing of a little weir-woman who brushed
him lightly with her garments as she went.

Which is another lie. My association with him was in brief meetings
at hectic studio tea-fights and two noisy dinners at Churchill’s,
at all of which I frowned impatiently at his tiresome conversation.
And his leave-taking with me consisted in his sharpening a
lead-pencil--beautifully he sharpened it--for me to write a telegram
with. It was not until this correspondence that we established an
unreliable intimacy. But to be told I seemed a weir-woman to a
hard-headed business man who could doubtless cheat a client out of
four thousand dollars easily in a half-day’s maneuvering is oddly
inspiriting.

And he tells me he is highly privileged to be permitted to gaze in
at the mezzo-tinted windows of my soul, which are surely curtained
against the passing proletariat.

Which is another lie. He has never remotely glimpsed my tired Soul in
the firmly false little letters I’ve written him. As to its being a
privilege if he had: it is the proletariat, it so happens, who have
first chance at those windows, which are not mezzo-tinted but made of
the plainest of plain glass. But the conceit tastes mellow and naïf
and bromidic and appetizing to me, like cream and raspberries in July.

And he tells me the most delightful thing in the world would be to
live near me and have a season of daily meetings--meetings of astral
selves upon a ‘higher plane’ whereon we should exchange those flowers
and fruits of the spirit which grow not from the soils but from the
esoteric essences of life:--that sort of thing.

Which is another lie. No possible man (except a Poet whom I
loved--or perhaps a scientist--) could find me delightful for more
than two consecutive meetings--I develop something like temper--and
I care for no higher planes except in airships. As for esoterics--I
would fainer exchange musings anent over-shoes than over-souls. And
my spirit bears in fertile earthy soil chiefly thistles from which
men gather no figs. But it gives me a warmish feeling, similar to
a hot-water bottle between my shoulders on a winter night, to read
that picturesque palaver written to me in my slim scorn by him in his
springy swivel chair.

Thus it goes. His letters are made all of softest quaintest lies
which I know to be lies the moment my gray gaze falls on them. All
his premises in regard to me and his deductions from them are roundly
lightly mistaken. But I like that fluent flattery the more because
it is so false. I am too vain a creature to want to cope often with
truths even though they might be uplifting self-lauding truths. My
vain peculiar Weakness demands as well semi-occasional collations of
creamed lies upon which it feeds like a sleek cat on creamed fish. My
humor enters into it, in no obvious way but eerily like a gay ghost.
My humor is a strong influence in me. It is stronger than my pride
and anger and fear and caution and reverence and self-love--stronger
than most things I own.

And it’s for reasons of pastime and vanity and oblique humor I
let letters from the business man come, though not often, into my
solitudes. And I spend hours of inert time-waste conning his fanciful
ideas. And the letters I write him in reply, though brief and
impersonal and done in my best false manner, consume a surprising lot
of time and mental and physical force to write. It is the Weakness in
it which is so devouring: it eats me hungrily and lingers about like
a buzzard, picking my bones.

A spinelessly Weak game. I hate its Weakness more than I like its
pleasant futility. I hate it and myself in it all the time I’m
dwelling on it. I hate it as I’d hate a little drug habit fastened on
my nerves.

Its influence is the same but more insidious than a drug would be,
more demoralizing. As feeling fear makes one afraid, feeling more
fear makes one more afraid.

Still once in a month, once in a two-month, I feel the hankering
itch to be applauded for second-rate qualities I do not own, and I
give way to it: in a particularly Weak way, after my sanest self has
reduced it analytically to shreds, and after saying bosh! with all my
selves.

After telling Me too that it is a common-tasting game. Life is a
strange music-clangor of gold bells, some silent, some far-echoing.
And the common-tasting thing cracks a bell-edge.

Then briskly I answer the last letter from Atlanta-Georgia and soon
there comes a fresh sheaf of smooth velvetish lies to pad my way.

There may come no more if this I write now should find its way to
Atlanta-Georgia. Or if fate or Bertha should intervene.

But always I know Weakness of me will find ways to work at its losing
trade.

It is of the dubious inevitable side of human nature--like gold teeth
and tinned salmon and bastard lacy valentines.




_Sweet fine sweatings of blood_


                                                        To-morrow

Merely from the view-point of outward intellect this book of myself
is oddly difficult to write.

My most-loved thing to do and my hardest thing to do is to write.

It is hard to catch and hold with mental fingers one’s own emotions
and then doubly hard to write them. A feeling is something without
the words and without even the thought. To put it into the thought
and then into the words is a minuter task than would be the
translating of a François-Villon poem into Choctaw.

It’s a knowing person who realizes her own emotions and a knowinger
who recognizes what is what, who is who, which is which among them.
I look inward at Me and I see an emotion of World-Weariness and
want to write it. I write it as nearly as I can. But when I have
done--it’s not World-Weariness that I wrote but its twin-sister,
Boredom-of-the-Moment, which happened to be next the other when I
looked. I am glad to have transcribed Boredom-of-the-Moment. It is
the finer and thinner and more elusive of the two. But how and why
did I fail of World-Weariness?

But sometime when I aim at Fear or Resentment or Surprise it may be
World-Weariness I’ll bring down unexpectedly with a clean wing-shot.

When I set out to write the Look-in-my-Eyes it may be the
Feel-of-my-Fingers that comes out in my round writing. Another time I
think I’m writing my Bad-Tooth: until I get it written when it turns
out to be my little Eye-Wrinkles.

Having failed of the thought often I fail of the words. When I have
a particularly M.-Mac-Lane thought to express I review the top tier
of my vocabulary of words to find proper ones for it. They are all
very nice words in that top-tier--neatly washed and dressed and
hair-brushed and tidied-up, like the children in a small private
school: words like Necessary and Irresolute and Crockery and
Inconvenience and Broth and Apprise: good words and useful if one’s
thought is radical or risky and wants conserving. I call some of
them to me and question them and consider them and ponder a bit, and
decide they will none of them suit. Then I go to the bottom tier, the
unkemptest of words in the untidiest attire: words like Traipse and
Nab and Glim and Hennery and Chape and Plash. And I at once reject
those as too carelessly bred for my terse thoughts to associate
with. (But for my uncombed ungroomed grimy-faced thoughts I turn to
them.) Then I glance over a tier of mysterious words, spruce but
with indefinable vagabond faces: such as Whelk and Mauger and Frush
and Gnurl and Yare and Hyaline. They are expressive but of a kind
it’s well to use with caution, the kind that may trip up thoughts
that would make them their medium and lead to slips ’twixt cups and
lips. So I dismiss them with a mental reservation of one or two to
use if I fail to find right ones among the less mysterious. Then I
turn to a tier that represents the virile middle-class in words, the
lower-case words, the mob and riot words, the words for poets and
anarchists and prophets: such as Adroit and Nightingale and Gallows
and Gutter and Woman and Madrigal and Death. And I say, ‘Without
doubt here are my words.’ But I use discretion. I know that tier of
words to be of the nature of bombs, of strychnine, of a dynamic force
resistible against all human and wordly substance. They also must be
used cautiously and with a sparing hand. With caution one can handle
a bomb, and sparingly one can eat strychnine, and one can control
any dynamic force by studying its tendencies and keeping out of its
direct road. It behooves one to heed those conditions in broaching
the countermining counter-irritant words if one would avoid blowing
oneself analytically broadcast.

So I may have found the right sort of words and measured their
possibilities and pitfalls. But again: it’s a nerve-racking task
to choose out one word from seven, one from five, one from two. I
see two words which may be the only proper ones out of ten thousand
to bear my thought. The two may be Echo and After-glow, each an
unacknowledged half-sister to the other: meaning respectively
something living and growing and vibrant in my spirit-ears, and
fading and dying and radiant before my spirit-eyes. But because my
spirit-ears may glow bright and hot from what they heard, or my
spirit-eyes may seem to themselves to gaze a moment at a soundless
sound--an Unheard Melody of Keats,--I miss the raylike distinction
and I write After-glow when my true word was Echo.

But another time I write Echo perfectly and masterfully to my own
delight: having meant After-glow.

So it is. There’s no plain sailing on this analytic sea. And if there
were it would be not worth while. I want nothing, nothing, nothing
that comes easily. What comes easily I distrust, be it love or
language. It afterward proves dead-sea fruit. What I suffer to get I
know to be life-food even if it drugs or pains or poisons me. It is
one lesson I have learned.

Without doubt it is so with everybody, all around. One sees only
surfaces, husks. Anyone looking casually at this Me sitting writing
might say, ‘How easily and smoothly and well she writes. How kind
of God to give her so light a task in life. How complacently go her
working hours.’ And I looking casually at--oh--Miss Lily Walker
singing and swaying and glancing sideways in a gorgeous Broadway
chorus--I might say, ‘How easy a task in life has _that_ brainless
gazelle. To work with her body and not even with the sweats and
sinews of it like a scrub-woman, and not with the facile shames of
it like a lorette, but with the grace and suppleness and beauty and
suggestions of it, aided by a soprano throat and a soprano face--with
only the effort it wants to fling it all over footlights. And that
pastime gets her her livelihood.’

But whoever marks me writing as one doing an easy task because I
write along rapidly enough considers nothing of my mental travail
for the thought, my blind grope for the language, my little nervous
anguish of choice among the double-edged and triple-pronged words:
and the neat concise failure of the result.

And no, I do not thus comment on Miss Lily Walker. I have
an appreciative pleasure in her charm and suppleness and
bird-and-butterfly prettiness. But after a bit of contemplation and
analysis of her surface I deduce the unconscious struggle it may be
for Miss Lily Walker to be supple on nights when she does not feel
supple, the thin agony of being sweet when she does not feel sweet,
the neurotic torture of being seductive _regularly_--by the night:
the more that perchance the struggle always _is_ unconscious. Her
brain being required in her body it’s to be assumed there’s none in
her head. But I can deduce a nervous red heart beating illogically
somewhere in her being protesting dumbly sometimes against one irking
item, sometimes against another, sometimes against all the items in
Miss Lily Walker’s scheme of life, but beating and beating on, like a
little automatic drum wound up tight and tossed into a maelstrom to
beat itself out.

I’d like--like with breathless eagerness--to read the analyzed being
just beneath Miss Lily Walker’s skin.

Everybody--every human being--is wildly _Real_: radiant and
desolate.--

With no amount of temperamental struggling could Miss Lily Walker
analyze a psychic emotion of her own and then find the right
word-combination to write it in.

With no conceivable effort of mine could I manage to be supple when I
do not feel supple.

So Miss Lily Walker and I are quits at this game.

It totals up evenly, all ways around.

Nobody gets through one Real day--though it be a dayful of Real
lies--without a demoniacal struggle of soul or a heavy blow on the
personal solar plexus.

And I make not even the intellect side of this book, which is a
Realness to me, without sweet fine sweatings of blood.




_Instinct--a ‘first law’_


                                                        To-morrow

I long to do a Murder.

Despite my futile way-of-life and my rotting destroying
half-acquiescence in it I have a furious positive Murder in me.

One near me in my daily life injures me and goes on injuring me in
a way which is scourging and malicious and intensely petty. There
is in it helpless humiliation for me--me self-loving, proud and
determinedly unsuppliant--and it makes maddening Murder rise in me.

I don’t know why I do not do the Murder. I have nothing to lose by
paying the law-penalty: nothing but my life, and my life is stripped
bare--and was always barren by God’s decree--of all that makes a
life sacred or lovely or precious. For long years and years, since
child-days, I have been lost.

I don’t know why I do not do the Murder: except that I think of it
and brood over it and turn it round and round smoulderingly in my
Mind. From no choice. I have tried to push the feeling away as a
common thing beneath me. It is beneath me, for I am not little but
someway big. But my Mind will take its toll of all that confronts me.

The humiliation and the helplessness to combat being humiliated in me
who keep a casual proudness toward people is like a secret hot sword
thrust, and kept freshly thrust, in my flesh. It makes me wild to do
the Murder. But it makes me brood over it till the red act is lost in
red brooding.

There come also thinkings.

Murder, any Murder, is in its essence cowardly, a slinking meanness.
And I am not cowardly and I am not mean. I am above malice and
retaliation--all such impoverished impoverishing emotions. A shrug of
my shoulders and they are satisfied. The impulse to hit back after a
bitter wound is not of vengeance. It is instinct--a ‘first law.’ But
Murder is self-accusingly cowardly and sneakingly human. I can’t get
away from that. To take away a person’s life is like setting fire to
his house--an officiously stooping act. It’s for me to live my life
in aloof self-sufficience. No human malice should reach me in it.
Then it’s not for me to reach out of it and stain my good fingers
with unpleasant sticky blood. I am always in a prison of radiance and
gloom.

But the mere habit of being a human being is breakingly insistent--no
matter how many or how few frocks one owns. Neither of my two dresses
is a protection against humiliation. A thin black serge dress
gives me to myself a melancholy cold inert air: but beneath the
smooth-fitting breast of it comes too often a throbbing frightful to
feel, frightful to know, made of fierce petty anger and abasing hurt.
I hide it and me in my room and twist my hands together and walk my
floor, and a hurricane of helpless bitter trifling woe shakes and
wrenches me. Then Murder enters me.

What humiliates me is an obvious common thing that to any human one
would mean hurt and more hurt. Though I am determinedly brave I am
sensitive.

I do not write itself because this is the book of me and not of
people.

It is a slight, a poor and vivid cruelness. There is the tie of blood
in it which in all ways--from a deep heritage--I respect: and it rubs
an added stinging poison in the wound.

It is an injury I do not deserve. What I deserve I accept. What I
do not deserve pressed on me to humiliate me makes Murder in me.
Regardless of the other one--

--it would be simpler and finer for me to do that Murder than to keep
it in me. So many times in a week the trembling smothering longing
to do that Murder beats, beats in my thin breast. To be so owned by
a thing so small:--it is grief and despair and fury and wild nervous
intolerableness. It strains my flesh--it wrenches my pulse--it blinds
my eyes--it fills my throat--

--it would be a simpler and finer thing to do any Murder than to
feel, even once, the strangling damnedness rising, rising at my
throat--




_Loose twos_


                                                        To-morrow

I take it for granted God knows all about me.

If God should read this it would not be news to him.

But his knowledge of me is not immediate knowledge nor immediately
interesting to him. He knows my Twos-and-Twos but he does not make
Fours of them.

I am formed of loose Twos which wait for God to make them Fours.

I can not do it myself. When I’ve tried the added Twos come out
threes, seventies, nines, twelves--all the mysterious numbers. Never
Fours.

Long ago I decided not to try but to wait for God.

I juggle with temperamental and psychic Twos and experiment in
hysteric additions.

But it’s no good my trying to make Fours.

If God does not take it up I shall be eternal Twos.

And I seem not greatly to care: whenever that comes home to me I
merely light a carefree cigarette.




_Knitting or plaiting straw_


                                                        To-morrow

The things I know are jumbled and tangled into an indescribable heap
inside me.

The things I Don’t Know are separated and ranged of their own
volition in long orderly rows in my conscious mentality.

The things I know glow with tints and gleams and will-o’-wisp lights
and primal colors and waveringly with the blinding gold-purple
lightnings of all-Time.

The things I Don’t Know glow--each one separately--with a small
precise lantern-brightness of its own.

Also in my wide background are things I don’t know and am unaware
of it: the mass of my luminous Ignorance--it shines with an earthy
phosphorescence.

When I look at the things I know I get an undetailed perspective of
me like a bird’s-eye view of London.

When I look at neat formal rows of things I Don’t Know I have a clear
look, as if through an uncurtained window into a bare little room, at
my quietest self sitting knitting or plaiting straw.

I reckon up and count up and check up lists of big and little things
I Don’t Know--like this, rapidly:

I Don’t Know what ink is made of, nor how to fire a Maxim gun:
I don’t know how to make a will: I don’t know how to cook a
prairie-chicken, nor what to feed a pet weasel, nor who invented the
snarling-iron, nor what it is.

I Don’t Know what food people eat in the Himalaya Mountains, nor how
Lord Cornwallis felt when he surrendered: I don’t know the color of
a chicken’s gizzard, nor of sand, nor of fish-scales, nor of mice: I
don’t know whether an English cabinet minister needs strength of mind
or strength of will, or both, or neither.

I Don’t Know how I hurt the true heart of my friend: I don’t know
astronomy nor solid geometry: I don’t know what I think with: I
don’t know what ooze leather is, nor who pitched for the Tigers in
nineteen-nine.

I Don’t Know a good horse from a bad horse: I don’t know why a bat
sleeps head downward, nor what wasps live on: I don’t know how to
open oysters, nor how to milk a cow: I don’t know the Latin for
‘whiskey.’

I Don’t Know whether friendship is a selfish or an unselfish thing,
nor who discovered the medlar apple: I don’t know what is a jab,
fistically speaking, nor a punch, nor a hook, nor a wallop, nor the
fighting weight of Packey McFarland: I don’t know whether a moth
‘marries’ or whether her eggs are impregnated like a fish’s: I don’t
know why a clasp knife is called a jack knife, nor what to do for an
aching foot.

I Don’t Know how glass is blown: I don’t know whether coal is
vegetable or mineral: I don’t know the chemical composition of the
sunset vapors, nor how to play euchre: I don’t know how many guns an
armored cruiser carries, nor whether a gorilla meditates: I don’t
know whether I hate or greatly admire Catherine and Marie de Medici:
I don’t know a winch from a windlass.

I Don’t Know where is the cinnamon bear’s native haunt: I don’t know
how flint is mined, nor if wire is made of steel: I don’t know who
was the better man--William Wordsworth or the Duke of Wellington: I
don’t know the advantages of tariff revision downward: I don’t know
where ex-President Taft will go when he dies.

I Don’t Know whether I feel more comfortable with or without my
stays: I don’t know the origin of the word ‘dogged’: I don’t know
whether a ‘full house’ is better than ‘two pairs,’ nor whether a
right merry heart to-day is better than a wrong contented mind
to-morrow: I don’t know whether rabbit-pie is made of cats in Paris,
nor how many sails has a sloop: I don’t know what makes a dead body
rot.

I Don’t Know how to sharpen a carving knife, nor how to roll a
cigarette: I don’t know the real English meaning of the French noun
‘élancement’: I don’t know whether my sex is a matter of my genital
organs or of my mental inwards: I don’t know how to determine the
contents of a circle in square inches, nor how to pronounce ‘zebra.’

I Don’t Know whether Edgar Allan Poe is big or little: I don’t know
how many soldiers fell at Shiloh: I don’t know whether temperament
or nature or circumstance makes one woman a happy kindhearted whore
and another an unhappy cruel-hearted nun: I don’t know how to grow
artichokes: I don’t know what brimstone is, nor how to play the
accordion: I don’t know what quality in me forms my handwriting.

I Don’t Know what-like was my Soul in the Stone Age: I don’t know
whether cheese is good or bad for my health: I don’t know what
becomes of discarded hairpins, nor a tooth-brush’s ultimate destiny:
I don’t know the ‘Fra Diavolo’ opera, nor whether anyone ever uses
the word ‘thwack.’

I Don’t Know whether my heart breaks from within or without: I don’t
know whether ‘good old Marie Lloyd’ of the London ‘halls’ has a brain
like G. K. Chesterton or a dexterous individuality like a juggler:
I don’t know whether I feel spiritual bliss in my knees or in my
spirit: I don’t know why I breathe and go on breathing.

I Don’t Know what became of the ten lost tribes of Israel: I don’t
know how to say how-do-you-do to a king: I don’t know the exact
meaning of my terror and despair: I don’t know why I love--why I ever
love--

I Don’t Know whether laws of chance govern a spinning roulette
wheel and ivory ball or whether chance is beyond law: I don’t
know what kind of missile a Krupp gun shoots: I don’t know how a
ground-and-lofty tumbler turns a triple air-summersault: I don’t
know whether I really am the way I look in the mirror: I don’t know
whether the Russian language has Romanic roots: I don’t know what is
the wild power in poetry.

I Don’t Know whether lust is a human coarseness or a human fineness:
I don’t know why death holds a so sweet lure since it would take away
my Body: I don’t know that I wouldn’t deny my Christ, if I had one,
three times before a given cockcrow: I don’t know on the other hand
that I would: I don’t know whether honor is a reality in human beings
or a pose: I don’t know that I mayn’t be able to think with my Body
when it is in its coffin.

I Don’t Know what makes each day a Day of dark Gold and life
mournfully precious: I don’t know where is God: I don’t know how they
make tea in Ireland: I don’t know how to pronounce the word ‘girl’:
I don’t know how to make lace: I don’t know whether I hear a sound
or feel it, nor why a spool of thread looks exactly like a Spool of
Thread.

I Don’t Know--I Don’t Know--I Don’t Know, rapidly, to the end of the
mystic common-place infinitudes.

--those give me a clear look, as if through an uncurtained window
into a bare little room, at my quietest self sitting knitting or
plaiting straw--




_A life-long lonely word_


                                                        To-morrow

Fleeting times I wonder if it is my defect or others’ that no human
family tie holds and warms me.

There is none. I think about it with wistfulness.

The only tie-of-blood feeling that clings to me is of my warming and
keeping-alive. And it is very feeble. It grows more feeble.

It is a trivial matter as I look at it universally.

But as I look at it earthlily: there would be an abnormalness, a
lostness in one when the mother who bore her got from it at best but
a small cool dislike.

It makes me feel humanly lost.

‘Lost’ is the shuddering life-long lonely word that brushes against
me some nights and noons.




_Their voices_


                                                        To-morrow

Every day at half-past ten and half-past two I hear the high
shrill sweet choric Voices of hundreds of children shaking the thin
clear air.

A public school is but a block from here. The children rush out of
it, a hilarious noisy crowd, for a few mid-morning and mid-afternoon
minutes. So those minutes, from hearing their Voices day after day,
and day after day, have become lyric to my inner-listening.

Their Voices stir me, rouse me, speak to me with old very joyous,
very woful meanings.

The children fairly leap out of the school-building through doors
and down fire-escape stairways. And their Voices are at once hurled
skyward, clamorous and chaotic.

The Sound they make is a roundly common sound yet ‘winged.’ It is an
untrammeled Sound, uncultivated, only a little civilized.

It is world-music.

In it is the note beyond culture, higher than civilization, and
older. It is brave as voices of the shrilling winds and warmer,
viriler. It is liltinger than bird-songs and lustier than roarings of
mountain cataracts.

Music of the world!--

A little door inside me opens to those Voices.

My little door opens at the first shriek of the first child out of
doors, and I hear not only the hundreds of vivid piercing Voices but
more--their far-off echoes.

They are the Voices of children, children light-held in crude cold
innocence. The eyes of the children are clear--their impulses and
instincts rule their little lives. They are yet untouched by the
tiredness and terror and shame and sorrow of being human beings.

So the Sound of their Voices sweeps out resistless and regardless
as the sea or the sun which makes nothing of its own strength or
weakness. And through my little spirit-door I hear them, the poignant
common little sweet Voices, echoing, flying away, farther and
farther: along the roads: over plains and hills: through valleys long
worldly distances from here: through streets: through stone buildings
and dingy courts: through big rich houses: through homes of comfort
and homes of misery and homes of desolate smugness: into lifeless
social foyers: into learned places: into law-courts and cabinet-rooms
of nations: into graveyards and churches and down into dead-vaults:
into theatres: into clinics: into shops: into factories: into dives
and stews and brothels and at lustful doorsteps: into hotels and
on sport-courses: into market-places and across battle-fields,
round monuments and in towers and in forts and in prisons and in
dungeons:--there along fly their Voices.

It is a brave, brave Sound, and an insistent: nothing stops it.

It is triumph.

The noise of the noisiest battle dies away in time. The pounding of
ocean-surf on the rocks and of electric thunder in the clouds are
lasting only with this earth. But brave wild Voices of children fly
on and on, outlasting a million earths, silencing aeons of thunder,
floating strongly back of the stars. The voices of men--wizards,
monks, artisans, thieves--echo no farther than their talking
conceits: even of poets except as they catch up into their sonance
something to interpret a cool gay clamor of child-Voices. The voices
of women--singing women, lovely women, angelic honest women--die with
their bodies: even of mothers of the children except as they follow
with their own echo, by dream and shadow, the thronging child-Voices
as they go.

For the Sound of the child-Voices is more potent than wizards’--it is
not cramped into thought-forms: more devotional than monks’ because
super-conscious; more menacing than thieves’ because absolute. And
it echoes, echoes, echoes in the market-place full-tongued, ringing,
rising like the northern gale when all the other voices are long
dead-silenced: and after.

Music of the world.

This moment I hear it for it is half-after two of a bright gold
day. The air is emotional, nectareal, and mellow and yellow and
hot-sparkling. The Voices pierce it like a storm of fine steel
arrows. I at once set open my spirit-door and through it come the
sweet shrill chorus and the marvel echo beginning and swelling and
starting away. It wakes vision so that I see--quick, evil, terribly
human, in the dazzlingest daytime colors--all those Places where the
Voices go.

I go to a window and watch the children running about beneath the
high tide of their Voices. And they and the school-building and the
streets and stone walls show in duller colors than the Places where
their Echo goes.

--small girls with clipped hair and bloused cotton frocks, taller
girls throwing a basket-ball, thin-legged little girls playing
hop-scotch, groups of varied sizes with rainbow ribbons in their
hair, confused masses of knitted sweaters and fat white-stockinged
legs and shiny leather belts and ankle-strapped shoes, and
little young shoulders and knees and waistlines--restless and
kaleidoscopic--

--and confused boy-groups--little fellows in suits misnamed
Oliver-Twist, larger boys of serge-Norfolk persuasion, types of
the generic knickerbocker at once motley and monotonous--all with
the strong sturdy calves of their legs clad in a time-honored kind
of black ribbed stockings, all with the same breed of ties and
collars and short-cropped hair, all with the tacit air of confessing
themselves the most serenely cruel of all animals--

A careless conscienceless happy mob.

It is the Sound of their Voices that invests them with the terrifying
Power, the long world-sweeping Force as of spirit and matter merged,
the human radioactivity not evil and not good, stronger than all evil
and all good.

Those children I look at must cease to be children, and must lose
their Voices and grow into monks and thieves and singing women--must
turn into persons--‘Romans, countrymen and lovers.’

But will come after those another chorus: the same chorus: the same
Voices.

The brief yellow mellow minutes have passed and the last shout has
been silenced and the hundreds of children, Rainbow Hair-Ribbons and
Black Ribbed Legs, are again gathered into the McKinley School.

And my little door is shut again: that door opens but for those
Voices.

The Voices: their echo flying everywhere flies here into my
still room: and it stirs me, rouses me, speaks to me with the old
joyous woe.

Music of the world.




_My damns_


                                                        To-morrow

I bear the detailed infliction of being a person with a tired mixture
of patience and indifference and scorn.

I say on Monday, Damn the ache in my left foot: on Tuesday, Damn
that rattling window--I hate it: on Wednesday, Damn this yellow
garter--it’s too tight: on Thursday, Damn my futile life: on Friday,
Damn the solitude: on Saturday, Damn these thoughts: on Sunday, Damn
my two dresses.

But I pronounce each day’s Damn in a half-perfunctory half-preoccupied
tone, more from duty and fitness than from conviction. I intently
mean each Damn, but the scornful indifferent patience which is my
spirit-essence leavens each one. I swear at my life’s perversities
with only a fatigued contempt due partly to bodily fragileness but
mostly to a cold continently reckless mood which is clasped on me
like a strong stupefied devil-fish. In this mood I should murmur the
same gelded Damn if I found myself penniless and foodless in strange
streets: if I became suddenly deaf: if my Body were being lashed with
whips or raped by a Mexican bandit. I should murmur the same worn
Damn if I were this moment on a gallows with the rope around my neck
and life were dearly madly precious.

I mark that with my musing regrets. I remember in the strong young
furies of eighteen each new day of my life was filled with passionate
poetic blasphemy, protests and rebellions of youth. Those were not
tired, not acquiescent, not indifferent to slings-and-arrows, but
firey-blooded quick-pulsed breathless brave young Damns.

There is splendor in being brave in a fighting attitude, but in being
brave through indifference there is no splendor.

But it is only toward calamity and adversity and worldly untowardness
that I feel indifferent. Fighting blood is stirred in me if not
against the hated things then for the loved things. I could fight
and I could die, and love it, to save poet-lusters, poet-fineness,
poet-beauty from the world’s flat griefs. In that, which I feel warm
and real and sparkling in my blood, in some splendor for me.

--and also I could die for my country: and there is fighting hatred
stirred in me against its foes--

But in poetry there is nothing that evokes a lusty curse against its
vulgar adversaries. Poetry floats too high upon its dazzling wings. I
get delicately drunk from watching it till I can see the wings’ Gold
Shadow touch its foes and magically split them into dust-atoms.

So then the morale of my Damns remains perfunctory.

But they are apt and useful. They fit into the nervous rhythms of my
life. They mark time in my spirit’s flawed action. I begin each day
with a Damn of sorts. I end each day with a Damn of sorts. At midday
sometimes it’s, ‘Damn the terrifying ignorance of people.’ In the
dusk a deep-felt Damn of the blood. In the night another. And at my
late eating time a negligible Damn.

A wonderful word, Damn. It means enough and not too much. It means
everything in life, and roundly nothing.

Without Damn my day would lack tone. Damn richly justifies each
pronouncement of itself in word-value, substance-value and musical
resonance. It harms nobody and it helps me. It destroys nothing and
it strengthens me. It damages my annoyances and mends me somewhat.

But--perfunctory, desultory, tiredly insolent, it would be thrilling
to think the hot fire would sometime be back in my Damns. Better that
than Youth’s faith in my dreams. Better that than the _jeune-fille_
beauty in my hair. Better than even Youth’s ichor in my veins:
Youth’s fire in my Damns--

But there is dearness in this mood, which is indifferent and scornful
and slightingly patient, though it wants splendor. Let my Damns be
always brave, always contemptuous of disaster to me, and they will be
first-water value though their kind alter never-so.




_To God, care of the whistling winds_


                                                        To-morrow

This morning came a letter from a half-forgot friend in London. She
is in vaudeville and has been booked for two months in the Music
Halls. Her letter is of a tenor productive of a letter in turn. But I
am somehow not free to write letters to friends while I’m living in
my two plain dresses. So I wrote this letter to God instead:

                                                 19th November.

Dear God:

I know you won’t answer this letter. I’m not sure you will get it.
But I have the feeling to write you a letter, though it should only
blow down the whistling winds.

I haven’t a thing to ask of you: no prayer to make. I am not
suppliant nor humble nor contrite. Nor would I justify myself as a
person in your eyes. I scorn to try to justify myself. What I am I
am. If I am a bad actor I take the results of it without plaint.
I comment on it--why not?--since cats may look at kings and each
person inherits four-and-twenty hours a day. But I am bewildered and
distraught and sad.

The best you do for me, God, when I think of you--you personally--is
to make me bewildered and distraught and sad.

But I’ve imagined I could put myself to you as a proposition to take
or to leave as you like: on my terms since I do not know yours.

There are some verses--the Rubaiyat--in which you are upbraided as if
you might be the dealer in some gambling game who had the long end of
all the wagers and still so protected his money that _he_ could not
lose however the cards turned.--‘from his helpless creature be repaid
pure Gold for what he lent him dross-allayed.’--‘thou who didst with
pitfall and with gin beset the Road I was to wander in--.’

But to me that seems a cheap attitude toward you, God. I admit you
are fair. If I thought you weren’t my mind would not vex itself with
you at all. I can not make you out a crooked dealer nor one who lends
out bad money and demands good money in repayment.

But you are reticent and cold-tempered and uninterested. So it seems.
The necklace which you gave me so long ago, made of little curses, I
wear always round my spirit-neck. It serves some purpose, perhaps,
and it answers as a keepsake: so at least I may not forget you
whether or not you forget me. I don’t ask any more of your attention
nor anything more of you than I would be willing to give you in
return. But I wish you would be willing to exchange attention with
me. I am lonely. I am terrified. I am frightfully overshadowed by
myself and my odd aloofness and my thronging solitary emotions and my
menacing trivialities. I am always fearing not that I may be wicked
or immoral or allied with evils--I don’t really care a tinker’s curse
about that--but that I may be growing petty and trivial and weak. It
is horrible, horrible to feel that I may be a weakling--you, God, may
not know how horrible to me. It is like black annihilation for all
eternity when my Soul longs frantically, desperately to live. I feel
weakness to be the only immoralness--hateful and vile in whatever
aspect. I want to be strong to endure and to live in noonday lights
and to overcome my poorness. I want, though I’m far from it, to be
brave and big. What I admire you for, though you’re so far off and
strange and inexplicable, is that you are strong. You are Strength,
you are Light, you are the Solution and the Absolute. You’d hardly
know what weakness is if it did not so crop out in this human race
you made. This human race is a faërily beautiful thing: star-flaming
poets have sung in it: lovely youth has breathed upon it: happy wild
hearts have informed it. But the odd keynote of it all is weakness.
And I have felt me tuned overmuch by that keynote.

--but I won’t be weak, I won’t be, I won’t be, God! Whether
you pay attention or not, whether I breathe only futileness, I
will be strong, strong, strong in myself--strong if only in my
falseness--strong and strong again--

This would be your chance with me if you cared to take it: because
I own now just my plain two dresses. When I grow out of this quiet
mood--(if ever I do: I begin to doubt it)--I shall have more dresses,
and then I shall think about them, God, and the phases of life
they’ll build up around me, and not about you. It’s not that pretty
frocks would take my attention away from you if you once claimed it.
Once you claimed my attention it would be yours forever. But pretty
frocks would mean I am again walking in paved peopled roads. Being
there without your attention I shall go where my garments may lead me
forgetful of you. One’s life is of the flavor of one’s clothes: ‘the
wine must taste of its own grapes.’

Now feels like a fitting time for you to be personal with me, to give
me a sign that you know I’m here. I know I am blind and ignorant
about that. You may know a time that shall be more fitting, a time
when my still mood and two dresses are long gone and my life is made
of fluff and lightness so your sign will crash into it like a black
two-ton meteor. I only tell you how it seems. If you should come
now and speak to me I should feel suddenly glad. To-day feels such
a day-of-God. The sky is all wet silver and the air a thin cloud
of gold. I sit writing you by my window, often looking out with
my forehead resting against the cool pane. There is an ache in my
forehead, in my insteps, in my backbone and in my spirit. By stopping
in here a moment you would gladden me. If you could give me, or show
me--where it perhaps had always been--one true thing to have always
in my life I should cling to it and ask nothing of it but that it
remain true. If you’d make me one far-off promise of a dawn to come
after this tired darkness I would take your word for it and would
walk toward your dawn in a straight road from which I should not ever
turn aside. In me is a small torch glowing though set in chaos. By
its light I should keep in the road leading to your dawn. I should
keep in it at any sacrifice to my merely human self: any sacrifice,
believe me.

It isn’t a bargain I would make with you. I don’t like the thought of
a bargain with you. I would rather take the chance and lose honestly:
not in everything but in this matter with you. You show me the road
and I take it for the sole reason that it’s a true one. I should
expect myself to pay the tolls--heavy ones since I’m innately a liar,
a someway bad lot. I know, the same as I know one and one make two,
that I’ve only to be square in the human business of living to get
back a square deal, though I’ll get badly battered, with it. But it
isn’t what I mean. Something inside me hungers for answeringness--a
Gleam--to make me know the worldly squareness and the battering are
worth while beyond themselves: but a detail in the game.

You mightn’t guess it but I am diffident about broaching this much
that may sound like a plea, so I’ll say no more of it.

But before I close the letter I want to tell you that I’m not wanting
in gratitude for the terrible beauty of this world. I feel with
ecstasy the burning loveliness of the life you give the human race.

I want to tell you thank-you for some things in it. But all that they
mean I can not tell in words.

Only yesterday a light at sundown lingered on the hill-tops and on
the desert back of the School of Mines in tints of Olive and Copper
and Ochre and Rose so delicate, so radiant, so dumbly forlorn that
I closed my eyes against it all as I walked along the sand: its
aliveness, its realness, its flawless golden dreadful peace tortured
and twisted and too-keenly interpreted me.

And one summer day in Central Park in New York I saw a little
Yellow-Yellow Butterfly fluttering above a small plot of brilliant
Green-Green Grass in the afternoon sunshine. To you, God, used to the
purpling splendor of untold worlds that mightn’t seem noteworthy.
But to me--because I am half-sister to so many trivialities the
Yellow-Yellow of those little wings and the sweet bright Green of
the clipped velvet Grass beneath the sun suddenly fiercely entered
in and beat-beat hard on my imagination. O the glare and the flare
of that fairy prettiness! I shall never forget that picture though
I should one day see those worlds. It made me think wildly of
you, God, at the time--and ever since. It is there yet in Central
Park, that particular plot of Grass, and if not that Yellow-Yellow
Butterfly--happily, happily Yellow it was--then another!

And to-day and often other days I read this--

  ‘_Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter_’--

--magic words: potent hushed wizardry of beauty. It opens the
doors of all the Inner Rooms and more blest, more precious, of the
celestial brain of him who wrote it. In making the glimmering Purple
of all your worlds, God, you have not surpassed the thing you made in
the regal wistful glory of John Keats.

And two nights ago I went close to my glass and looked deep into my
own dark gray eyes, and they were beautiful. Their color is the gray
not of peace but of stormy sky and clouded sea. Their expression is
alien and melancholy and they are never without circlings of fatigue
or stress. And when I meet their glance they mostly accuse and
condemn and confound me. But two nights ago they grew wide and deep
and breathless-looking at realizing me human and alive. And presently
I saw, back of their gray iris--my Soul: like a naked girl: like a
willow in the wind: like a drowning star at daybreak: an inherent
inexpressible grace--my Soul of many ages.

And this moment another little memory, God, of a tropic marsh
a little way back from the sea on the island in the bay at
St. Augustine, as it looked in the wane of one sun-flooded February
day. In the marsh were tall waving feathery salt-marsh grasses,
and little pools of murky water. And there were snail-shells and
ancient barnacles and smooth beach pebbles. And bordering the pools
were reeds and flags and tiny wax-petaled death-white lilies. By a
mound of wet moss was a slim wild blue heron standing on one leg and
staring about and preening its blue feathers. And over all the scene
was a Pink-Pink Flush. The curving quivering tops of the long grass
were Pink with it. The pools were dull Pink mirrors. The barnacles,
the pebbles, the death-white lilies were as if a thin bloody veil
had been flung down on them. Pink touched the heron’s wings, its
beak, its head, its glittering beady eyes and spindly leg. The
sinking sun shot a Pink broadside of dream-dust all over the marsh:
it lingered and hung and floated. Almost I could have reached out my
two hands and gathered a bouquet of Pink Flush. The stillness, which
was intense, was Pink stillness. O but it was pleasant, pleasant,
pleasant, God--it wrapped me in a scarf of Pink sweetness: it filled
my throat with Pink honey: it laid on me a gentle eager quiet
covetous Pink spell.

Nobody knows how you do it, God. But it is all--Sunset Tint,
Yellow-Yellow Moth, Conscious Soul, Poet-Flame--maddening and
precious and terrifying and transfiguring to me who live among it. I
cherish it as a lonely one may who loves it with passion and is never
happy in it. And for it all I thank you, God.

                                        Yours very sincerely,
                                                  Mary MacLane.

I wrote the Letter on my long-unused monogram note-paper to please my
whim, and put it in the envelope and addressed it to God, care of the
Whistling Winds. He may receive it--what do I know?--only _he_ knows,
and is reticent.

I only know he’ll not answer it.




_A working diaphragm_


                                                        To-morrow

I am not Respectable nor Refined nor in Good Taste.

I take a delicate M.-Mac-Lane pleasure in those facts.

I doubt if they are anyway peculiar to me, but they feel like a
someway delicious clandestine circumstance: something to enjoy all to
myself.

It is difficult to imagine any woman really Respectable on her inner
side, the side that is turned toward herself alone. And it’s certain
no woman is Refined: it feels not possible. (There are yet inland
places where the word is used in its smug sense and believed in.) And
no woman but a dead woman in her coffin is in complete Good Taste.
Every live woman has for instance a working diaphragm: and in a
diaphragm there is, in the final analysis, simply no taste at all.

(As for men--except poets--I mean _poets_: and perhaps scientists--they
are so ungenuine: a race of discreet cautious puppets: wooden dolls
who move as their strings are pulled: with nothing so real about them
inside as even outside--what use to dwell upon them?)

Nearly all women are perplexingly interesting as human beings. And I
am quite the most interesting human being I know: and with it the
most appealing, the most sincere--in my own false fashion, and the
most bespeaking.

It is much due to knowing and feeling me to be not Respectable nor
Refined nor in Good Taste: particularly to being not in Good Taste.

One autumn evening in Boston I went to dine with a man in his
apartment in Beacon Street. He is a mining engineer whom I have
known since we were both children. He had bidden me to dinner in his
off-hand engineering way, but when I arrived at his diggings he was
not there. He did not come. Instead there was a dinner waiting, a
Japanese boy to serve it, and a strange man who had happened in. The
strange man had iron-gray hair, a brow like Apollo, a jowl like Bill
Sikes and much conversation. He said that he was newly from China,
South Africa and Egypt and that in his life he had been married
seven times with book and bell. Together we ate the dinner, talking
pleasantly in the light of colored Chinese lamp-shades. There were
little birds to eat and Chinese wine to drink--_sam shu_ distilled
virilely from rice: always a little of it is too much. After the
dinner we were standing by a teakwood sideboard and the strange man
was holding me tightly in his arms against a large smooth evening
panel of shirt-front, and he was kissing my mouth with a great
deal of ardor. I did not like it. I thought of all the women he had
married and wondered if they had liked it. And I mused in my placid
brain, ‘As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives.’ It
was the only thought in my mind as I waited boredly for him to have
done. (It’s no good struggling.) And that incident I know was not
Respectable.

And one summer day I was riding horseback up a steep gorge in these
Montana hills. It was hot dusty riding. I came to a mountain stream
with a beautiful little white-and-blue cascade tumbling over a high
rock upon smooth pebbles below. I got down from my horse, took off
my dusty khaki suit and all my clothes and stood under the fall of
the little tumbling cascade, whitely naked, without so much as a
figleaf’s covering. It was delectable and pagan, what with my quaint
thoughts as I stood crouched beneath the sparkling splash. And I know
there was nothing Refined in it.

And one evening between nine and ten, a week ago. I was walking
across the broad desert valley east of this Butte. It is late
November and the night was stormy. A strong high gale swept the
Flat. Presently it rained. I was on my way back with a mile or two
to go. It rained harder. Heavy sheets of black water whipped and
whirled down on me and wrapped me in their wet wings. I love all
weather when it is mild and more when it is rough except when it
bears down too hard: then I feel indifferent to it. As I moved along
the dark road not hurrying and not loitering I was saying inside
me, ‘Why am I going to any shelter out of this heavy wet rain? Why
am I not a houseless beggar-woman with nothing gentler in all my
life than this November storm? It is not because I deserve gentler
things--’ And with a sudden heavy shudder I whispered, ‘I wish I
were a beggar-woman! I wish I had no roof to cover me in this cold
night-blackness. It would be honest: I should be stripped to my
deserts. And I wish it were so--this drenching rain, this strangling
wind--nothing but this--shelter, money, comfort, self-satisfaction,
however seemingly earned, are dishonest--thieved. I ought to
be--ragged beggar--bleared eyes--dirty petticoats--a foul ratty hole
to creep into--hunger--bodily misery--all the portion of outcasts--
As God may hear me--I’d eagerly tremblingly change lives this moment
with a beggar-woman. I would--I would--!’ It is a piece of clear
inside truth about myself. And I know it proves me to be in poor
Taste.

It is a matter of attitude. Each of those incidents might happen to
any woman--except perhaps the last. I have known but one girl who
agreed with me in such a feeling. And not quite that feeling. She
had married a lot of money with a horrible old gentleman and had
wearied of both. But the other two episodes could readily belong to
any woman of _esprit_ who might be on the outside both Respectable
and Refined: even a woman lawyer.

But my attitude in the incident of the strange iron-gray man,
though in a bored way I could have viciously knifed him, was not a
Respectable attitude. I was bored and fanciful when doubtless I ought
to have been breathlessly angry. But my breathless anger is too rare
and beautiful an emotion to waste on ridiculous strange iron-gray men.

In the incident of the sparkling cascade my attitude was shameless:
something of the sort. It is never reprehensible for a woman to
take a cold shower-bath in solitude and health. But my spirit rose
and rejoiced at my bodily nakedness and then grew nymph-like and
figleafless on its own account. My sex exploited itself in mental
visions, like of Leda and the Swan or of myself as a slim villainous
Scotch Aphrodite conceived by a bold surprising Titian. And doubtless
I ought to have felt timorous in the vast sunlit mountainside, or
like a sexless child (or merely ‘hygienic’ like William Muldoon and
Bernarr McFadden). But the quick charm of the situation and the
heavenly anguish of the icy water, and my lovely Body, and my odd
moralless musings were too intriguing to expend themselves banalely.

The wet night road and the beggar-woman wish: it is drearily real
to me. Though I wear two plain dainty dresses, in a house--in me,
beating, beating, pounding down is a cold wild heavy rain: and under
my feet a long lonely muddy road. If they belong to me--well. I love
Me the more for feeling them.

And I feel them because I am not yet dead and in my coffin, but alive
and with a working diaphragm: which diaphragms are in not Good Taste.




_Lot’s wife_


                                                        To-morrow

To-day in the afternoon I briskly manicured my fingernails, sitting
by my gold-and-blue window, and I mused upon Lot’s Wife.

So many persons and incidents and events and adventures and episodes
there are to muse upon, in this mixed world, dating from when it
began till now. There’s something to charm any mood. Let me leave the
doors of my mind open and anything at all may float in like an errant
butterfly on a summer’s day.

It is an entertaining world, by and large: a limitless vaudeville.

Lot’s Wife is to me a fantasy from the antique, a bit of archaic
frivol to beguile me.

When first I heard of her, from an acrid aunt of caustic humor who
told me the tale tersely in explanation of a biblical print, I was
seven years old. From that day to this my meditative thoughts have
from time to time flitted backward to dwell interestedly upon Lot’s
Wife. Later when I went to an Episcopal Sunday-school I was pleased
to find this adjuration in according-to-St.-Luke: ‘Remember Lot’s
Wife.’ There seemed no special meaning attached to it. It seemed like
Remember Lot’s Wife in any way you like--as it might be with a card
on her birthday, a useless gift at Christmas, in your prayers, or in
retributive patriotism like Remember the Alamo, Remember the Maine.

But I remember her because I like her.

There’s no name given for Lot’s Wife in the brief biblical narrative,
so I long ago named her Bella as expressive of the temperament and
character that have grown around her image in my thoughts. Poor
Bella, I ruminated as I tinted and polished my nails. Her life in
Sodom was not entirely satisfying to her. Sodom was a town completely
given over to pleasure of the physical and outward sorts. The
dwellers lived in and for their physical senses alone. And Bella had
it in her to care for the foods of the spirit. Not that she longed
for them--she was not so conscious of herself--but she had it in her
to care for them had they been given her. Still, Sodom and its ways
were the best she knew and she had known them all her life. The roots
of her temperament had shot down into the Sodomesque substrata. She
fondly loved the place.

Sodom was a prototype for Babylon or Pompeii, worshiping the hotness
of the sun in moralless plaisance, with fêtes and drinkings of wine
from gold and silver cups, and bathings in warm scented marble-lined
pools, and anointings with oils of olive and palm, and dwellings
among flowers of thin bright petals and birds of vivid plumage and
fountains of crystal and rainbow, and caterings to the sparkle and
froth of human emotions, and browsings amid loves and lights o’ love.
Can Bella be wondered at for growing fond of it all, having known
nothing substantialer? And can she rightly be blamed for hating the
thought of leaving it for dry sage-brush wilds in the mountains? She
did hate and dread that thought with all her soul from the moment
it was made known to her that Sodom for its sins was booked for
destruction. She had perhaps a fortnight in which to dread it, and a
fortnight if given over to dread is long enough to damage stronger
spirits than hers.

Bella was slender and svelte, with long straight soft beautiful
silken pale red hair and white-lidded eyes of grayish green. She
was thirty-eight--a young thirty-eight. There’s an old thirty-eight
which applies to greedy school-teachers, gangrenous woman
government-clerks, fading hard-hearted stenographers, over-righteous
woman doctors; to all whose virtue is ever indecently on guard. But
there’s a glory-tinted sun-kissed young thirty-eight which applies
to sensitive high-strung generously-emotional women like Bella Lot.
She had smooth hands with supple tapering fingers, an irregular
expressive-lipped mouth like a pimpernel-bloom, firm slim feet
and the quivering suggestive white knees of a wood-nymph. From any
angle-of-view can she be blamed for hating to take that equipment
away from the city-de-luxe which was its so proper setting and hiding
it in the sage-brush?

Furthermore Bella had a lover in Sodom. It is beyond a sane effort
of the imagination that she could have loved that unpleasing old man
Lot. The best and worst that can be said of him is that he was a fit
addition to the company of the old Patriarchs who were for the most
part an exceeding craven crew. The martyrs, the sages and especially
the prophets had their splendors. But the lean old patriarchs--The
sporting blood of all of them--in the sense of merest simplest
courage--from Adam down, would hardly aggregate one drop. There are
any number of reasons--as many as Bella had charms--to account for
Lot’s having married her. But what she could have seen in him to make
her wish or even willing to be married to him is a deep mystery to
me. It may have been his family. I believe Bella lacked family: she
was just a person. And was he not nephew to Abraham? But even being
niece-in-law to Abraham himself seems insufficient compensation for
being Lot’s Wife.

The Lots had two young daughters, one fifteen and one seventeen, it
might be. I do not know their names--call them Ethel and Agnes. But
they were of a recalcitrant temper and absorbed in their own racy
pastimes among the younger youth of Sodom and they had no need of
their mother. Besides, they ‘took after’ their father. So Bella was
fain to turn outward in search of nurturing matter whereon to feed
her humanness. Had it been expected of her to play fair with the
patriarch she would have played fair. But it was not expected of her
by anyone in Sodom--far from it, and least of all by the patriarch.
She was eight-and-thirty, and Lot--_he_ was doubtless eight or nine
hundred years old, after the surprising long-lived fashion of the
period.

So Bella found a lover ready and awaiting her. She would have found
a lover in the circumstances even without caring to. But she quite
cared to, I think. Everything points that way, and when one remembers
that good old man her husband one can not censure her but only pity
her. Be it as it may she had one--one as real as anything could be in
that town of sparkling froth.

Of the lover’s identity--little is known, as the historians say. My
fancy as I filed my fingernails failed me on the point. Suffice it
to state that ever and anon as time passed in Sodom the gray-green
eyes of Bella were gazed into with fondness, affection, adoration
and desire: the white eyelids of Bella had showers of light kisses
bestowed on them, soft-falling as rose-petals shaken loose in summer
winds: the tapering white hands of Bella were caressed and caressing
with the oddly intense tenderness of physical love: the pale red hair
of Bella was ruffled and fluffed and disarrayed by the fingers of
love: the red-pimpernel mouth of Bella was touched, bruised, clung
to by the lips of love: the svelte whiteness and nymph-knees of
Bella glowed as she broached love’s arms:--and all went much merrier
than marriage bells. In short, Bella paid herself with usury for the
deadliness of being Lot’s Wife.

And there we have the crux of Bella’s dread of leaving Sodom and its
tempered sweetness for the arid sage-brush hills and the respectively
cold and hectic companionship of the good old patriarch and the
recalcitrant daughters.

It can not be claimed for Bella that any white poetic fires gleamed
across her soul, that any limning beauty shone palely from within
her. The air of Sodom was not conducive to suchlike matters and Bella
was no finer than her breeding and generation. But she was gentle and
wistful and kind of heart. She was lovely to look at and ingenuously
lovable in her clinging affection and disarming naturalness. She was
all one could want to imagine in the word charming.

Came the night set for destruction and the Lot family fled
according to schedule. They fled away in the early damps of an
autumn evening through the outer city gates and along a rough road
faintly lit by a dying moon. They had three separate reasons for
fleeing. Lot fled because he was a patriarch and was given to doing
craven Old-Testamentish things of that sort: Bella fled because
she was Lot’s Wife and obliged to act out the rôle: and Ethel and
Agnes fled because they had true patriarchal blood in their veins
and had therefore no marked inclination to remain in Sodom to be
annihilated--‘safety first’ was one of their watchwords. They fled in
the van. Lot came after them, being less swift of foot. Bella lagged
behind. She didn’t want to go. Every way she looked at it she didn’t
want to go. She hated that flight for a thousand reasons.

The ghastly moon shed a terror on her with its dim rays. The ground
was hard and rutted with frosty mud and bruised her slender feet
through her white buckskin sandals.

She wore a loose _ninon_ gown of white silk and linen with a
gold girdle around her narrow loins and a gold clasp at the left
shoulder. Binding her long hair, so palely red in the moon, was a
white-and-gold fillet. In one hand she carried a gold-and-enamel
link bracelet, a gift but that afternoon from the lover. Suddenly
she stopped and cried to herself, ‘I’m too lovely for this fate--I’m
too lovely and beloved--the cruelty of God--: I’ll not go on!’ She
thought of the gleams and colorings of Sodom. She quickly reckoned
the cost and decided to pay it. She was a rare good sport, and a
quaint. She looked back at the doomed city blazing in brimstone--‘But
his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of
salt.’--

As I put away my chamois-skin buffer and glass paste-jar through my
mind floated the pensive burden of a by-gone French song--

  ‘_Oh, the poor, oh, the poor, oh, the poor--dear--girl_’--

She must have made a beautiful statue, all in glistening salt.

I wish I had a glistening little salty replica of it to set on my
desk: a so unusual, a so dainty conceit, Lot’s Wife!




_My echoing footsteps_


                                                        To-morrow

While I live so still in this life-space, while I muse and meditate
and analyze everything I touch, while I walk, while I work, while
I change from one plain frock to the other: in quiet hours roiled
tumbling storms of vicarious unhopeful Passion whirl, whirl in me:
Passion of Soul, Passion of Mind, Passion of living, Passion of this
mixed world: in terror, in wild unease, in reasonless mournful joy.

I never knew real Passion, Passion-meanings, till I reached thirty.
It is now I’m at life’s storm-center, youth’s climax, the high-pulsed
orgasmic moment of being alive.

At twenty the woman’s chrysalis soul and aching pulses awaken in
crude chaste Spring-cold beauty. At forty her fires either have
subsided to dim-glowing coals or leaped to too-positive, too-searing,
too-obvious flames--her bones and the filigrees of her spirit may be
alike dry, brittle-ish. But at thirty her Spring has but changed to
midsummer. Poesy still waits upon her Passions.

My Spring has changed, bloomed, burst to midsummer.

Soft electrical heat-currents of being swing and sweep around me.
They touch me and enter my veins. But the liquid essences of youth
still quell and compass them. I am at youth’s climax--a half-sullen,
half-smouldering youth which still is youth.

My rose of life is fragrant and aglow. Its sweet pink petals are
uncurled and conscious in the wavering light.

Winds flutter and stir and rumple and twist those petals--

To-day is a To-morrow of countless unrests. Large and little
Passions beat at me all the blue-and-copper day. I walked my floor
with irregular lagging steps. I felt menacing, dangerous to myself,
dynamic as nitro-glycerine: and smoothly drearily sane as a bar of
white soap. I stood at my window and looked long at the circling
range of mountains which skirt this Butte. Nothing else I have looked
at, of sea or plain or hill, affected me like that chain of barren
peaks. They are arid splendor and pale purple witchery and grief and
lasting sadness and deathlike beauty and woe and wonder. Their color
quietly stormed my eyes and blurred them with tears.

It was a mood in which any color or gleam or thought or strain of
music or note of sad world-laughter or any un-sane loveliness of
poetry could enchant or flay or transport me to my frayed last nerve.

There is terror in facing death on battlefields, on sinking ships,
in black ice-floes, in blazing buildings. But to me no death, for I
fear no death, could be so dreadfully pregnant with in-turning woe
and frenzy and all intolerable feeling as facing starkly my futile
life.

My life is a vast stone bastile of many little Rooms in which I am a
prisoner. I am locked there in solitude on bread and water and let to
roam in it at will. And each Room is tenanted by invisible garbled
furies and dubious ecstasies. I run with echoing footsteps from Room
to Room to escape them: but each Room is more unhabitable than the
last. There are scores of little Rooms, each with its ghosts, each
different.

In one Room silent voices in the air accuse my tired Spirit of wanton
vacillations and barren lack of purpose and utter waste, waste, waste
of itself. And they threaten death and destruction. I know that
accusation and I hate it: I hate it the more for that it’s wholly
just. To escape it I run from that Room along a dim passage into
another one. In it unseen fingers clutch my Heart. In their touch
also is an accusation: of selfishness and waste and want of something
to beat for: and in their touch is the savor of wild wishes and human
longings and passionate prayers for something warm and simple and
real to rest against: and in their pressing clutching turbulent touch
is a tormenting half-promise, chance-promise, no-promise: and the
hovering inevitable threat of death and destruction. That too I know
and hate and half-love: and I can’t bear it. So I run out of that
Room along a passage and into another. I hear my footsteps echoing as
I run.

--as a child when I ran in the early night through a dark leaf-lined
tunnel-like driveway the sound of my own flying footsteps on the
hardened gravel was the only thing that frightened me. I quite
believed there were bears in the brushwood on either side, but
fear of them never struck to the core of my child-being like the
unknown thing in my echoing steps. And it is fear I feel now from
the ghost-sound of my ghost-footsteps running, running away from the
little Rooms. It is realer to me now than were my child footsteps to
my child-self long ago: it is more definite than my hand which writes
this: it is hideous--

Out of a dim passage I run into another little Room. In it some gray
filmy threads, like strands of loose cobwebs caught on ceilings,
float about. They sweep gently against my cheeks and hands and
neck, and cling and twine and lightly hold with the half-felt
feeling peculiar to bits of cobwebs on the skin. And it torments my
woman-flesh with calefacient thrills fierce and goading and sweet.
There also is the accusation, now against my Body; for tissues and
strength wasted: for useless fires meant to warm human seeds to life,
meant to make me fruitful, meant to make me bear dear race-burdens:
accusation for the cosmic waste of hot objectless desire, for the
subtle guilt of a Lesbian tendency, for an unleashed over-positive
sex-fancy. With it too is the lowering promise of death and
destruction. It also is just. But out of my borne-along helplessness
in it comes no culpable emotion because of cobweb thrills and their
arraignment but only a wearing wearying despair. I rush out of that
Room in shrugging impatience, with only scorn for a threat of death,
for a threat of destruction--but with a wild fear of my own flying
steps. I hurry and hurry on from door to door: but it’s no good. In
some other Room my brain is anathematized from frowning walls as an
impish demoniac power which I use with no good intent and therefore
with bad intent: and again I shrink and run away. In another Room are
all the lies I have ever told: I have told legions--my own peculiar
lies, gentler on me than truths: they dart around me in the Room like
black heavy-winged moths, clouds of them fluttering at my forehead.
They drive me out shivering. In another Room four times when I was
a not-good-sport confront me in a row like pictures and sting me
and make me hide my eyes: I’d rather be a leper, a beast, a maniac
than a not-good-sport (for my own precious reasons)--and I rush away
again. In some other Room--

--the same galling torment in all the Rooms. Wherever I run with the
echo-echo of steps there are Accusing voices and half-formed Prayer
and uncertain Yearning and violent yet dumb and inexpectant Protest
and the unfailing Threat of death and destruction: not earth-death
but universe-death: death and death and death everywhere coming on
and on: myself knowing the just note in it all and from it grown numb
with some cold and restless terror. Also I know no door I run through
with my panic-feet will ever set me free of the bastile except a
death door: the earthly death of this tired life--

But it’s from this maelstrom that the flashing burning sparkling mad
magic of being alive leaps out brilliant and barbarous--and throbbing
and splendid and sweet. A merely human hunger comes back on me. Then
I want all I ever wanted with a hundredfold more voltage of wanting
than I have ever yet known.

I am all unhopeful, all unpeaceful, all a desperate Languor and a
tragic Futileness: I am an unspeakably untoward thing.

And already I have been seared and scarred trivially from standing
foolishly near some foolish human melting-pots.

No matter for any of it. I want to plunge headlong into life--not
imitation life which is all I’ve yet known, but honest worldly
life at its biggest and humanest and cruelest and damnedest: to be
blistered and scorched by it if it be so ordered--so that only it’s
_realness_--from the outside of my skin to the deeps of my spirit.

It is not happiness I want--nothing like it: its like never existed
since this world began.

I want to feel one big hot red bloody Kiss-of-Life placed square and
strong on my mouth and shot straight into me to the back wall of my
Heart.

       *       *       *       *       *

I write this book for my own reading.

It is my postulate to myself.

As I read it it makes me clench my teeth savagely: and coldly
tranquilly close my eyelids: it makes me love and loathe Me, Soul and
bones.

Clench and close as I will the winds flutter and stir and crumple and
twist my petals as _they_ will:--as I sit here tiredly, tiredly sane.




_A comfortably vicious person_


                                                        To-morrow

The blue-and-copper of yesterday is dead and buried this To-morrow in
a maroon twilight.

I this moment saw darkly from my window the somber hills in their
heavy spell of pale-purple and grief and splendor and sadness and
beauty and wonder and woe.

But their color brings no tears to my wicked gray eyes.

The passion-edged mood is burnt out.

Gone, gone, gone.

I listlessly change into the other black dress for listless
dinnertime and all my thought is that my abdomen is beautifully flat
and that I must purchase a new petticoat.

I rub a little rouge on my pale mouth and I idlingly recall a clever
and filthy story I once heard.

I laugh languidly at it and feel myself a comfortably vicious person.

I pronounce a damn on the familiar ache in my beloved left foot and
turn away from myself.

I stick out the tip of my forked-feeling tongue at the bastard
clock on the stairs. I note the hour on it with a fainness in my
spirit-gizzard to dedicate Me from that time forth to a big blue god
of Nastiness: Nastiness so restful, humorous, appetizing, reckless,
sure-of-itself.

--these hellish To-morrows creeping in their petty pace: they bring
in weak-kneed niceness, and they bring in doubts, and they bring in
meditation and imagery and all-around humanness, till I’m a mere
heavy-heeled dubious complicated jade.




_In my black dress and my still room_


                                                        To-morrow

I have fits of Laughter all to myself.

The world is full of funny things. All to myself I Laugh at them. I
lounge at my desk in the small night hours, and I finger a pencil or
a box or a rubber or a knife and rest my chin on my hand, and sit on
my right foot, and Laugh intermittently at this or that.

Ha! ha! ha! I say inwardly: with all my Heart: relishingly.

I laugh at the thought of a mouse I once encountered lying dead--so
neat, so virtuous--though soft and o’er-long dead--with its tail
folded around it--in a porcelain tea-pot: a strong inimical anomaly
to all who viewed it. It had a look of a saint in effigy in a whited
sepulcher. Looked at as a mouse it seemed out of place. Looked at as
a saint it was perfect.

I Laugh at the recollection of a lady I once met who had thick
black furry eyebrows incongruous to her face, which she took off
at night and laid on her bureau. They were at once ‘detached’ and
detachable: itself a subtle phenomenon. She referred to her mind as
her ‘intellects’ and talked with a quaint bogus learnedness, and in
remarkable grammar, of the Swedenborgian doctrines. Looked at as a
person she was inadequate. Looked at as a conundrum she was gifted
and profound.

I Laugh at that extraordinary tailor in the Mother Goose rhyme--him
‘whose name was Stout,’ who cut off the petticoats of the little old
woman ‘round about,’ herself having recklessly fallen asleep on the
public highway. The tale leaves me the impression that such were the
straitly economic ideas of the tailor that he obtained all his cloth
by wandering about with his shears until he happened upon persons
slumbering thus publicly and vulnerably. Looked at in any light that
tailor is ever surprising, ever original, ever rarely delectable.

I Laugh at William Jennings Bryan.

How William Jennings Bryan may look to the country and world-at-large
I have never much considered.

It is all in the angle of view: St. Simeon Stilites may seem
rousingly funny to some: Old King Cole may have been a frosty dullard
to those who knew him best.

To me William Jennings Bryan means bits of my relishingest brand of
gay mournful Laughter.

The ensemble and detail of William Jennings Bryan and his career
as a public man, viewed impersonally--as one looks at the moon--is
something hectic as hell’s-bells.

I remember William Jennings Bryan when his star first rose. It
was before Theodore Roosevelt was more than a name: before the
battleship _Maine_ was sunk at Havana: before Lanky Bob wrested the
heavyweight title from Gentleman Jim at Carson: before aëroplanes
were and automobiles were more than rare thin-wheeled restless
buggies: before the song ‘My Gal She’s a High-born Lady’ had yet
waned: before one Carrie Nation had hewn her way to fame with a
hatchet. I was a short-skirted little girl devouringly reading and
observing everything, and I took note of all those. So I took note
of William Jennings Bryan nominated for president by the Democratic
convention in eighteen-ninety-six. The zealous Democratic newspapers
referred to him, though he was then thirty-six, as the Boy Orator
of the Platte. Looked at as a grown man, advocating free coinage
of silver at sixteen-to-one--a daring dashing Democrat, he was a
plausible thing and even romantic. Looked at as a Boy Orator he
turned at once into a bald and aged lad oddly flavored with an
essence of Dare-devil Dick, of the boy on the burning deck, of a kind
of political Fauntleroy madly matured.

Long years later with the top of his hair and his waistline buried
deep in his past he became Secretary of State: and at the same time a
Chautauqua Circuit lecturer--entertaining placid satisfied audiences
alternately with a troupe of Swiss Yodlers. Of all things, yodlers.
Politics makes strange bedfellows and always did. But never before
has the American Department of State combined and vied with the
yodler’s art to entertain and instruct. Looked at as a monologist he
might pass if sufficiently interpolated with ah-le-ee! and ah-le-o-o!
Looked at as Secretary of State he is grilling and gruelling to the
senses: a frightful figure quite surpassing a mouse softly dead in a
tea-pot, a pair of detachable fuzzy Swedenborg-addicted eyebrows, a
presumptuously economical tailor.

And he entertained the foreign ministers at a state dinner, did
this unusual man, and he gave them to drink--what but grape-juice,
grape-juice in its virginity. Plain water might have seemed the
crystalline expression of a rigid puritanic spirit. Budweiser Beer,
bitter and bourgeois, might have been possible though surprising.
But grape-juice, served to seasoned Latin Titles and Graybeards and
Gold-Braid, long tamely familiar with the Widow Clicquot: that in
truth seems, after all the years, boyishly oratorical, wildly and
darkly Nebraskan. Looked at as an appetizing wash for a children’s
white-collared and pink-sashed party, or for anybody on a summer
afternoon, grape-juice is satisfactory. In the careless hands of
William Jennings Bryan with his soul so unscrupulously at peace, the
virgin grape-juice becomes a vitriolic thing: a defluent purple river
crushing one’s helpless spirit among its rocks and rapids.

--a terrible American, William Jennings Bryan. He is for ‘peace
at any price.’ There were some, long and long ago, who suffered
and endured one starveling winter in camp at Valley Forge that
William Jennings Bryan might wax Nebraskanly fat: and _he_ is
valiantly for peace: at any price--

For that my Laughter is tinged with fulfilling hatred.

Rich hot-livered Laughter must have in it essential love or hatred.

To William Jennings Bryan everything he has done in his political
career must seem all right.

It _is_ all right, undoubtedly. Just that.

--that Silver-tongued Boy Orator

those Yodlers

that Peerless Leader

that Grape-juice--

They come breaking into my melancholy night-hours with an odd
high-seasoned abruptness.

I wonder what God thinks of him.

It might be God thinks well of him.

But I--in my black dress and my still room--I say inwardly and
willy-nilly, and with all my Heart and relishingly:

Ha! ha! ha!




_Their little shoes_


                                                        To-morrow

Often in windy autumn nights I lie awake in my shadowy bed and think
of the children, the Drab-eyed thousands of children in this America
who work in coal mines and factories.

Whenever I’m wakeful and the night is windy and my room is dark and I
lie in aloneness--a long aloneness: centuries--then shadows come from
far-off world-wildnesses and float and flutter dimly unhappy around
my bed. They tell me tales of shame and tame petty hopelessness and
trifling despair.

And the one that comes oftenest is the one that tells of those
Drab-Eyed children distances from here, but very immediate, who work
in coal mines and factories. I read about them in magazines and
newspapers, but they aren’t then one one-hundredth so real as when
their shadow floats as close to me in the windy autumn night.

Once in Pennsylvania I saw a group of children, very Drab in the Eyes
and very thin in the necks and legs, who worked in a mill. Their look
made its imprint in my memory and more in my flesh. And it comes back
as if it were the only thing that mattered as I lie wakeful in the
windy night.

The children--unconscious and smiling their small decayed
smiles--they are living and being crushed between greed and need as
between two murderous millstones. Their frail flesh and their little
brittle bones, their voices and their pinched insides, the sweet
vague childish looks which belong in their faces are squeezed and
crunched by two millstones--squeezed, squeezed till their scrawny
fledgeling bodies are dry, breathless, and are gasping, strangling,
striving frightfully for life: and still are slowly, all too slowly,
dying between two millstones.

If it were their own greed or their own need--but it’s the greed of
fat people and the need of their own warped gaunt parents. Betwixt
the two the children meet homelike hideous ruin. Placidly they are
cheated and blighted and blasted, placidly and with the utmost
domesticness.

The most darkling-luminous thing about the Drab-Eyed children is
that they never weep. They talk among themselves and smile their
little dreadful decayed smiles, but they don’t weep. When they walk
it’s with a middle-aged gait: when they eat their noontime food it’s
as grown people do, with half-conscious economic and gastronomic
consideration. They count their Tuesdays and Wednesdays with
calculation as work-days, which should be childishly wind-sweptly
free. Which is all of less weight than the heavy fact that they never
weep.

They reckon themselves fairly fortunate with their bits of silver
in yellow envelopes every Saturday. They are permitted to keep a
bit of it, each child a bit for herself or himself, so that on
Sunday afternoons they lose themselves for precious hours watching
Charlie Chaplin. Many pink-faced inconsequent children whose parents
nurture them and guard them and eternally misunderstand them are less
worldlily lucky. But the pink-faced children often weep--loudly,
foolishly like puppies and snarling furry cubs--and wet sweet salt
tears of proper childishness are round and bright on their cheeks
and lashes. It’s a sun-washed blestness for them: they’re impelled
and allowed to weep. But the Drab Eyes shed no tears--they know no
reason why they should. There’s no impulse for soft liquid grief in
the murderous philosophy of two grinding millstones. And there’s no
time--the lives of the work-children move on fast. Their very shoes
are ground between the millstones.

--their little shoes are heartbreaking. The millstones grind many
things along with little-little shoes of children: germs of potent
splendid humanness that might grow bigly American in heroic ways or
in sane round honesty: germs that might grow into brave barbaric
beauty or warm wistful sweetness: germs that would grow into lips
blooming tender and fragrant as jonquils or into minds swimming
with lyrics:--what is strongly lasting and glorified in the forlorn
divine human thing--crumpled--twisted forever when millstones grind
children’s little poor shoes--

The young Drab Eyes are endlessly betrayed: their very color thieved.
There’s no reason why they should weep.

But there’s a far-blown sound as if ten thousand bad and good worldly
eyes were weeping in their stead: with a note in it careless,
compassionate and jadedly menacing.

I seem to hear it in the wakeful windy night. And I hear no
world-music pouring out of small throats of work-children shrill with
woe-and-joy. The sound they make is a dumb sound, for they never
weep: a ghost-wail of partly-dead children borne lowly across this
mixed world on a stale hellish breeze.




_The sleep of the dead_


                                                        To-morrow

When I’m dead I want to Rest awhile in my grave: for I’m Tired, Tired
always.

My Soul must go on as it has gone on up to now.

It has a long way to go, and it has come a long way.

My Soul first started on its journey somewhere in Asia before the
dawn of this civilization. And it has gone on since through the
centuries and through strange phases of Body, terrors of flesh and
blood, suffering long. But it has gone someway on, each space of the
journey taking it nearer to the journey’s-End.

It is the dim-felt memory of those journeys that heaps the Tiredness
on me now. Not only is my spirit Tired. Through my spirit my hands
are Tired: my knees are Tired: my drooping shoulders: my thin feet:
my sensitive backbone. When I lift my hand in the sunshine the weight
of the yellow honeyed air bears down and down on it because I’m so
Tired. When I start to walk on stone pavements the ache of them is in
my feet before I set a foot on them because I’m so Tired. The pulse
in my veins Tires my blood as it beats. My low voice, though I speak
but rarely--it Tires my throat. My breath Tires my chest. The weight
of my hair Tires my forehead and temples. My plain frocks Tire my
Body to wear. My swift trenchant thoughts Tire my Mind.

It is not the Tiredness of effort though I strive to the limits of my
strength every day.

It is not pain, Restful pain. It is Tired Tiredness.

So when I’m dead I want to Rest awhile in my grave. It _would_ Rest
me.

In the Episcopal Church they use a ritual of poetic beauty, full of
Restful things. One of them is the sleep of the dead. The crucified
Nazarene slept three days. But all others of us when we go down
into our graves are to sleep until a Judgment Day. ‘Judgment Day’
is preposterous and evilly crude: there’s no judgment till each can
judge himself simply and cruelly in the morning light. But the sleep
of the dead--

--the sleep of the dead. Its sound by itself without the thought is
Restful--

And the thought is Restful.

I imagine me wrapped in a shroud of soft thin wool cloth of a pale
color, laid in a plain wood coffin: and my eyelids are closed, and my
Tired feet are dead feet, and my hands are folded on my breast. And
the coffin is nine feet down in the ground and the earth covers it.
Upon that some green sod: and above, the ancient blue deep sheltering
sky: and the clouds and the winds and the suns and moons, and the
days and nights and circling horizons--those above my grave.

And my Body laid at its length, eyes closed, hands folded, down there
Resting: my Soul not yet gone but laid beside my Body in the coffin
Resting.

--might we lie like that--Resting, Resting, for weeks, months, ages--

Year after long year, Resting.




_Stickily mad_


                                                        To-morrow

It is damn-the-Smell-of-Turpentine!

Here I happen on a damn in me which is not desultory but bloodily
strong and alive and alone.

The wood in my blue-white room has been newly painted. For a day
and a night I intermittently encounter and go to bed in a spirit of
Turpentine. It bears a cruel obscure abortive message to my nerves.

I lie wakeful in the dark and try to reason out a logicalness or
poetry in a thing so artfully pestilential. But I am hysterically
lost in it and my heart beats hysterically in it.

I remember the inexpressible ingenuity of man: of white man as
against bone-brained savage races. Every invented usefulness feels
like divine witchcraft. A pen and a bottle of perfume and a door-knob
and a granite kettle and an electric light: I have the use of each
since white man is so ingenious. Were I a red Indian I should have
only the awkward barbarous stupid tools my race had used a thousand
years. I contrast the two as I lie wakeful, with a sense of richness
and of detailed repletion and of material blestness.

But at once comes the Smell of Turpentine and announces itself
something outside that and _different_, something stronger, something
masterfuler than ingenuity and savagery together. It tortures my
nerves: it burns my eyes: it lames my flesh: it jerks and flays and
garbles my inner body. The ingenuity of man has produced opium and
cocaine which would combat and hide it all behind a heavy curtain of
stupor, with effects equally damaging if less grievously subtle.

The Smell of Turpentine is a thing to bear since all its
counter-things bring only solider evil.

The paint was put on the wood by a dirty little man whom I briefly
inspected as something removed from my range of life. In return he
covertly eyed me. I expected my wakeful hours would be punished
by strong new paint and be-visioned by dirty little men. But it
is all sheer Turpentine with a power suggesting nothing human nor
super-natural nor divine. Just itself: a goblin virulence.

In all my Soul and bones and Mary-Mac-Laneness it is damn-the-Smell-
of-Turpentine as a bastard murderous hurt.

I have an odd feeling God has no more power over it than have I.

It half-calls for a _different_ Turpentine God.

I am shakily mad tonight, I believe, from a so slight sticky matter.




_God compensates me_


                                                        To-morrow

It’s a Sunday midnight and I’ve just eaten a Cold Boiled Potato.

I shall never be able to write one-tenth of my fondness for a Cold
Boiled Potato.

A Cold Boiled Potato is always an unpremeditated episode which is its
chief charm.

It’s nice to happen on a book of poetry on a window-sill. It’s nice
to surprise a square of chocolate in a glove box. It’s nice to come
upon a little yellow apple in ambush. It’s nice to get an unexpected
letter from Jane Gillmore. It’s nice to unearth a reserve fund of
silk stockings under a sofa pillow. And especially it’s nice to find
a Cold Boiled Potato on a pantry shelf at midnight.

I like caviare at luncheon. And I like venison at dinner, dark and
bloody and rich. And I like champagne bubbling passionately in a
hollow-stemmed glass on New Year’s day. And I like terrapin turtle.
And I like French-Canadian game-pie. And artichokes and grapes and
baby onions. And none of them has the odd gnome-ish charm of a Cold
Boiled Potato at midnight.

I can imagine no circumstance in which a Cold Boiled Potato would not
take precedent with me at midnight. If I had a broken arm: if I had a
husband lying dead in the next room: if I were facing abrupt worldly
disaster: if there were a burglar in the house: if I’d had a dayful
of depression: if God and opportunity were knocking and clamoring at
my door: I should disregard each and all some minutes at midnight if
I had also a Cold Boiled Potato.

I love to read Keats’s Nightingale in my hushed life. I love to
remember Caruso at the Metropolitan singing Celeste Aïda. I love to
watch the bewitching blonde Blanche Sweet in a moving picture. I love
to feel the summer moonlight on my eyelids. And it’s disarmingly
contented I am with a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight.

Content is my rarest emotion and I get it at midnight out of a Cold
Boiled Potato.

Some things in life thrill me. Some drive me garbledly mad. Some
uplift me. Some debauch me. Some strengthen and enlighten me. Some
hurt, hurt, hurt. But I’m not thrilled nor maddened nor uplifted nor
debauched nor strengthened nor enlightened nor hurt, but only fed-up
and fattened in spirit by a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight.

I stand in the pantry door leaning against the jamb, with a tiny
glass salt-shaker in one hand and the sweet dark pink Cold Boiled
Potato in the other. And I sprinkle it with salt and I nibble,
nibble, nibble. And I say aloud, ‘Gee, it’s good!’

I liked Cold Boiled Potato at four-and-twenty. I liked it at
seventeen. I liked it at twelve. At three I climbed on cake-boxes in
search of one. And now in the deep bloom of being myself I am made
roundly replete at midnight with a Cold Boiled Potato.

A Cold Boiled Potato--it tastes of chestnuts at midnight, the first
frost-kissed chestnuts in the woods: and it tastes of rain-water and
of salt and of roses: it tastes of young willow-bark and of earth
and of grass-stems: it tastes of the sun and the wind and of some
nameless relishingness born of the summer hillside that grew it: it
tastes at midnight so _like_ a Cold Boiled Potato.

A precious peach-colored orchid, an antique spider-web-like lace
handkerchief, a delicate purple butterfly, an emerald bracelet: I’d
strive for each of those in an eagerly casual way. But it’s like an
ogre at midnight I pounce on a Cold Boiled Potato.

A Cold Boiled Potato reminds me of the Dickens books in which so much
food is eaten cold and tastes so savory--even the ‘wilderness of cold
potatoes’ portioned to the Marchioness by Sally Brass. And it reminds
me of the Rip Van Winkle play--‘give this fellow a cold potato
and let him go.’ And it reminds me of Hamlet--funeral baked meats
might include it. And it reminds me of Robin Hood’s merry men, and
Huckleberry Finn, and the Canterbury Pilgrims, and the Prodigal Son,
and all the picturesque wayfarers. It reminds me of the poor as a
colorful race wrapped around with hungry romance. It reminds me that
life is full of life--rich and fruitful and evolutionary and cosmic:
few things feel so cosmic as a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight.
It makes me want as I nibble to plant a field of potatoes on a
southern-exposed hill and hoe them and dig them all by myself: and
give all but one to the poor and Boil that to eat Cold at midnight.

I have to be very hungry to crave a Cold Boiled Potato, but being
hungry no possible morsel of food can so interest me at midnight. The
same potato hot is domestic and tasteless. The same potato at ten
in the evening lukewarm within and sodden with memories of dinner,
is a repellent item. At midnight it is all unexpected magnetism. At
midnight my whole being is profoundly courteous, wooingly cordial
toward a Cold Boiled Potato.

If I had only what I deserved my portion might well be a Cold Boiled
Potato. Intrinsically it is rated low and I know me to be a sort
of jezebel. But I’d wonder each midnight if whoever metes out the
deserts in this surprising universe knew with what gust I rise at
it--_would_ I get it.

Nor am I satisfied like the meek and lowly with my midnight supper of
Cold Boiled Potato: damn the meek and lowly. It’s a satanic delight
I take in it. It’s a sly private orgie I make of it: a pirate’s
banquet, a thieves’ picnic, a pagan rite, a heathen revelry, a
conceit all and unhallowedly my own. My thoughts as I nibble are set
mostly on my villainies. No food I eat brings me so broad a license
of feeling--a sense of freedom--as a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight.

On a Cold Boiled Potato at midnight I am lightly valorous: call me
a trickster and I’ll call you a rotter: call me a liar and I’ll
call you a traitor: call me a coward and I’ll call you another: not
pugnaciously but gayly and serenely.

I am then in my most bespeaking mood. Anyone who met me standing
nibbling in a pantry doorway at midnight would be charmed. I would
talk with a dainty ribaldry and offer to share the feast.

For shadow-things piled too near God compensates me in unexpected
midnights with a Cold Boiled Potato: along with it a pantry doorway
to stand in and a little glass salt-shaker to hold in my other hand.




_The strange braveness_


                                                        To-morrow

If God has human feelings he must often have a burning at the eyes
and a fullness at the throat at the strange Braveness of human
people: their Braveness as they go on in the daily life, with aching
dumbish minds and disgruntled bereft bodies and flattened pinched
gnawed hearts.

The easy human slattern way would be to sink beneath the burden.

Instead, people: I and Another and all others--seamstresses and
monotonous clerks and lawyers and housewives: sit upright in chairs
and talk into telephones and walk fast and eat breakfasts and brush
hair: all the while marooned in a morass of small wild unexciting
tasteless Pain.

Of others--what do I know?

But I might say, ‘Look, God, I am not fallen on the ground, from this
and that--utterly lost and down. But sitting, drooping but strong, in
a chair, mending a lamp-shade--neat, orderly and at-it in my misery.’




_Just beneath my skin_


                                                        To-morrow

This I write is a strange thing.

So close to fact: so far from it.

So close to truth: so surrounded by lies.

It does not contain lies but is someway surrounded by a mist of lies.

A strange thing about it is that it _is_ expressing the Self Just
Beneath My Skin.

That Self is someways trivial and outlandish and mentally nervous,
flightly, silly--silly to a verge of tragicness. I know that to be
true from a long acquaintance with me. It is oddly intriguing to read
over some chapters and find it _shown_.

Some unconscious exact photography aids my writing talent.

Some chapters are bewilderingly and mysteriously true to life.

My everyday self that casually speaks to this or that person is
nothing like this book. My absorbed self that writes a letter to
an intimate acquaintance is not like this book. My heartfelt self
that deeply loves a friend, and gives of its depths, and thrills
answeringly to other depths, is not like this book.

This book is my mere Hidden Self--just under the skin but hid away
closer than the Thousand Mysteries: never shown to any other person
in any conversation or any association: never would be shown: never
could be.

How Another, any Other, would come out: what Another would show:
photographed Beneath the Skin--what do I know?

Perchance ten times more trivial and inconsequent and mad than Me.

If Another thinks Me someway mad, let him look at Himself Just
Beneath the Skin.

Perchance Another every day as he thanks a janitor for holding open a
door, would much prefer to drive a long rusty brad-nail deep into the
janitor’s skull.

Perchance Another has a brain like Goethe, a Soul like a
humming-bird, a Heart like a little round nutmeg.

What do I know?

I know what I am.

Another may know what he is.

But I can’t tell Me to Another and Another can’t tell Himself to Me.

I can tell Me to myself and write it.

Another if he reads will see Me: but not as I see Me. Instead,
through many veil-curtains and glasses, very darkly.




_God’s kindly caprice_


                                                        To-morrow

For twenty-five cents and one hour and twelve minutes one may get
in this present detailed world a bit of unforgettable complete
enchantment.

So I found to-day in a moving-picture theater. A Carmen, the real
Carmen of Prosper Mérimée glowed, vibrated, lived and died with
passion on a white screen.

Of all prose writers I know Prosper Mérimée is the one--(intimate
and sensitively alive as if I had lain against his shoulder as I
read ‘La Guzla’ and ‘Venus d’Ille’--he melts into my veins--)whom I
would most eagerly see interpreted. Of all fiction characters--if she
is fiction--the poignant Carmen is the one I would most eagerly see
realized.

Carmen is one of those fictions which are truer to life than life is.
Such fiction-things are all around, touching everybody: the spoken
truths which grow false at being spoken: the thought lies which turn
to truths the moment they touch words.

I have heard Carmen sung and seen her filmed by the lustrous Farrar,
and I have seen her play-acted by some lesser lights. But Bizet’s
opera, a sparkling music-storm, creates a sonant objective Carmen,
a beautiful bloody lyric, remote from Mérimée who made a Carmen
intensely peculiar to his own subjective art. And the stage-Carmen
has always been a stage-Carmen waiting in dusty, draughty wings
for her cues. It remained for the cinematograph, which is a true
literal mirror of human expression, to make Carmen burst into violent
physical life.

But it was less the scopes of the films which made Carmen animate
than it was the virile woman who played her. It was acting--but
acting in the sense of losing and sinking and saturating and
dissolving herself in another woman’s temperament: and by it she
achieved some strong sword, keen shadings of the Carmen character--to
the hair’s-breadth.

And she _looked_ like Carmen. It was not important to the vigorous
fire of her acting but it made bewitchment in the portrait. No one
I have before seen play Carmen fitted the elusive points of her
description.

  ‘Her eyes were set obliquely in her head but they were
  magnificent and large. Her lips, a little full but beautifully
  shaped, revealed a set of teeth as white as newly-skinned
  almonds. Her hair was black with blue lights on it like a
  raven’s wing, long and glossy. To every blemish she united some
  advantage which was perhaps all the more evident by contrast.
  There was something strange and wild about her beauty. Her face
  surprised you at first sight but nobody could forget it. Her
  eyes especially had an expression of mingled sensuality and
  fierceness which I had never seen in any human glance. Gypsy’s
  eye, wolf’s eye’--

This (from the English translation of the story by Lady Mary Loyd)
fitted to a charm the pictured vision of the foreign-looking
woman--her name is Theda Bara--who flung a throbbing Carmen across
the screen with indescribable heat and color and luster. It was
comparable only to the muscular force of the original which that
Mérimée rubs nervously and heavily into one’s thoughts. I felt it
someway satisfyingly unbelievable--an illusion more actual than
actuality: a dream which outbore fact.

I suppose there’s no other character like Carmen for flaming
roundness in all fiction: filled with her treacheries yet purely true
to herself, without fear, utterly game: fierce, coarse, ruthless and
reckless yet wrapped in a maddening unwitting pathos: strong and bold
and cruelly poised yet capable of sudden complete surrender: ignorant
and abandoned and criminal in every instinct yet beyond every
littleness, every pettiness: sensual yet contemptuous and indifferent
in it, a woman of essential chastity. Carmen is the one criminal
conception in whom there is no vulgar evil, no personal maculateness
though wrecking all the wildness of her temper in her tempestuous
days’-journeys. She is a romantic murderous appeal to human
superjudgment. It was this isolate quality of her which Theda Bara
gave out with mystic masterful art. She gauged the personal odors
and blood-pressures of Carmen. She slipped into Carmen’s skin and
first sucked in and then breathed out the irresistible menacingness
and arresting ruination of her beautiful diabolic spirit. A little
feverish artistic thrill ran in my veins as I sat in the dark
watching.

  ‘She had thrown her mantilla back,’ says Don José in the
  translated tale, ‘to show her shoulders and a great bunch of
  acacias that was thrust into her chemise. She had another acacia
  bloom in the corner of her mouth and she walked along swaying
  her hips like a filly from the Cordova stud farm. In my country
  anyone who had seen a woman dressed in that fashion would
  have crossed himself. In Seville every man paid her some bold
  compliment on her appearance. She had an answer to each and all
  with her hand on her hip--“Come, my love,” she began again, “make
  me seven ells of lace for my mantilla, my pet pin-maker.” And
  taking the acacia blossom out of her mouth she flipped it at me
  with her thumb so that it hit me just between the eyes. I tell
  you, sir, I felt as if a bullet had struck me.’

This first meeting of Carmen with the dragoon was pictured in a
brilliant hot-looking plaza as if before the cigarette factory in
Seville. This woman in throwing the flower at the soldier expressed
wonderfully in one fleet moment, by hand and lip and eye, the savage
sordid poetry and passionate freedom--that unearthly fragrance--which
_is_ Carmen.

The film version followed the scenes of the opera rather than the
story, which took nothing from the headlong truth of the central
figure.

But no picturing can equal the star-clarity of Mérimée’s prose in
Carmen’s death-scene--a thing of a piercing pathos comparable to
nothing I know in writing.

  ‘After we had gone a little distance I said to her, “So, my
  Carmen, you are quite ready to follow me, isn’t it so?”

  She answered, “Yes, I’ll follow you to the death--but I won’t
  live with you any more.”

  We had reached a lonely gorge. I stopped my horse.

  “Is this the place?” she said.

  And with a spring she reached the ground. She took off her
  mantilla and threw it at her feet, and stood motionless with one
  hand on her hip, looking at me steadily.

  “You mean to kill me, I see that well,” she said. “It is fate.
  But you’ll never make me give in.”

  I said to her: “Be rational, I implore you; listen to me. All
  the past is forgotten. Yet you know it is you who have been my
  ruin--it is because of you that I am a robber and a murderer.
  Carmen, my Carmen, let me save you, and save myself with you.”

  “José,” she answered, “what you ask is impossible. I don’t love
  you any more. You love me still and that is why you want to kill
  me. If I liked I might tell you some other lie, but I don’t
  choose to give myself the trouble. Everything is over between us
  two. You are my rom and you have the right to kill your romi,
  but Carmen will always be free. A calli she was born and a calli
  she’ll die.”

  “Then you love Lucas?” I asked.

  “Yes, I have loved him--as I loved you--for an instant--less than
  I loved you, perhaps. And now I don’t love anything. And I hate
  myself for ever having loved you.”

  I cast myself at her feet, I seized her hands, I watered them
  with tears, I reminded her of all the happy moments we had spent
  together, I offered to continue my brigand’s life, if that would
  please her. Everything, sir, everything--I offered her everything
  if she would only love me again.

  She said: “Love you again? That’s not possible. Live with you? I
  will not do it.”

  I was wild with fury. I drew my knife. I would have had her look
  frightened and sue for mercy--but that woman was a demon. I
  cried: “For the last time I ask you, Will you stay with me?”

  “No! No! No!” she said and she stamped her foot. Then she
  pulled a ring I had given her off her finger and cast it into
  the brushwood. I struck her twice over--I had taken Garcia’s
  knife because I had broken my own. At the second thrust she
  fell without a sound. It seems to me that I can still see her
  great black eyes staring at me. Then they grew dim and the
  lids closed.--For a good hour I lay there prostrate beside the
  corpse.’--

No play-acting could make the scene so pregnant and palpitant with
human-stuff and alive in vision as that translucent jewel-prose
of Mérimée. But so close as one art may counterfeit another, by
drinking-up the fiery spirit essence which informs it, so close
did this actor-woman compass and consummate the strong delicious
unafraidness of Carmen’s death-hour.

The scene was staged as in the opera--a court outside the
bull-fighting arena, with Carmen richly bejeweled and dressed in
the lacy smart-lady clothes of the Toreador’s mistress. But that
was nothing. The gypsy wildness of the written scene was in every
insolently splendid bodily movement and each fateful loveliness of
eyes and lips of the fulfilling Theda Bara.

I can still see the dark drooping-lidded dying eyes. I sensed Carmen
in conscious chambers of my Mind. I felt her in my throat. It was
Carmen herself living and breathing near me, the fearsomely adorable
Carmen who has haunted the edge of my thoughts since I first read her.

There are some odd crudenesses in Theda Bara’s acting which had the
effect of making her un-stagey, unobvious. They made her humanly
vibrant. And they added a devilish wistfulness to her Carmen and a
surprising feel of genuineness to the whole masque.

The actor’s art brings out the romance which is in human
bone-and-flesh. And Theda Bara seems someway a master of its physical
and spiritual subtleties. She expressed the swift emotion of Carmen
by ringing slightest possible changes on her own virile and mobile
body: insolence by kimboing an elbow: cruelty by the twitch of a
wrist: sensual feeling by moving a knee and an ankle: murder in the
twisting of her waistline: a fleet repressed animal tenderness by a
posture of shoulder and breast: a heartbreak of mirth in her careless
vivid lips: the desperate bravery of that death by the tilt of her
potent chin: the hurricane-freedom of Carmen’s soul by lifting her
face and her arms in the night wind. She worked with an exquisite
muscular sincerity, as if she strongly gave her best of brain and
blood and mettle to the part.

I looked at photographs of her which decorated the lobby of the
theater. She looks a beautiful and earnest-seeming girl of a mental
rather than a physical caste, with melancholy dark eyes, a childlike
mouth-profile and the slim patrician hands of a Bourbon duchess. She
will live in my warmed memory as the star of all the Carmens.

A flood of life and color goes into the staging of a Carmen film: a
throng of attractive faces and bodies of people, women and men and
lovely children, move through it in a pulsating gay pageant: flowers
and Spanish prettinesses of costume and country-side and street
and café are all over it, bright as life: and sweet winds blow in
it and leaves and grasses wave and flutter, and the sunshine melts
and mellows the air--all as if one saw it thrice-enlarged through
windows. It is not poetry--it is not in itself any art, but a dear
delectable counterfeit of it, a miracle-_taste_ of the outer-looking
madly-peopled world.

For me it meant my long-adored Mérimée given sudden brief life, the
haunting Carmen turned into flesh: a spell of silent human-music
which glowed and burned upon me like gentle fire.

Often is God thus capriciously kind to me.




_A fascinating creature_


                                                        To-morrow

I am a fascinating creature.

I move in no stultifying ruts. There’s no real yoke of custom on
my shoulders. My round white breasts beneath their black serge are
concurrent with nothing settled or subservient or discreet.

My Mind goes in no grooves made by other minds. It lives like a witch
in a forest, weaving its spells, revelling in smooth vivid adventure.
When I look at a round gray stone by a roadside I look at it not as
a young woman, not as a person, not as an artist, nor a geologist,
nor an economist, but as Me--as Mary MacLane--and as if there had not
before been a round gray stone by a roadside since the world began.
When I look at a chair with my somber eyes I say to the chair, ‘What
other persons may see when they look at you, chair, I don’t know--how
could I know? But I well know what I see and that what I see is
uninfluenced by other eyes that may have looked at you, were they
Aristotle’s or Galileo’s or an archangel’s.’ There may be equally
egotistic viewpoints--in Waco-Texas, or Japan, or Glasgow-Scotland or
the Orkney Islands, where not? I don’t know--I don’t care. What is it
to me? I know my own virile vision and that it thrills and informs
and translates me as if crackling bright-jagged lightnings broke
along my sky.--

It is a night of whispering breezes and little restless clouds, an
endearing night. It makes solitude a delectation. I walked out in it,
in the glimmering moonlight past buildings and houses and mines and
mounds. My thoughts as I walked were all of Me: how fascinating is Me.

I came in at midnight and met Me in my mirror. I pushed my
three-cornered hat backward off my head, slipped out of my loose coat
and dropped my squeezed gloves. I sank fatiguedly into a little chair
before the mirror, tipped the chair forward on its front legs, rested
my elbows on the bureau and my chin in my hands and looked absorbedly
at myself. Lovingly, tenderly, discerningly, marveling and absorbed
and deeply fascinated I looked at Me in the mirror. ‘You enchanted
one!’ said I, ‘You Witch-o’-the-world! you Mary MacLane!--who you
are _I_ don’t know--what you are I but partly know. You’re my
Companion, my Familiar, my Lover, my wilding Sweetheart--I love you!
I know that--that’s enough. I love your garbled temper, your aching
thoughts, your troubled Heart, your wasted spirit. I know much, much,
much of you and love you! I love your beauty-sense and your proud
scornful secret super-sensitiveness. I love your Eyes and your Lips
and your bodily Fire and Ice’--

--to _know_ oneself: apart from all the world!

One looking at me sees a cold-poised young woman, reserved and aloof,
slightly diffusing insolence and inspiring misgivings.

But I looking at Me see a woman standing high on flame-washed
battlements of her life in whom burn and beat the spirits and
lights and star-discords of uncounted tired lustrous ages. I see me
forlorn and radiant, drab and brilliant. I see me wrapped in a fiery
potentiality of pain and beauty and love and sorrow. I hear wild
voices

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