“‘Oh, Mary, go and call the cattle home,And call the cattle home,And call the cattle home,Across the sands of Dee!’The western wind was wild and dank with foam,And all alone went she.“The creeping tide came up along the sand,And o’er and o’er the sand,And round and round the sand,As far as eye could see;The blinding mist came up and hid theland—And never home came she.“Oh, is it weed, or fish, or floatinghair?—A tress of golden hair,Of drowned maiden’s hair,Above the nets at sea.Was never salmon yet that shone so fairAmong the stakes on Dee.“They rowed her in across the rolling foam,The cruel, crawling foam,The cruel, hungry foam,To her grave beside the sea;But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle homeAcross the sands of Dee.”This is a poem perfect. And in the Gray Dawn it expresses to me a most desirable thing—a short, eventless life, a sudden ceasing, and a forgotten voice sometimes calling. This Mary, in the Gray Dawn, would wish nothing else. If the waters rolled over me now—over my short, eventless life—there would be the sudden ceasing,—and the anemone lady would hear my voice sometimes, and remember me—the anemone lady and one or two others. And after a short time even my pathetic, passionate voice would sound faint and be forgotten, and my world of sand and barrenness would know me and my weary little life-tragedy no more.And well for me, I say,—in the Gray Dawn.It is different—oh, very different—when the yellow bursts through the gray. And the yellow is with me all day long, and at sunset—the red, red line!Yet—oh, sweet Gray Dawn!March 5.SOMETIMES I am seized with nearer, vivider sensations of love for my one friend, the anemone lady.She is so dear—so beautiful!My love for her is a peculiar thing. It is not the ordinary woman-love. It is something that burns with a vivid fire of its own. The anemone lady is enshrined in a temple on the inside of my heart that shall always only be hers.She is my first love—my only dear one.The thought of her fills me with a multitude of feelings, passionate yet wonderfully tender,—with delight, with rare, undefined emotions, with a suggestion of tears.Oh, dearest anemone lady, shall I ever be able to forget your beautiful face! There may be some long, crowded years before me; it may bethere will be people and people entering and departing—but, oh, no—no, I shall never forget! There will be in my life always—always the faint sweet perfume of the blue anemone: the memory of my one friend.Before she went away, to see her, to be near her, was an event in my life—a coloring of the dullness. Always when I used to look at her there would rush a train of things over my mind, a vaguely glittering pageant that came only with her, and that held an always-vivid interest for me.There were manifold and varied treasures in this train. There were skies of spangled sapphire, and there were lilies, and violets wet with dew. There was the music of violins, and wonderful weeds from the deep sea, and songs of troubadours, and gleaming white statues. There were ancient forests of oak and clematis vines; there were lemon-trees, and fretted palaces, and moss-covered old castles withmoats and draw-bridges and tiny mullioned windows with diamond panes. There was a cold, glittering cataract of white foam, and a little green boat far off down the river, drifting along under drooping willows. There was a tree of golden apples, and a banquet in a beautiful house with the melting music of lutes and harps, and mulled orange-wine in tall, thin glasses. There was a field of long, fine grass, soft as bat’s-wool, and there were birds of brilliant plumage—scarlet and indigo with gold-tipped wings.All these and a thousand fancies alike vaguely glittering would rush over me when I was with the anemone lady. Always my brain was in a gentle delirium. My nerves were unquiet.It was because I love her.Oh, there is not—there can never be—another anemone lady!My life is a desert—a desert, but the thin, clinging perfume of the blue anemone reaches to its utter confines. Andnothing in the desert is the same because of that perfume. Years will not fade the blue of the anemone, nor a thousand bitter winds blow away the rare fragrance.I feel in the anemone lady a strange attraction of sex. There is in me a masculine element that, when I am thinking of her, arises and overshadows all the others.“Why am I not a man,” I say to the sand and barrenness with a certain strained, tense passion, “that I might give this wonderful, dear, delicious woman an absolutely perfect love!”And this is my predominating feeling for her.So, then, it is not the woman-love, but the man-love, set in the mysterious sensibilities of my woman-nature. It brings me pain and pleasure mingled in that odd, odd fashion.Do you think a man is the only creature with whom one may fall in love?Often I see coming across the deserta long line of light. My soul turns toward it and shrinks away from it as it does from all the lights. Some day, perhaps, all the lights will roll into one terrible white effervescence and rush over my soul and kill it. But this light does not bring so much of pain, for it is soft and silvery, and always with it is the Soul of Anemone.March 8.THERE are several things in the world for which I, of womankind and nineteen years, have conceived a forcible repugnance—or rather, the feeling was born in me; I did not have to conceive it.Often my mind chants a fervent litany of its own that runs somewhat like this:From women and men who dispense odors of musk; from little boys with long curls; from the kind of people who call a woman’s figure her “shape”: Kind Devil, deliver me.From all sweet girls; from “gentlemen”; from feminine men: Kind Devil, deliver me.From black under-clothing—and any color but white; from hips that wobble as one walks; from persons with fishyeyes; from the books of Archibald C. Gunter and Albert Ross: Kind Devil, deliver me.From the soft persistent, maddening glances of water-cart drivers: Kind Devil, deliver me.From lisle-thread stockings; from round, tight garters; from brilliant brass belts: Kind Devil, deliver me.From insipid sweet wine; from men who wear moustaches; from the sort of people that call legs “limbs”; from bedraggled white petticoats: Kind Devil, deliver me.From unripe bananas; from bathless people; from a waist-line that slopes up in the front: Kind Devil, deliver me.From an ordinary man; from a bad stomach, bad eyes, and bad feet: Kind Devil, deliver me.From red note-paper; from a rhinestone-studded comb in my hair; from weddings: Kind Devil, deliver me.From cod-fish balls; from fried eggplant, fried beef-steak, fried pork-chops, and fried French toast: Kind Devil, deliver me.From wax flowers off a wedding-cake, under glass; from thin-soled shoes; from tape-worms; from photographs perched up all over my house: Kind Devil, deliver me.From soft old bachelors and soft old widowers; from any masculine thing that wears a pale blue necktie; from agonizing elocutionists who recite “Curfew Shall Not Ring To-Night,” and “The Lips That Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine”; from a Salvation Army singing hymns in slang: Kind Devil, deliver me.From people who persist in calling my good body “mere vile clay”; from idiots who appear to know all about me and enjoin me not to bathe my eyes in hot water since it hurts their own; from fools who tell me what I “want” to do: Kind Devil, deliver me.From a nice young man; from tinspoons; from popular songs: Kind Devil, deliver me.From pleasant old ladies who tell a great many uninteresting, obvious lies; from men with watch-chains draped across their middles; from some paintings of the old masters which I am unable to appreciate; from side-saddles: Kind Devil, deliver me.From the kind of man who sings, “Oh, Promise Me!”—who singsatit; from constipated dressmakers; from people who don’t wash their hair often enough: Kind Devil, deliver me.From a servant girl with false teeth; from persons who make a regular practice of rubbing oily mixtures into their faces; from a bed that sinks in the middle: Kind Devil, deliver me.And so on and on and on. And in each petition I am deeply sincere. But, kind Devil, only bring me Happiness and I will more than willingly be annoyed by all these things. Happiness for two days, kind Devil, andthen, if you will, languishing widowers, lisle-thread stockings—anything, for the rest of my life.And hurry, kind Devil, pray—for I am weary.March 9.IT IS astonishing to me how very many contemptible, petty vanities are lodged in the crevices of my genius. My genius itself is one grand good vanity—but it is not contemptible. And even those little vanities—though they are contemptible, I do not hold them in contempt by any means. I smile involuntarily at their absurdness sometimes, but I know well that they have their function.They are peculiarly of my mind, my humanness, and they are useful therein. When this mind stretches out its hand for things and finds only wilderness and Nothingness all about it, and draws the hand back empty, then it can only turn back—like my soul—to itself. And it finds these innumerable little vanities to quiet it and help it. My soul has no vanity, and it has nothing, nothing to quiet it. My soul is wearing itself out,eating itself away. These vanities are a miserable substitute for the rose-colored treasures that it sees a great way off and even imagines in its folly that it may have, if it continues to reach after them. Yet the vanities are something. They prevent my erratic, analytical mind from finding a great Nothing when it turns back upon itself.If I were not so unceasingly engrossed with my sense of misery and loneliness my mind would produce beautiful, wonderful logic. I am a genius—a genius—a genius. Even after all this you may not realize that I am a genius. It is a hard thing to show. But, for myself, I feel it. It is enough for me that I feel it.I am not a genius because I am foreign to everything in the world, nor because I am intense, nor because I suffer. One may be all of these and yet not have this marvelous perceptive sense. My genius is because of nothing. It was born in me as germs of evilwere born in me. And mine is a genius that has been given to no one else. The genius itself enables me to be thoroughly convinced of this.It is hopeless, never-ending loneliness!My ancestors in their Highlands—some of them—were endowed with second sight. My genius is not in the least like second sight. That savors of the supernatural, the mysterious. My genius is a sound, sure, earthly sense, with no suggestion of mystery or occultism. It is an inner sense that enables me to feel and know things that I could not possibly put into thought, much less into words. It makes me know and analyze with deadly minuteness every keen, tiny damnation in my terrible lonely life. It is a mirror that shows me myself and something in myself in a merciless brilliant light, and the sight at once sickens and maddens me and fills me with an unnamed woe. It is something unspeakably dreadful.The sight for the time deadens all thought in my mind. It freezes my reason and intellect. Logic can not come to my aid. I can only feel and know the thing and it analyzes itself before my eyes.I am alone with this—alone, alone, alone! There is no pitiful hand extended from the heights—there is no human being—ah, there is Nothing.How can I bear it! Oh, I ask you—how can I bear it!March 10.MY GENIUS is an element by itself, and it is not a thing that I can tell in so many words. But it makes itself felt in every point of my life. This book would be a very different thing if I were not a genius—though I am not a literary genius. Often people who come in contact with me and hear me utter a few commonplace remarks feel at once that I am extraordinary.I am extraordinary.I have tried longingly, passionately, to think that even this sand and barrenness is mine. But I can not. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that it, like all good things, is beyond me. It has something that I also have. In that is our bond of sympathy.But the sand and barrenness itself is not mine.Always I think there is but one picturein the world more perfect in its art than the picture of me in my sand and barrenness. It is the picture of the Christ crucified with two thieves. Nothing could be more divinely appropriate. The art in it is ravishingly perfect. It is one of the few perfect pictures set before the world for all time. As I see it before my mind I can think only of its utter perfectness. I can summon no feeling of grief at the deed. The deed and the art are perfect. Its perfectness ravishes my senses.And within me I feel that the picture of me in my sand and barrenness—knowing that even the sand and barrenness is not mine—is only second to it.March 11.SOMETIMES when I go out on the barrenness my mind wanders afar.To-day it went to Greece.Oh, it was very beautiful in Greece!There was a wide, long sky that was vividly, wonderfully blue. And there was a limitless sea that was gray and green. And it went far to the south. The sky and the sea spread out into the vast world—two beautiful elements, and they fell in love with each other. And the farther away they were the nearer they moved together until at last they met and clasped each other in the far distance. There were tall, dark-green trees of kinds that are seen only in Greece. They murmured and whispered in the stillness. The wind came off from the sea and went over them and around them. They quivered and trembled in shy, ecstatic joy—forthe wind was their best-beloved. There were banks of moss of a deep emerald color, and golden flowers that drooped their heavy sensual heads over to the damp black earth. And they also loved each other, and were with each other, and were glad. Clouds hung low over the sea and were dark-gray and heavy with rain. But the sun shone from behind them at intervals with beams of bronze-and-copper. Three white rocks rose up out of the sea, and the bronze-and-copper beams fell upon them, and straightway they were of gold.Oh, how beautiful were those three gold rocks that came up out of the sea!Aphrodite once came up out of this same sea. She came gleaming, with golden hair and beautiful eyes. Her skin glowed with tints of carmine and wild rose. Her white feet touched the smooth, yellow sand on the shore. The white feet of Aphrodite on the yellow sand made a picture of marvelousbeauty. She was flushed in the joy of new life.But the bronze-and-copper sunshine on the three white rocks was more beautiful than Aphrodite.I stood on the shore and looked at the rocks. My heart contracted with the pain that beautiful things bring.The bronze-and-copper in the wide gray and green sea!“This is the gateway of Heaven,” I said to myself. “Behind those three gold rocks there is music and the high notes of happy voices.” My soul grew faint. “And there is no sand and barrenness there, and no Nothingness, and no bitterness, and no hot, blinding tears. And there are no little heart-weary children, and no lonely young women—oh, there is no loneliness at all!” My soul grew more and more faint with thinking of it. “And there is no heart there but that is pure and joyous and in Peace—in long, still, eternal Peace. And every life comesthere to its own; and every earth-cry is answered, and every earth-pain is ended; and the dark spirit of Sorrow that hangs always over the earth is gone—gone,—beyond the gateway of Heaven. And more than all, Love is there and walks among the dwellers. Love is a shining figure with radiant hands, and it touches them all with its hands so that never-dying love enters into their hearts. And the love of each for another is like the love of each for self. And here at last is Truth. There is searching and searching over the earth after Truth—and who has found it? But here is it beyond the gateway of Heaven. Those who enter in know that it is Truth at last.”And so Peace and Love and Truth are there behind the three gold rocks.And then my soul could no longer endure the thought of it.Suddenly the sun passed behind a heavy, dark-gray cloud, and the bronze-and-copper faded from the three rocksand left them white—very white in the wide water.The yellow flowers laid their heads drowsily down on the emerald moss. The wind from off the sea played very gently among the motionless branches of the tall trees. The blue, blue sky and the wide, gray-green sea clasped each other more closely and mingled with each other and became one vague, shadowy element—and from it all I brought my eyes back thousands of leagues to my sand and barrenness.The sand and barrenness is itself an element, and I have known it a long, long time.March 12.EVERYTHING is so dreary—so dreary.I feel as if I would like to die to-day. I should not be the tiniest bit less unhappy afterward—but this life is unutterably weary. I am not strong. I can not bear things. I do not want to bear things. I do not long for strength. I want to be happy.When I was very little, it was cold and dreary also, but I was certain it would be different when I should grow and be ten years old. It must be very nice to be ten, I thought,—and one would not be nearly so lonesome. But when the years passed and I was ten it was just exactly as lonesome. And when I was ten everything was very hard to understand.But it will surely be different when I am seventeen, I said. I will know so much when I am seventeen. But whenI was seventeen it was even more lonely, and everything was still harder to understand.And again I said—faintly—everything will become clearer in a few years more, and I will wonder to think how stupid I have always been. But now the few years more have gone and here I am in loneliness that is more hopeless and harder to bear than when I was very little. Still, I wonder indeed to think how stupid I have been—and now I am not so stupid. I do not tell myself that it will be different when I am five-and-twenty.For I know that it will not be different.I know that it will be the same dreariness, the same Nothingness, the same loneliness.It is very, very lonely.It is hope deferred and maketh the heart sick.It is more than I can bear.Why—whywas I ever born!I can not live, and I can not die—forwhat is there after I am dead? I can see myself wandering in dark and lonely places.Yet I feel as if I would like to die to-day.March 13.IF IT were pain alone that one must bear, one could bear it. One could lose one’s sense of everything but pain.But it is pain with other things. It is the sense of pain with the sense of beauty and the sense of the anemone. And there is that mysterious pain.Who knows the name of that mysterious pain?It is these mingled senses that torture me.March 14.I HAVE been placed in this world with eyes to see and ears to hear, and I ask for Life. Is it to be wondered at? Is it so strange? Should I be content merely to see and to hear? There are other things for other people. Is it atrocious that I should ask for some other things also?Is thy servant a dog?March 15.IN THESE days of approaching emotional Nature even the sand and barrenness begins to stir and rub its eyes.My sand and barrenness is clothed in the awful majesty of countless ages. It stands always through the never-ending march of the living and the dead. It may have been green once—green and fertile, and birds and snakes and everything that loves green growing things may have lived in it. It may have sometime been rolling prairie. It may have been submerged in floods. It changed and changed in the centuries. Now it is sand and barrenness, and there are no birds and no snakes; only me. But whatever change came to it, whatever its transfiguration, the spirit of it never moved. Flood, or fertility, or rolling prairie, or barrenness—it isonly itself. It has a great self, a wonderful self.I shall never forget you, my sand and barrenness.Some day, shall my thirsty life be watered, my starved heart fed, my asking voice answered, my tired soul taken into the warmth of another with the intoxicating sweetness of love?It may be.But I shall remember the sand and barrenness that is with me in my Nothingness. The sand and barrenness and the memory of the anemone lady are all that are in any degree mine.And so then I shall remember it.As I stand among the barren gulches in these days and look away at the slow-awakening hills of Montana, I hear the high, swelling, half-tired, half-hopeful song of the world. As I listen I know that there are things, other than the Virtue and the Truth and the Love, that are not for me. There is beyond me, like these, the unbreaking,undying bond of human fellowship—a thing that is earth-old.It is beyond me, and it is nothing to me.In my intensest desires—in my widest longings—I never go beyondself. The ego is the all.Limitless legions of women and men in weariness and in joy are one. They are killing each other and torturing each other, and going down in sorrow to the dust. But they are one. Their right hands are joined in unseen sympathy and kinship.But my two hands are apart, and clasped together in an agony of loneliness.I have read of women who have been strongly, grandly brave. Sometimes I have dreamed that I might be brave. The possibilities of this life are magnificent.To be saturated with this agony, I say at times, and to bear with it all; not to sink beneath it, but to vanquishit, and to make it the grace and comeliness of my entire life from the Beginning to the End!Perhaps a woman—a real woman—could do this.But I?—No. I am not real—I do not seemrealto myself. In such things as these my life is a blank.There was Charlotte Corday—a heroine whom I admire above all the heroines. And more than she was a heroine she was a woman. And she had her agony. It was for love of her fair country.To suffer and do and die for love of something! It is glorious! What must be the exalted ecstasy of Charlotte Corday’s soul now!And I—with all my manifold passions—I am a coward.I have had moments when, vaguely and from far off, it seemed as if there might be bravery and exaltation for me,—when I could rise far over myself. I have felt unspeakable possibilities.While they lasted—what wonderful emotion was it that I felt?But they are not real.They fade away—they fade away.And again come the varied phenomena of my life to bewilder and terrify me.Confusion! Chaos! Damnation! They are not moments of exaltation now. Poor little Mary MacLane!“If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.”I do not know what to do.I do not know what were good to do.I would do nothing if I knew.I might add to my litany this: Most kind Devil, deliver me—from myself.March 16.TO-DAY I walked over the sand, and it was almost beautiful. The sun was sinking and the sky was filled with roses and gold.Then came my soul and confronted me. My soul is wondrous fair. It is like a young woman. The beauty of it is too great for human eyes to look upon. It is too great for mine. Yet I look.My soul said to me: “I am sick.”I answered: “And I am sick.”“We may be well,” said my soul. “Why are we not well?”“How may we be well?” I asked.“We may throw away all our vanity and false pride,” said my soul. “We way take on a new life. We may learn to wait and to possess ourselves in patience. We may labor and overcome.”“We can do none of these things,” Icried. “Have I not tried all of them some time in my short life? And have I not waited and wanted until you have become faint with pain? Have I not looked and longed? Dear soul, why do you not resign yourself? Why can you not stay quiet and trouble yourself and me no more? Why are you always straining and reaching? There isn’t anything for you. You are wearing yourself out.”My soul made answer: “I may strain and reach until only one worn nerve of me is left. And that one nerve may be scourged with whips and burned with fire. But I will keep one atom of faith. I may go bad, but I will keep one atom of faith in Love and in the Truth that is Love. You are a genius, but I am no genius. The years—a million of years—may do their utmost to destroy the single nerve. They may lash and beat it. I will keep my one atom of faith.”“You are not wise,” I said. “You have been wandering and longing for atime that seems a thousand years—through my cold, dark childhood to my cold, dark womanhood. Is that not enough to quiet you? Is that not enough to teach you the lesson of Nothing? You are not a genius, but you are not a fool.”“I will keep my one atom of faith,” said my soul.“But lie and sleep now,” I said. “Don’t reach after that Light any more. Let us both sleep a few years.”“No,” said my soul.“Oh, my soul,” I wailed, “look away at that glowing copper horizon—and beyond it. Let us go there now and take an infinite rest. Now! We can bear this no longer.”“No,” said my soul; “we will stay here and bear more. There would be no rest yet beyond the copper horizon. And there is no need of going anywhere. I have my one atom of faith.”I gazed at my soul as it stood plainly before me, weak and worn and faint, inthe fading light. It had one atom of faith, it said, and tried to hold its head high and to look strong and triumphant. Oh, the irony—the pathos of it!My soul, with its one pitiful atom of faith, looked only what it was—a weeping, hunted thing.March 17.IN SOME rare between-whiles it is as if nothing mattered. My heart aches, I say; my soul wanders; this person or that person was repelled to-day; but nothing matters.A great inner languor comes like a giant and lays hold of me. I lie fallow beneath it.Some one forgot me in the giving of things. But it does not matter. I feel nothing.Persons say to me, don’t analyze any more and you will not be unhappy.When Something throws heavy clubs at you and you are hit by them, don’t be hurt. When Something stronger than you holds your hands in the fire, don’t let it burn you. When Something pushes you into a river of ice, don’t be cold. When something draws a cutting lash across your naked shoulders,don’t let it concern you—don’t be conscious that it is there.This is great wisdom and fine, clear logic.It is a pity that no one has ever yet been able to live by it.But after all it’s no matter. Nothing is any one’s affair. It is all of no consequence.And have I not had all my anguish for nothing? I am a fool—a fool.A handful of rich black mud in a pig’s yard—does it wonder why it is there? Does it torture itself about the other mud around it, and about the earth and water of which it is made, and about the pig? Only fool’s mud would do so. And so, then, I am fool’s mud.Nothing counts. Nothing can possibly count.Regret, passion, cowardice, hope, bravery, unrest, pain, the love-sense, the soul-sense, the beauty-sense—all for nothing! What can a handful of richblack mud in a pig’s yard have to do with these? I am a handful of rich black mud—a fool-woman, fool’s mud.All on earth that I need to do is to lie still in the hot sun and feel the pig rolling and floundering and slushing about. It were folly to waste my mud nerves in wondering. Be quiet, fool-woman, let things be. Your soul is a fool’s-mud soul and is governed by the pig; your heart is a fool’s-mud heart, and wants nothing beyond the pig; your life is a fool’s-mud life, and is the pig’s life.Something within me shrieks now, but I do not know what it is—nor why it shrieks.It groans and moans.There is no satisfaction in being a fool—no satisfaction at all.March 18.BUT yes. It all matters, whether or no. Nature is one long battle, and the never-ending perishing of the weak. I must grind and grind away. I have no choice. And I must know that I grind.Fool, genius, young lonely woman—I must go round and round in the life within, for how many years the Devil knows. After that my soul must go round and round, for how many centuries the Devil knows.What a master-mind is that of the Devil! The world is a wondrous scheme. For me it is a scheme that is black with woe. But there may be in the world some one who finds it beautiful Real Life.I wonder as I write this Portrayal if there will be one person to read it and see a thing that is mingled with everyword. It is something that you must feel, that must fascinate you, the like of which you have never before met with.It is the unparalleled individuality of me.I wish I might write it in so many words of English. But that is not possible. If I have put it in every word and if you feel it and are fascinated, then I have done very well.I am marvelously clever if I have done so.I know that I am marvelously clever. But I have need of all my peculiar genius to show you my individuality—my aloneness.I am alone out on my sand and barrenness. I should be alone if my sand and barrenness were crowded with a thousand people each filled with melting sympathy for me—though it would be unspeakably sweet.People say of me, “She’s peculiar.” They do not understand me. If theydid they would say so oftener and with emphasis.And so I try to put my individuality in the quality of my diction, in my method of handling words.My conversation plainly shows this individuality—more than shows it, indeed. My conversation hurls it violently at people’s heads. My conversation—when I choose—makes people turn around in their chairs and stare and give me all of their attention. They admire me, though their admiration is mixed decidedly with other feelings.I like to be admired.It soothes my vanity.When you read this Portrayal you will admire me. You will surely have to admire me.And so this is life, and everything matters.But just now I will stop writing and go downstairs to my dinner. There is a porterhouse steak, broiled rare, andsome green young onions. Oh, they are good! And when one is to have a porterhouse steak for one’s dinner—and some green young onions, one doesn’t give a tupenny dam whether anything else matters or not.March 19.ON A day when the sky is like lead and a dull, tempestuous wilderness of gray clouds adds a dreariness to the sand, there is added to the loneliness of my life a deep bitterness of gall and wormwood.Out of my bitterness it is easy for bad to come.Surely Badness is a deep black pool wherein one may drown dullness and Nothingness.I do not know Badness well. It is something material that seems a great way off now, but that might creep nearer and nearer as I became less and less young.But now when the day is of the leaden dullness I look at Badness and long for it. I am young and all alone, and everything that is good is beyond my reach. But all that is bad—surely that is within the reach of every one.I wish for a long pageant of bad things to come and whirl and rage through this strange leaden life of mine and break the spell.Why should it not be Badness instead of Death? Death, it seems, will bring me but a change of agony. Badness would perhaps so crowd my life with its vivid phenomena that they would act as a neurotic to the racked nerves of my Nothingness. It would be an outlet—and possibly I could forget some things.I think just now of a woman who lived long ago and in whom the world at large seems not to have found anything admirable. I mean Messalina Valeria, the wife of the stupid emperor Claudius. I have conceived a profound admiration for this historic wanton. She may not indeed have had anything to forget; she may not have suffered. But she had the strength of will to take what she wanted, to do as she liked, to live as she chose to live.It is admirable and beautiful beyond expression to sacrifice and give up and wait for love of that good that gives in itself a just reward. And only next to this is the throwing to the winds of all restraint when the good holds itself aloof and gives nothing. We are weak, contemptible fools who do not grasp the resources within our reach when there is no just reward for our restraint. Why do we not take what we want of the various temptations? It is not that we are virtuous. It is that we are cowards.And it is worth while to remain true to an ideal that offers only the vaguest hopes of realization? It is not philosophy. When one has made up one’s mind that one wants a dish of hot stewed mushrooms, and set one’s heart on it, should one scorn a handful of raw evaporated apples, if one were starving, for the sake of the phantom dish of hot stewed mushrooms? Should one say, Let me starve, but I will never descendto evaporated apples; I will have nothing but a dish of hot stewed mushrooms? If one is sure one will have the stewed mushrooms finally, before one dies of starvation, then very well. One should wait for them and take nothing else.But it is not in my good peripatetic philosophy to pass by the Badness that the gods provide for the sake of a far-away, always-unrealized ideal, however brilliant, however beautiful, however golden.When the lead is in the sky and in my life, a vision of Badness looms up on the horizon and looks at me and beckons with a fascinating finger. Then I say to myself, What is the use of this unsullied, struggling soul; this unbesmirched, empty heart; this treasureless, innocent mind; this insipid maid’s-body? There are no good things for them. But here, to be sure, are fascinating, glittering bad things—the goods that the gods provide, the compensation of the Devil.Comes Death, some day, I said—but to die, in the sight of glittering bad things—and I only nineteen! These glittering things appear fair.There is really nothing evil in the world. Some things appear distorted and unnatural because they have been badly done. Had they been perfect in conception and execution they would strike one only with admiration at their fine, iridescent lights. You remember Don Juan and Haidee. That, to be sure, was not evil in any event—they loved each other. But if they had had only a passing, if intense, fancy for one another, who would call it evil? Who would call it anything but wonderful, charming, enchanting? The Devil’s bad things—like the Devil’s good things—may gleam and glisten, oh, how they may gleam and glisten! I have seen them do so, not only in a poem of Byron’s, but in the life that is.Always when the lead is in the sky I would like to cultivate thoroughly thisbranch of the vineyard. Now doesn’t it make you shiver to think of this dear little Mary MacLane wandering unloved through dark by-ways and deadly labyrinths? It makes me shiver. But it needn’t. If I am to wander unloved, why not as well wander there as through Nothingness?I fancy it must be wonderfully easy to become used to the many-sided Badness. I have lived my nineteen years in the midst of Nothingness, and I have not yet become used to it. It has sharp knives in it, has Nothingness. Badness may have some sharp knives also—but there are other things. Yes, there are other things.Kind Devil, if you are not to fetch me Happiness, then slip off from your great steel key-ring a bright little key to the door of the glittering, gleaming bad things, and give it me, and show me the way, and wish me joy.I would like to live about seven years of judicious Badness, and then Death,if you will. Nineteen years of damnable Nothingness, seven years of judicious Badness—and then Death. A noble ambition! But might it not be worse? If not that, then nineteen years of damnable Nothingness, and then Death. No; when the lead is in the sky that does not appeal to me. My versatile mind turns to the seven years of judicious Badness.There is nothing in the world without its element of Badness. It is in literature; it is in every art—in pictures, sculpture, even in music. There are certain fine, deep, minute passages in Beethoven and in Chopin that tell of things wonderfully, sublimely bad. Chopin one can not understand. Is there any one in the world who can understand him? But we know at once that there is the Badness—and it is music!There is the element of Badness in me.I long to cultivate my element ofBadness. Badness compared to Nothingness is beautiful. And so, then, I wait also for some one to come over the hill with things other than Happiness. But whatever I wait for, nothing comes.March 20.THERE were pictures in the red sunset sky to-day. I looked at them and was racked with passions of desire. I fancied to myself that I could have any of the good things in the pictures for the asking and the waiting. The while I knew that when the sunset should fade from the sky I would be overwhelmed by my heaviest woe.There was a picture of intense peace. There were stretches of flat, green country, and oak-trees and aspens, and a still, still lake. In the dim distance you could see fields of wheat and timothy-grass that moved a little as if in the wind. You could fancy the cows feeding just below the brow of the near hills, and a hawk floating and wheeling among the clouds. A rainbow arched over the lake. There is nothing lacking here, I thought. “Life and healthand peace possessing.” Give me this, kind Devil.There was a picture of endless, limitless strength. There were the oak-trees again but bereft now of every leaf, and the bristling, jagged rocks back of them were not more coldly staunch. The sun poured brilliantly bright upon them. A river flowed unmoved and quiet between yellow clay banks. A tornado might sweep over this and not one twig would be displaced, not one ripple would come to the river. Is it not fine! I said to myself. No feeling, no self-analysis, no aching, no pain—and the strength of the Philistines. Oh, kind Devil, I entreat you, let me have that!There was a picture of untrammeled revel and forgetfulness. There were fields of swaying daffodils and red lilies. The young shrubs tossed their heads and were joyous. Lambs gamboled and the happy meadow-lark knew whereof she sang.
“‘Oh, Mary, go and call the cattle home,And call the cattle home,And call the cattle home,Across the sands of Dee!’The western wind was wild and dank with foam,And all alone went she.“The creeping tide came up along the sand,And o’er and o’er the sand,And round and round the sand,As far as eye could see;The blinding mist came up and hid theland—And never home came she.“Oh, is it weed, or fish, or floatinghair?—A tress of golden hair,Of drowned maiden’s hair,Above the nets at sea.Was never salmon yet that shone so fairAmong the stakes on Dee.“They rowed her in across the rolling foam,The cruel, crawling foam,The cruel, hungry foam,To her grave beside the sea;But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle homeAcross the sands of Dee.”
“‘Oh, Mary, go and call the cattle home,And call the cattle home,And call the cattle home,Across the sands of Dee!’The western wind was wild and dank with foam,And all alone went she.“The creeping tide came up along the sand,And o’er and o’er the sand,And round and round the sand,As far as eye could see;The blinding mist came up and hid theland—And never home came she.“Oh, is it weed, or fish, or floatinghair?—A tress of golden hair,Of drowned maiden’s hair,Above the nets at sea.Was never salmon yet that shone so fairAmong the stakes on Dee.“They rowed her in across the rolling foam,The cruel, crawling foam,The cruel, hungry foam,To her grave beside the sea;But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle homeAcross the sands of Dee.”
“‘Oh, Mary, go and call the cattle home,And call the cattle home,And call the cattle home,Across the sands of Dee!’The western wind was wild and dank with foam,And all alone went she.
“The creeping tide came up along the sand,And o’er and o’er the sand,And round and round the sand,As far as eye could see;The blinding mist came up and hid theland—And never home came she.
“Oh, is it weed, or fish, or floatinghair?—A tress of golden hair,Of drowned maiden’s hair,Above the nets at sea.Was never salmon yet that shone so fairAmong the stakes on Dee.
“They rowed her in across the rolling foam,The cruel, crawling foam,The cruel, hungry foam,To her grave beside the sea;But still the boatmen hear her call the cattle homeAcross the sands of Dee.”
This is a poem perfect. And in the Gray Dawn it expresses to me a most desirable thing—a short, eventless life, a sudden ceasing, and a forgotten voice sometimes calling. This Mary, in the Gray Dawn, would wish nothing else. If the waters rolled over me now—over my short, eventless life—there would be the sudden ceasing,—and the anemone lady would hear my voice sometimes, and remember me—the anemone lady and one or two others. And after a short time even my pathetic, passionate voice would sound faint and be forgotten, and my world of sand and barrenness would know me and my weary little life-tragedy no more.
And well for me, I say,—in the Gray Dawn.
It is different—oh, very different—when the yellow bursts through the gray. And the yellow is with me all day long, and at sunset—the red, red line!
Yet—oh, sweet Gray Dawn!
SOMETIMES I am seized with nearer, vivider sensations of love for my one friend, the anemone lady.
She is so dear—so beautiful!
My love for her is a peculiar thing. It is not the ordinary woman-love. It is something that burns with a vivid fire of its own. The anemone lady is enshrined in a temple on the inside of my heart that shall always only be hers.
She is my first love—my only dear one.
The thought of her fills me with a multitude of feelings, passionate yet wonderfully tender,—with delight, with rare, undefined emotions, with a suggestion of tears.
Oh, dearest anemone lady, shall I ever be able to forget your beautiful face! There may be some long, crowded years before me; it may bethere will be people and people entering and departing—but, oh, no—no, I shall never forget! There will be in my life always—always the faint sweet perfume of the blue anemone: the memory of my one friend.
Before she went away, to see her, to be near her, was an event in my life—a coloring of the dullness. Always when I used to look at her there would rush a train of things over my mind, a vaguely glittering pageant that came only with her, and that held an always-vivid interest for me.
There were manifold and varied treasures in this train. There were skies of spangled sapphire, and there were lilies, and violets wet with dew. There was the music of violins, and wonderful weeds from the deep sea, and songs of troubadours, and gleaming white statues. There were ancient forests of oak and clematis vines; there were lemon-trees, and fretted palaces, and moss-covered old castles withmoats and draw-bridges and tiny mullioned windows with diamond panes. There was a cold, glittering cataract of white foam, and a little green boat far off down the river, drifting along under drooping willows. There was a tree of golden apples, and a banquet in a beautiful house with the melting music of lutes and harps, and mulled orange-wine in tall, thin glasses. There was a field of long, fine grass, soft as bat’s-wool, and there were birds of brilliant plumage—scarlet and indigo with gold-tipped wings.
All these and a thousand fancies alike vaguely glittering would rush over me when I was with the anemone lady. Always my brain was in a gentle delirium. My nerves were unquiet.
It was because I love her.
Oh, there is not—there can never be—another anemone lady!
My life is a desert—a desert, but the thin, clinging perfume of the blue anemone reaches to its utter confines. Andnothing in the desert is the same because of that perfume. Years will not fade the blue of the anemone, nor a thousand bitter winds blow away the rare fragrance.
I feel in the anemone lady a strange attraction of sex. There is in me a masculine element that, when I am thinking of her, arises and overshadows all the others.
“Why am I not a man,” I say to the sand and barrenness with a certain strained, tense passion, “that I might give this wonderful, dear, delicious woman an absolutely perfect love!”
And this is my predominating feeling for her.
So, then, it is not the woman-love, but the man-love, set in the mysterious sensibilities of my woman-nature. It brings me pain and pleasure mingled in that odd, odd fashion.
Do you think a man is the only creature with whom one may fall in love?
Often I see coming across the deserta long line of light. My soul turns toward it and shrinks away from it as it does from all the lights. Some day, perhaps, all the lights will roll into one terrible white effervescence and rush over my soul and kill it. But this light does not bring so much of pain, for it is soft and silvery, and always with it is the Soul of Anemone.
THERE are several things in the world for which I, of womankind and nineteen years, have conceived a forcible repugnance—or rather, the feeling was born in me; I did not have to conceive it.
Often my mind chants a fervent litany of its own that runs somewhat like this:
From women and men who dispense odors of musk; from little boys with long curls; from the kind of people who call a woman’s figure her “shape”: Kind Devil, deliver me.
From all sweet girls; from “gentlemen”; from feminine men: Kind Devil, deliver me.
From black under-clothing—and any color but white; from hips that wobble as one walks; from persons with fishyeyes; from the books of Archibald C. Gunter and Albert Ross: Kind Devil, deliver me.
From the soft persistent, maddening glances of water-cart drivers: Kind Devil, deliver me.
From lisle-thread stockings; from round, tight garters; from brilliant brass belts: Kind Devil, deliver me.
From insipid sweet wine; from men who wear moustaches; from the sort of people that call legs “limbs”; from bedraggled white petticoats: Kind Devil, deliver me.
From unripe bananas; from bathless people; from a waist-line that slopes up in the front: Kind Devil, deliver me.
From an ordinary man; from a bad stomach, bad eyes, and bad feet: Kind Devil, deliver me.
From red note-paper; from a rhinestone-studded comb in my hair; from weddings: Kind Devil, deliver me.
From cod-fish balls; from fried eggplant, fried beef-steak, fried pork-chops, and fried French toast: Kind Devil, deliver me.
From wax flowers off a wedding-cake, under glass; from thin-soled shoes; from tape-worms; from photographs perched up all over my house: Kind Devil, deliver me.
From soft old bachelors and soft old widowers; from any masculine thing that wears a pale blue necktie; from agonizing elocutionists who recite “Curfew Shall Not Ring To-Night,” and “The Lips That Touch Liquor Shall Never Touch Mine”; from a Salvation Army singing hymns in slang: Kind Devil, deliver me.
From people who persist in calling my good body “mere vile clay”; from idiots who appear to know all about me and enjoin me not to bathe my eyes in hot water since it hurts their own; from fools who tell me what I “want” to do: Kind Devil, deliver me.
From a nice young man; from tinspoons; from popular songs: Kind Devil, deliver me.
From pleasant old ladies who tell a great many uninteresting, obvious lies; from men with watch-chains draped across their middles; from some paintings of the old masters which I am unable to appreciate; from side-saddles: Kind Devil, deliver me.
From the kind of man who sings, “Oh, Promise Me!”—who singsatit; from constipated dressmakers; from people who don’t wash their hair often enough: Kind Devil, deliver me.
From a servant girl with false teeth; from persons who make a regular practice of rubbing oily mixtures into their faces; from a bed that sinks in the middle: Kind Devil, deliver me.
And so on and on and on. And in each petition I am deeply sincere. But, kind Devil, only bring me Happiness and I will more than willingly be annoyed by all these things. Happiness for two days, kind Devil, andthen, if you will, languishing widowers, lisle-thread stockings—anything, for the rest of my life.
And hurry, kind Devil, pray—for I am weary.
IT IS astonishing to me how very many contemptible, petty vanities are lodged in the crevices of my genius. My genius itself is one grand good vanity—but it is not contemptible. And even those little vanities—though they are contemptible, I do not hold them in contempt by any means. I smile involuntarily at their absurdness sometimes, but I know well that they have their function.
They are peculiarly of my mind, my humanness, and they are useful therein. When this mind stretches out its hand for things and finds only wilderness and Nothingness all about it, and draws the hand back empty, then it can only turn back—like my soul—to itself. And it finds these innumerable little vanities to quiet it and help it. My soul has no vanity, and it has nothing, nothing to quiet it. My soul is wearing itself out,eating itself away. These vanities are a miserable substitute for the rose-colored treasures that it sees a great way off and even imagines in its folly that it may have, if it continues to reach after them. Yet the vanities are something. They prevent my erratic, analytical mind from finding a great Nothing when it turns back upon itself.
If I were not so unceasingly engrossed with my sense of misery and loneliness my mind would produce beautiful, wonderful logic. I am a genius—a genius—a genius. Even after all this you may not realize that I am a genius. It is a hard thing to show. But, for myself, I feel it. It is enough for me that I feel it.
I am not a genius because I am foreign to everything in the world, nor because I am intense, nor because I suffer. One may be all of these and yet not have this marvelous perceptive sense. My genius is because of nothing. It was born in me as germs of evilwere born in me. And mine is a genius that has been given to no one else. The genius itself enables me to be thoroughly convinced of this.
It is hopeless, never-ending loneliness!
My ancestors in their Highlands—some of them—were endowed with second sight. My genius is not in the least like second sight. That savors of the supernatural, the mysterious. My genius is a sound, sure, earthly sense, with no suggestion of mystery or occultism. It is an inner sense that enables me to feel and know things that I could not possibly put into thought, much less into words. It makes me know and analyze with deadly minuteness every keen, tiny damnation in my terrible lonely life. It is a mirror that shows me myself and something in myself in a merciless brilliant light, and the sight at once sickens and maddens me and fills me with an unnamed woe. It is something unspeakably dreadful.The sight for the time deadens all thought in my mind. It freezes my reason and intellect. Logic can not come to my aid. I can only feel and know the thing and it analyzes itself before my eyes.
I am alone with this—alone, alone, alone! There is no pitiful hand extended from the heights—there is no human being—ah, there is Nothing.
How can I bear it! Oh, I ask you—how can I bear it!
MY GENIUS is an element by itself, and it is not a thing that I can tell in so many words. But it makes itself felt in every point of my life. This book would be a very different thing if I were not a genius—though I am not a literary genius. Often people who come in contact with me and hear me utter a few commonplace remarks feel at once that I am extraordinary.
I am extraordinary.
I have tried longingly, passionately, to think that even this sand and barrenness is mine. But I can not. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that it, like all good things, is beyond me. It has something that I also have. In that is our bond of sympathy.
But the sand and barrenness itself is not mine.
Always I think there is but one picturein the world more perfect in its art than the picture of me in my sand and barrenness. It is the picture of the Christ crucified with two thieves. Nothing could be more divinely appropriate. The art in it is ravishingly perfect. It is one of the few perfect pictures set before the world for all time. As I see it before my mind I can think only of its utter perfectness. I can summon no feeling of grief at the deed. The deed and the art are perfect. Its perfectness ravishes my senses.
And within me I feel that the picture of me in my sand and barrenness—knowing that even the sand and barrenness is not mine—is only second to it.
SOMETIMES when I go out on the barrenness my mind wanders afar.
To-day it went to Greece.
Oh, it was very beautiful in Greece!
There was a wide, long sky that was vividly, wonderfully blue. And there was a limitless sea that was gray and green. And it went far to the south. The sky and the sea spread out into the vast world—two beautiful elements, and they fell in love with each other. And the farther away they were the nearer they moved together until at last they met and clasped each other in the far distance. There were tall, dark-green trees of kinds that are seen only in Greece. They murmured and whispered in the stillness. The wind came off from the sea and went over them and around them. They quivered and trembled in shy, ecstatic joy—forthe wind was their best-beloved. There were banks of moss of a deep emerald color, and golden flowers that drooped their heavy sensual heads over to the damp black earth. And they also loved each other, and were with each other, and were glad. Clouds hung low over the sea and were dark-gray and heavy with rain. But the sun shone from behind them at intervals with beams of bronze-and-copper. Three white rocks rose up out of the sea, and the bronze-and-copper beams fell upon them, and straightway they were of gold.
Oh, how beautiful were those three gold rocks that came up out of the sea!
Aphrodite once came up out of this same sea. She came gleaming, with golden hair and beautiful eyes. Her skin glowed with tints of carmine and wild rose. Her white feet touched the smooth, yellow sand on the shore. The white feet of Aphrodite on the yellow sand made a picture of marvelousbeauty. She was flushed in the joy of new life.
But the bronze-and-copper sunshine on the three white rocks was more beautiful than Aphrodite.
I stood on the shore and looked at the rocks. My heart contracted with the pain that beautiful things bring.
The bronze-and-copper in the wide gray and green sea!
“This is the gateway of Heaven,” I said to myself. “Behind those three gold rocks there is music and the high notes of happy voices.” My soul grew faint. “And there is no sand and barrenness there, and no Nothingness, and no bitterness, and no hot, blinding tears. And there are no little heart-weary children, and no lonely young women—oh, there is no loneliness at all!” My soul grew more and more faint with thinking of it. “And there is no heart there but that is pure and joyous and in Peace—in long, still, eternal Peace. And every life comesthere to its own; and every earth-cry is answered, and every earth-pain is ended; and the dark spirit of Sorrow that hangs always over the earth is gone—gone,—beyond the gateway of Heaven. And more than all, Love is there and walks among the dwellers. Love is a shining figure with radiant hands, and it touches them all with its hands so that never-dying love enters into their hearts. And the love of each for another is like the love of each for self. And here at last is Truth. There is searching and searching over the earth after Truth—and who has found it? But here is it beyond the gateway of Heaven. Those who enter in know that it is Truth at last.”
And so Peace and Love and Truth are there behind the three gold rocks.
And then my soul could no longer endure the thought of it.
Suddenly the sun passed behind a heavy, dark-gray cloud, and the bronze-and-copper faded from the three rocksand left them white—very white in the wide water.
The yellow flowers laid their heads drowsily down on the emerald moss. The wind from off the sea played very gently among the motionless branches of the tall trees. The blue, blue sky and the wide, gray-green sea clasped each other more closely and mingled with each other and became one vague, shadowy element—and from it all I brought my eyes back thousands of leagues to my sand and barrenness.
The sand and barrenness is itself an element, and I have known it a long, long time.
EVERYTHING is so dreary—so dreary.
I feel as if I would like to die to-day. I should not be the tiniest bit less unhappy afterward—but this life is unutterably weary. I am not strong. I can not bear things. I do not want to bear things. I do not long for strength. I want to be happy.
When I was very little, it was cold and dreary also, but I was certain it would be different when I should grow and be ten years old. It must be very nice to be ten, I thought,—and one would not be nearly so lonesome. But when the years passed and I was ten it was just exactly as lonesome. And when I was ten everything was very hard to understand.
But it will surely be different when I am seventeen, I said. I will know so much when I am seventeen. But whenI was seventeen it was even more lonely, and everything was still harder to understand.
And again I said—faintly—everything will become clearer in a few years more, and I will wonder to think how stupid I have always been. But now the few years more have gone and here I am in loneliness that is more hopeless and harder to bear than when I was very little. Still, I wonder indeed to think how stupid I have been—and now I am not so stupid. I do not tell myself that it will be different when I am five-and-twenty.
For I know that it will not be different.
I know that it will be the same dreariness, the same Nothingness, the same loneliness.
It is very, very lonely.
It is hope deferred and maketh the heart sick.
It is more than I can bear.
Why—whywas I ever born!
I can not live, and I can not die—forwhat is there after I am dead? I can see myself wandering in dark and lonely places.
Yet I feel as if I would like to die to-day.
IF IT were pain alone that one must bear, one could bear it. One could lose one’s sense of everything but pain.
But it is pain with other things. It is the sense of pain with the sense of beauty and the sense of the anemone. And there is that mysterious pain.
Who knows the name of that mysterious pain?
It is these mingled senses that torture me.
I HAVE been placed in this world with eyes to see and ears to hear, and I ask for Life. Is it to be wondered at? Is it so strange? Should I be content merely to see and to hear? There are other things for other people. Is it atrocious that I should ask for some other things also?
Is thy servant a dog?
IN THESE days of approaching emotional Nature even the sand and barrenness begins to stir and rub its eyes.
My sand and barrenness is clothed in the awful majesty of countless ages. It stands always through the never-ending march of the living and the dead. It may have been green once—green and fertile, and birds and snakes and everything that loves green growing things may have lived in it. It may have sometime been rolling prairie. It may have been submerged in floods. It changed and changed in the centuries. Now it is sand and barrenness, and there are no birds and no snakes; only me. But whatever change came to it, whatever its transfiguration, the spirit of it never moved. Flood, or fertility, or rolling prairie, or barrenness—it isonly itself. It has a great self, a wonderful self.
I shall never forget you, my sand and barrenness.
Some day, shall my thirsty life be watered, my starved heart fed, my asking voice answered, my tired soul taken into the warmth of another with the intoxicating sweetness of love?
It may be.
But I shall remember the sand and barrenness that is with me in my Nothingness. The sand and barrenness and the memory of the anemone lady are all that are in any degree mine.
And so then I shall remember it.
As I stand among the barren gulches in these days and look away at the slow-awakening hills of Montana, I hear the high, swelling, half-tired, half-hopeful song of the world. As I listen I know that there are things, other than the Virtue and the Truth and the Love, that are not for me. There is beyond me, like these, the unbreaking,undying bond of human fellowship—a thing that is earth-old.
It is beyond me, and it is nothing to me.
In my intensest desires—in my widest longings—I never go beyondself. The ego is the all.
Limitless legions of women and men in weariness and in joy are one. They are killing each other and torturing each other, and going down in sorrow to the dust. But they are one. Their right hands are joined in unseen sympathy and kinship.
But my two hands are apart, and clasped together in an agony of loneliness.
I have read of women who have been strongly, grandly brave. Sometimes I have dreamed that I might be brave. The possibilities of this life are magnificent.
To be saturated with this agony, I say at times, and to bear with it all; not to sink beneath it, but to vanquishit, and to make it the grace and comeliness of my entire life from the Beginning to the End!
Perhaps a woman—a real woman—could do this.
But I?—No. I am not real—I do not seemrealto myself. In such things as these my life is a blank.
There was Charlotte Corday—a heroine whom I admire above all the heroines. And more than she was a heroine she was a woman. And she had her agony. It was for love of her fair country.
To suffer and do and die for love of something! It is glorious! What must be the exalted ecstasy of Charlotte Corday’s soul now!
And I—with all my manifold passions—I am a coward.
I have had moments when, vaguely and from far off, it seemed as if there might be bravery and exaltation for me,—when I could rise far over myself. I have felt unspeakable possibilities.While they lasted—what wonderful emotion was it that I felt?
But they are not real.
They fade away—they fade away.
And again come the varied phenomena of my life to bewilder and terrify me.
Confusion! Chaos! Damnation! They are not moments of exaltation now. Poor little Mary MacLane!
“If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.”
I do not know what to do.
I do not know what were good to do.
I would do nothing if I knew.
I might add to my litany this: Most kind Devil, deliver me—from myself.
TO-DAY I walked over the sand, and it was almost beautiful. The sun was sinking and the sky was filled with roses and gold.
Then came my soul and confronted me. My soul is wondrous fair. It is like a young woman. The beauty of it is too great for human eyes to look upon. It is too great for mine. Yet I look.
My soul said to me: “I am sick.”
I answered: “And I am sick.”
“We may be well,” said my soul. “Why are we not well?”
“How may we be well?” I asked.
“We may throw away all our vanity and false pride,” said my soul. “We way take on a new life. We may learn to wait and to possess ourselves in patience. We may labor and overcome.”
“We can do none of these things,” Icried. “Have I not tried all of them some time in my short life? And have I not waited and wanted until you have become faint with pain? Have I not looked and longed? Dear soul, why do you not resign yourself? Why can you not stay quiet and trouble yourself and me no more? Why are you always straining and reaching? There isn’t anything for you. You are wearing yourself out.”
My soul made answer: “I may strain and reach until only one worn nerve of me is left. And that one nerve may be scourged with whips and burned with fire. But I will keep one atom of faith. I may go bad, but I will keep one atom of faith in Love and in the Truth that is Love. You are a genius, but I am no genius. The years—a million of years—may do their utmost to destroy the single nerve. They may lash and beat it. I will keep my one atom of faith.”
“You are not wise,” I said. “You have been wandering and longing for atime that seems a thousand years—through my cold, dark childhood to my cold, dark womanhood. Is that not enough to quiet you? Is that not enough to teach you the lesson of Nothing? You are not a genius, but you are not a fool.”
“I will keep my one atom of faith,” said my soul.
“But lie and sleep now,” I said. “Don’t reach after that Light any more. Let us both sleep a few years.”
“No,” said my soul.
“Oh, my soul,” I wailed, “look away at that glowing copper horizon—and beyond it. Let us go there now and take an infinite rest. Now! We can bear this no longer.”
“No,” said my soul; “we will stay here and bear more. There would be no rest yet beyond the copper horizon. And there is no need of going anywhere. I have my one atom of faith.”
I gazed at my soul as it stood plainly before me, weak and worn and faint, inthe fading light. It had one atom of faith, it said, and tried to hold its head high and to look strong and triumphant. Oh, the irony—the pathos of it!
My soul, with its one pitiful atom of faith, looked only what it was—a weeping, hunted thing.
IN SOME rare between-whiles it is as if nothing mattered. My heart aches, I say; my soul wanders; this person or that person was repelled to-day; but nothing matters.
A great inner languor comes like a giant and lays hold of me. I lie fallow beneath it.
Some one forgot me in the giving of things. But it does not matter. I feel nothing.
Persons say to me, don’t analyze any more and you will not be unhappy.
When Something throws heavy clubs at you and you are hit by them, don’t be hurt. When Something stronger than you holds your hands in the fire, don’t let it burn you. When Something pushes you into a river of ice, don’t be cold. When something draws a cutting lash across your naked shoulders,don’t let it concern you—don’t be conscious that it is there.
This is great wisdom and fine, clear logic.
It is a pity that no one has ever yet been able to live by it.
But after all it’s no matter. Nothing is any one’s affair. It is all of no consequence.
And have I not had all my anguish for nothing? I am a fool—a fool.
A handful of rich black mud in a pig’s yard—does it wonder why it is there? Does it torture itself about the other mud around it, and about the earth and water of which it is made, and about the pig? Only fool’s mud would do so. And so, then, I am fool’s mud.
Nothing counts. Nothing can possibly count.
Regret, passion, cowardice, hope, bravery, unrest, pain, the love-sense, the soul-sense, the beauty-sense—all for nothing! What can a handful of richblack mud in a pig’s yard have to do with these? I am a handful of rich black mud—a fool-woman, fool’s mud.
All on earth that I need to do is to lie still in the hot sun and feel the pig rolling and floundering and slushing about. It were folly to waste my mud nerves in wondering. Be quiet, fool-woman, let things be. Your soul is a fool’s-mud soul and is governed by the pig; your heart is a fool’s-mud heart, and wants nothing beyond the pig; your life is a fool’s-mud life, and is the pig’s life.
Something within me shrieks now, but I do not know what it is—nor why it shrieks.
It groans and moans.
There is no satisfaction in being a fool—no satisfaction at all.
BUT yes. It all matters, whether or no. Nature is one long battle, and the never-ending perishing of the weak. I must grind and grind away. I have no choice. And I must know that I grind.
Fool, genius, young lonely woman—I must go round and round in the life within, for how many years the Devil knows. After that my soul must go round and round, for how many centuries the Devil knows.
What a master-mind is that of the Devil! The world is a wondrous scheme. For me it is a scheme that is black with woe. But there may be in the world some one who finds it beautiful Real Life.
I wonder as I write this Portrayal if there will be one person to read it and see a thing that is mingled with everyword. It is something that you must feel, that must fascinate you, the like of which you have never before met with.
It is the unparalleled individuality of me.
I wish I might write it in so many words of English. But that is not possible. If I have put it in every word and if you feel it and are fascinated, then I have done very well.
I am marvelously clever if I have done so.
I know that I am marvelously clever. But I have need of all my peculiar genius to show you my individuality—my aloneness.
I am alone out on my sand and barrenness. I should be alone if my sand and barrenness were crowded with a thousand people each filled with melting sympathy for me—though it would be unspeakably sweet.
People say of me, “She’s peculiar.” They do not understand me. If theydid they would say so oftener and with emphasis.
And so I try to put my individuality in the quality of my diction, in my method of handling words.
My conversation plainly shows this individuality—more than shows it, indeed. My conversation hurls it violently at people’s heads. My conversation—when I choose—makes people turn around in their chairs and stare and give me all of their attention. They admire me, though their admiration is mixed decidedly with other feelings.
I like to be admired.
It soothes my vanity.
When you read this Portrayal you will admire me. You will surely have to admire me.
And so this is life, and everything matters.
But just now I will stop writing and go downstairs to my dinner. There is a porterhouse steak, broiled rare, andsome green young onions. Oh, they are good! And when one is to have a porterhouse steak for one’s dinner—and some green young onions, one doesn’t give a tupenny dam whether anything else matters or not.
ON A day when the sky is like lead and a dull, tempestuous wilderness of gray clouds adds a dreariness to the sand, there is added to the loneliness of my life a deep bitterness of gall and wormwood.
Out of my bitterness it is easy for bad to come.
Surely Badness is a deep black pool wherein one may drown dullness and Nothingness.
I do not know Badness well. It is something material that seems a great way off now, but that might creep nearer and nearer as I became less and less young.
But now when the day is of the leaden dullness I look at Badness and long for it. I am young and all alone, and everything that is good is beyond my reach. But all that is bad—surely that is within the reach of every one.
I wish for a long pageant of bad things to come and whirl and rage through this strange leaden life of mine and break the spell.
Why should it not be Badness instead of Death? Death, it seems, will bring me but a change of agony. Badness would perhaps so crowd my life with its vivid phenomena that they would act as a neurotic to the racked nerves of my Nothingness. It would be an outlet—and possibly I could forget some things.
I think just now of a woman who lived long ago and in whom the world at large seems not to have found anything admirable. I mean Messalina Valeria, the wife of the stupid emperor Claudius. I have conceived a profound admiration for this historic wanton. She may not indeed have had anything to forget; she may not have suffered. But she had the strength of will to take what she wanted, to do as she liked, to live as she chose to live.
It is admirable and beautiful beyond expression to sacrifice and give up and wait for love of that good that gives in itself a just reward. And only next to this is the throwing to the winds of all restraint when the good holds itself aloof and gives nothing. We are weak, contemptible fools who do not grasp the resources within our reach when there is no just reward for our restraint. Why do we not take what we want of the various temptations? It is not that we are virtuous. It is that we are cowards.
And it is worth while to remain true to an ideal that offers only the vaguest hopes of realization? It is not philosophy. When one has made up one’s mind that one wants a dish of hot stewed mushrooms, and set one’s heart on it, should one scorn a handful of raw evaporated apples, if one were starving, for the sake of the phantom dish of hot stewed mushrooms? Should one say, Let me starve, but I will never descendto evaporated apples; I will have nothing but a dish of hot stewed mushrooms? If one is sure one will have the stewed mushrooms finally, before one dies of starvation, then very well. One should wait for them and take nothing else.
But it is not in my good peripatetic philosophy to pass by the Badness that the gods provide for the sake of a far-away, always-unrealized ideal, however brilliant, however beautiful, however golden.
When the lead is in the sky and in my life, a vision of Badness looms up on the horizon and looks at me and beckons with a fascinating finger. Then I say to myself, What is the use of this unsullied, struggling soul; this unbesmirched, empty heart; this treasureless, innocent mind; this insipid maid’s-body? There are no good things for them. But here, to be sure, are fascinating, glittering bad things—the goods that the gods provide, the compensation of the Devil.
Comes Death, some day, I said—but to die, in the sight of glittering bad things—and I only nineteen! These glittering things appear fair.
There is really nothing evil in the world. Some things appear distorted and unnatural because they have been badly done. Had they been perfect in conception and execution they would strike one only with admiration at their fine, iridescent lights. You remember Don Juan and Haidee. That, to be sure, was not evil in any event—they loved each other. But if they had had only a passing, if intense, fancy for one another, who would call it evil? Who would call it anything but wonderful, charming, enchanting? The Devil’s bad things—like the Devil’s good things—may gleam and glisten, oh, how they may gleam and glisten! I have seen them do so, not only in a poem of Byron’s, but in the life that is.
Always when the lead is in the sky I would like to cultivate thoroughly thisbranch of the vineyard. Now doesn’t it make you shiver to think of this dear little Mary MacLane wandering unloved through dark by-ways and deadly labyrinths? It makes me shiver. But it needn’t. If I am to wander unloved, why not as well wander there as through Nothingness?
I fancy it must be wonderfully easy to become used to the many-sided Badness. I have lived my nineteen years in the midst of Nothingness, and I have not yet become used to it. It has sharp knives in it, has Nothingness. Badness may have some sharp knives also—but there are other things. Yes, there are other things.
Kind Devil, if you are not to fetch me Happiness, then slip off from your great steel key-ring a bright little key to the door of the glittering, gleaming bad things, and give it me, and show me the way, and wish me joy.
I would like to live about seven years of judicious Badness, and then Death,if you will. Nineteen years of damnable Nothingness, seven years of judicious Badness—and then Death. A noble ambition! But might it not be worse? If not that, then nineteen years of damnable Nothingness, and then Death. No; when the lead is in the sky that does not appeal to me. My versatile mind turns to the seven years of judicious Badness.
There is nothing in the world without its element of Badness. It is in literature; it is in every art—in pictures, sculpture, even in music. There are certain fine, deep, minute passages in Beethoven and in Chopin that tell of things wonderfully, sublimely bad. Chopin one can not understand. Is there any one in the world who can understand him? But we know at once that there is the Badness—and it is music!
There is the element of Badness in me.
I long to cultivate my element ofBadness. Badness compared to Nothingness is beautiful. And so, then, I wait also for some one to come over the hill with things other than Happiness. But whatever I wait for, nothing comes.
THERE were pictures in the red sunset sky to-day. I looked at them and was racked with passions of desire. I fancied to myself that I could have any of the good things in the pictures for the asking and the waiting. The while I knew that when the sunset should fade from the sky I would be overwhelmed by my heaviest woe.
There was a picture of intense peace. There were stretches of flat, green country, and oak-trees and aspens, and a still, still lake. In the dim distance you could see fields of wheat and timothy-grass that moved a little as if in the wind. You could fancy the cows feeding just below the brow of the near hills, and a hawk floating and wheeling among the clouds. A rainbow arched over the lake. There is nothing lacking here, I thought. “Life and healthand peace possessing.” Give me this, kind Devil.
There was a picture of endless, limitless strength. There were the oak-trees again but bereft now of every leaf, and the bristling, jagged rocks back of them were not more coldly staunch. The sun poured brilliantly bright upon them. A river flowed unmoved and quiet between yellow clay banks. A tornado might sweep over this and not one twig would be displaced, not one ripple would come to the river. Is it not fine! I said to myself. No feeling, no self-analysis, no aching, no pain—and the strength of the Philistines. Oh, kind Devil, I entreat you, let me have that!
There was a picture of untrammeled revel and forgetfulness. There were fields of swaying daffodils and red lilies. The young shrubs tossed their heads and were joyous. Lambs gamboled and the happy meadow-lark knew whereof she sang.