And I am unable to judge which is the more savagely forlorn: the
starved-hearted child, or the woman, young and all alone.
The little wild stubborn child felt things and wanted things. She
did not know that she felt things and wanted things.
Now I feel and I want things and I know it with burning vividness.
The little vicious Mary MacLane suffered, but she did not know that
she suffered. Yet that did not make the suffering less.
And she reached out with a little sunburned hand to touch and take
something.
But the sunburned little hand remained empty. There was nothing
for it. No one had anything to put into it.
The little wild creature wanted to be loved; she wanted something
to put in her hungry little heart.
But no one had anything to put into a hungry little heart.
No one said “dear.”
The little vicious child was the only MacLane, and she felt somewhat
alone. But there, after all, were the lizards and the little garter
snakes.
The wretched, hardened little piece of untrained Nature has grown
and developed into a woman, young and alone. For the child there
was a Nothingness, and for the woman there is a great Nothingness.
Perhaps the Devil will bring me something in my lonely womanhood
to put in my wooden heart.
But the time when I was a child will never come again. It is
gone--gone. I may live through some long, long years, but nothing
like it will ever come. For there is nothing like it.
It is a life by itself. It has naught to do with philosophy, or
with genius, or with heights and depths, or with the red sunset
sky, or with the Devil.
These come later.
The time of the child is a thing apart. It is the Planting and
Seed-time. It is the Beginning of things. It decides whether there
shall be brightness or bitterness in the long after-years.
I have left that time far enough behind me. It will never come
back. And it had a Nothingness--do you hear, a _Nothingness_! Oh,
the pity of it! the pity of it!
Do you know why it is that I look back to the horizon at the figure
of an unkempt, rough child, and why I feel a surging torrent of
tears and anguish and despair?