But no. No one goes mad. The Devil does not propose to release any
one from a so beautifully-wrought, artistic damnation. He looks to
it that one’s senses are kept fully intact, and he fastens to them
with steel chains the Demon of Unrest.
It hurts--oh, it tortures me in the days and days! But when the
Devil brings me my Happiness I will forgive him all this.
When my Happiness is given me, the Unrest will still be with me,
I doubt not, but the Happiness will change the tenor of it, will
make it an instrument of joy, will clasp hands with it and mingle
itself with it,--the while I, with my wooden heart, my woman’s-body,
my mind, my soul, shall be in transports. I shall be filled with
pleasure so deep and pain so intense that my being’s minutest
nerve will reel and stagger in intoxication, will go drunk with
the fullness of Life.
When my Happiness is given me I shall live centuries in the hours.
And we shall all grow old rapidly,--I and my wooden heart, and my
woman’s-body, and my mind, and my soul. Sorrow may age one in some
degree. But Happiness--the real Happiness--rolls countless years
off from one’s finger-tips in a single moment, and each year leaves
its impress.
It is true that life is a tragedy to those who feel. When my Happiness
is given me life will be an ineffable, a nameless thing.
It will seethe and roar; it will plunge and whirl; it will leap
and shriek in convulsion; it will guiver in delicate fantasy; it
will writhe and twist; it will glitter and flash and shine; it
will sing gently; it will shout in exquisite excitement; it will
vibrate to the roots like a great oak in a storm; it will dance; it
will glide; it will gallop; it will rush; it will swell and surge;
it will fly; it will soar high--high; it will go down into depths
unexplored; it will rage and rave; it will yell in utter joy; it
will melt; it will blaze; it will ride triumphant; it will grovel
in the dust of entire pleasure; it will sound out like a terrific
blare of trumpets; it will chime faintly, faintly like the remote
tinkling notes of a harp; it will sob and grieve and weep; it will
revel and carouse; it will shrink; it will go in pride; it will
lie prone like the dead; it will float buoyantly on air; it will
moan, shiver, burst--oh, it will reek with Love and Light!
The words of the English language are futile. There are no words in
it, or in any other, to express an idea of that thing which would
be my life in its Happiness.
The words I have written describe it, it is true,--but confusedly
and inadequately.
But words are for everyday use.
When it comes my turn to meet face to face the unspeakable vision
of the Happy Life I shall be rendered dumb.
But the rains of my feeling will come in torrents!
January 28.
I am an artist of the most artistic, the highest type. I have
uncovered for myself the art that lies in obscure shadows. I have
discovered the art of the day of small things.
And that surely is art with a capital “A.”
I have acquired the art of Good Eating. Usually it is in the gray
and elderly forties and fifties that people cultivate this art--if
they ever do; it is indeed a rare art.
But I know it in all its rare exquisiteness at the young slim age
of nineteen--which is one more mark of my genius, do you see?
The art of Good Eating has two essential points: one must eat only
when one is hungry, and one must take small bites.
There are persons who eat for the sake of eating. They are gourmands,
and partake of the natures of the pig and the buzzard. There are
persons who take bites that are not small. These also are gourmands
and partake of the natures of the pig and the buzzard. There are
persons who can enjoy nothing in the way of eating except a luxurious,
well-appointed meal. These, it is safe to say, have not acquired
the art of anything.
But I--I have acquired the art of eating an olive.
Now listen, and I will tell you the art of eating an olive:
I take the olive in my fingers, and I contemplate its green oval
richness. It makes me think at once of the land where the green
citron grows--where the cypress and myrtle are emblems; of the
land of the Sun where human beings are delightfully, enchantingly
wicked,--where the men are eager and passionate, and the women
gracefully developed in mind and in body--and their two breasts
show round and full and delicately veined beneath thin drapery.
The mere sight of the olive conjures up this charming picture in
my mind.
I set my teeth and my tongue upon the olive, and bite it. It is
bitter, salt, delicious. The saliva rushes to meet it, and my tongue
is a happy tongue. As the morsel of olive rests in my mouth and is
crunched and squeezed lusciously among my teeth, a quick, temporary
change takes place in my character. I think of some adorable lines
of the Persian poet: “Give thyself up to Joy, for thy Grief will be
infinite. The stars shall again meet together at the same point in
the firmament, but of thy body shall bricks be made for a palace
wall.”
“Oh, dear, sweet, bitter olive!” I say to myself.
The bit of olive slips down my red gullet, and so into my stomach.
There it meets with a joyous welcome. Gastric juices leap out from
the walls and swathe it in loving embrace. My stomach is fond of
something bitter and salt. It lavishes flattery and endearment galore
upon the olive. It laughs in silent delight. It feels that the day
it has long waited for has come. The philosophy of my stomach is
wholly epicurean. Let it receive but a tiny bit of olive and it will
reck not of the morrow, nor of the past. It lives, voluptuously,
in the present. It is content. It is in paradise.
I bite the olive again. Again the bitter salt crisp ravishes my
tongue. “If this be vanity,--vanity let it be.” The golden moments
flit by and I heed them not. For am I not comfortably seated and
eating an olive? Go hang yourself, you who have never been comfortably
seated and eating an olive! My character evolves farther in its
change. I am now bent on reckless sensuality, let happen what will.
The fair earth seems to resolve itself into a thing oval and crisp
and good and green and deliciously salt. I experience a feeling of
fervent gladness that I am a female thing living, and that I have
a tongue and some teeth, and salivary glands.
Also this bit slips down my red gullet, and again the festive
Stomach lifts up a silent voice in psalms and rejoicing. It is
now an absolute monarchy with the green olive at its head. The
kisses of the gastric juice become hot and sensual and convulsive
and ecstatic. “Avaunt, pale, shadowy ghosts of dyspepsia!” says
my Stomach. “I know you not. I am of a brilliant, shining world.
I dwell in Elysian fields.”
Once more I bite the olive. Once more is my tongue electrified.
And the third stage in my temporary transformation takes place. I
am now a gross but supremely contented sensualist. An exquisite
symphony of sensualism and pleasure seems to play somewhere within
me. My heart purrs. My brain folds its arms and lounges. I put
my feet up on the seat of another chair. The entire world is now
surely one delicious green olive. My mind is capable of conceiving
but one idea--that of a green olive. Therefore the green olive is
a perfect thing--absolutely a perfect thing.
Disgust and disapproval are excited only by imperfections. When a
thing is perfect, no matter how hard one may look at it, one can
see only itself--itself, and nothing beyond.
And so I have made my olive and my art perfect.
Well, then, this third bit of olive slides down the willing gullet
into my stomach. “And then my heart with pleasure fills.” The play
of the gastric secretions is now marvelous. It is the meeting of
the waters! It were well, ah, how well, if the hearts of the world
could mingle in peace, as the gastric juices mingle at the coming
of a green olive into my stomach! “Paradise! Paradise!” says my
Stomach.
Every drop of blood in my passionate veins is resting. Through
my stomach--my _stomach_, do you hear--my soul seems to feel the
infinite. The minutes are flying. Shortly it will be over. But just
now I am safe. I am entirely satisfied. I want nothing, nothing.
My inner quiet is infinite. I am conscious that it is but momentary,
and it matters not. On the contrary, the knowledge of this fact
renders the present quiet--the repose, more limitless, more intense.
Where now, Devil, is your damnation? If this be damnation, damnation
let it be! If this be the human fall, then how good it is to be
fallen! At this moment I would fain my fall were like yours, Lucifer,
“never to hope again.”
And so, bite by bite, the olive enters into my body and soul. Each
bite brings with it a recurring wave of sensation and charm.
No. We will not dispute with the brilliant mind that declared life
a tragedy to those who feel. We will let that stand. However, there
are parts of the tragedy that are not tragic. There are parts that
admit of a turning aside.
As the years pass, one after another, I shall continue to eat. And
as I eat I shall have my quiet, my brief period of aberration.
This is the art of Eating.
I have acquired it by means of self-examination, analyzing--analyzing--
analyzing. Truly my genius is analytical. And it enables me to
endure--if also to feel bitterly--the heavy, heavy weight of life.
What a worm of misery I should be were it not for these bursts of
philosophy, these turnings aside!
If it please the Devil, one day I may have Happiness. That will be
all-sufficient. I shall then analyze no more. I shall be a different
being.
But meanwhile I shall eat.
When the last of the olive vanishes into the stomach, when it is
there reduced to animated chyme, when I play with the olive-seed
in my fingers, when I lean back in my chair and straighten out my
spinal column,--oh, then do you not envy me, you fine, brave world,
who are not a philosopher, who have not discovered the art of the
small things, who have not conscious chyme in your stomach, who
have not acquired the art of Good Eating!
January 29.
As I read over now and then what I have written of my Portrayal I
have alternate periods of hope and despair. At times I think I am
succeeding admirably--and again, what I have written compared to
what I have felt seems vapid and tame. Who has not felt the futility
of words when one would express feelings?
I take this hope and despair as another mark of genius. Genius,
apart from natural sensitiveness, is prone equally to unreasoning
joy and to bitterest morbidness.
I am more than fond of writing, though I have hours when I can not
write any more than I could paint a picture, or play Wagner as it
should be played.
I think my style of writing has a wonderful intensity in it, and
it is admirably suited to the creature it portrays. What sort
of Portrayal of myself would I produce if I wrote with the long,
elaborate periods of Henry James, or with the pleasant, ladylike
phrasing of Howells? It would be rather like a little tin phonograph
trolling out flowery poetry at breakneck speed, or like a deep-toned
church organ pouring forth “Goo-Goo Eyes” with ponderous feeling.
When I read a book I study it carefully to find whether the author
_knows things_, and whether I could, with the same subject, write
a better one myself.
The latter question I usually decide in the affirmative.
The highest thing one can do in literature is to succeed in saying
that thing which one meant to say. There is nothing better than
that--to make the world see your thoughts as you see them. Eugene
Field and Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson and Charles
Dickens, among others, have succeeded in doing this. They impress
the world with a sense of their courage and realness.
There are people who have written books which did not impress the
world in this way, but which nevertheless came out of the feeling
and fullness of zealous hearts. Always I think of that pathetic,
artless little old-fashioned thing, “Jane Eyre,” as a picture shown
to a world seeing with distorted vision. Charlotte Bronté meant one
thing when she wrote the book, and the world after a time suddenly
understood a quite different thing, and heaped praise and applause
upon her therefor. When I read the book I was not quite able to see
just what the message was that the Bronté intended to send out. But
I saw that there was a message--of bravery, perhaps, or of that
good which may come out of Nazareth. But the world that praised
and applauded and gave her money seems totally to have missed it.
It takes centuries of tears and piety and mourning to move this
world a tiny bit.
But still it will give you praise and applause and money if you will
prostitute your sensibilities and emotions for the gratification
of it.
I have no message to hide in a book and send out. I am writing a
Portrayal.
But a Portrayal is also a thing that may be misunderstood.
January 30.
An idle brain is the Devil’s workshop, they say. It is an absurdly
incongruous statement. If the Devil is at work in a brain it certainly
is not idle. And when one considers how brilliant a personage the
Devil is, and what very fine work he turns out, it becomes an open
question whether he would have the slightest use for most of the
idle brains that cumber the earth. But, after all, the Devil is so
clever that he could produce unexcelled workmanship with even the
poorest tools.
My brain is one kind of devil’s workshop, and it is as incessantly
hard-worked and always-busy a one as you could imagine.
It is a devil’s workshop, indeed, only I do the work myself. But
there is a mental telegraphy between the Devil and me, which accounts
for the fact that many of my ideas are so wonderfully groomed and
perfumed and colored. I take no credit to myself for this, though,
as I say, I do the work myself.
I try always to give the Devil his due--and particularly in this
Portrayal.
There are very few who give the Devil his due in this world of
hypocrites.
I never think of the Devil as that atrocious creature in red tights,
with cloven hoofs and a tail and a two-tined fork. I think of him
rather as an extremely fascinating, strong, steel-willed person in
conventional clothes--a man with whom to fall completely, madly in
love. I rather think, I believe, that he is incarnate at times.
Why not?
Periodically I fall completely, madly in love with the Devil. He
is so fascinating, so strong--so strong, exactly the sort of man
whom my wooden heart awaits. I would like to throw myself at his
head. I would make him a dear little wife. He would love me--he
would love me. I would be in raptures. And I would love him, oh,
madly, madly!
“What would you have me do, little MacLane?” the Devil would say.
“I would have you conquer me, crush me, know me,” I would answer.
“What shall I say to you?” the Devil would ask.
“Say to me, ‘I love you, I love you, I love you,’ in your strong,
steel, fascinating voice. Say it to me often, always--a million
times.”
“What would you have me do, little MacLane?” he would say again.
I would answer: “Hurt me, burn me, consume me with hot love, shake
me violently, embrace me hard, _hard_ in your strong, steel arms,
kiss me with wonderful burning kisses--press your lips to mine with
passion, and your soul and mine would meet then in an anguish of
joy for me!”
“How shall I treat you, little MacLane?”
“Treat me cruelly, brutally.”
“How long shall I stay with you?”
“Through the life everlasting--it will be as one day; or for one
day--it will be as the life everlasting.”
“And what kind of children will you bear me, little MacLane?” he
would say.
“I will bear wonderful, beautiful children--with great pain.”
“But you hate pain,” the Devil will say, “and when you are in your
pain you will hate me.”
“But no,” I will answer, “pain that comes of you whom I love will
be ineffable exaltation.”
“And how will you treat me, little MacLane?”
“I will cast myself at your feet; or I will minister to you with
divine tenderness; or I will charm you with fantastic deviltry;
when you weep, I will melt into tears; when you rejoice, I will go
wild with delight; when you go deaf I will stop my ears; when you
go blind I will put out my eyes; when you go lame I will cut off
my legs. Oh, I will be divinely dear, unutterably sweet!”
“Indeed you are rarely sweet,” the Devil will say. And I will be
in transports.
Oh, Devil, Devil, Devil!
Oh, misery, _misery_ of Nothingness!
The days are long--long and very weary as I await the Devil’s coming.
January 31.
To-day as I walked out I was impressed deeply with the wonderful
beautifulness of Nature even in her barrenness. The far-distant
mountains had that high, pure, transparent look, and the nearer ones
were transformed completely with a wistful, beseeching attitude
that reminded me of my life. It was late in the afternoon. As the
sun lowered, the pure lavender of the far-away hills was tinted
with faint-rose, and the gray of the nearer ones with sun-color.
And the sand--my sand and barrenness--almost flushed consciously in
its wide, mysterious magnitude. In the sky there was a white cloud.
The sky was blue--blue almost as when I was a child. The air was
very gentle. The earth seemed softened. There was an indefinite,
caressing something over all that went into my soul and stirred
it, and hurt it. There was that in the air which is there when
something is going to happen. Only nothing ever happens. It is
rare, I thought, that my sand and barrenness looks like this. I
crouched on the ground, and the wondrous calm and beauty of the
natural things awed and moved me with strange, still emotions.
I felt, and gazed about me, and felt again. And everything was very
still.
Presently my eyes filled quietly with tears.
I bent my head into the breast of a great gray rock. Oh, my soul, my
soul, I said over and over, not with passion. It is so divine--the
earth is so beautiful, so untainted--and I, what am I? It was so
beautiful that now as I write, and it comes over me again, I can
not restrain the tears.
Tears are not common.
I felt my wooden heart, my soul, quivering and sobbing with their
unknown wanting. This is my soul’s awakening. Ah, the pain of my
soul’s awakening! Is there nothing, _nothing_ to help this pain? I am
so lonely, so lonely--Fannie Corbin, my one friend, my dearly-loved
anemone lady, I want you so much--why aren’t you here! I want to
feel your hand with mine as I felt it sometimes before you went
away. You are the only one among a worldful of people to care a
little--and I love you with all the strength and worship I can give
to the things that are beautiful and true. You are the only one,
the only one--and my soul is full of pain, and I am sitting alone
on the ground, and my head lies on a rock’s breast.--
Strange, sweet passions stirred and waked somewhere deep within me
as I sat shivering on the ground. And I felt them singing far away,
as if their faint voices came out of that limitless deep, deep blue
above me; and it was like a choir of spirit-voices, and they sang
of love and of light and of dear tender dreams, and of my soul’s
awakening. Why is this--and what is it that is hurting so? Is it
because I am young, or is it because I am alone, or because I am
a woman?
Oh, it is a hard and bitter thing to be a woman! And why--why? Is
woman so foul a creature that she must needs be purged by this
infinite pain?
The choir of faint, sweet voices comes to me incessantly out of the
blue. My wooden heart and my soul are listening to them intently.
The voices are trying hard to tell me, to help me, but I can not
understand. I know only that it is about pure, exalted things, and
about the all-abiding love that is somewhere; and it is about the
earth-love, and about Truth,--but I can not understand. And the
voices sing of me the child--a song of the unloved, starved little
being; and a song of the unloved, half-grown creature; and a song
of me, a woman and all alone--awaiting the Devil’s coming.
Oh, my soul--my soul!
A female snake is born out of its mother’s white egg, and lives
awhile in content among weeds and grass, and dies.
A female dog lives some years, and has bones thrown at her, and
sometimes she receives a kick or a blow, and a dog-house to sleep
in, and dies.
A female bird has a nest, and worms to eat, and goes south in the
winter, and presently she dies.
A female toad has a swamp or a garden, some bugs and flies,
contentment--and then she dies.
And each of these has a male thing with her for a time, and soon
there are little snakes or little dogs for her to love as much as
it is given her to love--she can do no more.
And they are fortunate with their little snakes and little dogs.
A female human being is born out of her mother’s fair body, branded
with a strange, plague-tainted name, and let go; and lives awhile,
and dies. But before she dies she awakes. There is a pain that goes
with it.
And the male thing that is with her for a time is unlike a snake or
a dog. It is more like a man, and there is another pain for this.
And when a little human being comes with a soul of its own there must
be another awakening, for she has then reached the best and highest
state that any human being can reach, though she is a female human
being, and plague-tainted. And here also there is heavy soul-pain.
The name--the plague-tainted name branded upon her--means woman.
I lifted my head from the breast of the gray rock. The tears had
been falling, falling. Tears are so strange! Tears from the dried-up
fountain of nineteen years are like drops of water wrung out of
stone. Suddenly I got up from the ground and ran quickly over the
sand for several minutes. I did not dare look again at the hilltops
and the deep blue, nor listen again to the voices.
Oh, with it all, I am a coward! I shrink and cringe before the pain
of the dazzling lights. Yet I am waiting--longing for the most
dazzling light of all: the coming of the Devil.
February 1.
Oh, the wretched bitter loneliness of me!
In all the deep darkness, and the silence, there is never a faint
human light, never a voice!
How can I bear it--how can I bear it!
February 2.
I have been looking over the confessions of the Bashkirtseff.
They are indeed rather like my Portrayal, but they are not so
interesting, nor so intense. I have a stronger individuality than
Marie Bashkirtseff, though her mind was probably in a higher state
of development than mine, even when she was younger than I.
Most of her emotions are vacillating and inconsistent. She worships
a God one day and blasphemes him the next. She never loves her God.
And why, then, does she have a God? Why does she not abandon him
altogether? He seems to be of no use to her--except as a convenient
thing on which to fasten the blame for her misfortunes.--And, after
all, that is something very useful indeed.--And she loves the people
about her one day, and the next day she hates them.
But in her great passion--her ambition, Marie Bashkirtseff was
beautifully consistent. And what terrific storms of woe and despair
must have enveloped her when she knew that within a certain period
she would be dead--removed from the world, and her work left undone!
The time kept creeping nearer--she must have tasted the bitterness of
death indeed. She was sure of success, sure that her high-strained
ambition would be gratified to its last vestige--and then, to die!
It was certainly hard lines for the little Bashkirtseff.
My own despair is of an opposite nature.
There is one thing in the world that is more bitter than death--and
that is life.
Suppose that I learned I was to die on the twenty-seventh of June,
1903, for instance. It would give me a soft warm wave of pleasure,
I think. I might be in the depths of woe at the time; my despair
might be the despair of despair; my misery utterly unceasing,--and
I could say, Never mind, on the twenty-seventh of June, 1903, all
will be over--dull misery, rage, Nothingness, obscurity, the unknown
longing, every desire of my soul, all the pain--ended inevitably,
completely on the twenty-seventh of June, 1903. I might come upon
a new pain, but this, my long old torture, would cease.
You may say that I might end my life on that day, that I might do
so now. I certainly shall if the pain becomes greater than I can
bear--for what else is there to do? But I shall be far from satisfied
in doing so. What if I were to end everything now--when perhaps
the Devil may be coming to me in two years’ time with Happiness?
Upon dying it might be that I should go to some wondrous fair country
where there would be trees and running water, and a resting-place.
Well--oh, well! But I want the earthly Happiness. I am not
high-minded and spiritual. I am earthly, human--sensitive, sensuous,
sensual, and, ah, dear, my soul wants its earthly Happiness!
I can not bring myself to the point of suicide while there is a
possibility of Happiness remaining. But if I knew that irrevocable,
inevitable death awaited me on June twenty-seventh, 1903, I should
be satisfied. My Happiness might come before that time, or it might
not. I should be satisfied. I should know that my life was out of
my hands. I should know, above all, that my long, long, old, old
pain of loneliness would stop, June twenty-seventh, 1903.
I shall die naturally some day--probably after I have grown old
and sour. If I have had my Happiness for a year or a day, well and
good. I shall be content to grow as old and as sour as the Devil
wills. But having had no Happiness--if I find myself growing old
and still no Happiness--oh, then I vow I will not live another
hour, even if dying were rushing headlong to damnation!
I am, do you see, a philosopher and a coward--with the philosophy
of cowardice. I squeeze juice also from this fact sometimes--but
the juice is not sweet juice.
The Devil--the fascinating man-devil--it may be, is coming, coming,
coming.
And meanwhile I go on and on, in the midst of sand and barrenness.
February 3.
The town of Butte presents a wonderful field to a student of humanity
and human nature. There are not a great many people--seventy thousand
perhaps--but those seventy thousand are in their way unparalleled.
For mixture, for miscellany--variedness, Bohemianism--where is
Butte’s rival?
The population is not only of all nationalities and stations, but
the nationalities and stations mix and mingle promiscuously with
each other, and are partly concealed and partly revealed in the
mazes of a veneer that belongs neither to nation nor to station,
but to Butte.
The nationalities are many, it is true, but Irish and Cornish
predominate. My acquaintance extends widely among the inhabitants
of Butte. Sometimes when I feel in the mood for it I spend an
afternoon in visiting about among divers curious people.
At some Fourth of July demonstration, or on a Miners’ Union day, the
heterogeneous herd turns out--and I turn out, with the herd and of
it, and meditate and look on. There are Irishmen--Kelleys, Caseys,
Calahans, staggering under the weight of much whiskey, shouting
out their green-isle maxims; there is the festive Cornishman,
ogling and leering, greeting his fellow-countrymen with alcoholic
heartiness, and gazing after every feminine creature with lustful
eyes; there are Irish women swearing genially at each other in shrill
pleasantry, and five or six loudly-vociferous children for each;
there are round-faced Cornish women likewise, each with her train
of children; there are suave, sleek sporting men just out of the
bath-tub; insignificant lawyers, dentists, messengerboys; “plungers”
without number; greasy Italians from Meaderville; greasier French
people from the Boulevarde Addition; ancient miners--each of whom
was the first to stake a claim in Butte; starved-looking Chinamen
here and there; a contingent of Finns and Swedes and Germans;
musty, stuffy old Jew pawn-brokers who have crawled out of their
holes for a brief recreation; dirt-encrusted Indians and squaws in
dirty, gay blankets, from their flea-haunted camp below the town;
“box-rustlers”--who are as common in Butte as bar-maids in Ireland;
swell, flashy-looking Africans; respectable women with white aprons
tied around their waists and sailor-hats on their heads, who have
left the children at home and stepped out to see what was going on;
innumerable stray youngsters from the dark haunts of Dublin Gulch;
heavy restaurant-keepers with toothpicks in their mouths; a vast
army of dry-goods clerks--the “paper-collared” gentry; miners of
every description; representatives from Dog Town, Chicken Flats,
Busterville, Butchertown, and Seldom Seen--suburbs of Butte; pale,
thin individuals who sing and dance in beer-halls; smart society
people in high traps and tally-hos; impossible women--so-called
(though in Butte no one is more possible), in vast hats and extremely
plaid stockings; persons who take things seriously and play the
races for a living; “beer-jerkers”; “biscuit-shooters”; soft-voiced
Mexicans and Arabians;--the dregs, the élite, the humbly respectable,
the off-scouring--all thrown together, and shaken up, and mixed
well.
One may notice many odd bits of irony as one walks among these. One
may notice that the Irishmen are singularly carefree and strong and
comfortable--and so jolly! while the Irish women are frumpish and
careworn and borne earthward with children. The Cornishman who has
consumed the greatest amount of whiskey is the most agreeable,
and less and less inclined to leer and ogle. The Cornish woman
whose profanity is the shrillest and most genial and voluble, is
she whose life seems the most weighted and downtrodden. The young
women whose bodies are encased in the tightest and stiffest corsets
are in the most wildly hilarious spirits of all. The filthy little
Irish youngsters from Dublin Gulch are much brighter and more
clever in every way than the ordinary American children who are
less filthy. A delicate aroma of cocktails and whiskey-and-soda
hangs over even the four-in-hands and automobiles of the upper
crust. Gamblers, newsboys, and Chinamen are the most chivalrously
courteous among them. And the modest-looking “plunger” who has drunk
the greatest number of high-balls is the most gravely, quietly
polite of all. The rolling, rollicking, musical profanity of the
“ould sod”--Bantry Bay, Donegal, Tyrone, Tipperary--falls much less
limpidly from the cigaretted lips of the ten-year-old lad than
from those of his mother, who taught it to him. One may notice that
the husband and wife who smile the sweetest at each other in the
sight of the multitudes are they whose countenances bear various
scars and scratches commemorating late evening orgies at home; that
the peculiar solid, block-shaped appearance of some of the miners’
wives is due quite as much to the quantity of beer they drink as
to their annual maternity; that the one grand ruling passion of
some men’s lives is curiosity;--that the entire herd is warped,
distorted, barren, having lived its life in smoke-cured Butte.
A single street in Butte contains people in nearly every walk of
life--living side by side resignedly, if not in peace.
In a row of five or six houses there will be living miners and
their families, the children of which prevent life from stagnating
in the street while their mothers talk to each other--with the
inevitable profanity--over the back-fences. On the corner above
there will be a mysterious widow with one child, who has suddenly
alighted upon the neighborhood, stealthily in the night, and is
to be seen at rare intervals emerging from her door--the target
for dozens of pairs of eager eyes and half as many eager tongues.
And when the mysterious widow, with her one child, disappears some
night as suddenly and as stealthily as she appeared, an outburst of
highly-colored rumors is tossed with astonishing glibness over the
various back-fences--all relating to the mysterious widow’s shady
antecedents and past history, to those of her child, and to the
cause of her sudden departure,--no two of which rumors agree in any
particular. Across on the opposite corner there will be a company
of strange people who also descended suddenly, and upon whom the
eyes of the entire block are turned with absorbing interest. They
consist of half-a-dozen men and women seemingly bound together only
by ties of conviviality. The house is kept closely-blinded and quiet
all day, only to burst forth in a blaze of revel in the evening,
which revel lasts all night. This goes on until some momentous
night, at the request of certain proper ones, a police officer
glides quietly into the midst of a scene of unusual gaiety--and the
festive company melts into oblivion, never to return. They also
are then discussed with rapturous relish and in tones properly
lowered, over the back-fences. Farther down the street there will
live an interesting being of feminine persuasion who has had five
divorces and is in course of obtaining another. These divorces,
the causes therefor, the justice thereof, and the future prospects
of the multi-grass widow, are gone over, in all their bearings, by
the indefatigable tongues. Every incident in the history of the
street is put through a course of sprouts by these same tireless
members. The Jewish family that lives in the poorest house in the
neighborhood, and that is said to count its money by the hundred
thousands; the aristocratic family with the Irish-point curtains
in the windows--that lives on the county; the family whose husband
and father gains for it a comfortable livelihood--forging checks;
the miner’s family whose wife and mother wastes its substance in
diamonds and sealskin coats and other riotous living; the family in
extremely straitened circumstances into which new babies arrive in
great and distressing numbers; the strange lady with an apoplectic
complexion and a wonderfully foul and violent flow of invective--all
are discussed over and over and over again. No one is omitted.
And so this is Butte, the promiscuous--the Bohemian. And all these
are the Devil’s playthings. They amuse him, doubtless.
Butte is a place of sand and barrenness.
The souls of these people are dumb.
February 4.
Always I wonder, when I die will there be any one to remember me
with love?