The absence of one accentuated the significant damnation of the
others. There was something more forcibly maddening in the five
than in the six tooth-brushes. The damnation was not worse, but it
developed my feeling about them more vividly.
And so I put my tooth-brush back in the bathroom.
This house is comfortably furnished. My mother spends her life in
the adornment of it. The small square rooms are distinctly pretty.
But when I look at them seeingly I think of the proverb about the
dinner of stalled ox.
Yet there is no hatred here, except mine and my bitterness. I am
the only one of them whose bitter spirit cries out against things.
But there is that which is subtler and strikes deeper. There is
the lack of sympathy--the lack of everything that counts: there is
the great, deep Nothing.
How much better were there hatred here than Nothing!
I long hopelessly for will-power, resolution to take my life into
my own hands, to walk away from this house some day and never
return. I have nowhere to go--no money, and I know the world quite
too well to put the slightest faith in its voluntary kindness of
heart. But how much better and wider, less damned, less maddening,
to go out into it and be beaten and cheated and fooled with, than
_this_!--this thing that gathers itself easily into a circle made
of six tooth-brushes with a sufficiency of surplus damnation.
I have read about a woman who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho
and fell among thieves. Perhaps she had a house at Jerusalem with
six tooth-brushes and Nothingness. In that case she might have
rushed gladly into the arms of thieves.
I think of crimes that strike horror and revulsion to my maid-senses.
And I think of my Nothingness, and I ask myself were it not better
to walk the earth an outcast, a solitary woman, and meet and face
even these, than that each and every one of my woman-senses should
wear slowly, painfully to shreds, and strain and break--in this
unnameable Nothing?
Oh, the dreariness--the hopelessness of Nothing!
There are no words to tell it. And things are always hardest to
bear when there are no words for them.
However great one’s gift of language may be, there is always
something that one can not tell.