March 2.
Often in the early morning I leave my bed and get me dressed and
go out into the Gray Dawn. There is something about the Gray Dawn
that makes me wish the world would stop, that the sun would never
more come up over the edge, that my life would go on and on and
rest in the Gray Dawn.
In the Gray Dawn every hard thing is hidden by a gray mantle of
charity, and only the light, vague, caressing fancies are left.
Sometimes I think I am a strange, strange creature--something not
of earth, nor yet of heaven, nor of hell. I think at times I am a
little thing fallen on the earth by mistake: a thing thrown among
foreign, unfitting elements, where there is nothing in touch with
it, where life is a continual struggle, where every little door
is closed--every Why unanswered, and itself knows not where to
lay its head. I feel a deadly certainty in some moments that the
wild world contains not one moment of rest for me, that there will
never be any rest, that my woman’s-soul will go on asking long,
long centuries after my woman’s-body is laid in its grave.
I felt this in the Gray Dawn this morning, but the gray charitable
mantle softened it. Always I feel most acutely in the Gray Dawn,
but always there is the thing to soften it.
The gray atmosphere was charged. There was a tense electrical thrill
in the cold, soft air. My nerves were keenly alive. But the gray
curtain was mercifully there. I did not feel too much.
How I wished the yellow, beautiful sun would never more come up
over the edge to show me my nearer anguish!
“Stay with me, stay with me, soft Gray Dawn,” implored every one
of my tiny lives. “Let me forget. Let the vanity, the pain, the
longing sink deep and vanish--all of it, all of it! And let me rest
in the midst of the Gray Dawn.”
I heard music--the silent music of myriad voices that you hear when
all is still. One of them came and whispered to me softly: “Don’t
suffer any more just now, little Mary MacLane. You suffer enough
in the brightness of the sun and the blackness of the night. This
is the Gray Dawn. Take a little rest.”
“Yes,” I said, “I will take a little rest.”
And then a wild, swelling chorus of voices whispered in the
stillness: “Rest, rest, rest, little Mary MacLane. Suffer in the
brightness, suffer in the blackness--your soul, your wooden heart,
your woman’s-body. But now a little rest--a little rest.”
“A little rest,” I said again.
And straightway I began resting lest the sun should come too quickly
over the edge.
When I have heard in summer the wind in a forest of pines, blowing
a wondrous symphony of purity and truth, my varied nature felt
itself abashed and there was a sinking in my wooden heart. The
beauty of it ravished my senses, but it savored crushingly of the
virtue that is far above and beyond me, and I felt a certain sore,
despairing grief.
But the Gray Dawn is in perfect sympathy. It is quite as beautiful
as the wind in the pines, and its truth and purity are extremely
gentle, and partly hidden under the gray curtain.
Almost I can be a different Mary MacLane out in the Gray Dawn. Let
me forget all the mingled agonies of my life. Let me walk in the
midst of this soft grayness and drink of the waters of Lethe.
The Gray Dawn is not Paradise; it is not a Happy Valley; it is not
a Garden of Eden; it is not a Vale of Cashmere. It is the Gray
Dawn--soft, charitable, tender. “The brilliant celestial yellow
will come soon,” it says; “you will suffer then to your greatest
extent. But now I am here--and so, rest.”
And so in the Gray Dawn I was forgetting for a brief period. I was
submerged for a little in Lethe, river of oblivion. If I had seen
some one coming over the near horizon with Happiness I should have
protested: Wait, wait until the Gray Dawn has passed.
The deep, deep blue of the summer sky stirs me to a half-painful
joy. The cool green of a swiftly-flowing river fills my heart with
unquiet longings. The red, red of the sunset sky convulses my entire
being with passion. But the dear Gray Dawn brings me Rest.
Oh, the Gray Dawn is sweet--sweet!
Could I not die for very love of it!
The Gray Dawn can do no wrong. If those myriad voices suddenly had
begun to sing a voluptuous evil song of the so great evil that I
could not understand, but that I could feel instantly, still the
Gray Dawn would have been fine and sweet and beautiful.
Always I admire Mary MacLane greatly--though sometimes in my
admiration I feel a complete contempt for her. But in the Gray Dawn
I love Mary MacLane tenderly and passionately.
I seem to take on a strange, calm indifference to everything in the
world but just Mary MacLane and the Gray Dawn. We two are identified
with each other and joined together in shadowy vagueness from the
rest of the world.
As I walked over my sand and barrenness in the Gray Dawn a poem
ran continuously through my mind. It expressed to me in my gray
condition an ideal life and death and ending. Every desire of my
life melted away in the Gray Dawn except one good wish that my own
life and death might be short and obscure and complete like them.
The poem was this beautiful one of Charles Kingsley’s:
“‘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 the land--
And never home came she.
“Oh, is it weed, or fish, or floating hair?--
A tress of golden hair,
Of drowned maiden’s hair,
Above the nets at sea.
Was never salmon yet that shone so fair
Among 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 home
Across 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 be there 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 with
moats 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. And nothing 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 desert a 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 fishy eyes; 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 egg plant, 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 tin spoons; 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 sings _at_
it; 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, and then, 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 evil were 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.