And as I think of it I wonder if angels are not weeping somewhere
because of it.
March 31.
“She only said: ‘My life is dreary,
He cometh not,’ she said;
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’”
All day long this heart-sickening song of Mariana has been reeling
and swimming in my brain. I awoke with it early in the morning, and
it is still with me now in the lateness. I wondered at times during
the day why that very gentle and devilishly persistent refrain did
not drive me insane or send me into convulsions. I tried vainly to
fix my mind on a book. I began reading “Mill on the Floss,” but that
weird poem was not to be foiled. It bewitched my brain. Now, as I
write, I hear twenty voices chanting in a sad minor key--twenty
voices that fill my brain with sound to the bursting point. “He
cometh not--he cometh not--he cometh not.” “That I were dead”--“I
am aweary, aweary,--that I were dead--that I were dead.” “He cometh
not--that I were dead.”
It is maddening in that it is set sublimely to the music of my own
life.
Now that I have written it I can hope that it may leave me. If it
follows me through the night, and if I awake to another day of it
the cords of my overworked mind will surely break.
But let me thank the kind Devil.
It is leaving me now!
It is as if tons were lifted from my brain.
April 2.
How can any one bring a child into the world and not wrap it round
with a certain wondrous tenderness that will stay with it always!
There are persons whose souls have never entered into them.
My mother has some fondness for me--for my body because it came of
hers. That is nothing--nothing.
A hen loves its egg.
A hen!
April 3.
This evening in the slow-deepening dusk I sat by my window and
spent an hour in passionate conversation with the Devil. I fancied
I sat, with my hands folded and my feet crossed, on an ugly but
comfortable red velvet sofa in some nondescript room.
And the fascinating man-devil was seated near in a frail willow
chair.
He had willingly come to pass the time of day with me. He was in a
good-humored mood, and I amused and interested him. And for myself,
I was extremely glad to see the Devil sitting there and felt vividly
as always. But I sat quietly enough.
The fascinating man-devil has fascinating steel-gray eyes, and
they looked at me with every variety of glance--from quizzical to
tender.
It were easy--oh, how easy--to follow those eyes to the earth’s
ends.
The Devil leaned back in the frail willow chair and looked at me.
“And now that I am here, Mary MacLane,” he said, “what would you?”
“I want you to marry me,” I replied at once. “And I want it more
than ever anything was wanted since the world began.”
“So? I am flattered,” said the Devil, and smiled gently, enchantingly.
At that smile I was ravished and transported, and a spasm of some
rare emotion thrilled all the little nerves in me from my heels to
my forehead. And yet the smile was not for me but rather somewhat
at my expense.
“But,” he went on, “you must know it is not my custom to marry
women.”
“I am sure it is not,” I agreed, “and I do not ask to be peculiarly
favored. Anything that you may give me, however little, will
constitute marriage for me.”
“And would marriage itself be so small a thing?” asked the Devil.
“Marriage,” I said, “would be a great, oh, a wonderful thing, and the
most beautiful of all. I want what is good according to my lights,
and because I am a genius my lights are many and far-reaching.”
“What do your lights tell you?” the man-devil inquired.
“They tell me this: that nothing in the world matters unless love
is with it, and if love is with it and it seems to the virtuous a
barren and infamous thing, still--because of the love--it partakes
of the very highest.”
“And have you the courage of your convictions?” he said.
“If you offered me,” I replied, “that which to the blindly virtuous
seems the worst possible thing, it would yet be for me the red,
red line on the sky, my heart’s desire, my life, my rest. You are
the Devil. I have fallen in love with you.”
“I believe you have,” said the Devil. “And how does it feel to be
in love?”
Sitting composedly on the ugly red velvet sofa, with my hands
folded and my feet crossed, I attempted to define that wonderful
feeling.
“It feels,” I said, “as if sparks of fire and ice crystals ran riot
in my veins with my blood; as if a thousand pin-points pierced my
flesh, and every other point a point of pleasure, and every other
point a point of pain; as if my heart were laid to rest in a bed
of velvet and cotton-wool but kept awake by sweet violin arias; as
if milk and honey and the blossoms of the cherry flowed into my
stomach and then vanished utterly; as if strange, beautiful worlds
lay spread out before my eyes, alternately in dazzling light and
complete darkness with chaotic rapidity; as if orris-root were
sprinkled in the folds of my brain; as if sprigs of dripping-wet
sweet-fern were stuck inside my hot linen collar; as if--well, you
know,” I ended suddenly.
“Very good,” said the Devil. “You are in love. And you say you
are in love with me.”
“Oh, with you!” I exclaimed with suppressed violence. The effort to
suppress this violence cost me pounds of nerve-power. But I kept my
hands still quietly folded and my feet crossed, and it was a triumph
of self-control. “I want you to marry me,” I added despairingly.
“And you think,” he inquired, “that apart from the opinion of the
wise world, it would be a suitable marriage?”
“A suitable marriage!” I exclaimed. “I hate a suitable marriage!
No, it would not be suitable. It would be Bohemian, outlandish,
adorable!”
The Devil smiled.
This time the smile was for me. And, oh, the long, old, overpowering
enchantment of the smile of steel-gray eyes!--the steel-gray eyes
of the Devil!
It is one of those things that one remembers.
“You are a beautifully frank, little feminine creature,” he said.
“Frankness is in these days a lost art.”
“Yes, I am beautifully frank,” I replied. “Out of countless millions
of the Devil’s anointed I am one to acknowledge myself.”
“But withal you are not true,” said the man-devil.
“I am a liar,” I answered.
“You are a liar, surely,” he said, “but you stay with your lies.
To stay with anything is Truth.”
“It is so,” I replied. “Nevertheless I am false as woman can be.”
“But you know what you want.”
“Oh, yes,” I said, “I know what I want. I want you to marry me.”
“And why?”
“Because I love you.”
“That seems an excellent reason, certainly,” said the Devil.
“I want to be happy for once in my life,” I said. “I have never
been happy. And if I could be happy once for one gold day, I should
be satisfied, and I should have that to remember in the long years.”
“And you are a strangely pathetic little animal,” said the Devil.
“I am pathetic,” I said. I clasped my hands very tightly. “I know
that I am pathetic: and for this reason I am the most terribly
pathetic of all in the world.”
“Poor little Mary MacLane!” said the Devil. He leaned toward me.
He looked at me with those strange, wonderfully tender, divine
steel-gray eyes. “Poor little Mary MacLane!” he said again in a
voice that was like the Gray Dawn. And the eyes--the glance of
the steel-gray eyes entered into me and thrilled me through and
through. It frightened and soothed me. It racked and comforted me.
It ravished me with inconceivable gentleness so that I bent my head
down and sobbed as I breathed.
“Don’t you know, you little thing,” said the man-devil,
softly-compassionate, “your life will be very hard for you
always--harder when you are happy than when you go in Nothingness?”
“I know--I know. Nevertheless I want to be happy,” I sobbed. I
felt a rush of an old thick, heavy anguish. “It is day after day.
It is week after week. It is month after month. It is year after
year. It is only time going and going. There is no joy. There is
no lightness of heart. It is only the passing of days. I am young
and all alone. Always I have been alone: when I was five and lay in
the damp grass and tortured myself to keep back tears; and through
the long, cold, lonely years till now--and now all the torture does
not keep back the tears. There is no one--nothing--to help me bear
it. It is more than pathetic when one is nineteen in all young,
new feeling and sees Nothing anywhere--except long, dark, lonely
years behind her and before her. No one that loves me and long,
long years.”
I stopped. The gray eyes were fixed on me. Oh, they were the
steel-gray eyes!--and they had a look in them. The long, bitter
pageant of my Nothingness mingled with this look and the coming
together of these was like the joining of two halves.
I do not know which brings me the deeper pain--the loneliness and
weariness of my sand and barrenness, or the look in the steel-gray
eyes. But as always I would gladly leave all and follow the eyes
to the world’s end. They are like the sun’s setting. And they are
like the pale, beautiful stars. And they are like the shadows of
earth and sky that come together in the dark.
“Why,” asked the Devil, “are you in love with me?”
“You know so much--so much,” I answered. “I think it must be that.
The wisdom of the spheres is in your brain. And so, then, you must
understand me. Because no one understands all these smouldering
feelings my greatest agony is. You must need know the very finest
of them. And your eyes! Oh, it’s no matter why I’m in love with
you. It’s enough that I am. And if you married me I would make you
happier than you are.”
“I am not happy at all,” said the man-devil. “I am merely contented.”
“Contentment,” I said, “in place of Happiness, is a horrid feeling.
Not one of your countless advocates loves you. They all serve you
faithfully and well, but with it all they hate you. Always people
hate their tyrant. You are my tyrant, but I love you absorbingly,
madly. Happiness for me would be to live with you and see you made
happy by the overwhelming flood of my love.”
“It interests me,” he said. “You are a most interesting feminine
philosopher--and your philosophy is after my own heart, in its lack
of _virtue_. It is to be hoped you are not ‘intellectual,’ which
is an unpardonable trait.”
“Indeed, I am not,” I replied. “Intellectual people are detestable.
They have pale faces and bad stomachs and bad livers, and if they
are women their corsets are sure to be too tight, and probably
black, and if they are men they are _soft_, which is worse. And
they never by any chance know what it means to walk all day in the
rain, or to roll around on the ground in the dirt. And, above all,
they never fall in love with the Devil.”
“They are tiresome,” the Devil agreed. “If I were to marry you how
long would you be happy?”
“For three days.”
“You are wise,” he said. “You are wonderfully wise in some things,
though you are still very young.”
“I am wise,” I answered. “Being of womankind and nineteen years,
I am more than ready to give up absolutely everything that is good
in the world’s sight, though they are contemptible things enough
in my own, for love. All for love. Therefore I am wise. Also I am
a fool.”
“Why are you a fool?”
“Because I am a genius.”
“Your logic is good logic,” said the Devil.
“My logic--oh, I don’t care anything about logic,” I said with sudden
complete weariness. I felt buried and wrapped round and round in
weariness. Everything lost its color. Everything turned cold.
“At this moment,” said the Devil, “you feel as if you cared for
nothing at all. But if I chose I could bring about a transfiguration.
I could kiss your soul into Paradise.”