Oh, it is bitter--bitter.
Oh, is there a thing in the wide world more bitter?
_God_, where are you! I am crushed, wounded, stunned--and, oh--I
am alone!
April 10.
I have a sense of humor that partakes of the divine in life--for
there are things even in this chaotic irony that are divine. My
genius is not divine. My patheticness is not divine. My philosophy
is not divine, nor my originality, nor my audacity of thought.
These are peculiarly of the earth. But my sense of humor--
It is humor that is far too deep to admit of laughter. It is humor
that makes my heart melt with a high, unequaled sense of pleasure
and ripple down through my body like old yellow wine.
A rare tone in a person’s voice, a densely wrathful expression in
a pair of slate-colored eyes, a fine, fine shade of comparison and
contrast between a word in a conversation and an angleworm pattern
in a calico dressing-jacket--these are things that make me conscious
of divine emotion.
One day last summer an Italian peddler-woman stopped at the back door
and rested herself. I stood in the doorway, and the peddler-woman
and I talked. She had a dirty white handkerchief tied over her
head--as all Italian peddler-women do--and she had a telescope
valise filled with garters, and hairpins, and soap, and combs, and
pencils, and china buttons on blue cards, and bean-shooters, and
tacks, and dream-books, and mouth-organs, and green glass beads, and
jews-harps. There is something fascinating about a peddler-woman’s
telescope valise. This peddler-woman wore a black satine wrapper
and an ancient cape. She said that she would like to stop and rest
a while, and I told her she might. I had always wanted to talk to
a peddler-woman, and my mother never would allow one in the house.
“Is it nice to be a peddler?” I asked her.
“It ain’t bad,” replied the peddler-woman.
“Do you make a great deal of money?” I next inquired.
“Sometime I do, and sometime I don’t,” said the woman. She spoke with
an accent that, while it sounded Italian, still showed unmistakably
that she had lived in Butte.
“Well, do you make just enough to live on, or have you saved some
money?” I asked.
“I got four hundred dollar in the bank,” she replied. “I been
peddlin’ eight year.”
“Eight years of tramping around in all kinds of weather,” I said.
“Your philosophy must be peripatetic, too. Haven’t you ever had
rheumatism in your knees?”
“I got rheumatism in every joint in my body,” said the woman. “I
have to lay off, sometime.”
“Have you a husband?” I wished to know.
“I had a man--oh, yes,” said the peddler-woman.
“And where is he?”
“Back home--in Italy.”
“Why doesn’t he come out here and work for you?” I asked.
“Yes, w’y don’t he?” said the woman. “Dat-a man, he’s dem lucky
w’en he can get enough to eat--he is.”
“Why don’t you send him some money to pay his way out, since you’ve
saved so much?” I inquired.
“Holy God!” said the peddler-woman. “I work hard for dat-a money. I
save ev’ry cent. I ain’t go’n now to t’row it away--I ain’t. Dat-a
man, he’s all right w’ere he is--he is.”
“What did you marry him for?” I asked.
The peddler-woman looked at me with that look which seems to convey
the information that curiosity once killed a cat.
“What for?” I persisted--“for love?”
“I marry him w’en I was young girl. And he was young, too.”
“Yes--but what did you do it for? Was he awfully nice, and did he
say awfully sweet things to you?”
“He was dem sweet--oh, yes,” said the peddler-woman. She grinned.
“And I was young.”
“And you liked it when you were young and he was sweet, didn’t you?”
“Yes, I guess so. I was young,” she answered.
The fact that one is young seems to imply--in the Italian peddler
mind--a lacking in some essential points.
“And don’t you like your man now?” I asked.
“Dat-a man, he’s all right, in Italy--he is,” replied the woman.
“Well,” I observed, “if I had a man who had been dem sweet once,
when I had been young, but who was not sweet any more, I think I
should leave him in Italy, too.”
“You’ll git a man some day soon,” said the peddler-woman.