“They all do--oh, yes,” she said. “But you likely to be better
off peddlin’, I tell you.”
“Yes, I think it would be amusing to be a peddler for a while,” I
said. “But I should want the man, too, as long as he was dem sweet.”
The peddler-woman picked up the telescope valise.
“Yes,” she remarked, “a man, he’s sweet two days, t’ree days,
then--holy God! he never work, he git-a drunk, he make-a rough-house,
he raise hell.”
The peddler-woman nodded at me and limped out of the yard. The
telescope valise was heavy. When she walked every muscle in her
body seemed to be pressed into the service. She had a heavy, solid
look. She seemed as though she might weigh three hundred pounds,
though she was not large. The afternoon sun shone down brightly on
her dirty white handkerchief, on her brown comely face, on her brown
brass-ringed hands, on her black satine wrapper, on her ancient
cape.
As I watched her out of sight I thought to myself: “Two days, t’ree
days, then--holy God! he never work, he git-a drunk, he make-a
rough-house, he raise hell.”
I was conscious of an intense humor that was so far beyond laughter
that it was too deep even for tears. But I felt tears vaguely as
I watched the peddler-woman limping up the road.
It was not pathos. It was humor--humor. My emotion was one of vivid
pleasure--pleasure at the sight of the woman, and at the telescope
valise, and at her conversation supplemented by my own.
This emotion is divine, and I can not grasp it.
As I looked after the Italian peddler-woman it came to me with sudden
force that the earth is only the earth, but that it is touched here
and there brilliantly with divine fingers.
Long and often as I’ve sat in intense silent passion and gazed at
the red, red sunset sky, I have never then felt this sense of the
divine.
It comes only through humor.
It comes only with things like an Italian peddler-woman in a black
satine wrapper and an ancient cape.
My soul--how heavily it goes.
Life is a journeying up a spring-time hill. And at the top we wonder
why we are there. Have mercy on me, I implore in a dull idea that
the journey is so long--so long, and a human being is less than an
atom.
The solid, heavy figure of an Italian peddler-woman with a telescope
valise, limping away in the afternoon sunshine, is more convincing
of the Things that Are than would be the sound of the wailing of
legions of lost souls, could it be heard.
For the world must be amused.
And the world’s wind listeth as it bloweth.
April 11.
I write a great many letters to the dear anemone lady. I send some
of them to her and others I keep to read myself. I like to read
letters that I have written--particularly that I have written to her.
This is a letter that I wrote two days ago to my one friend:
“To you:--
“And don’t you know, my dearest, my friendship with you contains
other things? It contains infatuation, and worship, and bewitchment,
and idolatry, and a tiny altar in my soul-chamber whereon is burning
sweet incense in a little dish of blue and gold.
“Yes, all of these.
“My life is made up of many outpourings. All the outpourings have
one point of coming-together. You are the point of coming-together.
There is no other.
“You are the anemone lady.
“You are the one whom I may love.
“To think that the world contains one beautiful human being for me
to love!
“It is wonderful.
“My life is longing for the sight of you. My senses are aching for
lack of an anemone to diffuse itself among them.
“A year ago, when you were in the high school, often I used to go
over there when you would be going home, so that my life could be
made momentarily replete by the sight of you. You didn’t know I
was there--only a few times when I spoke to you.
“And now it is that I remember you.
“Oh, my dearest--you are the only one in the world!
“We are two women. You do not love me, but I love you.
“You have been wonderfully, beautifully kind to me.
“You are the only one who has ever been kind to me.
“There is something delirious in this--something of the nameless
quantity.
“It is old grief and woe to live nineteen years and to remember no
person ever to have been kind. But what is it--do you think?--at the
end of nineteen years, to come at last upon one who is wonderfully,
beautifully kind!
“Those persons who have had some one always to be kind to them can
never remotely imagine how this feels.
“Sometimes in these spring days when I walk miles down into the
country to the little wet gulch of the sweet-flags, I wonder why
it is that this thing does not make me happy. ‘She is wonderfully,
beautifully kind,’ I say to myself--‘and she is the anemone lady.
She is _wondrously_ kind, and though she’s gone, nothing can ever
change that.’
“But I am not happy.
“Oh, my one friend--what is the matter with me? What is this feeling?
Why am I not happy?
“But how can you know?
“You are beautiful.
“I am a small, vile creature.
“Always I awake to this fact when I think of the anemone lady.
“I am not good.
“But you are kind to me--you are kind to me--you are kind to me.
“You have written me two letters.
“The anemone lady came down from her high places and wrote me two
letters.
“It is said that God is somewhere. It may be so.
“But God has never come down from his high places to write me two
letters.
“Dear--do you see?--you are the only one in the world.
“=Mary MacLane.=”
April 12.
Oh, the dreariness, the Nothingness!
Day after day--week after week,--it is dull and gray and weary. It
is _dull_, =DULL=, DULL!
No one loves me the least in the world.
“My life is dreary--he cometh not.”