But to be an ardent pickpocket or an eager harlot would feel honester.
My Everyday goes like this: I waken in the morning and lie listless
some minutes with drooping eyelids. I look at a gilt-and-blue bar
of morning light which slants palely in at one window and at a
melting-gold triangle of sun which shows at the other window on the
red brick wall of the house next to this. Then I say ‘another day,’
and I kick off bed-covers with one foot and slide out of my narrow
bed, and into blue slippers, and out of a thin nightgown, and into
peignoir or bathrobe. I twist and flatten and gather up my tangled
hair and push some amber pins through it. And I go into a respectable
green-and-gray bathroom and draw a bath and get into it. I splash in
brief swift soapsuds, and go under a sudden heroic icy cold shower,
and dry me with a scourging towel. Then I go back into the blue-white
bed-room and get into clothes, feminine thin under-garments and a
nunlike frock.
I look in my mirror. Some days I’m a delicately beautiful girl.
Other days I’m a very plain woman.
One’s physical attractiveness is a matter of one’s mental chemistry.
I say to Me in the mirror, ‘It’s you-and-me, Mary MacLane, and
another wasting damning To-morrow.
“To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.”’
A haunting decadence is in that To-morrow thought. And always the
To-morrow thought comes out of my morning mirror. I dwell on it
awhile, till my gray eyes and my lips and my teeth and my forehead
are tired of it, and make nothing new of it.
I jerk the flat scollop of hair at one side of my forehead and
turn away. I open door and windows wider for the blowing-through
of breezes. And I wander down-stairs. It is half-after nine or
half-after ten. I go into the clean empty clock-ticking kitchen
and cook my breakfast. It is a task full of hungry plaisance and
pleasantness. I make a British-feeling breakfast of tea and marmalade
and little squares of toast and pink-and-tan rashers of bacon and two
delightful eggs. Up to the moment of broaching the eggs the morning
has an ancient sameness with other mornings. But eggs, though I’ve
eaten them every day for quite five-and-twenty years, are always a
fascinating novelty.
They are delicious in my breakfast. So are the squares of toast and
the bacon-rashers and the tea and marmalade. When I’ve done with them
I lay down my napkin by my cup, light a cigarette, breathe a puff
or two from it and feel contentedly aware that my brain has gone to
rest in sweet tranquillity with my breakfast. When my brain is in my
head it analyzes the soul out of my body, the gleam out of my gray
eyes, the savor out of my life, the human taste off my tongue. That
post-breakfast moment is the only peace-moment I know in my day and
in my life.
Having puffed away the cigarette and read bits of a morning paper
I then prove me arrantly middle-class by contemplating washing my
breakfast dishes.
I am middle-class, quite, from the Soul outward. But it is not
specially apparent--one’s tastes and aspirations flit garbledly far
and wide. But a tendency to wash one’s dishes after eating one’s
breakfast feels conclusively and pleasantly middle-class. Not that I
do always wash them, but always I think of it with the inclination to
do it.
I sit on the shaded front veranda in the summer noon-day and look
away south at the blue Highlands, ever snow-peaked: or east at the
near towering splendid grim wall of the arid Rockies which separates
this Butte from New York, from London,--the Spain-castles--the
Pyramids--the Isle of Lesbos: or south-west beyond house-tops at some
foothills above which hangs a fairy veil made by melting together a
Lump of Gold and an Apricot and spreading it thin.
Then restlessly I go into the house and up to my room. I put it in
order--in prim, prim immaculate order. One marked phase of mine
is of some wanton creature--a mænad, a mental Amazon, a she-imp.
But playing opposite to that is another--that of a New-England
spinster steel-riveted to certain neat ferociously-orderly habits.
A stray thread on my blue rug hurts, _hurts_ me until I pick it
up. Dust around my room gives me a nervous pain, a piteous gnawing
grief-of-the-senses, until I’ve removed it. And my chastened-looking
bed--after I’ve turned over its tufted mattress and ‘made’ it, smooth
and white and crisp and soft--how the fibers of me would writhe
should anyone sit on it. But no one sits on it. And I myself sooner
than press one finger-tip down into its perfectness would sell my
body to a Balkan soldier for four dimes: it is that way I feel about
it. My bed _must_ be kept perfect till the moment I slip into it at
night to float under the dream-worlds.
Then maybe I pull a soft black hat down over my hair and draw on
gloves and go out into the gray-paved streets for a longish walk.
Or maybe the day is humidly hot. Then I don’t go but stay in the
blue-white room and mend a bit of torn lingerie or a handkerchief
or a silk stocking or a petticoat. Or I take books and dig out some
Greek--Homer or a Sapphic fragment--very laboriously but marvelling
that I can do it at all: the first things one forgets being the
last things one learned at school. Or I read an English or a French
philosopher, or a translated Tolstoi, or a bit of Balzac novel, or
some bits of Dickens-books with which latter I am long familiar and
long enamored for the restful falseness of their sentiment and the
pungent appetizing charm of their villains.
And betweenwhiles I think and think.
Then it’s dinnertime and I perhaps change into the other nunlike
dress, and nibble some dinner with no appetite, and talk with the
assembled small family in a vein and tone of life-long insincerity.
When in family-circle-ness I’ve had to hide my true self as if behind
a hundred black veils since the age of two years. It would be a
poignant effort now to show any of it at the family dinners, which
is the only meeting-time. The one easy way is to be comprehensively
insincere at the dinners where with no appetite I nibble. None
there wants my sincerity, and so in my Soul’s accounting now it is
eternally and determinedly No Matter. It is a little bell which
stopped ringing long and long ago. If it rang now it would ring only
No-Matter, No-Matter.
Then it’s night and I go to take the walk I didn’t take in the
afternoon. I walk down long lonely streets. Long lonely thoughts
pile into me and through me and wrap me in a nebula that I can feel
around me like a mantle. I walk two or three miles of paved streets
till I’m very tired. I am lithe but fragile from constant involuntary
self-analysis. One may analyze one’s life-experience and life-emotion
till physical tissues at times grow frail, gossamer-thin. It is then
as if--at a word, a whispered thought, a beat of the heart--one’s
Soul might flutter through the Veil, join light hands with the
death-angel and flee away.
--but I love my life even while I analyze it bit by bit and so hate
it. I love it in its grating monotones and its moments of glow and
its days of shadow and storm and bitterish lowering passion--
I walk back beneath a night sky of dusky velvet-blue decked with
jewels of moon and star and flying bright-edged cloud. The night has
a subdued preciousness, like an illicitly pregnant woman’s. It is big
with the bastard-exquisite To-morrow. The night air kisses my lips
and throat. I pull off my gloves to feel it on my hands. It gives me
a charmed and unexciting feeling of being caressed without being
loved.
I come back to my blue-white room, take off my hat, ruffle my fingers
through my hair, look at Me in the mirror and smile the melancholy
wicked smile which I keep for Me-alone. It’s an intimate moment of
greeting--a recognition of my Familiar on coming back to her. Often
when I walk I go without Me, and wander far from Me, and forget Me.
Then I sit at my flat black desk and write desultorily for two or
three or four hours. Sometimes a letter, sometimes some verses or a
hectic fancy in staid prose. But now mostly this.
Then I go downstairs to a refrigerator or a cellar-way to find
food--a slice off an affable cold joint, some chaste-looking slices
of bread, a slim innocent onion. And I eat them, not relishingly but
voraciously, reminding myself of a lean foraging furtive coyote. It
is two or three or four in the morning. I smoke a quiet cigarette in
a cool night doorway and count the nervous gray-velvet moths outside
the screen.
And all the while I think and think.
Then I come up to my room and sit on the floor by my low bookcase and
read some last-century English poets--the Brownings and Shelley and
the unspeakable John Keats. The Poets make me a space of incalescent
magic and loveliness. They are the beings blest of a flaming Heaven.
In the midst of soddenest earthiness their fiery wings ‘pierce the
night.’
Then I’m thrilledly tired. I close the books and make ready for
my bed in a lyric-feeling languor. A soft soothing unsnapping of
whalebone stays: a muffled rhythmic undoing of metal-and-silk-rubber
garters: a pushing down and sliding out of daytime clothes
and into a thin pale cool silk nightgown: a hurried brushing
of hair: an anointing of hands and throat with faint-scented
cream: a goodnight to Me in the mirror: a last wave of a fateful
thing--my life-essence--casual and determined and contemptuous and
menacing--sweeping down over me in an invisible shower: and I’m
betwixt smooth linen sheets.
In twenty seconds blest, blest sleep.
Of such wide littleness is my day made. One day will differ from
another in this or that volcanic molehill. And some days I not only
wash a great many dishes but do a deal of housework neatly and
self-satisfactorily and like a devilish scullery maid.
And some days as I move in the petty pace thoughts and feelings sweet
or barbarous come and change my world’s face in a moment.
Also a casual human being of rabbitish brain and chipmunkish
sensibility may stray across my path and gently bore me and
accentuate my own paganness.
But always the same days in restless dubious To-morrowness.
Always immorally futile.
And eerily alone.
_A mathematic dead-wall_