I suppose there’s nothing quite peculiar to even my inmost self in
what I ponder and what I experience and what I feel.
My only elemental ‘differentness’ is that I find it and write it.
But I used to think at eighteen--those thrice-fired adolescent
moments--that only I suffered, only I reached achingly out into the
mists, only I tasted new-bloomed life-petals intolerably sweet and
bitter on my lips.
The egotism of youth is merciless, measureless, endlessly vulnerable.
Youth plays on itself as one plays on a little dulcimer, with music
as sweet, but with a crude cruel recklessness which jerks and breaks
the strings.
I have got by that stage of egotism. But I’ve entered on another
wilder, more lawless--farther-seeing if less be-visioned.
While I sit here this midnight in a Neat Blue Chair in this
Butte-Montana for what I know a legion-women of my psychic breed
may be sitting lonely in neat red or neat blue or neat gray or neat
any-colored chairs--in Wichita-Kansas and South Bend-Indiana and
Red Wing-Minnesota and Portland-Maine and Rochester-New York and
Waco-Texas and La Crosse-Wisconsin and Bowling Green-Kentucky:
each feeling Herself set in a wrong niche, caught in a tangle of
little vapidish cross-purpose: each waiting, waiting always--waiting
all her life--not hopeful and passionate like Eighteen but patient
or blasphemous or scornful or volcanic like Early-Thirty: the
waiting-sense giving to each a personal quality big and suggestive
and nurturing--and with it a long-accustomed feeling like a thin
bright blade stuck deep in her breast: each more or less roundly
hating Waco-Texas and Portland-Maine and Red Wing-Minnesota and the
other places: and each beset by hot unquiet humannesses inside her
and an old yearn of sex and the blood warring with myriad minute
tenets dating from civilization’s dawn-times.
But though I am of that psychic breed no little tenets war in me.
It’s as if a prelate and a wood-nymph had fathered and mothered
me: making me of a ridiculous poignant conscience and of no human
traditions.
I am free of innate conventionalities, free as a wildcat on a
twilight hill. I am free of them as I sit here, quiet-looking in my
plain black dress. The virile Scotch-Canadian curl is brushed and
brushed out of my hair to make it lie smooth and discreet over my
ears and forehead. My feet are shod daintily like a charming girl’s.
My nails are pinkly polishedly pointed. My narrow black eyebrows
look nearly patrician in their sereneness. My lips are stilly sad.
My eyelids droop like the sucking dove’s. But my gray eyes beneath
the lids--when I raise them to the glass, my own Essence looks out
of them, tiredly vivid. It seems made of languor and barbaricness
and despair: and vague guiltiness, and some pure disastrous heathen
religion, and lust: and lurid consciousness of everyday things and
smouldering melancholy and blazing loving hatred of life.
My gray eyes out-look the wildcat’s on a twilight hill.
But--so far as the Sitting goes--I sit here in my Neat Blue Chair
the same as they all sit in any-colored chairs in their Wichitas and
La Crosses.
_A lost person_