The least important thing in my life is its tangibleness.
The only things that matter lastingly are the things that happen
inside me.
If I do a cruel act and feel no cruelty in my Soul it is nothing. If
I feel cruelty in my Soul though I do no cruel act I’m guilty of a
sort of butchery and my spirit-hands are bloody with it.
The adventures of my spirit are realer than the outer things that
befall me.
To dwell on the self that is known only to me--the self that is
intricate and versatile, tinted, demi-tinted, deep-dyed, luminous,
gives me an intimate delectation, a mental inflorescence and
sometimes an exaltation. It is not always so but it can be so. But
always to look back on the mass of outer events that have made my
tangible life darkens my day.
Introspection throws a witching spell around me, though it may be a
black one.
But retrospection wraps me in a Winding Sheet.
When the day is already dark from low-hanging clouds--and often when
the sun is bright, bright, bright--I walk my floor and think of my
scattered life-flotsam with a frown at the eyebrows: a coarse and
heavy and twisted frown.
To-day was a leaden day. The air held a quality like the infernal
breath of dead people. I leaned elbows on my dull window-sill and
looked off at green and purple mountains. I tried to think of some
reason--some reason tangible or poetic--for living.
I wore my brocade Chinese coat fastened down the left side with
round flashing glass buttons and embroidered with blue bats and
gardenias: and with it a crinkly crêpe-silk petticoat: and silk
shoes and respectable white silk stockings. I felt righteous because
in the forenoon I had done much housework. I worked thoroughly and
well, swearing and repeating poetry softly to lend me impetus. And
afterward I felt useful and good.
But having changed from Dutch cap and apron and domesticness to
scented silk and my sad window I grew suddenly frail and vulnerable.
Shadows stormed my wall and scaled it and entered in and sacked my
castle. I lounged away from my window, folded my arms in my loose
blue sleeves and slowly walked my floor. I had no strength within to
combat shadows.
I picked up two alien shreds, of lint and paper respectively, from
the rug, but inside me undigested and indigestible memories had their
own way.
They brought close an unsatisfying and dissatisfying vista of Mary
MacLanes.
There was a stubborn baby in Winnipeg-Canada, as I’ve heard, a baby
with a white skin, coldly pensive dark-blue eyes, no hair, no voice,
hand-worked muslin frocks and a fat lumpish mien.
It was this Mary MacLane.
There was a three-year-old child, as I dimly remember, still in
Canada and still stubborn, with a stout keg-like pink-and-white body,
baffling blue eyes, a tiny voice, thick sun-colored curls, cambric
frocks and short white socks and a morose temper. She had one love,
a yellow tortoise-shell kitten which she hugged and hugged with
violence until one day it died surprisingly in her arms.
It was this Mary MacLane.
There was a seven-year-old child in Minnesota, as I well remember,
still stubborn and still often morose, with a thin bony little body,
conscious gray eyes, a tanned face, weather-beaten hands, untidy
frocks, beautiful fluffy golden hair, a tendency to secretiveness and
lies, a speculative mind, fantastic day-dreams and a free hoydenish
way of life. She had playmates but no loves except an objective love
for quiet greenwoods and sweet meadows and windy hills and hay-filled
barns, and for the surface details of life. She had subjective
hatreds for being fussed over, for being teased and for relatives.
It was this Mary MacLane.
There was a thirteen-year-old person, as I well remember, in a
windy Montana town, who was neither girl, child nor savage but
was a mixture of the three. She had a devilish contrary will and
temper, the unenlightened inexpressive wholly unattractive face and
features of early adolescence, a self-love that had not the dignity
of egotism and a devouring appetite for reading. She read everything
she happened on--from Voltaire to Nick Carter: from ‘Lady Audley’s
Secret’ to Fox’s Book of Martyrs. She read Alexander Pope and Victor
Hugo and John Stuart Mill. She read ‘Lena Rivers’ by Mary J. Holmes:
also Confucius: and the Brothers Grimm. She had a long-legged lanky
frame, conscious gray eyes, lovely coppery-gold dark hair and a silly
headful of tangled irrational thoughts. She had pathetic impossible
day-dreams. She had few companions and no loves but much hatred for
most things sane, sensible and honest.
It was this Mary MacLane.
There was an eighteen-year-old girl in this Butte, as I well
remember, with the outward savagery tamed out of her by studiousness.
She was slim but no longer lanky and owned a white-hot aliveness
and a grace. She had repelling gray eyes and the beautiful coppery
hair, and about her an isolation, a complete aloofness. Her spirit
fed itself on wonderful and exquisite dreams alternated by moods
of young passionate woe, analyzed and torn to shreds: all of it hid
beneath a very quiet surface. She had outwardly a tense markedly
virginal quality but was inwardly insolently demi-vierge. She had no
companions, no friendships. She absorbed herself in digging knowledge
out of her high school text-books, studying and imagining over it,
and wandering in the fascinating highways which it opened to her. She
was at her moment of brain-awakening, soul-awakening, sex-awakening,
life-awakening, world-awakening: it uncurtained windows of magic
old sorrow for her to look from. She had no characteristic
weaknesses--she was strongly and scornfully courageous. It and the
need of self-expression, born of her teeming spirit and life-long
suppression of it, led her to write herself out in a book, which was
published. It was a poetic book and had insight and vision and a riot
of color with youth as its keynote. And it was human and figuratively
and literally full of the devil. The far-and-wide public in England
and America read it, and the newspapers made a loud noise about it
and the lonely girl who wrote it found herself oddly notorious. It
brought money which made her free of Butte and it brought human
things into her life which changed her life forever. And it brought
her no inner or outer excitement or elation.
It was this Mary MacLane.
There was a girl of six-and-twenty in Boston and in New York who had
half-forgot her long-familiar Ego for several years. She lived and
moved in folly and triviality and falseness. From having had too
few companions she had too many who did her no good and no harm but
helped her waste passing days and dissipate her moods and mental
tissues. She had grown worldly in taste, weak in manner of thought,
fragile in body from a mad irregularity of food and sleep, and in
every attribute uncertain of herself. Her Soul lay sleeping: her
Heart because it felt too keenly worked overtime: nothing engaged her
Mind. But her analytic trend stayed by and with it she pulled to bits
the varied fragmentary things she encountered. She learned New York
town in human sordid enlightening disciplining ways. She learned
people of many kinds in many ways. She learned other young women,
which depressed and exhilarated and perplexed her. She learned men--a
race whose make and motive toward women bears no analysis. She had
not the usual defensive armor of the normal woman, for she was not a
normal woman but certain trends of varying individuals gathered into
one sensitive woman-envelope. She was careless toward men in their
crude sex-rapacity in ways no ‘regular’ woman would dare or care to
be. No man could wring one tear from her, nor cause a quickening of
her foolish Heart, nor any emotion in her save mirth. And there were
women friends-- There were some friendships whose ill effects she
will never recover from, from having bestowed too much of herself on
them in the headlong newness of knowing and owning friendship after
her long young loneliness.
--she could not cherish anything sanely. She couldn’t stand in her
doorway and watch a pretty bird flying above a green hedge, and
admire it for the gleam of its brilliant wings in the sun, and let
it go. She must needs run out--leaving her door standing open and
tea-and-cakes untasted within--and follow where the bird flew,
through mire and brier, round the world--
From the odd notoriety were many letters and experiences and
adventures. She met some famous persons--writers, actors, artists--of
agreeable philosophic plaisances. She saw her book of youth
burlesqued with artistic piquance in the Weber-and-Fields show of
its season (with one Collier, adroitest of comedians, cast as her
long-lost Devil). There was a hasty voyage to the edge of Europe--a
voyage of terrific seasickness lying in her stateroom: a half-glimpse
of Paris all gray and green in the rain: a whole glimpse of London,
mystic, Dickensesque and roundly British in its yellow-brown fog: and
back again within ten days with more berth-ridden seasickness lasting
from Cherbourg to New York harbor: the whole adventure grown from a
Spring morning impulse. There were winters in Florida at sun-flooded
resort towns full of gaudiness and gambling and surprising
winter-resort people. Those were mongrel wastrel years empty of
every realness, every purpose, every vantage: they filled her with a
bastard wisdom.
It was this Mary MacLane.
There was a girl of seven-and-twenty worn to psychic fragments and
returned on a winter’s day in a mood of indifference to this Butte.
It was her first return since she and her book had gone forth eight
years before. She celebrated it by being brought low with a baleful
blood-sucking demon of illness, what is called scarlet fever. Borne
upon by the mountain altitude after sea-levels and getting in the
way of epidemic germs, she had no chance. A strong feverish serpent
wound itself around her, consuming and destroying. There were
tortured dying weeks. She had never been ill before in all her life.
This was the most crucial bodily adventure she had known. It opened
a new and dreadful world. There was no passing of time in those
long, long weeks, no rational thinking, no day, no night, no dark,
no morning, no memory. There was pain, and utter weariness, and a
feeling of being hurried to her grave. There was an air of hurry
in the stillness around, as if she and Death had made a date which
she would be late in keeping unless she were urged on. There was a
doctor, and a crisp white starched nurse, and there were interminable
bitter drugs and tall narrow glasses of monotonous milk. She was
endlessly disturbed by milk and medicine, and by cold spongings
and changings of feverish bed-linens, and anointings with olive
oil, and takings of her temperature, and sprayings of her throat:
when she wanted only to sink down, down, forever and forever to the
underworld. She almost sank. But God capriciously decided he had
other plans for her--insomuch as decreeing she was not to be let
go then. After seven weeks she tiredly rose from her bed and took
stock of herself. Her rôle then was of a horrible yellow skeleton
with negative gray eyes, a wreck of tissue and vitality such as only
scarlet fever can achieve, and her beautiful thick coppery hair
changed to a strange short mouse-colored tangle. She was a long time
recovering. The scarlet demon changed her life and its meanings and
energies and outlooks more effectually than if she had been trapped
by a game-at-law and gaols and courts had had their toll of her.
But after months, a year and a half of months, her health came back
perfect if not vigorous, and her good looks--the few she ever had,
and even the humanizing incongruous curls, though changed, grew long
and covered her head again in a heathen frivol. A so magnificent
mystery is this blood-and-flesh. It grows up again out of its ashes.
Burn all of it but one cell in the scorchingest sickness and so that
bones are still whole it will renew itself from that, perfect as the
sweet-bay. But this mind, less magnificent and less mysterious and
more delicate and dubious, rallies only by aid of the heart beneath
it and the soul beyond it. Her mind came slowly out of darkened
apathy. It lived in a high-walled cloister telling its languid beads
by rote. But as if it sensed the sweet aura of her renewed body it at
last woke strong and cold overnight and was aware again of itself and
the mourning magic of being.
It was this Mary MacLane.
And after a year or two more it is this Mary MacLane.
It is I myself.
I walk my floor in leaden retrospect-days with a feel in my throat of
damned and damning unfulfillment and at my eyebrows the twisted frown.
In it is dread and anguish and worriment: in it is hideous altering
breaking prepollence of death.
--if my hair, just my hair, had not come back after that red fever
I’d have decided--not capriciously like God but determinedly like
myself--to have died by my own hand one night. It is no brave
thought and it would have been no brave deed. Though it wants a
lowering courage to leave life when, despite all, one loves its very
textureless _color_, its bodiless air: not to speak of the yellow hot
deathless sunshine that can not reach one in her dark grave--
But the look and feel of my hair are the look and feel of positive
life, opposed to death.
To live up to my hair would keep me brave.
But the retrospects, which I can’t escape, come and wrap me in the
Winding Sheet.
_The Dover road_