It is a quiet deep of night. A bell has just tolled two.
I am clothed in cool bedroom negligées and a softening sweetness of
cold cream, from head to foot.
I am tranquil for to-day I had a walk that made me feel Sincere and
Safe.
It is a comforting feeling: it is like a beef-sandwich.
It was a long walk south-east of Butte along an outskirting road
where I used often to walk when I was sixteen--a broad gray desert.
It was the same sand and barrenness. It was bare and withered as if a
giant coyote had picked its rocky ribs.
The day was windy and dusty. The sunshine was thick and sweet and
heavy like floating honey. The dust that blew against the white of my
neck was like ground glass.
My feet ached as I walked.
My shoes were Cuban-heeled thick-soled pumps of corded silk, a kind
easy to walk in. But the same feet which once readily bore me seven
miles along that road ache now at three. All of me ached as I walked
along. I cursed desultorily with a smooth whispered flow of curses,
because the circumstances seemed to demand it. But I loved the
walk--even the more for my tired feet and my aching knees and my
irking drooping shoulders and the hot glazed sand against my throat.
My Soul tasted realness in it.
Quite close to me, in immense sad beauty, were the deep high heavy
silent somber hills of Montana. To-day the nearer ones were a stately
enchanted Blue: a Blue of all ages: a Blue of infinitude: a Blue with
a feel of life and death in its Blueness. Above it the sky was not
blue but a pale glimmering shimmering silver hung across with gray
silk clouds soft as doves’ plumage.
I sat on a flat rock and looked at all of it and at the desert
around, and at my dusty shoes.
All of it felt overwhelmingly sincere: at one with the wide worn used
earth.
My dusty shoes looked to be at one with it and could interpret it.
I felt my shoes could claim their human prerogative of getting dusty
in any of this world’s roads.
It gave me a feeling of human Sincerity: good-and-evil Safeness.
It is on me now, along with cold cream and strong memory of Desert
and Sun and Blue.
It is as good as a beef-sandwich.
Better: I don’t like beef-sandwich.
_The merciless beauty_