The thing I admire most is strength. The thing I most hate is
Weakness, of each and every kind.
All the reassuring things in the world are in and of the strong deeds
done in it. All the mischief and despair come from human Weakness.
I would better strongly murder my foe than forgive him Weakly for
my seeming advantage. I would be happier in my mind as a careful
charwoman than as a loose-jointed poet. I would rather have a
farthing’s value as a faithful concubine than no value as a slattern
housewife.
Strength repays itself with strength--and with magnificence.
Truth is strength nearly always: and _not_ always.
To cheat strongly in the life-game gets me more than does Weak easy
honesty. By being a strong man Napoleon brought home the bacon. Being
an honest one would have got him not one rasher of the bacon of _his_
desire. The race is too ridden with ‘temperament’ to let truth be
its prevailing force. But strength plows its scornful way through
temperament like a steam-shovel. The bacon Napoleon brought home he
took from other people, causing them misery. They were Weak and let
him take it, or they were strong and got killed trying to keep it.
To get killed trying to keep your bacon is to be even stronger than
the Napoleon who lives and takes it from you. Those who sit still and
_let_ Napoleon get their bacon are fit only to be themselves made
into bacon.
Truth belongs with love, with friendship, with charity, with psychic
lovingkindness: with all the altruistic graces and tendernesses.
But in the mere grinding livingness of things it is to be strong. I
say to Me, ‘Mary MacLane, be strong: whether you’re living joyous on
a hill or mournful in a valley, make shift to be strong.’
In which paragraphs I make an apologetic preamble to Me when about to
dwell on my odd ironic element of Weakness. My Weakness is not an art
nor a science nor a gift nor a trait but is a sort of ruinous trade
touched with all of those, a trade at which I work and lose heavily
from a viewpoint of personal economy.
In Atlanta-Georgia lives a man with whom I exchange semi-occasional
letters. He is thirty-nine and clever and what is called a business
man. He is a business man not only by circumstance but by nature.
At a glance one would picture him in the setting of an office in
a steel-and-brick building with a roll-top desk, a swivel chair,
a cabinet full of files, a stenographer with an unregenerate
vocabulary, and stationery neatly engraved with his name, his
business, his cable address and his telephone number. The look of the
neat letterhead and the fibrous feel of the bond paper give one the
idea that whoever went into a business venture with him would come
out of it disadvantageously.
After another glance at himself one would infer that his leisure
hours might be fancifully spent. In hours of ease some business men
follow baseball, others golf, ‘tired’ ones musical comedy. Others
take up curio collecting or some personal phantasm. In the latter
category is my acquaintance of Atlanta. He affects Mary MacLane and
musings of her in his leisure hours. But what I am to him does not
concern nor much interest me. What he is to me concerns me, for
he--his letters--are a present source of my elaborated Weakness.
I feel a wave of conscious Weakness washing over me as I write about
it. His letters make a soft buffer, a foolish pretty window, a tinted
veil between me and my too-harsh actualities.
I met him when I lived in New York. He had read the book I wrote
in the early nineteen-hundreds and at meeting me he conceived a
thinly insistent admiration which someway went to his head. He has
at intervals since then written me letters full of charmed and
salubrious flattery and of appreciation and praise for traits and
gifts and qualities which I do not possess. They appeal and cater
remarkably to my vanity--and are pleasant and unreal and vain and
fatuous and fond and piquant.
He is a clever man and does not make love to me. A butcher’s-boy may
write love-letters--and I’d prefer those of a butcher’s-boy to those
of a business man: they would be more sincere and less hopelessly
discreet. But this business man is discerning and intuitive and
writes me no love. His wife--a business man always has a wife--could
not rationally object to what is in the letters, though she would
irrationally and naturally object to the letters themselves. She
is unloving and unloved--they always are--but whatever may be her
caste (I know only that she is tall and blonde and named Bertha)
she doubtless would find something superfluous in the idea of her
husband’s letters to me.
A letter comes from him in Georgia after I have written him a brief
disquieting one with a latent human appeal in it to make him think
the chief thing I need in life is his appreciation, his attitude
toward me, to brace my spirit. Then his comes, written in his small
slanting commercial hand. It is arresting from any angle and well
thought, well couched.
In it he tells me that my brain, scintillantly brilliant though it
is, needs the dim twilights of other brains such as his to catch the
sparks it throws off.
Which is a lie. My brain is not scintillantly brilliant and it
‘needs’ nothing. But the lie is agreeable to read. There is a gentle
caressingness in its untruth which feels someway soothinger than any
flattering fact.
And he tells me my chief attraction as an individual is my ability
accurately to gauge another individual and to breathe myself
graciously out to it and upon it while pretending to be immersed in
my own ego.
Which is another lie. Immersed in my own ego is never a pretense
with me, and I have not gauged--in the sense of weighing and
measuring--another individuality except to hate it. But it is
piquantly restful to hear that I am thus benign.
And he tells me that though several years have passed since he and I
took leave of one another he has never forgotten that last parting
because it was like the passing of a little weir-woman who brushed
him lightly with her garments as she went.
Which is another lie. My association with him was in brief meetings
at hectic studio tea-fights and two noisy dinners at Churchill’s,
at all of which I frowned impatiently at his tiresome conversation.
And his leave-taking with me consisted in his sharpening a
lead-pencil--beautifully he sharpened it--for me to write a telegram
with. It was not until this correspondence that we established an
unreliable intimacy. But to be told I seemed a weir-woman to a
hard-headed business man who could doubtless cheat a client out of
four thousand dollars easily in a half-day’s maneuvering is oddly
inspiriting.
And he tells me he is highly privileged to be permitted to gaze in
at the mezzo-tinted windows of my soul, which are surely curtained
against the passing proletariat.
Which is another lie. He has never remotely glimpsed my tired Soul in
the firmly false little letters I’ve written him. As to its being a
privilege if he had: it is the proletariat, it so happens, who have
first chance at those windows, which are not mezzo-tinted but made of
the plainest of plain glass. But the conceit tastes mellow and naïf
and bromidic and appetizing to me, like cream and raspberries in July.
And he tells me the most delightful thing in the world would be to
live near me and have a season of daily meetings--meetings of astral
selves upon a ‘higher plane’ whereon we should exchange those flowers
and fruits of the spirit which grow not from the soils but from the
esoteric essences of life:--that sort of thing.
Which is another lie. No possible man (except a Poet whom I
loved--or perhaps a scientist--) could find me delightful for more
than two consecutive meetings--I develop something like temper--and
I care for no higher planes except in airships. As for esoterics--I
would fainer exchange musings anent over-shoes than over-souls. And
my spirit bears in fertile earthy soil chiefly thistles from which
men gather no figs. But it gives me a warmish feeling, similar to
a hot-water bottle between my shoulders on a winter night, to read
that picturesque palaver written to me in my slim scorn by him in his
springy swivel chair.
Thus it goes. His letters are made all of softest quaintest lies
which I know to be lies the moment my gray gaze falls on them. All
his premises in regard to me and his deductions from them are roundly
lightly mistaken. But I like that fluent flattery the more because
it is so false. I am too vain a creature to want to cope often with
truths even though they might be uplifting self-lauding truths. My
vain peculiar Weakness demands as well semi-occasional collations of
creamed lies upon which it feeds like a sleek cat on creamed fish. My
humor enters into it, in no obvious way but eerily like a gay ghost.
My humor is a strong influence in me. It is stronger than my pride
and anger and fear and caution and reverence and self-love--stronger
than most things I own.
And it’s for reasons of pastime and vanity and oblique humor I
let letters from the business man come, though not often, into my
solitudes. And I spend hours of inert time-waste conning his fanciful
ideas. And the letters I write him in reply, though brief and
impersonal and done in my best false manner, consume a surprising lot
of time and mental and physical force to write. It is the Weakness in
it which is so devouring: it eats me hungrily and lingers about like
a buzzard, picking my bones.
A spinelessly Weak game. I hate its Weakness more than I like its
pleasant futility. I hate it and myself in it all the time I’m
dwelling on it. I hate it as I’d hate a little drug habit fastened on
my nerves.
Its influence is the same but more insidious than a drug would be,
more demoralizing. As feeling fear makes one afraid, feeling more
fear makes one more afraid.
Still once in a month, once in a two-month, I feel the hankering
itch to be applauded for second-rate qualities I do not own, and I
give way to it: in a particularly Weak way, after my sanest self has
reduced it analytically to shreds, and after saying bosh! with all my
selves.
After telling Me too that it is a common-tasting game. Life is a
strange music-clangor of gold bells, some silent, some far-echoing.
And the common-tasting thing cracks a bell-edge.
Then briskly I answer the last letter from Atlanta-Georgia and soon
there comes a fresh sheaf of smooth velvetish lies to pad my way.
There may come no more if this I write now should find its way to
Atlanta-Georgia. Or if fate or Bertha should intervene.
But always I know Weakness of me will find ways to work at its losing
trade.
It is of the dubious inevitable side of human nature--like gold teeth
and tinned salmon and bastard lacy valentines.
_Sweet fine sweatings of blood_