Despite my futile way-of-life and my rotting destroying
half-acquiescence in it I have a furious positive Murder in me.
One near me in my daily life injures me and goes on injuring me in
a way which is scourging and malicious and intensely petty. There
is in it helpless humiliation for me--me self-loving, proud and
determinedly unsuppliant--and it makes maddening Murder rise in me.
I don’t know why I do not do the Murder. I have nothing to lose by
paying the law-penalty: nothing but my life, and my life is stripped
bare--and was always barren by God’s decree--of all that makes a
life sacred or lovely or precious. For long years and years, since
child-days, I have been lost.
I don’t know why I do not do the Murder: except that I think of it
and brood over it and turn it round and round smoulderingly in my
Mind. From no choice. I have tried to push the feeling away as a
common thing beneath me. It is beneath me, for I am not little but
someway big. But my Mind will take its toll of all that confronts me.
The humiliation and the helplessness to combat being humiliated in me
who keep a casual proudness toward people is like a secret hot sword
thrust, and kept freshly thrust, in my flesh. It makes me wild to do
the Murder. But it makes me brood over it till the red act is lost in
red brooding.
There come also thinkings.
Murder, any Murder, is in its essence cowardly, a slinking meanness.
And I am not cowardly and I am not mean. I am above malice and
retaliation--all such impoverished impoverishing emotions. A shrug of
my shoulders and they are satisfied. The impulse to hit back after a
bitter wound is not of vengeance. It is instinct--a ‘first law.’ But
Murder is self-accusingly cowardly and sneakingly human. I can’t get
away from that. To take away a person’s life is like setting fire to
his house--an officiously stooping act. It’s for me to live my life
in aloof self-sufficience. No human malice should reach me in it.
Then it’s not for me to reach out of it and stain my good fingers
with unpleasant sticky blood. I am always in a prison of radiance and
gloom.
But the mere habit of being a human being is breakingly insistent--no
matter how many or how few frocks one owns. Neither of my two dresses
is a protection against humiliation. A thin black serge dress
gives me to myself a melancholy cold inert air: but beneath the
smooth-fitting breast of it comes too often a throbbing frightful to
feel, frightful to know, made of fierce petty anger and abasing hurt.
I hide it and me in my room and twist my hands together and walk my
floor, and a hurricane of helpless bitter trifling woe shakes and
wrenches me. Then Murder enters me.
What humiliates me is an obvious common thing that to any human one
would mean hurt and more hurt. Though I am determinedly brave I am
sensitive.
I do not write itself because this is the book of me and not of
people.
It is a slight, a poor and vivid cruelness. There is the tie of blood
in it which in all ways--from a deep heritage--I respect: and it rubs
an added stinging poison in the wound.
It is an injury I do not deserve. What I deserve I accept. What I
do not deserve pressed on me to humiliate me makes Murder in me.
Regardless of the other one--
--it would be simpler and finer for me to do that Murder than to keep
it in me. So many times in a week the trembling smothering longing
to do that Murder beats, beats in my thin breast. To be so owned by
a thing so small:--it is grief and despair and fury and wild nervous
intolerableness. It strains my flesh--it wrenches my pulse--it blinds
my eyes--it fills my throat--
--it would be a simpler and finer thing to do any Murder than to
feel, even once, the strangling damnedness rising, rising at my
throat--
_Loose twos_