This morning came a letter from a half-forgot friend in London. She
is in vaudeville and has been booked for two months in the Music
Halls. Her letter is of a tenor productive of a letter in turn. But I
am somehow not free to write letters to friends while I’m living in
my two plain dresses. So I wrote this letter to God instead:
19th November.
Dear God:
I know you won’t answer this letter. I’m not sure you will get it.
But I have the feeling to write you a letter, though it should only
blow down the whistling winds.
I haven’t a thing to ask of you: no prayer to make. I am not
suppliant nor humble nor contrite. Nor would I justify myself as a
person in your eyes. I scorn to try to justify myself. What I am I
am. If I am a bad actor I take the results of it without plaint.
I comment on it--why not?--since cats may look at kings and each
person inherits four-and-twenty hours a day. But I am bewildered and
distraught and sad.
The best you do for me, God, when I think of you--you personally--is
to make me bewildered and distraught and sad.
But I’ve imagined I could put myself to you as a proposition to take
or to leave as you like: on my terms since I do not know yours.
There are some verses--the Rubaiyat--in which you are upbraided as if
you might be the dealer in some gambling game who had the long end of
all the wagers and still so protected his money that _he_ could not
lose however the cards turned.--‘from his helpless creature be repaid
pure Gold for what he lent him dross-allayed.’--‘thou who didst with
pitfall and with gin beset the Road I was to wander in--.’
But to me that seems a cheap attitude toward you, God. I admit you
are fair. If I thought you weren’t my mind would not vex itself with
you at all. I can not make you out a crooked dealer nor one who lends
out bad money and demands good money in repayment.
But you are reticent and cold-tempered and uninterested. So it seems.
The necklace which you gave me so long ago, made of little curses, I
wear always round my spirit-neck. It serves some purpose, perhaps,
and it answers as a keepsake: so at least I may not forget you
whether or not you forget me. I don’t ask any more of your attention
nor anything more of you than I would be willing to give you in
return. But I wish you would be willing to exchange attention with
me. I am lonely. I am terrified. I am frightfully overshadowed by
myself and my odd aloofness and my thronging solitary emotions and my
menacing trivialities. I am always fearing not that I may be wicked
or immoral or allied with evils--I don’t really care a tinker’s curse
about that--but that I may be growing petty and trivial and weak. It
is horrible, horrible to feel that I may be a weakling--you, God, may
not know how horrible to me. It is like black annihilation for all
eternity when my Soul longs frantically, desperately to live. I feel
weakness to be the only immoralness--hateful and vile in whatever
aspect. I want to be strong to endure and to live in noonday lights
and to overcome my poorness. I want, though I’m far from it, to be
brave and big. What I admire you for, though you’re so far off and
strange and inexplicable, is that you are strong. You are Strength,
you are Light, you are the Solution and the Absolute. You’d hardly
know what weakness is if it did not so crop out in this human race
you made. This human race is a faërily beautiful thing: star-flaming
poets have sung in it: lovely youth has breathed upon it: happy wild
hearts have informed it. But the odd keynote of it all is weakness.
And I have felt me tuned overmuch by that keynote.
--but I won’t be weak, I won’t be, I won’t be, God! Whether
you pay attention or not, whether I breathe only futileness, I
will be strong, strong, strong in myself--strong if only in my
falseness--strong and strong again--
This would be your chance with me if you cared to take it: because
I own now just my plain two dresses. When I grow out of this quiet
mood--(if ever I do: I begin to doubt it)--I shall have more dresses,
and then I shall think about them, God, and the phases of life
they’ll build up around me, and not about you. It’s not that pretty
frocks would take my attention away from you if you once claimed it.
Once you claimed my attention it would be yours forever. But pretty
frocks would mean I am again walking in paved peopled roads. Being
there without your attention I shall go where my garments may lead me
forgetful of you. One’s life is of the flavor of one’s clothes: ‘the
wine must taste of its own grapes.’
Now feels like a fitting time for you to be personal with me, to give
me a sign that you know I’m here. I know I am blind and ignorant
about that. You may know a time that shall be more fitting, a time
when my still mood and two dresses are long gone and my life is made
of fluff and lightness so your sign will crash into it like a black
two-ton meteor. I only tell you how it seems. If you should come
now and speak to me I should feel suddenly glad. To-day feels such
a day-of-God. The sky is all wet silver and the air a thin cloud
of gold. I sit writing you by my window, often looking out with
my forehead resting against the cool pane. There is an ache in my
forehead, in my insteps, in my backbone and in my spirit. By stopping
in here a moment you would gladden me. If you could give me, or show
me--where it perhaps had always been--one true thing to have always
in my life I should cling to it and ask nothing of it but that it
remain true. If you’d make me one far-off promise of a dawn to come
after this tired darkness I would take your word for it and would
walk toward your dawn in a straight road from which I should not ever
turn aside. In me is a small torch glowing though set in chaos. By
its light I should keep in the road leading to your dawn. I should
keep in it at any sacrifice to my merely human self: any sacrifice,
believe me.
It isn’t a bargain I would make with you. I don’t like the thought of
a bargain with you. I would rather take the chance and lose honestly:
not in everything but in this matter with you. You show me the road
and I take it for the sole reason that it’s a true one. I should
expect myself to pay the tolls--heavy ones since I’m innately a liar,
a someway bad lot. I know, the same as I know one and one make two,
that I’ve only to be square in the human business of living to get
back a square deal, though I’ll get badly battered, with it. But it
isn’t what I mean. Something inside me hungers for answeringness--a
Gleam--to make me know the worldly squareness and the battering are
worth while beyond themselves: but a detail in the game.
You mightn’t guess it but I am diffident about broaching this much
that may sound like a plea, so I’ll say no more of it.
But before I close the letter I want to tell you that I’m not wanting
in gratitude for the terrible beauty of this world. I feel with
ecstasy the burning loveliness of the life you give the human race.
I want to tell you thank-you for some things in it. But all that they
mean I can not tell in words.
Only yesterday a light at sundown lingered on the hill-tops and on
the desert back of the School of Mines in tints of Olive and Copper
and Ochre and Rose so delicate, so radiant, so dumbly forlorn that
I closed my eyes against it all as I walked along the sand: its
aliveness, its realness, its flawless golden dreadful peace tortured
and twisted and too-keenly interpreted me.
And one summer day in Central Park in New York I saw a little
Yellow-Yellow Butterfly fluttering above a small plot of brilliant
Green-Green Grass in the afternoon sunshine. To you, God, used to the
purpling splendor of untold worlds that mightn’t seem noteworthy.
But to me--because I am half-sister to so many trivialities the
Yellow-Yellow of those little wings and the sweet bright Green of
the clipped velvet Grass beneath the sun suddenly fiercely entered
in and beat-beat hard on my imagination. O the glare and the flare
of that fairy prettiness! I shall never forget that picture though
I should one day see those worlds. It made me think wildly of
you, God, at the time--and ever since. It is there yet in Central
Park, that particular plot of Grass, and if not that Yellow-Yellow
Butterfly--happily, happily Yellow it was--then another!