I doubt if they are anyway peculiar to me, but they feel like a
someway delicious clandestine circumstance: something to enjoy all to
myself.
It is difficult to imagine any woman really Respectable on her inner
side, the side that is turned toward herself alone. And it’s certain
no woman is Refined: it feels not possible. (There are yet inland
places where the word is used in its smug sense and believed in.) And
no woman but a dead woman in her coffin is in complete Good Taste.
Every live woman has for instance a working diaphragm: and in a
diaphragm there is, in the final analysis, simply no taste at all.
(As for men--except poets--I mean _poets_: and perhaps scientists--they
are so ungenuine: a race of discreet cautious puppets: wooden dolls
who move as their strings are pulled: with nothing so real about them
inside as even outside--what use to dwell upon them?)
Nearly all women are perplexingly interesting as human beings. And I
am quite the most interesting human being I know: and with it the
most appealing, the most sincere--in my own false fashion, and the
most bespeaking.
It is much due to knowing and feeling me to be not Respectable nor
Refined nor in Good Taste: particularly to being not in Good Taste.
One autumn evening in Boston I went to dine with a man in his
apartment in Beacon Street. He is a mining engineer whom I have
known since we were both children. He had bidden me to dinner in his
off-hand engineering way, but when I arrived at his diggings he was
not there. He did not come. Instead there was a dinner waiting, a
Japanese boy to serve it, and a strange man who had happened in. The
strange man had iron-gray hair, a brow like Apollo, a jowl like Bill
Sikes and much conversation. He said that he was newly from China,
South Africa and Egypt and that in his life he had been married
seven times with book and bell. Together we ate the dinner, talking
pleasantly in the light of colored Chinese lamp-shades. There were
little birds to eat and Chinese wine to drink--_sam shu_ distilled
virilely from rice: always a little of it is too much. After the
dinner we were standing by a teakwood sideboard and the strange man
was holding me tightly in his arms against a large smooth evening
panel of shirt-front, and he was kissing my mouth with a great
deal of ardor. I did not like it. I thought of all the women he had
married and wondered if they had liked it. And I mused in my placid
brain, ‘As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives.’ It
was the only thought in my mind as I waited boredly for him to have
done. (It’s no good struggling.) And that incident I know was not
Respectable.
And one summer day I was riding horseback up a steep gorge in these
Montana hills. It was hot dusty riding. I came to a mountain stream
with a beautiful little white-and-blue cascade tumbling over a high
rock upon smooth pebbles below. I got down from my horse, took off
my dusty khaki suit and all my clothes and stood under the fall of
the little tumbling cascade, whitely naked, without so much as a
figleaf’s covering. It was delectable and pagan, what with my quaint
thoughts as I stood crouched beneath the sparkling splash. And I know
there was nothing Refined in it.
And one evening between nine and ten, a week ago. I was walking
across the broad desert valley east of this Butte. It is late
November and the night was stormy. A strong high gale swept the
Flat. Presently it rained. I was on my way back with a mile or two
to go. It rained harder. Heavy sheets of black water whipped and
whirled down on me and wrapped me in their wet wings. I love all
weather when it is mild and more when it is rough except when it
bears down too hard: then I feel indifferent to it. As I moved along
the dark road not hurrying and not loitering I was saying inside
me, ‘Why am I going to any shelter out of this heavy wet rain? Why
am I not a houseless beggar-woman with nothing gentler in all my
life than this November storm? It is not because I deserve gentler
things--’ And with a sudden heavy shudder I whispered, ‘I wish I
were a beggar-woman! I wish I had no roof to cover me in this cold
night-blackness. It would be honest: I should be stripped to my
deserts. And I wish it were so--this drenching rain, this strangling
wind--nothing but this--shelter, money, comfort, self-satisfaction,
however seemingly earned, are dishonest--thieved. I ought to
be--ragged beggar--bleared eyes--dirty petticoats--a foul ratty hole
to creep into--hunger--bodily misery--all the portion of outcasts--
As God may hear me--I’d eagerly tremblingly change lives this moment
with a beggar-woman. I would--I would--!’ It is a piece of clear
inside truth about myself. And I know it proves me to be in poor
Taste.
It is a matter of attitude. Each of those incidents might happen to
any woman--except perhaps the last. I have known but one girl who
agreed with me in such a feeling. And not quite that feeling. She
had married a lot of money with a horrible old gentleman and had
wearied of both. But the other two episodes could readily belong to
any woman of _esprit_ who might be on the outside both Respectable
and Refined: even a woman lawyer.
But my attitude in the incident of the strange iron-gray man,
though in a bored way I could have viciously knifed him, was not a
Respectable attitude. I was bored and fanciful when doubtless I ought
to have been breathlessly angry. But my breathless anger is too rare
and beautiful an emotion to waste on ridiculous strange iron-gray men.
In the incident of the sparkling cascade my attitude was shameless:
something of the sort. It is never reprehensible for a woman to
take a cold shower-bath in solitude and health. But my spirit rose
and rejoiced at my bodily nakedness and then grew nymph-like and
figleafless on its own account. My sex exploited itself in mental
visions, like of Leda and the Swan or of myself as a slim villainous
Scotch Aphrodite conceived by a bold surprising Titian. And doubtless
I ought to have felt timorous in the vast sunlit mountainside, or
like a sexless child (or merely ‘hygienic’ like William Muldoon and
Bernarr McFadden). But the quick charm of the situation and the
heavenly anguish of the icy water, and my lovely Body, and my odd
moralless musings were too intriguing to expend themselves banalely.
The wet night road and the beggar-woman wish: it is drearily real
to me. Though I wear two plain dainty dresses, in a house--in me,
beating, beating, pounding down is a cold wild heavy rain: and under
my feet a long lonely muddy road. If they belong to me--well. I love
Me the more for feeling them.
And I feel them because I am not yet dead and in my coffin, but alive
and with a working diaphragm: which diaphragms are in not Good Taste.
_Lot’s wife_