It is damn-the-Smell-of-Turpentine!
Here I happen on a damn in me which is not desultory but bloodily
strong and alive and alone.
The wood in my blue-white room has been newly painted. For a day
and a night I intermittently encounter and go to bed in a spirit of
Turpentine. It bears a cruel obscure abortive message to my nerves.
I lie wakeful in the dark and try to reason out a logicalness or
poetry in a thing so artfully pestilential. But I am hysterically
lost in it and my heart beats hysterically in it.
I remember the inexpressible ingenuity of man: of white man as
against bone-brained savage races. Every invented usefulness feels
like divine witchcraft. A pen and a bottle of perfume and a door-knob
and a granite kettle and an electric light: I have the use of each
since white man is so ingenious. Were I a red Indian I should have
only the awkward barbarous stupid tools my race had used a thousand
years. I contrast the two as I lie wakeful, with a sense of richness
and of detailed repletion and of material blestness.
But at once comes the Smell of Turpentine and announces itself
something outside that and _different_, something stronger, something
masterfuler than ingenuity and savagery together. It tortures my
nerves: it burns my eyes: it lames my flesh: it jerks and flays and
garbles my inner body. The ingenuity of man has produced opium and
cocaine which would combat and hide it all behind a heavy curtain of
stupor, with effects equally damaging if less grievously subtle.
The Smell of Turpentine is a thing to bear since all its
counter-things bring only solider evil.
The paint was put on the wood by a dirty little man whom I briefly
inspected as something removed from my range of life. In return he
covertly eyed me. I expected my wakeful hours would be punished
by strong new paint and be-visioned by dirty little men. But it
is all sheer Turpentine with a power suggesting nothing human nor
super-natural nor divine. Just itself: a goblin virulence.
In all my Soul and bones and Mary-Mac-Laneness it is damn-the-Smell-
of-Turpentine as a bastard murderous hurt.