The clearest lights on persons are small salient personal facts and
items about them and their ways of life.
To know that a woman is ‘sensitive’ is to have but a blurred
conception of her as one easily impressed, easily hurt. But to know
that she wears thick union-suitish under-clothes and uncompromising
cotton stockings is to know much about her: by those tokens she is
plain: she is stupid: she is smugly virtuous: she is poor: she is
narrow-thoughted: she lacks imagination: she is prosaic: she has a
defective sense of humor: she is catty: she is ‘kind’: she catches
cold: she is a thoroughly good woman.
To know that a child is ‘bright’ is to have no definite knowledge of
the child. But to know she flies into rages and bites whisk-brooms,
laces and her fragile grandmother is to have a wide-beamed
far-reaching spirit-light upon her.
That I am ‘thoughtful’ means little or anything or nothing: that I
love the odor of ink, that I hate the stings of conscience, that I
never lounge untidily about the house or in my room but am always
‘groomed,’--those tell me to myself.
Here for my enlightening I write a garbled list of my items and facts:
--I never see a soft new yeast-cake without wishing to squeeze it
for the salubrious feeling of the tinfoil bursting facilely and the
yeast oozing with its odd dry juiciness through my fingers.
--And I never see a shiny waxy green rubber plant without wanting to
bite the leaves precisely and daintily with my sharp teeth.
--My luncheon each late midday is made of four radishes, three
crackers and a thin glass of water: an anchoretic feast which I eat
with relish. The rhyme I murmur with it is: ‘what do you think, she
lives upon nothing but victuals and drink.’
--Whenever I look out my window at five in the afternoon I see a neat
nice-looking strange nigger-woman walking past. And the nigger-woman
glances casually up at my window and sees me. We are unknown to one
another and have belike as much and no more in common as if we grew
on different planets. But the nigger-woman and I are someway dimly
liking each other and dimly knowing it.
--I scent my belongings faintly with Houbigant’s Quelques Violettes
perfume.
--I like to light a box of matches at a twilight window-sill singly
and by twos and threes and little bunches, and hold them till they
burn out, and watch the little flames, and drop the burnt ends out
the window: a pastime inherited from my child-self.
--Of living creatures that I know I most hate cockroaches.
--Of inanimate things that I know I most hate a loose shutter
rattling at night in the wind.
--While I smoke after-dinner cigarettes down-stairs I put flat round
black records on a tall red Edison phonograph and I curl up in a
leather chair in the dark to listen to the music which is soft and
deep: ‘Che Gelida Manina’ in a wistful tenor, and ‘Refrain Audacious
Tar,’ and ‘Ah Quel Giorno,’ and ‘Scenes That are Brightest’ and
others and others--tantalizing, tawdry, artistic, cheaply pleasant,
luring, whatnot. And by turns it makes me lighthearted, lightheaded,
emotional, romantic, restless, evilly coarse. It is piquant
debauchery. Music sweetly poisons me.
--My bureau-drawers I keep neatly in order--lingerie and other
articles arranged convenient to my hand in white rows and fragrant
tidy piles: with the exception of the upper left-hand drawer which is
a bit of terrific snarled chaos. In it is an inky handkerchief of an
old vintage: in it are several un-mated crumpled gloves: in it are
some olive-pits: in it is an empty sticky liquid cold-cream bottle
with tufts of eider-down power-puff stuck to it: in it is a tangle
of smudged ribbons: in it are two pieces of pink rock-candy: in it
is a spent yellow-silk garter: in it is a torn sponge: in it are
blackened pieces of chamois-skin: in it is a broken scissors: in it
are three twisted ragged black-net veils: in it is a brass curtain
ring: in it is a broken scattered string of coral beads: in it is
a lump of wax: in it is a piece of knotted twine: in it are little
bunches of cotton-wool: in it is a spilled box of powder whitening
everything: in it is a spilled box of matches: in it is a jet
bracelet broken into small pieces: in it is a broken hand-mirror: in
it are some crushed cigarettes: in it is a ruined blue plume: in it
is a warped leather purse: in it is a damaged lump of red fingernail
paste: in it is a stick of gum arabic: in it is a bisque kewpie
defiled by wax, ink, paste, powder and rock-candy: in it are some
partly melted vestas: in it are other bits of rubbish: all in wildest
disorder. Why I do not empty the drawer and burn the rubbish I don’t
at all know.
--I sometimes take one or two of the neighborhood children to a
picture-show.
--Sometimes as I lean at my window I alternate looking at the
distant deeply-blue mountains by looking at the near-by women
who chance to pass on the stone pavement below--the smartly-clad
and lighthearted-seeming ones. I look at their good shoulders in
pastel-toned silk and at their trim silk ankles and proud flaring
skirts and insolent beautiful hats--the buoyant worldly insouciance
of their ensembles--as their owners walk along on happy errands. As I
look I feel Me to be behind prison bars looking out in thin psychic
jealousy: regret for a time when I also went thus buoyantly on happy
worldly errands and an odd raging silent impatience for a time when
I may again. But with it too the wavering acquiescence in this
analytic-writing mood.--‘pussy-cat-mieow,’ I ruminate, ‘can’t have
any milk until her best petticoat’s mended with silk.’
--One kind of man I impatiently scorn is the kind that looks bored if
I mention Ibsen or ceramics or Aztec civilization but is interested
instantly, alertly if I mention my garters. Equally I abhor the type
that begrudges me my own private phases of amorousness: not those who
condemn me for them: not those who dislike them in me: not those who
deplore them: but who _begrudge_ me them.
--Always I come up a stairway softly. Always I close doors softly. I
make no noise.
--The quaintest character I have met with in fiction is Huckleberry
Finn’s father, looked at as a father. Next in quaintness I place
Sally Brass, regarded as a human being.
--I like a glass of very hot water and a dish of preserved damson
plums on a sultry August day: and another of each on top of that: and
another of each on top of that.
--I like the word addle: I hate the word redress. I would fain have
my ‘wrongs’ ever addled than redressed: merely for the word prejudice.
--I would rather that almost any physical disaster should befall me
than that I ever achieve an ‘abdomen.’ When an abdomen comes in at
the door life’s romances fly fast out the windows: so it looks to me.
May death overtake me haply before the menopause.
--The pictures I have crowded on a small side-wall space two feet
from my eyes as I sit at my desk are: Theda Bara as Carmen: the
late Queen Isabella of Spain: Marie Lloyd, loved of the London
populace: a velvety-looking black-and-orange print of a leopard:
Blanche Sweet, loveliest of film actors: John Keats, a small old
print: Ethel Barrymore, a pencil drawing made by herself: Nell Gwyn,
a photograph of a Lely portrait: Watts’s ‘Hope’: Stanley Ketchel,
dead middle-weight fighter: ‘Jane Eyre’ by a Polish artist: Fanny
Brawn, the solitary extant silhouette print: Ty Cobb: two children:
Charlotte Corday in the Prison de l’Abbaye: Susan B. Anthony: a
Chinese lady: Andrea del Sarto: Queen Boadicea: and Christy Mathewson.
--I am old-fashioned in many of my tastes--in all my reading and
writing tastes. I do not like typewriters: they make fingertips
callous in a poor cause. And I do not like fountain-pens which
someway seem suitable only for business-letters, forgeries,
bookkeeping and crude cursory love-letters. I like a steel pen
in a fat glossy green enameled wood penholder with a thick
pleasant-feeling rubber sheath at the lower end.
--I wear to-day a modest frock of black silk: beneath it a light silk
petticoat: beneath that a white pussy-willow silk ‘envelope’ and a
pale narrow pink silk shirt chastened by many launderings: no stays:
thick white silk stockings gartered above my knees by circles of mild
mauve elastic: on my feet cross-ribboned bright-buckled black shoes:
round my neck a jet necklace:--all of it a costume that might be of a
conventional woman, a plain-living woman, a good woman, a well-bred
woman--saving only that beneath my left shoulder-blade the smooth
new pussy-willow silk has a jagged two-inch rent where it caught on
a drawer-handle: and the rent--in lieu of neatly mending it with
the thread and needle of woman’s custom--I caught up any way by its
jagged edges and tied tight in a hard vicious heathen knot: the note
of spiritual fornication, of Mary-Mac-Laneness: always there’s some
involuntary pagan touch to undo me, to arraign me, to betray me to
God and to myself.
--I wear five-and-a-half A-last shoes: number twenty-one snug
whalebone stays: and weigh a hundred-twenty-four pounds.
--I am fond of green peas, baseball and diamond rings.
--I like violently to spoil a little charlotte-russe with a fork:
it gives me the same feeling of lawless sweet-fiery lust which must
belong to a Moslem soldier when deflowering a Christian virgin: and
harms nobody.
--Sometimes when I’m dressing in the morning I glance down through
my window and see two elderly Butte business men, one a lawyer and
one a banker, going by on the way to their offices. And I wonder at
how frightfully respectable they look in their tailored clothes and
reproachless gloves and perfectly celestial-looking hats. I murmur:
‘Robin and Richard were two pretty men who lay in bed till the clock
struck ten.’
--I keep on my desk a little doll with fluffy skirts, blue eyes,
pouting lips and curly hair and named Little Jane Lee after an
adorable child I have seen in moving pictures.
--I am five feet six inches tall in my highish heels:
--I wear number six gloves: the calf of my leg is a shapely thing.
--The six extant Americans I most admire are Thomas A. Edison,
Harriet Monroe, Gertrude Atherton, Theodore Roosevelt, the remaining
Wright Brother, and Amy Lowell.
--I think I’d learn to be a cook, a professional cook, if I were less
easily fatigued.
--I love the sound of the clinking of two clean new white clay pipes,
one upon the other.
--I crack nuts with my teeth.
Voilà!
But not quite voilà-tout.
_A damned spider_