To-day was one of the To-morrows of encompassing dissatisfaction when
this seems all a nasty world and a nasty life.
A Spider drowned in my bath-tub this morning.
It was one of those long-legged spiders. It was in the tub when I
went there--a small ovalish dark-gray pellet with seven ray-like
legs as of an evil little sun lying flat on a white desert. It feels
inconceivable that any creature should naturally have an odd number
of legs: we are all, including spiders, laid out as with rule and
compass. Perhaps it is inconceivable. But this Spider had seven legs.
I counted them while I knelt, blue-peignoired, beside the tub with
my elbows on the edge and watched the Spider and waited for it to go
away. Whether it had lost a leg, or had one too many, or its kind
is normally made like that: those things I vexedly wondered about.
In either case it seemed a so much worse Spider. It did not go away
so I touched it gently with an oblong of green soap. Then it moved
and began to walk up the side of the tub. But the side is smooth as
glass and always it slipped back. I went to my room and fetched a
post-card. With a post-card newly from Delaware I lifted the Spider
out of the bath-tub. Then I scaled card and Spider to the farthest
ceiling corner of the room. Then I drew the tub one-third full of
tepid water. And there floating in it as if brought down by Black
Art was the seven-legged Spider, drowned and ruined. It spoiled the
atmosphere and anticipation of my morning tub. I shuddered miserably.
I pulled out the rubber plug and water and Spider washed down and
away into the dark sewer-wastes of Butte, into the bowels of the
earth, through the gateways of hell, I hope. I took a hasty shower
with a flavor of long-legged Spiders in it. I dressed, and combed
and coifed my hair, with the clouded thought in me that throughout
my life I shall inevitably encounter by eternal law a long-legged
Spider from time to time. I know there’ll be no evading it. Those
who know statistics doubtless could tell me how many Spiders I shall
encounter in so many or so many years: the exact percentage even to
the division of a week and the half or the quarter of a Spider. There
is something disconcerting and tragic in the thought.
The drowned Spider’s ghost pursued me all day though its memory faded.
My breakfast, though it included an egg, seemed antagonistic, hostile
toward me as I ate it. It made me melancholy.
I watched from my back window a slim boy painting a porch and
singing in incipient tenor a rhythmic lullaby beginning ‘go to sleep
my dus-ky ba-by.’ He painted silently for some minutes and then
dipped his brush in the tin of paint. Whenever he left off painting
to dip the brush he sang. Once he failed to sing when he dipped the
brush but instead burst forth with it in the midst of painting a
long mustard streak on his porch. Ordinarily that would not have
mattered to me since I am innately keyed and pitched to expect the
galvanically unexpected. But to-day it made me rackingly nervous.
In the afternoon I went for a walk. Down and down, seventeen squares
from here, in a quiet neighborhood a strange woman accosted me. She
was pale and smartly dressed and quite drunk. She said, ‘Listen--can
you remember which of these corners I was to meet a friend at?’ It
made me feel annoyed and bewildered and sad and silly.
When I came back I read awhile--a story of Guy de Maupassant’s about
a little dog named Pierrot, whose owner loved him much but loved
money more and could not bring herself to pay a tax of eight francs
to make Pierrot’s existence legal. So she threw him into a pit. As
heartbreaking a tale as even de Maupassant ever wrote. It made all
the loves in this world feel terrifyingly sordid. It made me unhappy.
Then I found a poetry-book and read about the Blessed Damozel leaning
out from the gold bar of heaven. Always, by her loveliness alone, she
stirs me to my still depths of tears. But to-day the song made me
feel over-wrought and life-worn.
To-night I walked out to a little desert-space west of the town, a
very pale, very gray desert, with a sweet wet mist like dissolving
pearls swathing it. The million placid stars looked down, remote and
hard, as if each one had newly forsaken me. It made me afraid and
cold around my heart.
Here I sit and nothing in all the world is pleasant or reassuring.
That damned Spider.
_To wander and hang and float about_