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  [Photograph: Author’s portrait]
  [Signature: Mary MacLane]

  I, MARY MACLANE

  _A DIARY OF HUMAN DAYS_

  BY
  MARY MACLANE
  AUTHOR OF “THE STORY OF MARY MACLANE”

  [Illustration: Publisher’s logo]

  NEW YORK
  FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
  PUBLISHERS

  _Copyright, 1917, by_
  FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

_All rights reserved, including that of translation into
foreign languages._

_To M-- T--_

  _these Live Fruits
  from the Withered Garden_

I, MARY MACLANE

_A crucible of my own making_

                                                        To-day

It is the edge of a somber July night in this Butte-Montana.

The sky is overcast. The nearer mountains are gray-melancholy.

And at this point I meet Me face to face.

I am Mary MacLane: of no importance to the wide bright world and
dearly and damnably important to Me.

Face to face I look at Me with some hatred, with despair and with
great intentness.

I put Me in a crucible of my own making and set it in the flaming
trivial Inferno of my mind. And I assay thus:

I am rare--I am in some ways exquisite.

I am pagan within and without.

I am vain and shallow and false.

I am a specialized being, deeply myself.

I am of woman-sex and most things that go with that, with some other
_pointes_.

I am dynamic but devasted, laid waste in spirit.

I’m like a leopard and I’m like a poet and I’m like a religieuse and
I’m like an outlaw.

I have a potent weird sense of humor--a saving and a demoralizing
grace.

I have brain, cerebration--not powerful but fine and of a remarkable
quality.

I am scornful-tempered and I am brave.

I am slender in body and someway fragile and firm-fleshed and sweet.

I am oddly a fool and a strange complex liar and a spiritual vagabond.

I am strong, individual in my falseness: wavering, faint, fanciful in
my truth.

I am eternally self-conscious but sincere in it.

I am ultra-modern, very old-fashioned: savagely incongruous.

I am young, but not very young.

I am wistful--I am infamous.

In brief, I am a human being.

I am presciently and analytically egotistic, with some arresting
dead-feeling genius.

And were I not so tensely tiredly sane I would say that I am mad.

So assayed I begin to write this book of myself, to show to myself in
detail the woman who is inside me. It may or it mayn’t show also a
type, a universal Eve-old woman. If it is so it is not my purport. I
sing only the Ego and the individual.

So does in secret each man and woman and child who breathes, but is
afraid to sing it aloud. And mostly none knows it is that he does
sing. But it is the only strength of each. A bishop serving truly
and tirelessly the poor of his diocese serves a strong vanity and
ideal of the Ego in himself. A starving sculptor who lives in and for
his own dreams is an Egotist equally with the bishop. And both are
Egotists equally with me.

Egotist, not egoist, is my word: it and not the idealized one is the
‘winged word.’

It is made of glow and gleam and splendor, that Ego. I would be its
votary.

So I write me this book of Me--my Soul, my Heart, my sentient Body,
my magic Mind: their potentialities and contradictions.

--there is a Self in each human one which lives and has its sweet
vain someway-frightful being not in depths and not in surfaces but
Just Beneath The Skin. It is the Self one keeps for oneself alone.
It is the Essence of soul and bones. It is the slyest subtlest thing
in human scope. It is the loneliest: tragically lonely. It is long,
long isolation--beautiful, terrifying, barbarous, shameful, trivial
to points of madness, ever-present, infinitely intriguing to oneself,
passionately hidden: hidden forever and forever--

It is my aim to write out that in the pages of this Me-book: no
depths save as they come up and touch that, no surfaces save as they
sink skin-deep. Only the flat unglowing bloody Self Just Beneath My
Skin.

I shall fail in it, partly because my writing skill is unequal to
some nicenesses in the task, but mostly because I am not very honest
even with myself.

I’ll come someway near it.

_Half inevitably, half by choice_

                                                        To-morrow

Half inevitably, half by choice, I write this book now.

I am at a lowering impatient shoulder-shrugging life-point where I
must express myself or lose myself or break.

And I am quite alone as I live my life.

And I am unhappy--a scornful unhappiness not of bitter positive grief
which admits of engulfing luxuries of sorrow, but of muffled unrests
and tortures of knowing I fit in nowhere, that I drift--drift--and it
brings an unbearable dread, always more and more dread, into days and
into wakeful nights.

And writing it turns the brunt of it a little away from me.

And to write is the thing I most love to do.

And I myself am the most immediate potent topic I can find in my
knowledge to write on: the biggest, the littlest, the broadest, the
narrowest, the loveliest, the hatefulest, the most colorful, the most
drab, the most mystic, the most obvious, and the one that takes me
farthest as a writer and as a person.

I write myself when I write the thoughts smouldering in me whether
they be of Death, of Roses, of Christ’s Mother, of Ten-penny Nails.

One’s thoughts are one’s most crucial adventures. Seriously and
strongly and intently to contemplate doing murder is everyway more
exciting, more romantic, more profoundly tragic than the murder done.

I unfold myself in accursed and precious written thoughts. I cast the
reflections of my inner selves on the paper from the insolent mirror
of my Mind.

--my Mind--it is so free--

My Soul is not free: God hung a string of curses, like a little
manacling chain, round its neck long and long ago. Always I feel it.
My Heart is not free for it is dead: in a listless way and a trivial
way, dead. And my Body--it is free but has a seeming of something
wasted and useless like a dinner spread out on a table uneaten and
growing cold.

--but my free Mind--

Though I were shut fast in a prison: though I were strapped in an
electric chair: though I were gnawed and decayed by leprosy: I
still could _think_, with thoughts free as gold-drenched outer air,
thoughts delicate-luminous as young dawn, thoughts facile, seductive,
speculative, artful, evil, sly, sublime.

You might cut off my two hands: but you could not keep me from
remembering the Sad Gray Loveliness of the Sea when the Rain beats,
beats, beats upon it.

You might admonish me by driving a red-hot spike between my two white
shoulders: but you could not by that influence my Thoughts--you could
not so much as change their current.

I am intently aware of my Mind from moment to moment--all the passing
life-moments. The awareness is a troubled power, a heavy burden and a
wild enchantment.--

Also what I feel I write.

I am my own law, my own oracle, my own one intimate friend, my own
guide though I guide me to dead-walls, my own mentor, my own foe, my
own lover.

I am in age one-and-thirty, a smouldering-flamed period which
feels the wings of the Youth-bird beating strong and violent for
flight--half-ready to fly away.

I am not a charming person. Quite seventy singly-used adjectives
would better fit me.

But I have some charm of youth, and a charm of sex, and a charm of
intellect and intuition, and some charms of personality.

I have a perfervid appreciation of those things in other persons. And
my steel has sometime struck fire from their flint.

But always my steel has turned back drearily yet strongly to itself.

_A twisted moral_

                                                        To-morrow

If I should meet God to know and speak to the first thing but one I
should ask him would be, ‘What was your idea, God, in making me?’

I can believe he had some Purpose in it.

I’m in most ways a devilish person. There’s sevenfold more evil
than good in me. It is evil of a mixed and menacing kind, the kind
that goes dressed in brave and beauty-tinted clothes and is sane
and sound. While the good in me is ill and forlorn and nervously
afraid--a something of tear-blurred eyes and trembling fingers.

Yet God has made many things less plausible than me. He has made
sharks in the ocean, and people who hire children to work in their
mills and mines, and poison ivy and zebras--

--and he has made besides a Wonder of things: Thin Pink Mountain
Dawns, Young English Poets, Hydrangeas in the sudden Blue of their
first Bloom, human Singing Voices,--more things, always more--

When I think of them all a joyous thrill breaks over me like a little
frenzied wave. It is delirium-of-bliss to feel oneself living though
shadows be pitch-black.

God has a Purpose in making everything, I think.

I am half-curious about the Purpose that goes with me. He might have
made me for his own amusement. He might have made me to discipline
my Soul with some blights and goads or to punish it for bacchanalian
ease and pleasure in the long-distant centuries-old past. He might
have made me to season or scourge other lives, as I may touch them,
with Mary-Mac-Lane-ness. He might have made me to point a twisted
moral.

I muse about it with doubts.

But if I knew my Purpose I belike would not swerve a hair’s-breadth
from my own course which is an unhallowedly selfish one.

If I could myself see a way of truth I would walk in it. I have it in
me to worship. I long to worship. And I am game, wearily and coldly
game: when I start I go on through to the end.

But I see no way of truth--none for me. And God is eternally absent
and reticent. So I go on in the way where I find myself. And muse
about it. And damn it faintly as I make nothing of it.

_Everyday and to-morrow_

                                                        To-morrow

Aloofly I live in this Butte in the outward rôle of a family daughter
with no responsibilities.

This Butte is an incongruous living-place for me.

And I have not one human friend in it--no kindliness. And Nature in
her perplexingest mood would not of herself have cast me as a family
daughter. Three things have kept me thus for four years past: that
nothing has called me out of it: a slight family pressure like a tiny
needle-point which pierces only if one moves: and to stay thus is
presently the line of least resistance.

Unless impelled to violent action by a violent reason--like love
or hatred or jealousy or a baby or humiliated pride or rowelling
ambition--a woman follows the physical line of least resistance. I
have followed it these years with outward acquiescence and inward
rages--languid rages which lay me waste.

The years and acquiescences and rages have built up a mood which
compasses me, drives me, damns me and lifts me up.

It is a forceful mood, though I am not myself forceful.

This mood is this book.--

I live an immoral life. It is immoral because it is deadly futile.
All my Tissues of body, soul, mind and heart are wasting, decaying,
wearing down, minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day: with no
return to me or to my life, nor to anything human or divine.

It makes me dread my life and myself.

I do not quite know why.

But to be an ardent pickpocket or an eager harlot would feel honester.

My Everyday goes like this: I waken in the morning and lie listless
some minutes with drooping eyelids. I look at a gilt-and-blue bar
of morning light which slants palely in at one window and at a
melting-gold triangle of sun which shows at the other window on the
red brick wall of the house next to this. Then I say ‘another day,’
and I kick off bed-covers with one foot and slide out of my narrow
bed, and into blue slippers, and out of a thin nightgown, and into
peignoir or bathrobe. I twist and flatten and gather up my tangled
hair and push some amber pins through it. And I go into a respectable
green-and-gray bathroom and draw a bath and get into it. I splash in
brief swift soapsuds, and go under a sudden heroic icy cold shower,
and dry me with a scourging towel. Then I go back into the blue-white
bed-room and get into clothes, feminine thin under-garments and a
nunlike frock.

I look in my mirror. Some days I’m a delicately beautiful girl.
Other days I’m a very plain woman.

One’s physical attractiveness is a matter of one’s mental chemistry.

I say to Me in the mirror, ‘It’s you-and-me, Mary MacLane, and
another wasting damning To-morrow.

  “To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
   Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.”’

A haunting decadence is in that To-morrow thought. And always the
To-morrow thought comes out of my morning mirror. I dwell on it
awhile, till my gray eyes and my lips and my teeth and my forehead
are tired of it, and make nothing new of it.

I jerk the flat scollop of hair at one side of my forehead and
turn away. I open door and windows wider for the blowing-through
of breezes. And I wander down-stairs. It is half-after nine or
half-after ten. I go into the clean empty clock-ticking kitchen
and cook my breakfast. It is a task full of hungry plaisance and
pleasantness. I make a British-feeling breakfast of tea and marmalade
and little squares of toast and pink-and-tan rashers of bacon and two
delightful eggs. Up to the moment of broaching the eggs the morning
has an ancient sameness with other mornings. But eggs, though I’ve
eaten them every day for quite five-and-twenty years, are always a
fascinating novelty.

They are delicious in my breakfast. So are the squares of toast and
the bacon-rashers and the tea and marmalade. When I’ve done with them
I lay down my napkin by my cup, light a cigarette, breathe a puff
or two from it and feel contentedly aware that my brain has gone to
rest in sweet tranquillity with my breakfast. When my brain is in my
head it analyzes the soul out of my body, the gleam out of my gray
eyes, the savor out of my life, the human taste off my tongue. That
post-breakfast moment is the only peace-moment I know in my day and
in my life.

Having puffed away the cigarette and read bits of a morning paper
I then prove me arrantly middle-class by contemplating washing my
breakfast dishes.

I am middle-class, quite, from the Soul outward. But it is not
specially apparent--one’s tastes and aspirations flit garbledly far
and wide. But a tendency to wash one’s dishes after eating one’s
breakfast feels conclusively and pleasantly middle-class. Not that I
do always wash them, but always I think of it with the inclination to
do it.

I sit on the shaded front veranda in the summer noon-day and look
away south at the blue Highlands, ever snow-peaked: or east at the
near towering splendid grim wall of the arid Rockies which separates
this Butte from New York, from London,--the Spain-castles--the
Pyramids--the Isle of Lesbos: or south-west beyond house-tops at some
foothills above which hangs a fairy veil made by melting together a
Lump of Gold and an Apricot and spreading it thin.

Then restlessly I go into the house and up to my room. I put it in
order--in prim, prim immaculate order. One marked phase of mine
is of some wanton creature--a mænad, a mental Amazon, a she-imp.
But playing opposite to that is another--that of a New-England
spinster steel-riveted to certain neat ferociously-orderly habits.
A stray thread on my blue rug hurts, _hurts_ me until I pick it
up. Dust around my room gives me a nervous pain, a piteous gnawing
grief-of-the-senses, until I’ve removed it. And my chastened-looking
bed--after I’ve turned over its tufted mattress and ‘made’ it, smooth
and white and crisp and soft--how the fibers of me would writhe
should anyone sit on it. But no one sits on it. And I myself sooner
than press one finger-tip down into its perfectness would sell my
body to a Balkan soldier for four dimes: it is that way I feel about
it. My bed _must_ be kept perfect till the moment I slip into it at
night to float under the dream-worlds.

Then maybe I pull a soft black hat down over my hair and draw on
gloves and go out into the gray-paved streets for a longish walk.
Or maybe the day is humidly hot. Then I don’t go but stay in the
blue-white room and mend a bit of torn lingerie or a handkerchief
or a silk stocking or a petticoat. Or I take books and dig out some
Greek--Homer or a Sapphic fragment--very laboriously but marvelling
that I can do it at all: the first things one forgets being the
last things one learned at school. Or I read an English or a French
philosopher, or a translated Tolstoi, or a bit of Balzac novel, or
some bits of Dickens-books with which latter I am long familiar and
long enamored for the restful falseness of their sentiment and the
pungent appetizing charm of their villains.

And betweenwhiles I think and think.

Then it’s dinnertime and I perhaps change into the other nunlike
dress, and nibble some dinner with no appetite, and talk with the
assembled small family in a vein and tone of life-long insincerity.
When in family-circle-ness I’ve had to hide my true self as if behind
a hundred black veils since the age of two years. It would be a
poignant effort now to show any of it at the family dinners, which
is the only meeting-time. The one easy way is to be comprehensively
insincere at the dinners where with no appetite I nibble. None
there wants my sincerity, and so in my Soul’s accounting now it is
eternally and determinedly No Matter. It is a little bell which
stopped ringing long and long ago. If it rang now it would ring only
No-Matter, No-Matter.

Then it’s night and I go to take the walk I didn’t take in the
afternoon. I walk down long lonely streets. Long lonely thoughts
pile into me and through me and wrap me in a nebula that I can feel
around me like a mantle. I walk two or three miles of paved streets
till I’m very tired. I am lithe but fragile from constant involuntary
self-analysis. One may analyze one’s life-experience and life-emotion
till physical tissues at times grow frail, gossamer-thin. It is then
as if--at a word, a whispered thought, a beat of the heart--one’s
Soul might flutter through the Veil, join light hands with the
death-angel and flee away.

--but I love my life even while I analyze it bit by bit and so hate
it. I love it in its grating monotones and its moments of glow and
its days of shadow and storm and bitterish lowering passion--

I walk back beneath a night sky of dusky velvet-blue decked with
jewels of moon and star and flying bright-edged cloud. The night has
a subdued preciousness, like an illicitly pregnant woman’s. It is big
with the bastard-exquisite To-morrow. The night air kisses my lips
and throat. I pull off my gloves to feel it on my hands. It gives me
a charmed and unexciting feeling of being caressed without being
loved.

I come back to my blue-white room, take off my hat, ruffle my fingers
through my hair, look at Me in the mirror and smile the melancholy
wicked smile which I keep for Me-alone. It’s an intimate moment of
greeting--a recognition of my Familiar on coming back to her. Often
when I walk I go without Me, and wander far from Me, and forget Me.

Then I sit at my flat black desk and write desultorily for two or
three or four hours. Sometimes a letter, sometimes some verses or a
hectic fancy in staid prose. But now mostly this.

Then I go downstairs to a refrigerator or a cellar-way to find
food--a slice off an affable cold joint, some chaste-looking slices
of bread, a slim innocent onion. And I eat them, not relishingly but
voraciously, reminding myself of a lean foraging furtive coyote. It
is two or three or four in the morning. I smoke a quiet cigarette in
a cool night doorway and count the nervous gray-velvet moths outside
the screen.

And all the while I think and think.

Then I come up to my room and sit on the floor by my low bookcase and
read some last-century English poets--the Brownings and Shelley and
the unspeakable John Keats. The Poets make me a space of incalescent
magic and loveliness. They are the beings blest of a flaming Heaven.
In the midst of soddenest earthiness their fiery wings ‘pierce the
night.’

Then I’m thrilledly tired. I close the books and make ready for
my bed in a lyric-feeling languor. A soft soothing unsnapping of
whalebone stays: a muffled rhythmic undoing of metal-and-silk-rubber
garters: a pushing down and sliding out of daytime clothes
and into a thin pale cool silk nightgown: a hurried brushing
of hair: an anointing of hands and throat with faint-scented
cream: a goodnight to Me in the mirror: a last wave of a fateful
thing--my life-essence--casual and determined and contemptuous and
menacing--sweeping down over me in an invisible shower: and I’m
betwixt smooth linen sheets.

In twenty seconds blest, blest sleep.

Of such wide littleness is my day made. One day will differ from
another in this or that volcanic molehill. And some days I not only
wash a great many dishes but do a deal of housework neatly and
self-satisfactorily and like a devilish scullery maid.

And some days as I move in the petty pace thoughts and feelings sweet
or barbarous come and change my world’s face in a moment.

Also a casual human being of rabbitish brain and chipmunkish
sensibility may stray across my path and gently bore me and
accentuate my own paganness.

But always the same days in restless dubious To-morrowness.

Always immorally futile.

And eerily alone.

_A mathematic dead-wall_

                                                        To-morrow

I’m put to it to decide whether God loves me or hates me when he sets
me down alone.

There are times when my Loneliness is a charmed and scintillant and
resourceful Loneliness with a strange and ecstatic gleam in it. The
miracle of being a person rushes upon and about and into me ‘with
lightning and with music.’

One loses that in a day of many friendships.

But oftener are times when the tired, tired heart and the weary,
weary brain beat-beat, beat-beat to anguished torturing self-rhythms.
The spirit of me closes its eyes in turbulent dusks of wondering
and wishing and leans its forehead against a mathematic dead-wall.
And it prays--blind useless unhumble prayers which leave it dry and
destitute, arid, unspeakably lacking. But when it lifts its head
and opens its eyes there are the melting mauves and maroons of a
dead sun across the evening sky, and the small far wistful flames of
always-hopeful stars.

--they make it matter less whether God loves or hates me, but I still
wish I knew.

_My neat blue chair_

                                                        To-morrow

I suppose there’s nothing quite peculiar to even my inmost self in
what I ponder and what I experience and what I feel.

My only elemental ‘differentness’ is that I find it and write it.

But I used to think at eighteen--those thrice-fired adolescent
moments--that only I suffered, only I reached achingly out into the
mists, only I tasted new-bloomed life-petals intolerably sweet and
bitter on my lips.

The egotism of youth is merciless, measureless, endlessly vulnerable.
Youth plays on itself as one plays on a little dulcimer, with music
as sweet, but with a crude cruel recklessness which jerks and breaks
the strings.

I have got by that stage of egotism. But I’ve entered on another
wilder, more lawless--farther-seeing if less be-visioned.

While I sit here this midnight in a Neat Blue Chair in this
Butte-Montana for what I know a legion-women of my psychic breed
may be sitting lonely in neat red or neat blue or neat gray or neat
any-colored chairs--in Wichita-Kansas and South Bend-Indiana and
Red Wing-Minnesota and Portland-Maine and Rochester-New York and
Waco-Texas and La Crosse-Wisconsin and Bowling Green-Kentucky:
each feeling Herself set in a wrong niche, caught in a tangle of
little vapidish cross-purpose: each waiting, waiting always--waiting
all her life--not hopeful and passionate like Eighteen but patient
or blasphemous or scornful or volcanic like Early-Thirty: the
waiting-sense giving to each a personal quality big and suggestive
and nurturing--and with it a long-accustomed feeling like a thin
bright blade stuck deep in her breast: each more or less roundly
hating Waco-Texas and Portland-Maine and Red Wing-Minnesota and the
other places: and each beset by hot unquiet humannesses inside her
and an old yearn of sex and the blood warring with myriad minute
tenets dating from civilization’s dawn-times.

But though I am of that psychic breed no little tenets war in me.

It’s as if a prelate and a wood-nymph had fathered and mothered
me: making me of a ridiculous poignant conscience and of no human
traditions.

I am free of innate conventionalities, free as a wildcat on a
twilight hill. I am free of them as I sit here, quiet-looking in my
plain black dress. The virile Scotch-Canadian curl is brushed and
brushed out of my hair to make it lie smooth and discreet over my
ears and forehead. My feet are shod daintily like a charming girl’s.
My nails are pinkly polishedly pointed. My narrow black eyebrows
look nearly patrician in their sereneness. My lips are stilly sad.
My eyelids droop like the sucking dove’s. But my gray eyes beneath
the lids--when I raise them to the glass, my own Essence looks out
of them, tiredly vivid. It seems made of languor and barbaricness
and despair: and vague guiltiness, and some pure disastrous heathen
religion, and lust: and lurid consciousness of everyday things and
smouldering melancholy and blazing loving hatred of life.

My gray eyes out-look the wildcat’s on a twilight hill.

But--so far as the Sitting goes--I sit here in my Neat Blue Chair
the same as they all sit in any-colored chairs in their Wichitas and
La Crosses.

_A lost person_

                                                        To-morrow

I am wandering about, a Lost Person, wandering and lost.

Not magnificently lost in wide Gothic forest closes, with strong
great blackish green trunks and branches all around overwhelming and
thrilling me.

Not dramatically lost on desert reefs with breakers riding up like
menacing hosts and joyously drowning me.

But lost surprisingly in a small clump of shoulder-high hazel-brush.
In it are some wood-ticks, and a few caterpillars, and a few wan
spiders which spin little desultory webs from twig to twig and then
abandon them for other twigs. Underfoot are unexpected wet places at
intervals that my high hard heels sink into exasperatingly.

I walk round and round and across in the hazel-brush groping and
knowing I’m lost in it but knowing little else of it: knowing no way
out of it.

The bushes bear green leaves--rather small ones and warped because
the clump is in a half-shaded place back of a hill. And they bear
hazel-nuts, but not very good ones--mostly shell.

_A thin damnedness_

                                                        To-morrow

I own Two plain black Dresses and none besides.

And I need no more.

In which two sentences I touch the crux and the keynote and the thin
damnedness of my life as it is set: of my life, not of myself, for
myself lives naked inside the circle of my life.

But my outer life is spaced by my Two plain Dresses. My Two Dresses
measure how far removed I presently am from the wide world of things.

In the world of things a woman is judged not specifically by her
morals: not invariably by her reputation: not absolutely by her
money: not indubitably by her social prestige: only relatively by her
beauty: and as to her brain or lack of it--la-la-la! She is judged in
the matter-world simply, completely, entirely by her clothes. It is
tacitly so agreed and decreed all over the earth--wherever women are
of the female sex and men pursue them.

It is no injustice to any woman. It is the fairest fiat in the
unwritten code.

Only a few women, the few specialized breeds, can express the fire
or the humanness in them by play-acting or suffragetting or singing
or painting or writing or trained-nursing or house-keeping. But
there’s not one--from a wandering Romany gypsy, red-blooded and
strong-hearted, to an over-guarded overbred British princess--who
doesn’t express what she is in the clothes she wears and the way she
wears them.

Her clothes conceal and reveal, artfully and contradictorily and
endlessly.

It is all a limitless field.

No actor could act Hamlet without that perfect Hamletesque black
costume.

A nun’s staid beautiful habit interprets her own meanings within and
without.

A woman naked may look markedly pure: the same woman clothed
conventionally and demurely may achieve a meanly ghoulishly foul
seeming.

One either is made or marred by one’s habiliments.

A woman by her raiment’s make and manner can express more of her wit,
her ego, her temper, her humor, her plastic pulsating personality
than she could by throwing a bomb, by making a good or bad pudding,
by losing her chastity or by traducing her neighbor. The germ and
shadow and likelihood of each of those acts is in the fashion and
line and detail of her garments.

A jury thinks it tries a woman for a crime. Some of the twelve good
and true may admit each to himself that they are trying the color of
her eyes or the shape of her chin or the droop of her shoulders. But
it’s only her clothes they unwittingly try for murder or theft or
forgery, or whatever has tripped her. It may be an alluringly shabby
little dress that saves her from the gallows. It may be a hat worn at
the wrong angle that is found guilty and sentenced to death. A glove
in her lap, a fluttering veil, a little white handkerchief dropped to
the floor by her chair--those are what the court tries for life or
liberty.--

But it is I I tell about, I and my Two plain Dresses.

In me a smart frock or an unbecoming one makes a surprising
difference. I impress my costume with my mixed temperament and it
retaliates in kind.

One day I looked a beautiful young creature--one August Saturday in
New York it was--in a tailored gown of embroidered linen. With it I
wore such a good hat: its color was pale olive: its texture was soft
Milan straw: its price was forty dollars. My shoes were gray silk. I
so fancied myself that day that I feared lest my writing talent had
gone away from me. For God takes away the beer if he gives you the
skittles. And in ill-conditioned clothes--some days the weather, the
devil, the soddenness of life get into one’s garments and make even
fair ones look ill-conditioned--I am plain-faced, plain all over--so
plain that the villainies of my nature feel doubtful and I half-think
I may be a good woman.

In a life full of people I would own varied delicate beautiful
clothes since it is by them one is judged, and since I am quite
vain. But no people are in my life. I feel deadlocked. I am caught in
a vise made by my own analytic ratiocination. I am not free to live a
world-life till I’ve someway expressed Me and learned if not whither
I go at least where I stand.

So it’s Two plain Dresses I own and none besides.

It may be I shall not ever again need more.

The Two Dresses are at present of serge and voile. Their identity
changes with change of fashion and with wearing out. They are cut
well and fit me well. But the Two does not change, nor the plainness.
I change only from one Frock to the other and from the other to the
one again.

I have various other clothes. A woman--whatever her traits and
tempers--garners what she can of handmade under-linens and dainty
nightgowns and silk hose and all such private panoply. They are the
apparel of her sex rather than her individuality. The uncognizant
world is unable to judge her by them. But the woman herself judges
and respects herself by the goodness of her intimate garments.

My sex is to me a mystic gift. I marvel over it and clothe it
silkenly.

Also I own a healthful-looking percale house-gown or two in which I
do housework.

But my passing life, my eerie lonely life, is lived in my Two Dresses
and none besides, and I need no more.

_A prison of self_

                                                        To-morrow

My Two Dresses tell me the scope of my present Mary-Mac-Lane-ness.

Every day they tell me things about myself.

They tell me I’m living in a prison of self, invisible and ascetic
and somberly just.

They tell me I’m living an outer life narrow and broodingly
companionless and that if I were not self-reliant by long habit a
leprous morbidness would rot me in body and spirit.

They tell me because of outer solitude an inner fever of emotion and
egotism and a fervid analytic light are on all my phases of self:
mental, physical, psychical and sexual.

They tell me my way of thought is at once meditative and
cave-womanish.

They tell me I’m all ways the Unmarried Woman and profoundly
loverless.

They tell me I’m like a child and like a sequestered savage.

They tell me I am having no restful unrealities of social life with
chattering women and no monotonous casually bloodthirsty flirtations
with men.

They tell me I walk daily to the edges of myself and stare into
horrible-sweet egotistic abysses.

They tell me I’m grave-eyed and coldly melancholy.

They tell me there’s a bereftness in the curves of my breasts and an
unfulfillment in my loose-girt loins.

They tell me I am barren of sensation and fertile in feeling.

They tell me God has taken away the beer and also the skittles and
left me only pieces of bread and drinks of water.

_A winding sheet_

                                                        To-morrow

The least important thing in my life is its tangibleness.

The only things that matter lastingly are the things that happen
inside me.

If I do a cruel act and feel no cruelty in my Soul it is nothing. If
I feel cruelty in my Soul though I do no cruel act I’m guilty of a
sort of butchery and my spirit-hands are bloody with it.

The adventures of my spirit are realer than the outer things that
befall me.

To dwell on the self that is known only to me--the self that is
intricate and versatile, tinted, demi-tinted, deep-dyed, luminous,
gives me an intimate delectation, a mental inflorescence and
sometimes an exaltation. It is not always so but it can be so. But
always to look back on the mass of outer events that have made my
tangible life darkens my day.

Introspection throws a witching spell around me, though it may be a
black one.

But retrospection wraps me in a Winding Sheet.

When the day is already dark from low-hanging clouds--and often when
the sun is bright, bright, bright--I walk my floor and think of my
scattered life-flotsam with a frown at the eyebrows: a coarse and
heavy and twisted frown.

To-day was a leaden day. The air held a quality like the infernal
breath of dead people. I leaned elbows on my dull window-sill and
looked off at green and purple mountains. I tried to think of some
reason--some reason tangible or poetic--for living.

I wore my brocade Chinese coat fastened down the left side with
round flashing glass buttons and embroidered with blue bats and
gardenias: and with it a crinkly crêpe-silk petticoat: and silk
shoes and respectable white silk stockings. I felt righteous because
in the forenoon I had done much housework. I worked thoroughly and
well, swearing and repeating poetry softly to lend me impetus. And
afterward I felt useful and good.

But having changed from Dutch cap and apron and domesticness to
scented silk and my sad window I grew suddenly frail and vulnerable.
Shadows stormed my wall and scaled it and entered in and sacked my
castle. I lounged away from my window, folded my arms in my loose
blue sleeves and slowly walked my floor. I had no strength within to
combat shadows.

I picked up two alien shreds, of lint and paper respectively, from
the rug, but inside me undigested and indigestible memories had their
own way.

They brought close an unsatisfying and dissatisfying vista of Mary
MacLanes.

There was a stubborn baby in Winnipeg-Canada, as I’ve heard, a baby
with a white skin, coldly pensive dark-blue eyes, no hair, no voice,
hand-worked muslin frocks and a fat lumpish mien.

It was this Mary MacLane.

There was a three-year-old child, as I dimly remember, still in
Canada and still stubborn, with a stout keg-like pink-and-white body,
baffling blue eyes, a tiny voice, thick sun-colored curls, cambric
frocks and short white socks and a morose temper. She had one love,
a yellow tortoise-shell kitten which she hugged and hugged with
violence until one day it died surprisingly in her arms.

It was this Mary MacLane.

There was a seven-year-old child in Minnesota, as I well remember,
still stubborn and still often morose, with a thin bony little body,
conscious gray eyes, a tanned face, weather-beaten hands, untidy
frocks, beautiful fluffy golden hair, a tendency to secretiveness and
lies, a speculative mind, fantastic day-dreams and a free hoydenish
way of life. She had playmates but no loves except an objective love
for quiet greenwoods and sweet meadows and windy hills and hay-filled
barns, and for the surface details of life. She had subjective
hatreds for being fussed over, for being teased and for relatives.

It was this Mary MacLane.

There was a thirteen-year-old person, as I well remember, in a
windy Montana town, who was neither girl, child nor savage but
was a mixture of the three. She had a devilish contrary will and
temper, the unenlightened inexpressive wholly unattractive face and
features of early adolescence, a self-love that had not the dignity
of egotism and a devouring appetite for reading. She read everything
she happened on--from Voltaire to Nick Carter: from ‘Lady Audley’s
Secret’ to Fox’s Book of Martyrs. She read Alexander Pope and Victor
Hugo and John Stuart Mill. She read ‘Lena Rivers’ by Mary J. Holmes:
also Confucius: and the Brothers Grimm. She had a long-legged lanky
frame, conscious gray eyes, lovely coppery-gold dark hair and a silly
headful of tangled irrational thoughts. She had pathetic impossible
day-dreams. She had few companions and no loves but much hatred for
most things sane, sensible and honest.

It was this Mary MacLane.

There was an eighteen-year-old girl in this Butte, as I well
remember, with the outward savagery tamed out of her by studiousness.
She was slim but no longer lanky and owned a white-hot aliveness
and a grace. She had repelling gray eyes and the beautiful coppery
hair, and about her an isolation, a complete aloofness. Her spirit
fed itself on wonderful and exquisite dreams alternated by moods
of young passionate woe, analyzed and torn to shreds: all of it hid
beneath a very quiet surface. She had outwardly a tense markedly
virginal quality but was inwardly insolently demi-vierge. She had no
companions, no friendships. She absorbed herself in digging knowledge
out of her high school text-books, studying and imagining over it,
and wandering in the fascinating highways which it opened to her. She
was at her moment of brain-awakening, soul-awakening, sex-awakening,
life-awakening, world-awakening: it uncurtained windows of magic
old sorrow for her to look from. She had no characteristic
weaknesses--she was strongly and scornfully courageous. It and the
need of self-expression, born of her teeming spirit and life-long
suppression of it, led her to write herself out in a book, which was
published. It was a poetic book and had insight and vision and a riot
of color with youth as its keynote. And it was human and figuratively
and literally full of the devil. The far-and-wide public in England
and America read it, and the newspapers made a loud noise about it
and the lonely girl who wrote it found herself oddly notorious. It
brought money which made her free of Butte and it brought human
things into her life which changed her life forever. And it brought
her no inner or outer excitement or elation.

It was this Mary MacLane.

There was a girl of six-and-twenty in Boston and in New York who had
half-forgot her long-familiar Ego for several years. She lived and
moved in folly and triviality and falseness. From having had too
few companions she had too many who did her no good and no harm but
helped her waste passing days and dissipate her moods and mental
tissues. She had grown worldly in taste, weak in manner of thought,
fragile in body from a mad irregularity of food and sleep, and in
every attribute uncertain of herself. Her Soul lay sleeping: her
Heart because it felt too keenly worked overtime: nothing engaged her
Mind. But her analytic trend stayed by and with it she pulled to bits
the varied fragmentary things she encountered. She learned New York
town in human sordid enlightening disciplining ways. She learned
people of many kinds in many ways. She learned other young women,
which depressed and exhilarated and perplexed her. She learned men--a
race whose make and motive toward women bears no analysis. She had
not the usual defensive armor of the normal woman, for she was not a
normal woman but certain trends of varying individuals gathered into
one sensitive woman-envelope. She was careless toward men in their
crude sex-rapacity in ways no ‘regular’ woman would dare or care to
be. No man could wring one tear from her, nor cause a quickening of
her foolish Heart, nor any emotion in her save mirth. And there were
women friends-- There were some friendships whose ill effects she
will never recover from, from having bestowed too much of herself on
them in the headlong newness of knowing and owning friendship after
her long young loneliness.

--she could not cherish anything sanely. She couldn’t stand in her
doorway and watch a pretty bird flying above a green hedge, and
admire it for the gleam of its brilliant wings in the sun, and let
it go. She must needs run out--leaving her door standing open and
tea-and-cakes untasted within--and follow where the bird flew,
through mire and brier, round the world--

From the odd notoriety were many letters and experiences and
adventures. She met some famous persons--writers, actors, artists--of
agreeable philosophic plaisances. She saw her book of youth
burlesqued with artistic piquance in the Weber-and-Fields show of
its season (with one Collier, adroitest of comedians, cast as her
long-lost Devil). There was a hasty voyage to the edge of Europe--a
voyage of terrific seasickness lying in her stateroom: a half-glimpse
of Paris all gray and green in the rain: a whole glimpse of London,
mystic, Dickensesque and roundly British in its yellow-brown fog: and
back again within ten days with more berth-ridden seasickness lasting
from Cherbourg to New York harbor: the whole adventure grown from a
Spring morning impulse. There were winters in Florida at sun-flooded
resort towns full of gaudiness and gambling and surprising
winter-resort people. Those were mongrel wastrel years empty of
every realness, every purpose, every vantage: they filled her with a
bastard wisdom.

It was this Mary MacLane.

There was a girl of seven-and-twenty worn to psychic fragments and
returned on a winter’s day in a mood of indifference to this Butte.
It was her first return since she and her book had gone forth eight
years before. She celebrated it by being brought low with a baleful
blood-sucking demon of illness, what is called scarlet fever. Borne
upon by the mountain altitude after sea-levels and getting in the
way of epidemic germs, she had no chance. A strong feverish serpent
wound itself around her, consuming and destroying. There were
tortured dying weeks. She had never been ill before in all her life.
This was the most crucial bodily adventure she had known. It opened
a new and dreadful world. There was no passing of time in those
long, long weeks, no rational thinking, no day, no night, no dark,
no morning, no memory. There was pain, and utter weariness, and a
feeling of being hurried to her grave. There was an air of hurry
in the stillness around, as if she and Death had made a date which
she would be late in keeping unless she were urged on. There was a
doctor, and a crisp white starched nurse, and there were interminable
bitter drugs and tall narrow glasses of monotonous milk. She was
endlessly disturbed by milk and medicine, and by cold spongings
and changings of feverish bed-linens, and anointings with olive
oil, and takings of her temperature, and sprayings of her throat:
when she wanted only to sink down, down, forever and forever to the
underworld. She almost sank. But God capriciously decided he had
other plans for her--insomuch as decreeing she was not to be let
go then. After seven weeks she tiredly rose from her bed and took
stock of herself. Her rôle then was of a horrible yellow skeleton
with negative gray eyes, a wreck of tissue and vitality such as only
scarlet fever can achieve, and her beautiful thick coppery hair
changed to a strange short mouse-colored tangle. She was a long time
recovering. The scarlet demon changed her life and its meanings and
energies and outlooks more effectually than if she had been trapped
by a game-at-law and gaols and courts had had their toll of her.
But after months, a year and a half of months, her health came back
perfect if not vigorous, and her good looks--the few she ever had,
and even the humanizing incongruous curls, though changed, grew long
and covered her head again in a heathen frivol. A so magnificent
mystery is this blood-and-flesh. It grows up again out of its ashes.
Burn all of it but one cell in the scorchingest sickness and so that
bones are still whole it will renew itself from that, perfect as the
sweet-bay. But this mind, less magnificent and less mysterious and
more delicate and dubious, rallies only by aid of the heart beneath
it and the soul beyond it. Her mind came slowly out of darkened
apathy. It lived in a high-walled cloister telling its languid beads
by rote. But as if it sensed the sweet aura of her renewed body it at
last woke strong and cold overnight and was aware again of itself and
the mourning magic of being.

It was this Mary MacLane.

And after a year or two more it is this Mary MacLane.

It is I myself.

I walk my floor in leaden retrospect-days with a feel in my throat of
damned and damning unfulfillment and at my eyebrows the twisted frown.

In it is dread and anguish and worriment: in it is hideous altering
breaking prepollence of death.

--if my hair, just my hair, had not come back after that red fever
I’d have decided--not capriciously like God but determinedly like
myself--to have died by my own hand one night. It is no brave
thought and it would have been no brave deed. Though it wants a
lowering courage to leave life when, despite all, one loves its very
textureless _color_, its bodiless air: not to speak of the yellow hot
deathless sunshine that can not reach one in her dark grave--

But the look and feel of my hair are the look and feel of positive
life, opposed to death.

To live up to my hair would keep me brave.

But the retrospects, which I can’t escape, come and wrap me in the
Winding Sheet.

_The Dover road_

                                                        To-morrow

I lay down at noonday on my green couch and I had a quaint dream.
I have just awakened from it in a flush of languor and comfort.
And the dream is vivid in my mind. I dreamed I was married and it
was pink-and-pearl dawn in my married bed-room. And in the bed one
inch away from mine was not my married husband but ‘another man.’
It was no man I can recall having seen. As I look back into the
dream he seems of the nowhere, a stranger. But in the dream he was
no stranger. I had crudely admitted him to my night. And I had just
awakened in the pink-and-white dawn and was sitting silk-gowned and
ruffle-haired in my bed, cross-legged like a tailor with my elbows
on my knees and my chin on my palms, idly contemplating him. And
he was lying in the other narrow bed contemplating me and smiling
a little. He had nice teeth and yellowish hair. The crux of the
dream was the sound ‘off-stage’ of the approaching footsteps of
monsieur-the-husband. As it always is in the psychology of dreams
the insistent thing in the situation was not the footsteps, nor even
that they were approaching, but the sound: the elusive threat of
their sound. He would presently discover us. Nobody appeared to care:
not ‘another man’ smiling so tranquilly: not I sitting musingly
overlooking him who had overnight ‘enjoyed me’: not the husband,
because he never knew it--before he could open the guilty door I
awoke.

A short-cut gently headlong dream. I was at once married, mixed
adulterantly with an imperfect stranger and awaiting in pleasant mild
anticipation, to match the pink-and-pearl of the summer dawn, the
climax in the approaching sound of my husband’s footsteps. It was
humorous and artistic. Unseemly preliminaries were done away with in
that dream. I was given at once the one exciting worthwhile moment
in it.

Having no data as to what were my husband’s temper and tenor, what
he looked like or who he was, I could not in the dream or out of it
surmise what he would say or how he would act when he opened the door.

--a theme for idling speculation in a summer’s day--

Also I wonder whence came that dream: so Unexpected: so Irrelevant to
any thought in me: so Artistically Right: so Disgusting: so Dramatic:
so quaintly Vulgar.

A question: to which the one answer is that unanswerable answer to
all questions, propounded by Mr. F.’s Aunt--‘There’s milestones on
the Dover road.’

_The harp of worn strings_

                                                        To-morrow

May I own no unleavened egotism.

May I own no egotism that is not sensitive and poignant and vibrant:
a harp of Worn Strings.

The surprising world is full of non-analytic persons of ox-eyed
vision and hen-headed mental caliber whose egotism is a stupendous
impregnable armor: those who burned the Maid of Orleans: those who
crucified the prophet of Nazareth: those who killed John Keats.

They inherit the earth, which is a Golden-Green earth, but never look
at it.

They accept this life, which is Intoxicating life, but never feel its
texture with their fingers.

They gather a Blue iris by a marsh-edge and let it die in their
sweating hands, or let it fall to the ground as they walk, or throw
it away when the Blue petals droop: without looking at it and
breathing it and knowing it: without sensing the tremulous Blue to be
lovelier in its wilting.

Theirs is the thick fat solidly-fierce egotism of an emperor or an
infant whose main metaphysic concept is that _he_ is alive, and will
remain alive, and must be alive, though all around him bleed drop by
drop to their death.

I have analyzed mine, and it is not so with me.

If I say I am enchanting or false or despicable it is because I know
it’s true. Not because I say it but because I have tested and proved
it. I feel the textures of my life with the tips of my fingers. I
turn my senses outward and let the old winds blow over them--icy,
balmy, harsh, gentle, scorching, cooling. I suffer for it but I know
those winds: songs of seas and stars and of little pebbles are in
their thunderous-dim wailing: life is in the soft stinging perfume of
their wings.

No breath of poetry and beauty comes to me that I do not pay for with
the beating ache of my Heart, the nervous tensions of my Body, the
fraying and shredding of my Soul. If any beauty or poet-thing comes
easily and gives me pleasure and not pain, I know I have not yet got
it and that it will come again.

It will come again: with the pain.

I can’t eat cake and have it.

I can’t make silk purses out of sows’ ears.

Those things I learn nearly perfectly from playing on my harp with
the Worn Strings.

_A strongly-windy Saturday_

                                                        To-morrow

It is a strongly-windy Saturday.

A thought achieves itself in my roiled-and-placid brain: that one
half of me is Mad, but the other half is doubly Sane and someway
over-Sane, so that in it all I break a little better than even.

_A someway separate individual_

                                                        To-morrow

This Body I live in is familiar and mysterious.

It is like a book of poetry to read and read again.

It has the owned sentientness of bone-and-flesh, and with it tremors
fine as spirit-emotions.

My Body is more chaste than my Mind, my Heart and my Soul. My Body if
fragile is healthful, and is one with the woman-race: it moves with
the sunlit cosmos. My Mind wanders in sex-chaos and muses on piquant
impure things, enchanting villainies, odd inversions, whatnot. My
Soul--a sweet and an exquisite Thing--its tired wings have borne it
languidly down the dim stairways of many centuries, some leading in
wilful perverted ways. And my Heart is a pagan Heart. Its essence is
flavored with the day and lyric trail of the Sapphic students.

Bodily I am also pagan in the freedom of my owned sex feelings--as
are all women. Most of them do not know it and those who do hide it
in a tomb-like silence, except the brazen, the headlongly honest and
the artlessly frank. I come under none of those heads. I am myself. I
live and ponder alone.

And my Body feels consciously aloof and as a someway separate
individual: with inner organs as eternal hopes, smooth skin as
emotion and drops of blood as thoughts--little drops of sparkling red
virile sweet blood for its thoughts.

I so _love_ my Body as it lives and breathes and moves about, with me
and close to me. It is my so constant companion. It is an attractive
girl, a human being of some charm. I love it for the priceless air
it breathes and the long jewel-days of sunshine it has known: for
the tiny wears and tears of its daily life--the rending of its
magic tissues with each going-up-or-down-stairs, each crossing of
a door-sill. I love it for that it must lie at last pale, pale and
still--still--still--in its grave.

I love my Body for its woman-complexities of sex. I love it for the
lonely lyric poetry of its cell-adventures.

I love my Body for this long journey of woe and loveliness which
it goes, from Birthday to Death-day, in wilding passions of subtle
nervousness: each day a day of bodily beauty and intolerableness and
fear and utter mystery: because life _is_, and because I own a white
smooth-skinned Body, and because the strange, strange Air of Everyday
breathes on it--touches it--always!

_Sincerity and despair_

                                                        To-morrow

I am a true Artist, not as a writer but as a writing-person.

I try to feel myself literarily a poet--finer-made than a god. But I
fail as a poet-litterateur as I fail as a poet-person. A poet flies
always on wings of fiery gold though it might be waywardly. But often
I walk with my feet in odd gutters, and have some plaisance in them,
and analyze their gutteriness absorbedly and own them as part of my
portion.

--poet or no poet, it is best to be myself. In heights and murks and
widths and trivial horrors, _myself_--

But as an Artist I am in the true. As a painter of words and maker of
paragraphs which picture my phases and emotions, and in my conscious
feeling anent it, I realize the artist _flair_, the artist temper. It
is not a literary but a personal art.

I have what goes with all artist-matter--long periods of dry-rot when
having nothing ripe to write I write nothing. My Artist-spirit proves
itself, justifies itself in my times of stagnation and reaction. Out
of it something human and sad and lustrous grows in me, something
which is half worldly but awaits its ripe time of expression with
someway-divine scorn.

I once thought me destined to be a ‘writer’ in the ordinary sense.
And many good people visioned a writing career for me. It has a vapid
taste, just to recall it. My flawed life has that to felicitate
upon--that I have not spent it in fat lumps of writing, magazine
tales and sex-novels. In the days, and later, when my demi-vierge
book made its success I was besought by publishers to write
others--to go on, to reap and garner. I pushed all that away with a
preoccupied hand, not as part and parcel of my wastrel living but in
my assured Artist-temper. I should feel more true-to-form to earn
my living by making linen roses in a shop, along with rows of pale
women, than by my writing.

My writing is to me a precious thing--and a rare bird--and a
Babylonish jade. It demands gold in exchange for itself. But though
it is my talent it is not my living. It is too myself, like my
earlobes and my throat, to commercialize by the day.

But I can not think of me as an Artist without thinking of me as a
Liar. The two are someway related. I am an appalling, an encompassing
Liar. I am a Liar by the clock. My life ticks out silent lies as my
little clock ticks out seconds. It is a phase hard to put my finger
on. I feel it on me the way I feel a headache. I write this book
with seriousness and earnestness. It is all a mood of sincerity and
despair. But except I give it some backgrounding of lies, though
each thing in it is fair fact, I fail as an Artist.

It is strange about lies--any lies, all lies. They are muscularly
stronger than truths. They come more readily to human tongues. They
fit more easily into the games of this life. And in me they seem
needful to my Artist mind.

I mean not the lies I may tell but the lies I think.

I mean not my falseness. That is a different thing, one I feel
someway responsible for. But the thinking lies feel to be a heritage
from ancient evil selves.

I lie to myself, to the air around me--I blow lies into space from my
quiet lips. And one half of me knows them for lies and the other half
of me _believes_ them.

Those half-known lies, the _need_ of the lies half-believed, are the
realization of an essential Artist-spirit.

The oblique belief in them and the recognition of them as lies
proclaim me to myself, as a writing-person: Liar and Artist.

_It’s not death_

                                                        To-morrow

It’s not Death I fear, nor Life.

I horridly fear something this side of Death but out-pacing Life a
little: a nervousness in my Stomach--a very Muddy Street--a Lonely
Hotel Room.

_A human prerogative_

                                                        To-morrow

It is a quiet deep of night. A bell has just tolled two.

I am clothed in cool bedroom negligées and a softening sweetness of
cold cream, from head to foot.

I am tranquil for to-day I had a walk that made me feel Sincere and
Safe.

It is a comforting feeling: it is like a beef-sandwich.

It was a long walk south-east of Butte along an outskirting road
where I used often to walk when I was sixteen--a broad gray desert.
It was the same sand and barrenness. It was bare and withered as if a
giant coyote had picked its rocky ribs.

The day was windy and dusty. The sunshine was thick and sweet and
heavy like floating honey. The dust that blew against the white of my
neck was like ground glass.

My feet ached as I walked.

My shoes were Cuban-heeled thick-soled pumps of corded silk, a kind
easy to walk in. But the same feet which once readily bore me seven
miles along that road ache now at three. All of me ached as I walked
along. I cursed desultorily with a smooth whispered flow of curses,
because the circumstances seemed to demand it. But I loved the
walk--even the more for my tired feet and my aching knees and my
irking drooping shoulders and the hot glazed sand against my throat.

My Soul tasted realness in it.

Quite close to me, in immense sad beauty, were the deep high heavy
silent somber hills of Montana. To-day the nearer ones were a stately
enchanted Blue: a Blue of all ages: a Blue of infinitude: a Blue with
a feel of life and death in its Blueness. Above it the sky was not
blue but a pale glimmering shimmering silver hung across with gray
silk clouds soft as doves’ plumage.

I sat on a flat rock and looked at all of it and at the desert
around, and at my dusty shoes.

All of it felt overwhelmingly sincere: at one with the wide worn used
earth.

My dusty shoes looked to be at one with it and could interpret it.

I felt my shoes could claim their human prerogative of getting dusty
in any of this world’s roads.

It gave me a feeling of human Sincerity: good-and-evil Safeness.

It is on me now, along with cold cream and strong memory of Desert
and Sun and Blue.

It is as good as a beef-sandwich.

Better: I don’t like beef-sandwich.

_The merciless beauty_

                                                        To-morrow

Sometimes the dusk is full of fire.

Some dusks I sit by my window looking out and hotly and coldly want a
Lover: hotly with my Body and coldly with my Mind.

A dusk has just gone. I sat looking out at it.

A mist of dark cream tinged with heated violet came from nowhere and
hung above the ground.

Suddenly came on me a sense of bewildering mysterious beauty.

In it was a feel of rippling warmth that crept into my bone-and-flesh
from forehead to heel, from temples to soles, from crown to toe-tips.

It crept slow and suffocating like magic chloroform.

I leaned elbows on window-sill and chin on palms and sunk my gaze
in the violet shades outside and straightway knew I wanted a Lover:
not in delicate moonlit culmination like Juliet in her balcony: not
denyingly like the timid young nun in her cloister assailed unaware
by faint forbidden emotions.

I wanted a Lover like the jungle leopard leaping through the
Springtime covert at nightfall to find her mate.

It is a subtle and an obvious feeling, made of a merciless beauty.

It is the tired urge of sex-tissues and nerve-cells: positive,
furious, fiery as the bloodiest sun.

It is the same which the heated leopard feels in her sharp immaculate
lust. It is quite the same--but it could not move me as I sat alone
loverless to the knitting of an eyebrow, to a change of posture, a
movement of elbows on the window-sill or of palms beneath my chin.
Nor could it, though the potential Lover had stood outside my window.

For any woman of any charm the world is full of Lovers: each and
all to be had by the flutter of her finger, the droop of her white
eyelids, the trembling of her pink-bowed lips. The world is full of
them--facile Lovers, craven, potent and pinchbeck. And it’s that kind
I want hotly with my Body, coldly with my Mind in dusks of rippling
warmth--rippling, rippling warmth--

I want the Lover as the leopard wants hers. But I’m not a leopard:
instead, a woman-person of keen sentientness and wild wistful
imagination. So I wouldn’t so much as crook a finger to call a Lover
to me: a curious nervous inertia.

It’s only I _want_ the Lover with frantic blind cosmic ardors
inside me.

I analyze it in my magic Mind and find I would call no Lover.
I analyze farther and find I’d reject all but an impossible
one-in-ten-thousand. But remains the desire, hot as live embers,
cold as hail.

Sex is an odd attribute. It has been to me like a blest impediment
and a celestial incumbrance and a radiant curse.--

When I was seventeen I stood on a threshold and peered curiously into
a dim-lit strange-scented Room.

It was unknown to me then. My mind alone bespoke it. As I stood at
its doorway the air it wafted out touched my sense with only the
lightest frayed-cobweb contact, unintelligible and unenlightening. I
had lived an emptily alone girlhood. I was icily virginal.

At five-and-twenty I crossed the Room’s threshold. I breathed
lightly the odd fragrance. I looked curiously around. I touched some
amorous-looking grapes and some love-promising apples that lay about:
I bit into one and burst a grape with my finger and thumb. I gathered
a weak-petaled flower or two. I gauged the Room and its furnishments
and was unthrilled by anything in it. Even bodily it left me
unthrilled.

Those two memory-mists do not keep me in the now-dusk and in the
strength and terror and fire of top-most youth from wanting a sudden
Lover with all that’s in my Body.

Love has naught to do with it. Love is a flame-winged Bird. I know
it. I know the values of my life and of me. I do not mistake tapers
for torches, ducats for louis d’ors, vicarious nepenthe for dreamless
death.

In dusk-moments my bone-and-flesh is all of me I’m sure of. It begins
and ends in this earth. It answers the violent summonses of this
earth and its dusks.

In the just-gone dusk I felt the prickling blood flow to my
finger-ends. A flood-tide, blinding red, surged and seethed and
bubbled and pounded at my heart.

‘I want a Lover--some Lover’--I murmured to the shadows beyond my
window.

I grew breathless.

The spirit of my flesh rose like a wind-blown flame.

A loud cry rang in my nerve-wilderness.

That moment the variant analysis which always rides with me stopped
dead.

There came instead sheer feeling--the merciless beauty.

--a man-person, maybe--the man of happy unanalytic brutality--to be
suddenly there with me: to flash into my shadowy solitude like a
lightning bolt and burst and break me.

--a quarter-hour of exquisite wildness--restlessness, made of
Star-flame and Lily-petal and Cloud-burst on Mountain-summits and
Sea-waves purple in a Stormy Dawn--an intolerable hunger and ecstasy--

But just gone and I sit writing it in the pale cast of thought.

But breathlessly I recall the breathlessness of it.

_My shoes_

                                                        To-morrow

I love my Shoes.

I love them because they so guard my feet.

I walk many a mile along the stone pavements and into distant odd
streets and on open roads at the outskirts of this Butte.

And while I walk I think.

I think things of a great many kinds--potent and magic and mad.
The act of walking starts an engine in my sparkling infernal mind.
And the weight and the sting and the hurt and the fascination of
my walking thoughts bear down on my slim feet as they carry me
along. And the hard-beaten world beneath them feels resentful and
uncomplaisant to my soles.

And then I look down at my Shoes with their trim tailored vamps and
their walk-worthy soles and instantly my feet feel secure against
evil, smartly protected from my thoughts and from the world’s
surface: my thoughts which shoot down on them out of my devilish
brain and the world-hardness beneath them.

To-day I was walking along the road that leads up the ever-wonderful
Anaconda Hill--a place of stones and sand-wastes and hoists and
scaffoldings and mines with ten thousand digging men thousands
of feet down in their metallic bowels. Close by were melancholy
mulberry-toned mountains at the north-east. They were tragic,
triumphant, grief-stricken, terrifyingly beautiful. Purple clouds
hung around them like mourning veils. I can’t look enough at
those--it is as if there weren’t enough looking-power in my human
gray eyes.

Presently I came to a small open space as I walked, a toy desert. A
toy desert is more like a desert than is a real one. The sand in it
is grayer sand. The stones are abrupter. The sun is flatter-looking.
The air is less willing to furnish breath to a human being. The best
that could be said of this one is that it was intolerably desolate. I
looked about and about it. And suddenly I was afraid. Afraid of many
things: afraid of grief-stricken mountains: afraid of my life and
of Me.

I leaned against a yellow ledge of rock with a subtle sickening
faintish feeling. ‘I am afraid,’ I said inside me, ‘of this world and
this life, and of all things little and large--nerves and Christmas
days and poetry: toy deserts and all. How can I cope with it--I
alone?’

Then I looked down at my Shoes of black soft dull leather and cloth,
buttoned snugly around my ankles and with tough supple soles fit to
take me to Jericho and back. Thus neatly armored I felt suddenly my
blue-veined feet need fear nothing from sand and stone and hardness
of ground. And if my feet are not afraid--my feet which bear weights
of all-of-me--why should afraidness touch my spirit which is proud?

There will be always Shoes in the world: stout stylish serviceable
boots, and pale delicate rat-skin pumps, and satin mule-slippers.

And always I shall have Shoes: in toy deserts I shall have black
strong snug-buttoned ones.

I looked at them in this toy-desert and straightway I wasn’t afraid.

It has been often like that.

So I love my Shoes.

_An eerie quality_

                                                        To-morrow

When I was Ten years old I played marbles ‘for keeps,’ smoked
little pieces of rattan buggywhip in the hay-scented barn and slid
‘belly-buster’ down long winter hills on my sled. And I hammered and
sawed ruinously with grownup tools, whistling happily. And I played
with dolls absorbedly for hours on end.

I was not boyish and not girlish.

I was not childish except for an oddly hungry child-heart.

I was myself.

So long ago and longer I consciously owned an eerie quality which
toppled over the edge of my humanness.

And still own it.

_A helliad_

                                                        To-morrow

This noonday as I sat on the veranda two young lads stopped by the
stone coping which borders this front yard, and conversed. One was
eager-looking and about eleven years old. The other was perhaps
thirteen and morose and he had a small rifle which he polished with a
bit of waste, not lifting his gaze as they talked.

Said the younger boy: ‘Say-Frank, I could ’a’ had that old shot-gun
off my dad if I’d ’a’ went after it to Rocker that time.’

‘Like hell you could,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank, you know that Winchester o’ Billy O’Rourke’s?--he made
six bull’s-eyes and one inside ring with it day ’fore yesterday.’

‘Like hell he did,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank, Mexicans and Indians can get a guy ev’ry time with a
long-distance rifle without taking aim through the sight.’

‘Like hell they can,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank, there’s a kid down on South Arizona that’s got a Colt
automatic that’ll hit without him aiming at all.’

‘Like hell there is,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank, you know them little brass machine-guns the militia’s
got?--the bores o’ them things ’re rifled just like this.’

‘Like hell they are,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank, my grandfather in Illinois ’s got a bullet in him he got
at the battle o’ Fredericksburg in the Civil War.’

‘Like hell he has,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank, it costs a hundred-thousand dollars to make a Krupp gun
and eighty dollars ev’ry time you fire it.’

‘Like hell it does,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank, it ain’t a felony to croak a burglar with a gun even if
he’s only breakin’ into somebody else’s house.’

‘Like hell it ain’t,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank, my mother goes huntin’, too--she can shoot rabbits and
ducks on the wing and once she got a deer with that big old .44 o’ my
Uncle Walt’s.’

‘Like hell she did,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank--listen, will you gimme your gun for my bicycle, both my
catcher’s gloves and four dollars when I get paid?’

‘Like hell I will,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank--listen, will you gimme it for my bicycle, my two
catcher’s gloves, four dollars when I get paid and my shepherd pup?’

‘Like hell I will,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank--listen,--and my artificial snake?’

‘Like hell,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank--listen,--and my half o’ Ernest’s camera?’

‘Like hell,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank--listen,--and my last year’s shin-guards?’

‘Like hell,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank--_listen_,--and my _this_ year’s shin-guards?’

‘Like _hell_,’ said Frank.

‘Say-Frank, come right down to it I don’t want a .22. If I get a gun
this year it’ll be a .32.’

‘Like he--’--

Which point I felt to be the too-note of the helliad, so I rose and
came into the house.

I felt replete with rhythm and with a sense of surprising human
attitudes remote from my own.

_Swift go my days_

                                                        To-morrow

Swift, Swift go my days.

By rights I think time should drag with me, for I am wasting my
portion of life as I live it.

But my days pass Swift--Swift, Swift.

They come, they fly away--before I know.

I’m thinking it is Tuesday: but while I’m thinking--Wednesday has
come: and gone: and Thursday is rushing in. Tuesday, blue-and-gold or
gray-and-silver, with its mornings and nights and bits of food and
openings of doors and thinkings: Wednesday with the same equipment:
Thursday the same.

Each day comes and goes like a flash of filmed silvered garbled light.

But there is time in each for me to touch the enchanted Everydayness:
time for the turbulent sly delight of tasting, smelling, feeling the
eternal humors and romances in each small thing near me--my Clock, my
Window, my Jar of Cold Cream, my Two Thumbs. There is time in each
day for it to make me pay a wearing glimmering feverish homage to the
mystic daily godhead.

My life exacts terrific homages from me.

I am wearing out--frailly, tiredly, from a desolate uneasy love of
living.

It is why my days go Swift when by rights time should drag leadenly
in punishment for barbarous futileness.

There is not time-space enough in any of the days sufficient to love
the virile green and the murderous red and the sweet pale surprising
purple in the sunset above the west desert: nor space to love the
smell of a sudden August rain: nor the flaming delicate Idea of the
poet John Keats.

While I’m starting to love each of those to its height of
love-worthiness--the to-day is gone: and the to-morrow, which must
see a new love-game started for each Thing, is come.

But while I say ‘is come’: it’s gone.

So Swift go my days--oh Swift, Swift!

_By the blood of dead Americans_

                                                        To-morrow

Since I wrote the beginning of this there has come the war in Europe:
a war full of suffering brave women and dead children: full of
German greed and cruelty and stupidity and of French gameness and
cheerfulness, French splendor of valor.

It has an effect of some kind on each person who reads so much as its
‘headlines.’

It has the effect on me of making me a jealously patriotic American.

It makes me think of Lexington and Gettysburg with an odd furious
personal shame.

We are Americans not by accident but by the blood of dead Americans.
But we assume it is by accident.

We lie down like a nation of bastards to let the pig-hearted Hun
trample by proxy on our neck.

It was for America to declare war in the same hour the _Lusitania_
passengers met murder.

We were not ‘too proud’ but afraid. Afraid and not ready.

Not ready has no right thing to do with it.

They were not ready at Lexington.

I long with some passion to exchange my two black dresses for two
white ones with red crosses on the sleeves: to serve my country in a
day of death and honor.

It too is all the time under my skin though I write along but in this
flawed song of myself.

_To express me_

                                                        To-morrow

I suppose I’m very lonely.

It is luck--luck from the stars--not to be beset by clusters of
people, people who do their thinking outside their heads, ‘cheerful’
people, people who say ‘pardon me’: all the damning sorts scattered
about obstructing one’s view of the horizons.

But for want of--other, _other_ people--I am intensely lonely.

When I was eighteen I thought I must be the most lonely creature in
this world. I analyzed my life then as now and it by itself had set
me apart. But I stood then as it’s given Youth to stand--on High
Ground. I was strong to endure loneliness while viciously hating
it. There was unaware a hope-colored bliss in my inexperience which
companioned me. I felt it then without knowing I felt it. I can see
that plainly now.

Now also I see plainly and feel plainly that I stand on lower ground,
at poorer vantage. As my bodily strength which was then robust is
now slight. The metaphysic life-shadows reach me more easily. They
have a feel of fatally shutting down, fatefully closing in. They are
the mirages on the dun-colored worldly air near me of my own useless
untoward selves. There is no more the hope-colored bliss.

At eighteen I said to me: ‘I’m lonely but some day I may be happily
friendshiped and apprehended and it will be like paradise.’

Now I say to me: ‘I’m lonely by fate and by nature and temperament. I’ve
known some friendships of vivid alluringness and informingness--they
await me now in the offing. And others. There _is_ paradise in it--an
odd sweet dubious paradise. But what’s the use--?’

It’s that what’s-the-use, born of the lower vantage-ground and
the closing-in shadows, that chiefly makes me lonely--lonely to a
desperateness and on through to a ruinous calm.

It is this metaphysic loneliness which breeds in me one constant
reasonless restless urgent motif: to Express me: not of-the-past
except desultorily, not of-the-future save indifferently: but of
my low-toned, low-echoing now. Until I’ve Expressed me there’s no
setting open the gates of my spirit to a passer-by, though the
passer-by should be a poet-in-the-flesh, a god, an angel with a torch.

Four-and-twenty turbulent moods may break over me in a day, or
four-and-twenty passive ones, or four-and-twenty someway joyous ones.
But like the theme in a fugue this loud tranquil recurrent need to
Express me transcends them all.

It is a big voracious part-human bird of prey. Of it too I say
what’s-the-use. But it is a need without a use, a need scornful of
use. It springs unconceived, unsourced from inside me. It rises from
the ashes of blightingest moods and beats its bruising strong wings
against my face.

It says: ‘Know me, defer to me, Slim-woman. Serve me, follow me,
gather-in all your answers for me. Do this though I undo you, though
I rend you, tear you with my sharp teeth so like a wolf’s. When
you’ve answered me I may let you go. Until then, turn to me. Tell me:
tell me again and again. Utter yourself. Interpret. Unfold.’

It makes my life-space someway sweet, someway heartbreaking, someway
frightful--strewn with dust of broken stars.

I live long hours of nervous profound passionate self-communion. I
discover strange lovely age-worn facets of my Soul. I discover the
subtle panting Ego--the wonderful thing that lives and waits in its
garbled radiance just beneath my skin.

To ask oneself and make answer out of oneself is the most delicious
of this life’s mental delectations. I might have missed it but for
those beating bruising wings against my face, now and years ago: for
expressing breeds the last Expressions.

I might have gone on through years and decades and lumps of months
knowing at best a little of some rare person, a little less or
more of another rare person, a little of a musician’s soul in a
nocturne, a little of a dead poet’s splendors. But to Me and my own
fine spirit-relationships to those things I could remain, but for my
radiant flawed egotistic interpreting, eternally strange.

But for it I’d not have the wit to perceive the one human being in
the world I may know with vitalness: my own Self. I should drop into
my grave at last without a good-by to the glowing one who was locked
just inside, whose hand I’d never clasped, whose sad prescient eyes
I’d never looked in, who was then flitting out and on and away.

It is a being cruel and transfiguring and terrifying: terribly worth
clasping close and breathing with.

And some days it sleeps, sleeps like the dead: it is delicater than
rose-vapors before the dawn: a sun-blown faëry thing.

When it sleeps I’m left alone. Then comes a doubtful dreadful quiet,
a hell of dumbness that only God could reach.

It is as if neither God nor I attempts to cope with it.

_Bastard lacy valentines_

                                                        To-morrow

The thing I admire most is strength. The thing I most hate is
Weakness, of each and every kind.

All the reassuring things in the world are in and of the strong deeds
done in it. All the mischief and despair come from human Weakness.

I would better strongly murder my foe than forgive him Weakly for
my seeming advantage. I would be happier in my mind as a careful
charwoman than as a loose-jointed poet. I would rather have a
farthing’s value as a faithful concubine than no value as a slattern
housewife.

Strength repays itself with strength--and with magnificence.

Truth is strength nearly always: and _not_ always.

To cheat strongly in the life-game gets me more than does Weak easy
honesty. By being a strong man Napoleon brought home the bacon. Being
an honest one would have got him not one rasher of the bacon of _his_
desire. The race is too ridden with ‘temperament’ to let truth be
its prevailing force. But strength plows its scornful way through
temperament like a steam-shovel. The bacon Napoleon brought home he
took from other people, causing them misery. They were Weak and let
him take it, or they were strong and got killed trying to keep it.
To get killed trying to keep your bacon is to be even stronger than
the Napoleon who lives and takes it from you. Those who sit still and
_let_ Napoleon get their bacon are fit only to be themselves made
into bacon.

Truth belongs with love, with friendship, with charity, with psychic
lovingkindness: with all the altruistic graces and tendernesses.

But in the mere grinding livingness of things it is to be strong. I
say to Me, ‘Mary MacLane, be strong: whether you’re living joyous on
a hill or mournful in a valley, make shift to be strong.’

In which paragraphs I make an apologetic preamble to Me when about to
dwell on my odd ironic element of Weakness. My Weakness is not an art
nor a science nor a gift nor a trait but is a sort of ruinous trade
touched with all of those, a trade at which I work and lose heavily
from a viewpoint of personal economy.

In Atlanta-Georgia lives a man with whom I exchange semi-occasional
letters. He is thirty-nine and clever and what is called a business
man. He is a business man not only by circumstance but by nature.
At a glance one would picture him in the setting of an office in
a steel-and-brick building with a roll-top desk, a swivel chair,
a cabinet full of files, a stenographer with an unregenerate
vocabulary, and stationery neatly engraved with his name, his
business, his cable address and his telephone number. The look of the
neat letterhead and the fibrous feel of the bond paper give one the
idea that whoever went into a business venture with him would come
out of it disadvantageously.

After another glance at himself one would infer that his leisure
hours might be fancifully spent. In hours of ease some business men
follow baseball, others golf, ‘tired’ ones musical comedy. Others
take up curio collecting or some personal phantasm. In the latter
category is my acquaintance of Atlanta. He affects Mary MacLane and
musings of her in his leisure hours. But what I am to him does not
concern nor much interest me. What he is to me concerns me, for
he--his letters--are a present source of my elaborated Weakness.

I feel a wave of conscious Weakness washing over me as I write about
it. His letters make a soft buffer, a foolish pretty window, a tinted
veil between me and my too-harsh actualities.

I met him when I lived in New York. He had read the book I wrote
in the early nineteen-hundreds and at meeting me he conceived a
thinly insistent admiration which someway went to his head. He has
at intervals since then written me letters full of charmed and
salubrious flattery and of appreciation and praise for traits and
gifts and qualities which I do not possess. They appeal and cater
remarkably to my vanity--and are pleasant and unreal and vain and
fatuous and fond and piquant.

He is a clever man and does not make love to me. A butcher’s-boy may
write love-letters--and I’d prefer those of a butcher’s-boy to those
of a business man: they would be more sincere and less hopelessly
discreet. But this business man is discerning and intuitive and
writes me no love. His wife--a business man always has a wife--could
not rationally object to what is in the letters, though she would
irrationally and naturally object to the letters themselves. She
is unloving and unloved--they always are--but whatever may be her
caste (I know only that she is tall and blonde and named Bertha)
she doubtless would find something superfluous in the idea of her
husband’s letters to me.

A letter comes from him in Georgia after I have written him a brief
disquieting one with a latent human appeal in it to make him think
the chief thing I need in life is his appreciation, his attitude
toward me, to brace my spirit. Then his comes, written in his small
slanting commercial hand. It is arresting from any angle and well
thought, well couched.

In it he tells me that my brain, scintillantly brilliant though it
is, needs the dim twilights of other brains such as his to catch the
sparks it throws off.

Which is a lie. My brain is not scintillantly brilliant and it
‘needs’ nothing. But the lie is agreeable to read. There is a gentle
caressingness in its untruth which feels someway soothinger than any
flattering fact.

And he tells me my chief attraction as an individual is my ability
accurately to gauge another individual and to breathe myself
graciously out to it and upon it while pretending to be immersed in
my own ego.

Which is another lie. Immersed in my own ego is never a pretense
with me, and I have not gauged--in the sense of weighing and
measuring--another individuality except to hate it. But it is
piquantly restful to hear that I am thus benign.

And he tells me that though several years have passed since he and I
took leave of one another he has never forgotten that last parting
because it was like the passing of a little weir-woman who brushed
him lightly with her garments as she went.

Which is another lie. My association with him was in brief meetings
at hectic studio tea-fights and two noisy dinners at Churchill’s,
at all of which I frowned impatiently at his tiresome conversation.
And his leave-taking with me consisted in his sharpening a
lead-pencil--beautifully he sharpened it--for me to write a telegram
with. It was not until this correspondence that we established an
unreliable intimacy. But to be told I seemed a weir-woman to a
hard-headed business man who could doubtless cheat a client out of
four thousand dollars easily in a half-day’s maneuvering is oddly
inspiriting.

And he tells me he is highly privileged to be permitted to gaze in
at the mezzo-tinted windows of my soul, which are surely curtained
against the passing proletariat.

Which is another lie. He has never remotely glimpsed my tired Soul in
the firmly false little letters I’ve written him. As to its being a
privilege if he had: it is the proletariat, it so happens, who have
first chance at those windows, which are not mezzo-tinted but made of
the plainest of plain glass. But the conceit tastes mellow and naïf
and bromidic and appetizing to me, like cream and raspberries in July.

And he tells me the most delightful thing in the world would be to
live near me and have a season of daily meetings--meetings of astral
selves upon a ‘higher plane’ whereon we should exchange those flowers
and fruits of the spirit which grow not from the soils but from the
esoteric essences of life:--that sort of thing.

Which is another lie. No possible man (except a Poet whom I
loved--or perhaps a scientist--) could find me delightful for more
than two consecutive meetings--I develop something like temper--and
I care for no higher planes except in airships. As for esoterics--I
would fainer exchange musings anent over-shoes than over-souls. And
my spirit bears in fertile earthy soil chiefly thistles from which
men gather no figs. But it gives me a warmish feeling, similar to
a hot-water bottle between my shoulders on a winter night, to read
that picturesque palaver written to me in my slim scorn by him in his
springy swivel chair.

Thus it goes. His letters are made all of softest quaintest lies
which I know to be lies the moment my gray gaze falls on them. All
his premises in regard to me and his deductions from them are roundly
lightly mistaken. But I like that fluent flattery the more because
it is so false. I am too vain a creature to want to cope often with
truths even though they might be uplifting self-lauding truths. My
vain peculiar Weakness demands as well semi-occasional collations of
creamed lies upon which it feeds like a sleek cat on creamed fish. My
humor enters into it, in no obvious way but eerily like a gay ghost.
My humor is a strong influence in me. It is stronger than my pride
and anger and fear and caution and reverence and self-love--stronger
than most things I own.

And it’s for reasons of pastime and vanity and oblique humor I
let letters from the business man come, though not often, into my
solitudes. And I spend hours of inert time-waste conning his fanciful
ideas. And the letters I write him in reply, though brief and
impersonal and done in my best false manner, consume a surprising lot
of time and mental and physical force to write. It is the Weakness in
it which is so devouring: it eats me hungrily and lingers about like
a buzzard, picking my bones.

A spinelessly Weak game. I hate its Weakness more than I like its
pleasant futility. I hate it and myself in it all the time I’m
dwelling on it. I hate it as I’d hate a little drug habit fastened on
my nerves.

Its influence is the same but more insidious than a drug would be,
more demoralizing. As feeling fear makes one afraid, feeling more
fear makes one more afraid.

Still once in a month, once in a two-month, I feel the hankering
itch to be applauded for second-rate qualities I do not own, and I
give way to it: in a particularly Weak way, after my sanest self has
reduced it analytically to shreds, and after saying bosh! with all my
selves.

After telling Me too that it is a common-tasting game. Life is a
strange music-clangor of gold bells, some silent, some far-echoing.
And the common-tasting thing cracks a bell-edge.

Then briskly I answer the last letter from Atlanta-Georgia and soon
there comes a fresh sheaf of smooth velvetish lies to pad my way.

There may come no more if this I write now should find its way to
Atlanta-Georgia. Or if fate or Bertha should intervene.

But always I know Weakness of me will find ways to work at its losing
trade.

It is of the dubious inevitable side of human nature--like gold teeth
and tinned salmon and bastard lacy valentines.

_Sweet fine sweatings of blood_

                                                        To-morrow

Merely from the view-point of outward intellect this book of myself
is oddly difficult to write.

My most-loved thing to do and my hardest thing to do is to write.

It is hard to catch and hold with mental fingers one’s own emotions
and then doubly hard to write them. A feeling is something without
the words and without even the thought. To put it into the thought
and then into the words is a minuter task than would be the
translating of a François-Villon poem into Choctaw.

It’s a knowing person who realizes her own emotions and a knowinger
who recognizes what is what, who is who, which is which among them.
I look inward at Me and I see an emotion of World-Weariness and
want to write it. I write it as nearly as I can. But when I have
done--it’s not World-Weariness that I wrote but its twin-sister,
Boredom-of-the-Moment, which happened to be next the other when I
looked. I am glad to have transcribed Boredom-of-the-Moment. It is
the finer and thinner and more elusive of the two. But how and why
did I fail of World-Weariness?

But sometime when I aim at Fear or Resentment or Surprise it may be
World-Weariness I’ll bring down unexpectedly with a clean wing-shot.

When I set out to write the Look-in-my-Eyes it may be the
Feel-of-my-Fingers that comes out in my round writing. Another time I
think I’m writing my Bad-Tooth: until I get it written when it turns
out to be my little Eye-Wrinkles.

Having failed of the thought often I fail of the words. When I have
a particularly M.-Mac-Lane thought to express I review the top tier
of my vocabulary of words to find proper ones for it. They are all
very nice words in that top-tier--neatly washed and dressed and
hair-brushed and tidied-up, like the children in a small private
school: words like Necessary and Irresolute and Crockery and
Inconvenience and Broth and Apprise: good words and useful if one’s
thought is radical or risky and wants conserving. I call some of
them to me and question them and consider them and ponder a bit, and
decide they will none of them suit. Then I go to the bottom tier, the
unkemptest of words in the untidiest attire: words like Traipse and
Nab and Glim and Hennery and Chape and Plash. And I at once reject
those as too carelessly bred for my terse thoughts to associate
with. (But for my uncombed ungroomed grimy-faced thoughts I turn to
them.) Then I glance over a tier of mysterious words, spruce but
with indefinable vagabond faces: such as Whelk and Mauger and Frush
and Gnurl and Yare and Hyaline. They are expressive but of a kind
it’s well to use with caution, the kind that may trip up thoughts
that would make them their medium and lead to slips ’twixt cups and
lips. So I dismiss them with a mental reservation of one or two to
use if I fail to find right ones among the less mysterious. Then I
turn to a tier that represents the virile middle-class in words, the
lower-case words, the mob and riot words, the words for poets and
anarchists and prophets: such as Adroit and Nightingale and Gallows
and Gutter and Woman and Madrigal and Death. And I say, ‘Without
doubt here are my words.’ But I use discretion. I know that tier of
words to be of the nature of bombs, of strychnine, of a dynamic force
resistible against all human and wordly substance. They also must be
used cautiously and with a sparing hand. With caution one can handle
a bomb, and sparingly one can eat strychnine, and one can control
any dynamic force by studying its tendencies and keeping out of its
direct road. It behooves one to heed those conditions in broaching
the countermining counter-irritant words if one would avoid blowing
oneself analytically broadcast.

So I may have found the right sort of words and measured their
possibilities and pitfalls. But again: it’s a nerve-racking task
to choose out one word from seven, one from five, one from two. I
see two words which may be the only proper ones out of ten thousand
to bear my thought. The two may be Echo and After-glow, each an
unacknowledged half-sister to the other: meaning respectively
something living and growing and vibrant in my spirit-ears, and
fading and dying and radiant before my spirit-eyes. But because my
spirit-ears may glow bright and hot from what they heard, or my
spirit-eyes may seem to themselves to gaze a moment at a soundless
sound--an Unheard Melody of Keats,--I miss the raylike distinction
and I write After-glow when my true word was Echo.

But another time I write Echo perfectly and masterfully to my own
delight: having meant After-glow.

So it is. There’s no plain sailing on this analytic sea. And if there
were it would be not worth while. I want nothing, nothing, nothing
that comes easily. What comes easily I distrust, be it love or
language. It afterward proves dead-sea fruit. What I suffer to get I
know to be life-food even if it drugs or pains or poisons me. It is
one lesson I have learned.

Without doubt it is so with everybody, all around. One sees only
surfaces, husks. Anyone looking casually at this Me sitting writing
might say, ‘How easily and smoothly and well she writes. How kind
of God to give her so light a task in life. How complacently go her
working hours.’ And I looking casually at--oh--Miss Lily Walker
singing and swaying and glancing sideways in a gorgeous Broadway
chorus--I might say, ‘How easy a task in life has _that_ brainless
gazelle. To work with her body and not even with the sweats and
sinews of it like a scrub-woman, and not with the facile shames of
it like a lorette, but with the grace and suppleness and beauty and
suggestions of it, aided by a soprano throat and a soprano face--with
only the effort it wants to fling it all over footlights. And that
pastime gets her her livelihood.’

But whoever marks me writing as one doing an easy task because I
write along rapidly enough considers nothing of my mental travail
for the thought, my blind grope for the language, my little nervous
anguish of choice among the double-edged and triple-pronged words:
and the neat concise failure of the result.

And no, I do not thus comment on Miss Lily Walker. I have
an appreciative pleasure in her charm and suppleness and
bird-and-butterfly prettiness. But after a bit of contemplation and
analysis of her surface I deduce the unconscious struggle it may be
for Miss Lily Walker to be supple on nights when she does not feel
supple, the thin agony of being sweet when she does not feel sweet,
the neurotic torture of being seductive _regularly_--by the night:
the more that perchance the struggle always _is_ unconscious. Her
brain being required in her body it’s to be assumed there’s none in
her head. But I can deduce a nervous red heart beating illogically
somewhere in her being protesting dumbly sometimes against one irking
item, sometimes against another, sometimes against all the items in
Miss Lily Walker’s scheme of life, but beating and beating on, like a
little automatic drum wound up tight and tossed into a maelstrom to
beat itself out.

I’d like--like with breathless eagerness--to read the analyzed being
just beneath Miss Lily Walker’s skin.

Everybody--every human being--is wildly _Real_: radiant and
desolate.--

With no amount of temperamental struggling could Miss Lily Walker
analyze a psychic emotion of her own and then find the right
word-combination to write it in.

With no conceivable effort of mine could I manage to be supple when I
do not feel supple.

So Miss Lily Walker and I are quits at this game.

It totals up evenly, all ways around.

Nobody gets through one Real day--though it be a dayful of Real
lies--without a demoniacal struggle of soul or a heavy blow on the
personal solar plexus.

And I make not even the intellect side of this book, which is a
Realness to me, without sweet fine sweatings of blood.

_Instinct--a ‘first law’_

                                                        To-morrow

I long to do a Murder.

Despite my futile way-of-life and my rotting destroying
half-acquiescence in it I have a furious positive Murder in me.

One near me in my daily life injures me and goes on injuring me in
a way which is scourging and malicious and intensely petty. There
is in it helpless humiliation for me--me self-loving, proud and
determinedly unsuppliant--and it makes maddening Murder rise in me.

I don’t know why I do not do the Murder. I have nothing to lose by
paying the law-penalty: nothing but my life, and my life is stripped
bare--and was always barren by God’s decree--of all that makes a
life sacred or lovely or precious. For long years and years, since
child-days, I have been lost.

I don’t know why I do not do the Murder: except that I think of it
and brood over it and turn it round and round smoulderingly in my
Mind. From no choice. I have tried to push the feeling away as a
common thing beneath me. It is beneath me, for I am not little but
someway big. But my Mind will take its toll of all that confronts me.

The humiliation and the helplessness to combat being humiliated in me
who keep a casual proudness toward people is like a secret hot sword
thrust, and kept freshly thrust, in my flesh. It makes me wild to do
the Murder. But it makes me brood over it till the red act is lost in
red brooding.

There come also thinkings.

Murder, any Murder, is in its essence cowardly, a slinking meanness.
And I am not cowardly and I am not mean. I am above malice and
retaliation--all such impoverished impoverishing emotions. A shrug of
my shoulders and they are satisfied. The impulse to hit back after a
bitter wound is not of vengeance. It is instinct--a ‘first law.’ But
Murder is self-accusingly cowardly and sneakingly human. I can’t get
away from that. To take away a person’s life is like setting fire to
his house--an officiously stooping act. It’s for me to live my life
in aloof self-sufficience. No human malice should reach me in it.
Then it’s not for me to reach out of it and stain my good fingers
with unpleasant sticky blood. I am always in a prison of radiance and
gloom.

But the mere habit of being a human being is breakingly insistent--no
matter how many or how few frocks one owns. Neither of my two dresses
is a protection against humiliation. A thin black serge dress
gives me to myself a melancholy cold inert air: but beneath the
smooth-fitting breast of it comes too often a throbbing frightful to
feel, frightful to know, made of fierce petty anger and abasing hurt.
I hide it and me in my room and twist my hands together and walk my
floor, and a hurricane of helpless bitter trifling woe shakes and
wrenches me. Then Murder enters me.

What humiliates me is an obvious common thing that to any human one
would mean hurt and more hurt. Though I am determinedly brave I am
sensitive.

I do not write itself because this is the book of me and not of
people.

It is a slight, a poor and vivid cruelness. There is the tie of blood
in it which in all ways--from a deep heritage--I respect: and it rubs
an added stinging poison in the wound.

It is an injury I do not deserve. What I deserve I accept. What I
do not deserve pressed on me to humiliate me makes Murder in me.
Regardless of the other one--

--it would be simpler and finer for me to do that Murder than to keep
it in me. So many times in a week the trembling smothering longing
to do that Murder beats, beats in my thin breast. To be so owned by
a thing so small:--it is grief and despair and fury and wild nervous
intolerableness. It strains my flesh--it wrenches my pulse--it blinds
my eyes--it fills my throat--

--it would be a simpler and finer thing to do any Murder than to
feel, even once, the strangling damnedness rising, rising at my
throat--

_Loose twos_

                                                        To-morrow

I take it for granted God knows all about me.

If God should read this it would not be news to him.

But his knowledge of me is not immediate knowledge nor immediately
interesting to him. He knows my Twos-and-Twos but he does not make
Fours of them.

I am formed of loose Twos which wait for God to make them Fours.

I can not do it myself. When I’ve tried the added Twos come out
threes, seventies, nines, twelves--all the mysterious numbers. Never
Fours.

Long ago I decided not to try but to wait for God.

I juggle with temperamental and psychic Twos and experiment in
hysteric additions.

But it’s no good my trying to make Fours.

If God does not take it up I shall be eternal Twos.

And I seem not greatly to care: whenever that comes home to me I
merely light a carefree cigarette.

_Knitting or plaiting straw_

                                                        To-morrow

The things I know are jumbled and tangled into an indescribable heap
inside me.

The things I Don’t Know are separated and ranged of their own
volition in long orderly rows in my conscious mentality.

The things I know glow with tints and gleams and will-o’-wisp lights
and primal colors and waveringly with the blinding gold-purple
lightnings of all-Time.

The things I Don’t Know glow--each one separately--with a small
precise lantern-brightness of its own.

Also in my wide background are things I don’t know and am unaware
of it: the mass of my luminous Ignorance--it shines with an earthy
phosphorescence.

When I look at the things I know I get an undetailed perspective of
me like a bird’s-eye view of London.

When I look at neat formal rows of things I Don’t Know I have a clear
look, as if through an uncurtained window into a bare little room, at
my quietest self sitting knitting or plaiting straw.

I reckon up and count up and check up lists of big and little things
I Don’t Know--like this, rapidly:

I Don’t Know what ink is made of, nor how to fire a Maxim gun:
I don’t know how to make a will: I don’t know how to cook a
prairie-chicken, nor what to feed a pet weasel, nor who invented the
snarling-iron, nor what it is.

I Don’t Know what food people eat in the Himalaya Mountains, nor how
Lord Cornwallis felt when he surrendered: I don’t know the color of
a chicken’s gizzard, nor of sand, nor of fish-scales, nor of mice: I
don’t know whether an English cabinet minister needs strength of mind
or strength of will, or both, or neither.

I Don’t Know how I hurt the true heart of my friend: I don’t know
astronomy nor solid geometry: I don’t know what I think with: I
don’t know what ooze leather is, nor who pitched for the Tigers in
nineteen-nine.

I Don’t Know a good horse from a bad horse: I don’t know why a bat
sleeps head downward, nor what wasps live on: I don’t know how to
open oysters, nor how to milk a cow: I don’t know the Latin for
‘whiskey.’

I Don’t Know whether friendship is a selfish or an unselfish thing,
nor who discovered the medlar apple: I don’t know what is a jab,
fistically speaking, nor a punch, nor a hook, nor a wallop, nor the
fighting weight of Packey McFarland: I don’t know whether a moth
‘marries’ or whether her eggs are impregnated like a fish’s: I don’t
know why a clasp knife is called a jack knife, nor what to do for an
aching foot.

I Don’t Know how glass is blown: I don’t know whether coal is
vegetable or mineral: I don’t know the chemical composition of the
sunset vapors, nor how to play euchre: I don’t know how many guns an
armored cruiser carries, nor whether a gorilla meditates: I don’t
know whether I hate or greatly admire Catherine and Marie de Medici:
I don’t know a winch from a windlass.

I Don’t Know where is the cinnamon bear’s native haunt: I don’t know
how flint is mined, nor if wire is made of steel: I don’t know who
was the better man--William Wordsworth or the Duke of Wellington: I
don’t know the advantages of tariff revision downward: I don’t know
where ex-President Taft will go when he dies.

I Don’t Know whether I feel more comfortable with or without my
stays: I don’t know the origin of the word ‘dogged’: I don’t know
whether a ‘full house’ is better than ‘two pairs,’ nor whether a
right merry heart to-day is better than a wrong contented mind
to-morrow: I don’t know whether rabbit-pie is made of cats in Paris,
nor how many sails has a sloop: I don’t know what makes a dead body
rot.

I Don’t Know how to sharpen a carving knife, nor how to roll a
cigarette: I don’t know the real English meaning of the French noun
‘élancement’: I don’t know whether my sex is a matter of my genital
organs or of my mental inwards: I don’t know how to determine the
contents of a circle in square inches, nor how to pronounce ‘zebra.’

I Don’t Know whether Edgar Allan Poe is big or little: I don’t know
how many soldiers fell at Shiloh: I don’t know whether temperament
or nature or circumstance makes one woman a happy kindhearted whore
and another an unhappy cruel-hearted nun: I don’t know how to grow
artichokes: I don’t know what brimstone is, nor how to play the
accordion: I don’t know what quality in me forms my handwriting.

I Don’t Know what-like was my Soul in the Stone Age: I don’t know
whether cheese is good or bad for my health: I don’t know what
becomes of discarded hairpins, nor a tooth-brush’s ultimate destiny:
I don’t know the ‘Fra Diavolo’ opera, nor whether anyone ever uses
the word ‘thwack.’

I Don’t Know whether my heart breaks from within or without: I don’t
know whether ‘good old Marie Lloyd’ of the London ‘halls’ has a brain
like G. K. Chesterton or a dexterous individuality like a juggler:
I don’t know whether I feel spiritual bliss in my knees or in my
spirit: I don’t know why I breathe and go on breathing.

I Don’t Know what became of the ten lost tribes of Israel: I don’t
know how to say how-do-you-do to a king: I don’t know the exact
meaning of my terror and despair: I don’t know why I love--why I ever
love--

I Don’t Know whether laws of chance govern a spinning roulette
wheel and ivory ball or whether chance is beyond law: I don’t
know what kind of missile a Krupp gun shoots: I don’t know how a
ground-and-lofty tumbler turns a triple air-summersault: I don’t
know whether I really am the way I look in the mirror: I don’t know
whether the Russian language has Romanic roots: I don’t know what is
the wild power in poetry.

I Don’t Know whether lust is a human coarseness or a human fineness:
I don’t know why death holds a so sweet lure since it would take away
my Body: I don’t know that I wouldn’t deny my Christ, if I had one,
three times before a given cockcrow: I don’t know on the other hand
that I would: I don’t know whether honor is a reality in human beings
or a pose: I don’t know that I mayn’t be able to think with my Body
when it is in its coffin.

I Don’t Know what makes each day a Day of dark Gold and life
mournfully precious: I don’t know where is God: I don’t know how they
make tea in Ireland: I don’t know how to pronounce the word ‘girl’:
I don’t know how to make lace: I don’t know whether I hear a sound
or feel it, nor why a spool of thread looks exactly like a Spool of
Thread.

I Don’t Know--I Don’t Know--I Don’t Know, rapidly, to the end of the
mystic common-place infinitudes.

--those give me a clear look, as if through an uncurtained window
into a bare little room, at my quietest self sitting knitting or
plaiting straw--

_A life-long lonely word_

                                                        To-morrow

Fleeting times I wonder if it is my defect or others’ that no human
family tie holds and warms me.

There is none. I think about it with wistfulness.

The only tie-of-blood feeling that clings to me is of my warming and
keeping-alive. And it is very feeble. It grows more feeble.

It is a trivial matter as I look at it universally.

But as I look at it earthlily: there would be an abnormalness, a
lostness in one when the mother who bore her got from it at best but
a small cool dislike.

It makes me feel humanly lost.

‘Lost’ is the shuddering life-long lonely word that brushes against
me some nights and noons.

_Their voices_

                                                        To-morrow

Every day at half-past ten and half-past two I hear the high
shrill sweet choric Voices of hundreds of children shaking the thin
clear air.

A public school is but a block from here. The children rush out of
it, a hilarious noisy crowd, for a few mid-morning and mid-afternoon
minutes. So those minutes, from hearing their Voices day after day,
and day after day, have become lyric to my inner-listening.

Their Voices stir me, rouse me, speak to me with old very joyous,
very woful meanings.

The children fairly leap out of the school-building through doors
and down fire-escape stairways. And their Voices are at once hurled
skyward, clamorous and chaotic.

The Sound they make is a roundly common sound yet ‘winged.’ It is an
untrammeled Sound, uncultivated, only a little civilized.

It is world-music.

In it is the note beyond culture, higher than civilization, and
older. It is brave as voices of the shrilling winds and warmer,
viriler. It is liltinger than bird-songs and lustier than roarings of
mountain cataracts.

Music of the world!--

A little door inside me opens to those Voices.

My little door opens at the first shriek of the first child out of
doors, and I hear not only the hundreds of vivid piercing Voices but
more--their far-off echoes.

They are the Voices of children, children light-held in crude cold
innocence. The eyes of the children are clear--their impulses and
instincts rule their little lives. They are yet untouched by the
tiredness and terror and shame and sorrow of being human beings.

So the Sound of their Voices sweeps out resistless and regardless
as the sea or the sun which makes nothing of its own strength or
weakness. And through my little spirit-door I hear them, the poignant
common little sweet Voices, echoing, flying away, farther and
farther: along the roads: over plains and hills: through valleys long
worldly distances from here: through streets: through stone buildings
and dingy courts: through big rich houses: through homes of comfort
and homes of misery and homes of desolate smugness: into lifeless
social foyers: into learned places: into law-courts and cabinet-rooms
of nations: into graveyards and churches and down into dead-vaults:
into theatres: into clinics: into shops: into factories: into dives
and stews and brothels and at lustful doorsteps: into hotels and
on sport-courses: into market-places and across battle-fields,
round monuments and in towers and in forts and in prisons and in
dungeons:--there along fly their Voices.

It is a brave, brave Sound, and an insistent: nothing stops it.

It is triumph.

The noise of the noisiest battle dies away in time. The pounding of
ocean-surf on the rocks and of electric thunder in the clouds are
lasting only with this earth. But brave wild Voices of children fly
on and on, outlasting a million earths, silencing aeons of thunder,
floating strongly back of the stars. The voices of men--wizards,
monks, artisans, thieves--echo no farther than their talking
conceits: even of poets except as they catch up into their sonance
something to interpret a cool gay clamor of child-Voices. The voices
of women--singing women, lovely women, angelic honest women--die with
their bodies: even of mothers of the children except as they follow
with their own echo, by dream and shadow, the thronging child-Voices
as they go.

For the Sound of the child-Voices is more potent than wizards’--it is
not cramped into thought-forms: more devotional than monks’ because
super-conscious; more menacing than thieves’ because absolute. And
it echoes, echoes, echoes in the market-place full-tongued, ringing,
rising like the northern gale when all the other voices are long
dead-silenced: and after.

Music of the world.

This moment I hear it for it is half-after two of a bright gold
day. The air is emotional, nectareal, and mellow and yellow and
hot-sparkling. The Voices pierce it like a storm of fine steel
arrows. I at once set open my spirit-door and through it come the
sweet shrill chorus and the marvel echo beginning and swelling and
starting away. It wakes vision so that I see--quick, evil, terribly
human, in the dazzlingest daytime colors--all those Places where the
Voices go.

I go to a window and watch the children running about beneath the
high tide of their Voices. And they and the school-building and the
streets and stone walls show in duller colors than the Places where
their Echo goes.

--small girls with clipped hair and bloused cotton frocks, taller
girls throwing a basket-ball, thin-legged little girls playing
hop-scotch, groups of varied sizes with rainbow ribbons in their
hair, confused masses of knitted sweaters and fat white-stockinged
legs and shiny leather belts and ankle-strapped shoes, and
little young shoulders and knees and waistlines--restless and
kaleidoscopic--

--and confused boy-groups--little fellows in suits misnamed
Oliver-Twist, larger boys of serge-Norfolk persuasion, types of
the generic knickerbocker at once motley and monotonous--all with
the strong sturdy calves of their legs clad in a time-honored kind
of black ribbed stockings, all with the same breed of ties and
collars and short-cropped hair, all with the tacit air of confessing
themselves the most serenely cruel of all animals--

A careless conscienceless happy mob.

It is the Sound of their Voices that invests them with the terrifying
Power, the long world-sweeping Force as of spirit and matter merged,
the human radioactivity not evil and not good, stronger than all evil
and all good.

Those children I look at must cease to be children, and must lose
their Voices and grow into monks and thieves and singing women--must
turn into persons--‘Romans, countrymen and lovers.’

But will come after those another chorus: the same chorus: the same
Voices.

The brief yellow mellow minutes have passed and the last shout has
been silenced and the hundreds of children, Rainbow Hair-Ribbons and
Black Ribbed Legs, are again gathered into the McKinley School.

And my little door is shut again: that door opens but for those
Voices.

The Voices: their echo flying everywhere flies here into my
still room: and it stirs me, rouses me, speaks to me with the old
joyous woe.

Music of the world.

_My damns_

                                                        To-morrow

I bear the detailed infliction of being a person with a tired mixture
of patience and indifference and scorn.

I say on Monday, Damn the ache in my left foot: on Tuesday, Damn
that rattling window--I hate it: on Wednesday, Damn this yellow
garter--it’s too tight: on Thursday, Damn my futile life: on Friday,
Damn the solitude: on Saturday, Damn these thoughts: on Sunday, Damn
my two dresses.

But I pronounce each day’s Damn in a half-perfunctory half-preoccupied
tone, more from duty and fitness than from conviction. I intently
mean each Damn, but the scornful indifferent patience which is my
spirit-essence leavens each one. I swear at my life’s perversities
with only a fatigued contempt due partly to bodily fragileness but
mostly to a cold continently reckless mood which is clasped on me
like a strong stupefied devil-fish. In this mood I should murmur the
same gelded Damn if I found myself penniless and foodless in strange
streets: if I became suddenly deaf: if my Body were being lashed with
whips or raped by a Mexican bandit. I should murmur the same worn
Damn if I were this moment on a gallows with the rope around my neck
and life were dearly madly precious.

I mark that with my musing regrets. I remember in the strong young
furies of eighteen each new day of my life was filled with passionate
poetic blasphemy, protests and rebellions of youth. Those were not
tired, not acquiescent, not indifferent to slings-and-arrows, but
firey-blooded quick-pulsed breathless brave young Damns.

There is splendor in being brave in a fighting attitude, but in being
brave through indifference there is no splendor.

But it is only toward calamity and adversity and worldly untowardness
that I feel indifferent. Fighting blood is stirred in me if not
against the hated things then for the loved things. I could fight
and I could die, and love it, to save poet-lusters, poet-fineness,
poet-beauty from the world’s flat griefs. In that, which I feel warm
and real and sparkling in my blood, in some splendor for me.

--and also I could die for my country: and there is fighting hatred
stirred in me against its foes--

But in poetry there is nothing that evokes a lusty curse against its
vulgar adversaries. Poetry floats too high upon its dazzling wings. I
get delicately drunk from watching it till I can see the wings’ Gold
Shadow touch its foes and magically split them into dust-atoms.

So then the morale of my Damns remains perfunctory.

But they are apt and useful. They fit into the nervous rhythms of my
life. They mark time in my spirit’s flawed action. I begin each day
with a Damn of sorts. I end each day with a Damn of sorts. At midday
sometimes it’s, ‘Damn the terrifying ignorance of people.’ In the
dusk a deep-felt Damn of the blood. In the night another. And at my
late eating time a negligible Damn.

A wonderful word, Damn. It means enough and not too much. It means
everything in life, and roundly nothing.

Without Damn my day would lack tone. Damn richly justifies each
pronouncement of itself in word-value, substance-value and musical
resonance. It harms nobody and it helps me. It destroys nothing and
it strengthens me. It damages my annoyances and mends me somewhat.

But--perfunctory, desultory, tiredly insolent, it would be thrilling
to think the hot fire would sometime be back in my Damns. Better that
than Youth’s faith in my dreams. Better that than the _jeune-fille_
beauty in my hair. Better than even Youth’s ichor in my veins:
Youth’s fire in my Damns--

But there is dearness in this mood, which is indifferent and scornful
and slightingly patient, though it wants splendor. Let my Damns be
always brave, always contemptuous of disaster to me, and they will be
first-water value though their kind alter never-so.

_To God, care of the whistling winds_

                                                        To-morrow

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