A winding sheet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 I closed my eyes against it all as I walked along the sand: its aliveness, its realness, its flawless golden dreadful peace tortured and twisted and too-keenly interpreted me.

And one summer day in Central Park in New York I saw a little Yellow-Yellow Butterfly fluttering above a small plot of brilliant Green-Green Grass in the afternoon sunshine. To you, God, used to the purpling splendor of untold worlds that mightn’t seem noteworthy. But to me--because I am half-sister to so many trivialities the Yellow-Yellow of those little wings and the sweet bright Green of the clipped velvet Grass beneath the sun suddenly fiercely entered in and beat-beat hard on my imagination. O the glare and the flare of that fairy prettiness! I shall never forget that picture though I should one day see those worlds. It made me think wildly of you, God, at the time--and ever since. It is there yet in Central Park, that particular plot of Grass, and if not that Yellow-Yellow Butterfly--happily, happily Yellow it was--then another!

And to-day and often other days I read this--

‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter’--

--magic words: potent hushed wizardry of beauty. It opens the doors of all the Inner Rooms and more blest, more precious, of the celestial brain of him who wrote it. In making the glimmering Purple of all your worlds, God, you have not surpassed the thing you made in the regal wistful glory of John Keats.

And two nights ago I went close to my glass and looked deep into my own dark gray eyes, and they were beautiful. Their color is the gray not of peace but of stormy sky and clouded sea. Their expression is alien and melancholy and they are never without circlings of fatigue or stress. And when I meet their glance they mostly accuse and condemn and confound me. But two nights ago they grew wide and deep and breathless-looking at realizing me human and alive. And presently I saw, back of their gray iris--my Soul: like a naked girl: like a willow in the wind: like a drowning star at daybreak: an inherent inexpressible grace--my Soul of many ages.

And this moment another little memory, God, of a tropic marsh a little way back from the sea on the island in the bay at St. Augustine, as it looked in the wane of one sun-flooded February day. In the marsh were tall waving feathery salt-marsh grasses, and little pools of murky water. And there were snail-shells and ancient barnacles and smooth beach pebbles. And bordering the pools were reeds and flags and tiny wax-petaled death-white lilies. By a mound of wet moss was a slim wild blue heron standing on one leg and staring about and preening its blue feathers. And over all the scene was a Pink-Pink Flush. The curving quivering tops of the long grass were Pink with it. The pools were dull Pink mirrors. The barnacles, the pebbles, the death-white lilies were as if a thin bloody veil had been flung down on them. Pink touched the heron’s wings, its beak, its head, its glittering beady eyes and spindly leg. The sinking sun shot a Pink broadside of dream-dust all over the marsh: it lingered and hung and floated. Almost I could have reached out my two hands and gathered a bouquet of Pink Flush. The stillness, which was intense, was Pink stillness. O but it was pleasant, pleasant, pleasant, God--it wrapped me in a scarf of Pink sweetness: it filled my throat with Pink honey: it laid on me a gentle eager quiet covetous Pink spell.

Nobody knows how you do it, God. But it is all--Sunset Tint, Yellow-Yellow Moth, Conscious Soul, Poet-Flame--maddening and precious and terrifying and transfiguring to me who live among it. I cherish it as a lonely one may who loves it with passion and is never happy in it. And for it all I thank you, God.

Yours very sincerely, Mary MacLane.

I wrote the Letter on my long-unused monogram note-paper to please my whim, and put it in the envelope and addressed it to God, care of the Whistling Winds. He may receive it--what do I know?--only he knows, and is reticent.

I only know he’ll not answer it.