Part 10

If you have been forgotten by the one who must have made you, and if you have been left alone of human beings all your life--all your nineteen years--then, when at last you see some one looking toward you with beautiful eyes, and extending to you a beautiful hand, and showing you a beautiful heart wherein is just a little of beautiful sympathy for you--for you--oh, that is harder than anything to bear. Harder than the loneliness and the bitterness--and the tears are nearer and nearer.

But one would be hurt often, often for the sake of the beautiful things. Yes, one would gladly be hurt long and often.

I shall never forget how it was with me when I first saw the beautiful eyes of my dearest anemone lady when they were looking gently--at me--and the beautiful hand, and the beautiful heart.

The awakening of my racked soul is hardly more heavily laden with passion and pain. I shall never forget.

Though I feel away from her also, she is the only one out of all to look gently at me.

Let me writhe and falter with pain; let me go mad--but oh, worldful of people--for the love of your God--give me out of this seething darkness only one beautiful human hand to touch mine with _love_, one beautiful human heart to know the aching sad loneliness of mine, one beautiful, human soul to mingle with mine in long, long Rest.

Oh, for a human being, my soul wails--a human being to love me!

Oh, to know--just once--what it is to be loved!

Nineteen years without one faint shadow of love is mouldy, crumbling age--is gray with the dust of centuries.

How long have I lived?

How long must I live?

I am shrieking at you, cold, stupid world.

Oh, the long, long waiting!

The millions of human beings!

I am a human being and there is no one--no one--no one.

Who can know this that has not felt it? You do not know--you can not know.

Surely I do not ask too much. But whether or not it is too much I can not go through the years without it--oh, I can not!

You have lived your nineteen years, fine world, and you have lived through some after years.

But in your nineteen years there was some one to love you.

It is that that counts.

Since you have had that some one, in your nineteen years, can you understand what life is to me--me--in my loneliness?

My wailing, waiting soul burns with but one desire: _to be loved--oh, to be loved_.

March 29.

I am making the world my confessor in this Portrayal. My mind is fairly bursting with egotism and pain, and in writing this I find a merciful outlet. I have become fond of my Portrayal. Often I lay my forehead and my lips caressingly upon the pages.

And I wish to let you know that there is in existence a genius--an unhappy genius, a genius starving in Montana in the barrenness--but still a genius. I am a creature the like of which you have never before happened upon. You have never suspected that there is such a person. I know that there is not such another. As I said in the beginning, the world contains not my parallel.

I am a fantasy--an absurdity--a genius!

Had I been one of the beasts that perish I had been likewise a fantasy. I think I should have been a small animal composite of a pig, a leopard, and a skunk: an animal that I fancy would be uncanny to look upon but admirable for a pet.

However, I am not one of the beasts that perish.

I am human.

That is another remarkable point.

I have heard persons say they can hardly believe I am quite human.

I am the most human creature that ever was placed on the earth. The geniuses are always more human than the herd. Almost a perfection of humanness is reached in me. This by itself makes me extraordinary. The rarest thing in the world, I find, is the quality of humanness.

Humanity and humaneness are much less rare.

“It is a brave thing to understand something of what we see.” Indeed it is. An exceeding brave thing. The one who said that had surely gone out on the highways and byways and found how little he could understand.

To understand oneself is not so brave a thing. To go in among the hidden gray shadows of the deep things is a fool’s errand. It is not from choice that I do it. No one carries a mill-stone around her neck from choice. When I see what is among the hidden gray shadows--when I see a vision of _Myself_--I am seized with a strange, sick terror.

A fool’s errand--but one that I must need go--and for that matter I myself am a fool.

Yet to know oneself well is a rare fine art.

I analyze myself now. I analyzed myself when I was three years old.

The only difference is that at the age of three I was not aware that I analyzed. It is true, that is a great difference. Now I know that I am analyzing at nineteen, and now I know that I analyzed at three.

And at the age of nineteen I know that I am a genius.

A genius who does not know that he is a genius is no genius. A drunken man might stagger up to a piano and accidentally play music that vibrates to the soul--that touches upon the mysteries. But he does not know his power, and he is no genius, though men awaken and go mad therefrom.

I know that I am a genius more than any genius that has lived.

I have a feeling that the world will never know this.

And as I think of it I wonder if angels are not weeping somewhere because of it.

March 31.

“She only said: ‘My life is dreary, He cometh not,’ she said; She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary, I would that I were dead!’”

All day long this heart-sickening song of Mariana has been reeling and swimming in my brain. I awoke with it early in the morning, and it is still with me now in the lateness. I wondered at times during the day why that very gentle and devilishly persistent refrain did not drive me insane or send me into convulsions. I tried vainly to fix my mind on a book. I began reading “Mill on the Floss,” but that weird poem was not to be foiled. It bewitched my brain. Now, as I write, I hear twenty voices chanting in a sad minor key--twenty voices that fill my brain with sound to the bursting point. “He cometh not--he cometh not--he cometh not.” “That I were dead”--“I am aweary, aweary,--that I were dead--that I were dead.” “He cometh not--that I were dead.”

It is maddening in that it is set sublimely to the music of my own life.

Now that I have written it I can hope that it may leave me. If it follows me through the night, and if I awake to another day of it the cords of my overworked mind will surely break.

But let me thank the kind Devil.

It is leaving me now!

It is as if tons were lifted from my brain.

April 2.

How can any one bring a child into the world and not wrap it round with a certain wondrous tenderness that will stay with it always!

There are persons whose souls have never entered into them.

My mother has some fondness for me--for my body because it came of hers. That is nothing--nothing.

A hen loves its egg.

A hen!

April 3.

This evening in the slow-deepening dusk I sat by my window and spent an hour in passionate conversation with the Devil. I fancied I sat, with my hands folded and my feet crossed, on an ugly but comfortable red velvet sofa in some nondescript room.

And the fascinating man-devil was seated near in a frail willow chair.

He had willingly come to pass the time of day with me. He was in a good-humored mood, and I amused and interested him. And for myself, I was extremely glad to see the Devil sitting there and felt vividly as always. But I sat quietly enough.

The fascinating man-devil has fascinating steel-gray eyes, and they looked at me with every variety of glance--from quizzical to tender.

It were easy--oh, how easy--to follow those eyes to the earth’s ends.

The Devil leaned back in the frail willow chair and looked at me.

“And now that I am here, Mary MacLane,” he said, “what would you?”

“I want you to marry me,” I replied at once. “And I want it more than ever anything was wanted since the world began.”

“So? I am flattered,” said the Devil, and smiled gently, enchantingly.

At that smile I was ravished and transported, and a spasm of some rare emotion thrilled all the little nerves in me from my heels to my forehead. And yet the smile was not for me but rather somewhat at my expense.

“But,” he went on, “you must know it is not my custom to marry women.”

“I am sure it is not,” I agreed, “and I do not ask to be peculiarly favored. Anything that you may give me, however little, will constitute marriage for me.”

“And would marriage itself be so small a thing?” asked the Devil.

“Marriage,” I said, “would be a great, oh, a wonderful thing, and the most beautiful of all. I want what is good according to my lights, and because I am a genius my lights are many and far-reaching.”

“What do your lights tell you?” the man-devil inquired.

“They tell me this: that nothing in the world matters unless love is with it, and if love is with it and it seems to the virtuous a barren and infamous thing, still--because of the love--it partakes of the very highest.”

“And have you the courage of your convictions?” he said.

“If you offered me,” I replied, “that which to the blindly virtuous seems the worst possible thing, it would yet be for me the red, red line on the sky, my heart’s desire, my life, my rest. You are the Devil. I have fallen in love with you.”

“I believe you have,” said the Devil. “And how does it feel to be in love?”

Sitting composedly on the ugly red velvet sofa, with my hands folded and my feet crossed, I attempted to define that wonderful feeling.

“It feels,” I said, “as if sparks of fire and ice crystals ran riot in my veins with my blood; as if a thousand pin-points pierced my flesh, and every other point a point of pleasure, and every other point a point of pain; as if my heart were laid to rest in a bed of velvet and cotton-wool but kept awake by sweet violin arias; as if milk and honey and the blossoms of the cherry flowed into my stomach and then vanished utterly; as if strange, beautiful worlds lay spread out before my eyes, alternately in dazzling light and complete darkness with chaotic rapidity; as if orris-root were sprinkled in the folds of my brain; as if sprigs of dripping-wet sweet-fern were stuck inside my hot linen collar; as if--well, you know,” I ended suddenly.

“Very good,” said the Devil. “You are in love. And you say you are in love with me.”

“Oh, with you!” I exclaimed with suppressed violence. The effort to suppress this violence cost me pounds of nerve-power. But I kept my hands still quietly folded and my feet crossed, and it was a triumph of self-control. “I want you to marry me,” I added despairingly.

“And you think,” he inquired, “that apart from the opinion of the wise world, it would be a suitable marriage?”

“A suitable marriage!” I exclaimed. “I hate a suitable marriage! No, it would not be suitable. It would be Bohemian, outlandish, adorable!”

The Devil smiled.

This time the smile was for me. And, oh, the long, old, overpowering enchantment of the smile of steel-gray eyes!--the steel-gray eyes of the Devil!

It is one of those things that one remembers.

“You are a beautifully frank, little feminine creature,” he said. “Frankness is in these days a lost art.”

“Yes, I am beautifully frank,” I replied. “Out of countless millions of the Devil’s anointed I am one to acknowledge myself.”

“But withal you are not true,” said the man-devil.

“I am a liar,” I answered.

“You are a liar, surely,” he said, “but you stay with your lies. To stay with anything is Truth.”

“It is so,” I replied. “Nevertheless I am false as woman can be.”

“But you know what you want.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, “I know what I want. I want you to marry me.”

“And why?”

“Because I love you.”

“That seems an excellent reason, certainly,” said the Devil.

“I want to be happy for once in my life,” I said. “I have never been happy. And if I could be happy once for one gold day, I should be satisfied, and I should have that to remember in the long years.”

“And you are a strangely pathetic little animal,” said the Devil.

“I am pathetic,” I said. I clasped my hands very tightly. “I know that I am pathetic: and for this reason I am the most terribly pathetic of all in the world.”

“Poor little Mary MacLane!” said the Devil. He leaned toward me. He looked at me with those strange, wonderfully tender, divine steel-gray eyes. “Poor little Mary MacLane!” he said again in a voice that was like the Gray Dawn. And the eyes--the glance of the steel-gray eyes entered into me and thrilled me through and through. It frightened and soothed me. It racked and comforted me. It ravished me with inconceivable gentleness so that I bent my head down and sobbed as I breathed.

“Don’t you know, you little thing,” said the man-devil, softly-compassionate, “your life will be very hard for you always--harder when you are happy than when you go in Nothingness?”

“I know--I know. Nevertheless I want to be happy,” I sobbed. I felt a rush of an old thick, heavy anguish. “It is day after day. It is week after week. It is month after month. It is year after year. It is only time going and going. There is no joy. There is no lightness of heart. It is only the passing of days. I am young and all alone. Always I have been alone: when I was five and lay in the damp grass and tortured myself to keep back tears; and through the long, cold, lonely years till now--and now all the torture does not keep back the tears. There is no one--nothing--to help me bear it. It is more than pathetic when one is nineteen in all young, new feeling and sees Nothing anywhere--except long, dark, lonely years behind her and before her. No one that loves me and long, long years.”

I stopped. The gray eyes were fixed on me. Oh, they were the steel-gray eyes!--and they had a look in them. The long, bitter pageant of my Nothingness mingled with this look and the coming together of these was like the joining of two halves.

I do not know which brings me the deeper pain--the loneliness and weariness of my sand and barrenness, or the look in the steel-gray eyes. But as always I would gladly leave all and follow the eyes to the world’s end. They are like the sun’s setting. And they are like the pale, beautiful stars. And they are like the shadows of earth and sky that come together in the dark.

“Why,” asked the Devil, “are you in love with me?”

“You know so much--so much,” I answered. “I think it must be that. The wisdom of the spheres is in your brain. And so, then, you must understand me. Because no one understands all these smouldering feelings my greatest agony is. You must need know the very finest of them. And your eyes! Oh, it’s no matter why I’m in love with you. It’s enough that I am. And if you married me I would make you happier than you are.”

“I am not happy at all,” said the man-devil. “I am merely contented.”

“Contentment,” I said, “in place of Happiness, is a horrid feeling. Not one of your countless advocates loves you. They all serve you faithfully and well, but with it all they hate you. Always people hate their tyrant. You are my tyrant, but I love you absorbingly, madly. Happiness for me would be to live with you and see you made happy by the overwhelming flood of my love.”

“It interests me,” he said. “You are a most interesting feminine philosopher--and your philosophy is after my own heart, in its lack of _virtue_. It is to be hoped you are not ‘intellectual,’ which is an unpardonable trait.”

“Indeed, I am not,” I replied. “Intellectual people are detestable. They have pale faces and bad stomachs and bad livers, and if they are women their corsets are sure to be too tight, and probably black, and if they are men they are _soft_, which is worse. And they never by any chance know what it means to walk all day in the rain, or to roll around on the ground in the dirt. And, above all, they never fall in love with the Devil.”

“They are tiresome,” the Devil agreed. “If I were to marry you how long would you be happy?”

“For three days.”

“You are wise,” he said. “You are wonderfully wise in some things, though you are still very young.”

“I am wise,” I answered. “Being of womankind and nineteen years, I am more than ready to give up absolutely everything that is good in the world’s sight, though they are contemptible things enough in my own, for love. All for love. Therefore I am wise. Also I am a fool.”

“Why are you a fool?”

“Because I am a genius.”

“Your logic is good logic,” said the Devil.

“My logic--oh, I don’t care anything about logic,” I said with sudden complete weariness. I felt buried and wrapped round and round in weariness. Everything lost its color. Everything turned cold.

“At this moment,” said the Devil, “you feel as if you cared for nothing at all. But if I chose I could bring about a transfiguration. I could kiss your soul into Paradise.”

I answered, “Yes,” without emotion.

“An hour,” said the Devil, “is not very long. But we know it is long enough to suffer in, and go mad in, and live in, and be happy in. And the world contains a great many hours. Now I am leaving you. It is likely that I may never come again, and it is likely that I may come again.”

It all vanished. I still sat by my window in the gloom. “It is dreary,” I said.

But yes. The world contains a great many hours.

April 4.

I have asked for bread, sometimes, and I have been given a stone.

Oh, it is a bitter thing--oh, it is piteous, piteous!

I find that I am not far apart from human beings. I can still be crushed, wounded, stunned, by the attitude of human beings.

To-day I looked for human-kindness, and I was given coldness. I repelled human beings.

I asked for bread and I was given a stone.

Oh, it is bitter--bitter.

Oh, is there a thing in the wide world more bitter?

_God_, where are you! I am crushed, wounded, stunned--and, oh--I am alone!

April 10.

I have a sense of humor that partakes of the divine in life--for there are things even in this chaotic irony that are divine. My genius is not divine. My patheticness is not divine. My philosophy is not divine, nor my originality, nor my audacity of thought. These are peculiarly of the earth. But my sense of humor--

It is humor that is far too deep to admit of laughter. It is humor that makes my heart melt with a high, unequaled sense of pleasure and ripple down through my body like old yellow wine.

A rare tone in a person’s voice, a densely wrathful expression in a pair of slate-colored eyes, a fine, fine shade of comparison and contrast between a word in a conversation and an angleworm pattern in a calico dressing-jacket--these are things that make me conscious of divine emotion.

One day last summer an Italian peddler-woman stopped at the back door and rested herself. I stood in the doorway, and the peddler-woman and I talked. She had a dirty white handkerchief tied over her head--as all Italian peddler-women do--and she had a telescope valise filled with garters, and hairpins, and soap, and combs, and pencils, and china buttons on blue cards, and bean-shooters, and tacks, and dream-books, and mouth-organs, and green glass beads, and jews-harps. There is something fascinating about a peddler-woman’s telescope valise. This peddler-woman wore a black satine wrapper and an ancient cape. She said that she would like to stop and rest a while, and I told her she might. I had always wanted to talk to a peddler-woman, and my mother never would allow one in the house.

“Is it nice to be a peddler?” I asked her.

“It ain’t bad,” replied the peddler-woman.

“Do you make a great deal of money?” I next inquired.

“Sometime I do, and sometime I don’t,” said the woman. She spoke with an accent that, while it sounded Italian, still showed unmistakably that she had lived in Butte.

“Well, do you make just enough to live on, or have you saved some money?” I asked.

“I got four hundred dollar in the bank,” she replied. “I been peddlin’ eight year.”

“Eight years of tramping around in all kinds of weather,” I said. “Your philosophy must be peripatetic, too. Haven’t you ever had rheumatism in your knees?”

“I got rheumatism in every joint in my body,” said the woman. “I have to lay off, sometime.”

“Have you a husband?” I wished to know.

“I had a man--oh, yes,” said the peddler-woman.

“And where is he?”

“Back home--in Italy.”

“Why doesn’t he come out here and work for you?” I asked.

“Yes, w’y don’t he?” said the woman. “Dat-a man, he’s dem lucky w’en he can get enough to eat--he is.”

“Why don’t you send him some money to pay his way out, since you’ve saved so much?” I inquired.

“Holy God!” said the peddler-woman. “I work hard for dat-a money. I save ev’ry cent. I ain’t go’n now to t’row it away--I ain’t. Dat-a man, he’s all right w’ere he is--he is.”

“What did you marry him for?” I asked.

The peddler-woman looked at me with that look which seems to convey the information that curiosity once killed a cat.

“What for?” I persisted--“for love?”

“I marry him w’en I was young girl. And he was young, too.”

“Yes--but what did you do it for? Was he awfully nice, and did he say awfully sweet things to you?”

“He was dem sweet--oh, yes,” said the peddler-woman. She grinned. “And I was young.”

“And you liked it when you were young and he was sweet, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I guess so. I was young,” she answered.

The fact that one is young seems to imply--in the Italian peddler mind--a lacking in some essential points.

“And don’t you like your man now?” I asked.

“Dat-a man, he’s all right, in Italy--he is,” replied the woman.

“Well,” I observed, “if I had a man who had been dem sweet once, when I had been young, but who was not sweet any more, I think I should leave him in Italy, too.”

“You’ll git a man some day soon,” said the peddler-woman.

I was interested to know that.

“They all do--oh, yes,” she said. “But you likely to be better off peddlin’, I tell you.”

“Yes, I think it would be amusing to be a peddler for a while,” I said. “But I should want the man, too, as long as he was dem sweet.”

The peddler-woman picked up the telescope valise.

“Yes,” she remarked, “a man, he’s sweet two days, t’ree days, then--holy God! he never work, he git-a drunk, he make-a rough-house, he raise hell.”

The peddler-woman nodded at me and limped out of the yard. The telescope valise was heavy. When she walked every muscle in her body seemed to be pressed into the service. She had a heavy, solid look. She seemed as though she might weigh three hundred pounds, though she was not large. The afternoon sun shone down brightly on her dirty white handkerchief, on her brown comely face, on her brown brass-ringed hands, on her black satine wrapper, on her ancient cape.

As I watched her out of sight I thought to myself: “Two days, t’ree days, then--holy God! he never work, he git-a drunk, he make-a rough-house, he raise hell.”

I was conscious of an intense humor that was so far beyond laughter that it was too deep even for tears. But I felt tears vaguely as I watched the peddler-woman limping up the road.

It was not pathos. It was humor--humor. My emotion was one of vivid pleasure--pleasure at the sight of the woman, and at the telescope valise, and at her conversation supplemented by my own.

This emotion is divine, and I can not grasp it.

As I looked after the Italian peddler-woman it came to me with sudden force that the earth is only the earth, but that it is touched here and there brilliantly with divine fingers.

Long and often as I’ve sat in intense silent passion and gazed at the red, red sunset sky, I have never then felt this sense of the divine.

It comes only through humor.

It comes only with things like an Italian peddler-woman in a black satine wrapper and an ancient cape.

My soul--how heavily it goes.

Life is a journeying up a spring-time hill. And at the top we wonder why we are there. Have mercy on me, I implore in a dull idea that the journey is so long--so long, and a human being is less than an atom.