Chapter IV: Part 4

My ancestors in their Highlands--some of them--were endowed with second sight. My genius is not in the least like second sight. That savors of the supernatural, the mysterious. My genius is a sound, sure, earthly sense, with no suggestion of mystery or occultism. It is an inner sense that enables me to feel and know things that I could not possibly put into thought, much less into words. It makes me know and analyze with deadly minuteness every keen, tiny damnation in my terrible lonely life. It is a mirror that shows me myself and something in myself in a merciless brilliant light, and the sight at once sickens and maddens me and fills me with an unnamed woe. It is something unspeakably dreadful. The sight for the time deadens all thought in my mind. It freezes my reason and intellect. Logic can not come to my aid. I can only feel and know the thing and it analyzes itself before my eyes.

I am alone with this--alone, alone, alone! There is no pitiful hand extended from the heights--there is no human being--ah, there is Nothing.

How can I bear it! Oh, I ask you--how can I bear it!

March 10.

My genius is an element by itself, and it is not a thing that I can tell in so many words. But it makes itself felt in every point of my life. This book would be a very different thing if I were not a genius--though I am not a literary genius. Often people who come in contact with me and hear me utter a few commonplace remarks feel at once that I am extraordinary.

I am extraordinary.

I have tried longingly, passionately, to think that even this sand and barrenness is mine. But I can not. I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that it, like all good things, is beyond me. It has something that I also have. In that is our bond of sympathy.

But the sand and barrenness itself is not mine.

Always I think there is but one picture in the world more perfect in its art than the picture of me in my sand and barrenness. It is the picture of the Christ crucified with two thieves. Nothing could be more divinely appropriate. The art in it is ravishingly perfect. It is one of the few perfect pictures set before the world for all time. As I see it before my mind I can think only of its utter perfectness. I can summon no feeling of grief at the deed. The deed and the art are perfect. Its perfectness ravishes my senses.

And within me I feel that the picture of me in my sand and barrenness--knowing that even the sand and barrenness is not mine--is only second to it.

March 11.

Sometimes when I go out on the barrenness my mind wanders afar.

To-day it went to Greece.

Oh, it was very beautiful in Greece!

There was a wide, long sky that was vividly, wonderfully blue. And there was a limitless sea that was gray and green. And it went far to the south. The sky and the sea spread out into the vast world--two beautiful elements, and they fell in love with each other. And the farther away they were the nearer they moved together until at last they met and clasped each other in the far distance. There were tall, dark-green trees of kinds that are seen only in Greece. They murmured and whispered in the stillness. The wind came off from the sea and went over them and around them. They quivered and trembled in shy, ecstatic joy--for the wind was their best-beloved. There were banks of moss of a deep emerald color, and golden flowers that drooped their heavy sensual heads over to the damp black earth. And they also loved each other, and were with each other, and were glad. Clouds hung low over the sea and were dark-gray and heavy with rain. But the sun shone from behind them at intervals with beams of bronze-and-copper. Three white rocks rose up out of the sea, and the bronze-and-copper beams fell upon them, and straightway they were of gold.

Oh, how beautiful were those three gold rocks that came up out of the sea!

Aphrodite once came up out of this same sea. She came gleaming, with golden hair and beautiful eyes. Her skin glowed with tints of carmine and wild rose. Her white feet touched the smooth, yellow sand on the shore. The white feet of Aphrodite on the yellow sand made a picture of marvelous beauty. She was flushed in the joy of new life.

But the bronze-and-copper sunshine on the three white rocks was more beautiful than Aphrodite.

I stood on the shore and looked at the rocks. My heart contracted with the pain that beautiful things bring.

The bronze-and-copper in the wide gray and green sea!

“This is the gateway of Heaven,” I said to myself. “Behind those three gold rocks there is music and the high notes of happy voices.” My soul grew faint. “And there is no sand and barrenness there, and no Nothingness, and no bitterness, and no hot, blinding tears. And there are no little heart-weary children, and no lonely young women--oh, there is no loneliness at all!” My soul grew more and more faint with thinking of it. “And there is no heart there but that is pure and joyous and in Peace--in long, still, eternal Peace. And every life comes there to its own; and every earth-cry is answered, and every earth-pain is ended; and the dark spirit of Sorrow that hangs always over the earth is gone--gone,--beyond the gateway of Heaven. And more than all, Love is there and walks among the dwellers. Love is a shining figure with radiant hands, and it touches them all with its hands so that never-dying love enters into their hearts. And the love of each for another is like the love of each for self. And here at last is Truth. There is searching and searching over the earth after Truth--and who has found it? But here is it beyond the gateway of Heaven. Those who enter in know that it is Truth at last.”

And so Peace and Love and Truth are there behind the three gold rocks.

And then my soul could no longer endure the thought of it.

Suddenly the sun passed behind a heavy, dark-gray cloud, and the bronze-and-copper faded from the three rocks and left them white--very white in the wide water.

The yellow flowers laid their heads drowsily down on the emerald moss. The wind from off the sea played very gently among the motionless branches of the tall trees. The blue, blue sky and the wide, gray-green sea clasped each other more closely and mingled with each other and became one vague, shadowy element--and from it all I brought my eyes back thousands of leagues to my sand and barrenness.

The sand and barrenness is itself an element, and I have known it a long, long time.

March 12.

Everything is so dreary--so dreary.

I feel as if I would like to die to-day. I should not be the tiniest bit less unhappy afterward--but this life is unutterably weary. I am not strong. I can not bear things. I do not want to bear things. I do not long for strength. I want to be happy.

When I was very little, it was cold and dreary also, but I was certain it would be different when I should grow and be ten years old. It must be very nice to be ten, I thought,--and one would not be nearly so lonesome. But when the years passed and I was ten it was just exactly as lonesome. And when I was ten everything was very hard to understand.

But it will surely be different when I am seventeen, I said. I will know so much when I am seventeen. But when I was seventeen it was even more lonely, and everything was still harder to understand.

And again I said--faintly--everything will become clearer in a few years more, and I will wonder to think how stupid I have always been. But now the few years more have gone and here I am in loneliness that is more hopeless and harder to bear than when I was very little. Still, I wonder indeed to think how stupid I have been--and now I am not so stupid. I do not tell myself that it will be different when I am five-and-twenty.

For I know that it will not be different.

I know that it will be the same dreariness, the same Nothingness, the same loneliness.

It is very, very lonely.

It is hope deferred and maketh the heart sick.

It is more than I can bear.

Why--_why_ was I ever born!

I can not live, and I can not die--for what is there after I am dead? I can see myself wandering in dark and lonely places.

Yet I feel as if I would like to die to-day.

March 13.

If it were pain alone that one must bear, one could bear it. One could lose one’s sense of everything but pain.

But it is pain with other things. It is the sense of pain with the sense of beauty and the sense of the anemone. And there is that mysterious pain.

Who knows the name of that mysterious pain?

It is these mingled senses that torture me.

March 14.

I have been placed in this world with eyes to see and ears to hear, and I ask for Life. Is it to be wondered at? Is it so strange? Should I be content merely to see and to hear? There are other things for other people. Is it atrocious that I should ask for some other things also?

Is thy servant a dog?

March 15.

In these days of approaching emotional Nature even the sand and barrenness begins to stir and rub its eyes.

My sand and barrenness is clothed in the awful majesty of countless ages. It stands always through the never-ending march of the living and the dead. It may have been green once--green and fertile, and birds and snakes and everything that loves green growing things may have lived in it. It may have sometime been rolling prairie. It may have been submerged in floods. It changed and changed in the centuries. Now it is sand and barrenness, and there are no birds and no snakes; only me. But whatever change came to it, whatever its transfiguration, the spirit of it never moved. Flood, or fertility, or rolling prairie, or barrenness--it is only itself. It has a great self, a wonderful self.

I shall never forget you, my sand and barrenness.

Some day, shall my thirsty life be watered, my starved heart fed, my asking voice answered, my tired soul taken into the warmth of another with the intoxicating sweetness of love?

It may be.

But I shall remember the sand and barrenness that is with me in my Nothingness. The sand and barrenness and the memory of the anemone lady are all that are in any degree mine.

And so then I shall remember it.

As I stand among the barren gulches in these days and look away at the slow-awakening hills of Montana, I hear the high, swelling, half-tired, half-hopeful song of the world. As I listen I know that there are things, other than the Virtue and the Truth and the Love, that are not for me. There is beyond me, like these, the unbreaking, undying bond of human fellowship--a thing that is earth-old.

It is beyond me, and it is nothing to me.

In my intensest desires--in my widest longings--I never go beyond _self_. The ego is the all.

Limitless legions of women and men in weariness and in joy are one. They are killing each other and torturing each other, and going down in sorrow to the dust. But they are one. Their right hands are joined in unseen sympathy and kinship.

But my two hands are apart, and clasped together in an agony of loneliness.

I have read of women who have been strongly, grandly brave. Sometimes I have dreamed that I might be brave. The possibilities of this life are magnificent.

To be saturated with this agony, I say at times, and to bear with it all; not to sink beneath it, but to vanquish it, and to make it the grace and comeliness of my entire life from the Beginning to the End!

Perhaps a woman--a real woman--could do this.

But I?--No. I am not real--I do not seem _real_ to myself. In such things as these my life is a blank.

There was Charlotte Corday--a heroine whom I admire above all the heroines. And more than she was a heroine she was a woman. And she had her agony. It was for love of her fair country.

To suffer and do and die for love of something! It is glorious! What must be the exalted ecstasy of Charlotte Corday’s soul now!

And I--with all my manifold passions--I am a coward.

I have had moments when, vaguely and from far off, it seemed as if there might be bravery and exaltation for me,--when I could rise far over myself. I have felt unspeakable possibilities. While they lasted--what wonderful emotion was it that I felt?

But they are not real.

They fade away--they fade away.

And again come the varied phenomena of my life to bewilder and terrify me.

Confusion! Chaos! Damnation! They are not moments of exaltation now. Poor little Mary MacLane!

“If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces.”

I do not know what to do.

I do not know what were good to do.

I would do nothing if I knew.

I might add to my litany this: Most kind Devil, deliver me--from myself.

March 16.

To-day I walked over the sand, and it was almost beautiful. The sun was sinking and the sky was filled with roses and gold.

Then came my soul and confronted me. My soul is wondrous fair. It is like a young woman. The beauty of it is too great for human eyes to look upon. It is too great for mine. Yet I look.

My soul said to me: “I am sick.”

I answered: “And I am sick.”

“We may be well,” said my soul. “Why are we not well?”

“How may we be well?” I asked.

“We may throw away all our vanity and false pride,” said my soul. “We way take on a new life. We may learn to wait and to possess ourselves in patience. We may labor and overcome.”

“We can do none of these things,” I cried. “Have I not tried all of them some time in my short life? And have I not waited and wanted until you have become faint with pain? Have I not looked and longed? Dear soul, why do you not resign yourself? Why can you not stay quiet and trouble yourself and me no more? Why are you always straining and reaching? There isn’t anything for you. You are wearing yourself out.”

My soul made answer: “I may strain and reach until only one worn nerve of me is left. And that one nerve may be scourged with whips and burned with fire. But I will keep one atom of faith. I may go bad, but I will keep one atom of faith in Love and in the Truth that is Love. You are a genius, but I am no genius. The years--a million of years--may do their utmost to destroy the single nerve. They may lash and beat it. I will keep my one atom of faith.”

“You are not wise,” I said. “You have been wandering and longing for a time that seems a thousand years--through my cold, dark childhood to my cold, dark womanhood. Is that not enough to quiet you? Is that not enough to teach you the lesson of Nothing? You are not a genius, but you are not a fool.”

“I will keep my one atom of faith,” said my soul.

“But lie and sleep now,” I said. “Don’t reach after that Light any more. Let us both sleep a few years.”

“No,” said my soul.

“Oh, my soul,” I wailed, “look away at that glowing copper horizon--and beyond it. Let us go there now and take an infinite rest. Now! We can bear this no longer.”

“No,” said my soul; “we will stay here and bear more. There would be no rest yet beyond the copper horizon. And there is no need of going anywhere. I have my one atom of faith.”

I gazed at my soul as it stood plainly before me, weak and worn and faint, in the fading light. It had one atom of faith, it said, and tried to hold its head high and to look strong and triumphant. Oh, the irony--the pathos of it!

My soul, with its one pitiful atom of faith, looked only what it was--a weeping, hunted thing.

March 17.

In some rare between-whiles it is as if nothing mattered. My heart aches, I say; my soul wanders; this person or that person was repelled to-day; but nothing matters.

A great inner languor comes like a giant and lays hold of me. I lie fallow beneath it.

Some one forgot me in the giving of things. But it does not matter. I feel nothing.

Persons say to me, don’t analyze any more and you will not be unhappy.

When Something throws heavy clubs at you and you are hit by them, don’t be hurt. When Something stronger than you holds your hands in the fire, don’t let it burn you. When Something pushes you into a river of ice, don’t be cold. When something draws a cutting lash across your naked shoulders, don’t let it concern you--don’t be conscious that it is there.

This is great wisdom and fine, clear logic.

It is a pity that no one has ever yet been able to live by it.

But after all it’s no matter. Nothing is any one’s affair. It is all of no consequence.

And have I not had all my anguish for nothing? I am a fool--a fool.

A handful of rich black mud in a pig’s yard--does it wonder why it is there? Does it torture itself about the other mud around it, and about the earth and water of which it is made, and about the pig? Only fool’s mud would do so. And so, then, I am fool’s mud.

Nothing counts. Nothing can possibly count.

Regret, passion, cowardice, hope, bravery, unrest, pain, the love-sense, the soul-sense, the beauty-sense--all for nothing! What can a handful of rich black mud in a pig’s yard have to do with these? I am a handful of rich black mud--a fool-woman, fool’s mud.

All on earth that I need to do is to lie still in the hot sun and feel the pig rolling and floundering and slushing about. It were folly to waste my mud nerves in wondering. Be quiet, fool-woman, let things be. Your soul is a fool’s-mud soul and is governed by the pig; your heart is a fool’s-mud heart, and wants nothing beyond the pig; your life is a fool’s-mud life, and is the pig’s life.

Something within me shrieks now, but I do not know what it is--nor why it shrieks.

It groans and moans.

There is no satisfaction in being a fool--no satisfaction at all.

March 18.

But yes. It all matters, whether or no. Nature is one long battle, and the never-ending perishing of the weak. I must grind and grind away. I have no choice. And I must know that I grind.

Fool, genius, young lonely woman--I must go round and round in the life within, for how many years the Devil knows. After that my soul must go round and round, for how many centuries the Devil knows.

What a master-mind is that of the Devil! The world is a wondrous scheme. For me it is a scheme that is black with woe. But there may be in the world some one who finds it beautiful Real Life.

I wonder as I write this Portrayal if there will be one person to read it and see a thing that is mingled with every word. It is something that you must feel, that must fascinate you, the like of which you have never before met with.

It is the unparalleled individuality of me.

I wish I might write it in so many words of English. But that is not possible. If I have put it in every word and if you feel it and are fascinated, then I have done very well.

I am marvelously clever if I have done so.

I know that I am marvelously clever. But I have need of all my peculiar genius to show you my individuality--my aloneness.

I am alone out on my sand and barrenness. I should be alone if my sand and barrenness were crowded with a thousand people each filled with melting sympathy for me--though it would be unspeakably sweet.

People say of me, “She’s peculiar.” They do not understand me. If they did they would say so oftener and with emphasis.

And so I try to put my individuality in the quality of my diction, in my method of handling words.

My conversation plainly shows this individuality--more than shows it, indeed. My conversation hurls it violently at people’s heads. My conversation--when I choose--makes people turn around in their chairs and stare and give me all of their attention. They admire me, though their admiration is mixed decidedly with other feelings.

I like to be admired.

It soothes my vanity.

When you read this Portrayal you will admire me. You will surely have to admire me.

And so this is life, and everything matters.

But just now I will stop writing and go downstairs to my dinner. There is a porterhouse steak, broiled rare, and some green young onions. Oh, they are good! And when one is to have a porterhouse steak for one’s dinner--and some green young onions, one doesn’t give a tupenny dam whether anything else matters or not.

March 19.

On a day when the sky is like lead and a dull, tempestuous wilderness of gray clouds adds a dreariness to the sand, there is added to the loneliness of my life a deep bitterness of gall and wormwood.

Out of my bitterness it is easy for bad to come.

Surely Badness is a deep black pool wherein one may drown dullness and Nothingness.

I do not know Badness well. It is something material that seems a great way off now, but that might creep nearer and nearer as I became less and less young.

But now when the day is of the leaden dullness I look at Badness and long for it. I am young and all alone, and everything that is good is beyond my reach. But all that is bad--surely that is within the reach of every one.

I wish for a long pageant of bad things to come and whirl and rage through this strange leaden life of mine and break the spell.

Why should it not be Badness instead of Death? Death, it seems, will bring me but a change of agony. Badness would perhaps so crowd my life with its vivid phenomena that they would act as a neurotic to the racked nerves of my Nothingness. It would be an outlet--and possibly I could forget some things.

I think just now of a woman who lived long ago and in whom the world at large seems not to have found anything admirable. I mean Messalina Valeria, the wife of the stupid emperor Claudius. I have conceived a profound admiration for this historic wanton. She may not indeed have had anything to forget; she may not have suffered. But she had the strength of will to take what she wanted, to do as she liked, to live as she chose to live.

It is admirable and beautiful beyond expression to sacrifice and give up and wait for love of that good that gives in itself a just reward. And only next to this is the throwing to the winds of all restraint when the good holds itself aloof and gives nothing. We are weak, contemptible fools who do not grasp the resources within our reach when there is no just reward for our restraint. Why do we not take what we want of the various temptations? It is not that we are virtuous. It is that we are cowards.

And it is worth while to remain true to an ideal that offers only the vaguest hopes of realization? It is not philosophy. When one has made up one’s mind that one wants a dish of hot stewed mushrooms, and set one’s heart on it, should one scorn a handful of raw evaporated apples, if one were starving, for the sake of the phantom dish of hot stewed mushrooms? Should one say, Let me starve, but I will never descend to evaporated apples; I will have nothing but a dish of hot stewed mushrooms? If one is sure one will have the stewed mushrooms finally, before one dies of starvation, then very well. One should wait for them and take nothing else.

But it is not in my good peripatetic philosophy to pass by the Badness that the gods provide for the sake of a far-away, always-unrealized ideal, however brilliant, however beautiful, however golden.

When the lead is in the sky and in my life, a vision of Badness looms up on the horizon and looks at me and beckons with a fascinating finger. Then I say to myself, What is the use of this unsullied, struggling soul; this unbesmirched, empty heart; this treasureless, innocent mind; this insipid maid’s-body? There are no good things for them. But here, to be sure, are fascinating, glittering bad things--the goods that the gods provide, the compensation of the Devil.

Comes Death, some day, I said--but to die, in the sight of glittering bad things--and I only nineteen! These glittering things appear fair.

There is really nothing evil in the world. Some things appear distorted and unnatural because they have been badly done. Had they been perfect in conception and execution they would strike one only with admiration at their fine, iridescent lights. You remember Don Juan and Haidee. That, to be sure, was not evil in any event--they loved each other. But if they had had only a passing, if intense, fancy for one another, who would call it evil? Who would call it anything but wonderful, charming, enchanting? The Devil’s bad things--like the Devil’s good things--may gleam and glisten, oh, how they may gleam and glisten! I have seen them do so, not only in a poem of Byron’s, but in the life that is.

Always when the lead is in the sky I would like to cultivate thoroughly this branch of the vineyard. Now doesn’t it make you shiver to think of this dear little Mary MacLane wandering unloved through dark by-ways and deadly labyrinths? It makes me shiver. But it needn’t. If I am to wander unloved, why not as well wander there as through Nothingness?

I fancy it must be wonderfully easy to become used to the many-sided Badness. I have lived my nineteen years in the midst of Nothingness, and I have not yet become used to it. It has sharp knives in it, has Nothingness. Badness may have some sharp knives also--but there are other things. Yes, there are other things.

Kind Devil, if you are not to fetch me Happiness, then slip off from your great steel key-ring a bright little key to the door of the glittering, gleaming bad things, and give it me, and show me the way, and wish me joy.

I would like to live about seven years of judicious Badness, and then Death, if you will. Nineteen years of damnable Nothingness, seven years of judicious Badness--and then Death. A noble ambition! But might it not be worse? If not that, then nineteen years of damnable Nothingness, and then Death. No; when the lead is in the sky that does not appeal to me. My versatile mind turns to the seven years of judicious Badness.

There is nothing in the world without its element of Badness. It is in literature; it is in every art--in pictures, sculpture, even in music. There are certain fine, deep, minute passages in Beethoven and in Chopin that tell of things wonderfully, sublimely bad. Chopin one can not understand. Is there any one in the world who can understand him? But we know at once that there is the Badness--and it is music!

There is the element of Badness in me.

I long to cultivate my element of Badness. Badness compared to Nothingness is beautiful. And so, then, I wait also for some one to come over the hill with things other than Happiness. But whatever I wait for, nothing comes.

March 20.

There were pictures in the red sunset sky to-day. I looked at them and was racked with passions of desire. I fancied to myself that I could have any of the good things in the pictures for the asking and the waiting. The while I knew that when the sunset should fade from the sky I would be overwhelmed by my heaviest woe.

There was a picture of intense peace. There were stretches of flat, green country, and oak-trees and aspens, and a still, still lake. In the dim distance you could see fields of wheat and timothy-grass that moved a little as if in the wind. You could fancy the cows feeding just below the brow of the near hills, and a hawk floating and wheeling among the clouds. A rainbow arched over the lake. There is nothing lacking here, I thought. “Life and health and peace possessing.” Give me this, kind Devil.

There was a picture of endless, limitless strength. There were the oak-trees again but bereft now of every leaf, and the bristling, jagged rocks back of them were not more coldly staunch. The sun poured brilliantly bright upon them. A river flowed unmoved and quiet between yellow clay banks. A tornado might sweep over this and not one twig would be displaced, not one ripple would come to the river. Is it not fine! I said to myself. No feeling, no self-analysis, no aching, no pain--and the strength of the Philistines. Oh, kind Devil, I entreat you, let me have that!

There was a picture of untrammeled revel and forgetfulness. There were fields of swaying daffodils and red lilies. The young shrubs tossed their heads and were joyous. Lambs gamboled and the happy meadow-lark knew whereof she sang.

“The winds with wonder whist
Smoothly the waters kissed.”

Be carefree, be light-hearted, be wicked--above all, forget. The deeds are what you will; the time is now; the aftermath is nothing; the day of reckoning is never. Love things lightly, take all that you see, and to the winds with regret! Gracious Devil, I whispered intensely, give me this and no other!

There was a picture of raging elements. “The winds blew, and the rains descended and the floods came.” The sky was overcast with rolling clouds. The air was heavy with unrest. There was a gray stone house set upon a rocky point, and I had momentary glimpses of an unquiet sea below it. Back on the surface of the land slender trees were waving wildly in the gale. The wind and the rain were saying, “Damn you, little earth, I have you now,--I will rend and ruin you.” They whipped and raged in frenzied joy. The little earth liked it. The elements whirled and whistled round the gray stone house. A lurid light came from a ghastly moon between clouds. The entire scene was desolately savage and forlorn, but attractive. As I listened in fancy to that shrieking, wailing wind, and saw green branches jerked and twisted asunder in the storm, my barren, defrauded heart leaped and exulted. If I could live in the midst of this and be beaten and shaken roughly, would not that deep sense forget to ache? Kind Devil, pray send me some storms. It is Nothingness that bears down heavy.

There was a picture of an exalted spiritual life. There was that strange bright light. And the things in the picture were those things alone in this world that are real, and the only things that count. The old, soft green of the old, old rolling hills was the green of love--the earth-love and the love that comes from beyond the earth. The air and the blue water and the sunshine were so beautifully real and true that except for their deep-reaching, passionate tenderness human strength could not endure them. There were lanes of climbing vines and white violets. Was it my fancy that brought their thin fragrance to me over piles of billowy clouds? There was something there that was old--old as the race. Those green valleys were the same as when the mists first lifted from the earth. As I looked my life stood still. My soul shivered faintly. As I looked I felt nearer, my God, to thee--though I have no God and everything is away from me, nothing tender comes to me.

Still it was nearer, my God, to thee.

A voice came out of the far, far distant ages and said very gently: “All these shadows are falling in vain. You are blinded and bewildered in the darkness--the darkness is deep--deep. There is not one dim ray of light. Your feet falter and stumble. You can not see. But the shadows are falling in vain.”

I ask you, Why is this life not mine?

I implore and wring my hands in agonized entreaty, and almost it seems sometimes my fingers can grasp these things--but there is something cold and strong between them and me. Oh, what is it!

There was a picture of various castles in Spain. They were most beautiful, were those castles. The lights that shone on the battlements were soft, bright lights. For one thing, I fancied I saw myself and Fame with me. Fame is very fine. The sun and moon and stars may go dark in the Heavens. Bitter rain may fall out of the clouds. But never mind. Fame has a sun and moon and gently brilliant stars of her own, and these, shining once, shine always. The green river may run dry in the land. But Fame has a green river that never runs dry. One may wander over the face of the earth. But Fame is herself a refuge. One may be a target for stones and mud. Yes--but Fame stands near with her arm laid across one’s shoulders--as no other arm can be laid across one’s shoulders. Fame would fill several empty places. Fame would continue to fill them for some years.

Fame, if you please, Devil.

There was a picture of Death. I saw a figure lying in the midst of a desert that was rather like my sand and barrenness. Not far off a wolf sat on his haunches and waited for the end. A buzzard perched near and waited also. They both appeared hungry. It seemed as though the end might come quickly.

Let it come, kind Devil.

And a wolf and a buzzard are better than an undertaker and some worms. Although that doesn’t much matter.

And oh, there again was the dearest picture of all--the red, red picture of Happiness for me, Happiness with the sunshine falling on the Heaven-kissing hills! There was I, and I loved and was loved. I--out of loneliness into perfect Happiness! The yellow-gold of the glorious hot sun melted and poured over the earth and over everything that was there. The river ran and rippled and sang the most sweetly glad song that ever river sang. Winged things sparkled in the gold light and flew down the sky. “The wonderful air was over me; the wonderful wind was shaking the tree.” The silent voices in the air rang out like flutes and clarionets. And the love of the man-devil for me was everywhere--above me, around me, within me. It would last for a number of beautiful yellow-gold days. I--out of the anguish of loneliness into this!

My heart is filled with desire.

My soul is filled with passion.

My life is a life of longing.

All pictures fade before this picture. They fade completely. When the sun itself faded I gazed over my sand and barrenness with blurred, unseeing eyes and wished only with a heavy, desolate spirit for the coming of the Devil.

March 21.

Some people think, absurdly enough, that to be Scotch or descended from the Scottish clans is to be rather strong, rather conservative, firm in faith, and all that. The idea is one that should be completely exploded by this time. I think that the Scotch as a nation are the most difficult of all to characterize. Their traits and tendencies cover a wider field than those of any other. To be Scotch is to be anything. There is no man so narrow as a Scotchman. There is no man so broad as a Scotchman. There is no mind so versatile as a Scotch mind. At the same time only a Scotch mind is capable of clinging with bull-dog tenacity to one idea. A Scotch heart out of all, and through all, can be true as death. A Scotch heart--the same one--can be cunning and treacherous as false human hearts are made. To be English is to have limits; the Germans, the French, the Russians--they have all some inevitable attributes to modify their genius.

But one may be anything--anything, if one is Scotch.

Always I think of the cruel, hardened, ferocious, weather-beaten, kilted Clan MacLean wandering over bleak winter hills, fighting the powerful MacDonalds and MacGregors--and generally wiping them from the earth,--marching away with merrily shrieking pipes from fields of withered, blood-soaked heather--and all this merely to gather intensified life for me. I feel that the causes of my tragedy began long, long ago from remote germs.

My Scotch blood added to my genius sense has made me into a dangerous chemical compound. By analyzing I have brought an almost clear portrait of myself up before my mind’s eyes.

When I was a child I did not analyze knowingly, but the child was this same genius, though I am one of the kind that changes widely and decidedly in the years. This weary unhappiness is not a matter of development.

When I was a child I felt dumbly what I feel now less dumbly. At the age of five I used sometimes to weep silently in the night--I did not know why. It was that I felt my aloneness, my foreignness to all things. I felt the heavy, heavy weight of life--and I was only five.

I was only five, and it seems a thousand years ago. But sometimes back through the long, winding, unused passages of my mind I hear that silent sobbing of the child and the unarmed wailing of a tiny, tired soul.

It mingles with the bitter Nothingness of the grown young woman, and oh, with it all--with it all I am so unhappy!

There is something subtly _Scotch_ in all this.

But Scotch or Indian or Japanese, there is no stopping of the pain.

March 22.

I fear, do you know, fine world, that you do not yet know me really well--particularly me of the flesh. Me of the peculiar philosophy and the unhappy spirit you know rather well by now, unless you are stupider than I think you are. But you might pass me in the street--you might spend the day with me--and never suspect that I am I. Though for the matter of that, even if I had set before you a most graphic and minutely drawn portrait of myself, I am certainly clever enough to act a quite different rôle if I chose--when you came to spend the day. Still, if the world at large is to know me as I desire it to know me without ever seeing me, I shall have to bring myself into closer personal range with it--and you may rise in your seats and focus your opera-glasses, stare with open mouths, stand on your hind-legs and gape--I will myself turn on glaring green and orange lights from the wings.

I believe that it’s the trivial little facts about anything that describe it the most effectively. In “Vanity Fair,” when Beckey Sharpe was describing young Crawley in a letter to her friend Amelia, she stated that he had hay-colored whiskers and straw-colored hair. And knowing this you feel that you know much more about the Crawley than you would if Miss Sharpe had not mentioned those things. And yet it is but a mere matter of color!

When you think that Dickens was extremely fond of cats you feel at once that nothing could be more fitting. Somehow that marvelously mingled humor and pathos and gentle irony seem to go exceedingly well with a fondness for soft, green-eyed, purring things. If you had not read the pathetic humor, but knew about Dickens and his warm feline friends you might easily expect such things from him.

When you read somewhere that Dr. Johnson is said never to have washed his neck and his ears, and then go and read some of his powerful, original philosophy, you say to yourself, “Yes, I can readily believe that this man never troubled himself to wash his neck and his ears.” I, for my part, having read some of the things he has written, can not reconcile myself to the fact that he ever washed any part of his anatomy. I admire Dr. Johnson--though I wash my own neck occasionally.

When you think of Napoleon amusing himself by taking a child on his knee and pinching it to hear it cry, you feel an ecstatic little wave of pleasure at the perfect fitness of things. You think of his hard, brilliant, continuous victories, and you suspect that Napoleon Bonaparte lived but to gratify Napoleon Bonaparte. When you think of the heavy, muscular man smilingly pinching the child, you are quite sure of it. Such a method of amusement for that king among men is so exquisitely appropriate that you wonder why you had not thought of it yourself.

So, then, yes. I believe strenuously in the efficacy of seemingly trivial facts as portrayers of one’s character--one’s individual humanness.

Now I will set down for your benefit divers and varied observations relative to me--an interesting one of womankind and nineteen years, and curious and fascinating withal.

Well, then.

Nearly every day I make me a plate of hot, rich fudge, with brown sugar (I should be an entirely different person if I made it with white sugar--and the fudge would not be nearly so good), and take it upstairs to my room, with a book or a newspaper. My mind then takes in a part of what is contained in the book or the newspaper, and the stomach of the MacLane takes in all of what is contained in the plate. I sit by my window in a miserable, uncomfortable, stiff-backed chair, but I relieve the strain by resting my feet on the edge of the low bureau. Usually the book that I read is an old dilapidated bound volume of that erstwhile periodical, “Our Young Folks.” It is a thing that possesses a charm for me. I never grow tired of it. As I eat my nice brown little squares of fudge I read about a boy whose name is Jack Hazard and who, J. T. Trowbridge informs the reader, is doing his best, and who seems to find it somewhat difficult. I believe I could repeat pages of J. T. Trowbridge from memory, and that ancient bound volume has become a part of my life. I stop reading after a few minutes, but I continue to eat--and gaze at the toes of my shoes which need polishing badly, or at the conglomeration of brilliant pictures on my bedroom wall, or out of the window at the children playing in the street. But mostly I gaze without seeing, and my versatile mind is engaged either in nothing or in repeating something over and over, such as, “But the sweet face of Lucy Gray will never more be seen.” Only I am not aware that I have been repeating it until I happen to remember it afterward.

Always the fudge is very good, and I eat and eat with unabated relish until all the little squares are gone. A very little of my fudge has been known to give some people a most terrific stomach-ache--but my own digestive organs seem to like nothing better. It’s so brown--so rich!

I amuse myself with this for an hour or two in the afternoon. Then I go downstairs and work awhile.

There are few things that annoy me so much as to be called a young lady. I am no lady--as any one could see by close inspection, and the phrase has an odious sound. I would rather be called a sweet little thing, or a fallen woman, or a sensible girl--though they would each be equally a lie.

Always I am glad when night comes and I can sleep. My mind works busily repeating things while I divest myself of my various dusty garments. As I remove a dozen or two of hairpins from my head I say within me:

“You are old, father William, one would hardly suppose
That your eye is as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose--
What made you so awfully clever?”

Always I take a little clock to bed with me and hang it by a cord at the head of my bed for company. I have named the clock Little Fido, because it is so constant and ticks always. It is beginning to stand in the same relation to me as J. T. Trowbridge’s magazine. If I were to go away from here I should take Little Fido and the magazine with me.

Every morning, being beautifully hungry after my walk, I eat three boiled eggs out of the shell for my breakfast. The while I mentally thank the kind Providence that invented hens. Also I eat bits of toast. I have my breakfast alone--because the rest of the family are still sleeping,--sitting at a corner of the kitchen table. I enjoy those three eggs and those bits of toast. Usually when I am eating my breakfast I am thinking of three things: the varying price of any eggs that are fit to eat; of what to do after I’ve finished my housework and before lunch; and of my one friend. And I meditatively and gently kick the leg of the table with the heel of my right foot.

I have beautiful hair.

In the front of my shirt-waist there are nine cambric handkerchiefs cunningly distributed. My figure is very pretty, to be sure, but not so well developed as it will be in five years--if I live so long. And so I help it out materially with nine cambric handkerchiefs. You can see by my picture that my waist curves gracefully out. Only it is not all flesh--some of it is handkerchief. It amuses me to do this. It is one of my petty vanities.

Likewise by an ingenious arrangement of my striped moreen petticoat I contrive to display a more evident pair of hips than Nature seems to have intended for me at this stage. Doubtless they also will take on fuller proportions when some years have passed. Still I am not dissatisfied with them as they are. It is not as if they were too well developed--in which case I should have need of all my skill in arranging my moreen petticoat so as to lessen their effect. It is easy enough to add on to these things, but one would experience serious difficulty in attempting to take from them. I hate that heavy, aggressive kind of hips. Moreover, small, graceful ones are desirable when one is nineteen. The world at large judges you more leniently on that account--usually. Narrow, shapely hips may give one an effect of youth and harmlessness which is a distinct advantage, when, for instance, one is writing a Portrayal and so will be at the world’s mercy. I believe I should not think of attempting to write a Portrayal if I had hips like a pair of saddle-bags. Certainly it would avail me nothing.

Sometimes I look at my face in a mirror and find it not plain but ugly. And there are other times when I look and find it not pretty but beautiful with a Madonna-like sweetness.

I told you I might say more about the liver that is within me before I have done. Well, then, I will say this: that the world, if it had a liver like mine, would be very different from what it is. The world would be many-colored and mobile and passionate and nervous and high-strung and intensely alive and poetic and romantic and philosophical and egotistic and pathetic, and, oh, racked to the verge of madness with the spirit of unrest--if the world had a liver like mine. It is not all of these now. It is rather stupid. Gods and little fishes! would not the world be wonderful if all in it were like me? And it would be if it had a liver like mine. For it is my liver mostly that makes me what I am--apart from my genius. My liver is fine and perfect, but sensitive, and, well--it’s a dangerous thing to have within you.

It is the liver of the MacLanes.

It is the foundation of the curious castle of my existence.

And after all, fine, brave, stupid world, you may be grateful to the Devil that yours is not like it.

I have seventeen little engraved portraits of Napoleon that I keep in one of my bureau-drawers. Often late in the evening, between nine and ten o’clock, when I come in from a walk over the sand and barrenness, I take these pictures from the drawer and gaze at them carefully a long time and think of that man until I am stirred to the depths.

And then easily and naturally I fall in love with Napoleon.

If only he were living now, I think to myself, I would make my way to him by whatever means and cast myself at his feet. I would entreat him with the most passionate humbleness of spirit to take me into his life for three days. To be the wife of Napoleon for three days--that would be enough for a lifetime! I would be much more than satisfied if I could get three such days out of life.

I suppose a man is either a villain or a fool, though some of them seem to be a judicious mingling of both. The type of the distinct villain is preferable to a mixture of the two, and to a plain fool. I like a villain anyway--a villain that can be rather tender at times. And so, then, as I look at the pictures I fall in love with the incomparable Napoleon. The seventeen pictures are all different and all alike. I fall in love with each picture separately.

In one he is ugly and unattractive--and strong. I fall in love with him.

In another he is cruel and heartless and utterly selfish--and strong. I fall in love with him.

In a third he has a fat, pudgy look, and is quite insignificant--and strong. I fall in love with him.

In a fourth he is grandly sad and full of despair--and strong. I fall in love with him.

In the fifth he is greasy and greedy and common-looking--and strong. I fall in love with him.

In the sixth he is masterly and superior and exalted--and strong. I fall in love with him.

In the seventh he is romantic and beautiful--and strong. I fall in love with him.

In the eighth he is obviously sensual and reeking with uncleanness--and strong. I fall in love with him.

In the ninth he is unearthly and mysterious and unreal--and strong. I fall in love with him.

In the tenth he is black and sullen-browed, and ill-humored--and strong. I fall in love with him.

In the eleventh he is inferior and trifling and inane--and strong. I fall in love with him.

In the twelfth he is rough and ruffianly and uncouth--and strong. I fall in love with him.

In the thirteenth he is little and wolfish and vile--and strong. I fall in love with him.

In the fourteenth he is calm and confident and intellectual--and strong. I fall in love with him.

In the fifteenth he is vacillating and fretful and his mouth is like a woman’s--and still he is strong. I fall in love with him.

In the sixteenth he is slow and heavy and brutal--and strong. I fall in love with him.

In the seventeenth he is rather tender--and strong. I fall vividly in love with him.