Chapter V: Part 5

Napoleon was rather like the Devil, I think as I sit in the straight-backed chair with my feet on the bureau and gaze long and intently at the seventeen pictures, late in the evening.

Then I wearily put them away, maddened with the sense of Nothingness, and take Little Fido and go to bed.

Sometimes, early in the evening just before dinner, I sit in the stiff-backed chair with my elbows on the window-sill and my head resting on one hand, and I look out of the window at a Pile of Stones and a Barrel of Lime. These are in the vacant lot next to this house.

I fix my eyes intently on the Pile of Stones and the Barrel of Lime. And I fix my thoughts on them also. And some of my widest thoughts come to me then.

I feel an overwhelming wave of a kind of pantheism which, at the moment I feel it, begins slowly to grow less and less and continues in this until finally it dwindles to a Pile of Stones and a Barrel of Lime.

I feel at the moment that the universe is a Pile of Stones and a Barrel of Lime. They alone are the Real Things.

Take anything at any point and deceive yourself into thinking that you are happy with it. But look at it heavily; dig down underneath the layers and layers of rose-colored mists and you will find that your Thing is a Pile of Stones and a Barrel of Lime.

A struggle or two, a fight, an agony, a passing--and then the only Real Things: a Pile of Stones and a Barrel of Lime.

Damn everything! Afterward you will find that you have done all your damning for naught. For there is nothing worthy of damnation except a Pile of Stones and a Barrel of Lime--and they are not damnable. They have never harmed you, and moreover they alone are the Real Things.

Julius Caesar made many wars. Sir Francis Drake went sailing over the seas. It was all child’s play and counts for nothing. Here are the Pile of Stones and a Barrel of Lime.

And so this is how it is early in the evening just before dinner, when I sit in the uncomfortable chair with my elbows on the window-sill and my head resting on one hand.

I have two pictures of Marie Bashkirtseff high upon my wall. Often I lean my head on the back of the chair with my feet on the bureau--always with my feet on the bureau--and look at these pictures.

In one of them she is eighteen years old and wears a green frock which is extremely becoming--of which fact the person inside of it seems fully aware. The other picture is taken from her last photograph, when she was twenty-four.

Marie Bashkirtseff is a very beautiful creature. And evidently _she_ is not obliged to arrange a moreen petticoat over her plumpness. She has a wonderfully voluptuous look for a woman of eighteen years. In the later picture vanity is written in every line of her graceful form and in every feature of that charming face. The picture fairly yells: “I am Marie Bashkirtseff--and, oh, I am splendid!”

And as I look at the pictures I am glad. For though she was admirable and splendid, and all, she was no such genius as I. She had a genius of her own, it is true. But the Bashkirtseff, with her voluptuous body and her attractive personality, is after all a bit ordinary. My genius, though not powerful, is rare and deep, and no one has ever had or ever will have a genius like it.

Mary MacLane, if you live--if you live, my darling, the world will one day recognize your genius. And when once the world has recognized such genius as this--oh, then no one will ever think of profaning it by comparing it with any Bashkirtseff!

But I would give up this genius eagerly, gladly--at once and forever--for one dear, bright day free from loneliness.

The portraits of the Bashkirtseff are certainly beautiful, but there is something about them that is--well, not common, but bourgeois at least, as if she were a German waitress of unusual appearance, or an aristocratic shop-girl, or a nurse with good taste who would walk out on pleasant forenoons wheeling a go-cart--something of that sort. Perhaps it is because her neck is too short, or because her wrists are too muscular-looking. I thank a gracious Devil as I look up at the pictures that I have not those particular points and that particular bourgeois air. I am bound to confess that I have one of my own, but mine is Highland Scotch--and anyway, I am Mary MacLane.

Marie Bashkirtseff is beautiful enough, however, that she can easily afford to look rather second-rate.

I like to look at my two pictures of her.

I value money literally for its own sake. I like the feeling of dollars and quarters rubbing softly together in my hand. Always it reminds me of those lovely chestfuls of gold that Captain Kidd buried--no one seems to know just where. Usually I keep some fairly-clean dollars and quarters to handle. “Money is so nice!” I say to myself.

If you think, fine world, that I am always interesting and striking and admirable, always original, showing up to good advantage in a company of persons, and all--why, then you are beautifully mistaken. There are times, to be sure, when I can rivet the attention of the crowd heavily upon myself. But mostly I am the very least among all the idiots and fools. I show up to the poorest possible advantage.

Of several ways that are mine there is one that gives me a distinct and hopeless air of insignificance. I have seen people, having met me for the first time, glance carelessly at me as if they were quite sure I had not an idea in my brain--if I had a brain; as if they wondered why I had been asked there; as if they were fully aware that they had but to fiddle and “It” would dance. Sometimes before this highly intellectual gathering breaks up I manage to make them change their minds with astonishing suddenness. But nearly always I don’t bother about it at all. I go among people occasionally because it amuses me. It may be a literary club where they talk theosophy, or it may be a Cornish dance where they have pasty and saffron cake and the chief amusement is sending beer-bottles at various heads, or it may be a lady-like circle of married women with cerise silk drop-skirts and white kid gloves, drinking chocolate in the afternoon and talking about something “shocking!”

And often, as I say, I am the least of them.

Genius is an odd thing.

When certain of my skirts need sewing, they don’t get sewed. I simply pin the rents in them together and it lasts as long or longer than if I had seated myself in my stiff-backed chair with a needle and thread and mended them--like a sensible girl. (I hate a sensible girl.)

Though I have never yet hurriedly pinned up a torn flounce or several inches of skirt-binding without saying softly to myself, using a trite, expressive phrase, “Certainly, it’s a hell of a way to do.” Still I never take a needle and mend my garments. I couldn’t, anyway. I never learned to sew, and I don’t intend ever to learn. It reminds me too much of a constipated dressmaker.

And so I pin up the torn places--though, as I say, I never fail to make use of the quaint, expressive phrase.

All of which a reasonably astute reader will recognize as an important point in the portraying of any character--whether mine or the queen of Spain’s.

I had for my dinner to-day some whole-wheat bread, some liver-and-bacon, and some green, green early asparagus. While I was eating these the world seemed a very nice place indeed.

I never see people walking along on the opposite side of the street, as I sit by my window, without wondering who they are, and how they live, and how ugly they would look if their bodies were not adorned with clothes. Always I feel certain that some of them are bow-legged.

And sometimes I see a woman in a fearful state of deshabille walk across the vacant lot next to this. “A plague on me,” I say then to myself, “if I ever become middle-aged and if my entire being seems to tip up in the front, and if I go about with no stays so that when I tie an apron around my waist my upper fatness hangs over the band like a natural blouse.”

And so--I could go on writing all night these seemingly trivial but really significant details relating to the outer genius. But these will answer. These to any one who knows things will be a revelation.

Sometimes you know things, fine brave world.

You must know likewise that though I do ordinary things, when _I_ do them they cease to be ordinary. I make fudge--and a sweet girl makes fudge, but there are ways and ways of doing things. This entire affair of the fudge is one of my uniquest points.

No sweet girl makes fudge and eats it, as I make fudge and eat it.

So it is.

But, oh--who is to understand all this? Who will understand any of this Portrayal? My unhappy soul has delved in shadows far, far beyond and below.

March 23.

My philosophy, I find after very little analysis, approaches precariously near to sensualism.

It is wonderful how many sides there can be to just one character.

Nature, with all those suns, and all those hilltops, and all those rivers, and all those stars, is inscrutable--intangible--maddening. It affects one with unutterable joy and anguish, but no one can ever begin to understand what it means.

Human nature is yet more inscrutable--and nothing appears on the surface. One can have no idea of the things buried in the minds of one’s acquaintances. And mostly they are fools and have no idea themselves of what germs are in themselves--of what they are capable. And in most minds it is true the dormant devils never awaken and never are known.

It is another sign of my analytical genius, that I, aged nineteen, recognize the devils in my character. I have not the slightest wish, since things are as they are with me, to rid myself of them. There is in me much more of evil than of good. Genius like mine must needs have with it manifold bad. “I have in me the germ of every crime.” I have no desire to destroy these germs. I should be glad indeed to have them develop into a ravaging disease. Something in this dreadful confusion would then give way. My wooden heart and my soul would cry out in the darkness less heavily, less bitterly.

They want something--they know not what.

I give them poison.

They snatch it and eat it hungrily.

Then they are not so hungry. They become quieter.

The ravaging disease soothes them to sleep--it descends on them like rain in the autumn.

When I hurry over my sand and barrenness my vivid passions come to me--or when I sit and look at the horizon. When I walk slowly I consider calmly the question of how much evil I should need to kill off my finer feelings, to poison thoroughly this soul of unrest and this wooden heart so that they would never more be conscious of too-brilliant lights, and to make myself over into a quite different creature.

A little evil would do--a little of a fine, good quality.

I should like a man to come (it is always a man, have you ever noticed?--whatever one contemplates when one is of womankind and young). I should like a man to come, I said calmly to myself to-day as I walked slowly over my barrenness--a perfect villain to come and fascinate me and lead me with strong, gentle allurements to what would be technically termed my ruin. And as the world views such things it would be my ruin. But as I view such things it would not be ruin. It would be a new lease on life.

Yes, I should like a man to come--any man so that he is strong and thoroughly a villain, and so that he fascinates me. Particularly he must fascinate me. There must be no falling in love about it. I doubt if I could fascinate him, but I should ask him quite humbly to lead me to my ruin.

I have never yet seen the man who would not readily respond to such an appeal.

This villain would be no exception.

I would then jerk my life out of this Nothingness by the roots. Farewell, a long farewell, I would say. Then I would go forth with the man to my ruin. The man would be bad to his heart’s core. And after living but a short time with him my shy, sensitive soul would be irretrievably poisoned and polluted. The defilement of so sacred and beautiful a thing as marriage is surely the darkest evil that can come to a life. And so everything within me that had turned toward that too-bright light would then drink deep of the lees of death.

The thirst of this incessant unrest and longing, this weariness of _self_, would be quenched completely.

My life would be like fertile soil planted thickly with rank wild mustard. On every square inch of soil there would be a dozen sprouts of wild mustard. There would be no room--no room at all--for an anemone to grow. If one should start up, instantly it would be choked and overrun with wild mustard. But no anemone would start up.

My life now is a life of pain and revolt.

My life darkened and partly killed would be more than content to drift along with the current.

Oh, it would be a rest!

The Christians sing, there is rest for the weary, on the other side of Jordan, where the tree of life is blooming. But that rest, of course, is for the Christians. My rest will have to come on this side of Jordan. Let the impress of a thoroughly evil and strong man be stamped upon my inner life, and I am convinced there would come a wonderful settled quiet over it. Its spirit would be broken. It would rest. Why not? I have no virtue-sense. Nothing to me is of any consequence except to be rid of this unrest and pain. Yes, surely I might rest.

The coming of the man-devil would bring rest. But I am fool enough to think that marriage--the real marriage--is possible for me!

This other thing is within the reach of every one--of fools and geniuses alike--and of all that come between.

And so I want a fascinating wicked man to come and make me positively, rather than negatively, wicked. I feel a terrific wave of utter weariness. My life lies fallow. I am tired of sitting here. The sand and barrenness is gray with age. And I am gray with age.

Happiness--the red of the sunset sky--is the intensest desire of my life.

But I will grasp eagerly anything else that is offered me--_anything_.

The poisoning of my soul--the passing of my unrest--would rouse my mental power. My genius would receive a wonderful impetus from it. You would marvel, good world, at the things I should write. Not that they would be exalted--not that they would surge upward. Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles? But they would be marvels of fire and intensity. I should no longer exhaust much of my energy in grinding, grinding within. The things that would come of the thorns and thistles would excite your astonishment and admiration, though they be not grapes and figs.

And as for me--the real me--the creature imbued with a spirit of intense femininity, with a spirit of an intense sense of Love--with a spirit like that of the Magdalene who loved too much, with the very soul of unrest and Nothingness--this thing would vanish swiftly into oblivion, and I should go down a dark world and feel not.

March 25.

One of the remarkable points about my life is that it is so completely, hopelessly alone--a lonely, lonely life. This book of mine contains but one character--myself.

There is also the Devil--as a possibility.

And there is also the anemone lady--my dearest beloved--as a memory.

I have read books that were written to portray but one character, and there were various people brought in to help in the portraying. But my one friend is gone, and there is no person who enters into my inner life in the very least. I am always alone. I might mingle with people intimately every hour of my life--still I should be alone.

Always alone--alone.

Not even a God to worship.

How do I bear this? How do I get through the days and days?

And, oh, when it all comes over me, what frightful rage--what long agony of my breaking heart--what utter woe!

When the stars shine down upon me with cold hatred; when miles and miles of barrenness stretch out around me and envelop me in their weary, weary Nothingness; when the wind blows over me like the breath of a vicious giant; when the ugly, ugly sun radiates centuries of hard, heavy bitterness around me from its stinging rays; when the sky maddens me with its cold, careless blue; when the rivers that are flowing over the earth send echoes to me of their hateful voices; when I hear wild geese honking in bitter wailing melody; when bristling edges of jagged rocks cut sharply into my tired life; when drops of rain fall on me and pierce me like steel points; when the voices in the air shriek little-minded malice in my ears; when the green of Nature is the green of spitefulness and cruelty; when the red, red of the setting sun burns and consumes me with its horrid feverish effervescence; when I feel the all-hatred of the Universe for its poor little earth-bugs: then it is that I approach nearest to Rest.

The softnesses are my Unrest.

I do not want those bitter things.

But I must have them if I would rest.

I want the softnesses and I want Rest!

Oh, dear faint soul, it is hard--hard for us.

We are sick with loneliness.

March 26.

Now and again I have torturing glimpses of a Paradise. And I feel my soul in its pain every moment of my life. Otherwise, how gladly would I deny the existence of a soul and a life to come!

For my soul is beset with Nothingness, and the Paradise that shows itself is not for me.

March 28.

Hatred, after all, is the easiest thing of all to bear.

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.

The solid, heavy figure of an Italian peddler-woman with a telescope valise, limping away in the afternoon sunshine, is more convincing of the Things that Are than would be the sound of the wailing of legions of lost souls, could it be heard.

For the world must be amused.

And the world’s wind listeth as it bloweth.

April 11.

I write a great many letters to the dear anemone lady. I send some of them to her and others I keep to read myself. I like to read letters that I have written--particularly that I have written to her.

This is a letter that I wrote two days ago to my one friend:

“To you:--

“And don’t you know, my dearest, my friendship with you contains other things? It contains infatuation, and worship, and bewitchment, and idolatry, and a tiny altar in my soul-chamber whereon is burning sweet incense in a little dish of blue and gold.

“Yes, all of these.

“My life is made up of many outpourings. All the outpourings have one point of coming-together. You are the point of coming-together. There is no other.

“You are the anemone lady.

“You are the one whom I may love.

“To think that the world contains one beautiful human being for me to love!

“It is wonderful.

“My life is longing for the sight of you. My senses are aching for lack of an anemone to diffuse itself among them.

“A year ago, when you were in the high school, often I used to go over there when you would be going home, so that my life could be made momentarily replete by the sight of you. You didn’t know I was there--only a few times when I spoke to you.

“And now it is that I remember you.

“Oh, my dearest--you are the only one in the world!

“We are two women. You do not love me, but I love you.

“You have been wonderfully, beautifully kind to me.

“You are the only one who has ever been kind to me.

“There is something delirious in this--something of the nameless quantity.

“It is old grief and woe to live nineteen years and to remember no person ever to have been kind. But what is it--do you think?--at the end of nineteen years, to come at last upon one who is wonderfully, beautifully kind!

“Those persons who have had some one always to be kind to them can never remotely imagine how this feels.

“Sometimes in these spring days when I walk miles down into the country to the little wet gulch of the sweet-flags, I wonder why it is that this thing does not make me happy. ‘She is wonderfully, beautifully kind,’ I say to myself--‘and she is the anemone lady. She is _wondrously_ kind, and though she’s gone, nothing can ever change that.’

“But I am not happy.

“Oh, my one friend--what is the matter with me? What is this feeling? Why am I not happy?

“But how can you know?

“You are beautiful.

“I am a small, vile creature.

“Always I awake to this fact when I think of the anemone lady.

“I am not good.

“But you are kind to me--you are kind to me--you are kind to me.

“You have written me two letters.

“The anemone lady came down from her high places and wrote me two letters.

“It is said that God is somewhere. It may be so.

“But God has never come down from his high places to write me two letters.

“Dear--do you see?--you are the only one in the world.

“=Mary MacLane.=”

April 12.

Oh, the dreariness, the Nothingness!

Day after day--week after week,--it is dull and gray and weary. It is _dull_, =DULL=, DULL!

No one loves me the least in the world.

“My life is dreary--he cometh not.”

I am unhappy--unhappy.

It rains. The blue sky is weeping. But it is not weeping because I am unhappy.

I hate the blue sky, and the rain, and the wet ground, and everything. This morning I walked far away over the sand, and these things made me think they loved me--and that I loved them. But they fooled me. Everything fools me. I am a fool.

No one loves me. There are people here. But no one loves me--no one understands--no one cares.

It is I and the barrenness. It is I--young and all alone.

Pitiful Heaven!--but no, Heaven is not pitiful.

Heaven also has fooled me, more than once.

There is something for every one that I have ever known--some tender thing. But what is there for me? What have I to remember out of the long years?

The blue sky is weeping, but not for me. The rain is persistent and heavy as damnation. It falls on my mind and it maddens my mind. It falls on my soul and it hurts my soul.--Everything hurts my soul.--It falls on my heart and it warps the wood in my heart.

Of womankind and nineteen years, a philosopher of the peripatetic school, a thief, a genius, a liar, and a fool--and unhappy, and filled with anguish and hopeless despair. What is my life? Oh, what is there for me!

There has always been Nothing. There will always be Nothing.

There was a miserable, damnable, wretched, lonely childhood. Itself has passed, but the pain of it has not passed. The pain of it is with me and is added to the pain of now. It is pain that never lets itself be forgotten. The pain of the childhood was the pain of Nothing. The pain of now is the pain of Nothing. Oh, the pathetic burlesque-tragedy of Nothing!

It is burlesque, but it is none the less tragedy. It is tragedy that eats its way inward.

It is only I and the sand and barrenness.

I have never a tender thing in my life. The sand and barrenness has never a grass-blade.

I want a human being to love me. I have need of it. I am starving to death for lack of it.

Bitterest salt tears surge upward--sobs are shaking themselves out from the depths. Oh, the salt is bitter. I might lay me down and weep all day and all night--and the salt would grow more bitter and more bitter.

But life in its Nothingness is more bitter still.

It is burlesque-tragedy that is the most tragic of all.

It is an inward dying that never ends. It is the bitterness of death added to the bitterness of life.

What hell is there like that of one weak little human being placed on the earth--and left _alone_?

There are people who live and enjoy. But my soul and I--we find life too bitter, and too heavy to carry alone. Too bitter, and too heavy.

Oh, that I and my soul might perish at this moment, forever!

April 13.

I am sitting writing out on my sand and barrenness. The sky is pale and faded now in the west, but a few minutes ago there was the same old-time, always-new miracle of roses and gold, and glints and gleams of silver and green, and a river in vermilions and purples--and lastly the dear, the beautiful: the red, red line.

There also are heavy black shadows.

I have given my heart into the keeping of this.

And still, as always, I look at it--and feel it all with thrilling passion--and await the Devil’s coming.

L’ENVOI:

October 28, 1901.

And so there you have my Portrayal. It is the record of three months of Nothingness. Those three months are very like the three months that preceded them, to be sure, and the three that followed them--and like all the months that have come and gone with me, since time was. There is never anything different; nothing ever happens.

Now I will send my Portrayal into the wise wide world. It may stop short at the publisher; or it may fall still-born from the press; or it may go farther, indeed, and be its own undoing.

That’s as may be.

I will send it.

What else is there for me, if not this book?

And, oh, that some one may understand it!