The Story of Mary MacLane by Mary MacLane (free reads txt) 📖

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 unnamed 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 role 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 Becky 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 these 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 exceeding 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 though 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 up-stairs 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 on 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 bed-room 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 down-stairs and work a while. -

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 hair-pins 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 prices 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 will 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