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

it! I wish to leave all my obscurity, my misery,—my weary unhappiness behind me forever.

I am deadly, deadly tired of my unhappiness.

I wish this Portrayal to be published and launched into that deep salt sea—the world. There are some there surely who will understand it and me.

Can I be that thing which I am—can I be possessed of a peculiar rare genius, and yet drag my life out in obscurity in this uncouth, warped, Montana town!

It must be impossible! If I thought the world contained nothing more than that for me—oh, what should I do! Would I make an end of my dreary little life now? I fear I would. I am a philosopher—and a coward. And it were infinitely better to die now in the high-beating pulses of youth than to drag on, year after year, year after year, and find oneself at last a stagnant old woman, spiritless, hopeless, with a declining body, a declining mind,—and nothing to look back on except the visions of things that might have been—and the weariness.

I see the picture. I see it plainly. Oh, kind Devil, deliver me from it!

Surely there must be in a world of manifold beautiful things something among them for me.

And always while I am still young, there is that dim light, the Future. But it is indeed a dim, dim light, and ofttimes there’s a treachery in it.

*

January 15

So then yes. I find myself at this stage of womankind and nineteen years, a genius, a thief, a liar—a general moral vagabond, a fool more or less, and a philosopher of the peripatetic school. Also I find that even this combination can not make one happy. It serves, however, to occupy my versatile mind, to keep me wondering what it is a kind Devil has in store for me.

A philosopher of my own peripatetic school—hour after hour I walk over the desolate sand and dreariness among tiny hills and gulches on the outskirts of this mining town; in the morning, in the long afternoon, in the cool of the night. And hour after hour, as I walk, through my brain some long, long pageants march: the pageant of my fancies, the pageant of my unparalleled egotism, the pageant of my unhappiness, the pageant of my minute analyzing, the pageant of my peculiar philosophy, the pageant ofmy dull, dull life,—and the pageant of the Possibilities.

We three go out on the sand and barrenness: my wooden heart, my good young woman’s-body, my soul. We go there and contemplate the long sandy wastes, the red, red line on the sky at the setting of the sun, the cold gloomy mountains under it, the ground without a weed, without a grass-blade even in their season—for they have years ago been killed off by the sulphur smoke from the smelters.

So this sand and barrenness forms the setting for the personality of me.

*

January 16

I feel about forty years old.

Yet I know my feeling is not the feeling of forty years. These are the feelings of miserable, wretched youth.

Every day the atmosphere of a house becomes unbearable, so every day I go out to the sand and the barrenness. It is not cold, neither is it mild. It is gloomy.

I sit for two hours on the ground by the side of a pitiably small narrow stream of water. It is not even a natural stream. I dare say it comes from some mine among the hills. But it is well enough that the stream is not natural—when you consider the sand and barrenness. It is singularly appropriate.

And I am singularly appropriate to all of them. It is good, after all, to be appropriate to something—to be in touch with something, even sand and barrenness.

The sand and barrenness is old—oh, very old. You think of this when you look at it.

What should I do if the earth were made of wood, with a paper sky!

I feel about forty years old.

And again I say I know my feeling is not the feeling of forty years. These are the feelings of miserable, wretched youth.

Still more pitiable than the sand and barrenness and the poor unnatural stream is the dry, warped cemetery where the dry, warped people of Butte bury their dead friends. It is a source of satisfaction to me to walk down to this cemetery, and contemplate it, and revel in its utter pitiableness.

“It is more pitiable than I and my sand and barrenness and my poor unnatural stream,” I say over and over, and take my comfort.

Its condition is more forlorn than that of a woman young and alone. It is unkempt. It is choked with dust and stones. The few scattered blades of grass look rather ashamed to be seen growing there. A great many of the headstones are of wood and are in a shameful state of decay. Those that are of stone are still more shameful in their hard brightness.

The dry, warped friends of the dry, warped people of Butte are buried in this dusty dreary wind-havocked waste. They are left here and forgotten.

The Devil must rejoice in this graveyard.

And I rejoice with the Devil.

It is something for me to contemplate that is more pitiable than I and my sand and barrenness and my unnatural stream.

I rejoice with the Devil.

The inhabitants of this cemetery are forgotten. I have watched once the burying of a young child. Every day for a fortnight afterward I came back, and I saw the mother of the child there. She came and stood by the small new grave. After a few days more she stopped coming.

I knew the woman and went to her house to see her. She was beginning to forget the child. She was beginning to take up again the thread of her life where she had let it go. The thread of her life is involved in the divorces and fights of her neighbors.

Out in the warped graveyard her child is forgotten. And presently the wooden headstone will begin to decay. But the worms will not forget their part. They have eaten the small body by now, and enjoyed it. Always worms enjoy a body to eat.

And also the Devil rejoiced.

And I rejoiced with the Devil.

They are more pitiable, I insist, than I and my sand and barrenness—the mother whose life is involved in divorces and fights, and the worms eating at the child’s body, and the wooden headstone which will presently decay.

And so the Devil and I rejoice.

But no matter how ferociously pitiable is the dried-up graveyard, the sand and barrenness and the sluggish little stream have their own persistent individual damnation. The world is at least so constructed that its treasures may be damned each in a different manner and degree.

I feel about forty years old.

And I know my feeling is not the feeling of forty years. They do not feel any of these things at forty. At forty the fire has long since burned out. When I am forty I shall look back to myself and my feelings at nineteen—and I shall smile.

Or shall I indeed smile?

*

January 17

I can do this.

Let me but make a beginning, let me but strike the world in a vulnerable spot, and I can take it by storm. Let me but win my spurs, and then you will see me—of womankind and young—valiantly astride a charger riding down the world, with Fame following at the charger’s heels, and the multitudes agape.

But oh, more than all this I want to be happy!

Fame is indeed benign and gentle and satisfying. But Happiness is something at once tender and brilliant beyond all things.

I want Fame more than I can tell.

But more than Fame I want Happiness. I have never been happy in my weary young life.

Think, oh think of being happy for a year—for a day! How brilliantly blue the sky would be; how swiftly and joyously would the green rivers run; how madly, merrily triumphant the four winds of heaven would sweep round the cornersof the fair earth!

What would I not give for one day, one hour, of that charmed thing Happiness! What would I not give up?

How we eager fools tread on each other’s heels, and tear each other’s hair, and scratch each other’s faces, in our furious gallop after Happiness. For some it is embodied in Fame, for some in Money, for some in Power, for some in Virtue—and for me in something very much like love.

None of the other fools desires Happiness as I desire it. For one single hour of Happiness I would give up at once these things: Fame, and Money, and Power, and Virtue, and Honor, and Righteousness, and Truth, and Logic, and Philosophy, and Genius. The while I would say, What a little, little price to pay for dear Happiness.

I am ready and waiting to give all that I have to the Devil in exchange for Happiness. I have been tortured so long with the dull, dull misery of Nothingness—all my nineteen years. I want to be happy—oh, I want to be happy -

The Devil has not yet come. But I know that he usually comes, and I await him eagerly.

I am fortunate that I am not one of those burdened with an innate sense of virtue and honor which must come always before Happiness. They are but few who find their Happiness in their Virtue. The rest of them must be content to see it walk away. But with me virtue and honor are nothing.

I long unspeakably for Happiness.

And so I await the Devil’s coming.

*

January 18

And meanwhile—as I wait—my mind occupies itself with its own good odd philosophy, so that even the Nothingness becomes almost endurable.

The Devil has given me some good things—for I find that the Devil owns and rules the earth and all that therein is. He has given me, among other things—my admirable young woman’s body, which I enjoy thoroughly and of which I am passionately fond.

A spasm of pleasure seizes me when I think in some acute moment of the buoyant health and vitality of this fine young body that is feminine in every fiber.

You may gaze at and admire the picture in the front of this book.It is the picture of a genius—a genius with a good strong young-woman’s body,—and inside the pictured body is a liver, a MacLane liver, of admirable perfectness.

Other young women and older women and men of all ages have good bodies also, I doubt not—though the masculine body is merely flesh, it seems, flesh and bones and nothing else. But few recognize the value of their bodies; few have grasped the possibilities, the artistic graceful perfection, the poetry of human flesh in its health. Few have even sense enough indeed to keep their flesh in health, or to know what health is until they have ruined some vital organ, and so banished it forever.

I have not ruined any of my vital organs, and I appreciate what health is. I have grasped the art, the poetry of my fine feminine body.

- This at the age of nineteen is a triumph for me. -

Sometime in the midst of the brightness of an October I have walked for miles in the still high air under the blue of the sky. The brightness of the day and the blue of the sky and the incomparable high air have entered into my veins and flowed with my red blood. They have penetrated into every remote nerve-center and into the marrow of my bones.

At such a time this young