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

be divinely dear, unutterably sweet!”

“Indeed you are rarely sweet,” the Devil will say. And I will be in transports.

Oh, Devil, Devil, Devil!

Oh, misery, misery of Nothingness!

The days are long—long and very weary as I await the Devil’s coming.

*

January 31

To-day as I walked out I was impressed deeply with the wonderful beautifulness of Nature even in her barrenness. The far-distant mountains had that high pure transparent look, and the nearer ones were transformed completely with a wistful beseeching attitude that reminded me of my life. It was late in the afternoon. As the sun lowered, the pure lavender of the far-away hills was tinted with faint-rose, and the gray of the nearer ones with sun-color. And the sand—my sand and barrenness—almost flushed consciously in its wide, mysterious magnitude. In the sky there was a white cloud. The sky was blue—blue almost as when I was a child. The air was very gentle. The earth seemed softened. There was an indefinite caressing something over all that went into my soul and stirred it, and hurt it. There was that in the air which is there when something is going to happen.—Only nothing ever happens.

- It is rare, I thought, that my sand and barrenness looks like this. I crouched on the ground, and the wondrous calm and beauty of the natural things awed and moved me with strange, still emotions.

I felt, and gazed about me, and felt again. And everything was very still.

Presently my eyes filled quietly with tears.

I bent my head into the breast of a great gray rock. Oh, my soul, my soul, I said over and over, not with passion. It is so divine—the earth is so beautiful, so untainted—and I, what am I? It was so beautiful that now as I write, and it comes over me again, I can not restrain the tears.

Tears are not common.

I felt my wooden heart, my soul, quivering and sobbing with their unknown wanting. This is my soul’s awakening. Ah, the pain of my soul’s awakening! Is there nothing, nothing to help this pain? I am so lonely, so lonely—Fannie Corbin, my one friend, my dearly-loved anemone lady, I want you so much—why aren’t you here! I want to feel your hand with mine as I felt it sometimes before you went away. You are the only one among a worldful of people to care a little—and I love you with all the strength and worship I can give to the things that are beautiful and true. You are the only one, the only one—and my soul is full of pain, and I am sitting alone on the ground, and my head lies on a rock’s breast. -

Strange, sweet passions stirred and waked somewhere deep within me as I sat shivering on the ground. And I felt them singing far away, as if their faint voices came out of that limitless deep, deep blue above me; and it was like a choir of spirit-voices, and they sang of love and of light and of dear tender dreams, and of my soul’s awakening. Why is this—and what is it that is hurting so? Is it because I am young, or is it because I am alone, or because I am a woman?

Oh, it is a hard and bitter thing to be a woman! And why—why? Is woman so foul a creature that she must needs be purged by this infinite pain?

The choir of faint, sweet voices comes to me incessantly out of the blue. My wooden heart and my soul are listening to them intently. The voices are trying hard to tell me, to help me, but I can not understand. I know only that it is about pure, exalted things, and about the all-abiding love that is somewhere; and it is about the earth-love, and about Truth,—but I can not understand. And the voices sing of me the child—a song of the unloved, starved little being; and a song of the unloved, half-grown creature; and a song of me, a woman and all alone—awaiting the Devil’s coming.

Oh, my soul—my soul!

A female snake is born out of its mother’s white egg, and lives a while in contentment among weeds and grass, and dies.

A female dog lives some years, and has bones thrown at her, and sometimes she receives a kick or a blow, and a dog-house to sleep in, and dies.

A female bird has a nest, and worms to eat, and goes south in the winter, and presently she dies.

A female toad has a swamp or a garden, some bugs and flies, contentment—and then she dies.

And each of these has a male thing with her for a time, and shortly there are little snakes or little dogs for her to love as much as it is given her to love—she can do no more.

And they are fortunate with their little snakes and little dogs.

A female human being is born out of her mother’s fair body, branded with a strange, plague-tainted name, and let go; and lives awhile, and dies. But before she dies she awakes. There is a pain that goes with it.

And the male thing that is with her for a time is unlike a snake or a dog. It is more like a man, and there is another pain for this.

And when a little human being comes with a soul of its own there must be another awakening, for she has then reached the best and highest state that any human being can reach, though she is a female human being, and plague-tainted. And here also there is heavy soul-pain.

The name—the plague-tainted name branded upon her—means woman.

I lifted my head from the breast of the gray rock. The tears had been falling, falling. Tears are so strange! Tears from the dried-up fountain of nineteen years are like drops of water wrung out of stone. Suddenly I got up from the ground and ran quickly over the sand for several minutes. I did not dare look again at the hilltops and the deep blue, nor listen again to the voices.

Oh, with it all, I am a coward! I shrink and cringe before the pain of the dazzling lights. Yet I am waiting—longing for the most dazzling light of all: the coming of the Devil.

*

February 1

Oh, the wretched bitter loneliness of me!

In all the deep darkness, and the silence, there is never a faint human light, never a voice!

How can I bear it—how can I bear it!

*

February 2

I have been looking over the confessions of the Bashkirtseff. They are indeed rather like my Portrayal, but they are not so interesting, nor so intense. I have a stronger individuality than Marie Bashkirtseff, though her mind was probably in a higher state of development than mine, even when she was younger than I.

Most of her emotions are vacillating and inconsistent. She worships a God one day and blasphemes him the next. She never loves her God. And why, then, does she have a God? Why does she not abandon him altogether? He seems to be of no use to her—except as a convenient thing on which to fasten the blame for her misfortunes.—And, after all, that is something very useful indeed.—And she loves the people about her one day, and the next day she hates them.

But in her great passion—her ambition—Marie Bashkirtseff was beautifully consistent. And what terrific storms of woe and despair must have enveloped her when she knew that within a certain period she would be dead—removed from the world, and her work left undone! The time kept creeping nearer—she must have tasted the bitterness of death indeed. She was sure of success, sure that her high-strained ambition would be gratified to its last vestige—and then, to die! It was certainly hard lines for the little Bashkirtseff.

My own despair is of an opposite nature.

There is one thing in the world that is more bitter than death—and that is life.

Suppose that I learned I was to die on the twenty-seventh of June, 1903, for instance. It would give me a soft warm wave of pleasure, I think. I might be in the depths of woe at the time; my despair might be the despair of despair; my misery utterly unceasing,—and I could say, “Never mind, on the twenty-seventh of June, 1903, all will be over—dull misery, rage, Nothingness, obscurity, the unknown longing, every desire of my soul, all the pain—ended inevitably, completely on the twenty-seventh of June, 1903.” I might come upon a new pain, but this, my long old torture, would cease.

You may say that I might end my life on that day, that I might do so now. I certainly shall if the pain becomes greater than I can bear—for what else is there to do? But I shall be far from satisfied in doing so. What if I were to end everything now—when perhaps the Devil may be coming to me in two years’ time with Happiness?

Upon dying it might be that I should go to some wondrous fair country where there would be trees and running water, and a resting-place. Well—oh, well! But I want the earthly Happiness. I am not high-minded and spiritual. I am earthly, human—sensitive, sensuous, sensual, and, ah, dear, my soul wants its earthly Happiness!

I can not bring myself to the point of suicide while there is a possibility of Happiness remaining. But if I knew that irrevocable, inevitable death awaited me on June twenty-seventh, 1903, I should be satisfied. My Happiness might come before that time, or it might not. I should be satisfied. I should know that my life was out of my hands. I should know, above all, that my long, long, old, old pain of loneliness would stop, June twenty-seventh, 1903.

I shall die naturally some day—probably after I have grown old and sour. If I have had my Happiness for a year or a day, well and good. I shall be content to grow as old and as sour as the Devil wills. But having had no Happiness—if I find myself growing old and still no Happiness—oh, then I vow I will not live another hour, even if dying were rushing headlong to damnation!

I am, do you see, a philosopher and a coward—with the philosophy of cowardice. I squeeze juice also from this fact sometimes—but the juice is not sweet juice.

The Devil—the fascinating man-Devil—it may be, is coming, coming, coming.

And meanwhile I go on and on, in the midst of sand and barrenness.

February 3

The town of Butte presents a wonderful field to a student of humanity and human nature. There are not a great many people—seventy thousand perhaps—but those seventy thousand are in their way unparalleled. For mixture, for miscellany—variedness, Bohemianism—where is Butte’s rival?

The population is not only of all nationalities and stations, but the nationalities and stations mix and mingle promiscuously with each other, and are partly concealed and partly revealed in the mazes of a veneer that belongs neither to nation nor to station, but to Butte.

The nationalities are many, it is true, but Irish and Cornish predominate. My acquaintance extends widely among the inhabitants of Butte. Sometimes when I feel in the mood for it I spend an afternoon in visiting about among divers curious people.

At some Fourth of July demonstration, or on a Miners’ Union day, the heterogeneous herd turns out—and I turn out, with the herd and of it, and meditate and look on. There are Irishmen—Kelleys, Caseys, Calahans, staggering under the weight of much whiskey, shouting out their green-isle maxims; there is the festive Cornishman, ogling and leering, greeting his fellow-countrymen with alcoholic heartiness, and gazing after