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

every feminine creature with lustful eyes; there are Irish women swearing genially at each other in shrill pleasantry, and five or six loudly-vociferous children for each; there are round-faced Cornish women likewise, each with her train of children; there are suave sleek sporting men just out of the bath-tub; insignificant lawyers, dentists, messenger-boys; “plungers” without number; greasy Italians from Meaderville; greasier French people from the Boulevarde Addition; ancient miners—each of whom was the first to stake a claim in Butte; starved-looking Chinamen here and there; a contingent of Finns and Swedes and Germans; musty, stuffy old Jewish pawn-brokers who have crawled out of their holes for a brief recreation; dirt-encrusted Indians and squaws in dirty-gay blankets, from their flea-haunted camp below the town; “box rustlers”—who are as common in Butte as bar-maids in Ireland; swell, flashy-looking Africans; respectable women with white aprons tied around their waists and sailor-hats on their heads, who have left the children at home and stepped out to see what was going on; innumerable stray youngsters from the dark haunts of Dublin Gulch; heavy restaurant-keepers with tooth-picks in their mouths; a vast army of dry-goods clerks—the “paper-collared” gentry; miners of every description; representatives from Dog Town, Chicken Flats, Busterville, Butchertown and Seldom Seen—suburbs of Butte; pale thin individuals who sing and dance in beer-halls; smart society people in high traps and tally-hos; impossible women—so-called (though in Butte no one is more possible), in vast hats and extremely plaid stockings; persons who take things seriously and play the races for a living; “beer-jerkers”; “biscuit-shooters”; soft-voiced Mexicans and Arabians;—the dregs, the elite, the humbly respectable, the off-scouring—all thrown together, and shaken up, and mixed well.

One may notice many odd bits of irony as one walks among these. One may notice that the Irish men are singularly carefree and strong and comfortable—and so jolly! While the Irish women are frumpish and careworn and borne earthward with children. The Cornishman who has consumed the greatest amount of whiskey is the most agreeable, and less and less inclined to leer and ogle. The Cornish woman whose profanity is the shrillest and most genial and voluble, is she whose life seems the most weighted and downtrodden. The young women whose bodies are encased in the tightest and stiffest corsets are in the most wildly hilarious spirits of all. The filthy little Irish youngsters from Dublin Gulch are much brighter and more clever in every way than the ordinary American children who are less filthy. A delicate aroma of cocktails and whiskey-and-soda hangs over even the four-in-hands and automobiles of the upper crust. Gamblers, news-boys, and Chinamen are the most chivalrously courteous among them. And the modest-looking “plunger” who has drunk the greatest number of high-balls is the most gravely, quietly polite of all. The rolling, rollicking, musical profanity of the “ould sod”—Bantry Bay, Donegal, Tyrone, Tipperary—falls much less limpidly from the cigaretted lips of the ten-year-old lad than from those of his mother, who taught it to him. One may notice that the husband and wife who smile the sweetest at each other in the sight of the multitudes are they whose countenances bear various scars and scratches commemorating late evening orgies at home; that the peculiar solid, block-shaped appearance of some of the miners’ wives is due quite as much to the quantity of beer they drink as to their annual maternity; that the one grand ruling passion of some men’s lives is curiosity;—that the entire herd is warped, distorted, barren, having lived its life in smoke-cured Butte.

A single street in Butte contains people in nearly every walk of life—living side by side resignedly, if not in peace.

In a row of five or six houses there will be living miners and their families, the children of which prevent life from stagnating in the street while their mothers talk to each other—with the inevitable profanity—over the back-fences. On the corner above there will be a mysterious widow with one child, who has suddenly alighted upon the neighborhood, stealthily in the night, and is to be seen at rare intervals emerging from her door—the target for dozens of pairs of eager eyes and half as many eager tongues. And when the mysterious widow, with her one child, disappears some night as suddenly and as stealthily as she appeared, an outburst of highly-colored rumors is tossed with astonishing glibness over the various back-fences—all relating to the mysterious widow’s shady antecedents and past history, to those of her child, and to the cause of her sudden departure,—no two of which rumors agree in any particular. Across on the opposite corner there will be a company of strange people who also descended suddenly, and upon whom the eyes of the entire block are turned with absorbing interest. They consist of half-a-dozen men and women seemingly bound together only by ties of conviviality. The house is kept closely-blinded and quiet all day, only to burst forth in a blaze of revel in the evening, which revel lasts all night. This goes on until some momentous night, at the request of certain proper ones, a police officer glides quietly into the midst of a scene of unusual gaiety—and the festive company melts quietly into oblivion, never to return. They also are then discussed with rapturous relish and in tones properly lowered, over the back-fences. Farther down the street there will live an interesting being of feminine persuasion who has had five divorces and is in the course of obtaining another. These divorces, the causes therefor, thejustice thereof, and the future prospects of the multi-grass widow, are gone over, in all their bearings, by the indefatigable tongues. Every incident in the history of the street is put through a course of sprouts by these same tireless members. The Jewish family that lives in the poorest house in theneighborhood, and that is said to count its money by the hundred thousand; the aristocratic family with the Irish-point curtains in the windows—that lives on the county; the family whose husband and father gains for it a comfortable livelihood—forging checks; the miner’s family whose wife and mother wastes its substance in diamonds and seal-skin coats and other riotous living; the family in extremely straitened circumstances into which new babies arrive in great and distressing numbers; the strange lady with an apoplectic complexion and a wonderfully foul and violent flow of invective—all are discussed over and over and over again. No one is omitted.

And so this is Butte, the promiscuous—the Bohemian. And all these are the Devil’s playthings. They amuse him, doubtless.

Butte is a place of sand and barrenness.

The souls of these people are dumb.

*

February 4

Always I wonder, when I die will there be any one to remember me with love?

I know I am not lovable.

That I want it so much only makes me less lovable, it seems. But—who knows?—it may be there will be some one.

My anemone lady does not love me. How can she—since she does not understand me? But she allows me to love her—and that carries me a long way. There are many—oh, a great many—who will not allow you to love them if you would.

There is no one to love me now.

Always I wonder how it will be after some long years when I find myself about to die.

*

February 7

In this house where I drag out my accursed, devilishly weary existence, up-stairs in the bathroom, on the little ledge at the top of the wainscotting, there are six tooth-brushes: an ordinary white bone-handled one that is my younger brother’s; a white twisted-handled one that is my sister’s; a flat-handled one that is my older brother’s; a celluloid-handled one that is my stepfather’s; a silver-handled one that is mine; and another ordinary one that is my mother’s.

The sight of these tooth-brushes day after day, week after week, and always, is one of the most crushingly maddening circumstances in my fool’s life.

Every Friday I wash up the bathroom. Usually I like to do this. I like the feeling of the water squeezing through my fingers, and always it leaves my nails beautifully neat. But the obviousness of those six tooth-brushes signifying me and the five other members of this family and the aimless emptiness of my existence here—Friday after Friday—makes my soul weary and my heart sick.

Never does the pitiable barren contemptible damnable narrow Nothingness of my life in this house come upon me with a so intense force as when my eyes happen upon those six tooth-brushes.

Among the horrors of the Inquisition, a minute refinement of cruelty was reached when the victim’s head was placed beneath a never-ceasing falling of water, drop by drop.

A convict sentenced to solitary confinement, spending his endless days staring at four blank walls, feels that had he committed every known crime he could not possibly deserve his punishment.

I am not undergoing an Inquisition, nor am I a convict in solitary confinement. But I live in a house with people who affect me mostly through their tooth-brushes—and those I should like, above all things, to gather up and pitch out the bathroom window—and oh, damn them, damn them!

You who read this, can you understand the depth of bitterness and hatred that is contained in this for me? Perhaps you can a little if you are a woman and have felt yourself alone.

When I look at the six tooth-brushes a fierce, lurid storm of rage and passion comes over me. Two heavy leaden hands lay hold of my life and press, press, press. They strike the sick, sick weariness to my inmost soul.

Oh, to leave this house and these people, and this intense Nothingness—oh, to pass out from them, forever! But where can I go, what can I do? I feel with mad fury that I am helpless. The grasp of the stepfather and the mother is contemptible and absurd—but with the persistence and tenacity of narrow minds. It is like the two heavy leaden hands. It is not seen—it is not tangible. It is felt.

Once I took away my own silver-handled tooth-brush from the bathroom ledge, and kept it in my bed-room for a day or two. I thought to lessen the effect of the six.

I put it back in the bathroom.

The absence of one accentuated the significant damnation of the others. There was something more forcibly maddening in the five than in the six tooth-brushes. The damnation was not worse, but it developed my feeling about them more vividly.

And so I put my tooth-brush back in the bathroom.

This house is comfortably furnished. My mother spends her life in the adornment of it. The small square rooms are distinctly pretty.

But when I look at them seeingly I think of the proverb about the dinner of stalled ox.

Yet there is no hatred here, except mine and my bitterness. I am the only one of them whose bitter spirit cries out against things.

But there is that which is subtler and strikes deeper. There is the lack of sympathy—the lack of everything that counts: there is the great deep Nothing.

How much better were there hatred here than Nothing!

I long hopelessly for will-power, resolution to take my life into my own hands, to walk away from this house some day and never return. I have nowhere to go—no money, and I know the world quite too well to put the slightest faith in its voluntary kindness of heart. But how much better and wider, less damned, less maddening, to go out into it and be beaten and cheated and fooled with, than this!—this thing that gathers itself easily into a circle made of six tooth-brushes with a sufficiency of surplus damnation.

I have read about a woman who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves. Perhaps she had a house