I, Mary MacLane

by Mary MacLane

  I only know he’ll not answer it.

  A WORKING DIAPHRAGM

  To-morrow

  I am not Respectable nor Refined nor in Good Taste.

  I take a delicate M.-Mac-Lane pleasure in those facts.

  I doubt if they are anyway peculiar to me, but they feel like a someway delicious clandestine circumstance: something to enjoy all to myself.

  It is difficult to imagine any woman really Respectable on her inner side, the side that is turned toward herself alone. And it’s certain no woman is Refined: it feels not possible. (There are yet inland places where the word is used in its smug sense and believed in.) And no woman but a dead woman in her coffin is in complete Good Taste. Every live woman has for instance a working diaphragm: and in a diaphragm there is, in the final analysis, simply no taste at all. (As for men—except poets—I mean poets: and perhaps scientists—they are so ungenuine: a race of discreet cautious puppets: wooden dolls who move as their strings are pulled: with nothing so real about them inside as even outside—what use to dwell upon them?)

  Nearly all women are perplexingly interesting as human beings. And I am quite the most interesting human being I know: and with it the most appealing. the most sincere—in my own false fashion, and the most bespeaking.

  It is much due to knowing and feeling me to be not Respectable nor Refined nor in Good Taste: particularly to being not in Good Taste.

  One autumn evening in Boston I went to dine with a man in his apartment in Beacon Street. He is a mining engineer whom I have known since we were both children. He had bidden me to dinner in his off-hand engineering way, but when I arrived at his diggings he was not there. He did not come. Instead there was a dinner waiting, a Japanese boy to serve it, and a strange man who had happened in. The strange man had iron-gray hair, a brow like Apollo, a jowl like Bill Sikes and much conversation. He said that he was newly from China, South Africa and Egypt and that in his life he had been married seven times with book and bell. Together we ate the dinner, talking pleasantly in the light of colored Chinese lamp-shades. There were little birds to eat and Chinese wine to drink— sam sbu distilled virilely from rice: always a little of it is too much. After the dinner we were standing by a teakwood sideboard and the strange man was holding me tightly in his arms against a large smooth evening panel of shirt-front, and he was kissing my mouth with a great deal of ardor. I did not like it. I thought of all the women he had married and wondered if they had liked it. And I mused in my placid brain, ‘As I was going to St. Ives I met a man with seven wives.’ It was the only thought in my mind as I waited boredly for him to have done. (It’s no good struggling.) And that incident I know was not Respectable.

  And one summer day I was riding horseback up a steep gorge in these Montana hills. It was hot dusty riding. I came to a mountain stream with a beautiful little white-and-blue cascade tumbling over a high rock upon smooth pebbles below. I got down from my horse, took off my dusty khaki suit and all my clothes and stood under the fall of the little tumbling cascade, whitely naked, without so much as a figleaf’s covering. It was delectable and pagan, what with my quaint thoughts as I stood crouched beneath the sparkling splash. And I know there was nothing Refined in it.

  And one evening between nine and ten, a week ago. I was walking across the broad desert valley east of this Butte. It is late November and the night was stormy. A strong high gale swept the Flat. Presently it rained. I was on my way back with a mile or two to go. It rained harder. Heavy sheets of black water whipped and whirled down on me and wrapped me in their wet wings. I love all weather when it is mild and more when it is rough except when it bears down too hard: then I feel indifferent to it. As I moved along the dark road not hurrying and not loitering I was saying inside me, ‘Why am I going to any shelter out of this heavy wet rain? Why am I not a houseless beggar-woman with nothing gentler in all my life than this November storm? It is not because I deserve gentler things—’ And with a sudden heavy shudder I whispered ‘I wish I were a beggar-woman! I wish I had no roof to cover me in this cold night-blackness. It would be honest: I should be stripped to my deserts. And I wish it were so—this drenching rain, this strangling wind—nothing but this—shelter, money, comfort, self-satisfaction, however seemingly earned, are dishonest—thieved. I ought to be—ragged beggar—bleared eyes—dirty petticoats—a foul ratty hole to creep into—hunger—bodily misery—all the portion of outcasts— As God may hear me—I’d eagerly tremblingly change lives this moment with a beggar-woman. I would—I would—!’ It is a piece of clear inside truth about myself. And I know it proves me to be in poor Taste.

  It is a matter of attitude. Each of those incidents might happen to any woman—except perhaps the last. I have known but one girl who agreed with me in such a feeling. And not quite that feeling. She had married a lot of money with a horrible old gentleman and had wearied of both. But the other two episodes could readily belong to any woman of esprit who might be on the outside both Respectable and Refined: even a woman lawyer.

  But my attitude in the incident of the strange iron-gray man, though in a bored way I could have viciously knifed him, was not a Respectable attitude. I was bored and fanciful when doubtless I ought to have been breathlessly angry. But my breathless anger is too rare and beautiful an emotion to waste on ridiculous strange iron-gray men.

  In the incident of the sparkling cascade my attitude was shameless: something of the sort. It is never reprehensible for a woman to take a cold shower-bath in solitude and health. But my spirit rose and rejoiced at my bodily nakedness and then grew nymph-like and figleafless on its own account. My sex exploited itself in mental visions, like of Leda and the Swan or of myself as a slim villainous Scotch Aphrodite conceived by a bold surprising Titian. And doubtless I ought to have felt timorous in the vast sunlit mountainside, or like a sexless child (or merely ‘hygienic’ like William Muldoon and Bernarr McFadden). But the quick charm of the situation and the heavenly anguish of the icy water, and my lovely Body, and my odd moralless musings were too intriguing to expend themselves banalely.

  The wet night road and the beggar-woman wish: it is drearily real to me. Though I wear two plain dainty dresses, in a house—in me, beating, beating, pounding down is a cold wild heavy rain: and under my feet a long lonely muddy road. If they belong to me—well. I love Me the more for feeling them.

  And I feel them because I am not yet dead and in my coffin, but alive and with a working diaphragm: which diaphragms are in not Good Taste.

  LOT’S WIFE

  To-morrow

  To-day in the afternoon I briskly manicured my fingernails, sitting by my gold-and-blue window, and I mused upon Lot’s Wife.

  So many persons and incidents and events and adventures and episodes there are to muse upon, in this mixed world, dating from when it began till now. There’s something to charm any mood. Let me leave the doors of my mind open and anything at all may float in like an errant butterfly on a summer’s day.

  It is an entertaining world, by and large: a limitless vaudeville.

  Lot’s Wife is to me a fantasy from the antique, a bit of archaic frivol to beguile me.

  When first I heard of her, from an acrid aunt of caustic humor who told me the tale tersely in explanation of a biblical print, I was seven years old. From that day to this my meditative thoughts have from time to time flitted backward to dwell interestedly upon Lot’s Wife. Later when I went to an Episcopal Sunday-school I was pleased to find this adjuration in according-to-St.-Luke: ‘Remember Lot’s Wife.’ There seemed no special meaning attached to it. It seemed like Remember Lot’s Wife in any way you like—as it might be with a card on her birthday, a useless gift at Christmas, in your prayers, or in retributive patriotism like Remember the Alamo, Remember the Maine.

  But I remember her because I like her.

  There’s no name given for Lot’s Wife in the brief biblical narrative, so I long ago named her Bella as expressive of the temperament and character that have grown around her image in my t
houghts. Poor Bella, I ruminated as I tinted and polished my nails. Her life in Sodom was not entirely satisfying to her. Sodom was a town completely given over to pleasure of the physical and outward sorts. The dwellers lived in and for their physical senses alone. And Bella had it in her to care for the foods of the spirit. Not that she longed for them—she was not so conscious of herself—but she had it in her to care for them had they been given her. Still, Sodom and its ways were the best she knew and she had known them all her life. The roots of her temperament had shot down into the Sodomesque substrata. She fondly loved the place.

  Sodom was a prototype for Babylon or Pompeii, worshiping the hotness of the sun in moralless plaisance, with fetes and drinkings of wine from gold and silver cups, and bathings in warm scented marble-lined pools, and anointings with oils of olive and palm, and dwellings among flowers of thin bright petals and birds of vivid plumage and fountains of crystal and rainbow, and caterings to the sparkle and froth of human emotions, and browsings amid loves and lights o’ love. Can Bella be wondered at for growing fond of it all, having known nothing substantialer? And can she rightly be blamed for hating the thought of leaving it for dry sage-brush wilds in the mountains? She did hate and dread that thought with all her soul from the moment it was made known to her that Sodom for its sins was booked for destruction. She had perhaps a fortnight in which to dread it, and a fortnight if given over to dread is long enough to damage stronger spirits than hers.

  Bella was slender and svelte, with long straight soft beautiful silken pale red hair and white-lidded eyes of grayish green. She was thirty-eight—a young thirty-eight. There’s an old thirty-eight which applies to greedy schoolteachers, gangrenous woman government-clerks, fading hard-hearted stenographers, over-righteous woman doctors; to all whose virtue is ever indecently on guard. But there’s a glory-tinted sun-kissed young thirty-eight which applies to sensitive high-strung generously-emotional women like Bella Lot. She had smooth hands with supple tapering fingers, an irregular expressive-lipped mouth like a pimpernel-bloom, firm slim feet and the quivering suggestive white knees of a wood-nymph. From any angle-of-view can she be blamed for hating to take that equipment away from the city-de-luxe which was its so proper setting and hiding it in the sage-brush?

  Furthermore Bella had a lover in Sodom. It is beyond a sane effort of the imagination that she could have loved that unpleasing old man Lot. The best and worst that can be said of him is that he was a fit addition to the company of the old Patriarchs who were for the most part an exceeding craven crew. The martyrs, the sages and especially the prophets had their splendors. But the lean old patriarchs—The sporting blood of all of them—in the sense of merest simplest courage—from Adam down, would hardly aggregate one drop. There are any number of reasons—as many as Bella had charms—to account for Lot’s having married her. But what she could have seen in him to make her wish or even willing to be married to him is a deep mystery to me. It may have been his family. I believe Bella lacked family: she was just a person. And was he not nephew to Abraham? But even being niece-in-law to Abraham himself seems insufficient compensation for being Lot’s Wife.

  The Lots had two young daughters, one fifteen and one seventeen, it might be. I do not know their names—call them Ethel and Agnes. But they were of a recalcitrant temper and absorbed in their own racy pastimes among the younger youth of Sodom and they had no need of their mother. Besides, they ‘took after’ their father. So Bella was fain to turn outward in search of nurturing matter whereon to feed her humanness. Had it been expected of her to play fair with the patriarch she would have played fair. But it was not expected of her by anyone in Sodom—far from it, and least of all by the patriarch. She was eight-and-thirty, and Lot—he was doubtless eight or nine hundred years old, after the surprising long-lived fashion of the period. So Bella found a lover ready and awaiting her. She would have found a lover in the circumstances even without caring to. But she quite cared to, I think. Everything points that way, and when one remembers that good old man her husband one can not censure her but only pity her. Be it as it may she had one—one as real as anything could be in that town of sparkling froth.

  Of the lover’s identity—little is known, as the historians say. My fancy as I filed my fingernails failed me on the point. Suffice it to state that ever and anon as time passed in Sodom the gray-green eyes of Bella were gazed into with fondness, affection, adoration and desire: the white eyelids of Bella had showers of light kisses bestowed on them, soft-falling as rose-petals shaken loose in summer winds: the tapering white hands of Bella were caressed and caressing with the oddly intense tenderness of physical love: the pale red hair of Bella was ruffled and fluffed and disarrayed by the fingers of love: the red-pimpernel mouth of Bella was touched, bruised, clung to by the lips of love: the svelte whiteness and nymph-knees of Bella glowed as she broached love’s arms:—and all went much merrier than marriage bells. In short, Bella paid herself with usury for the deadliness of being Lot’s Wife. And there we have the crux of Bella’s dread of leaving Sodom and its tempered sweetness for the arid sage-brush hills and the respectively cold and hectic companionship of the good old patriarch and the recalcitrant daughters.

  It cannot be claimed for Bella that any white poetic fires gleamed across her soul, that any limning beauty shone palely from within her. The air of Sodom was not conducive to suchlike matters and Bella was no finer than her breeding and generation. But she was gentle and wistful and kind of heart. She was lovely to look at and ingenuously lovable in her clinging affection and disarming naturalness. She was all one could want to imagine in the word charming.

  Came the night set for destruction and the Lot family fled according to schedule. They fled away in the early damps of an autumn evening through the outer city gates and along a rough road faintly lit by a dying moon. They had three separate reasons for fleeing. Lot fled because he was a patriarch and was given to doing craven Old-Testamentish things of that sort: Bella fled because she was Lot’s Wife and obliged to act out the rôle: and Ethel and Agnes fled because they had true patriarchal blood in their veins and had therefore no marked inclination to remain in Sodom to be annihilated—‘safety first’ was one of their watchwords. They fled in the van. Lot came after them, being less swift of foot. Bella lagged behind. She didn’t want to go. Every way she looked at it she didn’t want to go. She hated that flight for a thousand reasons.

  The ghastly moon shed a terror on her with its dim rays. The ground was hard and rutted with frosty mud and bruised her slender feet through her white buckskin sandals.

  She wore a loose ninon gown of white silk and linen with a gold girdle around her narrow loins and a gold clasp at the left shoulder. Binding her long hair, so palely red in the moon, was a white-and-gold fillet. In one hand she carried a gold-and-enamel link bracelet, a gift but that afternoon from the lover. Suddenly she stopped and cried to herself, ‘I’m too lovely for this fate—I’m too lovely and beloved—the cruelty of God—: I’ll not go on!’ She thought of the gleams and colorings of Sodom. She quickly reckoned the cost and decided to pay it. She was a rare good sport, and a quaint. She looked back at the doomed city blazing in brimstone—‘But his wife looked back from behind him, and she became a pillar of salt.’—

  As I put away my chamois-skin buffer and glass paste-jar through my mind floated the pensive burden of a by-gone French song—

  ‘Oh, the poor, oh, the poor, oh, the poor—dear— girl’

  She must have made a beautiful statue, all in glistening salt. I wish I had a glistening little salty replica of it to set on my desk: a so unusual, a so dainty conceit, Lot’s Wife!

  MY ECHOING FOOTSTEPS

  To-morrow

  While I live so still in this life-space, while I muse and meditate and analyze everything I touch, while I walk, while I work, while I change from one plain frock to the other: in quiet hours roiled tumbling storms of vicarious unhopeful Passion whirl, whirl in me: Passion of Soul, Passion of Mind, Passion of living,
Passion of this mixed world: in terror, in wild unease, in reasonless mournful joy.

  I never knew real Passion, Passion-meanings, till I reached thirty. It is now I’m at life’s storm-center, youth’s climax, the high-pulsed orgasmic moment of being alive.

  At twenty the woman’s chrysalid soul and aching pulses awaken in crude chaste Spring-cold beauty. At forty her fires either have subsided to dim-glowing coals or leaped to too-positive, too-searing, too-obvious flames—her bones and the filigrees of her spirit may be alike dry, brittle-ish. But at thirty her Spring has but changed to midsummer. Poesy still waits upon her Passions.

  My Spring has changed, bloomed, burst to midsummer.

  Soft electrical heat-currents of being swing and sweep around me. They touch me and enter my veins. But the liquid essences of youth still quell and compass them. I am at youth’s climax—a half-sullen, half-smouldering youth which still is youth. My rose of life is fragrant and aglow. Its sweet pink petals are uncurled and conscious in the wavering light.

  Winds flutter and stir and rumple and twist those petals—

  To-day is a To-morrow of countless unrests. Large and little Passions beat at me all the blue-and-copper day. I walked my floor with irregular lagging steps. I felt menacing, dangerous to myself, dynamic as nitro-glycerine: and smoothly drearily sane as a bar of white soap. I stood at my window and looked long at the circling range of mountains which skirt this Butte. Nothing else I have looked at, of sea or plain or hill, affected me like that chain of barren peaks. They are arid splendor and pale purple witchery and grief and lasting sadness and deathlike beauty and woe and wonder. Their color quietly stormed my eyes and blurred them with tears.

  It was a mood in which any color or gleam or thought or strain of music or note of sad world-laughter or any un-sane loveliness of poetry could enchant or flay or transport me to my frayed last nerve.