by Mary MacLane
There is terror in facing death on battlefields, on sinking ships, in black ice-floes, in blazing buildings. But to me no death, for I fear no death, could be so dreadfully pregnant with in-turning woe and frenzy and all intolerable feeling as facing starkly my futile life.
My life is a vast stone bastile of many little Rooms in which I am a prisoner. I am locked there in solitude on bread and water and let to roam in it at will. And each Room is tenanted by invisible garbled furies and dubious ecstasies. I run with echoing footsteps from Room to Room to escape them: but each Room is more unhabitable than the last. There are scores of little Rooms, each with its ghosts, each different.
In one Room silent voices in the air accuse my tired Spirit of wanton vacillations and barren lack of purpose and utter waste, waste, waste of itself. And they threaten death and destruction. I know that accusation and I hate it: I hate it the more for that it’s wholly just. To escape it I run from that Room along a dim passage into another one. In it unseen fingers clutch my Heart. In their touch also is an accusation: of selfishness and waste and want of something to beat for: and in their touch is the savor of wild wishes and human longings and passionate prayers for something warm and simple and real to rest against: and in their pressing clutching turbulent touch is a tormenting half-promise, chance-promise, no-promise: and the hovering inevitable threat of death and destruction. That too I know and hate and half-love: and I can’t bear it. So I run out of that Room along a passage and into another. I hear my footsteps echoing as I run.—as a child when I ran in the early night through a dark leaf-lined tunnel-like driveway the sound of my own flying footsteps on the hardened gravel was the only thing that frightened me. I quite believed there were bears in the brushwood on either side, but fear of them never struck to the core of my child-being like the unknown thing in my echoing steps. And it is fear I feel now from the ghost-sound of my ghost-footsteps running, running away from the little Rooms. It is realer to me now than were my child footsteps to my child-self long ago: it is more definite than my hand which writes this: it is hideous—
Out of a dim passage I run into another little Room. In it some gray filmy threads, like strands of loose cobwebs caught on ceilings, float about. They sweep gently against my cheeks and hands and neck, and cling and twine and lightly hold with the half-felt feeling peculiar to bits of cobwebs on the skin. And it torments my woman-flesh with calefaciant thrills fierce and goading and sweet. There also is the accusation, now against my Body; for tissues and strength wasted: for useless fires meant to warm human seeds to life, meant to make me fruitful, meant to make me bear dear race-burdens: accusation for the cosmic waste of hot objectless desire, for the subtle guilt of a Lesbian tendency, for an unleashed over-positive sex-fancy. With it too is the lowering promise of death and destruction. It also is just. But out of my borne-along helplessness in it comes no culpable emotion because of cobweb thrills and their arraignment but only a wearing wearying despair. I rush out of that Room in shrugging impatience, with only scorn for a threat of death, for a threat of destruction—but with a wild fear of my own flying steps. I hurry and hurry on from door to door: but it’s no good. In some other Room my brain is anathematized from frowning walls as an impish demoniac power which I use with no good intent and therefore with bad intent: and again I shrink and run away. In another Room are all the lies I have ever told: I have told legions— my own peculiar lies, gentler on me than truths: they dart around me in the Room like black heavy-winged moths, clouds of them fluttering at my forehead. They drive me out shivering. In another Room four times when I was a not-good-sport confront me in a row like pictures and sting me and make me hide my eyes: I’d rather be a leper, a beast, a maniac than a not-good-sport (for my own precious reasons)—and I rush away again. In some other Room—
—the same galling torment in all the Rooms. Wherever I run with the echo-echo of steps there are Accusing voices and half-formed Prayer and uncertain Yearning and violent yet dumb and inexpectant Protest and the unfailing Threat of death and destruction: not earth-death but universe-death: death and death and death everywhere coming on and on: myself knowing the just note in it all and from it grown numb with some cold and restless terror. Also I know no door I run through with my panic-feet will ever set me free of the bastile except a death door: the earthly death of this tired life—
But it’s from this maelstrom that the flashing burning sparkling mad magic of being alive leaps out brilliant and barbarous—and throbbing and splendid and sweet. A merely human hunger comes back on me. Then I want all I ever wanted with a hundredfold more voltage of wanting than I have ever yet known.
I am all unhopeful, all unpeaceful, all a desperate Languor and a tragic Futileness: I am an unspeakably untoward thing.
And already I have been seared and scarred trivially from standing foolishly near some foolish human melting-pots. No matter for any of it. I want to plunge headlong into life—not imitation life which is all I’ve yet known, but honest worldly life at its biggest and humanest and crudest and damnedest: to be blistered and scorched by it if it be so ordered—so that only it’s realness—from the outside of my skin to the deeps of my spirit.
It is not happiness I want—nothing like it: its like never existed since this world began.
I want to feel one big hot red bloody Kiss-of-Life placed square and strong on my mouth and shot straight into me to the back wall of my Heart.
I write this book for my own reading.
It is my postulate to myself.
As I read it it makes me clench my teeth savagely: and coldly tranquilly close my eyelids: it makes me love and loathe Me, Soul and bones.
Clench and close as I will the winds flutter and stir and crumple and twist my petals as they will:—as I sit here tiredly, tiredly sane.
A COMFORTABLY VICIOUS PERSON
To-morrow
The blue-and-copper of yesterday is dead and buried this To-morrow in a maroon twilight.
I this moment saw darkly from my window the somber hills in their heavy spell of pale-purple and grief and splendor and sadness and beauty and wonder and woe.
But their color brings no tears to my wicked gray eyes.
The passion-edged mood is burnt out.
Gone, gone, gone.
I listessly change into the other black dress for listless dinnertime and all my thought is that my abdomen is beautifully flat and that I must purchase a new petticoat.
I rub a little rouge on my pale mouth and I idlingly recall a clever and filthy story I once heard.
I laugh languidly at it and feel myself a comfortably vicious person.
I pronounce a damn on the familiar ache in my beloved left foot and turn away from myself.
I stick out the tip of my forked-feeling tongue at the bastard clock on the stairs. I note the hour on it with a fainness in my spirit-gizzard to dedicate Me from that time forth to a big blue god of Nastiness: Nastiness so restful, humorous, appetizing, reckless, sure-of-itself.
—these hellish To-morrows creeping in their petty pace: they bring in weak-kneed niceness, and they bring in doubts, and they bring in meditation and imagery and all-around humanness, till I’m a mere heavy-heeled dubious complicated jade.
IN MY BLACK DRESS AND MY STILL ROOM
To-morrow
I have fits of Laughter all to myself.
The world is full of funny things. All to myself I Laugh at them. I lounge at my desk in the small night hours, and I finger a pencil or a box or a rubber or a knife and rest my chin on my hand, and sit on my right foot, and Laugh intermittently at this or that.
Ha! ha I ha! I say inwardly: with all my Heart: relishingly. I laugh at the thought of a mouse I once encountered lying dead—so neat, so virtuous—though soft and o’er-long dead—with its tail folded around it—in a porcelain tea-pot: a strong inimical anomaly to all who viewed it. It had a look of a saint in effigy in a whited sepulcher. Looked at as a mouse it seemed out of place. Looked at as a saint it was perfect.
I Laugh at that extraordinary tailor in the Mother Goose rhyme—him ‘whose name was Stout,’ who cut off the petticoats of the little old woman ‘round about,’ herself having recklessly fallen asleep on the public highway. The tale leaves me the impression that such were the straitly economic ideas of the tailor that he obtained all his cloth by wandering about with his shears until he happened upon persons slumbering thus publicly and vulnerably. Looked at in any light that tailor is ever surprising, ever original, ever rarely delectable.
I Laugh at William Jennings Bryan.
How William Jennings Bryan may look to the country and world-at-large I have never much considered.
It is all in the angle of view: St. Simeon Stilites may seem rousingly funny to some: Old King Cole may have been a frosty dullard to those who knew him best. To me William Jennings Bryan means bits of my relishingest brand of gay mournful Laughter.
The ensemble and detail of William Jennings Bryan and his career as a public man, viewed impersonally—as one looks at the moon—are something hectic as hell’s-bells.
I remember William Jennings Bryan when his star first rose. It was before Theodore Roosevelt was more than a name: before the battleship Maine was sunk at Havana: before Lanky Bob wrested the heavyweight title from Gentleman Jim at Carson: before aëroplanes were and automobiles were more than rare thin-wheeled restless buggies: before the song ‘My Gal She’s a High-born Lady’ had yet waned: before one Carrie Nation had hewn her way to fame with a hatchet. I was a short-skirted little girl devouringly reading and observing everything, and I took note of all those. So I took note of William Jennings Bryan nominated for president by the Democratic convention in eighteen-ninety-six. The zealous Democratic newspapers referred to him, though he was then thirty-six, as the Boy Orator of the Platte. Looked at as a grown man, advocating free coinage of silver at sixteen-to-one—a daring dashing Democrat, he was a plausible thing and even romantic. Looked at as a Boy Orator he turned at once into a bald and aged lad oddly flavored with an essence of Dare-devil Dick, of the boy on the burning deck, of a kind of political Fauntleroy madly matured.
Long years later with the top of his hair and his waistline buried deep in his past he became Secretary of State: and at the same time a Chautauqua Circuit lecturer—entertaining placid satisfied audiences alternately with a troupe of Swiss Yodlers. Of all things, yodlers. Politics makes strange bedfellows and always did. But never before has the American Department of State combined and vied with the yodler’s art to entertain and instruct. Looked at as a monologist he might pass if sufficiently interpolated with ah-le-ee! and ah-le-o-o! Looked at as Secretary of State he is grilling and gruelling to the senses: a frightful figure quite surpassing a mouse softly dead in a tea-pot, a pair of detachable fuzzy Swedenborg-addicted eyebrows, a presumptuously economical tailor.
And he entertained the foreign ministers at a state dinner, did this unusual man, and he gave them to drink—what but grape-juice, grape-juice in its virginity. Plain water might have seemed the crystalline expression of a rigid puritanic spirit. Budweiser Beer, bitter and bourgeois, might have been possible though surprising. But grape-juice, served to seasoned Latin Titles and Graybeards and Gold-Braid, long tamely familiar with the Widow Clicquot: that in truth seems, after all the years, boyishly oratorical, wildly and darkly Nebraskan. Looked at as an appetizing wash for a children’s white-collared and pink-sashed party, or for anybody on a summer afternoon, grape-juice is satisfactory. In the careless hands of William Jennings Bryan with his soul so unscrupulously at peace, the virgin grape-juice becomes a vitriolic thing: a defluent purple river crushing one’s helpless spirit among its rocks and rapids.
—a terrible American, William Jennings Bryan. He is for ‘peace at any price.’ There were some, long and long ago, who suffered and endured one starveling winter in camp at Valley Forge that William Jennings Bryan might wax Nebraskanly fat: and he is valiantly for peace: at any price—For that my Laughter is tinged with fulfilling hatred. Rich hot-livered Laughter must have in it essential love or hatred.
To William Jennings Bryan everything he has done in his political career must seem all right.
It is all right, undoubtedly. Just that.
—that Silver-tongued Boy Orator
those Yodlers
that Peerless Leader
that Grape-juice—
They come breaking into my melancholy night-hours with an odd high-seasoned abruptness.
I wonder what God thinks of him.
It might be God thinks well of him.
But I—in my black dress and my still room—I say inwardly and willy-nilly, and with all my Heart and relishingly:
Ha! ha! ha!
THEIR LITTLE SHOES
To-morrow
Often in windy autumn nights I lie awake in my shadowy bed and think of the children, the Drab-eyed thousands of children in this America who work in coal mines and factories.
Whenever I’m wakeful and the night is windy and my room is dark and I lie in aloneness—a long aloneness: centuries—then shadows come from far-off world-wildnesses and float and flutter dimly unhappy around my bed. They tell me tales of shame and tame petty hopelessness and trifling despair.
And the one that comes oftenest is the one that tells of those Drab-Eyed children distances from here, but very immediate, who work in coal mines and factories. I read about them in magazines and newspapers, but they aren’t then one one-hundredth so real as when their shadow floats as close to me in the windy autumn night.
Once in Pennsylvania I saw a group of children, very Drab in the Eyes and very thin in the necks and legs, who worked in a mill. Their look made its imprint in my memory and more in my flesh. And it comes back as if it were the only thing that mattered as I lie wakeful in the windy night.
The children—unconscious and smiling their small decayed smiles—they are living and being crushed between greed and need as between two murderous millstones. Their frail flesh and their little brittle bones, their voices and their pinched insides, the sweet vague childish looks which belong in their faces are squeezed and crunched by two millstones—squeezed, squeezed till their scrawny fledgeling bodies are dry, breathless, and are gasping, strangling, striving frightfully for life: and still are slowly, all too slowly, dying between two millstones.
If it were their own greed or their own need—but it’s the greed of fat people and the need of their own warped gaunt parents. Betwixt the two the children meet homelike hideous ruin. Placidly they are cheated and blighted and blasted, placidly and with the utmost domesticness.
The most darkling-luminous thing about the Drab-Eyed children is that they never weep. They talk among themselves and smile their little dreadful decayed smiles, but they don’t weep. When they walk it’s with a middle-aged gait: when they eat their noontime food it’s as grown people do, with half-conscious economic and gastronomic consideration. They count their Tuesdays and Wednesdays with calculation as work-days, which should be childishly wind-sweptly free. Which is all of less weight than the heavy fact that they never weep.
They reckon themselves fairly fortunate with their bits of silver in yellow envelopes every Saturday. They are permitted to keep a bit of it, each child a bit for herself or himself, so that on Sunday afternoons they lose themselves for precious hours watching Charlie Chaplin. Many pink-faced inconsequent children whose parents nurture them and guard them and eternally misunderstand them are less worldlily lucky. But the pink-faced children often weep—loudly, foolishly like puppies and snarling furry cubs—and
wet sweet salt tears of proper childishness are round and bright on their cheeks and lashes. It’s a sun-washed blestness for them: they’re impelled and allowed to weep. But the Drab Eyes shed no tears—they know no reason why they should. There’s no impulse for soft liquid grief in the murderous philosophy of two grinding millstones. And there’s no time—the lives of the work-children move on fast. Their very shoes are ground between the millstones.
—their little shoes are heartbreaking. The millstones grind many things along with little-little shoes of children: germs of potent splendid humanness that might grow bigly American in heroic ways or in sane round honesty: germs that might grow into brave barbaric beauty or warm wistful sweetness: germs that would grow into lips blooming tender and fragrant as jonquils or into minds swimming with lyrics:—what is strongly lasting and glorified m the forlorn divine human thing— crumpled—twisted forever when millstones grind children’s little poor shoes—
The young Drab Eyes are endlessly betrayed: their very color thieved. There’s no reason why they should weep.
But there’s a far-blown sound as if ten thousand bad and good worldly eyes were weeping in their stead: with a note in it careless, compassionate and jadedly menacing.
I seem to hear it in the wakeful windy night. And I hear no world-music pouring out of small throats of work-children shrill with woe-and-joy. The sound they make is a dumb sound, for they never weep: a ghost-wail of partly-dead children borne lowly across this mixed world on a stale hellish breeze.
THE SLEEP OF THE DEAD
To-morrow
When I’m dead I want to Rest awhile in my grave: for I’m Tired, Tired always.
My Soul must go on as it has gone on up to now. It has a long way to go, and it has come a long way. My Soul first started on its journey somewhere in Asia before the dawn of this civilization. And it has gone on since through the centuries and through strange phases of Body, terrors of flesh and blood, suffering long. But it has gone someway on, each space of the journey taking it nearer to the journey’s End.
