I Await the Devil's Coming - Unexpurgated and Annotated

by MacLane, Mary

  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 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 élite, 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, the justice 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 the neighborhood, 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 bath-room, on the little ledge at the top of the wainscoting, 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 bath-room. 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 bath-room 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 bath-room.

  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 bath-room.

  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 at Jerusalem with six tooth-brushes and Nothingness. In that case she might have rushed gladly into the arms of thieves.

  I think of crimes that would strike horror and revulsion to my maid-senses. And I think of my Nothingness, and I ask myself were it not better to walk the earth an outcast, a solitary woman, and meet and face even these, than that each and every one of my woman-senses should wear slowly, painfully to shreds, and strain and break - in this unnameable Nothing?

  Oh, the dreariness - the hopelessness of Nothing!

  There are no words to tell it. And things are always hardest to bear when there are no words for them.