I Await the Devil's Coming - Unexpurgated and Annotated

by MacLane, Mary

  However great one’s gift for language may be there is always something that one can not tell.

  I am weary of self - always self. But it must be so.

  My life is filled with self.

  If my soul could awaken fully perhaps I might be lifted out of myself - surely I should be. But my soul is not awake. It is awakening, trying to open its eyes; and it is crying out blindly after something, but it can not know. I have a dreadful feeling that it will stay always like this.

  Oh, I feel everything - everything! I feel what might be. And there is Nothing. There are six tooth-brushes.

  Would I stop for a few fine distinctions, a theory, a natural law even, to escape from this into Happiness - or into something greatly less?

  Misery - misery! If only I could feel it less!

  Oh, the weariness, the weariness - as I await the Devil’s coming.

  February 8

  Often I walk out to a place on the flat valley below the town, to flirt with Death. There is within me a latent spirit of coquetry, it appears.

  Down on the flat there is a certain deep dark hole with several feet of water at the bottom.

  This hole completely fascinates me. Sometimes when I start out to walk in a quite different direction, I feel impelled almost irresistibly to turn and go down on the flat in the direction of the fascinating, deep black hole.

  And here I flirt with Death. The hole is so narrow - only about four feet across - and so dark, and so deep! I don’t know whether it was intended to be a well, or whether it is an abandoned shaft of some miner. At any rate it is isolated and deserted, and it has a rare loving charm for me.

  I go there sometimes in the early evening and kneel on the edge of it, and lean over the dark pit, with my hand grasping a wooden stake that is driven into the ground near by. And I drop little stones down and hear them splash hollowly, and it sounds a long way off.

  There is something wonderfully soothing, wonderfully comforting to my unrestful, aching wooden heart in the dark mystery of this fascinating hole. Here is the End for me, if I want it - here is the Ceasing, when I want it. And I lean over and smile quietly.

  “No flowers,” I say to myself, “no weeping idiots, no senseless funeral, no oily undertaker fussing over my woman’s-body, no useless Christian prayers. Nothing but this deep dark restful grave.”

  No one would ever find it. It is a mile and a half from any house.

  The water - the dark still water at the bottom - would gurgle over me and make an end quickly. Or if I feared there was not enough water, I would bring with me a syringe and some morphine and inject an immense quantity into one white arm, and kneel over the tender darkness until my youth-weary, waiting-worn senses should be overcome, and my slim light body should fall. It would splash into the water at bottom - it would follow the little stones at last. And the black muddy water would soak in and begin the destroying of my body, and murky bubbles would rise so long as my lungs continued to breathe. Or perhaps my body would fall against the side of the hole, and the head would lie against it out of the water. Or perhaps only the face would be out of the water, turned upward to the light above - or turned half-down, and the hair would be darkly wet and heavy, and the face would be blue-white below it, and the eyes would sink inward.

  “The End, the End -” I say softly and ecstatically. Yet I do not lean farther out. My hand does not loosen its tight grasp on the wooden stake. I am only flirting with Death now.

  Death is fascinating - almost like the Devil. Death makes use of all his arts and wiles, powerful and alluring, and flirts with deadly temptation for me. And I make use of my arts and wiles - and tempt him.

  Death would like dearly to have me, and I would like dearly to have him. It is a flirtation that has its source in mutual desire. We do not love each other, Death and I, - we are not friends. But we desire each other sensually, lustfully.

  Sometime I suppose I shall yield to the desire. I merely play at it now - but in an unmistakable manner. Death knows it is only a question of time.

  But first the Devil must come. First the Devil, then Death: a deep dark soothing grave - and the early evening, “and a little folding of the hands to sleep.”

  February 12

  I am in no small degree, I find, a sham - a player to the gallery. Possibly this may be felt as you read these analyses.

  While all of these emotions are written in the utmost seriousness and sincerity, and are exactly as I feel them, day after day - so far as I have the power to express what I feel - still I aim to convey through them all the idea that I am lacking in the grand element of Truth - that there is in the warp and woof of my life a thread that is false - false.

  I don’t know how to say this without the fear of being misunderstood. When I say I am in a way a sham, I have no reference to the truths as I have given them in this Portrayal, but to a very light and subtle thing that runs through them.

  Oh, do not think for an instant that this analysis of my emotions is not perfectly sincere and real, and that I have not felt all of them more than I can put into words. They are my tears - my life-blood!

  But in my life, in my personality, there is an essence of falseness and insincerity. A thin, fine vapor of fraud hangs always over me and dampens and injures some things in me that I value.

  I have not succeeded thoroughly in analyzing this - it is so thin, so elusive, so faint - and yet not little. It is a natural thing enough viewed in the light of my other traits.

  I have lived my nineteen years buried in an environment at utter variance with my natural instincts, where my inner life is never touched, and my sympathies very rarely, if ever, appealed to. I never disclose my real desires or the texture of my soul. - Never, that is to say, to any one except my one friend, the anemone lady. - And so every day of my life I am playing a part; I am keeping an immense bundle of things hidden under my cloak. When one has played a part - a false part - all one’s life, for I was a sly, artful little liar even in the days of five and six, then one is marked. One may never rid oneself of the mantle of falseness, charlatanry - particularly if one is innately a liar.

  A year ago when the friendship of my anemone lady was given me, and she would sometimes hear sympathetically some long-silent bit of pain, I felt a snapping of tense-drawn cords, a breaking away of flood-gates - and a strange new pain. I felt as if I must clasp her gentle hand tightly and give way to the pent-up surging tears of eighteen years. I had wanted this tender thing more than anything else all my life, and it was given me suddenly.

  I felt a convulsion and a melting, within.

  But I could not tell my one friend exactly what I felt. There was no doubt in my own mind as to my own perfect sincerity of feeling, but there was with it and around it this vapor of fraud, a spirit of falseness that rose and confronted me and said “hypocrite,” “fool.”

  It may be that the spirit of falseness is itself a false thing - yet true or false, it is with me always. I have tried, in writing out my emotions, to convey an idea of this sham element while still telling everything faithfully true. Sometimes I think I have succeeded, and at other times I seem to have signally failed. This element of falseness is absolutely the very thinnest, the very finest, the rarest of all the things in my many-sided character.

  It is not the most unimportant.

  I have seen visions of myself walking in various pathways. I have seen myself trying one pathway and another. And always it is the same: I see before me in the path, darkening the way and filling me with dread and discouragement, a great black shadow - the shadow of my own element of falseness.

  I can not rid myself of it.

  I am an innate liar.

  This is a hard thing to write about. Of all things it is the most liable to be misunderstood. You will probably misunderstand it, for I have not succeeded in giving the right idea of it. I aimed
at it and missed it. It eluded me completely.

  You must take the idea as I have just now presented it for what it may be worth. This is as near as I can come to it. But it is something infinitely finer and rarer.

  It is a difficult task to show to others a thing which, though I feel and recognize it thoroughly, I have not yet analyzed for myself.

  But this is a complete Portrayal of me - as I await the Devil’s coming - and I must tell everything - everything.

  February 13

  So then yes. As I have said, I find that I am quite, quite odd. My various acquaintances say that I am funny. They say, “Oh, it’s that May MacLane, Dolly’s younger sister. She’s funny.” But I call it oddity. I bear the hall-mark of oddity.

  There was a time, a year or two since, when I was an exceedingly sensitive little fool. Sensitive in that it used to strike very deep when my young acquaintances would call me funny and find in me a vent for their distinctly unfriendly ridicule. My years in the High School were not years of joy. Two years ago I had not yet risen above these things. I was a sensitive little fool.

  But that sensitiveness, I rejoice to say, has gone from me. The opinion of these young people, or of these old people, is now a thing that is quite unable to affect me.

  The more I see of conventionality, it seems, the more I am odd.

  Though I am young and feminine - very feminine - yet I am not that quaint conceit, a girl : the sort of person that Laura E. Richards writes about, and Nora Perry, and Louisa M. Alcott, - girls with bright eyes, and with charming faces - (they always have charming faces), - standing with reluctant feet where the brook and river meet, - and all that sort of thing.

  I missed all that.

  I have read some girl-books, a few years ago - Hildegarde Graham, and What Katy Did, and all, - but I read them from afar. I looked at those creatures from behind a high board fence. I felt as if I had more tastes in common with the Jews wandering through the Wilderness, or with a band of fighting Amazons. I am not a girl. I am a woman, of a kind. I began to be a woman at twelve, or more properly, a genius.

  And then, usually, if one is not a girl one is a heroine - of the kind you read about. But I am not a heroine, either. A heroine is beautiful - eyes like the sea, shoots opaque glances from under drooping lids, walks with undulating movements, her bright smile haunts one still, falls methodically in love with a man - always with a man, - eats things (they are always called “viands”) with a delicate appetite, and on special occasions her voice is full of tears. I do none of these things. I am not beautiful. I do not walk with undulating movements - indeed, I have never seen any one walk so, except, perhaps, a cow that has been overfed. My bright smile haunts no one. I shoot no opaque glances from my eyes, which are not like the sea by any means. I have never eaten any viands, and my appetite for what I do eat is most excellent. And my voice has never yet, to my knowledge, been full of tears.

  No. I am not a heroine.

  There never seem to be any plain heroines, except Jane Eyre, and she was very unsatisfactory. She should have entered into marriage with her beloved Rochester in the first place. I should have, let there be a dozen mad wives up-stairs. But I suppose the author thought she must give her heroine some desirable thing - high moral principles, since she was not beautiful. Some people say that beauty is a curse. It may be true, but I’m sure I should not have minded being cursed a little. And I know several persons who might well say the same. But anyway, I wish some one would write a book about a plain, bad heroine so that I might feel in real sympathy with her.

  So far from being a girl or a heroine, I am a thief - as I have before suggested.

  I mind me of how, not long since, I stole three dollars. A woman whom I know rather well, and lives near, called me into her house as I was passing and asked me to do an errand for her. She was having an ornate gown made, and she needed some more applique with which to festoon it. The applique cost nine dollars a yard. My trusting neighbor gave me a bit of the braid for a sample and two twenty-dollar bills. I was to get four yards. I did so, and came back and gave her the braid and a single dollar. The other three dollars I kept myself. I wanted three dollars very much, to put with a few that I already had in my purse. My trusting neighbor is of the kind that throws money about carelessly. I knew she would not pay any attention to a little detail like that - she was deeply interested in her new frock; or perhaps she would think I had got thirty-nine dollars’ worth of applique. At any rate, she did not need the money, and I wanted three dollars, and so I stole it.

  I am a thief.

  It has been suggested to me that I am a kleptomaniac. But I am sure my mind is perfectly sane. I have no such excuse. I am a plain, down-right thief.

  This is only one of my peculations. I steal money, or anything that I want, whenever I can, nearly always. It amuses me - and one must be amused.

  I have only two stipulations: that the person to whom it belongs does not need it pressingly, and that there is not the slightest chance of being found out. (And of course I could not think of stealing from my one friend.)

  It would be extremely inconvenient to be known as a thief, merely.

  When the world knows you are a thief it blinds itself completely to your other attributes. It calls you a thief, and there’s an end. I am a genius as well as a thief - but the world would quite overlook that fact. “A thief ’s a thief,” says the world. That is very true. But the mere fact of being a thief should not exclude the consideration of one’s other traits. When the world knows you are a Methodist minister, for instance, it will admit that you may also be a violinist, or a chemist, or a poet, and will credit you therefor. And so if it condemns you for being a thief, it should at the same time admire you for being a genius. If it does not admire you for being a genius, then it has no right to condemn you for being a thief.

  - And why the world should condemn any one for being a thief - when there is not within its confines any one who is not a thief in some way - is a bit of irony upon which I have wasted much futile logic. -

  I am not trying to justify myself for stealing. I do not consider it a thing that needs to be justified, any more than walking or eating or going to bed. But, as I say, if the world knew that I am a thief without being first made aware with emphasis that I am some other things also, then the world would be a shade cooler for me than it already is - which would be very cool indeed.

  And so in writing my Portrayal I have dwelt upon some other things at some length before touching on my thieving propensities.

  None of my acquaintances would suspect that I am a thief. I look so respectable, so refined, so “nice,” so inoffensive, so sweet, even!

  But, for that matter, I am a great many things that I do not appear to be.

  The woman from whom I stole the three dollars, if she reads this, will recognize it. This will be inconvenient. I fervently hope she may not read it. It is true she is not of the kind that reads.

  But after all, it’s of no consequence. This Portrayal is Mary MacLane: her wooden heart, her young woman’s-body, her mind, her soul.

  - The world may run and read. -

  I will tell you what I did with the three dollars. In Dublin Gulch, which is a rough quarter of Butte inhabited by extremely Irish people, there lives an old world-soured, wrinkle-faced woman. She lives alone in a small untidy house. She swears frightfully like a parrot, and her reputation is bad - so bad indeed that even the old woman’s compatriots in Dublin Gulch do not visit her lest they damage their own. It is true that the profane old woman’s morals are not good - have never been good - judged by the world’s standards. She bears various marks of cold, rough handling on her mind and body. Her life has all but run its course. She is worn out.

  Once in a while I go to visit this old woman. - My reputation must be sadly damaged now. -

  I sit with her for an hour or two and listen to
her. She is extremely glad to have me here. Except me she has no one to talk to but the milk man, the grocery man, and the butcher. So always she is glad to see me. There is a certain bond of sympathy between her and me. We are fond of each other. When she sees me picking my way toward her house, her hard sour face softens wonderfully and a light of distinct friendliness comes into her green eyes.

  Don’t you know, there are few people enough in the world whose hard sour faces will soften at the sight of you and a distinctly friendly light come into their green eyes. For myself I find such people few indeed.

  So the profane old woman and I are fond of each other. No question of morals, or of immorals, comes between us. We are equals.

  I talk to her a little - but mostly she talks. She tells me of the time when she lived in County Galway, when she was young - and of her several husbands, and of some who were not husbands, and of her children scattered over the earth. And she shows me old tin-types of these people. She has told me the varied tale of her life a great many times. I like to hear her tell it. It is like nothing else I have heard. The story in its unblushing simplicity, the sour-faced old woman sitting telling it, and the tin-types, - contain a thing that is absurdly, grotesquely, tearlessly sad.

  Once when I went to her house I brought with me six immense heavy fragrant chrysanthemums.

  They had been bought with the three dollars I had stolen.

  It pleased me to buy them for the profane old woman. They pleased her also - not because she cares much for flowers, but because I brought them to her. I knew they would please her, but that was not the reason I gave her them.

  I did it purely and simply to please myself.

  I knew the profane old woman would not be at all concerned as to whether they had been bought with stolen money or not, and my only regret was that I had not had an opportunity to steal a larger sum so that I might have bought more chrysanthemums without inconveniencing my purse.

  But as it was they filled her dirty little dwelling with perfume and color.