I Await the Devil's Coming - Unexpurgated and Annotated

by MacLane, Mary

  Oh, how beautiful were those three gold rocks that came up out of the sea!

  Aphrodite once came up out of this same sea. She came gleaming, with golden hair and beautiful eyes. Her skin glowed with hints of carmine and wild rose. Her white feet touched the smooth, yellow sand on the shore. - The white feet of Aphrodite on the yellow sand made a picture of marvelous beauty. - She was flushed in the joy of new life.

  But the bronze-and-copper sunshine on the three white rocks was more beautiful than Aphrodite.

  I stood on the shore and looked at the rocks. My heart contracted with the pain that beautiful things bring.

  The bronze-and-copper in the wide gray and green sea!

  “This is the gateway of Heaven,” I said to myself. “Behind those three gold rocks there is music and the high notes of happy voices.” My soul grew faint. “And there is no sand and barrenness there, and no Nothingness, and no bitterness, and no hot, blinding tears. And there are no little heart-weary children, and no lonely young women - oh, there is no loneliness at all!” My soul grew more and more faint with thinking of it. “And there is no heart there but that is pure and joyous and in Peace - in long, still, eternal Peace. And every life comes there to its own; and every earth-cry is answered, and every earth-pain is ended; and the dark spirit of Sorrow that hangs always over the earth is gone - gone, - beyond the gateway of heaven. And more than all, Love is there and walks among the dwellers. Love is a shining figure with radiant hands, and it touches them all with its hands so that never-dying love enters into their hearts. And the love of each for another is like the love of each for self. And here at last is Truth. There is searching and searching over the earth after Truth - and who has found it? But here is it beyond the gateway of heaven. Those who enter in know that it is Truth at last.”

  And so Peace and Love and Truth are there behind the three gold rocks.

  And then my soul could no longer endure the thought of it.

  Suddenly the sun passed behind a heavy, dark-gray cloud and the bronze-and-copper faded from the three rocks and left them white - very white in the wide water.

  The yellow flowers laid their heads drowsily down on the emerald moss. The wind from off the sea played very gently among the motionless branches of the tall trees. The blue, blue sky and the wide, gray-green sea clasped each other more closely and mingled with each other and became one vague, shadowy element - and from it all I brought my eyes back thousands of leagues to my sand and barrenness.

  The sand and barrenness is itself an element, and I have known it a long, long time.

  March 12

  Everything is so dreary - so dreary.

  I feel as if I should like to die to-day. I should not be the tiniest bit less unhappy afterward - but this life is unutterably weary. I am not strong. I can not bear things. I do not want to bear things. I do not long for strength. I want to be happy.

  When I was very little, it was cold and dreary also, but I was certain it would be different when I should grow and be ten years old. It must be very nice to be ten, I thought, - and one would not be nearly so lonesome. But when the years passed and I was ten it was just exactly as lonesome. And when I was ten everything was very hard to understand.

  But it will surely be different when I am seventeen, I said, - I will know so much when I am seventeen. But when I was seventeen it was even more lonely, and everything was still harder to understand.

  And again I said - faintly - everything will become clearer in a few years more, and I will wonder to think how stupid I have always been. But now the few years more have gone and here I am in loneliness that is more hopeless and harder to bear than when I was very little. Still, I wonder indeed to think how stupid I have been - and now I am not so stupid. I do not tell myself that it will be different when I am five-and-twenty.

  For I know that it will not be different.

  I know that it will be the same dreariness, the same Nothingness, the same loneliness.

  It is very, very lonely.

  It is hope deferred and maketh the heart sick.

  It is more than I can bear.

  Why - why was I ever born!

  I can not live, and I can not die - for what is there after I am dead? I can see myself wandering in dark and lonely places.

  Yet I feel as if I would like to die to-day.

  March 13

  If it were pain alone that one must bear, one could bear it. One could lose one’s sense of everything but pain.

  But it is pain with other things. It is the sense of pain with the sense of beauty and the sense of the anemone. And there is that mysterious pain.

  Who knows the name of that mysterious pain?

  It is these mingled senses that torture me.

  March 14

  I have been placed in this world with eyes to see and ears to hear, and I ask for Life. Is it to be wondered at? Is it so strange? Should I be content merely to see and to hear? There are other things for other people. Is it atrocious that I should ask for some other things also?

  Is thy servant a dog?

  March 15

  In these days of approaching emotional Nature even the sand and barrenness begins to stir and rub its eyes.

  My sand and barrenness is clothed in the awful majesty of countless ages. It stands always through the never-ending march of the living and the dead. It may have been green once - green and fertile, and birds and snakes and everything that loves green growing things may have lived in it. It may have sometime been rolling prairie. It may have been submerged in floods. It changed and changed in the centuries. Now it is sand and barrenness and there are no birds and no snakes; only me. But whatever change came to it, whatever its transfiguration, the spirit of it never moved. Flood, or fertility, or rolling prairie, or barrenness - it is only itself. It has a great self, a wonderful self.

  I shall never forget you, my sand and barrenness.

  Some day, shall my thirsty life be watered, my starved heart fed, my asking voice answered, my tired soul taken into the warmth of another with the intoxicating sweetness of love?

  It may be.

  But I shall remember the sand and barrenness that is with me in my Nothingness. The sand and barrenness and the memory of the anemone lady are all that are in any degree mine.

  And so then I shall remember it.

  As I stand among the barren gulches in these days and look away at the slow-awakening hills of Montana, I hear the high, swelling, half-tired, half-hopeful song of the world. As I listen I know that there are things, other than the Virtue and the Truth and the Love, that are not for me. There is beyond me, like these, the unbreaking, undying bond of human fellowship - a thing that is earth-old.

  It is beyond me and it is nothing to me.

  In my intensest desires - in my widest longings - I never go beyond self. The ego is the all.

  Limitless legions of women and men in weariness and in joy are one. They are killing each other and torturing each other, and going down in sorrow to the dust. But they are one. Their right hands are joined in unseen sympathy and kinship.

  But my two hands are apart, and clasped together in an agony of loneliness.

  I have read of women who have been strongly, grandly brave. Sometimes I have dreamed that I might be brave. The possibilities of this life are magnificent.

  To be saturated with this agony, I say at times, and to bear with it all; not to sink beneath it but to vanquish it, and to make it the grace and comeliness of my entire life from the Beginning to the End!

  Perhaps a woman - a real woman - could do this.

  But I? - No. I am not real - I do not seem real to myself. In such things as these my life is a blank.

  There was Charlotte Corday - a heroine whom I admire above all the heroines. And more than she was a heroine she was a woman. And she h
ad her agony. It was for love of her fair country.

  To suffer and do and die for love of something! It is glorious! What must be the exalted ecstasy of Charlotte Corday’s soul now!

  And I - with all my manifold passions - I am a coward.

  I have had moments when, vaguely and from far off, it seemed as if there might be bravery and exaltation for me, - when I could rise far over myself. I have felt unspeakable possibilities. While they lasted - what wonderful emotion was it that I felt?

  But they are not real.

  They fade away - they fade away.

  And again come the varied phenomena of my life to bewilder and terrify me.

  Confusion! Chaos! Damnation! They are not moments of exaltation now. Poor little Mary MacLane!

  If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do,

  Chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages

  Princes’ palaces.

  I do not know what to do.

  I do not know what were good to do.

  I would do nothing if I knew.

  I might add to my litany this: Most kind Devil deliver me - from myself.

  March 16

  To-day I walked over the sand and it was almost beautiful. The sun was sinking and the sky was filled with roses and gold.

  Then came my soul and confronted me. My soul is wondrous fair. It is like a young woman. The beauty of it is too great for human eyes to look upon. It is too great for mine. Yet I look.

  My soul said to me: “I am sick.”

  I answered: “And I am sick.”

  “We may be well,” said my soul. “Why are we not well?”

  “How may we be well?” I asked.

  “We may throw away all our vanity and false pride,” said my soul. “We may take on a new life. We may learn to wait and possess ourselves in patience. We may labor and overcome -”

  “We can do none of these things,” I cried. “Have I not tried all of them sometime in my short life? And have I not waited and waited until you have become faint with pain? Have I not looked and longed? Dear soul, why do you not resign yourself? Why can you not stay quiet and trouble yourself and me no more? Why are you always straining and reaching? There isn’t anything for you. You are wearing yourself out.”

  My soul made answer: “I may strain and reach until only one worn nerve of me is left. And that one nerve may be scourged with whips and burned with fire. But I will keep one atom of faith. I may go bad, but I will keep one atom of faith in Love and in the Truth that is Love. You are a genius, but I am no genius. The years - a million of years - may do their utmost to destroy the single nerve. They may lash and beat it. I will keep my one atom of faith.”

  “You are not wise,” I said. “You have been wandering and longing for a time that seems a thousand years - through my cold dark childhood to my cold dark womanhood. Is that not enough to quiet you? Is that not enough to teach you the lesson of Nothing? You are not a genius, but you are not a fool.”

  “I will keep my one atom of faith,” said my soul.

  “But lie and sleep now,” I said. “Don’t reach after that Light any more. Let us both sleep a few years.”

  “No,” said my soul.

  “Oh, my soul,” I wailed, “look away at that glowing copper horizon - and beyond it. Let us go there now and take an infinite rest. Now! We can bear this no longer.”

  “No,” said my soul. “We will stay here and bear more. There would be no rest yet beyond the copper horizon. And there is no need of going anywhere. I have my one atom of faith.”

  I gazed at my soul as it stood plainly before me, weak and worn and faint, in the fading light. It had one atom of faith, it said, and tried to hold its head high and to look strong and triumphant. Oh, the irony - the pathos of it!

  My soul, with its one pitiful atom of faith, looked only what it was - a weeping, hunted thing.

  March 17

  In some rare between-whiles it is as if nothing mattered. My heart aches, I say; my soul wanders; this person or that person was repelled to-day; but nothing matters.

  A great inner languor comes like a giant and lays hold of me. I lie fallow beneath it.

  Someone forgot me in the giving of things. But it does not matter. I feel nothing.

  Persons say to me, don’t analyze any more and you will not be unhappy.

  When Something throws heavy clubs at you and you are hit by them, don’t be hurt. When Something stronger than you holds your hands in the fire, don’t let it burn you. When Something pushes you into a river of ice, don’t be cold. When Something draws a cutting lash across your naked shoulders, don’t let it concern you - don’t be conscious that it is there.

  This is great wisdom and fine clear logic.

  It is a pity that no one has ever yet been able to live by it.

  But after all it’s no matter. Nothing is any one’s affair. It is all of no consequence.

  And have I not had all my anguish for nothing? I am a fool - a fool.

  A handful of rich black mud in a pig’s yard - does it wonder why it is there? Does it torture itself about the other mud around it, and about the earth and water of which it is made, and about the pig? Only fool’s-mud would do so. And so then I am fool’s-mud.

  Nothing counts. Nothing can possibly count.

  Regret, passion, cowardice, hope, bravery, unrest, pain, the love-sense, the soul-sense, the beauty-sense - all for nothing! What can a handful of rich black mud in a pig’s yard have to do with these? I am a handful of rich black mud - a fool-woman, fool’s-mud.

  All on earth that I need to do is to lie still in the hot sun and feel the pig rolling and floundering and slushing about. It were folly to waste my mud-nerves on wondering. - Be quiet, fool-woman, let things be. Your soul is a fool’s-mud soul and is governed by the pig; your heart is a fool’s-mud heart, and wants nothing beyond the pig; your life is a fool’s-mud life and is the pig’s life.

  Something within me shrieks now, but I do not know what it is - nor why it shrieks.

  It groans and moans.

  There is no satisfaction in being a fool - no satisfaction at all.

  March 18

  But yes. It all matters, whether or no. Nature is one long battle and the never-ending perishing of the weak. I must grind and grind away. I have no choice. And I must know that I grind.

  Fool, genius, young lonely woman - I must go round and round in the life within, for how many years the Devil knows. After that my soul must go round and round, for how many centuries the Devil knows.

  What a master-mind is that of the Devil! The world is a wondrous scheme. For me it is a scheme that is black with woe. But there may be in the world some one who finds it beautiful Real Life.

  I wonder as I write this Portrayal if there will be one person to read it and see a thing that is mingled with every word. It is something that you must feel, that must fascinate you, the like of which you have never before met with.

  It is the unparalleled individuality of me.

  I wish I might write it in so many words of English. But that is not possible. If I have put it in every word and if you feel it and are fascinated, then I have done very well.

  I am marvelously clever if I have done so.

  I know that I am marvelously clever. But I have need of all my peculiar genius to show you my individuality - my aloneness.

  I am alone out on my sand and barrenness. I should be alone if my sand and barrenness were crowded with a thousand people each filled with melting sympathy for me - though it would be unspeakably sweet.

  People say of me, “She’s peculiar.” They do not understand me. If they did, they would say so oftener and with emphasis.

  And so I try to put my individuality in the quality of my diction, in my method of handling
words.

  My conversation plainly shows this individuality - more than shows it indeed. My conversation hurls it violently at people’s heads. My conversation - when I choose - makes people turn around in their chairs and stare and give me all of their attention. They admire me, though their admiration is mixed decidedly with other feelings.

  I like to be admired.

  It soothes my vanity.

  When you read this Portrayal you will admire me. You will surely have to admire me.

  And so this is life and everything matters.

  But just now I will stop writing and go down-stairs to my dinner. There is a porterhouse steak, broiled rare, and some green onions. Oh, they are good! And when one is to have a porterhouse steak for one’s dinner - and some green young onions - one doesn’t give a tuppenny damn whether anything else matters or not.

  March 19

  On a day when the sky is like lead and a dull, tempestuous wilderness of gray clouds adds a dreariness to the sand, there is added to the loneliness of my life a deep bitterness of gall and wormwood.

  Out of my bitterness it is easy for bad to come.

  Surely Badness is a deep black pool wherein one may drown dullness and Nothingness.

  I do not know Badness well. It is something material that seems a great way off now but that might creep nearer and nearer as I became less and less young.

  But now when the day is of the leaden dullness I look at Badness and long for it. I am young and all alone, and everything that is good is beyond my reach. But all that is bad - surely that is within the reach of every one.

  I wish for a long pageant of bad things to come and whirl and rage through this strange leaden life of mine and break the spell.

  Why should it not be Badness instead of Death? Death, it seems, will bring me but a change of agony. Badness would perhaps so crowd my life with its vivid phenomena that they would act as a narcotic to the racked nerves of my Nothingness. It would be an outlet - and possibly I could forget some things.