They want something - they know not what.
I give them poison.
They snatch it and eat it hungrily.
Then they are not so hungry. They become quieter.
The ravaging disease soothes them to sleep - it descends on them like rain in the autumn. And so.
When I hurry over my sand and barrenness my vivid passions come to me - or when I sit and look at the horizon. When I walk slowly I consider calmly the question of how much evil I should need to kill off my finer feelings, to poison thoroughly this soul of unrest and this wooden heart so that they would never more be conscious of too-brilliant Lights, and to make myself over into a quite different creature.
A little evil would do - a little of a fine, good quality.
I should like a man to come (it is always a man, have you ever noticed? - whatever one contemplates when one is of womankind and young). I should like a man to come, I said calmly to myself to-day as I walked slowly over my barrenness - a perfect villain to come and fascinate me and lead me with strong gentle allurements to what would be technically termed my ruin. And as the world views such things it would be my ruin. But as I view such things it would not be ruin. It would be a new lease on life.
Yes. I should like a man to come - any man so that he is strong and thoroughly a villain, and so that he fascinates me. Particularly he must fascinate me. There must be no falling in love about it. I doubt if I could fascinate him but I should ask him quite humbly to lead me to my ruin.
I have never yet seen the man who would not readily respond to such an appeal.
This villain would be no exception.
I would then jerk my life out of this Nothingness by the roots. Fare- well, a long farewell, I would say. Then I would go forth with the man to my ruin. The man would be bad to his heart’s core. And after living but a short time with him my shy, sensitive soul would be irretrievably poisoned and polluted. The defilement of so sacred and beautiful a thing as marriage is surely the darkest evil that can come to a life. And so everything within me that had turned toward that too-bright Light would then drink deep of the lees of death.
The thirst of this incessant unrest and longing, this weariness of self, would be quenched completely.
My life would be like fertile soil planted thickly with rank wild mustard. On every square inch of soil there would be a dozen sprouts of wild mustard. There would be no room - no room at all - for an anemone to grow. If one should start up, instantly it would be choked and overrun with wild mustard.
- But no anemone would start up. -
My life now is a life of pain and revolt.
My life darkened and partly killed would be more than content to drift along with the current.
Oh, it would be a rest!
The Christians sing, there is rest for the weary, on the other side of Jordan, where the tree of life is blooming. But that rest of course is for the Christians. My rest will have to come on this side of Jordan. Let the impress of a thoroughly evil and strong man be stamped upon my inner life and I am convinced there would come a wonderful settled quiet over it. Its spirit would be broken. It would rest. Why not? I have no virtue-sense. Nothing to me is of any consequence except to be rid of this unrest and pain. Yes, surely I might rest.
The coming of the man-Devil would bring rest. But am I fool enough to think that marriage - the real marriage - is possible for me?
This other thing is within the reach of every one - of fools and geniuses alike - and of all that come between.
And so I want a fascinating wicked man to come and make me positively, rather than negatively, wicked. I feel a terrific wave of utter weariness. My life lies fallow. I am tired of sitting here. The sand and barrenness is gray with age. And I am gray with age.
Happiness - the red of the sunset sky - is the intensest desire of my life.
But I will grasp eagerly anything else that is offered me - anything.
The poisoning of my soul - the passing of my unrest - would rouse my mental power. My genius would receive a wonderful impetus from it. You would marvel, good world, at the things I should write. Not that they would be exalted - not that they would surge upward. Do men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles? But they would be marvels of fire and intensity. I should no longer exhaust much of my energy in grinding, grinding within. The things that would come of the thorns and thistles would excite your astonishment and admiration, though they be not grapes and figs.
And as for me - the real me - the creature imbued with a spirit of intense femininity, with a spirit of an intense sense of Love - with a spirit like that of the Magdalene who loved too much, with the very soul of unrest and Nothingness - this thing would vanish swiftly into oblivion, and I, a despoiled animal, should go down a dark world and feel not.
March 25
One of the remarkable points about my life is that it is so completely, hopelessly alone - a lonely, lonely life. This book of mine contains but one character - myself.
There is also the Devil - as a possibility.
And there is also the anemone lady - my dearest beloved - as a memory.
I have read books that were written to portray but one character and there were various people brought in to help in the portraying. But my one friend is gone, and there is no person who enters into my inner life in the very least. I am always alone. I might mingle with people intimately every hour of my life - still I should be alone.
Always alone - alone.
Not even a God to worship.
How do I bear this! How do I get through the days and days!
And oh, when it all comes over me, what frightful rage - what long agony of my breaking heart - what utter woe!
When the stars shine down upon me with cold hatred; when miles and miles of barrenness stretch out around me and envelop me in its weary, weary Nothingness; when the wind blows over me like the breath of a vicious giant; when the ugly, ugly sun radiates centuries of hard, heavy bitterness around me from its stinging rays; when the sky maddens me with its cold careless blue; when the rivers that are flowing over the earth send echoes to me of their hateful voices; when I hear wild geese honking in bitter wailing melody; when bristling edges of jagged rocks cut sharply into my tired life; when drops of rain fall on me and pierce me like steel points; when the voices in the air shriek little-minded malice in my ears; when the green of Nature is the green of spitefulness and cruelty; when the red, red of the setting sun burns and consumes me with its horrid feverish effervescence; when I feel the all-hatred of the Universe for its poor little earth-bugs: then it is that I approach nearest to Rest.
The softnesses are my Unrest.
I do not want those bitter things.
But I must have them if I would rest.
I want the softnesses and I want Rest!
Oh, dear faint soul, it is hard - hard for us.
We are sick with loneliness.
March 26
Now and again I have torturing glimpses of a Paradise. And I feel my soul in its pain every moment of my life. Otherwise, how gladly would I deny the existence of a soul and a life to come!
For my soul is beset with Nothingness, and the Paradise that shows itself is not for me.
March 28
Hatred, after all, is the easiest thing of all to bear.
If you have been forgotten by the one who must have made you, and if you have been left alone of human beings all your life - all your nine- teen years, - then, when at last you see some one looking toward you with beautiful eyes, and extending to you a beautiful hand, and showing you a beautiful heart wherein is just a little of beautiful sympathy for you - for you - oh, that is harder than anything to bear. Harder than the loneliness and the bitterness - and the tears are nearer and nearer.
But one would be hurt often, often for the sake of
the beautiful things. Yes, one would gladly be hurt long and often.
I shall never forget how it was with me when I first saw the beautiful eyes of the dearest anemone lady when they were looking gently - at me, - and the beautiful hand, and the beautiful heart. The awakening of my racked soul is hardly more heavily laden with passion and pain. I shall never forget.
Though I feel away from her also, she is the only one out of all to look gently at me.
- Let me writhe and falter with pain; let me go mad - but oh, worldful of people - for the love of your God - give me out of this seething darkness only one beautiful human hand to touch mine with love, one beautiful human heart to know the aching sad loneliness of mine, one beautiful human soul to mingle with mine in long, long Rest. -
Oh, for a human being, my soul wails - a human being to love me!
Oh, to know - just once - what it is to be loved!
Nineteen years without one faint shadow of love is mouldy, crumbling age - is gray with the dust of centuries.
How long have I lived!
How long must I live!
I am shrieking at you, cold stupid world.
Oh, the long, long waiting -
The millions of human beings -
I am a human being and there is no one - no one - no one.
Who can know this that has not felt it? You do not know - you can not know.
Surely I do not ask too much. But whether or not it is too much I can not go through the years without it - oh, I can not!
You have lived your nineteen years, fine world, and you have lived through some after years.
But in your nineteen years there was some one to love you.
It is that that counts.
Since you have had that some one, in your nineteen years, can you understand what life is to me - me - in my loneliness?
My wailing, waiting soul burns with but one desire: to be loved - oh, to be loved.
March 29
I am making the world my confessor in this Portrayal. My mind is fairly bursting with egotism and pain and in writing this I find a merciful outlet. I have become fond of my Portrayal. Often I lay my forehead and my lips caressingly upon the pages.
And I wish to let you know that there is in existence a genius - an unhappy genius, a genius starving in Montana in the barrenness - but still a genius. I am a creature the like of which you have never before happened upon. You have never suspected that there is such a person. I know that there is not such another. As I said in the beginning, the world contains not my parallel.
I am a fantasy - an absurdity - a genius!
Had I been one of the beasts that perish I had been likewise a fantasy. I think I should have been a small animal composite of a pig, a leopard, and a skunk: an animal that I fancy would be uncanny to look upon but admirable for a pet.
However I am not one of the beasts that perish.
I am human.
That is another remarkable point.
I have heard persons say they can hardly believe I am quite human.
I am the most human creature that ever was placed on the earth. The geniuses are always more human than the herd. Almost a perfection of humanness is reached in me. This by itself makes me extraordinary. The rarest thing in the world, I find, is the quality of humanness.
Humanity and humaneness are much less rare.
“It is a brave thing to understand something of what we see.” Indeed it is. An exceeding brave thing. The one who said that had surely gone out on the highways and byways and found how little he could understand.
To understand oneself is not so brave a thing. To go in among the hidden gray shadows of the deep things is a fool’s errand. It is not from choice that I do it. No one carries a mill-stone around her neck from choice. When I see what is among the hidden gray shadows - when I see a vision of Myself - I am seized with a strange sick terror.
A fool’s errand - but one on which I must need go.
- And for that matter I myself am a fool. -
Yet to know oneself well is a rare fine art.
I analyze myself now. I analyzed myself when I was three years old.
The only difference is that at the age of three I was not aware that I analyzed. - It is true, that is a great difference. - Now I know that I am analyzing at nineteen, and now I know that I analyzed at three.
And at the age of nineteen I know that I am a genius.
A genius who does not know that he is a genius is no genius. A drunken man might stagger up to a piano and accidentally play music that vibrates to the soul - that touches upon the mysteries. But he does not know his power and he is no genius though men awaken and go mad therefrom.
I know I am a genius more than any genius that has lived.
I have a feeling that the world will never know this.
And as I think of it I wonder if angels are not weeping somewhere because of it.
March 31
She only said : “My life is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am weary, aweary.
I would that I were dead.”
All day long this heart-sickening song of Mariana has been reeling and swimming in my brain. I awoke with it early in the morning and it is still with me now in the lateness. I wondered at times during the day why that very gentle and devilishly persistent refrain did not drive me insane or send me into convulsions. I tried vainly to fix my mind on a book. I began reading The Mill on the Floss, but that weird poem was not to be foiled. It bewitched my brain. Now as I write I hear twenty voices chanting it in a sad minor key - twenty voices that fill my brain with sound to the bursting point. “He cometh not - he cometh not - he cometh not.” “That I were dead” - “I am aweary, aweary,” - “that I were dead - that I were dead.” “He cometh not - that I were dead.”
It is maddening in that it is set sublimely to the music of my own life.
Now that I have written it I can hope that it may leave me. If it follows me through the night and if I awake to another day of it the cords of my overworked mind will surely break.
But let me thank the kind Devil.
It is leaving me now!
It is as if tons were lifted from my brain.
April 2
How can any one bring a child into the world and not wrap it round with a certain wondrous tenderness that will stay with it always!
- There are persons whose souls have never entered into them. -
My mother has some fondness for me - for my body because it came of hers. That is nothing - nothing.
A hen loves its egg.
A hen!
April 3
This evening in the slow-deepening dusk I sat by my window and spent an hour in passionate conversation with the Devil. I fancied I sat, with my hands folded and my feet crossed, on an ugly but comfortable red velvet sofa in some nondescript room.
And the fascinating man-Devil was seated near in a frail willow chair.
He had willingly come to pass the time of day with me. He was in a good-humored mood and I amused and interested him. And for myself, I was extremely glad to see the Devil sitting there and felt vividly as always. But I sat quietly enough.
The fascinating man-Devil has fascinating steel-gray eyes, and they looked at me with every variety of glance - from quizzical to tender.
- It were easy - oh, how easy - to follow those eyes to the earth’s ends. -
The Devil leaned back in the frail willow chair and looked at me.
“And now that I am here, Mary MacLane,” he said, “what would you?”
“I want you to marry me,” I replied at once. “And I want it more than ever anything was wanted since the world began.”
“So? I am flattered,” said
the Devil, and smiled gently, enchantingly.
At that smile I was ravished and transported and a spasm of some rare emotion thrilled all the little nerves in me from my heels to my forehead. And yet the smile was not for me but rather somewhat at my expense.
“But,” he went on, “you must know it is not my custom to marry the women.”
“I am sure it is not,” I agreed, “and I do not ask to be peculiarly favored. Anything that you may give me, however little, will constitute marriage for me.”
“And would marriage itself be so small a thing?” asked the Devil.
“Marriage,” I said, “would be a great, oh, a wonderful thing, the most beautiful of all. I want what is good according to my lights, and because I am a genius my lights are many and far-reaching.”
“What do your lights tell you?” the man-Devil inquired.
“They tell me this: that nothing in the world matters unless love is with it, and if love is with it and it seems to the virtuous a barren and infamous thing, still - because of the love - it partakes of the very highest.”
“And have you the courage of your convictions?” he said.
“If you offered me,” I replied, “that which to the blindly virtuous seems the worst possible thing, it would yet be for me the red, red line on the sky, my heart’s desire, my life, my rest. You are the Devil. I have fallen in love with you.”
“I believe you have,” said the Devil. “And how does it feel to be in love?”
Sitting composedly on the ugly red velvet sofa, with my hands folded and my feet crossed, I attempted to define that wonderful feeling.
I Await the Devil's Coming - Unexpurgated and Annotated Page 13
