by Mary MacLane
Before having her drinks she is unelated and uninformed like a corpse coldly electrified by a storage battery. As she drinks and drinks on she remains outwardly unchanged as the way is with her race— but within! The changes that come to pass in the heavy person of Josephina as the white flames wash down her walls!
Into her dull veins pours a hot stream like melted seething copper and it heats her knees till she knows she has knees and that they are white and very beautiful: and it heats her legs and her back and her breasts till they glow with the double-glow of an Aphrodite’s in a reluctant Adonis’s arms: it heats her eyes and temples and throat till she feels herself a radiant girl: it heats the crown of her head till she feels something like a brain there: it heats her heart and stomach till she’s filled with a gay gust for life: it heats her imagination till she even imagines herself in love with her hard Finn husband since he is not by to beat her and so dispel the fancy: it heats a sense of humor into her till she laughs suddenly and heartily at some fugitive funniness that had Iain long frozen in her memory: it heats a hundred little human carburetors in her which send a wreathe of vapors up into her drab being to flush it with misty golds and thin blues and rosy crimsons till her dormant involuntary soul awakes—a thing of old mellowed beauty, it may be —and is wafted on warm pretty vapory wings far from alleys, far from mops and scrubbing-brushes, far from thirty-five cents an hour, far from doorsteps—to fair sweet Isles of the Blest!
Nearing the last of her pint bottles she reels sideways on the doorstep: her bad hat cants forward: she sprawls about. The policeman on that beat to whom in that aspect she is a figure long familiar strolls toward her late in the night and looks at her with a lackluster eye. But Josephina is physically unaware of all this world. Her last pint bottle is gamely emptied, her inner sun’s chromosphere burns like mad—but her body, unable to cope with the virile delectations new-risen within it, limply gives way.
A quaint picture, interesting to dwell on: her thick bathless body laid low in the darkened alley, with the empty pint bottles scattered on the paving-stones beside it—but her astral shape, lit by the subtle fires of alcohol, lifted high, high to remote elysiums. The policeman calls the ‘wagon’ and Josephina is taken up by several ungentle hands and tossed into it like a sack of coal. They take her to the city jail and lock her in a cell. The next morning she stands jaded and morbidly intoxicated before a police judge who glances at her uninterestedly for the several-hundredth time and says five days.
The five days can not be pleasant days but Josephina owns a robust sporting spirit. She gives not so much as the shrug of a shoulder either at going into jail or coming out of it. A black eye from her husband, a broken arm from a drunken fall, a filthy sojourn in jail: all one to her. She accepts them as she accepts all of her life, with an immense psychic calm. But she takes strongly to drink to translate herself out if it. And let her drink.
I know how she feels for I take to John Keats. I don’t myself care much for strong drink. I drink a little of it at irregular intervals, but, by and large, I drink without éclat. In this mountain altitude whiskey makes me sick, champagne makes me dizzy and gin is a pungent punishment. One morning after reading of Josephina’s white-line distinction in a police-court column I tasted some alcohol, but it had a varnish flavor and had strangling effects on my throat. It made me marvel at Josephina’s prowess. I like absinthe in its bitter strength mostly because to sit sipping it feels restfully forbidden. Port wine is a brackish medicine, I hate the stickiness of cordials, and a cocktail I like chiefly to content plate. So much for me and strong drink.
Josephina on the other hand does not care for John Keats. I sounded her on poetry in some of its human aspects: there was nobody at home. Her own enlightened north country has some poets of borealic iron and brain-brawn and beauty: to Josephina’s wooden intellect their books are eternally closed.
But the Demon Rum looses a heated flood of poetry upon her, which I can but vision and not feel.
I am incapable of strong drink even as Josephina is incapable of John Keats.
We are quits there.
I look on myself as the more fortunate.—John Keats! A woman so drunk as to fall and reel about is always an exquisitely shameful thing. And when I think of how she’s tossed into the wagon—to mention but one item—
But it’s a matter of the human equation. Doubtless it is all relative. The Finn woman is not aware of how she is knocked about, and if she were she would not regard it with any of my imagination. So what matter?
A likeable and admirable person is Josephina. A so strong fine businesslike worker, a so thoroughbred sport, a so splendid drunkard, and asking no odds of God or man. In her stolid Finn fashion she likes me as she has proven, and I like her though she makes me feel inferior.
—if Josephina could and would write her inner isolated world of thoughts—the saga of her one horrid gown! There would be a book. All blacks and carmines—all stolidly sober and brilliantly drunk—all dingily bathless: deeply savagely quietly human.
It would be a book savoring not of white alcohol but of the salty unshed Tears, the dry artistic Griefs of Josephina.
BENEFICENT BEDLAM
To-morrow
I have been so long Sane it would be gay and sweet and resting to go Mad.
I would I could go Mad.
To a Mad-woman a Door is not a Door, probably: a Cat is not a Cat, belike: and To-morrow is not To-morrow at all—it may be week-before-last, it may be next year, it may be an exquisite jest. One cannot tell what it is.
It is the thing one escapes by going Mad: Monotony.
It’s all beneficent bedlam.
A DEATHLY PATHOS
To-morrow
I love the sex-passion which is in this witching Body of me. I love to feel its portent grow and creep over me, like a climbing vine of tiny red roses, in the occasional dusks.
It is no shame or shadow or sordidness: but beauty and sweetness and light.
no token of sin: a token of virtue.
no thing to crush: rather to nurture, to garner.
no thing to forget: to remember, to think about.
no flat weak drawn-out prose: live potent clipped heated poetry.
not common and loosely human: rare and divine.
not fat daily soup: stinging wine of life.
not valueless because born of nothing and nowhere: valuable, priceless, a treasure under lock and key.
Sex-desire comes wandering in dusk-time and gulfs me as in a swift violent sweet-smelling whirlwind. It goes away sudden-variant as it came, out of a region of hot quick shadows.
And for that, for hours and days afterward, oranges and apples look brighter-colored to my eyes: hammocks swing easier as I sit in them: rugs feel softer to my feet: the black dresses lend themselves gentler to my form: pencils slide faciler on paper: my voice speaks less difficultly into telephones: meanings sound super-vibrant in Keats’s Odes: sugar—little pinches of granulated sugar—are sharper, sweeter-sweeter in my throat.
And God grows less remote. And my wooden coffin and deep wet yellow clay grave move a long way back from me.
—all from fleeting ungratified wish of sly sex-tissues—
Also in it, and in my life from it, I sense some deathly pathos.
THE NECKLACE
To-morrow
The Necklace which God long ago hung round the white neck of my Soul is composed of little-seeming curses, like precious and semi-precious gems. They are polished smooth as if by age, as if by wear, as if by fingering and as if by brisk industrious rubbing.
The Necklace is at once beautiful and ugly. The gems are in color chiefly blues and greens—with grays, lavenders, drabs and mauves. But mostly blues and greens. They make a circlet of small stones strung at short intervals as if on a strong thin gold wire, with two large tawdry pretty pendants hung in front. One of the pendants is my fertile phase of Weakness and the other my odd encompassing Folly. The smaller stones are seventeen in number and their names
and natures are these:
the first is Dishonesty which makes ghosts of half my life.
the second is Pretense, hard and genuine stone, which keeps me from being all-ways sincere even to anyone who knows me and whom I know: who loves me and whom I love.
the third is Fear which makes me who scorn all leonine dangers cringe and crawl for trifles of life incredibly little.
the fourth is Sensuality which burns and bursts across my Mind, half-missing my Body.
the fifth is Anxiety, strange flawed green stone—by it I worry, tortured and wildly wavering, about the passing hours of my life: where they are going, where they are taking me.
the sixth is Amativeness, extraordinary deep-tinted warm false gem—it makes me love someway amorously some person I meet and fancy: an intimate tragedy, crucial and trivial.
the seventh is Fatigue of the spirit itself, gray sad stone, meaning terrible sensations of age in my young flesh.
the eighth is Incongruity, the sense and feeling of it, round blue stone—it kills what might be art and constructiveness and excellence in me.
the ninth is Acquiescence, worn dull stone—it has kept me all the ages from the salvation of heated luminous strife.
the tenth is Sensitiveness, pale-toned stone—by it the fingers of life touch me too suddenly, too sharply, too tensely to do me the good they might.
the eleventh is Doubt, frail opalescent stone—by it my delight in the sunny Spring wind against my cheek is qualified with dubious surprise: by it I half-disbelieve in moon and stars and in long country roads stretched out solitary, lovely, drenched in sunset.
the twelfth is Self-consciousness, blue-and-green stone—it robs me of the comfort and self-respect of feeling any motive in me to be un-ulterior.
the thirteenth is Introspection, beautiful-beautiful blue-green stone—it pays for its place in beauty but by it I lose the building, the substance, the matter of living.
the fourteenth is Intensity—too vivid vision, too vivid taste for some details of life—little hot-looking cool-feeling stone—by it I undervalue and overvalue, dwell upon surfaces, missing the serene feel and possession of precious solidness.
the fifteenth is Isolation, pale purple stone—it makes me feel never at home, never at ease, never belonging—a subtle insulation—in this sheltered peopled world.
the sixteenth is Bewilderment, mixed-tinted stone—by it I wonder what is truth with truth seeming that moment fluttering soft-plumed wings at my throat.
the seventeenth is—it has no name—the Feel-of-Me, bright blue-green stone, lovely and loathesome—by it I’ve lost my way, I’ve felt all and only Me when I might have groped outward, hand and foot, and found a wind-swept path to go in: I was always blurred by Me.
A small Necklace, all dull gleams and unusual tints, strung finely and strongly and beautifully on shining gold. The sweet Soul droops like a wilted lily under even its slight weight. Strong fine rivets hold it firm-clasped and the weight of the two charming imitation pendant-stones keep it gracefully in place. My loved and lovely Soul has worn it through the ages: manacle, shackle.
How long more—God may know but does not tell me.
It’s only a Necklace. And my Soul is a Soul!
Even under the frail galling burden of the flesh the Soul of me to-morrow could tear off that Necklace and crumble it to airless nothing.
It does not: but could.
SLYLY GARBLING AND CROSS-PURPOSING
To-morrow
At rarish intervals comes my Soul to visit me.
My Soul is light sheer Being.
My Soul is like a young most beautiful girl marked and worn by long cycles of time but not anyway aged. She comes dressed in something like gray-white de-soie muslin or fine-grained crêpe silk, a loose-belted frock reaching to her ankles.
My Soul is unmoved by the world and the flesh and their feeling, as befits a Soul. She looks on me with a chill faëryish contempt, as also befits a Soul. The quality of her contempt is of weary understanding and is like a caress.
In the dusk of yesterday came my Soul to visit me— a dusk of a deep beauty. The last glow of the sun lay along the earth, and all was gentian blue. I leaned against my window-pane watching it, and beside me sat her Presence. Her Presence makes me feel wonderfully gifted: it is mine, this Soul all Golden-Silk and Silken-Gold!
We talk on many topics, of many things: I in worldly nervous ignorance and with a wishfulness to reach and compass and know: the Soul with poise and surety of attitude, a wearied patience and the chill sweet contempt.
She answers me from her cool old tranquil view-point, which is near me yet remote.
We talked last of some bygone persons I have been, some shapes she wore.
Said the Soul: ‘Early in the sixteenth century you were a ragged Russian peasant girl living in ignorance and filth in a hut by a swamp-edge. You had parents both of whom beat your body black-and-blue from your babyhood. And at eighteen you were a coarsened hardy wench tending a drove of pigs and goats on the sunny steppe. I was there with you as presently as now—as sentient, as perceptive. But it is a question whether you or the little beasts you drove were the more beastly stupid. You and they were equal in outer quality, equal in uncleanliness, equally covered with vermin.’
I have no ghost-memory of that time, but as the Soul told of it a nascent feeling came on me, as if some part of my Mind felt its way back to that. I warmed to the thought of the Peasant Girl. I was quiescent to her filth and ignorance.
Said I: ‘Was she brave and fairly honest?’
Said the Soul: ‘You were a ready liar—you lied your way out of many a beating. But you were brave enough. You faced the roughnesses of your life uncringing, and you died game.’
Said I: ‘How did I die?’
Said the Soul: ‘You were run neatly through the body by the short sword of a soldier whose lust-desire you had had the hardihood to refuse—and I fled away upon the instant.’ Said I: ‘I half-knew it—she died a violent death. You—were you glad to be quit of her filthy flesh, her surroundings, her ignorance?’ Said the soul: ‘Glad? Such things mean nothing to me. Your body, be it sweet or foul, has no bearing on my long journey. Motives—motif—back of your human acts make me glad or sorry at leaving you.’
Said I: ‘Tell me about a time when I seemed someway fine, humanly fine.’
Said the Soul: ‘In London, near the end of the seventeenth century, before and during the period of the Gordon Riots, you lived in a way of peace. From when you were fourteen until you were twentynine you lived alone with your little lame half-sister whom you cared for very devotedly, very tenderly.’ My little half-sister—Until the Soul spoke of her there was no vision, no image like her. Then something of me remembered.
Said I: ‘What was she like? Who were our parents?’
Said the Soul: ‘Your mother died at your birth, hers at her birth. Your father was hanged at Tyburn for forgery. The sister was pale, large-eyed, long-haired, crippled from a dislocated shoulder and hip. When you were twenty-five she was eleven, a beautiful frail child. You lived in two rooms above a linen-draper’s and you supported the two of you by weaving and calendering cloths for the shopkeeper, and by illuminating missals and manuscripts when you could get that work. For a very poor wage, but living was cheap. All the time you took zealous care of your sister. Your heart was bound up in her—you adored her.’
Said I: ‘I know that. Tell me what we did—how we lived—how we loved each other.’
Said the Soul: ‘In the summer evenings you often walked out along quiet London streets—the sister sometimes with a crutch and your arm about her, sometimes in a rolling chair, whilst you walked beside her pushing it. Your father had educated you in an erratic fashion. You had a deal of desultory knowledge—what is called knowledge—and you educated the young sister in the same manner. Often it was of the poets—Latin, English, Italian, and of histories and sciences and arts—what odd comprehensive bits you knew—that you two talked as you saunte
red in the bright late English sunlight. Or you talked of the little details of your joint life. Sometimes you sat together—you holding her close in your arms—by a window in your darkening front room, and watched the children at play in the common opposite, and conversed and were quietly happy. You were maternal and the child was a mature old-fashioned yet childish innocent child.’
My little sister—sweet—long gone— Would that I had her now!
Said I: ‘Tell me what we said.’
Said the Soul: ‘You said to her, “Our poverty and even our deprivations, dearest, which for your sake I feel deeply would not matter, not the least, to me if I could see you well and strong.” And the child replied, “Sweet, just to rest like this in your arms each twilight makes me rich, rich—as rich as the smartest ladies in Piccadilly.” And you said, “Rich reminds me, Darling, we shall have four extra shillings—four bright silver shillings—at the end of this week from the book-seller. So what shall we purchase for a treat? There’ll be, if you like, prawns and crumpets for tea, for days to come—or if my Child prefers oranges or pineapples once—” And the child replied with her cheeks quite pink at the thought, “O Sister-love, let us have the pines, just one day, and let us make-believe to be ladies that day, and comport ourselves like ladies, and take our tea—all like ladies.” And you pressed her close to your breast—you both wore caps and kerchiefs and stuff-gowns in the fashion of the lower-middle artisan class—and showered gentle kisses on her cheeks and eyelids, and promised her the pineapples and the tea like ladies.’