I, Mary MacLane

by Mary MacLane

  —I would rather that almost any physical disaster should befall me than that I ever achieve an ‘abdomen.’ When an abdomen comes in at the door life’s romances fly fast out the windows: so it looks to me. May death overtake me haply before the menopause.

  —The pictures I have crowded on a small side-wall space two feet from my eyes as I sit at my desk are: Theda Bara as Carmen: the late Queen Isabella of Spain: Marie Lloyd, loved of the London populace: a velvety-looking black-and-orange print of a leopard: Blanche Sweet, loveliest of film actors: John Keats, a small old print: Ethel Barrymore, a pencil drawing made by herself: Nell Gwyn, a photograph of a Lely portrait: Watts’s ‘Hope’: Stanley Ketchel, dead middle-weight fighter: ‘Jane Eyre’ by a Polish artist: Fanny Brawn, the solitary extant silhouette print: Ty Cobb: two children: Charlotte Corday in the Prison de I’Abbaye: Susan B. Anthony: a Chinese lady: Andrea del Sarto: Queen Boadicea: and Christy Mathewson.

  —I am old-fashioned in many of my tastes—in all my reading and writing tastes. I do not like typewriters: they make fingertips callous in a poor cause. And I do not like fountain-pens which someway seem suitable only for business-letters, forgeries, bookkeeping and crude cursory love-letters. I like a steel pen in a fat glossy green enameled wood penholder with a thick pleasant-feeling rubber sheath at the lower end.

  —I wear to-day a modest frock of black silk: beneath it a light silk petticoat: beneath that a white pussy-willow silk ‘envelope’ and a pale narrow pink silk shirt chastened by many launderings: no stays: thick white silk stockings gartered above my knees by circles of mild mauve elastic: on my feet cross-ribboned bright-buckled black shoes: round my neck a jet necklace:—all of it a costume that might be of a conventional woman, a plain-living woman, a good woman, a well-bred woman—saving only that beneath my left shoulderblade the smooth new pussy-willow silk has a jagged two-inch rent where it caught on a drawer-handle: and the rent—in lieu of neatly mending it with the thread and needle of woman’s custom—I caught up any way by its jagged edges and tied tight in a hard vicious heathen knot: the note of spiritual fornication, of Mary-Mac-Laneness: always there’s some involuntary pagan touch to undo me, to arraign me, to betray me to God and to myself.

  —I wear five-and-a-half A-last shoes: number twenty-one snug whalebone stays: and weigh a hundred-twenty-four pounds.

  —I am fond of green peas, baseball and diamond rings.

  —I like violently to spoil a little charlotte-russe with a fork: it gives me the same feeling of lawless sweet-fiery lust which must belong to a Moslem soldier when deflowering a Christian virgin: and harms nobody.

  —Sometimes when I’m dressing in the morning I glance down through my window and see two elderly Butte business men, one a lawyer and one a banker, going by on the way to their offices. And I wonder at how frightfully respectable they look in their tailored clothes and reproachless gloves and perfectly celestial-looking hats. I murmur: ‘Robin and Richard were two pretty men who lay in bed till the clock struck ten.’

  I keep on my desk a little doll with fluffy skirts, blue eyes, pouting lips and curly hair and named Little Jane Lee after an adorable child I have seen in moving pictures.

  —I am five feet six inches tall in my highish heels:

  —I wear number six gloves: the calf of my leg is a shapely thing.

  —The six extant Americans I most admire are Thomas A. Edison, Harriet Monroe, Gertrude Atherton, Theodore Roosevelt, the remaining Wright Brother, and Amy Lowell.

  —I think I’d learn to be a cook, a professional cook, if I were less easily fatigued.

  —I love the sound of the clinking of two clean new white clay pipes, one upon the other.

  —I crack nuts with my teeth.

  Voilà!

  But not quite voilà-tout.

  A DAMNED SPIDER

  To-morrow

  To-day was one of the To-morrows of encompassing dissatisfaction when this seems all a nasty world and a nasty life.

  A Spider drowned in my bath-tub this morning. It was one of those long-legged spiders. It was in the tub when I went there—a small ovalish dark-gray pellet with seven ray-like legs as of an evil little sun lying flat on a white desert. It feels inconceivable that any creature should naturally have an odd number of legs: we are all, including spiders, laid out as with rule and compass. Perhaps it is inconceivable. But this Spider had seven legs. I counted them while I knelt, blue-peignoired, beside the tub with my elbows on the edge and watched the Spider and waited for it to go away. Whether it had lost a leg, or had one too many, or its kind is normally made like that: those things I vexedly wondered about. In either case it seemed a so much worse Spider. It did not go away so I touched it gently with an oblong of green soap. Then it moved and began to walk up the side of the tub. But the side is smooth as glass and always it slipped back. I went to my room and fetched a post-card. With a post-card newly from Delaware I lifted the Spider out of the bath-tub. Then I scaled card and Spider to the farthest ceiling comer of the room. Then I drew the tub one-third full of tepid water. And there floating in it as if brought down by Black Art was the seven-legged Spider, drowned and ruined. It spoiled the atmosphere and anticipation of my morning tub. I shuddered miserably. I pulled out the rubber plug and water and Spider washed down and away into the dark sewer-wastes of Butte, into the bowels of the earth, through the gateways of hell, I hope. I took a hasty shower with a flavor of long-legged Spiders in it. I dressed, and combed and coifed my hair, with the clouded thought in me that throughout my life I shall inevitably encounter by eternal law a long-legged Spider from time to time. I know there’ll be no evading it. Those who know statistics doubtless could tell me how many Spiders I shall encounter in so many or so many years: the exact percentage even to the division of a week and the half or the quarter of a Spider. There is something disconcerting and tragic in the thought.

  The drowned Spider’s ghost pursued me all day though its memory faded.

  My breakfast, though it included an egg, seemed antagonistic, hostile toward me as I ate it. It made me melancholy. I watched from my back window a slim boy painting a porch and singing in incipient tenor a rhythmic lullaby beginning ‘go to sleep my dus-ky ba-by.’ He painted silently for some minutes and then dipped his brush in the tin of paint. Whenever he left off painting to dip the brush he sang. Once he failed to sing when he dipped the brush but instead burst forth with it in the midst of painting a long mustard streak on his porch. Ordinarily that would not have mattered to me since I am innately keyed and pitched to expect the galvanically unexpected. But to-day it made me rackingly nervous.

  In the afternoon I went for a walk. Down and down, seventeen squares from here, in a quiet neighborhood a strange woman accosted me. She was pale and smartly dressed and quite drunk. She said, ‘Listen—can you remember which of these corners I was to meet a friend at?’ It made me feel annoyed and bewildered and sad and silly.

  When I came back I read awhile—a story of Guy de Maupassant’s about a little dog named Pierrot, whose owner loved him much but loved money more and could not bring herself to pay a tax of eight francs to make Pierrot’s existence legal. So she threw him into a pit. As heartbreaking a tale as even de Maupassant ever wrote. It made all the loves in this world feel terrifyingly sordid. It made me unhappy.

  Then I found a poetry-book and read about the Blessed Damozel leaning out from the gold bar of heaven. Always, by her loveliness alone, she stirs me to my still depths of tears. But to-day the song made me feel over-wrought and life-worn.

  To-night I walked out to a little desert-space west of the town, a very pale, very gray desert, with a sweet wet mist like dissolving pearls swathing it. The million placid stars looked down, remote and hard, as if each one had newly forsaken me. It made me afraid and cold around my heart. Here I sit and nothing in all the world is pleasant or reassuring.

  That damned Spider.

  TO WANDER AND BANG AND FLOAT ABOUT

  To-morrow

  My damnedest da
mningest quality is Wavering

  —Wavering—

  I might say I prefer the dawn to the twilight or the twilight to the dawn.

  Neither would be true.

  I love the dawn—I love the twilight.

  What I unconsciously prefer is the long negative Wavering space-of-day between the two.

  I might say I prefer heaven to hell or hell to heaven. Neither would be true.

  My garbled gyral nature, partaking uneasily of both, prefers to wander and hang and float about between the two. I might say I prefer strength to weakness or weakness to strength.

  Neither would be true.

  What I prefer is a hellish hovering, an endless torturing Tenterhook between the two.

  And that Wavering preference is against my will, against my reason, against my judgment, against my taste and liking—against my life, my welfare, my salvation: against the clear lights of my spirit. I know I work intently and industriously at the articles of my damnation in the Wavering—Wavering—

  I know it would be better to die at once: failing that, to live but to live positively as a beggar, a whore, a thief or a milliner. Knowing that, I know also I Waver: I know I shall prefer to Waver: I know I shall constantly Waver.

  I am constant—I am remarkably profoundly constant—in my Wavering.

  In the morning as I dress I draw on a stocking— a long black or white glistening stocking. I know I do it only because the mixed big world, which refuses to Waver, is pushing—pushing me. I would choose if I could—though loathing my choice—to stay with my bare foot and my stocking in my hand, Wavering. Between drawing it on and pausing barefoot, Wavering. I prefer not to draw on the stocking: I prefer not to be barefoot: I prefer Wavering—Wavering—

  When I’m hungry I choose: not to let food alone: not to eat it: to have it by me and Waver, Waver emptily. Not to enjoy its anticipation: not to contemplate it. No—no! To Waver! I reach and take the food because the world in its pushing pushes me.

  If the world stopped pushing—

  One reason it will be pleasant to be dead: I can then no longer Waver.

  Worms will eat me unwaveringly. Or they may then do the Wavering. But I shall no more pause with a bare foot and an empty stocking, a dish of food and a gnawing midriff. Here I sit as yet, alive and Wavering.

  The Wavering is not the pale cast of thought: it is not my way of analysis: it is only Wavering—Wavering—

  Wavering is not among the blue-green Stones in my antique necklace: not by that name—not as one Stone.

  It is a marked and hateful and hellish gift of this present Me who house my Soul.

  It is half of this Mary MacLane—who is I—: and I know.

  I am constant alone—noticeably tensely constant—in my Wavering: and less constant in Wavering than in the ghoulish preference.

  An odd and subtle doom.

  A THOUSAND KISSES

  To-morrow

  Among my other gifts I own also Wantonness. In proof of which I am wishing as I sit here for a Thousand careless kisses: eleven o’clock of still evening—a Thousand Kisses.

  A wonderful, wonderful attribute, Wantonness: rich, rich luster in the conscious temperament which owns it, a Giftthing delicate and gorgeous.

  By it I want a Thousand Kisses: a Thousand—made all of Wantonness.

  Kisses come in differing kinds and only one is Wanton.

  The kiss of a lover has an intense cosmic use: the kiss of a mother is tender fostering food: the kiss of a friend is vantage and grace of friendliness: the kiss of a child is cool charm of snowflakes and green springtime leaves.

  And the kiss of Wantonness is not of use, nor of food, nor of gracing vantage, nor of childhood charm—but is restless essence of humanness and worldliness and mere sheer limitless encompassing liking: born of sweet lips, alien it might be, and secretly ‘unattuned,’ but warm and fond and present: answering the pathos of infinite jejuneness which flows, flows always in red human blood.

  Through the race rides a long dread wistfulness, made of tears and lies and the barbaric distress and pitfall of everyday’s journey: a crying wish for a cup of warmed drugged sweet ease to turn it all a moment away: but a moment away.

  And through all the race is the measureless poetry, purling and mantling in its bowl of flesh. Each human one is made of the sun, and made of the moon, and made of the four winds and the seas and the last pink sea-foam on the crests of the twilit waves: and made of salt and of sugar and of lonesome calling of loons and quick song of skylarks: and made of sword-edges and of money and of dolls and toys and painted glass: and made of loose reckless shuffling of dry autumn leaves, and of nerves and of illusions and of broken food and hesitance: and made of Mother-Goose rhymes and of cigarette-ashes and of raveled silk: and made of layers and layers of mixed-up passionate colors and of gilded cakes and of strawberries and of temperamental orgasms and raw silvery onions and gaming and dancing and minute-by-minute inconsistency: all veiled in a thin gold veil—all in a thin gold veil.

  Betwixt the wistfulness and the poetry—bélas, what chance has the human equation, unsought, unwarned, unchallenged of God to be straitly equable!

  No chance.

  Happily no chance.

  Thus I, Mary MacLane, so conscious of Me and garbledly gifted, want a Thousand Kisses at eleven o’clock of a still evening.

  No spirit-hands of Love are laid soft on my drooping shoulders in the passing days: no Love—no Love—in all my life. No miracle Wonder and Gentleness stirs in and against my Heart: my Heart is strangely dead of a strange Realness, known and felt but unachieved:—no Love—no Love in my life.

  And I can wish for no Love, for the listless Heart is listlessly dead.

  I wish instead, in hastening present clock-ticking moments, for a Thousand present-warmed Kisses: a Thousand in Wanton response to a Wanton eleven o’clock.

  Dominating waving washing warmth of Wantonness, compassing me at eleven o’clock.

  A Thousand careless insouciant Kisses: a Thousand gorgeous delicate Kisses: a round Thousand.

  From what lips—whose lips—what do I know?—: so their Kisses are a Thousand.

  From what lips—what do I care?—: so they be eager and live and tenderly false.

  —come some of the Thousand glowing on my pink lips, and my white fingers, which were tense, relax—

  —come more of the Thousand, and my rigid hard-riding thoughts grow drowsy and pliant and negligible.

  —come more of the Thousand, and my knees and the marrow in my bones are gently aware of most logical opiate ease—

  —come more of the Thousand, and my midriff is full of cream-and-chocolate casualness and my smooth arms are washed down with mists of custom.

  —come more of the Thousand, and my seven senses start to melt at the edges—

  —come more of the Thousand, and the palms of my hands wax merely pleasant-feeling and the soles of my feet fatly comfortable—

  —come the last of the Thousand in a swirling silly lovely lightly-insane shower—and I feel exactly like a woman in the next street who goes forth clad in mustard-and-cerise with a devilish black-and-white Valeska-Suratt parasol: and more—much more—I feel the way she looks—

  For this Wanton-thing is not amour but psychology: in it I am less the mænad than the philosopher: less the Cyprian woman than the Muse.

  I am a deeply gifted woman.

  I am not prone on my green couch, frayed, frazzled, bowed-down in spirit from a day of frightful stress and cross-purpose.

  Instead, hair-triggerishly alive, with definite desire beating hotly this moment in my throat: the wish for Kisses—Kisses far removed from Death and Graves and Coffins: Kisses of this present clock-tickingness, Kisses useless, meaningless, sweet—oh, sweet!—

  —in number, a Thousand: in kind, Wanton.

  A FLUTTERING-MOTH WISH

  To-morrow

  A wish that God would come personally to see me flutters in my thoughts ever and anon like a restless moth.
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  I am in a prison-mood and coldly content to be in it. For how long content—content is not the word: despairingly acquiescent—there’s no word to express that—I can noway tell. But now I live and breathe aloof and strange-mooded. And with it I wish God would visit me a moment.

  It is not a strong wish. Yet restless and persistent. I want to be free from myself and away, loosed in the little broad big narrow World: but first and more I want God to visit me.

  I want people again, those away from here who are my friends—some glowing-spirited ones who appreciate my Mind and cater to me: I want, I think, a poet to love me with some unobvious madness: but first and more I want God to visit me.

  More than I want strength of spirit and flesh, more than I want a fat mental peace, more than I want to know John Keats in star-spaces: more than I want my dream-Child: I want God to visit me.

  More than I wish this appalling tiredness would leave me: more than I wish this I write to be a realization, a defait portrait of the thin-hidden Me, my self-expression achieved: more than I want to be quit of my two black dresses and back in the wide sweet frivol of variegated clothes: I want God to visit me.

  God must know all about that. He must have known it a long time. He still does not come. If he would come and tell me one thing, one certain thing, it would be enough. It would show me a direction and I could keep on in it by myself. If God would tell me even a sheerest matter-of-fact, for sure—like What O’Clock by his time it really is: that would be a spark from which I could build an eternal fire for myself. Forever after I could dispense with God as a personality.

  I am strangely weak. Strong of will, strong of mind, but weak of purpose: damnably, damnedly. I shall never be able to write in words one onet-housandth of the dramatic drastic weakness which is in me. But I hate weakness with so deep and strong a hatred, and to know one eternal certain thing would be so roundly restful, I could then go on: I could vanquish the potent pettinesses which beset me.