I Await the Devil's Coming - Unexpurgated and Annotated

by MacLane, Mary

  And so it is, do you see, that all things look different after a satisfying dinner, that the color of the world changes, that life in fact resolves itself into two things: a fine rare-broiled porterhouse steak from Omaha, and some fresh green young onions from California.

  January 24

  I am charmingly original. I am delightfully refreshing. I am startlingly Bohemian. I am quaintly interesting - the while in my sleeve I may be smiling and smiling - and a villain. I can talk to a roomful of dull people and compel their interest, admiration, and astonishment. I do this sometimes for my own amusement. As I have said, I am a rather plain-featured, insignificant-looking genius, but I have a graceful personality. I have a pretty figure. I am well set up. And when I choose to talk in my charmingly original fashion, embellishing my conversation with many quaint lies, I have a certain very noticeable way with me, an “air.”

  - It is well, if one has nothing, to acquire an air. -

  And an air taken in conjunction with my charming originality, my delightfully refreshing candor, is something powerful and striking in its way.

  I do not, however, exert myself often in this way; partly because I can sometimes foresee, from the character of the assembled company, that my performance will not have the desired effect - for I am a genius, and genius at close range at times carries itself unconsciously to the point where it becomes so interesting that it is atrocious, and can not be carried farther without having somewhat mildly disastrous results; and then again, the facial antics of some ten or a dozen persons possessed more or less of the qualities of the genus fool - even they become tiresome after a while.

  Always I talk about myself on an occasion of this kind. Indeed, my conversation is on all occasions devoted directly or indirectly to myself.

  When I talk on the subject of ethics, I talk of it as it is related to Mary MacLane.

  When I give out broad-minded opinions about Ninon de l’Enclos, I demonstrate her relative position to Mary MacLane!

  When I discourse liberally on the subject of the married relation, I talk of it only as it will affect Mary MacLane.

  An interesting creature, Mary MacLane.

  - As a matter of fact, it is so with every one, only every one is far from realizing and acknowledging it. -

  And I have not lacked listeners, though these people do not appreciate me. They do not realize that I am a genius.

  I am of womankind and of nineteen years. I am able to stand off and gaze critically and dispassionately at myself and my relation to my environment, to the world, to everything the world contains. I am able to judge whether I am good and whether I am bad. I am able indeed to tell what I am and where I stand. I can see far, far inward. I am a genius.

  Charlotte Brontë did this in some degree, and she was a genius; and also Marie Bashkirtseff, and Olive Schreiner, and George Eliot. They are all geniuses.

  And so then I am a genius - a genius in my own right.

  I am fundamentally, organically egotistic. My vanity and self-conceit have attained truly remarkable development as I’ve walked and walked in the loneliness of the sand and barrenness.

  Not the least remarkable part of it is that I know my egotism and vanity thoroughly - thoroughly, and plume myself thereon.

  These are the ear-marks of a genius - and of a fool. There is a finely drawn line between a genius and a fool. Often this line is overstepped and your fool becomes a genius, or your genius becomes a fool.

  It is but a tiny step.

  There’s but a tiny step between the great and the little, the tender and the contemptuous, the sublime and the ridiculous, the aggressive and the humble, the Paradise and the perdition.

  And so it is between the genius and the fool.

  I am a genius.

  - I am not prepared to say how many times I may overstep the finely drawn line, or how many times I have already overstepped it. ‘Tis a matter of small moment. -

  I have entered into certain things marvelously deep. I know things, I know that I know them, and I know that I know that I know them. Which is a fine psychological point.

  It is magnificent of me to have gotten so far, at the age of nineteen, with no training other than that of the sand and barrenness. Magnificent - do you hear?

  Very often I take this fact in my hand and squeeze it hard like an orange, to get the sweet, sweet juice from it. I squeeze a great deal of juice from it every day, and every day the juice is renewed, like the vitals of Prometheus. And so I squeeze and squeeze, and drink the juice, and try to be satisfied.

  Yes, you may gaze long and curiously at the portrait in the front of this book. It is of one who is a genius of egotism and analysis, a genius who is awaiting the Devil’s coming, - a genius, with a wondrous liver within.

  I shall tell you more about this liver, I think, before I have done.

  January 25

  I can remember a time long, oh, very long ago. That is the time when I was a child. It is ten or a dozen years ago.

  Or is it a thousand years ago?

  It is when you have but just parted from your friend that he seems farthest from you. When I have lived several more years the time when I was a child will not seem so far behind me.

  Just now it is frightfully far away. It is so far away that I can see it plainly outlined on the horizon.

  It is there always for me to look at. And when I look I can feel the tears deep within me - a salt ocean of tears that roll and surge and swell bitterly in a dull, mad anguish, and never come to the surface.

  I do not know which is the more weirdly and damnably pathetic: I when I was a child, or I when I am grown to a woman, young and all alone. I weigh the question coldly and logically, but my logic trembles with rage and grief and unhappiness.

  When I was a child I lived in Canada and in Minnesota. I was a little wild savage. In Minnesota there were swamps where I used to wet my feet in the spring, and there were fields of tall grass where I would lie flat on my stomach in company with lizards and little garter snakes. And there were poplar-leaves that turned their pale green backs upward on a hot afternoon, and soon there would be terrific thunder and lightning and rain. And there were robins that sang at dawn. - These things stay with one always. - And there were children with whom I used to play and fight.

  I was tanned and sunburned and I had an unkempt appearance. My face was very dirty. The original pattern of my frock was invariably lost in layers and vistas of the native soil. My hair was braided or else it flew about, a tangled maze, according as I could be caught by some one and rubbed and straightened before I ran away for the day. My hands were little and strong and brown, and wrought much mischief. I came and went at my own pleasure. I ate what I pleased; I went to bed all in my own good time; I tramped wherever my stubborn little feet chose. I was impudent; I was contrary; I had an extremely bad temper; I was hard-hearted; I was full of infantile malice.

  Truly I was a vicious little beast.

  I was a little piece of untrained Nature.

  And I am unable to judge which is the more savagely forlorn: the starved-hearted child, or the woman, young and all alone.

  The little wild stubborn child felt things and wanted things. She did not know that she felt things and wanted things.

  Now I feel and I want things and I know it with burning vividness.

  The little vicious Mary MacLane suffered, but she did not know that she suffered. Yet that did not make the suffering less.

  And she reached out with a little sunburned hand to touch and take something.

  But the sunburned little hand remained empty. There was nothing for it. No one had anything to put into it.

  The little wild creature wanted to be loved; she wanted something to put in her hungry little heart.

  But no one had anything to put into a hungry little heart.

>   No one said “dear.”

  The little vicious child was the only MacLane, and she felt somewhat alone. But there, after all, were the lizards and the little garter snakes.

  The wretched, hardened little piece of untrained Nature has grown and developed into a woman, young and alone. For the child there was a Nothingness, and for the woman there is a great Nothingness.

  Perhaps the Devil will bring me something in my lonely womanhood to put in my wooden heart.

  But the time when I was a child will never come again. It is gone - gone. I may live through some long, long years, but nothing like it will ever come. For there is nothing like it.

  It is a life by itself. It has naught to do with philosophy, or with genius, or with heights and depths, or with the red sunset sky, or with the Devil.

  These come later.

  The time of the child is a thing apart. It is the Planting and Seed-time. It is the Beginning of things. It decides whether there shall be brightness or bitterness in the long after-years.

  I have left that time far enough behind me. It will never come back. And it had a Nothingness - do you hear, a Nothingness ! Oh, the pity of it! The pity of it -

  Do you know why it is that I look back to the horizon at the figure of an unkempt, rough child, and why I feel a surging torrent of tears and anguish and despair?

  I feel more than that indeed, but I have no words to tell it.

  I shall have to miss forever some beautiful, wonderful things because of that wretched lonely childhood.

  There will always be a lacking, a wanting - some dead branches that never grew leaves.

  It is not deaths and murders and plots and wars that make life tragedy.

  It is Nothing that makes life tragedy.

  It is day after day, and year after year, and Nothing.

  It is a sunburned little hand reached out and Nothing put into it.

  January 26

  I sit at my window and look out upon the housetops and chimneys of Butte. As I look I have a weary, disgusted feeling.

  People are abominable creatures.

  Under each of the roofs live a man and woman joined together by that very slender thread - the marriage ceremony, - and their children, the result of the marriage ceremony.

  How many of them love each other? Not two in a hundred, I warrant. The marriage ceremony is their one miserable petty paltry excuse for living together.

  This marriage rite, it appears, is often used as a cloak to cover a world of rather shameful things.

  How virtuous these people are, to be sure, under their different roof-trees. So virtuous are they indeed that they are able to draw themselves up in the pride of their own purity, when they happen upon some corner where the marriage ceremony is lacking. So virtuous are they that the men can afford to find amusement and diversion in the woes of the corner that is without the marriage rite; and the women may draw away their skirts in shocked horror and wonder that such things can be, in view of their own spotless virtue.

  And so they live on under the roofs, and they eat and work and sleep and die; and the children grow up and seek other roofs, and call upon the marriage ceremony even as their parents before them - and then they likewise eat and work and sleep and die; and so on world without end.

  This also is life - the life of the good, virtuous Christians.

  I think, therefore, that I should prefer some life that is not virtuous.

  I shall never make use of the marriage ceremony. - I hereby register a vow, Devil, to that effect. -

  When a man and a woman love one another that is enough. That is marriage. A religious rite is superfluous. And if the man and woman live together without the love, no ceremony in the world can make it marriage. The woman who does this need not feel the tiniest bit better than her lowest sister in the streets. Is she not indeed a step lower since she pretends to be what she is not - plays the virtuous woman? While the other unfortunate pretends nothing. She wears her name on her sleeve.

  If I were obliged to be one of these I would rather be she who wears her name on her sleeve. I certainly would. The lesser of two evils, always.

  I can think of nothing in the world like the utter littleness, the paltriness, the contemptibleness, the degradation, of the woman who is tied down under a roof with a man who is really nothing to her; who wears the man’s name, who bears the man’s children - who plays the virtuous woman. There are too many such in the world now.

  May I never, I say, become that abnormal merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity - a virtuous woman.

  Anything, Devil, but that.

  And so, as I look over the roofs and chimneys I have a weary, disgusted feeling.

  January 27

  This is not a diary. It is a Portrayal. It is my inner life shown in its nakedness. I am trying my utmost to show everything - to reveal every petty vanity and weakness, every phase of feeling, every desire. It is a remarkably hard thing to do, I find, to probe my soul to its depths, to expose its shades and half-lights.

  Not that I am troubled with modesty or shame. Why should one be ashamed of anything?

  But there are elements in one’s mental equipment so vague, so opaque, so undefined - how is one to grasp them? I have analyzed and analyzed, and I have gotten down to some extremely fine points - yet still there are things upon my own horizon that go beyond me.

  There are feelings that rise and rush over me overwhelmingly. I am helpless, crushed and defeated, before them. It is as if they were written on the walls of my soul-chamber in an unknown language.

  My soul goes blindly seeking, seeking, asking. Nothing answers. I cry out after some unknown Thing with all the strength of my being; every nerve and fiber in my young woman’s-body and my young woman’s-soul reaches and strains in anguished unrest. At times as I hurry over my sand and barrenness all my life’s manifold passions culminate in utter rage and woe. Waves of intense, hopeless longing rush over me and envelop me round and round. My heart, my soul, my mind go wandering - wandering; ploughing their way through darkness with never a ray of light; groping with helpless hands; asking, longing, wanting things: pursued by a Demon of Unrest.

  I shall go mad - I shall go mad, I say over and over to myself.

  But no. No one goes mad. The Devil does not propose to release any one from a so beautifully wrought, artistic damnation. He looks to it that one’s senses are kept fully intact, and he fastens to them with steel chains the demon of Unrest.

  It hurts, - oh, it tortures me in the days and days! But when the Devil brings my Happiness I will forgive him all this.

  When my Happiness is given me, the Unrest will still be with me, I doubt not, but the Happiness will change the tenor of it, will make it an instrument of joy, will clasp hands with it and mingle itself with it, - the while I, with my wooden heart, my woman’s-body, my mind, my soul, shall be in transports. I shall be filled with pleasure so deep and pain so intense that my being’s minutest nerve will reel and stagger in intoxication, will go drunk with the fullness of Life.

  When my Happiness is given me I shall live centuries in the hours. And we shall all grow old rapidly, - I and my wooden heart, and my woman’s-body, and my mind, and my soul. Sorrow may age one in some degree. But Happiness - the real Happiness - rolls countless years off from one’s finger-tips in a single moment, and each year leaves its impress.

  It is true that life is a tragedy to those who feel. When my Happiness is given me life will be an ineffable, a nameless thing.

  It will seethe and roar; it will plunge and whirl; it will leap and shriek in convulsion; it will quiver in delicate fantasy; it will writhe and twist; it will glitter and flash and shine; it will sing gently; it will shout in exquisite excitement; it will vibrate to the roots like a great oak in a storm; it will dance; it will glide; it will gallop; it will rush; it wi
ll swell and surge; it will fly; it will soar high - high; it will go down into depths unexplored; it will rage and rave; it will yell in utter joy; it will melt; it will blaze; it will ride triumphant; it will grovel in the dust of entire pleasure; it will sound out like a terrific blare of trumpets; it will chime faintly, faintly like the remote tinkling notes of a harp; it will sob and grieve and weep; it will revel and carouse; it will shrink; it will go in pride; it will lie prone like the dead; it will float buoyantly on air; it will moan, shiver, burst, - oh, it will reek of Love and Light!

  The words of the English language are futile. There are no words in it, or in any other, to express an idea of that thing which would be my life in its Happiness.

  The words I have written describe it, it is true - but confusedly and inadequately.

  But words are for every-day use.

  When it comes my turn to meet face to face the unspeakable vision of the Happy Life I shall be rendered dumb.

  But the rains of my feeling will come in torrents!

  January 28

  I am an artist of the most artistic, the highest type. I have uncovered for myself the art that lies in obscure shadows. I have discovered the art of the day of small things.

  And that surely is Art with a capital A.

  I have acquired the art of Good Eating. Usually it is in the gray and elderly forties and fifties that people cultivate this art - if they ever do; it is indeed a rare art.

  But I know it in all its rare exquisiteness at the young slim age of nineteen. Which is one more mark of my genius, do you see?

  The art of Good Eating has two essential points: one must eat only when one is hungry, and one must take small bites.

  There are persons who eat for the sake of eating. They are gourmands and partake of the natures of the pig and the buzzard. There are persons who take bites that are not small. These also are gourmands and partake of the natures of the pig and the buzzard. There are persons who can enjoy nothing in the way of eating except a luxurious, well-appointed meal. These, it is safe to say, have not acquired the art of anything.