I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days. Mary MacLane
magic and loveliness. They are the beings blest of a flaming Heaven. In the midst of soddenest earthiness their fiery wings ‘pierce the night.’
Then I’m thrilledly tired. I close the books and make ready for my bed in a lyric-feeling languor. A soft soothing unsnapping of whalebone stays: a muffled rhythmic undoing of metal-and-silk-rubber garters: a pushing down and sliding out of daytime clothes and into a thin pale cool silk nightgown: a hurried brushing of hair: an anointing of hands and throat with faint-scented cream: a goodnight to Me in the mirror: a last wave of a fateful thing—my life-essence—casual and determined and contemptuous and menacing—sweeping down over me in an invisible shower: and I’m betwixt smooth linen sheets.
In twenty seconds blest, blest sleep.
Of such wide littleness is my day made. One day will differ from another in this or that volcanic molehill. And some days I not only wash a great many dishes but do a deal of housework neatly and self-satisfactorily and like a devilish scullery maid.
And some days as I move in the petty pace thoughts and feelings sweet or barbarous come and change my world’s face in a moment.
Also a casual human being of rabbitish brain and chipmunkish sensibility may stray across my path and gently bore me and accentuate my own paganness.
But always the same days in restless dubious To-morrowness.
Always immorally futile.
And eerily alone.
A mathematic dead-wall
To-morrow
I’M put to it to decide whether God loves me or hates me when he sets me down alone.
There are times when my Loneliness is a charmed and scintillant and resourceful Loneliness with a strange and ecstatic gleam in it. The miracle of being a person rushes upon and about and into me ‘with lightning and with music.’
One loses that in a day of many friendships.
But oftener are times when the tired, tired heart and the weary, weary brain beat-beat, beat-beat to anguished torturing self-rhythms. The spirit of me closes its eyes in turbulent dusks of wondering and wishing and leans its forehead against a mathematic dead-wall. And it prays—blind useless unhumble prayers which leave it dry and destitute, arid, unspeakably lacking. But when it lifts its head and opens its eyes there are the melting mauves and maroons of a dead sun across the evening sky, and the small far wistful flames of always-hopeful stars.
—they make it matter less whether God loves or hates me, but I still wish I knew.
My neat blue chair
To-morrow
I SUPPOSE there’s nothing quite peculiar to even my inmost self in what I ponder and what I experience and what I feel.
My only elemental ‘differentness’ is that I find it and write it.
But I used to think at eighteen—those thrice-fired adolescent moments—that only I suffered, only I reached achingly out into the mists, only I tasted new-bloomed life-petals intolerably sweet and bitter on my lips.
The egotism of youth is merciless, measureless, endlessly vulnerable. Youth plays on itself as one plays on a little dulcimer, with music as sweet, but with a crude cruel recklessness which jerks and breaks the strings.
I have got by that stage of egotism. But I’ve entered on another wilder, more lawless—farther-seeing if less be-visioned.
While I sit here this midnight in a Neat Blue Chair in this Butte-Montana for what I know a legion-women of my psychic breed may be sitting lonely in neat red or neat blue or neat gray or neat any-colored chairs—in Wichita-Kansas and South Bend-Indiana and Red Wing-Minnesota and Portland-Maine and Rochester-New York and Waco-Texas and La Crosse-Wisconsin and Bowling Green-Kentucky: each feeling Herself set in a wrong niche, caught in a tangle of little vapidish cross-purpose: each waiting, waiting always—waiting all her life—not hopeful and passionate like Eighteen but patient or blasphemous or scornful or volcanic like Early-Thirty: the waiting-sense giving to each a personal quality big and suggestive and nurturing—and with it a long-accustomed feeling like a thin bright blade stuck deep in her breast: each more or less roundly hating Waco-Texas and Portland-Maine and Red Wing-Minnesota and the other places: and each beset by hot unquiet humannesses inside her and an old yearn of sex and the blood warring with myriad minute tenets dating from civilization’s dawn-times.
But though I am of that psychic breed no little tenets war in me.
It’s as if a prelate and a wood-nymph had fathered and mothered me: making me of a ridiculous poignant conscience and of no human traditions.
I am free of innate conventionalities, free as a wildcat on a twilight hill. I am free of them as I sit here, quiet-looking in my plain black dress. The virile Scotch-Canadian curl is brushed and brushed out of my hair to make it lie smooth and discreet over my ears and forehead. My feet are shod daintily like a charming girl’s. My nails are pinkly polishedly pointed. My narrow black eyebrows look nearly patrician in their sereneness. My lips are stilly sad. My eyelids droop like the sucking dove’s. But my gray eyes beneath the lids—when I raise them to the glass, my own Essence looks out of them, tiredly vivid. It seems made of languor and barbaricness and despair: and vague guiltiness, and some pure disastrous heathen religion, and lust: and lurid consciousness of everyday things and smouldering melancholy and blazing loving hatred of life.
My gray eyes out-look the wildcat’s on a twilight hill.
But—so far as the Sitting goes—I sit here in my Neat Blue Chair the same as they all sit in any-colored chairs in their Wichitas and La Crosses.
A lost person
To-morrow
I AM wandering about, a Lost Person, wandering and lost.
Not magnificently lost in wide Gothic forest closes, with strong great blackish green trunks and branches all around overwhelming and thrilling me.
Not dramatically lost on desert reefs with breakers riding up like menacing hosts and joyously drowning me.
But lost surprisingly in a small clump of shoulder-high hazel-brush. In it are some wood-ticks, and a few caterpillars, and a few wan spiders which spin little desultory webs from twig to twig and then abandon them for other twigs. Underfoot are unexpected wet places at intervals that my high hard heels sink into exasperatingly.
I walk round and round and across in the hazel-brush groping and knowing I’m lost in it but knowing little else of it: knowing no way out of it.
The bushes bear green leaves—rather small ones and warped because the clump is in a half-shaded place back of a hill. And they bear hazel-nuts, but not very good ones—mostly shell.
A thin damnedness
To-morrow
I OWN Two plain black Dresses and none besides.
And I need no more.
In which two sentences I touch the crux and the keynote and the thin damnedness of my life as it is set: of my life, not of myself, for myself lives naked inside the circle of my life.
But