I, Mary MacLane: A Diary of Human Days. Mary MacLane
thinking, no day, no night, no dark, no morning, no memory. There was pain, and utter weariness, and a feeling of being hurried to her grave. There was an air of hurry in the stillness around, as if she and Death had made a date which she would be late in keeping unless she were urged on. There was a doctor, and a crisp white starched nurse, and there were interminable bitter drugs and tall narrow glasses of monotonous milk. She was endlessly disturbed by milk and medicine, and by cold spongings and changings of feverish bed-linens, and anointings with olive oil, and takings of her temperature, and sprayings of her throat: when she wanted only to sink down, down, forever and forever to the underworld. She almost sank. But God capriciously decided he had other plans for her—insomuch as decreeing she was not to be let go then. After seven weeks she tiredly rose from her bed and took stock of herself. Her rôle then was of a horrible yellow skeleton with negative gray eyes, a wreck of tissue and vitality such as only scarlet fever can achieve, and her beautiful thick coppery hair changed to a strange short mouse-colored tangle. She was a long time recovering. The scarlet demon changed her life and its meanings and energies and outlooks more effectually than if she had been trapped by a game-at-law and gaols and courts had had their toll of her. But after months, a year and a half of months, her health came back perfect if not vigorous, and her good looks—the few she ever had, and even the humanizing incongruous curls, though changed, grew long and covered her head again in a heathen frivol. A so magnificent mystery is this blood-and-flesh. It grows up again out of its ashes. Burn all of it but one cell in the scorchingest sickness and so that bones are still whole it will renew itself from that, perfect as the sweet-bay. But this mind, less magnificent and less mysterious and more delicate and dubious, rallies only by aid of the heart beneath it and the soul beyond it. Her mind came slowly out of darkened apathy. It lived in a high-walled cloister telling its languid beads by rote. But as if it sensed the sweet aura of her renewed body it at last woke strong and cold overnight and was aware again of itself and the mourning magic of being.
It was this Mary MacLane.
And after a year or two more it is this Mary MacLane.
It is I myself.
I walk my floor in leaden retrospect-days with a feel in my throat of damned and damning unfulfillment and at my eyebrows the twisted frown.
In it is dread and anguish and worriment: in it is hideous altering breaking prepollence of death.
—if my hair, just my hair, had not come back after that red fever I’d have decided—not capriciously like God but determinedly like myself—to have died by my own hand one night. It is no brave thought and it would have been no brave deed. Though it wants a lowering courage to leave life when, despite all, one loves its very textureless color, its bodiless air: not to speak of the yellow hot deathless sunshine that can not reach one in her dark grave—
But the look and feel of my hair are the look and feel of positive life, opposed to death.
To live up to my hair would keep me brave.
But the retrospects, which I can’t escape, come and wrap me in the Winding Sheet.
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