I Await the Devil's Coming - Unexpurgated and Annotated (16 page)

Always alone - alone.

Not even a God to worship.

How do I bear this! How do I get through the days and days!

And oh, when it all comes over me, what frightful rage - what long agony of my breaking heart - what utter woe!

When the stars shine down upon me with cold hatred; when miles and miles of barrenness stretch out around me and envelop me in its weary, weary Nothingness; when the wind blows over me like the breath of a vicious giant; when the ugly, ugly sun radiates centuries of hard, heavy bitterness around me from its stinging rays; when the sky maddens me with its cold careless blue; when the rivers that are flowing over the earth send echoes to me of their hateful voices; when I hear wild geese honking in bitter wailing melody; when bristling edges of jagged rocks cut sharply into my tired life; when drops of rain fall on me and pierce me like steel points; when the voices in the air shriek little-minded malice in my ears; when the green of Nature is the green of spitefulness and cruelty; when the red, red of the setting sun burns and consumes me with its horrid feverish effervescence; when I feel the all-hatred of the Universe for its poor little earth-bugs: then it is that I approach nearest to Rest.

The softnesses are my Unrest.

I do not want those bitter things.

But I must have them if I would rest.

I want the softnesses and I want Rest!

Oh, dear faint soul, it is hard - hard for us.

We are sick with loneliness.

March 26

Now and again I have torturing glimpses of a Paradise. And I feel my soul in its pain every moment of my life. Otherwise, how gladly would I deny the existence of a soul and a life to come!

For my soul is beset with Nothingness, and the Paradise that shows itself is not for me.

March 28

Hatred, after all, is the easiest thing of all to bear.

If you have been forgotten by the one who must have made you, and if you have been left alone of human beings all your life - all your nine- teen years, - then, when at last you see some one looking toward you with beautiful eyes, and extending to you a beautiful hand, and showing you a beautiful heart wherein is just a little of beautiful sympathy for you - for you - oh, that is harder than anything to bear. Harder than the loneliness and the bitterness - and the tears are nearer and nearer.

But one would be hurt often, often for the sake of the beautiful things. Yes, one would gladly be hurt long and often.

I shall never forget how it was with me when I first saw the beautiful eyes of the dearest anemone lady when they were looking gently - at me, - and the beautiful hand, and the beautiful heart. The awakening of my racked soul is hardly more heavily laden with passion and pain. I shall never forget.

Though I feel away from her also, she is the only one out of all to look gently at me.

- Let me writhe and falter with pain; let me go mad - but oh, worldful of people - for the love of your God - give me out of this seething darkness only one beautiful human hand to touch mine with
love
, one beautiful human heart to know the aching sad loneliness of mine, one beautiful human soul to mingle with mine in long, long Rest. -

Oh, for a human being, my soul wails - a human being to love me!

Oh, to know - just once - what it is to be loved!

Nineteen years without one faint shadow of love is mouldy, crumbling age - is gray with the dust of centuries.

How long have I lived!

How long must I live!

I am shrieking at you, cold stupid world.

Oh, the long, long waiting -

The millions of human beings -

I am a human being and there is no one - no one - no one.

Who can know this that has not felt it? You do not know - you can not know.

Surely I do not ask too much. But whether or not it is too much I can not go through the years without it - oh, I can not!

You have lived your nineteen years, fine world, and you have lived through some after years.

But in your nineteen years there was some one to love you.

It is that that counts.

Since you have had that some one, in your nineteen years, can you understand what life is to me - me - in my loneliness?

My wailing, waiting soul burns with but one desire:
to be loved -
oh, to be loved
.

March 29

I am making the world my confessor in this Portrayal. My mind is fairly bursting with egotism and pain and in writing this I find a merciful outlet. I have become fond of my Portrayal. Often I lay my forehead and my lips caressingly upon the pages.

And I wish to let you know that there is in existence a genius - an unhappy genius, a genius starving in Montana in the barrenness - but still a genius. I am a creature the like of which you have never before happened upon. You have never suspected that there is such a person. I know that there is not such another. As I said in the beginning, the world contains not my parallel.

I am a fantasy - an absurdity - a genius!

Had I been one of the beasts that perish I had been likewise a fantasy. I think I should have been a small animal composite of a pig, a leopard, and a skunk: an animal that I fancy would be uncanny to look upon but admirable for a pet.

However I am not one of the beasts that perish.

I am human.

That is another remarkable point.

I have heard persons say they can hardly believe I am quite human.

I am the most human creature that ever was placed on the earth. The geniuses are always more human than the herd. Almost a perfection of humanness is reached in me. This by itself makes me extraordinary. The rarest thing in the world, I find, is the quality of humanness.

Humanity and humaneness are much less rare.

“It is a brave thing to understand something of what we see.” Indeed it is. An exceeding brave thing. The one who said that had surely gone out on the highways and byways and found how little he could understand.

To understand oneself is not so brave a thing. To go in among the hidden gray shadows of the deep things is a fool’s errand. It is not from choice that I do it. No one carries a mill-stone around her neck from choice. When I see what is among the hidden gray shadows - when I see a vision of
Myself
- I am seized with a strange sick terror.

A fool’s errand - but one on which I must need go.

- And for that matter I myself am a fool. -

Yet to know oneself well is a rare fine art.

I analyze myself now. I analyzed myself when I was three years old.

The only difference is that at the age of three I was not aware that I analyzed. - It is true, that is a great difference. - Now I know that I am analyzing at nineteen, and now I know that I analyzed at three.

And at the age of nineteen I know that I am a genius.

A genius who does not know that he is a genius is no genius. A drunken man might stagger up to a piano and accidentally play music that vibrates to the soul - that touches upon the mysteries. But he does not know his power and he is no genius though men awaken and go mad therefrom.

I know I am a genius more than any genius that has lived.

I have a feeling that the world will never know this.

And as I think of it I wonder if angels are not weeping somewhere because of it.

March 31

She only said
:
“My life is dreary,

He cometh not,” she sai
d
;

She said, “I am weary, aweary.

I would that I were dead.”

All day long this heart-sickening song of Mariana has been ree
l
ing and swimming in my brain. I awoke with it early in the morning and it is still with me now in the lateness. I wondered at times during the day why that very gentle and devilishly persistent refrain did not drive me insane or send me into convulsions. I tried vainly to fix my mind on a book. I began reading
The Mill on the Floss
, but that weird poem was not to be foiled. It bewitched my brain. Now as I write I hear twenty voices chanting it in a sad minor key - twenty voices that fill my brain with sound to the bursting point. “He cometh not - he cometh not - he cometh not.” “That I were dead” - “I am aweary, aweary,” - “that I were dead - that I were dead.” “He cometh not - that I were dead.”

It is maddening in that it is set sublimely to the music of my own life.

Now that I have written it I can hope that it may leave me. If it follows me through the night and if I awake to another day of it the cords of my overworked mind will surely break.

But let me thank the kind Devil.

It is leaving me now!

It is as if tons were lifted from my brain.

April 2

How can any one bring a child into the world and not wrap it round with a certain wondrous tenderness that will stay with it always!

- There are persons whose souls have never entered into them. -

My mother has some fondness for me - for my body because it came of hers. That is nothing - nothing.

A hen loves its egg.

A hen!

April 3

This evening in the slow-deepening dusk I sat by my window and spent an hour in passionate conversation with the Devil. I fancied I sat, with my hands folded and my feet crossed, on an ugly but comfortable red velvet sofa in some nondescript room.

And the fascinating man-Devil was seated near in a frail willow chair.

He had willingly come to pass the time of day with me. He was in a good-humored mood and I amused and interested him. And for myself, I was extremely glad to see the Devil sitting there and felt vividly as always. But I sat quietly enough.

The fascinating man-Devil has fascinating steel-gray eyes, and they looked at me with every variety of glance - from quizzical to tender.

- It were easy - oh, how easy - to follow those eyes to the earth’s ends. -

The Devil leaned back in the frail willow chair and looked at me.

“And now that I am here, Mary MacLane,” he said, “what would you?”

“I want you to marry me,” I replied at once. “And I want it more than ever anything was wanted since the world began.”

“So? I am flattered,” said the Devil, and smiled gently, enchantingly.

At that smile I was ravished and transported and a spasm of some rare emotion thrilled all the little nerves in me from my heels to my forehead. And yet the smile was not for me but rather somewhat at my expense.

“But,” he went on, “you must know it is not my custom to marry the women.”

“I am sure it is not,” I agreed, “and I do not ask to be peculiarly favored. Anything that you may give me, however little, will constitute marriage for me.”

“And would marriage itself be so small a thing?” asked the Devil.

“Marriage,” I said, “would be a great, oh, a wonderful thing, the most beautiful of all. I want what is good according to my lights, and because I am a genius my lights are many and far-reaching.”

“What do your lights tell you?” the man-Devil inquired.

“They tell me this: that nothing in the world matters unless love is with it, and if love is with it and it seems to the virtuous a barren and infamous thing, still - because of the love - it partakes of the very highest.”

“And have you the courage of your convictions?” he said.

“If you offered me,” I replied, “that which to the blindly virtuous seems the worst possible thing, it would yet be for me the red, red line on the sky, my heart’s desire, my life, my rest. You are the Devil. I have fallen in love with you.”

“I believe you have,” said the Devil. “And how does it feel to be in love?”

Sitting composedly on the ugly red velvet sofa, with my hands folded and my feet crossed, I attempted to define that wonderful feeling.

“It feels,” I said, “as if sparks of fire and ice crystals ran riot in my veins with my blood; as if a thousand pin-points pierced my flesh, and every other point a point of pleasure, and every other point a point of pain; as if my heart were laid to rest in a bed of velvet and cotton-wool but kept awake by sweet violin arias; as if milk and honey and the blossoms of the cherry flowed into my stomach and then vanished utterly; as if strange beautiful worlds lay spread out before my eyes, alternately in dazzling light and complete darkness with chaotic rapidity; as if orris-root were sprinkled in the folds of my brain; as if sprigs of dripping wet sweet-fern were stuck inside my hot linen collar; as if - well, you know,” I ended suddenly.

“Very good,” said the Devil. “You are in love. And you say you are in love with me.”

“Oh, with you!” I exclaimed with suppressed violence. The effort to suppress this violence cost me pounds of nerve-power. But I kept my hands still quietly folded and my feet crossed, and it was a triumph of self-control. “I want you to marry me,” I added despairingly.