 Part 6 of the Story of Mary MacLean. January 31st. Today, as I walked out I was impressed deeply with the wonderful beautifulness of nature even in her barrenness. The far distant mountains had that high, pure, transparent look, and the nearer ones were transformed completely with a wistful, beseeching attitude that reminded me of my life. It was late in the afternoon, as the sun lowered, the pure lavender of the faraway hills was tinted with faint rose, and the gray of the nearer ones with sun-color. And the sand, my sand and barrenness, almost flushed consciously in its wide, mysterious magnitude. In the sky there was a white cloud. The sky was blue, blue almost as when I was a child. The air was very gentle. The earth seemed softened. There was an indefinite caressing something all over that went into my soul and stirred it and hurt it. There was that in the air which is there when something is going to happen. Only nothing ever happens. It is rare, I thought, that my sand and barrenness looks like this. I crouched on the ground and the wondrous calm and beauty of the natural things awed and moved me with strange, still emotions. I felt and gazed about me, and felt again, and everything was very still. Presently my eyes filled quietly with tears. I bent my head onto the breast of a great gray rock. Oh my soul, my soul, I said over and over, not with passion. It is so divine, the earth is so beautiful, so untainted, and I, what am I? It was so beautiful that now, as I write, and it comes over me again, I cannot restrain the tears. Tears are not common. I felt my wooden heart, my soul, quivering and sobbing with their unknown wanting. This is my soul's awakening. Ah, the pain of my soul's awakening! Is there nothing, nothing to help this pain? I am so lonely, so lonely. Fanny Corbin, my one friend, my dearly loved anemone lady, I want you so much, why aren't you here? I want to feel your hand with mine, as I felt it sometimes before you went away. You are the only one among a world full of people to care a little, and I love you with all the strength and worship I can give to the things that are beautiful and true. You are the only one, the only one, and my soul is full of pain, and I am sitting alone on the ground, and my head lies on a rock's breast. Strange, sweet passions stirred and waked somewhere deep within me as I sat shivering on the ground, and I felt them singing far away as if their faint voices came out of that limitless deep, deep blue above me. And it was like a choir of spirit voices, and they sang of love and of light and of dear tender dreams and of my soul's awakening. Why is this? And what is it that is hurting so? Is it because I am young, or is it because I am alone, or because I am a woman? Oh, it is a hard and bitter thing to be a woman, and why, why is woman so foul a creature that she must needs be purged by this infinite pain? The choir of faint sweet voices comes to me incessantly out of the blue. My wooden heart and my soul are listening to them intently. The voices are trying hard to tell me, to help me, but I cannot understand. I know only that it is about pure exalted things, and about the all-abiding love that is somewhere, and it is about the earth-love and about truth. But I cannot understand, and the voices sing of me the child, a song of the unloved starved little being, and a song of the unloved half-grown creature, and a song of me, a woman, and all alone, awaiting the devil's coming. Oh, my soul, my soul! A female snake is born out of its mother's white egg, and lives a while in content among weeds and grass, and dies. A female dog lives some years, and has bones thrown at her, and sometimes she receives a kick or a blow, and a doghouse to sleep in, and dies. A female bird has a nest and worms to eat, and goes south in the winter, and presently she dies. A female toad has a swamp or a garden, some bugs and flies, contentment, and then she dies. And each of these has a male thing with her for a time, and soon there are little snakes or little dogs for her to love as much as it has given her to love. She can do no more, and they are fortunate with their little snakes and little dogs. A female human being is born out of her mother's fair body, branded with a strange, plague-tainted name, and let go, and lives a while, and dies. But before she dies she wakes. There is a pain that goes with it, and the male thing that is with her for a time is unlike a snake or a dog. It is more like a man, and there is another pain for this. And when a little human being comes with a soul of its own, there must be another awakening, for she has then reached the best and highest state that any human being can reach, though she is a female human being, and plague-tainted. And here also there is heavy soul-pain. The name, the plague-tainted name branded upon her, means woman. I lifted my head from the breast of the gray rock. The tears had been falling, falling. Tears are so strange. Tears from the dried-up fountain of nineteen years are like drops of water wrung out of stone. Suddenly I got up from the ground and ran quickly over the sand for several minutes. I did not dare look again at the hill-tops and the deep blue, nor listen again to the voices. Oh, with it all I am a-coward. I shrink and cringe before the pain of the dazzling lights. Yet I am waiting, longing for the most dazzling light of all, the coming of the devil. February 1st. Oh, the wretched, bitter loneliness of me! In all the deep darkness and the silence there is never a faint human light, never a voice. How can I bear it? How can I bear it? February 2nd. I have been looking over the confessions of the basket-seth. They are indeed rather like my portrayal, but they are not so interesting, nor so intense. I have a stronger individuality than Marie Bashkortsev, though her mind was probably in a higher state of development than mine, even when she was younger than I. Most of her emotions are vacillating and inconsistent. She worships a god one day and blasphemes him the next. She never loves her god. And why, then, does she have a god? Why does she not abandon him altogether? He seems to be of no use to her, except as a convenient thing on which to fasten the blame for her misfortunes. And, after all, that is something very useful indeed. And she loves the people about her one day, and the next day she hates them. But in her great passion, her ambition, Marie Bashkortsev was beautifully consistent. And what terrific storms of woe and despair must have enveloped her when she knew that within a certain period she would be dead, removed from the world, and her work left undone. The time kept creeping nearer. She must have tasted the bitterness of death indeed. She was sure of success, sure that her high-strained ambition would be gratified to its last vestige, and then to die. It was certainly hard lines for little Bashkortsev. My own despair is of an opposite nature. There is one thing in the world that is more bitter than death. And that is life. Suppose that I learned I was to die on the twenty-seventh of June, 1903, for instance. It would give me a soft, warm wave of pleasure, I think. I might be in the depths of woe at the time. My despair might be the despair of despair. My misery utterly unceasing. And I could say, never mind, on the twenty-seventh of June, 1903, all will be over. Dull misery, rage, nothingness, obscurity, the unknown longing, every desire of my soul, all the pain, ended inevitably, completely, on the twenty-seventh of June, 1903. I might come upon a new pain, but this, my long old torture, would cease. You may say that I might end my life on that day, that I might do so now. I certainly shall, if the pain becomes greater than I can bear. For what else is there to do? But I shall be far from satisfied in doing so. What if I were to end everything now, when perhaps the devil may be coming to me in two years' time with happiness? Upon dying, it might be that I should go to some wondrous fair country where there would be trees and running water and a resting place. Well, oh well, but I want the earthly happiness. I am not high-minded and spiritual. I am earthly, human, sensitive, sensuous, sensual, and ah, dear, my soul wants its earthly happiness. I cannot bring myself to the point of suicide, while there is a possibility of happiness remaining. But if I knew that irrevocable, inevitable death awaited me, on June 27th, 1903, I should be satisfied. My happiness might come before that time, or it might not. I should be satisfied. I should know that my life was out of my hands. I should know, above all, that my long, long, old pain of loneliness would stop, June 27th, 1903. I shall die naturally some day, probably after I have grown old and sour. If I have had my happiness for a year or a day, well and good, I shall be content to grow as old and as sour as the devil wills. But having had no happiness, if I find myself growing old and still no happiness. Oh, then I vow I will not live another hour, even if dying were rushing headlong into damnation. I am, do you see, a philosopher and a coward. With the philosophy of cowardice, I squeeze juice also from this fact sometimes. But the juice is not sweet juice. The devil, the fascinating man, devil it may be, is coming, coming, coming. And meanwhile, I go on and on, in the midst of sand and barrenness. February 3rd The town of Butte presents a wonderful field to a student of humanity and human nature. There are not a great many people, seventy thousand perhaps, but those seventy thousand are in their way unparalleled. For mixture, for miscellany, variedness, bohemianism, where is Butte's rival? The population is not only of all nationalities and stations, but the nationalities and stations mix and mingle promiscuously with each other, and are partly concealed and partly revealed in the mazes of a veneer that belongs neither to nation nor to station, but to Butte. The nationalities are many, it is true, but Irish and Cornish predominate. My acquaintance extends widely among the inhabitants of Butte. Sometimes, when I feel in the mood for it, I spend an afternoon in visiting about among diverse curious people. At some fourth of July demonstration, or on a minor's union day, the heterogeneous herd turns out, and I turn out, with the herd, and of it, and meditate and look on. There are Irishmen, Kellys, Casey's, Callaghan's, staggering under the weight of much whiskey, shouting out their green aisle maxims. There is the festive Cornishmen, ogling and leering, greeting his fellow countrymen with alcoholic hardiness, and gazing after every feminine creature with lustful eyes. There are Irishwomen swearing genially at each other in shrill pleasantry, and five or six loudly vociferous children for each. There are round-faced Cornishwomen likewise, each with their train of children. There are suave, sleek, sporting men, just out of the bathtub. Insignificant lawyers, dentists, messenger boys, plungers without number, greasy Italians from Meaderville, greasier French people from the Boulevard Edition, ancient miners, each of whom was the first to stake a claim in Butte, starved-looking Chinaman here and there, a contingent of Finns and Swedes and Germans, musty, stuffy old Jew pawnbrokers who have crawled out of their holes for a brief recreation, dirt-encrusted Indians and squaws in dirty, gay blankets, from their flea-haunted camp below the town. Box-russlers, who are as common in Butte as barmaids in Ireland, swell, flashy-looking Africans, respectable women with white aprons tied around their waists and sailor hats on their heads, who have left the children at home and stepped out to see what was going on. Innumerable stray youngsters from the dark haunts of Dublin Gulch, heavy restaurant-keepers with toothpicks in their mouths, a vast army of dry-goods clerks, the paper-collar gentry, miners of every description, representatives from Dogtown, Chicken Flats, Busterville, Butchertown and Seldom Scene, suburbs of Butte, pale, thin individuals who sing and dance in beer-halls, smart society-people in high traps and tally-hoes, impossible women, so-called, though in Butte no one is more possible. In vast hats and extremely plaid stockings, persons who take things seriously and play the races for a living, beer-jerkers, biscuit-shooters, soft-voiced Mexicans and Arabians, the dregs, the elite, the humbly respectable, the off-scouring, all thrown together and shaken up and mixed well. One may notice many odd bits of irony as one walks among these streets. One may notice that the Irishmen are singularly carefree and strong and comfortable and so jolly, while the Irish women are frumpish and care-worn and born earthward with children. The Cornishmen, who has consumed the greatest amount of whisky, is the most agreeable, and less and less inclined to leer and ogle. The Cornish woman, whose profanity is the shrillest and most genial and valuable, is she whose life seems the most weighted and downtrodden. The young women, whose bodies are encased in the tightest and stiffest corsets, are in the most wildly hilarious spirits of all. The filthy little Irish youngsters from Dublin Gulch are much brighter and more clever in every way than the ordinary American children who are less filthy. A delicate aroma of cocktails and whisky and soda hangs over even the foreign hands and automobiles of the upper crust. Gambler's newsboys and Chinaman are the most chivalrously courteous among them, and the modest-looking plunger, who has drunk the greatest number of highballs, is the most gravely, quietly polite of all. The rolling, rollicking musical profanity of the old sod, Bantry Bay, Donegal Tyrone, Tipperary, falls much less limpidly from the cigarette-ed lips of the ten-year-old lad than from those of his mother who taught it to him. One may notice that the husband and wife who smile the sweetest at each other in the sight of the multitudes are they whose countenances bear various scars and scratches, commemorating late evening orgies at home, that the peculiar, solid, block-shaped appearance of some of the minor's wives is due quite as much to the quantity of beer they drink as to their annual maternity, that the one grand ruling passion of some men's lives is curiosity, that the entire herd is warped, distorted, barren, having lived its life in smoke-cured butte. A single street in butte contains people in nearly every walk of life, living side by side, resignedly, if not in peace. In a row of five or six houses there will be living minors and their families, the children of which prevent life from stagnating in the street while their mothers talk to each other, with the inevitable profanity over the back fences. On the corner above there will be a mysterious widow with one child, who is suddenly alighted upon the neighbourhood, stealthily in the night, and is to be seen at rare intervals emerging from her door, the target for dozens of pairs of eager eyes and half as many eager tongues. And when the mysterious widow, with her one child, disappears some night as suddenly and as stealthily as she appeared, an outburst of highly-coloured rumours is tossed with astonishing glibness over the various back fences, all relating to the mysterious widow's shady antecedents and past history, to those of her child, and to the cause of her sudden departure, no two of which rumours agree in any particular. Across, on the opposite corner, there will be a company of strange people who also descend suddenly, and upon whom the eyes of the entire block are turned with absorbing interest. They consist of half a dozen men and women, seemingly bound together only by ties of conviviality. The house is kept closely blinded, and quiet all day, only to burst forth in a blaze of revel in the evening. Which revel lasts all night. This goes on until some momentous night, at the request of certain proper ones, a police officer glides quietly into the midst of a scene of unusual gaiety, and the festive company melts into oblivion, never to return. They also are then discussed with rapturous relish, and in tones properly lowered over the back fences. Farther down the street there will live an interesting being of feminine persuasion, who has had five divorces and is in course of obtaining another. These divorces, the causes therefore, the justice thereof, and the future prospects of the multi-grass widow are gone over, in all their bearings, by the indefatigable tongues. Every incident in the history of the street is put through a course of sprouts by these same tireless members, the Jewish family that lives in the poorest house in the neighbourhood, and that is said to count its money by the hundred thousands, the aristocratic family with the Irish Point curtains in the windows that lives on the county, the family whose husband and father gains for it a comfortable livelihood, forging checks, the miners' family, whose wife and mother wastes its substance and diamonds and seal-skin coats, and other riotous living, the family in extremely straightened circumstances, into which new babies arrive in great and distressing numbers, the strange lady with an apoplectic complexion, and a wonderfully foul and violent flow of invective, are all discussed over and over and over again. No one is omitted. And so this is Butte, the promiscuous, the bohemian. And all these are the devil's playthings. They amuse him doubtless. Butte is a place of sand and barrenness. The souls of these people are dumb. End of Part 6 Part 7 of The Story of Mary MacLean This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Reading by Kristen Hughes The Story of Mary MacLean by Mary MacLean Part 7 February 4th Always I wonder, when I die, will there be anyone to remember me with love? I know I am not lovable. That I want it so much only makes me less lovable, it seems. But who knows? It may be there will be someone. My anemone lady does not love me. How can she, since she does not understand me? But she allows me to love her, and that carries me a long way. There are many, oh, great many, who would not allow you to love them if you would. There is no one to love me now. Always I wonder how it will be after some long years when I find myself about to die. February 7th In this house, where I drag out my accursed, devilish, weary existence, upstairs in the bathroom, on the little ledge at the top of the Wainskidding, there are six toothbrushes. An ordinary white bone-handled one that is my younger brothers. A white twisted-handled one that is my sisters. A flat-handled one that is my older brothers. A celluloid-handled one that is my stepfathers. A silver-handled one that is mine. And another ordinary one that is my mother's. The sight of these toothbrushes, day after day, week after week, and always, is one of the most crushingly maddening circumstances in my fool's life. Every Friday I wash up the bathroom. Usually I like to do this. I like the feeling of the water squeezing through my fingers. And always it leaves my nails beautifully neat. But the obviousness of those six toothbrushes signifying me and the other five members of this family and the aimless emptiness of my existence here, Friday after Friday, makes my soul weary and my heart sick. Never does the pitiable, barren, contemptible, damnable, narrow nothingness of my life in this house come upon me with so incessant a force as when my eyes happen upon those six toothbrushes. Among the horrors of the Inquisition, a minute refinement of cruelty was reached when the victim's head was placed beneath a never-ceasing falling of water, drop by drop. A convict sentenced to solitary confinement, spending his endless days staring at four blank walls, feels that had he committed every known crime he could not possibly deserve his punishment. I am not undergoing an Inquisition, nor am I a convict in solitary confinement. But I live in a house with people who affect me mostly through their toothbrushes, and those I should like above all things to gather up and pitch out of the bathroom window. And oh, damn them! Damn them! You who read this, can you understand the depth of bitterness and hatred that is contained in this for me? Perhaps you can a little if you are a woman and have felt yourself alone. When I look at the six toothbrushes, a fierce lurid storm of rage and passion comes over me. Two heavy leaden hands lay hold of my life and press, press, press. They strike the sick, sick weiriness to my inmost soul. Oh, to leave this house and these people in this incessant nothingness! Oh, to pass out from them forever! But where can I go? What can I do? I feel with mad fury that I am helpless. The grasp of the stepfather and the mother is contemptible and absurd, but with the persistence and tenacity of narrow minds. It is like the two heavy leaden hands. It is not seen. It is not tangible. It is felt. Once I took away my own silver-handled toothbrush from the bathroom ledge and kept it in my bedroom for a day or two. I thought to lessen the effect of the six. I put it back in the bathroom. The absence of one accentuated the significant damnation of the others. There was something more forcibly maddening in the five than in the six toothbrushes. The damnation was not worse, but it developed my feeling about them more vividly, and so I put my toothbrush back in the bathroom. This house is comfortably furnished. My mother spends her life in the adornment of it. The small square rooms are distinctly pretty. But when I look at them, seeingly, I think of the proverb about the dinner of the stalled ox. Yet there is no hatred here, except mine and my bitterness. I am the only one of them whose bitter spirit cries out against things. But there is that which is subtler and strikes deeper. There is the lack of sympathy, the lack of everything that counts. There is the great, deep nothing. How much better were their hatred there than nothing? I long hopelessly for will-power, resolution to take my life into my own hands, to walk away from this house some day and never return. I have nowhere to go, no money, and I know the world quite too welled but the slightest faith in its voluntary kindness of heart. But how much better and wider, less damned, less maddening, to go out into it and be beaten and cheated and fooled with than this? This thing that gathers itself easily into a circle made of six toothbrushes with a sufficiency of surplus damnation. I have read about a woman who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves. Perhaps she had a house at Jerusalem with six toothbrushes and nothingness. In that case she might have rushed gladly into the arms of thieves. I think of crimes that strike horror and revulsion into my made senses. And I think of my nothingness, and I ask myself, were it not better to walk the earth in outcast, a solitary woman, and meet and face even these than that each and every one of my woman's senses should wear slowly, painfully to shreds, and strain and break in this unnamable nothingness? Oh, the dreariness, the hopelessness of nothing! There are no words to tell it, and things are always hardest to bear when there are no words for them. However great one's gift of language may be, there is always something that one cannot tell. I am weary of self, always self, but it must be so. My life is filled with self. If my soul could awaken fully, perhaps I might be lifted out of myself. Surely I should be. But my soul is not awake. It is awakening, trying to open its eyes, and it is crying out blindly after something, but it cannot know. I have a dreadful feeling that it will stay always like this. Oh, I feel everything, everything. I feel what might be, and there is nothing. There are six toothbrushes. Would I stop for a few fine distinctions, a theory, a natural law even, to escape from this into happiness, or into something greatly less? Misery, misery! If only I could feel it less! Oh, the weariness, the weariness as I await the devil's coming. February 8th. Often I walk out to a place on the flat valley below the town, to flirt with death. There is within me a latent spirit of coca-tree it appears. Down on the flat there is a certain deep, dark hole with several feet of water at the bottom. This hole completely fascinates me. Sometimes, when I start out to walk in a quite different direction, I feel impelled, almost irresistibly, to turn and go down on the flat in the direction of the fascinating, deep, black hole. And here I flirt with death. The hole is so narrow, only about four feet across, and so dark and so deep. I don't know whether it was intended to be a well, or whether it is an abandoned shaft of some minor. At any rate, it is isolated and deserted, and it has a rare, loving charm for me. I go there sometimes in the early evening, and kneel on the edge of it and lean over the dark pit, with my hands grasping a wooden stake that is driven into the ground nearby. And I drop little stones down, and hear them splash hollowly, and it sounds a long way off. There is something wonderfully soothing, wonderfully comforting to my unrestful, aching wooden heart in the dark mystery of this fascinating hole. Here is the end for me, if I want it. Here is the ceasing, when I want it. And I lean over and smile quietly. No flowers, I say softly to myself. No weeping idiots. No senseless funeral. No oily undertaker fussing over my woman's body. No useless Christian prayers. Nothing but this deep, dark, restful grave. No one would ever find it. It is a mile and a half from any house. The water, the dark, still water at the bottom, would gurgle over me and make an end quickly. Or if I feared there was not enough water, I would bring with me a syringe and some morphine, and inject an immense quantity into one white arm, and kneel over the tender darkness, until my youth weary, wading, worn senses should be overcome, and my slim, light body should fall. It would splash into the water at the bottom, it would follow the little stones at last, and the black, muddy water would soak in and begin the destroying of my body, and murky bubbles would rise so long as my lungs continued to breathe. Or perhaps my body would fall against the side of the hole, and the head would lie against it out of the water. Or perhaps only the face would be out of the water, turned upward to the light above. Or turned half down, and the hair would be darkly wet and heavy, and the face would be blue-white below it, and the eyes would sink inward. The end. The end, I say softly and ecstatically. Yet I do not lean farther out. My hand does not loosen its tight grasp on the wooden stake. I am only flirting with death now. Death is fascinating, almost like the devil. Death makes use of all his arts and wiles, powerful and alluring, and flirts with deadly temptation for me, and I make use of my arts and wiles, and tempt him. Death would like dearly to have me, and I would like dearly to have him. It is a flirtation that has its source in mutual desire. We do not love each other, death and I. We are not friends, but we desire each other sensually, lustfully. Sometime I suppose I shall yield to the desire. I merely play at it now, but in an unmistakable manner. Death knows it is only a question of time. But first the devil must come. First the devil, then death. A deep, dark, soothing grave. And the early evening, and a little folding of the hands to sleep. February 12th. I am in no small degree, I find, a sham. A player to the gallery. Possibly this may be felt as you read these analyses. While all of these emotions are written in the utmost seriousness and sincerity, and are exactly as I feel them, day after day, so far as I have the power to express what I feel, still I aim to convey through them all the idea that I am lacking in the grand element of truth. That there is in the warp and woof of my life a thread that is false—false. I don't know how to say this without the fear of being misunderstood. When I say I am in a way a sham, I have no reference to the truths as I have given them in this portrayal, but to a very light and subtle thing that runs through them. Oh, do not think for an instant that this analysis of my emotions is not perfectly sincere and real, and that I have not felt all of them more than I can put into words. They are my tears, my lifeblood. But in my life, in my personality, there is an essence of falseness and insincerity. A thin, fine vapor of fraud hangs always over me, and dampens and injures some of the things in me that I value. I have not succeeded thoroughly in analyzing this. It is so thin, so elusive, so faint, and yet not little. It is a natural thing enough viewed in the light of my other traits. I have lived my nineteen years, buried in an environment at utter variance with my natural instincts, where my inner life is never touched, and my sympathies very rarely, if ever, appealed to. I never disclose my real desires or the texture of my soul. Never, that is to say, to anyone except my one friend, the anemone lady. And so every day of my life I am playing a part. I am keeping an immense bundle of things hidden under my cloak. When one has played a part, a false part, all one's life, for I was a sly, artful little liar, even in the days of five and six. Then one is marked. One may never rid oneself of the mantle of falseness, charlatanry, particularly if one is innately a liar. A year ago, when the friendship of my anemone lady was given to me, and she would sometimes hear sympathetically some long silent bit of pain, I felt a snapping of tense drawn cords, a breaking away of floodgates, and a strange new pain. I felt as if I must clasp her gentle hand tightly, and give way to the pent-up, surging tears of eighteen years. I had wanted this tender thing more than anything else all my life, and it was given me suddenly. I felt a convulsion and a melting within. But I could not tell my one friend exactly what I felt. There was no doubt in my own mind as to my own perfect sincerity of feeling. But there was with it and around it this vapor of fraud, a spirit of falseness that rose and confronted me and said hypocrite, fool. It may be that the spirit of falseness is itself a false thing. Yet true or false, it is always with me. I have tried in writing out my emotions to convey an idea of this sham element while still telling everything faithfully true. Sometimes I think I have succeeded, and at other times I seem to have significantly failed. This element of falseness is absolutely the very thinnest, the very finest, the rarest of all the things in my many-sided character. It is not the most unimportant. I have seen visions of myself walking in various pathways. I have seen myself trying one pathway and another. And always it is the same. I see before me in the path, darkening the way and filling me with dread and discouragement, a great black shadow, the shadow of my own element of falseness. I cannot rid myself of it. I am an innate liar. This is a hard thing to write about. Of all things it is the most liable to be misunderstood. You will probably misunderstand it, for I have not succeeded in giving the right idea of it. I aimed at it and missed it. It eluded me completely. You must take the idea as I have just now presented it, for what it may be worth. This is as near as I can come to it. But it is something infinitely finer and rarer. It is a difficult task to show others a thing which, though I feel and recognize it thoroughly, I have not yet analyzed for myself. But this is a complete portrayal of me, as I await the Devil's coming, and I must tell everything. Everything. End of Part 7. The Story of Mary MacLean, Part 8 The Story of Mary MacLean, by Mary MacLean Part 8 February 13 So then, yes, as I have said, I find that I am quite, quite odd. My various acquaintances say that I am funny. They say, oh, it's that May MacLean, Dolly's younger sister. She's funny. But I call it oddity. I bear the hallmark of oddity. There was a time, a year or two since, when I was an exceedingly sensitive little fool. Sensitive, in that it used to strike very deep when my young acquaintances would call me funny, and find in me a vent for their distinctly unfriendly ridicule. My years in the high school were not years of joy. Two years ago I had not yet risen above these things. I was a sensitive little fool. But that sensitiveness, I rejoice to say, has gone from me. The opinion of these young people, or of these old people, is now a thing that is quite unable to affect me. The more I see of conventionality, it seems, the more I am odd. Though I am young and feminine, very feminine, yet I am not that quaint conceit, a girl, the sort of person that Laura E. Richards writes about, and Nora Perry and Louisa M. Alcott, girls with bright eyes and with charming faces. They always have charming faces, standing with reluctant feet where the brookened river meet, and all that sort of thing. I missed all that. I have read some girl-books a few years ago, Hildegard Graham and what Katie did and all, but I read them from afar. I looked at those creatures from behind a high-board fence. I felt as if I had more tastes in common with the Jews wandering through the wilderness, or with a band of fighting Amazons. I am not a girl, I am a woman of a kind. I began to be a woman at twelve, or more properly, a genius. And then usually, if one is not a girl, one is a heroine, of the kind you read about. But I am not a heroine either. A heroine is beautiful. Eyes like the sea shoot opaque glances from under drooping lids, walks with undulating movements, her bright smile haunts one still, falls methodically in love with a man, always with a man, eats things, they're always called viands, with a delicate appetite. And on special occasions her voice is full of tears. I do none of these things. I am not beautiful. I do not walk with undulating movements. Indeed, I have never seen anyone walk so, except perhaps a cow that has been overfed. My bright smile haunts no one. I shoot no opaque glances from my eyes, which are not like the sea by any means. I have never eaten any viands, and my appetite for what I do eat is most excellent. And my voice has never yet, to my knowledge, been full of tears. No, I am not a heroine. There never seemed to be any plain heroines, except Jane Eyre, and she was very unsatisfactory. She should have entered into marriage with her beloved Rochester in the first place. I should have. Let there be a dozen madwives upstairs. But I suppose the author thought she must give her heroine some desirable thing, high moral principles, since she was not beautiful. Some people say that beauty is a curse. It may be true, but I'm sure I should not have at all minded being cursed a little. And I know several persons who might well say the same. But anyway, I wish someone would write a book about a plain, bad heroine, so that I might feel in real sympathy with her. So far from being a girl or a heroine, I am a thief, as I have before suggested. I mined me of how not long since I stole three dollars. A woman whom I know rather well and lives near called me into her house as I was passing and asked me to do an errand for her. She was having an ornate gown made, and she needed some more applique with which to festoon it. The applique cost nine dollars a yard. My trusting neighbor gave me a bit of the braid for a sample and two twenty dollar bills. I was to get four yards. I did so and came back and gave her the braid and a single dollar. The other three dollars I kept myself. I wanted three dollars very much to put with a few that I already had in my purse. My trusting neighbors of the kind that throws money about carelessly. I knew she would not pay any attention to a little detail like that. She was deeply interested in her new frock. Or perhaps she would think that I had got thirty nine dollars worth of applique. At any rate, she did not need the money, and I wanted three dollars, and so I stole it. I am a thief. It has been suggested to me that I am a kleptomaniac, but I am sure my mind is perfectly sane. I have no such excuse. I am a plain downright thief. This is only one of my many speculations. I steal money or anything that I want whenever I can, nearly always. It amuses me, and one must be amused. I have only two stipulations, that the person to whom it belongs does not need it pressingly, and that there is not the smallest chance of being found out. And of course I could not think of stealing from my one friend. It would be extremely inconvenient to be known as a thief merely. When the world knows you are a thief, it blinds itself completely to your other attributes. It calls you a thief and there's an end. I am a genius as well as a thief, but the world would quite overlook that fact. A thief said thief, says the world, that is very true, but the mere fact of being a thief should not exclude the consideration of one's other traits. When the world knows you are a Methodist minister, for instance, it will admit that you may also be a violinist, or a chemist, or a poet, and will credit you therefore. And so, if it condemns you for being a thief, it should at the same time admire you for being a genius. If it does not admire you for being a genius, then it has no right to condemn you for being a thief. And why the world should condemn anyone for being a thief, when there is not within its confines anyone who is not a thief in some way, is a bit of irony upon which I have wasted much feudal logic. I am not trying to justify myself for stealing. I do not consider it a thing that needs to be justified, any more than walking or eating or going to bed. But as I say, if the world knew that I am a thief without being first made aware with emphasis, that I am some other things also, then the world would be a shade cooler for me than it already is, which would be very cool indeed. And so in writing my portrayal I have dwelt upon other things at some length, before touching on my thieving propensities. None of my acquaintances would suspect that I am a thief. I look so respectable, so refined, so nice, so inoffensive, so sweet even. But for that matter I am a great many things that I do not appear to be. The woman from whom I stole the three dollars, if she reads this will recognize it. This will be inconvenient. I fervently hope she may not read it. It is true she is not the kind that reads. But after all, it's of no consequence. This portrayal is Mary MacLean, her wooden heart, her young woman's body, her mind, her soul. The world may run and read. I will tell you what I did with the three dollars. In Dublin Gulch, which is a rough quarter of butte inhabited by poor Irish people, there lives an old, world-sourred, wrinkled-faced woman. She lives alone in a small, untidy house. She swears frightfully like a parrot, and her reputation is bad. So bad indeed that even the old woman's compatriots in Dublin Gulch do not visit her lest they damage their own. It is true that the profane old woman's morals are not good, have never been good judged by the world's standards. She bears various marks of cold, rough handling on her mind and body. Her life is all but run its course. She is worn out. Once in a while I go to visit this old woman. My reputation must be sadly damaged by now. I sit with her for an hour or two and listen to her. She is extremely glad to have me there. Except me she has no one to talk to but the milkman, the grocery man and the butcher. So always she is glad to see me. There is a certain bond of sympathy between her and me. We are fond of each other. When she sees me picking my way towards her house, her hard, sour face softens wonderfully and a light of distinct friendliness comes into her green eyes. Don't you know there are few people enough in the world whose hard, sour faces will soften outside of you and a distinctly friendly light come into their green eyes. For myself I find such people few indeed. So the profane old woman and I are fond of each other. No question of morals or of immorals comes between us. We are equals. I talk to her a little but mostly she talks. She tells me of the time when she lived in County Galway when she was young and of her several husbands and of some who were not husbands and of her children scattered over the earth. And she shows me old tin types of these people. She has told me the varied tale of her life a great many times. I like to hear her tell it. It is like nothing else I have heard. The story in its unblushing simplicity, the sour-faced old woman sitting telling it and the tin types contain a thing that is absurdly grotesquely, tearlessly sad. Once when I went to her house I brought with me six immense, heavy, fragrant chrysanthemums. They had been bought with the three dollars I had stolen. It pleased me to buy them for the profane old woman. They pleased her also, not because she cares much for flowers, but because I brought them to her. I knew they would please her, but that was not the reason I gave her them. I did it purely and simply to please myself. I knew the profane old woman would not be at all concerned as to whether they had been bought with stolen money or not, and my only regret was that I had not had an opportunity to steal a larger sum so that I might have bought more chrysanthemums without inconveniencing my purse. But as it was they filled her dirty little dwelling with perfume in colour. Long ago when I was six I was a thief. Only I was not then as now a graceful, light-fingered thief. I had not the philosophy of stealing. When I would steal a copper scent out of my mother's pocket-book I would feel a dreadful suffocating sinking in my bad heart, and for days and nights afterwards, long after I had eaten the chocolate mousse, the copper scent would haunt me and haunt me and owe how I wished it back in that pocket-book with the clasp shut tight and the bureau drawer locked. And so is it not finer to be nineteen in a thief with the philosophy of stealing than to be six and haunted day and night by a copper scent? For now always my only regret is when I have stolen five dollars that I did not steal ten while I was about it. It is a long time ago since I was six, February seventeenth. Today I walked over the hill where the sun vanishes down in the afternoon. I followed the sun so far as I could, but two even very good legs can do no more than carry one into the midst of the sunshine, and then one may stand and take leave lovingly of it. I stood in the valley below the hill and looked away at the gold-yellow mountains that rise into the cloudy blue, and at the long grey stretches of rolling sand. It all reminded me of the devil and the happiness he will bring me. Someday the devil will come to me and say, come with me, and I will answer yes, and he will take me away with him to a place where it is wet and green, where the yellow-yellow sunshine falls on heaven-kissing hills and misty cloudy masses float over the valleys. And for days I shall be happy, happy, happy. For days the devil and I will love each other intensely, perfectly, for days. He will be incarnate, but he will not be a man. He will be the man-devil, and his soul will take mine to itself, and they will be one for days. Imagine me raised out of my misery and obscurity, dullness and nothingness into the full, brilliant life of the devil for days. The love of the man-devil will enter into my barren, barren life and melt all the cold hard things and water the barrenness, and a million little green-growing plants will start out of it, and a clear, sparkling spring will flow over it through the dreary, sandy stretches of my bitterness among the false, stony roads of my pain and hatred, and a great, rushing, flashing cataract of melting love will flow over my weariness and unrest and wash it away forever. My soul will be fully awakened and there will be a million little sweet new souls in the growing green things, and they will fill my life with everything that is beautiful, tenderness and divineness and compassion and exaltation and uplifting grace and light and rest and gentleness and triumph and truth and peace. My life will be born far out of self, and self will sink quietly out of sight, and I shall see it farther and farther away until it disappears. It is the last, the last of that merry Maclean, I will say, and I will feel a long, sighing, quivering farewell. A thousand years of misery and now a million years of happiness. When the sun is setting in the valley and the crests of those heaven-kissing hills are painted violet and purple, and the valley itself is reeking and swimming in yellow-gold light, the man-devil, whom I love more than all, and I will go out into it. We will be saturated in the yellow light of the sun and the golden light of love. The man-devil will say to me, Look, you little creature, at this beautiful picture of joy and happiness. It is the picture of your life as it will be while I am with you, and I am with you for days. Ah, yes, I will take a last long farewell of this merry Maclean. Not one faint shadow of her weary wretched nothingness will remain. There will be instead a brilliant, buoyant, joyous creature transformed adorned, garlanded by the love of the devil. My mind will be a treasure-house of art, swept and garnished and strong and at its best. My barren, hungry heart will come at last to its own. The red flames of the man-devil's love will burn out for ever its pitiable, distorted wooden quality, and he will take it and cherish it, and give me his. My young woman's body likewise will be metamorphosed, and I shall feel it developing and filling with myriads of little contentments and pleasures. Always my young woman's body is a great and important part to me, and when I am married to the devil, its finely organized nerve-power and intricate sensibility will be culminated to marvellous completeness. My soul upon my soul will descend consciously the light that never was on land or sea. This will be for days, for days. No matter what came before, I will say, no matter what comes afterward, just now it is the man-devil, my beloved and I, living in the yellow light. Thinking of living with the devil in a bare little house, in the midst of green wetness and sweetness and yellow light for days, in the grey dawn it will be ineffably sweet and beautiful, with shining leaves and the grey unfathomable air and the wet grass and all. Be happy now, my weary little wife, the devil will say, and the long, long, yellow-gold day will be filled with the music of real life. My grandest possibility will be realized. The world contains a great many things, and this is my grandest possibility realized. I will weep rapturous tears. When I think of all this and write it, there's in me a feeling that is more than pain. Perhaps the very sweetest, the tenderest, the most pitiful and benign human voice in the world could sing these things, and this feeling set to their own wondrous music, and it would echo far, far, and you would understand. End of Part 8. Part 9 of the Story of Mary MacLean. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Reading by Kristen Hughes. The Story of Mary MacLean by Mary MacLean. Part 9. February 20th. At times when I walk among the natural things, the barren natural things, I know that I believe in something. Why can I not call it God and pray to it? There is something. I do not know it intellectually, but I feel it. I feel it with my soul. It does not seem to reach down to me. It does not pity me. It does not look at me tenderly in my unhappiness. My soul feels only that it is there. No, it is not all loving, all gracious, all pitying. It hurts me. It hurts me always as I walk over the sand. But even while it hurts me, it seems to promise. Ah, those beautiful things that it promises me. And then the hurting is anguish, for I know that the promises will never be fulfilled. There is within me a thing that is aching, aching, aching always as the days pass. It is not my pain of wanting, nor my pain of unrest, nor my pain of bitterness, nor of hatred. No, those in all their own anguish. This aching is another pain. It is a pain that I do not know, that I feel ignorantly but sharply. And, oh, it is torture, torture. My soul is worn and weary with pain. There is no compassion, no mercy upon me. There is no one to help me bear it. It is just I alone out on the sand and barrenness. It is cruel anguish to be always alone, and so long. Oh, so long. Nineteen years are as ages to you when you are nineteen. When you are nineteen there is no experience to tell you that all things have an end. This aching pain has no end. I feel no tears now, but I feel heavy sobs that shake my life to its center. My soul is wandering in a wilderness. There is a great light sometimes that draws my soul toward it. When my soul turns toward it, it shines out brilliant and dazzling and awful, and the worn sensitive thing shrinks away and shivers and is faint. Shall my soul have to know this light inevitably? Must it some day plunge into this? Oh, it may be, it may be, but I know that I shall die with the pain. There are times when the great light is dim and beautiful as the starlight, the utter agony of it, the cruel, ineffable loveliness. Do you understand this? I am telling you my young, passionate life agony. Do you listen to it indifferently? Has it no meaning for anyone? For me it means everything. For me it makes life old, long weariness. It may be that you know, and perhaps you would even weep a little with me if you had time. It is as if this light were the light of the Christian religion, and the Christian religion is full of hatred. It says, come unto me, you that are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. But when you would go, when you reach up with your weary hands, it sends you a two brilliant light. It makes you fair, wondrous promises. It puts you off. You beseech it in your suffering, while the waters near me roll, while the tempest still is high. But it does not listen. It does not care. Worship me. Worship me, it says. But after that let me alone. There is a book full of promises. Take it and thank me and worship me. It does not care. If I obey it, it looks on indifferently. If I disobey it, it looks on indifferently. If I am in woe, it looks on indifferently. If I am in a brief joy, it looks on indifferently. I am left all alone. All alone. The light has shown me, and I reach after it. But it is placed high out of my reach. I see the promises in the light. Oh, why, why does it promise these things? Is not the burden of life already greater than I can bear? And there is the story of the Christ. It is beautiful. It is damningly beautiful. It draws the tears of pain and soft anguish from me at the sense of beauty. And when every nerve in me is melted and overflowing, then suddenly I am conscious that it is a lie. A lie. Everywhere I turn there is nothing, nothing. My soul wails out its grief and loneliness. My soul wanders hither and thither in the dark wilderness and asks, asks always in blind, dull agony, how long? How long? February 22nd. Life is a pitiful thing. February 23rd. I stand in the midst of my sand and barrenness and gaze hard at everything that is within my range of vision. And ruin my eyes trying to see into the darkness beyond. And nearly always I feel a vague contempt for you, fine brave world, for you and all the things that I see from my barrenness. But I promise you, if someone comes from among you over the sunset hill one day with love for me, I will fall at your feet. I am a selfish conceited impudent little animal. It is true. But after all, I am only one grand conglomeration of wanting. And when someone comes over the barren hill to satisfy the wanting, I will be humble, humble in my triumph. It is a difficult thing, a most difficult thing, to live on as one year follows another, from childhood slowly to womanhood, without one single sharer of your life. To be alone, always alone, when your one friend is gone. Oh yes, it is hard. Particularly when one is not high-minded and spiritual, when one's near longing is not a god and a religion, when one wants above all things the love of a human being, when one is a woman, young and all alone. Doubtless you know this. After all, fine brave world, there are some things that you know very well. Whether or not you care is a quite different matter. You have the power to take this wooden heart in a tight, suffocating grasp. You have the power to do this with pain for me, and you have the power to do it with ravishing gentleness. But whether or not you will is another matter. You may think evil of me before you have finished reading this. You'll be very right to think so, according to your standards. But sometimes you see evil where there is no evil, and think evil when the only evil is in your own brains. My life is a dry and barren life. You can change it. Oh the little more and how much it is, and the little less, and what worlds away. Yes, you can change it. Stranger things have happened. Again, whether you will, that is quite a different thing. No doubt you are the people, and wisdom will die with you. I do not question that. I will admit and believe anything you may assert about yourselves. I do not want your wisdom, your judgment. I want someone to come up over the barren sunset hill. My thoughts are the thoughts of youth, which are said to be long, long thoughts. Your life is multicolored and filled with people. My life is of the gray of sand and barrenness, and consists of Mary Maclean, the longing for happiness, and the memory of the anemone lady. This portrayal is my deepest sincerity, my tears, my drops of red blood. Some of it has rung from me, rung by my ambition to tell everything. It is not altogether good that I should give you all this, since I do not give it for love of you. I am giving it in exchange for a few gaily colored things. I want you to know all these passions and emotions. I give them with the utmost freedom. I shall be furious indeed if you do not take them. At the same time, the fact that I am exchanging my tears and my drops of red blood for your gaily colored trifles, is not a thing that thrills me with delight. But it is of little moment. When the devil comes over the hill with happiness, I will rush at him frantically headlong, and nothing else will matter. February 25th. Mary Maclean, what are you, you forlorn, desolate little creature? Why are you not of and in the galloping herd? Why is it that you stand out separately against the background of a gloomy sky? Why can you not enter into the lives and sympathies of other young creatures? There have been times when you strained every despairing nerve to do so, before you realized that these things were not for you, that the only sympathy for you was that of Mary Maclean, and the only things for you were those you could take yourself, not which were given to you. And your things are few, few you starved lean little mudcat, you worn youth weary obscure little genius. Oh, it is weary some waiting for the devil. February 28th. Today, when I walked over my sand and barrenness, I felt infinite grief. Everything is beyond me, nothing is mine. My single friendship shines brightly before me, and is fascinating, and always just out of reach. I want the love and sympathy of human beings, and I repel human beings. Yes, I repel human beings. There is something about me that faintly and finely and unmistakably repels. When my happiness comes, shall I be able to have it? Shall I be able to have it? Shall I ever have anything? This repellent power is not an outward quality. It is something that comes from deeply, deeply within. It is something that was there in the beginning. It is a thing from the original. There is no ridding myself of it. There is no ridding myself of it. There is no ridding myself of it. Oh, I am damned, damned! There is not one soul in the world to feel for me and with me, not one out of all the millions. No one can understand, no one. You are saying to yourself that I imagine this. What right have you to say so? You don't know anything about me. I know all about me. I have studied all the elements and phases in my life for years and years. I do not imagine anything. I am even fool enough to shut my eyes to some things until inevitably I know I must meet them. I am wracked with the passions of youth and I am young in years. Beyond that I am mature, old. I am not a child in anything but my passions and my years. I feel and recognize everything thoroughly. I have not to imagine anything. My inner life is before my eyes. There is something about me that no one can understand. Can there ever be anyone to understand? Shall I not always walk my barren road alone? This follows me incessantly. It is burning like a smoldering fire every hour of my life. Oh, deep black despair. How I suffer. How I suffer just in being alive. I feel infinite grief. Oh, infinite grief. March 2nd. Often in the early morning I leave my bed and get me dressed and go out into the Grey Dawn. There is something about the Grey Dawn that makes me wish the world would stop. That the sun would never more come up over the edge. That my life would go on and on and rest in the Grey Dawn. In the Grey Dawn every hard thing is hidden by a grey mantle of charity and only the light, vague caressing fancies are left. Sometimes I think I am a strange, strange creature. Something not of earth, nor yet of heaven nor of hell. I think at times I am a little thing fallen on the earth by mistake. A thing thrown among foreign, unfitting elements where there is nothing in touch with it, where life is a continual struggle, where every little door is closed, every why unanswered, and itself knows not where to lay its head. I feel a deadly certainty in some moments that the wild world contains not one moment of rest for me, that there will never be any rest, that my woman's soul will go on asking long, long centuries after my woman's body is laid in its grave. I felt this in the Grey Dawn this morning, but the grey charitable mantle softened it. Always I feel most acutely in the Grey Dawn, but always there is the thing to soften it. The grey atmosphere was charged. There was a tense electrical thrill in the cold, soft air. My nerves were keenly alive, but the grey curtain was mercifully there. I did not feel too much. How I wished the yellow beautiful sun would never more come up over the edge to show me my nearer anguish. Stay with me, stay with me, soft Grey Dawn, implored every one of my tiny lives. Let me forget, let the vanity, the pain, the longing sink deep and vanish, all of it, all of it, and let me rest in the midst of the Grey Dawn. I heard music, the silent music of myriad voices that you hear when all is still. One of them came and whispered to me softly, Don't suffer any more just now, little Mary Maclean. You suffer enough in the brightness of the sun and the blackness of the night. This is the Grey Dawn. Take a little rest. Yes, I said. I will take a little rest. And then a wild, swelling chorus of voices whispered in the stillness. Rest, rest, rest, little Mary Maclean. Suffer in the brightness. Suffer in the blackness. Your soul. Your wooden heart. Your woman's body. Your soul. Your woman's body. But now a little rest. A little rest. A little rest, I said again. And straight away I began resting lest the sun should come too quickly over the edge. When I have heard in summer the wind in a forest of pines blowing a wondrous symphony of purity and truth, my varied nature felt itself abashed and there was a sinking in my wooden heart. The beauty of it ravished my senses but it savoured crushingly of the virtue that is far above and beyond me and I felt a certain sore despairing grief. But the Grey Dawn is in perfect sympathy. It is quite as beautiful as the wind in the pines and its truth and purity are extremely gentle and partly hidden under the grey curtain. Almost I can be a different Mary Maclean out in the Grey Dawn. Let me forget all the mingled agonies of my life. Let me walk in the midst of this soft greyness and drink of the waters of Lethi. The Grey Dawn is not paradise. It is not a happy valley. It is not a garden of Eden. It is not a veil of cashmere. It is the Grey Dawn. Soft, charitable tender. The brilliant celestial yellow will come soon, it says. You will suffer then to your greatest extent but now I am here and so rest. And so in the Grey Dawn I was forgetting for a brief period. I was submerged for a little in Lethi, river of oblivion. If I had seen someone coming over the near horizon with happiness I should have protested. Wait! Wait until the Grey Dawn has passed. The deep, deep blue of the summer sky stirs me to a half-painful joy. The cool green of a swiftly flowing river fills my heart with unquiet longings. The red, red of the sunset sky convulses my entire being with passion. But the dear Grey Dawn brings me rest. Oh, the Grey Dawn is sweet. Sweet. Could I not die for very love of it? The Grey Dawn can do no wrong if those myriad voices suddenly had begun to sing a voluptuous, evil song of the so great evil that I could not understand but that I could feel instantly. Still, the Grey Dawn would have been fine and sweet and beautiful. Always I admire Mary MacLean greatly. Though sometimes in my admiration I feel a complete contempt for her. But in the Grey Dawn I love Mary MacLean tenderly and passionately. I seem to take on a strange calm indifference to everything in the world but just Mary MacLean and the Grey Dawn. We too are identified with each other. And joined together in shadowy vagueness from the rest of the world. As I walked over my sand and barrenness in the Grey Dawn a poem ran continuously through my mind. It expressed to me in my grey condition an ideal life and death and ending. Every desire of my life melted away in the Grey Dawn except one good wish that my life would never return. The Grey Dawn except one good wish that my own life and death might be short and obscure and complete like them. The poem was this beautiful one of Charles Kingsley's. Oh Mary go and call the cattle home and call the cattle home and call the cattle home across the sands of Dee. The western wind was wild and dank with foam and all alone went she. The creeping tide came up along the sand and oar and oar the sand and round and round the sand as far as I could see. The blinding mist came up and hid the land and never home came she. Oh is it weed or fish or floating hair a tress of golden hair of drowned maidens hair above the nets at sea. Was never salmon yet that shone so fair among the stakes on Dee. They rode her in across the rolling foam the cruel crawling foam the cruel hungry foam to her grave beside the sea but still the boatman hear her call the cattle home across the sands of Dee. This is a poem perfect and in the grey dawn it expresses to me a most desirable thing a short eventless life a sudden ceasing and a forgotten voice sometimes calling this Mary in the grey dawn would wish nothing else if the waters rolled over me now over my short eventless life there would be the sudden ceasing and the anemone lady would hear my voice sometimes and remember me the anemone lady and one or two others and after a short time even my pathetic passionate voice would sound faint and be forgotten and my world of sand and barrenness would know me and my weary little life tragedy no more and well for me I say in the grey dawn it is different oh very different when the yellow bursts forth through the grey and the yellow is with me all day long and at sunset the red red line yet oh sweet grey dawn end of part 9 part 10 of the story of Mary MacLean this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org reading by Kristen Hughes the story of Mary MacLean by Mary MacLean part 10 March 5th sometimes I am seized with nearer, vivider sensations of love for my one friend, the anemone lady she is so dear, so beautiful my love for her is a peculiar thing it is not the ordinary woman love it is something that burns with a vivid fire of its own the anemone lady is enshrined in a temple on the inside of my heart that shall always only be hers she is my first love my only dear one the thought of her fills me with a multitude of feelings passionate yet wonderfully tender with delight, with rare undefined emotions with a suggestion of tears oh dearest anemone lady shall I ever be able to forget your beautiful face there may be some long crowded years before me it may be there will be people and people entering and departing but oh no, no I shall never forget there will be in my life always, always the faint sweet perfume of the blue anemone the memory of my one friend before she went away to see her, to be near her was an event in my life a colouring of the dullness always when I used to look at her there would rush a train of things over my mind a vaguely glittering pageant that came only with her and that held an always vivid interest for me there were manifold and varied treasures in this train there were skies of spangled sapphire and there were lilies and violets wet with dew there was the music of violins and wonderful weeds from the deep sea and songs of troubadours and gleaming white statues there were ancient forests of oak and clematis vines there were lemon trees and fretted palaces and moss-covered old castles with motes and drawbridges and tiny mullioned windows with diamond panes there was a cold glittering cataract of white foam and a little green boat far off down the river drifting along under drooping willows there was a tree of golden apples and a banquette in a beautiful house with the melting music of lutes and harps and mulled orange wine in tall thin glasses there was a field of long fine grass soft as bats' wool and there were birds of brilliant plumage scarlet and indigo with gold-tipped wings all these and a thousand fancies alike vaguely glittering would rush over me when I was with the anemone lady always my brain was in a gentle delirium my nerves were on quiet it was because I loved her oh there is not there can never be another anemone lady my life is a desert, a desert but the thin, clinging perfume of the blue anemone reaches to its utter confines and nothing in the desert is the same because of that perfume years will not fade the blue of the anemone nor a thousand bitter winds blow away the rare fragrance I feel in the anemone lady a strange attraction of sex there is in me a masculine element that when I am thinking of her arises and overshadows all the others why am I not a man I say to the sand and barrenness with a certain strain, tense passion that I might give this wonderful, dear, delicious woman an absolutely perfect love and this is my predominating feeling for her so then it is not the woman love but the man love set in the mysterious sensibilities of my woman nature it brings me pain and pleasure mingled in that odd, odd fashion do you think a man is the only creature with whom one may fall in love often I see coming across the desert a long line of light my soul turns toward it and shrinks away from it as it does from all the lights some day perhaps all the lights will roll into one terrible white effervescence and rush over my soul and kill it but this light does not bring so much of pain for it is soft and silvery and always with it is the soul of anemone March 8th there are several things in the world for which I, of womankind and nineteen years have conceived a forcible repugnance or rather the feeling was born in me I did not have to conceive it often my mind chants a fervent litany of its own that runs somewhat like this from women and men who dispense odours of musk from little boys with long curls from the kind of people who call a woman's figure her shape kind devil deliver me from all sweet girls from gentlemen from feminine men from black underclothing and any colour but white from hips that wobble as one walks from persons with fishy eyes from the books of Archibald C. Gunter and Albert Ross kind devil deliver me from the soft persistent maddening glances of water-cart drivers kind devil deliver me from leisle thread stockings from round tight garters from brilliant brass belts kind devil deliver me from insipid sweet wine from men who wear mustaches from the sort of people that call legs limbs from bedraggled white petticoats kind devil deliver me from unripe bananas from bathless people from a waistline that slopes up in the front kind devil deliver me from an ordinary man from a bad stomach bad eyes and bad feet kind devil deliver me from red note paper from studied comb in my hair from weddings kind devil deliver me from codfish balls from fried eggplant fried beef steak fried pork chops and fried french toast kind devil deliver me from wax flowers off a wedding cake under glass from thin sold shoes from tapeworms from photographs perched up all over my house kind devil deliver me from soft old bachelors from any masculine thing that wears a pale blue necktie from agonizing allocutionists who recite curfew shall not ring tonight and the lips that touch liquor shall never touch mine from a salvation army singing hymns in slang kind devil deliver me from people who persist in calling my good body mere vile clay from idiots who appear to know all about me and enjoin me not to bathe my eyes in hot water since it hurts their own from fools who tell me what I want to do kind devil deliver me from a nice young man from tin spoons from popular songs kind devil deliver me from pleasant old ladies who tell a great many uninteresting obvious lies from men with watch chains draped across their middles from some paintings of the old masters which I am unable to appreciate from side saddles kind devil deliver me from the kind of man who sings O promise me who sings at it from constipated dress makers from people who don't wash their hair often enough kind devil deliver me from a servant girl with false teeth from persons who make a regular practice of rubbing oily mixtures into their face from a bed that sinks in the middle kind devil deliver me and so on and on and on and in each petition I am deeply sincere but kind devil only bring me happiness and I will more than willingly be annoyed by all these things happiness for two days kind devil and then if you will languishing widowers lasal thread stockings anything for the rest of my life and hurry kind devil pray for I am weary March 9th it is astonishing to me how very many contemptible petty vanities are lodged in the crevices of my genius my genius itself is one grand good vanity but it is not contemptible and even those little vanities though they are contemptible I do not hold them in contempt by any means I smile involuntarily at their absurdness sometimes but I know well that they have their function they are peculiarly of my mind my humanness and they are useful therein when this mind stretches out its hand for things and finds only wilderness and nothingness all about it and draws the hand back empty then it can only turn back like my soul to itself and it finds these innumerable little vanities to quiet it and help it my soul has no vanity and it has nothing nothing to quiet it my soul is wearing itself out and it finds itself away these vanities are a miserable substitute for the rose-colored treasure that it sees a great way off and even imagines in its folly that it may have if it continues to reach after them yet the vanities are something they prevent my erratic analytical mind from finding a great nothing when it turns back upon itself if I were not so unceasingly engrossed with my sense of misery and loneliness my mind would produce beautiful wonderful logic I am a genius a genius a genius even after all this you may not realize that I am a genius it is a hard thing to show but for myself I feel it it is enough for me that I feel it I am not a genius because I am foreign to everything in the world nor because I am intense nor because I suffer one may be all of these but I have this marvellous perceptive sense my genius is because of nothing it was born in me as germs of evil were born in me and mine is a genius that has been given to no one else the genius itself enables me to be thoroughly convinced of this it is hopeless never ending loneliness my ancestors in their highlands some of them were endowed with second sight my genius is not in the least like second sight that savers of the supernatural, the mysterious my genius is a sound sure earthly sense with no suggestion of mystery or cultism it is an inner sense that enables me to feel and know things that I could not possibly put into thought much less into words it makes me know and analyze with deadly minuteness every keen, tiny damnation in my terrible lonely life I am a genius I am a genius I am a genius it is a mirror that shows me myself and something in myself in a merciless brilliant light and the sight at once sickens and maddens me and fills me with an unnamed woe it is something unspeakably dreadful the sight for the time deadens all thought in my mind it freezes my reason and intellect logic cannot come to my aid I can only feel and know the thing and it analyzes itself before my eyes I am alone with this alone, alone, alone there is no pitiful hand extended from the heights there is no human being ah there is nothing how can I bear it oh I ask you how can I bear it March 10th my genius is an element by itself and it is not a thing that I can tell in so many words but it makes itself felt in every point of my life this book would be a very different thing if I were not a genius though I am not a literary genius often people who come in contact with me and hear me utter a few commonplace remarks feel at once that I am extraordinary I am extraordinary I have tried longingly, passionately to think that even this sand and barrenness is mine but I cannot I know beyond the shadow of a doubt that it like all good things is beyond me it has something that I also have in that is our bond and sympathy but the sand and barrenness itself is not mine always I think there is but one picture in the world more perfect in its art than the picture of me in my sand and barrenness it is the picture of the Christ crucified with two thieves nothing could be more divinely appropriate the art in it is ravishingly perfect it is one of the few perfect pictures set before the world for all time as I see it before my mind I can think only of its utter perfectness I can summon no feeling of grief at the deed the deed and the art are perfect its perfectness ravishes my senses and within me I feel that the picture of me in my sand and barrenness knowing that even the sand and barrenness is not mine is only second to it March 11th sometimes when I go out on the barrenness my mind wanders afar today it went to Greece oh it was very beautiful in Greece there was a wide long sky that was vividly wonderfully blue and there was a limitless sea that was grey and green and it went far to the south and the sea spread out into the vast world two beautiful elements and they fell in love with each other and the farther away they were the nearer they moved together until at last they met and clasped each other in the far distance there were tall dark green trees of a kind that are seen only in Greece they murmured and whispered in the stillness the wind came off from the sea and went over them and around them they quivered and trembled in the shy ecstatic joy for the wind was their best beloved there were banks of moss of a deep emerald colour and golden flowers that drooped their heavy sensual heads over to the damp black earth and they also loved each other and were with each other and were glad clouds hung low over the sea and were dark grey and heavy with rain but the sun shone from behind them at intervals with beams of bronze and copper three white rocks rose up out of the sea and the bronze and copper beams fell upon them and straight away they were of gold oh how beautiful were those three gold rocks that came up out of the sea Aphrodite once came up out of the same sea she came gleaming with golden hair and beautiful eyes her skin glowed with tints of carmine and wild rose her white feet touched the smooth yellow sand on the shore the white feet of Aphrodite on the yellow sand made a picture of marvellous beauty she was flushed in the joy of new life but the bronze and copper sunshine on the three white rocks was more beautiful than Aphrodite I stood on the shore and looked at the rocks my heart contracted with the pain that beautiful things bring the bronze and copper and the wide grey and green sea this is the gateway of heaven I said to myself behind those three gold rocks there is music and the high notes of happy voices my soul grew faint and there is no sand and barrenness there and no nothingness and no bitterness and no hotness and no bitterness and no hot blinding tears and there are no little heart weary children and no lonely young women oh there is no loneliness at all my soul grew more and more faint with thinking of it and there is no heart there but that is pure and joyous and in peace in long still eternal peace and every life comes there to its own and every earth cry is answered and every earth pain is ended and the dark spirit of sorrow that hangs always over the earth is gone gone beyond the gateway of heaven and more than all love is there and walks among the dwellers love is a shining figure with radiant hands and it touches them all with its hands so that never dying love enters into their hearts and the love of each for another is like the love of each for self and here at last is truth there is searching and searching over the earth after truth and who has found it but here it is beyond the gateway of heaven those who enter in know that it is truth at last and so peace and love and truth are there behind the three gold rocks and then my soul could no longer endure the thought of it suddenly the sun passed behind a heavy dark grey cloud and the bronze and copper faded from the three rocks and left them white very white in the wide water the yellow flowers laid their heads drowsily down on the emerald moss the winds from off the sea played very gently among the motionless branches of the tall trees the blue blue sky and the wide grey green sea clasped each other more closely and mingled with each other and became one vague shadowy element and from it all I brought my eyes back thousands of leagues to my sand and barrenness the sand and barrenness is itself an element and I have known it a long long time End of Part 10