I Await the Devil's Coming - Unexpurgated and Annotated (5 page)

These come later.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is Nothing that makes life tragedy.

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

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

January 26

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

People are abominable creatures.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anything, Devil, but that.

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

January 27

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But words are for every-day use.

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

But the rains of my feeling will come in torrents!

January 28

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

And that surely is Art with a capital A.

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

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

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

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

But I - I have acquired the art of eating an olive.

Now listen and I will tell you the art of eating an olive.

I take the olive in my fingers, and I contemplate its green oval richness. It makes me think at once of the land where the green citron grows - where the cypress and myrtle are emblems; of the land of the Sun where human beings are delightfully, enchantingly wicked, - where the men are eager and passionate, and the women gracefully developed in mind and in body - and their two breasts show round and full and delicately veined beneath fine drapery.

The mere sight of the olive conjures up this charming picture in my mind.

I set my teeth and my tongue upon the olive, and bite it. It is bitter, salt, delicious. The saliva rushes to meet it, and my tongue is a happy tongue. As the morsel of olive rests in my mouth and is crunched and squeezed lusciously among my teeth, a quick temporary change takes place in my character. I think of some adorable lines of the Persian poet:

Give thyself up to Joy, for thy Grief will be infinite.

The stars shall again meet together

At the same point in the firmament,

But of thy body shall bricks be made

For a palace wall.

“Oh, dear, sweet, bitter olive,” I say to myself.

The bit of olive slips down my red gullet, and so into my Stomach. There it meets with a joyous welcome. Gastric juices leap out from the walls and swathe it in loving embrace. My Stomach is fond of something bitter and salt. It lavishes flattery and endearment galore upon the olive. It laughs in silent delight. It feels that the day it has long waited for has come. The philosophy of my Stomach is wholly Epicurean. Let it receive but a tiny bit of olive and it will reck not of the morrow, nor of the past. It lives, voluptuously, in the present. It is content. It is in Paradise.

I bite the olive again. Again the bitter salt crisp ravishes my tongue. “If this be vanity, - vanity let it be.” The golden moments flit by and I heed them not. For am I not comfortably seated and eating an olive? - Go hang yourself, you who have never been comfortably seated and eating an olive! - My character evolves farther in its change. I am now bent on reckless sensuality, let happen what will. The fair earth seems to resolve itself into a thing oval and crisp and good and green and deliciously salt. I experience a feeling of fervent gladness that I am a female thing living, and that I have a tongue and some teeth, and salivary glands.

Also this bit slips down my red gullet, and again the festive Stomach lifts up a silent voice in psalms and rejoicing. It is now an absolute monarchy with the green olive at its head. The kisses of the gastric juice become hot and sensual and convulsive and ecstatic. “Avaunt, pale shadowy ghosts of dyspepsia!” says my Stomach. “I know you not. I am of a brilliant shining world. I dwell in Elysian fields.”

Once more I bite the olive. Once more is my tongue electrified. And the third stage in my temporary transformation takes place. I am now a gross but supremely contented sensualist. An exquisite symphony of sensualism and pleasure seems to play somewhere within me. My heart purrs. My brain folds its arms and lounges. - I put my feet up on the seat of another chair. - The entire world is now surely one delicious green olive. My mind is capable of conceiving but one idea: that of a green olive. Therefore the green olive is a perfect thing - absolutely a perfect thing.

Disgust and disapproval are excited only by imperfections. When a thing is perfect, no matter how hard one may look at it, one can only see itself - itself, and nothing beyond.

And so I have made my olive and my art perfect.

Well then, this third bit of olive slides down the willing gullet into my Stomach. “And then my heart with pleasure fills.” The play of the gastric secretions is now marvelous. It is the meeting of the waters! It were well, ah, how well if the hearts of the world could mingle in peace, as the gastric juices mingle at the coming of a green olive into my Stomach! “Paradise, Paradise!” says my Stomach.