I Await the Devil's Coming - Unexpurgated and Annotated (17 page)

“And you think,” he inquired, “that apart from the opinion of the wise world, it would be a suitable marriage?”

“A suitable marriage!” I exclaimed. “I hate a suitable marriage! No, it would not be suitable. It would be Bohemian, outlandish, adorable!”

The Devil smiled.

This time the smile was for me. And oh, the long, old overpowering enchantment of the smile of steel-gray eyes! - the steel-gray eyes of the Devil!

It is one of those things that one remembers.

“You are a beautifully frank little feminine creature,” he said. “Frankness is in these days a lost art.”

“Yes, I am beautifully frank,” I replied. “Out of countless millions of the Devil’s anointed I am one to acknowledge myself.”

“But withal you are not true,” said the man-Devil.

“I am a liar,” I answered.

“You are a liar, surely,” he said, “but you stay with your lies. To stay with anything is Truth.”

“It is so,” I replied. “Nevertheless I am as false as woman can be.”

“But you know what you want.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, “I know what I want. I want you to marry me.”

“And why?”

“Because I love you.”

“That seems an excellent reason, certainly,” said the Devil.

“I want to be happy for once in my life,” I said. “I have never been happy. And if I could be happy once for one gold day I should be satisfied, and I should have that to remember in the long years.”

“And you are a strangely pathetic little animal,” said the Devil.

“I am pathetic,” I said. I clasped my hands very tightly. “I know that I am pathetic: and for this reason I am the most terribly pathetic of all in the world.”

“Poor little Mary MacLane,” said the Devil. He leaned toward me. He looked at me with those strange, wonderfully tender, divine steel-gray eyes. “Poor little Mary MacLane,” he said again in a voice that was like the Gray Dawn. And the eyes - the glance of the steel-gray eyes entered into me and thrilled me through and through. It frightened and soothed me. It racked and comforted me. It ravished me with inconceivable gentleness so that I bent my head down and sobbed as I breathed.

“Don’t you know, you little thing,” said the man-Devil, softly-compassionate, “your life will be very hard for you always - harder when you are happy than when you go in Nothingness?”

“I know - I know. Nevertheless I want to be happy,” I sobbed. I felt a rush of an old thick heavy anguish. “It is day after day. It is week after week. It is month after month. It is year after year. It is only time going and going. There is no joy. There is no lightness of heart. It is only the passing of days. I am young and all alone. Always I have been alone: when I was five and lay in the damp grass and tortured myself to keep back tears; and through the long cold lonely years till now - and now all the torture does not keep back the tears. There is no one - nothing - to help me bear it. It is more than pathetic when one is nineteen in all young new feeling and sees Nothing anywhere - except long dark lonely years behind her and before her. - No one that loves me and long, long years. -”

I stopped. The gray eyes were fixed on me. Oh, they were the steel-gray eyes! - and they had a look in them. The long bitter pageant of my Nothingness mingled with this look and the coming together of these was like the joining of two halves.

I do not know which brings me the deeper pain - the loneliness and weariness of my sand and barrenness, or the look in the steel-gray eyes. But as always I would gladly leave all and follow the eyes to the world’s ends. They are like the sun’s setting. And they are like the pale beautiful stars. And they are like the shadows of earth and sky that come together in the dark.

“Why,” asked the Devil, “are you in love with me?”

“You know so much - so much,” I answered. “I think it must be that. The wisdom of the spheres is in your brain. And so then you must understand me. Because no one understands all these smouldering feelings my greatest agony is. You must need know the very finest of them.
- And your eyes! Oh, it’s no matter why I’m in love with you. It’s enough that I am. And if you married me I would make you happier than you are.”

“I am not happy at all,” said the man-Devil. “I am merely contented.”

“Contentment,” I said, “in place of Happiness, is a horrid feeling. Not one of your countless advocates loves you. They serve you faithfully and well, but with it all they hate you. Always people hate their tyrant. You are my tyrant but I love you absorbingly, madly. Happiness for me would be to live with you and see you made happy by the overwhelming flood of my love.”

“It interests me,” he said. “You are a most interesting feminine philosopher - and your philosophy is after my own heart, in its lack of
virtue
. It is to be hoped that you are not ‘intellectual,’ which is an unpardonable trait.”

“Indeed I am not,” I replied. “Intellectual people are detestable. They have pale faces and bad stomachs and bad livers, and if they are women their corsets are sure to be too tight, and probably black, and if they are men they are
soft
, which is worse. And they never by any chance know what it means to walk all day in the rain, or to roll around on the ground in the dirt. And above all, they never fall in love with the Devil.”

“They are tiresome,” the Devil agreed. “If I were to marry you how long would you be happy?”

“For three days.”

“You are wise,” he said. “You are wonderfully wise in some things though you are still very young.”

“I am wise,” I answered. “Being of womankind and nineteen years I am more than ready to give up absolutely everything that is good in the world’s sight, though they are contemptible things enough in my own, for love. All for love. Therefore I am wise. Also I am a fool.”

“Why are you a fool?”

“Because I am a genius.”

“Your logic is good logic,” said the Devil.

“My logic - oh, I don’t care anything about logic,” I said with sudden complete weariness. I felt buried and wrapped round and round in weariness. Everything lost its color. Everything turned cold.

“At this moment,” said the Devil, “you feel as if you cared for nothing at all. But if I chose I could bring about a transfiguration. I could kiss your soul into Paradise.”

I answered “Yes,” without emotion.

“An hour,” said the Devil, “is not very long. But we know it is long enough to suffer in, and go mad in, and live in, and be happy in. And the world contains a great many hours. Now I am leaving you. It is likely that I may never come again, and it is likely that I may come again.”

It all vanished. I still sat by my window in the gloom. “It is dreary,” I said.

But yes. The world contains a great many hours.

April 4

I have asked for bread, sometimes, and I have been given a stone.

Oh, it is a bitter thing - oh, it is piteous, piteous!

I find that I am not far apart from human beings. I can still be crushed, wounded, stunned - by the attitude of human beings.

To-day I looked for human-kindness, and I was given coldness. I repelled human beings.

I asked for bread and I was given a stone.

Oh, it is bitter - bitter.

Oh, is there a thing in the wide world more bitter?

God
, where are you! I am crushed, wounded, stunned - and oh, - I am alone!

April 10

I have a sense of humor that partakes of the divine in life - for there are things even in this chaotic irony that are divine. My genius is not divine. My patheticness is not divine. My philosophy is not divine, nor my originality, nor my audacity of thought. These are peculiarly of the earth. But my sense of humor -

It is humor that is far too deep to admit of laughter. It is humor that makes my heart melt with a high, unequaled sense of pleasure and ripple down through my body like old yellow wine.

A rare tone in a person’s voice, a densely wrathful expression in a pair of slate-colored eyes, a fine, fine shade of comparison and contrast between a word in a conversation and an angle-worm pattern in a calico dressing-jacket - these are the things that make me conscious of divine emotion.

One day last summer an Italian peddler-woman stopped at the back door and rested herself. I stood in the doorway and the peddler-woman and I talked. She had a dirty white handkerchief tied over her head - as all Italian peddler-women do - and she had a telescope valise filled with garters, and hair-pins, and soap, and combs, and pencils, and china buttons on blue cards, and bean-shooters, and tacks, and dream-books, and mouth-organs, and green glass beads, and jew’s-harps. - There is something fascinating about a peddler-woman’s telescope valise. - This peddler-woman wore a black satine wrapper and an ancient cape. She said that she would like to stop and rest a while, and I told her she might. I had always wanted to talk to a peddler-woman, and my mother never would allow one in the house.

“Is it nice to be a peddler?” I asked her.

“It ain’t bad,” replied the peddler-woman.

“Do you make a great deal of money?” I next inquired.

“Sometime I do, and sometime I don’t,” said the woman. She spoke with an accent that, while it sounded Italian, still showed unmistakably that she had lived in Butte.

“Well, do you make just enough to live on, or have you saved some money?” I asked.

“I got four hundred dollar in the bank,” she replied. “I been peddlin’ eight year.”

“Eight years of tramping around in all kinds of weather,” I said. “Your philosophy must be peripatetic, too. Haven’t you ever had rheumatism in your knees?”

“I got rheumatism in every joint in my body,” said the woman. “I have to lay off, sometime.”

“Have you a husband?” I wished to know.

“I had a man - oh, yes,” said the peddler-woman.

“And where is he?”

“Back home - in Italy.”

“Why doesn’t he come out here and work for you?” I asked.

“Yes, w’y don’t he?” said the woman. “Dat-a man, he’s dem lucky w’en he can git enough to eat - he is.”

“Why don’t you send him some money to pay his way out, since you’ve saved so much?” I inquired.

“Holy God!” said the peddler-woman. “I work hard for dat-a money. I save ev’ry cent. I ain’t go’n now to t’row it away - I ain’t. Dat-a man, he’s all right w’ere he is - he is.”

“What did you marry him for?” I asked.

The peddler-woman looked at me with that look which seems to convey the information that curiosity once killed a cat.

“What for?” I persisted - “for love?”

“I marry him w’en I was young girl. And he was young, too.”

“Yes - but what did you do it for? Was he awfully nice, and did he say awfully sweet things to you?”

“He was dem sweet - oh, yes,” said the peddler-woman. She grinned. “And I was young.”

“And you liked it when you were young and he was sweet, didn’t you?”

“Yes, I guess so. I was young,” she answered.

The fact that one is young seems to imply - in the Italian peddler mind - a lacking in some essential points.

“And don’t you like your man now?” I asked.

“Dat-a man, he’s all right, in Italy - he is,” replied the woman.

“Well,” I observed, “if I had a man who had been dem sweet once, when I had been young, but who was not sweet any more, I think I should leave him in Italy, too.”

“You’ll git a man some day soon,” said the peddler-woman.

I was interested to know that.

“They all do - oh, yes,” she said. “But you likely to be better off peddlin’, I tell you.”

“Yes, I think it would be amusing to be a peddler for a while,” I said. “But I should want the man, too, as long as he was dem sweet.”

The peddler-woman picked up the telescope valise.

“Yes,” she remarked, “a man, he’s sweet two days, t’ree days, then - holy God! he never work, he git-a drunk, he make-a rough house, he raise hell.”

The peddler-woman nodded at me and limped out of the yard. The telescope valise was heavy. When she walked every muscle in her body seemed pressed into the service. She had a heavy solid look. She seemed as though she might weigh three hundred pounds though she was not large. The afternoon sun shone down brightly on her dirty white handkerchief, on her brown comely face, on her brown brass-ringed hands, on her black satine wrapper, on her ancient cape.

As I watched her walk out of sight I thought to myself: “Two days, t’ree days, then - holy God! he never work, he git-a drunk, he make-a rough house, he raise hell.”

I was conscious of an intense humor that was so far beyond laughter that it was too deep even for tears. But I felt tears vaguely as I watched the peddler-woman limping up the road.

It was not pathos. It was humor - humor. My emotion was one of vivid pleasure - pleasure at the sight of the woman, and at the telescope valise, and at her conversation supplemented by my own.

This emotion is divine and I can not grasp it.

As I looked after the Italian peddler-woman it came to me with sudden force that the earth is only the earth, but that it is touched here and there brilliantly with divine fingers.