I say to Me in the mirror, ‘It’s you-and-me, Mary MacLane, and another wasting damning To-morrow.
“To-morrow and to-morrow and to-morrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day.”’
A haunting decadence is in that To-morrow thought. And always the To-morrow thought comes out of my morning mirror. I dwell on it awhile, till my gray eyes and my lips and my teeth and my forehead are tired of it, and make nothing new of it.
I jerk the flat scollop of hair at one side of my forehead and turn away. I open door and windows wider for the blowing-through of breezes. And I wander down-stairs. It is half-after nine or half-after ten. I go into the clean empty clock-ticking kitchen and cook my breakfast. It is a task full of hungry plaisance and pleasantness. I make a British-feeling breakfast of tea and marmalade and little squares of toast and pink-and-tan rashers of bacon and two delightful eggs. Up to the moment of broaching the eggs the morning has an ancient sameness with other mornings. But eggs, though I’ve eaten them every day for quite five-and-twenty years, are always a fascinating novelty.
They are delicious in my breakfast. So are the squares of toast and the bacon-rashers and the tea and marmalade. When I’ve done with them I lay down my napkin by my cup, light a cigarette, breathe a puff or two from it and feel contentedly aware that my brain has gone to rest in sweet tranquillity with my breakfast. When my brain is in my head it analyzes the soul out of my body, the gleam out of my gray eyes, the savor out of my life, the human taste off my tongue. That post-breakfast moment is the only peace-moment I know in my day and in my life.
Having puffed away the cigarette and read bits of a morning paper I then prove me arrantly middle-class by contemplating washing my breakfast dishes.
I am middle-class, quite, from the Soul outward. But it is not specially apparent—one’s tastes and aspirations flit garbledly far and wide. But a tendency to wash one’s dishes after eating one’s breakfast feels conclusively and pleasantly middle-class. Not that I do always wash them, but always I think of it with the inclination to do it.
I sit on the shaded front veranda in the summer noon-day and look away south at the blue Highlands, ever snow-peaked: or east at the near towering splendid grim wall of the arid Rockies which separates this Butte from New York, from London,—the Spain-castles—the Pyramids—the Isle of Lesbos: or south-west beyond house-tops at some foothills above which hangs a fairy veil made by melting together a Lump of Gold and an Apricot and spreading it thin.
Then restlessly I go into the house and up to my room. I put it in order—in prim, prim immaculate order. One marked phase of mine is of some wanton creature—a mænad, a mental Amazon, a she-imp. But playing opposite to that is another—that of a New-England spinster steel-riveted to certain neat ferociously-orderly habits. A stray thread on my blue rug hurts, hurts me until I pick it up. Dust around my room gives me a nervous pain, a piteous gnawing grief-of-the-senses, until I’ve removed it. And my chastened-looking bed—after I’ve turned over its tufted mattress and ‘made’ it, smooth and white and crisp and soft—how the fibers of me would writhe should anyone sit on it. But no one sits on it. And I myself sooner than press one finger-tip down into its perfectness would sell my body to a Balkan soldier for four dimes: it is that way I feel about it. My bed must be kept perfect till the moment I slip into it at night to float under the dream-worlds.