At twenty the woman’s chrysalis soul and aching pulses awaken in crude chaste Spring-cold beauty. At forty her fires either have subsided to dim-glowing coals or leaped to too-positive, too-searing, too-obvious flames—her bones and the filigrees of her spirit may be alike dry, brittle-ish. But at thirty her Spring has but changed to midsummer. Poesy still waits upon her Passions.
My Spring has changed, bloomed, burst to midsummer.
Soft electrical heat-currents of being swing and sweep around me. They touch me and enter my veins. But the liquid essences of youth still quell and compass them. I am at youth’s climax—a half-sullen, half-smouldering youth which still is youth.
My rose of life is fragrant and aglow. Its sweet pink petals are uncurled and conscious in the wavering light.
Winds flutter and stir and rumple and twist those petals—
To-day is a To-morrow of countless unrests. Large and little Passions beat at me all the blue-and-copper day. I walked my floor with irregular lagging steps. I felt menacing, dangerous to myself, dynamic as nitro-glycerine: and smoothly drearily sane as a bar of white soap. I stood at my window and looked long at the circling range of mountains which skirt this Butte. Nothing else I have looked at, of sea or plain or hill, affected me like that chain of barren peaks. They are arid splendor and pale purple witchery and grief and lasting sadness and deathlike beauty and woe and wonder. Their color quietly stormed my eyes and blurred them with tears.
It was a mood in which any color or gleam or thought or strain of music or note of sad world-laughter or any un-sane loveliness of poetry could enchant or flay or transport me to my frayed last nerve.
There is terror in facing death on battlefields, on sinking ships, in black ice-floes, in blazing buildings. But to me no death, for I fear no death, could be so dreadfully pregnant with in-turning woe and frenzy and all intolerable feeling as facing starkly my futile life.
My life is a vast stone bastile of many little Rooms in which I am a prisoner. I am locked there in solitude on bread and water and let to roam in it at will. And each Room is tenanted by invisible garbled furies and dubious ecstasies. I run with echoing footsteps from Room to Room to escape them: but each Room is more unhabitable than the last. There are scores of little Rooms, each with its ghosts, each different.
In one Room silent voices in the air accuse my tired Spirit of wanton vacillations and barren lack of purpose and utter waste, waste, waste of itself. And they threaten death and destruction. I know that accusation and I hate it: I hate it the more for that it’s wholly just. To escape it I run from that Room along a dim passage into another one. In it unseen fingers clutch my Heart. In their touch also is an accusation: of selfishness and waste and want of something to beat for: and in their touch is the savor of wild wishes and human longings and passionate prayers for something warm and simple and real to rest against: and in their pressing clutching turbulent touch is a tormenting half-promise, chance-promise, no-promise: and the hovering inevitable threat of death and destruction. That too I know and hate and half-love: and I can’t bear it. So I run out of that Room along a passage and into another. I hear my footsteps echoing as I run.