I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 17
IT is a quiet deep of night. A bell has just tolled two.
I am clothed in cool bedroom negligées and a softening sweetness of cold cream, from head to foot.
I am tranquil for to-day I had a walk that made me feel Sincere and Safe.
It is a comforting feeling: it is like a beef-sandwich.
It was a long walk south-east of Butte along an outskirting road where I used often to walk when I was sixteen—a broad gray desert. It was the same sand and barrenness. It was bare and withered as if a giant coyote had picked its rocky ribs.
The day was windy and dusty. The sunshine was thick and sweet and heavy like floating honey. The dust that blew against the white of my neck was like ground glass.
My feet ached as I walked.
My shoes were Cuban-heeled thick-soled pumps of corded silk, a kind easy to walk in. But the same feet which once readily bore me seven miles along that road ache now at three. All of me ached as I walked along. I cursed desultorily with a smooth whispered flow of curses, because the circumstances seemed to demand it. But I loved the walk—even the more for my tired feet and my aching knees and my irking drooping shoulders and the hot glazed sand against my throat.
My Soul tasted realness in it.
Quite close to me, in immense sad beauty, were the deep high heavy silent somber hills of Montana. To-day the nearer ones were a stately enchanted Blue: a Blue of all ages: a Blue of infinitude: a Blue with a feel of life and death in its Blueness. Above it the sky was not blue but a pale glimmering shimmering silver hung across with gray silk clouds soft as doves' plumage.
I sat on a flat rock and looked at all of it and at the desert around, and at my dusty shoes.
All of it felt overwhelmingly sincere: at one with the wide worn used earth.
My dusty shoes looked to be at one with it and could interpret it.
I felt my shoes could claim their human prerogative of getting dusty in any of this world's roads.
It gave me a feeling of human Sincerity: good-and-evil Safeness.
It is on me now, along with cold cream and strong memory of Desert and Sun and Blue.
It is as good as a beef-sandwich.
Better: I don't like beef-sandwich.