I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 18
SOMETIMES the dusk is full of fire.
Some dusks I sit by my window looking out and hotly and coldly want a Lover: hotly with my Body and coldly with my Mind.
A dusk has just gone. I sat looking out at it.
A mist of dark cream tinged with heated violet came from nowhere and hung above the ground.
Suddenly came on me a sense of bewildering mysterious beauty.
In it was a feel of rippling warmth that crept into my bone-and-flesh from forehead to heel, from temples to soles, from crown to toe-tips.
It crept slow and suffocating like magic chloroform.
I leaned elbows on window-sill and chin on palms and sunk my gaze in the violet shades outside and straightway knew I wanted a Lover: not in delicate moonlit culmination like Juliet in her balcony: not denyingly like the timid young nun in her cloister assailed unaware by faint forbidden emotions.
I wanted a Lover like the jungle leopard leaping through the Springtime covert at nightfall to find her mate.
It is a subtle and an obvious feeling, made of a merciless beauty.
It is the tired urge of sex-tissues and nerve-cells: positive, furious, fiery as the bloodiest sun.
It is the same which the heated leopard feels in her sharp immaculate lust. It is quite the same—but it could not move me as I sat alone loverless to the knitting of an eyebrow, to a change of posture, a movement of elbows on the window-sill or of palms beneath my chin. Nor could it, though the potential Lover had stood outside my window.
For any woman of any charm the world is full of Lovers: each and all to be had by the flutter of her finger, the droop of her white eyelids, the trembling of her pink-bowed lips. The world is full of them—facile Lovers, craven, potent and pinchbeck. And it's that kind I want hotly with my Body, coldly with my Mind in dusks of rippling warmth—rippling, rippling warmth—
I want the Lover as the leopard wants hers. But I'm not a leopard: instead, a woman-person of keen sentientness and wild wistful imagination. So I wouldn't so much as crook a finger to call a Lover to me: a curious nervous inertia.
It's only I want the Lover with frantic blind cosmic ardors inside me.
I analyze it in my magic Mind and find I would call no Lover. I analyze farther and find I'd reject all but an impossible one-in-ten-thousand. But remains the desire, hot as live embers, cold as hail.
Sex is an odd attribute. It has been to me like a blest impediment and a celestial incumbrance and a radiant curse.—
When I was seventeen I stood on a threshold and peered curiously into a dim-lit strange-scented Room.
It was unknown to me then. My mind alone bespoke it. As I stood at its doorway the air it wafted out touched my sense with only the lightest frayed-cobweb contact, unintelligible and unenlightening. I had lived an emptily alone girlhood. I was icily virginal.
At five-and-twenty I crossed the Room's threshold. I breathed lightly the odd fragrance. I looked curiously around. I touched some amorous-looking grapes and some love-promising apples that lay about: I bit into one and burst a grape with my finger and thumb. I gathered a weak-petaled flower or two. I gauged the Room and its furnishments and was unthrilled by anything in it. Even bodily it left me unthrilled.
Those two memory-mists do not keep me in the now-dusk and in the strength and terror and fire of top-most youth from wanting a sudden Lover with all that's in my Body.
Love has naught to do with it. Love is a flame-winged Bird. I know it. I know the values of my life and of me. I do not mistake tapers for torches, ducats for louis d'ors, vicarious nepenthe for dreamless death.
In dusk-moments my bone-and-flesh is all of me I'm sure of. It begins and ends in this earth. It answers the violent summonses of this earth and its dusks.
In the just-gone dusk I felt the prickling blood flow to my finger-ends. A flood-tide, blinding red, surged and seethed and bubbled and pounded at my heart.
'I want a Lover—some Lover'—I murmured to the shadows beyond my window.
I grew breathless.
The spirit of my flesh rose like a wind-blown flame.
A loud cry rang in my nerve-wilderness.
That moment the variant analysis which always rides with me stopped dead.
There came instead sheer feeling—the merciless beauty.
—a man-person, maybe—the man of happy unanalytic brutality—to be suddenly there with me: to flash into my shadowy solitude like a lightning bolt and burst and break me.
—a quarter-hour of exquisite wildness—restlessness, made of Star-flame and Lily-petal and Cloud-burst on Mountain-summits and Sea-waves purple in a Stormy Dawn—an intolerable hunger and esctasy—
But just gone and I sit writing it in the pale cast of thought.
But breathlessly I recall the breathlessness of it.