I, Mary MacLane/Chapter 53
TO-DAY came the Finn woman and cleaned my blue-and-white bedroom.
She comes now and again and cleans excellently.
I would like to clean my room myself but lack the strength and skill to do it well.
But I stay with the Finn woman and show her how and I watch her work and muse upon her. She would be called in England a charwoman, but in this America of the vast mongrel heterogenesis she is an unclassified laborer.
I like to watch her and talk with her a bit and dwell on her mixed potentialities. She contrasts fascinatingly with me.
She is a human being and so am I, and beyond and with that there are odd parallels and similarities and distinctions between her and me.
Her name is Josephina and she looks as if it might be.
Mine is Mary MacLane but I don't look entirely like it.
She lives a lonely life and so do I, differing in sort and circumstance.
I am middle-class and American of Canadian reminiscence, and early-thirty.
Josephina is Finn and lower-class with a 'foreign' look, and she is forty-five and looks sixty and is twelve years out of Finland.
I am tallish and slim and weigh nine wavering stone.
The Finn woman is short and solid and weighs all of a hundred and seventy pounds.
I am slender of flank and ankle, narrow through the loins and bony at the shoulders.
The Finn woman is thick everywhere, broad of girth and deep of chest like a Percheron stallion.
I am darkish with dusky gray eyes.
Josephina is dirty-blond with pale narrow blue eyes like a china doll's.
My sex feels to me like a mysterious sweetness.
Josephina's sex looks porcinely obvious and uninteresting like her large dubious breasts.
I am inwardly full of strong-flavored emotions.
The one positive outward feeling Josephina manifests is a dull but comprehensive hatred, peculiar to her nationality and station, for everything Swedish.
The Finn woman has a husband now and had a different one formerly.
I have none and never had.
Josephina is elemental primeval woman.
So am I but terrifically qualified by complexity, incongruity.
I have white smooth firm beautiful hands.
Josephina's hands are particularly ugly and have a menacing look.
I have quick intelligence.
Josephina is markedly stupid.
I live in a quiet clean bungalow.
Josephina lives in an unusually filthy unrestful little house.
I own two dresses whose personnel alters at intervals.
Josephina owns one unchanging dress, septic, maculate and repellent.
I have a sense of humor vivid and intriguing to myself.
Josephina has no more sense of humor than a flatiron.
I bathe foamily icily each morning.
Josephina would seem never to have had a bath. She cleans windows and floors and rugs for thirty-five cents an hour. She would regard it as a fantastic waste of time and soap to clean herself for nothing.
I own in a still flawed life one phase which is an endless treasure of beauty and power and charm and light: my love for John Keats.
The Finn woman owns about the same thing in a life which may be more still and flawed than mine: her love for strong drink.
There begins a curious line of similitude between us.
I feel oddly joyous and light of heart on a solitary veranda corner with the John-Keats poetry book open in my lap.
And Josephina has been found many a time by Butte policemen sitting alone joyous and very drunk, in dark alleys with empty pint bottles strewn all about her.
In my un-Keats hours I am mostly mournful. And Josephina sober has all the melancholy of her race with an added gloom, as if the acetylene had run out of all her lamps. That my melancholy is more lustrous than hers I lay to her native dullness as against my native braininess, and to alcohol's having rotting effects on human mental tissues: whilst John Keats to those who drink his poetry is a starry savior.
I like to think there's the same ambrosial food in the Demon Rum for Josephina as in the Grecian Urn for me.
There seems no other pleasure in life for her.
The limit of her literary pursuit is the reading of a four-page Finnish newspaper full of obituaries.
The opalescent enchantments of her inner being mean nothing to her: she wouldn't know her entity from her duodenum.
Her body can bring her no delight: there's no lightness to it, no tang, no feminine charm, no consciousness to make her love it as the Dianas love theirs.
A sunset above the western peaks is less than a setting sun to her.
Her food is merely her fodder.
Love and Romance pass her by. She and the husband vie with each other for solitary possession of their little nasty house. And her personality is not conducive to lovers.
She has nor chick nor child to mother.
Her idea of a life beyond this vale is crude and uncomfortable. She went two Sundays to the Finnish church and had a surprising lusty doctrine of eternal fire rammed down her throat: she took the Finn minister's word for it and quitted the fold, preferring to live this life unhampered by flaming anticipation. All her material treasure she works for with mops and scrubbing-brushes at thirty-five cents an hour.
Other roads being thus blocked it is sing-ho for King Alcohol in pint bottles.
Josephina is what is called a white liner. Which means that she has drunk so long, so much, so regularly that whiskey, rum, gin and brandy have no or negligible effects upon her. To achieve her intoxicating aim she must drink pure alcohol.
By the same token I eschew many a tame poet: I must have John Keats.
What the poetry of John Keats does to me I know.
What the distilled waters of her choice do to Josephina it pleases me to imagine while I watch her clean my walls and floor and windows.
She works strongly, steadily, quietly till I pronounce the room clean. Then she stops, carries the pails and other things downstairs to the kitchen, removes a big brass pin from the rear of her dingy skirt which had held it back and doubled over her darkling petticoat, re-dons an antique rain-coat and bad hat, ties her clinking silver into the corner of a decadent handkerchief, bids me good-evening with a grave blond Finn bow and goes out into the dusk. She takes her way through alleys and short-cuts to the side door of a 'Finlander' gin-palace in the Finn quarter of the town. And there she lays out her day's wage in the pint bottles of her delight. As many pint bottles as her few dollars will buy, so many she buys. She ventures her all in the name of passionate thirst taking no thought of the morrow. She then seeks out some alley with a dark door-step and there she does her drinking. It would not do to go home with her alcoholic wealth because the husband might be there who, like the alphabetic vintner, would 'drink all himself.' So she drinks away in pint-bottle-ish peace, sitting alone in the gloom of the alleyway door-step, in her limp rain-coat and bad hat and her stolid Finn self-sufficience.
Because I like Josephina it charms me to think of the happiness that must be hers as she sits emptying pint bottles into herself and the white strong fire-water begins to work.
Before having her drinks she is unelated and uninformed like a corpse coldly electrified by a storage battery. As she drinks and drinks on she remains outwardly unchanged as the way is with her race—but within! The changes that come to pass in the heavy person of Josephina as the white flames wash down her walls!
Into her dull veins pours a hot stream like melted seething copper and it heats her knees till she knows she has knees and that they are white and very beautiful: and it heats her legs and her back and her breasts till they glow with the double-glow of an Aphrodite's in a reluctant Adonis's arms: it heats her eyes and temples and throat till she feels herself a radiant girl: it heats the crown of her head till she feels something like a brain there: it heats her heart and stomach till she's filled with a gay gust for life: it heats her imagination till she even imagines herself in love with her hard Finn husband since he is not by to beat her and so dispel the fancy: it heats a sense of humor into her till she laughs suddenly and heartily at some fugitive funniness that had lain long frozen in her memory: it heats a hundred little human carburetors in her which send a wreathe of vapors up into her drab being to flush it with misty golds and thin blues and rosy crimsons till her dormant involuntary soul awakes—a thing of old mellowed beauty, it may be—and is wafted on warm pretty vapory wings far from alleys, far from mops and scrubbing-brushes, far from thirty-five cents an hour, far from doorsteps—to fair sweet Isles of the Blest!
Nearing the last of her pint bottles she reels sideways on the doorstep: her bad hat cants forward: she sprawls about. The policeman on that beat to whom in that aspect she is a figure long familiar strolls toward her late in the night and looks at her with a lackluster eye. But Josephina is physically unaware of all this world. Her last pint bottle is gamely emptied, her inner sun's chromosphere burns like mad—but her body, unable to cope with the virile delectations new-risen within it, limply gives way.
A quaint picture, interesting to dwell on: her thick bathless body laid low in the darkened alley, with the empty pint bottles scattered on the paving-stones beside it—but her astral shape, lit by the subtle fires of alcohol, lifted high, high to remote elysiums. The policeman calls the 'wagon' and Josephina is taken up by several ungentle hands and tossed into it like a sack of coal. They take her to the city jail and lock her in a cell. The next morning she stands jaded and morbidly intoxicated before a police judge who glances at her uninterestedly for the several-hundredth time and says five days.
The five days can not be pleasant days but Josephina owns a robust sporting spirit. She gives not so much as the shrug of a shoulder either at going into jail or coming out if it. A black eye from her husband, a broken arm from a drunken fall, a filthy sojourn in jail: all one to her. She accepts them as she accepts all of her life, with an immense psychic calm. But she takes strongly to drink to translate herself out of it. And let her drink.
I know how she feels for I take to John Keats. I don't myself care much for strong drink. I drink a little of it at irregular intervals, but, by and large, I drink without éclat. In this mountain altitude whiskey makes me sick, champagne makes me dizzy and gin is a pungent punishment. One morning after reading of Josephina's white-line distinction in a police-court column I tasted some alcohol, but it had a varnish flavor and had strangling effects on my throat. It made me marvel at Josephina's prowess. I like absinthe in its bitter strength mostly because to sit sipping it feels restfully forbidden. Port wine is a brackish medicine, I hate the stickiness of cordials, and a cocktail I like chiefly to contemplate. So much for me and strong drink.
Josephina on the other hand does not care for John Keats. I sounded her on poetry in some of its human aspects: there was nobody at home. Her own enlightened north country has some poets of borealic iron and brain-brawn and beauty: to Josephina's wooden intellect their books are eternally closed.
But the Demon Rum looses a heated flood of poetry upon her, which I can but vision and not feel.
I am incapable of strong drink even as Josephina is incapable of John Keats.
We are quits there.
I look on myself as the more fortunate.—John Keats!
A woman so drunk as to fall and reel about is always an exquisitely shameful thing. And when I think of how she's tossed into the wagon—to mention but one item—
But it's a matter of the human equation. Doubtless it is all relative. The Finn woman is not aware of how she is knocked about, and if she were she would not regard it with any of my imagination. So what matter?
A likeable and admirable person is Josephina. A so strong fine businesslike worker, a so thoroughbred sport, a so splendid drunkard, and asking no odds of God or man. In her stolid Finn fashion she likes me as she has proven, and I like her though she makes me feel inferior.
—if Josephina could and would write her inner isolated world of thoughts—the saga of her one horrid gown! There would be a book. All blacks and carmines—all stolidly sober and brilliantly drunk—all dingily bathless: deeply savagely quietly human.
It would be a book savoring not of white alcohol but of the salty unshed Tears, the dry artistic Griefs of Josephina.