IN THIS house where I drag out my accursed, devilish, weary existence, upstairs in the bathroom, on the little ledge at the top of the wainscoting, there are six tooth-brushes: an ordinary white bone-handled one that is my younger brother's; a white twisted-handled one that is my sister's; a flat-handled one that is my older brother's; a celluloid-handled one that is my stepfather's; a silver-handled one that is mine; and another ordinary one that is my mother's. The sight of these tooth-brushes day after day, week after week, and always, is one of the most crushingly maddening circumstances in my fool's life.
Every Friday I wash up the bathroom. Usually I like to do this. I like the feeling of the water squeezing through my fingers, and always it leaves my nails beautifully neat. But the obviousness of those six tooth-brushes signifying me and the five other members of this family and the aimless emptiness of my existence here—Friday after Friday—makes my soul weary and my heart sick.
Never does the pitiable, barren, contemptible, damnable, narrow Nothingness of my life in this house come upon me with so intense a force as when my eyes happen upon those six tooth-brushes.
Among the horrors of the Inquisition, a minute refinement of cruelty was reached when the victim's head was placed beneath a never-ceasing falling of water, drop by drop.
A convict sentenced to solitary confinement, spending his endless days staring at four blank walls, feels that had he committed every known crime he could not possibly deserve his punishment.
I am not undergoing an Inquisition, nor am I a convict in solitary confinement. But I live in a house with people who affect me mostly through their tooth-brushes—and those I should like, above all things, to gather up and pitch out of the bathroom window—and oh, damn them, damn them!
You who read this, can you understand the depth of bitterness and hatred that is contained in this for me? Perhaps you can a little if you are a woman and have felt yourself alone.
When I look at the six tooth-brushes a fierce, lurid storm of rage and passion comes over me. Two heavy leaden hands lay hold of my life and press, press, press. They strike the sick, sick weariness to my inmost soul.
Oh, to leave this house and these people, and this intense Nothingness—oh, to pass out from them, forever! But where can I go, what can I do? I feel with mad fury that I am helpless. The grasp of the stepfather and the mother is contemptible and absurd—but with the persistence and tenacity of narrow minds. It is like the two heavy leaden hands. It is not seen—it is not tangible. It is felt.
Once I took away my own silver-handled tooth-brush from the bathroom ledge, and kept it in my bedroom for a day or two. I thought to lessen the effect of the six.
I put it back in the bathroom.
The absence of one accentuated the significant damnation of the others. There was something more forcibly maddening in the five than in the six tooth-brushes. The damnation was not worse, but it developed my feeling about them more vividly.
And so I put my tooth-brush back in the bathroom.
This house is comfortably furnished. My mother spends her life in the adornment of it. The small square rooms are distinctly pretty.
But when I look at them seeingly I think of the proverb about the dinner of stalled ox.
Yet there is no hatred here, except mine and my bitterness. I am the only one of them whose bitter spirit cries out against things.
But there is that which is subtler and strikes deeper. There is the lack of sympathy—the lack of everything that counts: there is the great, deep Nothing.
How much better were there hatred here than Nothing!
I long hopelessly for will-power, resolution to take my life into my own hands, to walk away from this house some day and never return. I have nowhere to go—no money, and I know the world quite too well to put the slightest faith in its voluntary kindness of heart. But how much better and wider, less damned, less maddening, to go out into it and be beaten and cheated and fooled with, than this!—this thing that gathers itself easily into a circle made of six tooth-brushes with a sufficiency of surplus damnation.
I have read about a woman who went down from Jerusalem to Jericho and fell among thieves. Perhaps she had a house at Jerusalem with six tooth-brushes and Nothingness. In that case she might have rushed gladly into the arms of thieves.
I think of crimes that strike horror and revulsion to my maid-senses. And I think of my Nothingness, and I ask myself were it not better to walk the earth an outcast, a solitary woman, and meet and face even these, than that each and every one of my woman-senses should wear slowly, painfully to shreds, and strain and break—in this unnameable Nothing?
Oh, the dreariness—the hopelessness of Nothing!
There are no words to tell it. And things are always hardest to bear when there are no words for them.
However great one's gift of language may be, there is always something that one can not tell.
I am weary of self—always self. But it must be so.
My life is filled with self.
If my soul could awaken fully perhaps I might be lifted out of myself—surely I should be. But my soul is not awake. It is awakening, trying to open its eyes; and it is crying out blindly after something, but it can not know. I have a dreadful feeling that it will stay always like this.
Oh, I feel everything—everything! I feel what might be. And there is Nothing. There are six tooth-brushes.
Would I stop for a few fine distinctions, a theory, a natural law even, to escape from this into Happiness—or into something greatly less?
Misery—misery! If only I could feel it less!
Oh, the weariness, the weariness—as I await the Devil's coming.