I CAN remember a time long, oh, very long ago. That is the time when I was a child. It is ten or a dozen years ago.
Or is it a thousand years ago?
It is when you have but just parted from your friend that he seems farthest from you. When I have lived several more years the time when I was a child will not seem so far behind me.
Just now it is frightfully far away. It is so far away that I can see it plainly outlined on the horizon.
It is there always for me to look at. And when I look I can feel the tears deep within me—a salt ocean of tears that roll and surge and swell bitterly in a dull, mad anguish, and never come to the surface.
I do not know which is the more weirdly and damnably pathetic: I when I was a child, or I when I am grown to a woman, young and all alone. I weigh the question coldly and logically, but my logic trembles with rage and grief and unhappiness.
When I was a child I lived in Canada and in Minnesota. I was a little wild savage. In Minnesota there were swamps where I used to wet my feet in the spring, and there were fields of tall grass where I would lie flat on my stomach in company with lizards and little garter snakes. And there were poplar leaves that turned their pale green backs upward on a hot afternoon, and soon there would be terrific thunder and lightning and rain. And there were robins that sang at dawn. These things stay with one always. And there were children with whom I used to play and fight.
I was tanned and sunburned, and I had an unkempt appearance. My face was very dirty. The original pattern of my frock was invariably lost in layers and vistas of the native soil. My hair was braided or else it flew about, a tangled maze, according as I could be caught by some one and rubbed and straightened before I ran away for the day. My hands were little and strong and brown, and wrought much mischief. I came and went at my own pleasure. I ate what I pleased; I went to bed all in my own good time; I tramped wherever my stubborn little feet chose. I was impudent; I was contrary; I had an extremely bad temper; I was hard-hearted; I was full of infantile malice. Truly I was a vicious little beast.
I was a little piece of untrained Nature.
And I am unable to judge which is the more savagely forlorn: the starved-hearted child, or the woman, young and all alone.
The little wild stubborn child felt things and wanted things. She did not know that she felt things and wanted things.
Now I feel and I want things and I know it with burning vividness.
The little vicious Mary MacLane suffered, but she did not know that she suffered. Yet that did not make the suffering less.
And she reached out with a little sunburned hand to touch and take something.
But the sunburned little hand remained empty. There was nothing for it. No one had anything to put into it.
The little wild creature wanted to be loved; she wanted something to put in her hungry little heart.
But no one had anything to put into a hungry little heart.
No one said "dear."
The little vicious child was the only MacLane, and she felt somewhat alone. But there, after all, were the lizards and the little garter snakes.
The wretched, hardened little piece of untrained Nature has grown and developed into a woman, young and alone For the child there was a Nothingness, and for the woman there is a great Nothingness.
Perhaps the Devil will bring me something in my lonely womanhood to put in my wooden heart.
But the time when I was a child will never come again. It is gone—gone. I may live through some long, long years, but nothing like it will ever come. For there is nothing like it.
It is a life by itself. It has naught to do with philosophy, or with genius, or with heights and depths, or with the red sunset sky, or with the Devil.
These come later.
The time of the child is a thing apart. It is the Planting and Seed-time. It is the Beginning of things. It decides whether there shall be brightness or bitterness in the long after-years.
I have left that time far enough behind me. It will never come back. And it had a Nothingness—do you hear, a Nothingness! Oh, the pity of it! the pity of it!
Do you know why it is that I look back to the horizon at the figure of an unkempt, rough child, and why I feel a surging torrent of tears and anguish and despair?
I feel more than that indeed, but I have no words to tell it.
I shall have to miss forever some beautiful, wonderful things because of that wretched, lonely childhood.
There will always be a lacking, a wanting—some dead branches that never grew leaves.
It is not deaths and murders and plots and wars that make life tragedy.
It is Nothing that makes life tragedy.
It is day after day, and year after year, and Nothing.
It is a sunburned little hand reached out and Nothing put into it.