I Await the Devil's Coming - Unexpurgated and Annotated by Mary MacLane Read Free Book Online

find amusement and diversion in the woes of the corner that is without the marriage rite; and the women may draw away their skirts in shocked horror and wonder that such things can be, in view of their own spotless virtue.
    And so they live on under the roofs, and they eat and work and sleep and die; and the children grow up and seek other roofs, and call upon the marriage ceremony even as their parents before them - and then they likewise eat and work and sleep and die; and so on world without end.
    This also is life - the life of the good, virtuous Christians.
    I think, therefore, that I should prefer some life that is not virtuous.
    I shall never make use of the marriage ceremony. - I hereby register a vow, Devil, to that effect. -
    When a man and a woman love one another that is enough. That is marriage. A religious rite is superfluous. And if the man and woman live together without the love, no ceremony in the world can make it marriage. The woman who does this need not feel the tiniest bit better than her lowest sister in the streets. Is she not indeed a step lower since she pretends to be what she is not - plays the virtuous woman? While the other unfortunate pretends nothing. She wears her name on her sleeve.
    If I were obliged to be one of these I would rather be she who wears her name on her sleeve. I certainly would. The lesser of two evils, always.
    I can think of nothing in the world like the utter littleness, the paltriness, the contemptibleness, the degradation, of the woman who is tied down under a roof with a man who is really nothing to her; who wears the man’s name, who bears the man’s children - who plays the virtuous woman. There are too many such in the world now.
    May I never, I say, become that abnormal merciless animal, that deformed monstrosity - a virtuous woman.
    Anything, Devil, but that.
    And so, as I look over the roofs and chimneys I have a weary, disgusted feeling.

    January 27
    This is not a diary. It is a Portrayal. It is my inner life shown in its nakedness. I am trying my utmost to show everything - to reveal every petty vanity and weakness, every phase of feeling, every desire. It is a remarkably hard thing to do, I find, to probe my soul to its depths, to expose its shades and half-lights.
    Not that I am troubled with modesty or shame. Why should one be ashamed of anything?
    But there are elements in one’s mental equipment so vague, so opaque, so undefined - how is one to grasp them? I have analyzed and analyzed, and I have gotten down to some extremely fine points - yet still there are things upon my own horizon that go beyond me.
    There are feelings that rise and rush over me overwhe lm ingly. I am helpless, crushed and defeated, before them. It is as if they were written on the walls of my soul-chamber in an unknown language.
    My soul goes blindly seeking, seeking, asking. Nothing answers. I cry out after some unknown Thing with all the strength of my being; every nerve and fiber in my young woman’s-body and my young woman’s-soul reaches and strains in anguished unrest. At times as I hurry over my sand and barrenness all my life’s manifold passions culminate in utter rage and woe. Waves of intense, hopeless longing rush over me and envelop me round and round. My heart, my soul, my mind go wandering - wandering; ploughing their way through darkness with never a ray of light; groping with helpless hands; asking, longing, wanting things: pursued by a Demon of Unrest.
    I shall go mad - I shall go mad, I say over and over to myself.
    But no. No one goes mad. The Devil does not propose to release any one from a so beautifully wrought, artistic damnation. He looks to it that one’s senses are kept fully intact, and he fastens to them with steel chains the demon of Unrest.
    It hurts, - oh, it tortures me in the days and days! But when the Devil brings my Happiness I will forgive him all this.
    When my Happiness is given me, the Unrest will still be with me, I doubt not, but the