I must face the fact that I am no longer a young woman. I am a widow, mother of two thoroughly dressed, handsomely educated, spiteful daughters. Nevertheless I am starved. I am starved for youth. There must be, I tell myself, new worlds to conquer; there simply must be. It’s only right.
When I was a child, and had curls down my back, I realized that it was horrible to be a child. Now that I am a matron, I realize that its horrible to be a matron. But I must not admit it, even to myself, I’m so volatile. In this year alone I’ve read Frühlings Erwachen, A Night in the Luxembourg and Salomé in Greek. Successively I’ve burned, buried and mutilated them, but their message flames in my soul, only I can’t read the message until the fire burns down. I must have patience.
I am about to confess in a big way. This is my confession. I have an unsatisfied, insubordinate gland somewhere about me, the same identical gland, I’m convinced, that produced the Blue Bird and gave that determined look of cheerfulness to the Hapsburgs. I think it is called the infantile gland; any way, there it is. It must have its day.
I have been all around the border of my lake. Leaning down I drew ever so many water lilies to me, crushing them against my heart—but my better nature bid me let them go. Then I gathered a handful of gravel and started tossing it at the goldfish, until it dawned upon me that I was satisfying an impulse to cruelty in a small way. Now I am resting under the sun-dial trying to calm my riotous nerves. As I sit I toy with a fallen maple leaf. Life and the seasons are so implacable, aren’t they? They are here today and gone tomorrow, it’s so splendid and heartless!
My God, as I sit here I realize that I am perishable! O if that brute of an Einstein had only taken a fancy to my relativity! Time and space are my enemies. If it were not for time, I should not be dangerous, and if it were not for space, I should not feel so limited! How cruel is reason! How sharper than a serpent’s tooth is meditation! How subtle is the lack of reason!
I said that I had made what was possibly my greatest confession. I lied! This is it: I am a girl, a mere child, amid my years. I have a sweet, forgiving nature, and I long to exert it, the trouble is that I’ve forgiven everything and everybody three or four times. I want to exert my womanly impulses, but there are so many womenly women exerting theirs, what chance have I who am no longer what I was?
On the other hand, of course, I have my feline qualities. I long to stretch out, at full length, on a couch, and hear men moaning about the corridors because I am indisposed. Ah how charming! I yearn to take up art. I feel, with my natural untrained instinct, I could mean a great deal to some new movement if I could only get it before it had moved much.
Then I want to be a psychic. I think there are ever so many messages just lost in space, waiting for a friend. For instance, I get a number of undefined feelings in a single day. Only yesterday I was mute with a sense of impending doom. The sense, or the doom, I don’t know which, ran right through me. It was colossal! Might it not have heralded something of import? Perhaps it meant that red shoes were giving way to green; perhaps it presaged new dimensions; perhaps it meant there will be no more war. How can one tell? And I must know. I’m that way.
Today I went driving. I got down at the park and went among those strangely innocent children one always sees in parks, pulling the swans about by their tails, sticking pins into the fish, and sitting on dogs. My arms were full of Little Elsie books, and a few copies of the Story of Mankind for those who are interested in retaliation. But no one seemed to want them.
I had half a dozen of those little rubber balls on elastic that come back at you, no matter what you do. These were for children at the breast. I sat a long time by the duck pond watching my reflection in the water, thinking on the inhumanity of man.
I was about to reenter my carriage, still thinking it, when my attention was attracted by a very young man. He could not have been over twenty-five. He had that peculiar dazed expression seen on the faces of immigrants who have been stunned in a foreign country. He might have been a Russian, a Swede, a Pole, an Italian, a Frenchman, he might have been anything. I did not know. I got hurriedly into my carriage and, directing the coachman to the Shelborne for tea, kept my eyes firmly fixed on the middle of his back.
Today I returned to the park. I came empty handed, to be free, untroubled. “Alice,” I said, “be vibrant, you are still young, you love life. A woman is as young as she looks, a man as young as he feels.” “Alice,” I said, “be a man, pull yourself together. You still pulse with the eternal scheme of things. You know you do.” But my pulse tires me!
I cannot leave the park alone. I have become passionately attached to it. I sit by the pond and my thoughts revert to the young man of a day or two back. He was so manly. The perfect gentleman, so experienced without having learned anything, so tender and yet so racial. I think he would make my daughter Mariann, a fate second to none. I must meet him socially.
The welfare of my daughter is close to me—he is sitting on the bench just opposite. He is reading something. Is it Lettish, Finnish, Swedish? How beautiful is uncertainty!
All is well. My brother Alex happened to know the young man. He had no sooner set eyes on him than he exclaimed: “As I live, Prendaville Jones!” Imagine my delight. Prendaville Jones! The name is alive with possibilities!
The whole family has met him. Mariann has lost her appetite, she avoids me. Can it be that her heart has learned that secret gesture called love?
I have made a perfectly ghastly discovery! Oh, I can’t write it! It has sent me to bed where I now lie writing it. The ink has dried on my pen for the hundredth time. I cannot put pen to paper. I am wrapped up in arnica and my head is done up in towels. Near at hand are the smelling salts, the Social Register and a guide to Monte Carlo. I am not myself.
I light cigarette after cigarette, and cast them all into that space outside my window that I used to call nature. Now I will not recognize nature. I have turned the lights off and on twenty times trying to calm myself. In vain! I am a moral and physical menace to human nature. This is it: I am in love with Prendaville Jones! I, a woman of forty, know once again the anguish of spring, the torture of love! I sleep badly, I scorn food. The fires of jealousy leap through me. I thirst for my daughter’s life! My own daughter! And now I know what I must do. I don’t want youth. I don’t want passion. I want those dear, dead days that I used to spend thinking of my lost youth, imagining I wanted it back. I want those long, pleasant, unproductive moments with my Elsie books and my water lilies. I want those hours spent in mild, unfertile thoughts of danger. I want those basking, middle-years among my beautifully worn out acquaintances. I long for rest and the non-eventful forties. I tell you, I want to be untroubled once more.
This is what I am going to do. At midnight, on the hour, I shall dress myself in my lace dressing gown, and, taking the paper weight with the picture of St. George driving out the dragons on the reverse side, I shall go down though the tall grasses, as a matron should, who is encased in her implacable years, and there, at the pond’s edge, cast myself in. No one shall know that I blossomed again at the age of discretion.
For I cannot bear the return of youth. It’s too much, I am too tired. I shall kill myself!
I have killed myself!