Read Ebook: Letters of a Dakota Divorcee by Burr Jane

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There is a N. Y. Central time table on my desk and I am eternally looking up train connections until I feel like a bureau of information. I have enough money to get back on, tucked away in my stocking. And if I have to take in washing I won't touch it. Funds are getting very low so I've started writing short stories again but "like" usual, publishers don't seem to recognize a genius and my P. O. box is always filled with long yellow comebacks--slip enclosed "Sorry we find your valuable Mss. unavailable for our publication, etc." However, nothing beats trying but failure. And although everything on this mud ball looks inky, and I am once more Past Grand Master of Hoodoo Philosophy, I shall grit my teeth and push ahead as I have done a thousand times before. My debts are growing like a snow ball and although I am not entirely broke, I am so badly bent that it ceases to be funny. There isn't a blooded dog here except the ones we Easterners bring. The Sioux Falls dogs are like the people--you can't tell exactly what breed they are, but as a few of the N. Y. lawyers and doctors and a few of the N. Y. dogs have remained here, we hope for a better blending in the next litter.

There is an Englishman here who calls himself "Chappie" but "Baw Jove" he never saw the other side of the Atlantic if I am any judge. But you can hand these people any sort of pill and they'll swallow it without making a face. We have no indigestible pleasures here, but the food. I am suffering from gastric nostalgia. I was so hungry for something sharp and sour last night that I bought a bottle of horse-radish and ate it in cold blood. Today my digestive apparatus is slumped and I feel like the ragged edge of a misspent career.

Every night the man in the next room, treats himself to a skin full and comes home so pleasantly lit up that he has to be put to bed. Last night he must have drunk like the sands of the desert, for he was a bit more tipsy than ever and flung apologies and hiccoughs over my transom.

I look back upon my old life as an impression received in the dawn, and already it seems but a level highroad on a gray day. Marriage laws were made by old maids--any one can see that. And they have decreed that conjugal love, apart from passion, is elevating and a woman in yielding herself may evict the sanctum of love if the man may legally call her his own. It's all wrong dear--woman has been sacrificed to the family. And what a degrading imitation of Nature to propagate the species. How glorious never again to be shod in the slippers of matrimony--I seem to demand the advantages of marriage with none of the drawbacks.

To return to things less serious, Othello hates something about my new combination lingerie and barks like fury when I put it on--maybe it is the blue ribbon--I'll try a dash of lavender tomorrow.

My affection is all for you--for the opposite sex it seems to have grown as cold as a raked-out oven.

Goodnight, MARIANNE.

September 21.

Most Precious Lorna:

I am excited--excited--from the bottom lift on my French heels to the top hair on my golden puffs.

Now who would have thought that the "Fate Sisters" would discover me way out here and sit on the corner of Minnesota and 12th spinning their breakable yarn.

Well--well--yesterday the one with the weary look and the crooked nose, got a knot in her twine and this is how it happened. I was crossing this Minnie-something street, when a shrill siren and the cannonade of a powerful exhaust warned me to stay my tootsies. I wasn't looking for a big white aseptic machine out here or any other kind, so the blooming thing crashed into us and rather than have Bunky hurt, I ran the risk of losing my life, but not until I had assured myself that the man at the wheel was exotic to this soil.

Zip-bang-gasoline-smoke! and I was fished out, laid tenderly on the back seat and rushed to a druggery. I allowed the dramatic spirits of pneumonia to be forced down my throat by his manicured hands and somehow I couldn't find the courage to take my head away from his shoulder--it was such a comfy, tailored Fifth Avenue shoulder. You know my reputation--30 years in a circus and never lost a spangle.

What is it that the Christian Scientists have on their souvenir spoons: "There is no life in matter?"--well old girl I can sign a testimonial to the opposite. Poor little Bunky added one more knot to his tail during the mix-up, but as every knot is worth twenty-four dollars on a French bull pup's tail, I don't mind this acquisition.

I was asked the other day if Bunk was a Pomeranian and I said, "No, a French bull pup." The woman answered, "That's the same thing, isn't it?"

Finally with a little home-made sob I opened my eyes and asked the same question that Eve put to Adam the morning after God had presented him with that poisonous bon-bon. "Where am I?" and it's none of your inquisitive business what he answered. The white auto will call tonight to see of I'm still living and meantime I have ordered fifty yards of white dabby stuff from "Fantles" to keep busy on. No--not a trousseau--I shall never--never marry again--I'm too full of experience.

I told the white auto that I had been hemmed in so long that I did not know how to act in decent society any more and he said he's the best hem-ripper that ever lived, so I think I'll take a chance. Isn't there a great difference in men, dear? But, in husbands--they vary only in the color of their hair.

I'm so glad motors stand without hitching. Now you'll say "Can't you leave men alone for six months?" Sometimes my conscience does get feverish and bothers me, but it's so seldom that I am grateful for the change as it acts as a stimulation to my gray matter--whatever that is.

My honest intentions were to leave off my puffs and artificials while here, just to give Nature a chance, but now that I have been run over by an auto I consider the plan inadvisable.

There are dandy golf links here but they don't allow "Divorsays" on the ground. The Sioux Falls women, had it stopped three years ago, because they were all neglected when any number of my tribe appeared.

Not a soul knows what I'm here for. One must never tell. That's the first divorce colony by-law. I have become a perfect diplomat and know how to keep still in three languages. I just casually told my troubles to the boarding house keeper and her daughters, but they don't count, as they are such dears, and it won't go any further.

As long as I live, my attorney says, I must sign in hotel registers from Sioux Falls--If I do the clerks will stoop to pick cockle burrs and tumble weeds off my skirts and help me to loosen my Indian wampum--whatever that is.

Father Time, whom I mentioned in my last and who possesses as much energy for getting divorces as Roosevelt exhibits in the Baby market, has taken to peddling "The Ladies Home Journal," and the "Saturday Evening Post," and if you only knew how cunning he looks with his abbreviated coat and short, quick, little steps, you would give a dollar for a picture of him to paste in your book of curiosities of the world.

Court was in session last week and all sorts of real Indians paraded the streets. They weren't like our dear old Irish Indians on Manhattan Island, who perambulate inside little houses placarded with one night corn cures; these were the real article and their wives walked behind, just like New York wives, carrying an orphan asylum on their backs and provisions for the week on their hips.

Last night at a wonderful performance of Fiske in "Rosmerholm," the house was packed with Indians and in the ghostly part where everybody throws himself into the mill-stream, Squaw Sloppy-Closey and Chief Many-Licey opened soda pop and passed it to each other for a drink out of the same bottle. Poor Fiske was horrified and threatened to stop the performance if the soda pop artillery didn't cease its bombarding.

The wind tears around the corner of my room on the bias and the cats keep up a Thomas Concert beneath my windows all night long. No wonder I have nightmares. Last night I dreamed that I was a saint with an apple pie for a halo--this boarding house pie habit will eventually tell on the strongest nerves.

Last night I cut my leg on a barbed wire--no dear I wasn't hurdling the fence--the wire was on the side walk, where everything except the kitchen stove usually lies. I hope I won't have lockjaw--it's harder on a woman than it is on a man anytime. I was just thinking how clever it would be, if a man who had a chattering wife, would keep a bunch of rusty pins on hand.

Thank heaven that the sunshine is free and that the florist's window is gratis to look at, otherwise on my slender means I should have to take advantage of the bankrupt law.

My old friend Insomnia again stands incessantly at the foot of my bed and bids me corner the sunrise market. A heavy heart is mine tonight and though I try to fancy beautiful pictures in the crystal ball of the future, I grow sick with anticipation as the visions fall away before they are half formed, leaving me melancholy and wondering if there is an angel somewhere who collects the sighs of such ever-repressed feeling.

Goodnight, MARIANNE.

October 5.

Lorna Dear:

Well, Lorna, you and I were "all day suckers" to believe that Mrs. Phyllis Lathrop was touring California; I bumped plump into her yesterday in front of the poor-house. No, dear, I did not go there to stay, merely to visit. Phyllis is nice in her red-headed way and looked very fresh and sweet with the lower part of her face lost in a tulle abyss. She lives just a whisper away from me--so strange I haven't seen her before. She's trotting around with a Sioux Falls fellow who looks like a Dutch luncheon favor. Every time he lifts his hat I look for bon-bons to drop out. Says she must be loving someone all the time, even if she is considered in the light of an accommodation train. She's the unfinished sort of a woman who carries her beauty around in little tubes and seems so used to audiences that I always feel that she must have sung between the acts.

The fellow whose motor sent me to the brink of the Styx, is now preparing me by night light to take the 33d degree of happiness. You have heard of him I know, Carlton Somerville, the Wall Street broker. I forget what it was his wife did that got on his nerves, but anyway he too is hibernating in Sioux Falls clay. We have gotten "First-namey" and have frankly decided that in order to keep our cleverness from dying of inanition, we will practice on each other.

How could you, my dearest friend, accuse me of being forgetful of Bern? He wouldn't appreciate me at all if I forgot how. And really six months of non-practice would be ruination.

Carlton has fallen in love over his depth with that beefy Mrs. Claymore and takes me motoring to pour his love into my aural labyrinths. I don't object to playing second fiddle, but when it comes to holding the triangle for the drummer, I pass blind. Never mind, while he isn't watching some day he'll get stung, for I'm really fond of him. You say that you are so much stronger willed than I am--did you ever look at yourself in the mirror? Carlton has eyes that I adore--they are the deeply sad sort that would make one think that love had passed that way. If it really hasn't, he might as well begin to put up the grand stand and have the tickets printed. My dear, I'd never marry another man with a memory--most inconvenient asset that a husband can possess.

After a month and a half of drinking Sioux Falls water, I would bring a higher price as a lime kiln than I would in the woman market. One's pelt gets wind tanned and such a thing as a daintily flushed face is as unlooked for out here as consideration from the natives.

My head ached so yesterday that I called on a doctor, "Visit including all medicine, one dollar." Isn't it "patetic?" He raved about the climate and said he brought his wife here with T. B., and she improved so much. Naturally I asked, "How is she now?" He said, "O, she's dead." Don't blame him for raving about the climate, do you?

My dear it is worth a trip out here to see a whist party "let out." No, not "bridge,"--they haven't heard of it yet--just plain whist; but as I was saying, to see one turn out with its white alpaca skirt and blue satin ribbon belt. I've paid two dollars at Hammerstein's to see things not half so funny. O, for a sip of Fleischman's coffee--there are grounds for divorce in every cup out here. The butter we eat, walks in from the country alone, and at every meal we get smashed potatoes piled as high as the snow on the Alps. I can't look a potato in the eye any more.

If I had Carnegie's millions, I'd go straight to Chicago, buy a big, fat, thick, beef steak, step into the middle of it and eat my way out. I'm hungry, hungry. I worry down the "dope" that they deal out in the dining room, then go back to my sanctum and finish on limey water and crack-nells--you know what they are, a powdery sort of counterfeit cake that chokes you to death if you happen to breathe while you're chewing it.

Last night while trying to cut some stringy roast beef and still retain my dignity, the man with the red tie said: "Put your other foot on it." I'm afraid if I don't eat potatoes again, my stomach will shrivel so that I will never be able to sit through a course dinner when I get back. Potatoes distend it all right--I feel like I have swallowed one wing of Fleischman's yeast factory whenever I eat them. You have to come down on the meat with such force to make any impression on it, that more gets pushed up between your teeth than goes down your alimentary canal; then you spend the balance of the night squandering Japanese dental floss. I unconsciously finish my prayers with "Lord preserve us from the holy trinity of roast beef, roast mutton and roast pork."

You can recognise one of the clan in a moment by what is known as the "Divorsay jaw." No feek and weeble expression on our faces but "Do or die" is the look we have in our optics.

Every time I go to church I vow I'll never go again. The organ is asthmatic and the wheezing gets on my gray matter.

The Judge has begun to wear a fur coat--Dakota cow fur, I think, and he looks for all the world like a turkey gobbler in distress.

I sleep on what they call here a "sanitary couch." Can't fathom the mystery of the name, for mine is so chucked with dust that I dream I'm in a sand storm crossing the Sahara, and when I awaken my sympathies are keen with the camel.

There's a new boarder here whose face looks like a chapel and every time she opens her mouth you're afraid it's going to be the Lord's Prayer. She wears a wide ruching which makes her look excited; distributes tracts, and can't see a joke. She says she's Miss and leaves envelopes around with "Mrs." written on them in red ink--modest writing fluid I've always considered it.

Will you buy me some new puffs? Mine are all ratty and I feel bare-footed without them. Enclosed is a clipping from my hair. Read it carefully. False hair is no crime as long as it matches--like that German song that says "Kissing is no sin with a pretty woman."

You can imagine what disastrous effect Eleanor Glynn's book had on the "Divorce Colony." We all bunched together and said "What's the use," and if it hadn't been for the old man who eats his soup out loud, we would have bolted in a mass to suggest "Free Love" to our respective "Fiascos"--Dakota's past tense for "Fiance."

I long so to flash my calciums on a Fifth Ave. stroller that I'd flirt with God if I met him.

I close dear with a sigh over my chin, which is getting triple .

October 25.

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