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Title: Many Marriages
Author: Sherwood Anderson
Release date: August 27, 2025 [eBook #76745]
Language: English
Original publication: New York: B.W. Huebsch, Inc, 1923
Credits: Carla Foust, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive/Canadian Libraries)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MANY MARRIAGES ***
MANY MARRIAGES
_OTHER BOOKS BY_
SHERWOOD ANDERSON
WINDY MCPHERSON’S SON (1916)
MARCHING MEN (1917)
MID-AMERICAN CHANTS (1918)
WINESBURG, OHIO (1919)
POOR WHITE (1920)
THE TRIUMPH OF THE EGG (1921)
_SHERWOOD ANDERSON_
_MANY MARRIAGES_
[Illustration]
NEW YORK B. W. HUEBSCH, INC. MCMXXIII
COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY
B. W. HUEBSCH, INC.
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
Published, February 20.
Second printing, February 20.
Third printing, March.
To
PAUL ROSENFELD
AN EXPLANATION
I wish to make an explanation--that should perhaps be also an
apology--to the readers of the _Dial_.
To the magazine I make due acknowledgment for the permission to print
in this book form.
To the _Dial_ reader I must explain that the story has been greatly
expanded since it appeared serially in the magazine. The temptation to
amplify my treatment of the theme was irresistible. If I have succeeded
in thus indulging myself without detriment to my story I shall be glad.
SHERWOOD ANDERSON.
A FOREWORD
If one seek love and go towards it directly, or as directly as one may
in the midst of the perplexities of modern life, one is perhaps insane.
Have you not known a moment when to do what would seem at other times
and under somewhat different circumstances the most trivial of acts
becomes suddenly a gigantic undertaking.
You are in the hallway of a house. Before you is a closed door and
beyond the door, sitting in a chair by a window, is a man or woman.
It is late in the afternoon of a summer day and your purpose is to step
to the door, open it, and say, “It is not my intention to continue
living in this house. My trunk is packed and in an hour a man, to whom
I have already spoken, will come for it. I have only come to say that I
will not be able to live near you any longer.”
There you are, you see, standing in the hallway, and you are to go into
the room and say these few words. The house is silent and you stand for
a long time in the hallway, afraid, hesitant, silent. In a dim way you
realize that when you came down into the hallway from the floor above
you came a-tiptoe.
For you and the one beyond the door it is perhaps better that you do
not continue living in the house. On that you would agree if you could
but talk sanely of the matter. Why are you unable to talk sanely?
Why has it become so difficult for you to take the three steps towards
the door? You have no disease of the legs. Why are your feet so heavy?
You are a young man. Why do your hands tremble like the hands of an old
man?
You have always thought of yourself as a man of courage. Why are you
suddenly so lacking in courage?
Is it amusing or tragic that you know you will be unable to step to the
door, open it, and going inside say the few words, without your voice
trembling?
Are you sane or are you insane? Why this whirlpool of thoughts within
your brain, a whirlpool of thoughts that, as you now stand hesitant,
seem to be sucking you down and down into a bottomless pit?
BOOK ONE
MANY MARRIAGES
I
There was a man named Webster lived in a town of twenty-five thousand
people in the state of Wisconsin. He had a wife named Mary and a
daughter named Jane and he was himself a fairly prosperous manufacturer
of washing machines. When the thing happened of which I am about to
write he was thirty-seven or eight years old and his one child, the
daughter, was seventeen. Of the details of his life up to the time a
certain revolution happened within him it will be unnecessary to speak.
He was however a rather quiet man inclined to have dreams which he
tried to crush out of himself in order that he function as a washing
machine manufacturer; and no doubt, at odd moments, when he was on a
train going some place or perhaps on Sunday afternoons in the summer
when he went alone to the deserted office of the factory and sat for
several hours looking out through a window and along a railroad track,
he gave way to dreams.
However for many years he went quietly along his way doing his work
like any other small manufacturer. Now and then he had a prosperous
year when money seemed plentiful and then he had bad years when the
local banks threatened to close him up, but as a manufacturer he did
manage to survive.
And so there was this Webster, drawing near to his fortieth year, and
his daughter had just graduated from the town high school. It was early
fall and he seemed to be going along and living his life about as usual
and then this thing happened to him.
Down within his body something began to affect him like an illness.
It is a little hard to describe the feeling he had. It was as though
something were being born. Had he been a woman he might have suspected
he had suddenly become pregnant. There he sat in his office at work or
walked about in the streets of his town and he had the most amazing
feeling of not being himself, but something new and quite strange.
Sometimes the feeling of not being himself became so strong in him that
he stopped suddenly in the streets and stood looking and listening. He
was, let us say, standing before a small store on a side street. Beyond
there was a vacant lot in which a tree grew and under the tree stood an
old work horse.
Had the horse come down to the fence and talked to him, had the tree
raised one of its heavier lower branches and thrown him a kiss or
had a sign that hung over the store suddenly shouted saying--“John
Webster, go prepare thyself for the day of the coming of God”--his life
at that time would not have seemed more strange than it did. Nothing
that could have happened in the exterior world, in the world of such
hard facts as sidewalks under his feet, clothes on his body, engines
pulling trains along the railroad tracks beside his factory, and street
cars rumbling through the streets where he stood, none of these could
possibly have done anything more amazing than the things that were at
that moment going on within him.
There he was, you see, a man of the medium height, with slightly
graying black hair, broad shoulders, large hands, and a full, somewhat
sad and perhaps sensual face, and he was much given to the habit of
smoking cigarettes. At the time of which I am speaking he found it very
hard to sit still in one spot and to do his work and so he continually
moved about. Getting quickly up from his chair in the factory office
he went out into the shops. To do so he had to pass through a large
outer office where there was a bookkeeper, a desk for his factory
superintendent and other desks for three girls who also did some kind
of office work, sent out circulars regarding the washing machine to
possible buyers, and attended to other details.
In his own office there was a broad-faced woman of twenty-four who
was his secretary. She had a strong, well-made body, but was not very
handsome. Nature had given her a broad flat face and thick lips, but
her skin was very clear and she had very clear fine eyes.
A thousand times, since he had become a manufacturer, John Webster
had walked thus out of his own office into the general office of the
factory and out through a door and along a board walk to the factory
itself, but not as he now walked.
Well, he had suddenly begun walking in a new world, that was a fact
that could not be denied. An idea came to him. “Perhaps I am becoming
for some reason a little insane,” he thought. The thought did not alarm
him. It was almost pleasing. “I like myself better as I am now,” he
concluded.
He was about to pass out of his small inner office into the larger
office and then on into the factory, but stopped by the door. The woman
who worked there in the room with him was named Natalie Swartz. She
was the daughter of a German saloon-keeper of the town who had married
an Irish woman and then had died leaving no money. He remembered what
he had heard of her and her life. There were two daughters and the
mother had an ugly temper and was given to drink. The older daughter
had become a teacher in the town schools and Natalie had learned
stenography and had come to work in the office of the factory. They
lived in a small frame house at the edge of town and sometimes the old
mother got drunk and abused the two girls. They were good girls and
worked hard, but in her cups the old mother accused them of all sorts
of immorality. All the neighbors felt sorry for them.
John Webster stood at the door with the door-knob in his hand. He was
looking hard at Natalie, but did not feel in the least embarrassed nor
strangely enough did she. She was arranging some papers, but stopped
working and looked directly at him. It was an odd sensation to be able
to look thus, directly into another person’s eyes. It was as though
Natalie were a house and he were looking in through a window. Natalie
herself lived within the house that was her body. What a quiet strong
dear person she was and how strange it was that he had been able to sit
near her every day for two or three years without ever before thinking
of looking into her house. “How many houses there are within which I
have not looked,” he thought.
A strange rapid little circle of thought welled up within him as he
stood thus, without embarrassment, looking into Natalie’s eyes. How
clean she had kept her house. The old Irish mother in her cups might
shout and rave calling her daughter a whore, as she sometimes did,
but her words did not penetrate into the house of Natalie. The little
thoughts within John Webster became words, not expressed aloud, but
words that ran like voices shouting softly within himself. “She is
my beloved,” one of the voices said. “You shall go into the house
of Natalie,” said another. A slow blush spread over Natalie’s face
and she smiled. “You are not very well lately. Are you worried about
something?” she said. She had never spoken to him before with just
that manner. There was a suggestion of intimacy about it. As a matter
of fact the washing machine business was at that time doing very well.
Orders were coming in rapidly and the factory was humming with life.
There were no notes to be paid at the bank. “Why, I am very well,” he
said, “very happy and very well, at just this moment.”
He went on into the outer office and the three women employed there and
the bookkeeper too stopped working to look at him. Their looking up
from their desks was just a kind of gesture. They meant nothing by it.
The bookkeeper came and asked a question regarding some account. “Why,
I would like it if you would use your own judgment about that,” John
Webster said. He was vaguely conscious the question had been concerned
with some man’s credit. Some man, in a far-away place, had written to
order twenty-four washing machines. He would sell them in a store. The
question was, when the time came, would he pay the manufacturer?
The whole structure of business, the thing in which all the men and
women in America were, like himself, in some way involved, was an odd
affair. Really he had not thought much about it. His father had owned
this factory and had died. He had not wanted to be a manufacturer. What
had he wanted to be? His father had certain things called patents.
Then the son, that was himself, was grown and had begun to manage
the factory. He got married and after a time his mother died. Then
the factory belonged to him. He made the washing machines that were
intended to take the dirt out of people’s clothes and employed men
to make them and other men to go forth and sell them. He stood in
the outer office seeing, for the first time, all life of modern men
as a strange involved thing. “It wants understanding and a lot of
thinking about,” he said aloud. The bookkeeper had turned to go back
to his desk, but stopped and turned, thinking he had been spoken to.
Near where John Webster stood a woman was addressing circulars. She
looked up and smiled suddenly and he liked her smiling so. “There is
a way--something happens--people suddenly and unexpectedly come close
to each other,” he thought and went out through the door and along the
board walk toward the factory.
In the factory there was a kind of singing noise going on and there
was a sweet smell. Great piles of cut boards lay about and the singing
noise was made by saws cutting the boards into proper lengths and
shapes to make up the parts of the washing machines. Outside the
factory doors were three cars loaded with lumber and workmen were
unloading boards and sliding them along a kind of runway into the
building.
John Webster felt very much alive. The timbers had no doubt come to
his factory from a great distance. That was a strange and interesting
fact. Formerly, in his father’s time, there had been a great deal of
timber land in Wisconsin but now the forests were pretty much cut away
and timber was shipped in from the South. Somewhere, in the place from
which had come the boards, now being unloaded at his factory door, were
forests and rivers and men going into the forests and cutting down
trees.
He had not for years felt so alive as he did at that moment, standing
there by the factory door and seeing the men slide the boards from the
car along the runway and into the building. How peaceful and quiet
the scene! The sun was shining and the boards were of a bright yellow
color. A kind of perfume came from them. His own mind was an amazing
thing too. At the moment he could see, not only the cars and the men
unloading them, but also the land from which the boards came. There
was a place, far in the South, where the waters of a low marshy river
had spread out until the river was two or three miles wide. It was
spring and there had been a flood. At any rate, in the imagined scene,
many trees were submerged and there were men in boats, black men, who
were pushing logs out of the submerged forest into the wide sluggish
stream. The men were great powerful fellows and sang as they worked,
a song about John, the disciple and close comrade of Jesus. The men
had on high boots and in their hands were long poles. Those in the
boats on the river itself caught the logs when they were pushed out
from among the trees and gathered them together to form a great raft.
Two of the men jumped out of the boats and ran about on the floating
logs fastening them together with young saplings. The other men, back
somewhere in the forest, kept singing and the men on the raft answered.
The song was about John and how he went down to fish in a lake. And the
Christ came to call him and his brothers out of the boats to go through
the hot dusty land of Galilee, “following in the footsteps of the
Lord.” Presently the song stopped and there was silence.
How strong and rhythmical the bodies of the workers! Their bodies
swayed back and forth as they worked. There was a kind of dance in
their bodies.
Now two things happened in John Webster’s fanciful world. A woman, a
golden-brown woman, came down along the river in a boat and all the
workmen stopped working to stand looking at her. She had no hat on her
head and as she pushed the boat forward through the sluggish water her
young body swayed from side to side, as the bodies of the men workers
had swayed when they handled the logs. The hot sun was shining on the
body of the brown girl and her neck and shoulders were bare. One of
the men on the raft called to her. “Hello, Elizabeth,” he shouted. She
stopped paddling the boat and let it float for a moment.
“Hello you’ self, you China boy,” she answered laughing.
Again she began to paddle vigorously. A log shot out from amid the
trees at the river’s edge, the trees that were submerged in the yellow
water, and a young black stood astride it. With the pole in his hand he
gave a vigorous push against one of the trees and the log came swiftly
down toward the raft where two other men stood waiting.
The sun was shining on the neck and shoulders of the brown girl in the
boat. The movements of her arms made dancing lights on her skin. The
skin was brown, a golden coppery brown. Her boat slipped about a bend
of the river and disappeared. There was a moment of silence and then,
from back among the trees, a voice took up a new song in which the
other blacks joined--
“Doubting Thomas, doubting Thomas,
Doubting Thomas, doubt no more.
And before I’d be a slave,
I’d be buried in my grave,
And go home to my father and be saved.”
John Webster stood with blinking eyes watching the men unload boards
at his factory door. The little voices within him were saying strange
joyous things. One could not be just a manufacturer of washing machines
in a Wisconsin town. In spite of oneself one became, at odd moments,
something else too. One became a part of something as broad as the land
in which one lived. One went about in a little shop in a town. The
shop was in an obscure place, by a railroad track and beside a shallow
stream, but it was also a part of some vast thing no one had as yet
begun to understand. He himself was a man standing, clad in ordinary
clothes, but within his clothes, and within his body too there was
something, well perhaps not vast in itself, but vaguely indefinitely
connected with some vast thing. It was odd he had never thought of that
before. Had he thought of it? There were the men before him unloading
the timbers. They touched the timbers with their hands. A kind of
union was made between them and the black men who had cut the timbers
and floated them down a stream to a sawmill in some far-away Southern
place. One went about all day and every day touching things other men
had touched. There was something wanted, a consciousness of the thing
touched. A consciousness of the significance of things and people.
“And before I’d be a slave,
I’d be buried in my grave,
And go home to my father and be saved.”
He went through the door into his shop. Near by, at a machine, a man
was sawing boards. There was no doubt the pieces selected for the
making of his washing machine were not always of the best. Some of
the pieces would soon enough break. They were put into a part of the
machine where it didn’t so much matter, where they wouldn’t be seen.
The machines had to be sold at a low price. He felt a little ashamed
and then laughed. One might easily become involved in small things when
there were big rich things to be thought about. One was a child and had
to learn to walk. What was it one had to learn? To walk about smelling
things, tasting things, feeling things perhaps. One had to learn who
else was in the world besides oneself, for one thing. One had to look
about a little. It was all very well to be thinking that better boards
should be put into washing machines that poor women bought, but one
might easily become corrupted by giving oneself over to such thoughts.
There was danger of a kind of smug self-righteousness got from thinking
about putting only good boards in washing machines. He had known men
like that and had always had a kind of contempt for them.
He went on through the factory, past rows of men and boys standing at
machines at work, forming the various parts of the washing machines,
putting the parts together, painting and packing the machines for
shipment. The upper part of the building was given over to the storage
of materials. He walked through piles of cut boards to a window that
looked down upon the shallow and now half-dry stream on the banks of
which the factory stood. There were signs all about forbidding smoking
in the factory, but he had forgotten and now took a cigarette out of
his pocket and lighted it.
A rhythm of thought went on within him that was in some way related to
the rhythm of the bodies of the black men at work in the forest of the
world of his imagination. He had been standing before his factory door
in a town in the state of Wisconsin but at the same time he was in the
South, with some blacks working on a river, and at the same time with
some fishermen on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, when a man came down
to the shore and began to say strange words. “There must be more than
one of me,” he thought vaguely and when his mind had formed the thought
something seemed to have happened within himself. A few moments before,
as he stood in the presence of Natalie Swartz down in the office, he
had thought of her body as a house within which she lived. That was
an illuminating thought too. Why could not more than one person live
within such a house?
It would clear a good many things up if such an idea got abroad. No
doubt it was an idea that had come to a great many other men, but
perhaps they had not put it forth in a simple enough way. He had
himself gone to school in his town and later to the University at
Madison. For a time he had read a good many books. At one time he had
thought he might like to be a writer of books.
And no doubt a great many of the writers of books had been visited by
just such thoughts as he was having now. Within the pages of some books
one found a kind of refuge from the tangle of things in daily life.
Perhaps as they wrote, these men felt, as he felt now, exhilarated,
carried out of themselves.
He puffed at his cigarette and looked beyond the river. His factory
was at the edge of town and beyond the river fields began. All men and
women were like himself standing on a common ground. All over America,
all over the world for that matter, men and women did outward things
much as he did. They ate food, slept, worked, made love.
He was growing a little weary of thinking and rubbed his hand across
his forehead. His cigarette had burned out and he dropped it on the
floor and lighted another. Men and women tried to go within one
another’s bodies, were at times almost insanely anxious to do it. That
was called making love. He wondered if a time might come when men and
women did that quite freely. It was difficult to try to think one’s way
through such a tangle of thoughts.
There was one thing sure, he had never before been in this state. Well
that was not true. There was a time once. It was when he married. Then
he had felt as he did now, but something had happened.
He began to think of Natalie Swartz. There was something clear and
innocent about her. Perhaps, without knowing, he had fallen in love
with her, the daughter of a saloon-keeper and the drunken old Irish
woman. That would explain much if it had happened.
He became aware of a man standing near him and turned. A workman in
overalls stood a few feet away. He smiled. “I guess you have forgotten
something,” he said. John Webster smiled also. “Well yes,” he said,
“a good many things. I’m nearly forty years old and I guess I have
forgotten to live. What about you?”
The workman smiled again. “I mean the cigarettes,” he said and pointed
to the burning and smoking end of the cigarette that lay on the floor.
John Webster put his foot on it and then dropping the other cigarette
to the floor put his foot on that. He and the workman stood looking
at each other as but a little while before he had looked at Natalie
Swartz. “I wonder if I might go within his house also,” he thought.
“Well, I thank you. I had forgotten. My mind was far away,” he said
aloud. The workman nodded. “I am sometimes like that myself,” he
explained.
The puzzled manufacturer went down out of the upstairs room and along
a branch of the railroad that led into the shop to the main tracks
along which he walked toward the more inhabited part of town. “It must
be almost noon,” he thought. Usually he had lunch at a place near his
factory and his employees brought their lunches in packages and tin
pails. He thought now he would go to his own home. He would not be
expected but thought he would like to look at his wife and daughter.
A passenger train came rushing down along the tracks and although the
whistle blew madly he was unaware of it. Then when it was almost upon
him a young negro, a tramp perhaps, at any rate a black man in ragged
clothes who was also walking on the tracks, ran to him and taking hold
of his coat jerked him violently to one side. The train rushed past and
he stood staring after it. He and the young negro also looked into each
other’s eyes. He put his hand into his pocket, instinctively feeling
that he should pay the man for the service done him.
And then a kind of shudder ran through his body. He was very tired.
“My mind was far away,” he said. “Yes, boss. I’m sometimes that way
myself,” the young negro said, smiling and walking away along the
tracks.
II
John Webster rode to his house on a street car. It was half-past
twelve o’clock when he arrived and, as he had anticipated, he was
not expected. Behind his house, a rather commonplace looking frame
affair, there was a little garden with two apple trees. He walked
around the house and saw his daughter, Jane Webster, lying in a hammock
hung between the trees. There was an old rocking-chair under one of
the trees near the hammock and he went and sat in it. His daughter
was surprised at his coming upon her so, at the noon hour when he so
seldom appeared. “Well, hello Dad,” she said listlessly, sitting up
and dropping on the grass at his feet a book she had been reading. “Is
there anything wrong?” she asked. He shook his head.
Picking up the book he began to read and her head dropped again to the
cushion in the hammock. The book was a modern novel of the period. It
concerned life in the old city of New Orleans. He read a few pages.
It was no doubt the sort of thing that might take one out of oneself,
take one away from the dullness of life. A young man was stealing along
a street in the darkness and had a cloak wrapped about his shoulders.
Overhead the moon shone. The magnolia trees were in blossom filling
the air with perfume. The young man was very handsome. The scene of
the novel was laid in the time before the Civil War and he owned a
great many slaves.
John Webster closed the book. There was no need of reading. When he was
still a young man he had sometimes read such books himself. They took
one out of oneself, made the dullness of everyday existence seem less
terrible.
That was an odd thought, that everyday existence need be dull. There
was no doubt the last twenty years of his own life had been dull, but
during that morning, life had not been so. It seemed to him he had
never before had such a morning.
Another book lay in the hammock and he took it up and read a few lines:
“You see,” said Wilberforce calmly, “I am returning to South Africa
soon. I am not even planning to cast my fortunes with Virginia.”
Umbrage broke into protestations, came up, and put his hand on John’s
arm, and then Malloy looked at his daughter. As he feared would be
the case, her eyes were fastened on Charles Wilberforce. He had
thought, when he brought her to Richmond that night, that she was
looking wonderfully well and gay. So indeed she had been, with the
prospect before her of seeing Charles again after six weeks. Now
she was lifeless and pale as a candle from which the flame has been
struck.
John Webster glanced at his daughter. As he sat he could look directly
into her face.
“As pale as a candle from which the flame has been struck, huh. What a
fancy way of putting things.” Well, his own daughter Jane was not pale.
She was a robust young thing. “A candle that has never been lighted,”
he thought.
It was a strange and terrible fact, but the truth was he had never
thought much about his daughter, and here she was almost a woman.
There was no doubt she already had the body of a woman. The functions
of womanhood went on in her body. He sat, looking directly at her. A
moment before he had been very weary, now the weariness was quite gone.
“She might already have had a child,” he thought. Her body was prepared
for child-bearing, it had grown and developed to that state. What an
immature face she had. Her mouth was pretty but there was something,
a kind of blankness. “Her face is like a fair sheet of paper on which
nothing has been written.”
Her eyes in wandering met his eyes. It was odd. Something like fright
came into them. She sat quickly up. “What’s the matter with you, Dad?”
she asked sharply. He smiled. “There isn’t anything the matter,”
he said, looking away. “I thought I’d come home to lunch. Is there
anything wrong about that?”
* * * * *
His wife, Mary Webster, came to the back door of the house and called
her daughter. When she saw her husband her eyebrows went up. “This is
unexpected. What brought you home at this time of the day?” she asked.
They went into the house and along a hallway to the dining room, but
there was no place set for him. He had a feeling they both thought
there was something wrong, almost immoral, about his being home at that
time of the day. It was unexpected and the unexpected has a doubtful
air. He concluded he had better explain. “I had a headache and thought
I would come home and lie down for an hour,” he said. He felt they
looked relieved, as though he had taken a load off their minds, and
smiled at the thought. “May I have a cup of tea? Will it be too much
trouble?” he asked.
While the tea was being brought he pretended to look out through
a window, but in secret studied his wife’s face. She was like her
daughter. There was nothing written on her face. Her body was getting
heavy.
She had been a tall slender girl with yellow hair when he married her.
Now the impression she gave off was of one who had grown large without
purpose, “somewhat as cattle are fattened for slaughter,” he thought.
One did not feel the bone and muscle back of her bulk. Her yellow hair
that, when she was younger, had a way of glistening strangely in the
sunlight was now rather colorless. It had the air of being dead at the
roots and there were folds of quite meaningless flesh on the face among
which little streams of wrinkles wandered.
“Her face is a blank thing, untouched by the finger of life,” he
thought. “She is a tall tower, without a foundation, that will soon
fall down.” There was something very lovely and at the same time rather
terrible to himself in the state he was now in. Things he said or
thought to himself had a kind of poetic power in them. A group of words
formed in his mind and the words had power and meaning. He sat playing
with the handle of the teacup. Suddenly a great desire to see his own
body came over him. He arose and with an apology went out of the room
and up a stairway. His wife called to him: “Jane and I are going to
drive out into the country. Is there anything I can do for you before
we go?”
He stopped on the stairs, but did not answer at once. Her voice was
like her face, a little fleshy and heavy. How odd it was for him, a
commonplace washing machine manufacturer in a Wisconsin town, to be
thinking in this way, to be noting all these little details of life.
He resorted to a trick, wanting to hear his daughter’s voice. “Did you
call to me, Jane?” he asked. The daughter answered, explaining that
it was her mother who had spoken and repeating what had been said. He
answered that he wanted nothing but to lie down for an hour and went
on up the stairs and into his own room. The daughter’s voice, like the
mother’s, seemed to represent her exactly. It was young and clear, but
had no resonance. He closed the door to his room and bolted it. Then he
began taking off his clothes.
Now he was not in the least weary. “I’m sure I must be a little insane.
A sane person would not note every little thing that goes on as I do
to-day,” he thought. He sang softly, wanting to hear his own voice,
to in a way test it against the voices of his wife and daughter. He
hummed over the words of a negro song that had been in his mind earlier
in the day,
“And before I’d be a slave,
I’d be buried in my grave,
And go home to my father and be saved.”
He thought his own voice all right. The words came out of his throat
clearly and there was a kind of resonance too. “Had I tried to sing
yesterday it would not have sounded like that,” he concluded. The
voices of his mind were playing about busily. There was a kind of
gaiety in him. The thought that had come that morning when he looked
into the eyes of Natalie Swartz came running back. His own body, that
was now naked, was a house. He went and stood before a mirror and
looked at himself. His body was still slender and healthy looking,
outside. “I think I know what all this business is I am going through,”
he concluded. “A kind of house cleaning is going on. My house has
been vacant now for twenty years. Dust has settled on the walls and
furniture. Now, for some reason I do not understand, the doors and
windows have been thrown open. I shall have to scrub the walls and the
floors, make everything sweet and clean as it is in Natalie’s house.
Then I shall invite people in to visit me.” He ran his hands over his
naked body, over his breasts, arms, and legs. Something within him was
laughing.
He went and threw himself, thus naked on the bed. There were four
sleeping rooms in the upper floor of the house. His own was at a
corner and there were doors opening into his wife’s and his daughter’s
rooms. When he had first married his wife they had slept together, but
when the baby came they gave that up and never did it afterward. Once
in a long while now he went in to his wife at night. She wanted him,
let him know in some woman’s way that she wanted him, and he went, not
happily or eagerly, but because he was a man and she a woman and it was
done. The thought wearied him a little. “Well it hasn’t happened for
some weeks.” He did not want to think about it.
He owned a horse and carriage that was kept at a livery stable and now
it was being driven up to the door of the house. He heard the front
door close. His wife and daughter were driving out into the country.
The window of his room was open and a breeze blew in and across his
body. The next-door neighbor had a garden and cultivated flowers.
The air that came in was fragrant. The sounds were all soft, quiet
sounds. Sparrows chirped. A large winged insect flew against the screen
that covered the window and crawled slowly toward the top. Away off
somewhere the bell of a locomotive began to ring. Perhaps it was on the
tracks by his factory where Natalie was now sitting at her desk. He
turned to look at the winged thing, crawling slowly. The little voices
that lived within one’s body were not always serious. Sometimes they
played like children. One of the voices declared that the eyes of the
insect were looking at him with approval. Now the insect was speaking.
“You are a devil of a fellow to have been so long asleep,” it said.
The bell of the locomotive could still be heard, coming from a long
distance, softly. “I’ll tell Natalie what that winged fellow had to
say,” he thought and smiled at the ceiling. His cheeks became flushed
and he slept quietly with his hands thrown above his head, as a child
sleeps.
III
When he awoke an hour later he was at first frightened. He looked about
the room wondering if he had been ill.
Then his eyes began an inventory of the furniture of the room. He did
not like anything there. Had he lived for twenty years of his life
among such things? They were no doubt all right. He knew little of such
things. Few men did. A thought came. How few men in America ever really
thought of the houses they lived in, of the clothes they wore. Men
were willing to go through a long life without any effort to decorate
their bodies, to make lovely and full of meaning the dwellings in
which they lived. His own clothes were hanging on a chair where he had
thrown them when he came into the room. In a moment he would get up
and put them on. Thousands of times, since he had come to manhood, he
had gone through the performance of clothing his body without thought.
The clothes had been bought casually at some store. Who had made them?
What thought had been given to the making of them or to the wearing of
them either? He looked at his body lying on the bed. The clothes would
enclose his body, wrap it about.
A thought came into his mind, rang across the spaces of his mind like a
bell heard across fields: “Nothing either animate or inanimate can be
beautiful that is not loved.”
Getting off the bed he dressed quickly and hurrying out of the room ran
down a flight of stairs to the floor below. At the foot of the stairs
he stopped. He felt suddenly old and weary and thought perhaps he had
better not try to go back to the factory that afternoon. There was no
need of his presence there. Everything was going all right. Natalie
would attend to anything that came up.
“A fine business if I, a respectable business man with a wife and a
grown daughter, get myself involved in an affair with Natalie Swartz,
the daughter of a man who when he was alive ran a low saloon and of
that terrible old Irish woman who is the scandal of the town and who
when she is drunk talks and yells so that the neighbors threaten to
have her arrested and are only held back because they have sympathy for
the daughters.
“The fact is that a man may work and work to make a decent place for
himself and then by a foolish act all may be destroyed. I’ll have to
watch myself a little. I’ve been working too steadily. Perhaps I’d
better take a vacation. I don’t want to get into a mess,” he thought.
How glad he was that, although he had been in a state all day long, he
had said nothing to anyone that would betray his condition.
He stood with his hand on the railing of the stairs. At any rate he
had been doing a lot of thinking for the last two or three hours. “I
haven’t been wasting my time.”
A notion came. After he married and when he had found out his wife was
frightened and driven within herself by every outburst of passion and
that as a result there was not much joy in making love to her he had
formed a habit of going off on secret expeditions. It had been easy
enough to get away. He told his wife he was going on a business trip.
Then he went somewhere, to the city of Chicago usually. He did not go
to one of the big hotels, but to some obscure place on a side street.
Night came and he set out to find himself a woman. Always he went
through the same kind of rather silly performance. He was not given to
drinking, but he now took several drinks. One might go at once to some
house where women were to be had, but he really wanted something else.
He spent hours wandering in the streets.
There was a dream. One vainly hoped to find, wandering about somewhere,
a woman who by some miracle would love with freedom and abandon. Along
through the streets one went usually in dark badly lighted places where
there were factories and warehouses and poor little dwellings. One
wanted a golden woman to step up out of the filth of the place in which
one walked. It was insane and silly and one knew these things, but one
persisted insanely. Amazing conversations were imagined. Out from the
shadow of one of the dark buildings the woman was to step. She was
also lonely, hungry, defeated. One went boldly up to her and began at
once a conversation filled with strange and beautiful words. Love came
flooding their two bodies.
Well perhaps that was exaggerated a little. No doubt one was never
quite fool enough to expect anything so wonderful as all that. At any
rate what one did was to wander about in the dark streets thus for
hours and in the end take up with some prostitute. The two hurried
silently off into a little room. Uh. There was always the feeling,
“Perhaps other men have been in here with her already to-night.” There
was a halting attempt at conversation. Could they get to know each
other, this woman and this man? The woman had a businesslike air. The
night was not over and her work was done at night. Too much time must
not be wasted. From her point of view a great deal of time had to be
wasted in any event. Often one walked half the night without making any
money at all.
After such an adventure John Webster came home the next day feeling
very mean and unclean. Still he did work better at the office and at
night for a long time he slept better. For one thing he kept his mind
on affairs and did not give way to dreams and to vague thoughts. When
one was running a factory that was an advantage.
Now he stood at the foot of the stairs, thinking perhaps he had better
go off on such an adventure again. If he stayed at home and sat all day
and every day in the presence of Natalie Swartz there was no telling
what would happen. One might as well face facts. After his experience
of that morning, his looking into her eyes, in just the same way he
had, the life of the two people in the office would be changed. A new
thing would have come into the very air they breathed together. It
would be better if he did not go back to the office, but went off at
once and took a train to Chicago or Milwaukee. As for his wife--he
had got that notion into his head of a kind of death of the flesh. He
closed his eyes and leaned against the stair railing. His mind became a
blank.
A door leading into the dining room of the house opened and a woman
stepped forth. She was the Webster’s one servant and had been in the
house for many years. Now she was past fifty and as she stood before
John Webster he looked at her as he hadn’t for a long time. A multitude
of thoughts came quickly, like a handful of shot thrown against a
window pane.
The woman standing before him was tall and lean and her face was marked
by deep lines. It was an odd thing, the notions men had got into their
heads about the beauty of women. Perhaps Natalie Swartz, when she was
fifty, would look much like this woman.
Her name was Katherine and her coming to work for the Websters long ago
had brought on a quarrel between John Webster and his wife. There had
been a wreck on the railroad near the Webster factory and this woman
was traveling in the day coach of the wrecked train with a man much
younger than herself, who was killed. A young man of Indianapolis, who
worked in a bank, had run away with a woman who was a servant in his
father’s house and after he disappeared a large sum of money was missed
at the bank. He had been killed in the wreck as he sat with the woman
and all trace of him had been lost until someone from Indianapolis,
quite by chance, saw and recognized Katherine on the streets of her
adopted town. The question asked was, what had become of the money, and
Katherine had been accused of knowing and of concealing it.
Mrs. Webster had wanted to discharge her at once and there had been
a quarrel in which the husband had in the end come out victorious.
For some reason the whole strength of his being had been put into the
matter and one night as he stood in the common bedroom with his wife he
had made a pronouncement so strong that he himself was surprised by the
words that came from his lips. “If this woman goes out of this house
without going voluntarily then I go also,” he had said.
Now John Webster stood in the hallway of his house looking at the woman
who had been the cause of the quarrel long ago. Well, he had seen her
going silently about the house almost every day during the long years
since that thing happened, but he had not looked at her as he did now.
When she grew older Natalie Swartz might look as this woman now looked.
If he were to be a fool and run away with Natalie, as that young fellow
from Indianapolis had once run away with this woman, and if it fell
out there was no railroad wreck he might some day be living with a
woman who looked somewhat as Katherine now looked.
The thought did not alarm him. It was on the whole rather a sweet
thought. “She has lived and sinned and suffered,” he thought. There
was about the woman’s person a kind of strong quiet dignity and it was
reflected in her physical being. There was no doubt a kind of dignity
coming into his own thoughts too. The notion of going off to Chicago or
Milwaukee to walk through dirty streets hungering for the golden woman
to come to him out of the filth of life was quite gone now.
The woman Katherine was smiling at him. “I did not eat any lunch
because I did not feel like eating but now I’m hungry. Is there
anything to eat in the house, anything you might get for me without too
much trouble?” he asked.
She lied cheerfully. She had just prepared lunch for herself in the
kitchen but now offered it to him.
He sat at the table eating the food Katherine had prepared. Outside
the house the sun was shining. It was only a little after two o’clock
and the afternoon and evening were before him. It was strange how the
Bible, the older Testaments, kept asserting themselves in his mind.
He had never been much of a Bible reader. There was perhaps a kind of
massive splendor to the prose of the book that now fell into step with
his own thoughts. In that time, when men lived on the hills and on the
plains with their flocks, life lasted in the body of a man or woman a
long time. Men were spoken of who had lived for several hundred years.
Perhaps there was more than one way to reckon the length of life. In
his own case--if he could live every day as fully as he had been living
this day, life would be for him lengthened indefinitely.
Katherine came into the room bringing more food and a pot of tea and
he looked up and smiled at her. Another thought came. “It would be an
amazingly beautiful thing to have happen in the world if everyone,
every living man, woman, and child, should suddenly, by a common
impulse, come out of their houses, out of the factories and stores,
come, let us say, into a great plain, where everyone could see everyone
else, and if they should there and then, all of them, in the light of
day, with everyone in the world knowing fully what everyone else in
the world was doing, if they should all by one common impulse commit
the most unforgivable sin of which they were conscious, what a great
cleansing time that would be.”
His mind made a kind of riot of pictures and he ate the food Katherine
had set before him without thought of the physical act of eating.
Katherine started to go out of the room and then, noting that he was
unaware of her presence, stopped by the door leading into the kitchen
and stood looking at him. He had never known that she had been aware
of the struggle he had gone through for her many years before. Had he
not made that struggle she would not have stayed on in the house. As
a matter of fact, on that evening when he had declared that if she
were to be made to leave he would leave also, the door to the bedroom
upstairs was a little ajar and she was in the hallway downstairs. She
had packed her few belongings and had them in a bundle and had intended
to steal away somewhere. There was no point to her staying. The man
she loved was dead and now she was being hounded by the newspapers and
there was a threat that if she did not tell where the money was hidden
she would be sent to prison. As for the money--she did not believe the
man who had been killed knew any more about it than she did. No doubt
there was money stolen and then, because he had run away with her, the
crime was put upon her lover. The affair was very simple. The young man
worked in the bank and was engaged to be married to a woman of his own
class. And then one night he and Katherine were alone in his father’s
house and something happened between them.
As she stood watching her employer eat the food she had prepared for
herself, Katherine thought proudly of an evening long before when
she had quite recklessly become the sweetheart of another man. She
remembered the fight John Webster had once made for her and thought
with contempt of the woman who was her employer’s wife.
“That such a man should have such a woman,” she thought, recalling the
long heavy figure of Mrs. Webster.
As though aware of her thoughts the man again turned and smiled at her.
“I am eating the food she had prepared for herself,” he told himself,
and got quickly up from the table. He went out into the hallway and
having taken his hat from a rack lighted a cigarette. Then he returned
to the dining room door. The woman stood by the table looking at him
and he in turn looked at her. There was no embarrassment. “If I should
go away with Natalie and she should become like Katherine it would
be fine,” he thought. “Well, well, good bye,” he said haltingly and
turning walked rapidly out of the house.
* * * * *
As John Webster walked along the street the sun was shining and as
there was a light breeze a few leaves were falling from the maple shade
trees with which the streets were lined. Soon there would be frost and
the trees would be all afire with color. If one could only be aware,
glorious days were ahead. Even in the Wisconsin town one might have
glorious days. There was a little pang of hunger, a new kind of hunger,
within him as he stopped and stood for a moment looking up and down the
residence street on which he had been walking. Two hours before, lying
naked on the bed in his own house, he had been having the thoughts
concerning clothes and houses. It was a charming thought to play with
but brought sadness too. Why was it that so many houses along the
street were ugly? Were people unaware? Could anyone be quite completely
unaware? Could one wear ugly commonplace clothes, live always in an
ugly or commonplace house in a commonplace street of a commonplace town
and remain always unaware?
Now he was thinking of things he decided had better be left out of the
thoughts of a business man. However, for this one day, he would give
himself over to the thinking of any thought that came into his head.
To-morrow things would be different. He would become again what he had
always been (with the exception of a few slips, times when he had been
rather as he was now), a quiet orderly man going about his business and
not given to foolishness. He would run his washing machine business
and try to keep his mind on that. In the evenings he would read the
newspapers and keep abreast of the events of the day.
“I don’t go on a bat very often. I deserve a little vacation,” he
thought rather sadly.
* * * * *
Ahead of him in the street, almost two blocks ahead, a man walked. John
Webster had met the man once. He was a professor in a small college
of the town, and once, two or three years before, there had been an
effort made, on the part of the college president, to raise money among
local business men to help the school through a financial crisis. A
dinner was given and attended by a number of the college faculty and by
an organization called the Chamber of Commerce to which John Webster
belonged. The man who now walked before him had been at the dinner and
he and the washing machine manufacturer had been seated together. He
wondered if he might now presume on that brief acquaintanceship to go
and talk with the man. He had been thinking rather unusual thoughts to
come into a man’s head and perhaps, if he could talk with some other
man and in particular with a man whose business in life it was to have
thoughts and to understand thought, something might be gained.
There was a narrow strip of grass between the sidewalk and the roadway
and along this John Webster began to run. He just grabbed his hat in
his hand and ran bareheaded for perhaps two hundred yards and then
stopped and looked quietly up and down the street.
It was all right, after all. Apparently no one had seen his strange
performance. There were no people sitting on the porches of the houses
along the street. He thanked God for that.
Ahead of him the college professor went soberly along with a book under
his arm, unaware that he was followed. When he saw that his absurd
performance had escaped notice John Webster laughed. “Well, I went to
college myself once. I’ve heard enough college professors talk. I don’t
know why I should expect anything from one of that stripe.”
Perhaps to speak of the things that had been in his mind that day
something almost like a new language would be required.
There was that thought about Natalie being a house kept clean and
sweet for living, a house into which one might go gladly and joyfully.
Could he, a washing machine manufacturer of a Wisconsin town, stop on
the street a college professor and say--“I want to know, Mr. College
Professor, if your house is clean and sweet for living so that people
may come into it and, if it is so, I want you to tell me how you went
about it to cleanse your house.”
The notion was absurd. It made one laugh to even think of any such
thing. There would have to be new figures of speech, a new way of
looking at things. For one thing people would have to be more truly
aware of themselves than they had ever been before.
Almost in the centre of town and before a stone building that was some
kind of public institution there was a small park with benches and John
Webster stopped following the college professor and went and sat on
one of them. From where he sat he could see along two of the principal
business thoroughfares.
It wasn’t a thing done by prosperous washing machine manufacturers,
this sitting on benches in the park in the middle of the afternoon
but he, at the moment, did not much care. To tell the truth the place
for such a man as himself, who owned a factory where many men were
employed, was at his desk in his own office. In the evening one might
stroll about, read the newspapers or go to the theatre but now, at this
hour, the thing was to attend to affairs, be on the job.
He smiled at the thought of himself lolling there on the park bench
like a public idler or a tramp. On other benches in the little park
sat other men and that was the kind of men they were. Well, they were
the kind of fellows who didn’t fit into things, who hadn’t jobs. One
could tell that by looking at them. There was a kind of hang-dog air
about them and although two of the men on a nearby bench talked to
each other they did it in a dull listless way that showed they were not
really interested in what they were saying. Were men, when they talked,
ever really interested in what they said to each other?
John Webster put his arms above his head and stretched. He was more
aware of himself, of his own body, than he had been for years. “There’s
something going on like the breaking up of a long hard winter. Spring
is coming in me,” he thought and the thought pleased him like a caress
from the hand of someone he loved.
Weary tired moments had been coming to him all day long and now another
came. He was like a train running through a mountainous country and
occasionally passing through tunnels. In one moment the world about him
was all alive and then it was just a dull dreary place that frightened
him. The thought that came to him was something like this--“Well, here
I am. There is no use denying it, something unusual has happened to me.
Yesterday I was one thing. Now I am something else. About me everywhere
are these people I have always known, here in this town. Down that
street there before me, at the corner there, in that stone building,
is the bank where I do the banking business for my factory. It happens
that just at this particular time I do not owe them any money, but a
year from now I may be in debt to that institution up to my eyebrows.
There have been times, in the years I have lived and worked as a
manufacturer, when I was altogether in the power of the men who now sit
at desks behind those stone walls. Why they didn’t close me up and
take my business away from me I don’t know. Perhaps they did not think
it worth while and then, perhaps, they felt, if they left me on there I
would be working for them anyway. At any rate now, it doesn’t seem to
matter much what such an institution as a bank may decide to do.
“One can’t quite make out what other men think. Perhaps they do not
think at all.
“If I come right down to it I suppose I’ve never done much thinking
myself. Perhaps the whole business of life, here in this town and
everywhere else, is just a kind of accidental affair. Things happen.
People are swept along, eh? That’s the way it must be.”
It was incomprehensible to him and his mind soon grew weary of trying
to think further along that road.
It went back to the matter of people and houses. Perhaps one could
speak of that matter to Natalie. There was something simple and clear
about her. “She has been working for me for three years now and it is
strange I’ve never thought much about her before. She has a way of
keeping things clear and straight. Everything has gone better since she
has been with me.”
It would be a thing to think about if all the time, since she had been
with him, Natalie had understood the things that were just now becoming
a little plain to him. Suppose, from the very beginning, she had been
ready to have him go within herself. One could get quite romantic
about the matter if one allowed oneself to think about it.
There she would be, you see, that Natalie. She got out of bed in the
morning and while she was there, in her own room, in the little frame
house out at the edge of town, she said a little prayer. Then she
walked along the streets and down along the railroad tracks to her work
and to sit all day in the presence of a man.
It was an interesting thought, just to suppose, as a kind of playful
diversion let us say, that she, that Natalie, was pure and clean.
In that case she wouldn’t be thinking much of herself. She loved, that
is to say she had opened the doors of herself.
One had a picture of her standing with the doors of her body open.
Something constantly went out of her and into the man in whose presence
she spent the day. He was unaware, was in fact too much absorbed in his
own trivial affairs to be aware.
Her own self also began to be absorbed with his affairs, to take the
load of small and unimportant details of business off his mind in order
that he in turn become aware of her, standing thus, with the doors
of her body opened. How clean, sweet, and fragrant the house within
which she lived! Before one went within such a house one would have to
cleanse oneself too. That was clear. Natalie had done it with prayers
and devotion, single-minded devotion to the interests of another. Could
one cleanse one’s own house that way? Could one be as much the man as
Natalie was the woman? It was a test.
As for the matter of houses--if one got thinking of one’s own body in
that way where would it all end? One might go further and think of
one’s own body as a town, a city, as the world.
It was a road to madness too. One might think of people constantly
passing in and out of each other. In all the world there would be no
more secrecy. Something like a great wind would sweep through the world.
“A people drunk with life. A people drunk and joyous with life.”
The sentences rang through John Webster like great bells ringing. He
sat upright on the park bench. Had the listless fellows sitting about
him on other benches heard the words? For just a moment he thought the
words might be running like living things through the streets of his
town, stopping people on the streets, making people look up from their
work in offices and factories.
“One had better go a little slow and not get oneself out of hand,” he
told himself.
He began trying to think along another road. Across a little stretch of
grass and a roadway before him there was a store with trays of fruit,
oranges, apples, grapefruit, and pears arranged on the sidewalk and now
a wagon stopped at the store door and began to unload other things. He
looked long and hard at the wagon and at the store front.
His mind slipped off at a new tangent. There he was, himself, John
Webster, sitting on that bench in a park in the very heart of a town in
the state of Wisconsin. It was fall and nearly time for frost to come,
but there was still new life in the grass. How green the grass was in
the little park! The trees were alive too. Soon now they would flame
with color and then sleep for a period. To all the world of living
green things there would come the flame of evening and then the night
of winter.
Out before the world of animal life the fruits of the earth would be
poured. Out of the ground they would come, off trees and bushes, out of
the seas, lakes, and rivers, the things that were to maintain animal
life during the period when the world of vegetable life slept the sweet
sleep of winter.
It was a thing to think about too. Everywhere, all about him must be
men and women who lived altogether unaware of such things. To tell the
truth he had himself been, all his life, unaware. He had just eaten
food, stuffed it into his body through his mouth. There had been no
joy. He had not really tasted things, smelled things. How filled with
fragrant suggestive smells life might be!
It must have come about that as men and women went out of the fields
and hills to live in cities, as factories grew and as the railroads and
steamboats came to pass the fruits of the earth back and forth a kind
of dreadful unawareness must have grown in people. Not touching things
with their hands people lost the sense of them. That was it, perhaps.
John Webster remembered that, when he was a boy, such matters were
differently arranged. He lived in the town and knew nothing much of
country life, but at that time town and country were more closely wed.
In the fall, at just this time of the year, farmers used to drive into
town and deliver things at his father’s house. At that time everyone
had great cellars under his house and in the cellars were bins that
were to be filled with potatoes, apples, turnips. There was a trick
man had learned. Straw was brought in from fields near the town and
pumpkins, squashes, heads of cabbage, and other solid vegetables were
wrapped in straw and put into a cool part of the cellar. He remembered
that his mother wrapped pears in bits of paper and kept them sweet and
fresh for months.
As for himself, although he did not live in the country he was, at that
time, aware of something quite tremendous going on. Wagons arrived
at his father’s house. On Saturdays a farm woman, who drove an old
gray horse, came to the front door and knocked. She was bringing the
Websters their weekly supply of butter and eggs and often a chicken for
the Sunday dinner. John Webster’s mother went to the door to meet her
and the child ran along, clinging to his mother’s skirts.
The farm woman came into the house and sat up stiffly in a chair in
the parlor while her basket was being emptied and while the butter
was being taken out of its stone jar. The boy stood with his back to
the wall in a corner and studied her. Nothing was said. What strange
hands she had, so unlike his mother’s hands, that were soft and white.
The farm woman’s hands were brown and the knuckles were like the
bark-covered knobs that sometimes grew on the trunks of trees. They
were hands to take hold of things, to take hold of things firmly.
After the men from the country had come and had put the things in the
bins in the cellar it was fine to go down there in the afternoon when
one had come home from school. Outside the leaves were all coming off
the trees and everything looked bare. One felt a little sad and almost
frightened at times and the visits to the cellar were reassuring. The
rich smell of things, fragrant and strong smells! One got an apple out
of one of the bins and stood eating it. In a far corner there were the
dark bins where the pumpkins and squashes were buried in straw and
everywhere, along the walls, were the glass jars of fruit his mother
had put up. How many of them, what a plenitude of everything. One could
eat and eat and still there would be plenty.
At night sometimes, when one had gone upstairs and had got into bed,
one thought of the cellar and of the farm woman and the farm men.
Outside the house it was dark and a wind was blowing. Soon there would
be winter and snow and skating. The farm woman with the strange,
strong-looking hands had driven the gray horse off along the street on
which the Webster house stood, and around a corner. One had stood at a
window down stairs and had watched her out of sight. She had gone off
into some mysterious place, spoken of as the country. How big was the
country and how far away was it? Had she got there yet? It was night
now and very dark. The wind was blowing. Was she still driving the
gray horse on and on, the reins held in her strong brown hands?
The boy had got into bed and had pulled the covers up about him. His
mother came into the room and after kissing him went away taking his
lamp. He was safe in the house. Near him, in another room, his father
and mother slept. Only the country woman, with the strong hands, was
now out there alone in the night. She was driving the gray horse on and
on into the darkness, into the strange place from which came all the
good, rich-smelling things, now stored away in the cellar under the
house.
IV
“Well, hello you, Mr. Webster. This is a fine place for you to be
day-dreaming. I’ve been standing here and looking at you for several
minutes and you haven’t even seen me.”
John Webster jumped to his feet. The afternoon was passing and already
there was a kind of grayness falling over the trees and the grass in
the little park. The late afternoon sun was shining on the figure of
the man who stood before him and, although the man was short of stature
and slight, his shadow on the stone walk was grotesquely long. The man
was evidently amused at the thought of the prosperous manufacturer
day-dreaming there in the park and laughed softly, his body swaying a
little back and forth. The shadow also swayed. It was like a thing hung
on a pendulum, swinging back and forth, and even as John Webster sprang
to his feet a sentence went through his mind. “He takes life with a
long slow easy swing. How does that happen? He takes life with a long
slow easy swing,” his mind said. It seemed like a fragment of a thought
snatched out of nowhere, a fragmentary dancing little thought.
The man who stood before him owned a small second-hand book store on
a side street along which John Webster was in the habit of walking as
he went back and forth to his factory. On summer evenings the man sat
in a chair before his shop and made comments on the weather and on
passing events to the people going up and down the sidewalk. Once when
John Webster was with his banker, a gray dignified looking man, he had
been somewhat embarrassed because the bookseller called out his name.
He had never done it until that day and never did it afterward. The
manufacturer had become self-conscious and had explained the matter to
the banker. “I really don’t know the man. I was never in his shop,” he
said.
In the park John Webster stood before the little man deeply
embarrassed. He told a harmless lie. “I’ve had a headache all day and
sat down here for a moment,” he said sheepishly. It was annoying that
he felt like apologizing. The little man smiled knowingly. “You ought
to take something for that. It might get a man like you into a hell of
a mess,” he said and walked away, his long shadow dancing behind him.
With a shrug of his shoulders John Webster went rapidly through a
crowded business street. He was quite sure now that he knew what he
wanted to do. He did not loiter and give way to vague thoughts, but
walked briskly along the street. “I’ll keep my mind occupied,” he
decided. “I’ll think about my business and how to develop it.” During
the week before, an advertising man from Chicago had come into his
office and had talked to him about advertising his washing machine in
the big national magazines. It would cost a good deal of money, but
the advertising man had said that he could raise his selling price
and sell many more machines. That sounded possible. It would make
the business a big one, an institution of national prominence, and
himself a big figure in the industrial world. Other men had got into a
position like that through the power of advertising. Why shouldn’t he
do something of the sort?
He tried to think about the matter, but his mind didn’t work very
well. It was a blank. What happened was that he walked along with his
shoulders thrown back and felt childishly important about nothing. He
had to be careful or he would begin laughing at himself. There was
within him a lurking fear that in a few minutes he would begin laughing
at the figure of John Webster as a man of national importance in the
industrial world and the fear made him hurry faster than ever. When he
got to the railroad tracks that ran down to his factory he was almost
running. It was amazing. The advertising man from Chicago could use big
words, apparently without being in any danger of suddenly beginning
to laugh. When John Webster was a young fellow and had just come out
of college, that was when he read a great many books and sometimes
thought he would like to become a writer of books, at that time he had
often thought he wasn’t cut out to be a business man at all. Perhaps
he was right. A man who hadn’t any more sense than to laugh at himself
had better not try to become a figure of national importance in the
industrial world, that was sure. It wanted serious fellows to carry off
such positions successfully.
Well now he had begun to be a little sorry for himself, that he was not
cut out to be a big figure in the industrial world. What a childish
fellow he was. He began to scold himself, “Won’t I ever grow up?”
As he hurried along the railroad tracks, trying to think, trying not to
think, he kept his eyes turned to the ground and something attracted
his attention. To the west, over the tops of distant trees and across
the shallow river beside which his factory stood, the sun was just
going down and its rays were suddenly caught by something that looked
like a piece of glass lying among the stones on the railroad roadbed.
He stopped his rush along the tracks and leaned over to pick it up.
It was something, perhaps a jewel of some sort, perhaps just a cheap
little plaything some child had lost. The stone was about the size and
shape of a small bean and was dark green. When the rays of the sun fell
on it, as he held it in his hand, the color changed. After all it might
be a valuable thing. “Perhaps some woman, riding on a train through the
town, has lost it out of her ring or out of a brooch she wears at her
throat,” he thought and had a momentary picture floating in his mind.
In the picture there was a tall strong fair woman, standing, not on a
train but on a hill above a river. The river was wide and as it was
winter was covered with ice. The woman had one hand raised and was
pointing. A ring was on her finger and the small green stone was set in
the ring. He could see everything very minutely. The woman stood on the
hill and the sun shone on her and the stone in the ring was now pale,
now dark like the waters of a sea, and beside the woman stood a man,
a rather heavy-looking man with gray hair, with whom the woman was in
love. The woman was saying something to the man about the stone set in
the ring and John Webster could hear the words very distinctly. What
strange words she was saying. “My father gave it to me and told me to
wear it for all my loves. He called it, ‘the jewel of life,’” she said.
Hearing the rumble of a train, far away somewhere in the distance,
John Webster got off the tracks. There was at just that place a high
embankment beside the river along which he could walk. “I don’t intend
to come near being killed by a train as I was this morning when that
young negro saved me,” he thought. He looked away to the west and to
the evening sun and then down at the bed of the river. Now the river
was low and only a narrow channel of water ran through wide banks of
caked mud. He put the little green stone in his vest pocket.
“I know what I am going to do,” he told himself resolutely. Quickly a
plan formed itself in his mind. He would go to his office and hurry
through any letters that had come in. Then, without looking at Natalie
Swartz, he would get up and go away. There was a train for Chicago at
eight o’clock and he would tell his wife he had business in the city
and would take the train. What a man had to do in life was to face
facts and then act. He would go to Chicago and find himself a woman.
When it came right down to the truth he would go on a regular bat. He
would find himself a woman and he would get drunk and if he felt like
doing it would stay drunk for several days.
There were times when it was perhaps necessary to be a down-right
rotter. He would do that too. While he was in Chicago and with the
woman he had found he would write a letter to his bookkeeper at the
factory and tell him to discharge Natalie Swartz. Then he would write
Natalie a letter and send her a large check. He would send her six
months’ pay. The whole thing might cost him a pretty sum, but anything
was better than this going on as he was, a regular crazy kind of man.
As for the woman in Chicago, he would find her all right. One got bold
after a few drinks and when one had the money to spend women were
always to be had.
It was too bad that it was so but the truth was that the need of women
was a part of a man’s makeup and the fact might as well be faced. “When
you come down to that, I am a business man and it is a business man’s
place in the scheme of things to face facts,” he decided and suddenly
he felt very resolute and strong.
As for Natalie, to tell the truth, there was in her perhaps something
that it was a little hard for him to resist. “If there were only my
wife it would be different but there is my daughter Jane. She is a
pure young innocent thing and must be protected. I can’t let her in for
a mess,” he told himself as he walked boldly along the little spur of
the tracks that led to the door of his factory.
V
When he had opened the door that led into the little room where he had
been sitting and working beside Natalie for three years, he quickly
closed it behind him and stood with his back to the door and with his
hand on the door-knob, as though for support. Natalie’s desk was beside
a window at a corner of the room and beyond his own desk and through
the window one could see into an empty space beside the spur of tracks
that belonged to the railroad company, but in which he had been given
the privilege of piling a reserve supply of lumber. The lumber was so
piled that, in the soft evening light, the yellow boards made a kind of
background for Natalie’s figure.
The sun was shining on the lumber pile, the last soft rays of the
evening sun. Above the lumber pile there was a space of clear light and
into this Natalie’s head was thrust.
An amazing and lovely thing had happened. When the fact of it came
into his consciousness something within John Webster was torn open.
What a simple thing Natalie had done and yet how significant. He stood
with the door-knob grasped in his hand, clinging to the door-knob, and
within himself the thing happened he had been trying to avoid. Tears
came into his eyes. In all his after life he never lost the sense of
that moment. In one instant all within himself was muddy and dirty with
the thoughts he had been having about the proposed trip to Chicago and
then the mud and dirt was all, as by a quick miracle, swept away.
“At any other time what Natalie had done might have passed unnoticed,”
he told himself later, but that fact did not in any way destroy its
significance. All of the women who worked in his office as well as the
bookkeeper and the men in the factory were in the habit of carrying
their lunches and Natalie had brought her lunch on that morning as
always. He remembered having seen her come in with it wrapped in a
paper package.
Her home was a long distance away, at the edge of the town. None of the
other of his employees came from so great a distance.
And on that noon she had not eaten her lunch. There it was done up in
its package and lying on a shelf back of her head.
What had happened was this--at the noon time she had hurried out of the
office and had run all the way home to her mother’s house. There was
no bathtub there, but she had drawn water from a well and put it in a
common washtub in a shed back of the house. Then she had plunged into
the water and washed her body from head to foot.
After she had done that she had gone upstairs and arrayed herself in
a special dress, the best one she owned, the one she had always kept
for Sunday afternoons and for special occasions. As she dressed, her
old mother, who had been following her about, swearing at her and
demanding an explanation, stood at the foot of the stairway leading to
her room and called her vile names. “You little whore, you are planning
to go out with some man to-night so you are fixing yourself up as
though you were about to be married. A swell chance either of my two
daughters have got to ever get themselves husbands. If you’ve got any
money in your pocket you give it to me. I wouldn’t care so much about
your traipsing around if you ever got any money,” she declared in a
loud voice. On the evening before she had got money from one of the
daughters and during the morning had provided herself with a bottle of
whiskey. Now she was enjoying herself.
Natalie had paid no attention to her. When she was fully dressed she
hurried down the stairs, brushing the old woman aside, and half ran
back to the factory. The other women employed there had laughed when
they saw her coming. “What’s Natalie up to?” they had asked each other.
John Webster stood looking at her and thinking. He knew all about what
she had done and why she had done it although he had seen nothing. Now
she did not look at him, but, turning her head slightly, looked out
over the lumber piles.
Well then she had known all day what had been going on within himself.
She had understood his sudden desire to come within herself so she
had run home to bathe and array herself. “It was like washing the
door sills of her house and hanging newly laundered curtains at the
windows,” he thought whimsically.
“You have changed your dress, Natalie,” he said aloud. It was the first
time he had ever called her by that name. Tears were in his eyes and
his knees suddenly felt weak. He walked, a little unsteadily, across
the room, and knelt beside her. Then he put his head in her lap and
felt her broad strong hand in his hair and on his cheek.
For a long time he knelt thus breathing deeply. The thoughts of the
morning came back. After all though he wasn’t thinking. The things
going on within him were not so definite as thoughts. If his body were
a house it was now the cleansing time for that house. A thousand little
creatures were running through the house, going swiftly up and down
stairs, opening windows, laughing, crying to each other. The rooms
of his house echoed with new sounds, with joyous sounds. His body
trembled. Now, after this had happened, a new life would begin for him.
His body would be more alive. He would see things, smell things, taste
things, as never before.
He looked up into Natalie’s face. How much did she know of all this?
Well, she would no doubt be unable to say it in words but there was a
way in which she did understand. She had run home to bathe and array
herself. That was the reason he knew she knew. “How long have you been
ready for this to happen?” he asked.
“For a year,” she said. She had grown a little pale. In the room it
was beginning to grow dark.
She got up and putting him gently aside went to the door leading into
the outer office and slipped a bolt that would prevent the door being
opened.
Now she was standing with her back to the door and with her hand on the
knob as he had been standing some time before. He got up and went to
his own desk, near a window that faced the spur of the railroad track,
and sat in his office chair. Leaning forward he buried his face in his
two arms. The trembling, shaking thing continued to go on within him.
Still the little joyous voices called. The cleansing within was going
on and on.
Natalie spoke of the affairs of the office. “There were some letters,
but I answered them and even dared to sign your name. I did not want
you to be bothered to-day.”
She came to where he sat, leaning forward on the desk, trembling, and
knelt beside him. After a time he put an arm about her shoulder.
The outside noises of the office went steadily on. In the outer office
someone was running a typewriting machine. It was quite dark in the
inner office now, but above the railroad track, some two or three
hundred yards away, there was a lamp suspended in the air and when it
was lighted a faint light came into the dark room and fell upon the two
crouched figures. Presently a whistle blew and the workers from the
factory went off up the spur of track. In the outer office the four
people were getting ready to go home.
In a few minutes they came out, closing a door behind them, and walked
also along the spur of track. Unlike the workers from the factory they
knew the two people were still in the inner office and were curious.
One of the three women came boldly up to the window and looked in.
She went back to the others and they stood for a few minutes, making a
small intense group in the half darkness. Then they went slowly away.
When the group broke up, on the embankment above the river, the
bookkeeper, a man of thirty-five, and the oldest of the three women
went to the right along the tracks while the other two went to the
left. The bookkeeper and the woman he walked with did not speak of
what had been seen. They walked for several hundred yards together and
then parted, turning from the tracks into separate streets. When the
bookkeeper was alone he began to worry about the future. “You’ll see.
Within a few months I’ll have to be looking for a new place. When that
sort of thing begins business goes to pieces.” He was worried about the
fact that, as he had a wife and two children and did not get a very
large salary, he had no money saved. “Damn that Natalie Swartz. I’ll
bet she’s a whore, that’s what I’ll bet,” he muttered as he went along.
As for the two remaining women, one of them wanted to speak of the two
people kneeling together in the dark office while the other did not.
There were several ineffectual attempts at talk of the matter on the
part of the older of the two and then they also parted. The youngest of
the three, the one who had smiled at John Webster that morning when he
had just come out of Natalie’s presence and when he had for the first
time realized that the doors of her being were open to him, went along
the street past the door of the bookseller’s shop and up a climbing
street into the lighted business section of the town. She kept smiling
as she went along and it was because of something she herself did not
understand.
It was because she was herself one in whom the little voices talked and
now they were going busily. Some phrase, picked up somewhere, from the
Bible perhaps when she was a young girl and went to Sunday school, or
from some book, kept saying itself over and over in her mind. What a
charming combination of plain words in everyday use among people. She
kept saying them in her mind and after a time, when she came to a place
in the street where there was no one near, she said them aloud. “And as
it turned out there was a marriage in our house,” were the words she
said.
BOOK TWO
I
As you will remember, the room in which John Webster slept was at a
corner of the house, upstairs. From one of his two windows he looked
out into the garden of a German who owned a store in his town but whose
real interest in life was the garden. All through the year he worked
at it and had John Webster been more alive, during the years he lived
in the room, he might have got keen pleasure out of looking down upon
his neighbor at work. In the early morning and late afternoon the
German was always to be seen, smoking his pipe and digging, and a great
variety of smells came floating up and in at the window of the room
above, the sour acid smell of vegetables decaying, the rich heady smell
of stable manure and then, all through the summer and late into the
fall, the fragrant smell of roses and the marching procession of the
flowers of the seasons.
John Webster had lived in his room for many years without much thought
of what a room, within which a man lives and the walls of which enclose
him like a garment when he sleeps, might be like. It was a square room
with one window looking down into the German’s garden and another
window that faced the blank walls of the German’s house. There were
three doors--one leading into a hallway, one into the room where his
wife slept, and a third that led into his daughter’s room.
One came into the place at night and closed the doors and prepared
oneself for sleep. Behind the two walls were the two other people, also
preparing for sleep, and behind the walls of the German’s house no
doubt the same thing was going on. The German had two daughters and a
son. They would be going to bed or were already in bed. There was, at
that street end, something like a little village of people going to bed
or already in bed.
For a good many years John Webster and his wife had not been very
intimate. Long ago, when he had found himself married to her he had
found also that she had a theory of life, picked up somewhere, perhaps
from her parents, perhaps just absorbed out of the general atmosphere
of fear in which so many modern women live and breathe, clutched at, as
it were, and used as a weapon against too close contact with another.
She thought, or believed she thought, that even in marriage a man and
woman should not be lovers except for the purpose of bringing children
into the world. The belief threw a sort of heavy air of responsibility
about the matter of love-making. One does not go very freely in and out
of the body of another when the going in and out involves such heavy
responsibility. The doors of the body become rusty and creak. “Well,
you see,” John Webster, in later years, sometimes explained, “one is
quite seriously at the business of bringing another human into the
world. Here is the Puritan in full flower. The night has come. From
the gardens back of men’s houses comes the scent of flowers. Little
hushed noises arise followed by silences. The flowers in their gardens
have known an ecstasy unfettered by any awareness of responsibility,
but man is something else. For ages he has been taking himself with
extraordinary seriousness. The race, you see, must be perpetuated. It
must be improved. There is in this affair something of obligation to
God and to one’s fellow men. Even when, after long preparation, talk,
prayer, and the acquiring of a little wisdom, a kind of abandon is
acquired, as one would acquire a new language, one has still achieved
something quite foreign to the flowers, the trees, and the life and the
carrying on of life among what is called the lower animals.”
As for the earnest God-fearing people, among whom John Webster and his
wife then lived and as one of whom they had for so many years counted
themselves, the chances are no such thing as ecstasy is ever acquired
at all. There is instead, for the most part, a kind of cold sensuality
tempered by an itching conscience. That life can perpetuate itself
at all in such an atmosphere is one of the wonders of the world and
proves, as nothing else could, the cold determination of nature not to
be defeated.
And so for years the man had been in the habit of coming into his
bedroom at night, taking off his clothes, and hanging them on a chair
or in a closet and then crawling into bed to sleep heavily. Sleeping
was a part of the necessary business of living and if, before he
slept, he thought at all he thought of his washing machine business.
There was a note due and payable at the bank on the next day and he
had no money with which to pay it. He thought of that and of what he
could and would say to the banker to induce him to renew the note.
Then he thought about the trouble he was having with the foreman at
his factory. The man wanted a larger wage and he was trying to think
whether or not, if he did not give it to him, the man would quit and
put him to the trouble of finding another foreman.
When he slept he did not sleep lightly and no fancies visited his
dreams. What should have been a sweet time of renewal became a heavy
time filled with distorted dreams.
And then, after the doors of Natalie’s body had been swung open for
him, he became aware. After that evening when they had knelt together
in the darkness it was hard for him to go home in the evening and sit
at table with his wife and daughter. “Well, I can’t do it,” he told
himself and ate his evening meal at a restaurant down town. He stayed
about, walking in unfrequented streets, talking or in silence beside
Natalie and then went with her to her own house, far out at the edge of
town. People saw them walking thus together and, as there was no effort
at concealment, there was a blaze of talk in the town.
When John Webster went home to his own house his wife and daughter had
already gone to bed. “I am very busy at the shop. Do not expect to see
much of me for a time,” he had said to his wife on the morning after he
had told Natalie of his love.
He did not intend to stay on in the washing machine business or to
continue his married life. What he would do he did not quite know. He
would live with Natalie for one thing. The time had come to do that.
He had spoken of it to Natalie on that first evening of their intimacy.
On that evening, after the others were all gone they went to walk
together. As they went through the streets people in the houses were
sitting down to the evening meal, but the man and woman did not think
of eating.
John Webster’s tongue had become loosened and he did a great deal of
talking to which Natalie listened in silence. Of the people of the town
those he did not know all became romantic figures in his awaking mind.
His fancy wanted to play about them and he let it. They went along a
residence street toward the open country beyond and he kept speaking
of the people in the houses. “Now Natalie, my woman, you see all these
houses here,” he said waving his arms to right and left, “well, what
do you and I know about what goes on back of these walls?” He kept
taking deep breaths as he went along, just as he had done back there
at the office when he had run across the room to kneel at Natalie’s
feet. The little voices within him were still talking. He had been
something like this sometimes when he was a boy, but no one had ever
understood the riotous play of his fancy and in time he had come to
think that letting his fancy go was all foolishness. Then when he was
a young man and had married there had come a sharp new flare-up of the
fanciful life, but then it had been frozen in him by the fear and the
vulgarity that is born of fears. Now it was playing madly. “Now you
see, Natalie,” he cried, stopping on the sidewalk to take hold of her
two hands and swinging them madly back and forth, “now you see, here’s
how it is. These houses along here look like just ordinary houses, such
as you and I live in, but they aren’t like that at all. The outer walls
are, you see, just things stuck up, like scenery on a stage. A breath
can blow the walls down or an outburst of flames can consume them all
in an hour. I’ll bet you what--I’ll bet that what you think is that
the people back of the walls of these houses are just ordinary people.
They aren’t at all. You’re all wrong about that, Natalie, my love. The
women in the rooms back of these walls are all fair sweet women and you
should just go into the rooms. They are hung with beautiful pictures
and tapestry and the women have jewels on their hands and in their hair.
“And so the men and women live together in their houses and there are
no good people, only beautiful ones, and children are born and their
fancies are allowed to riot all over the place, and no one takes
himself too seriously and thinks the whole outcome of human life
depends upon himself, and people go out of these houses to work in the
morning and come back at night and where they get all the rich comforts
of life they have I can’t make out. It’s because there is really such a
rich abundance of everything in the world somewhere and they have found
out about it, I suppose.”
On their first evening together he and Natalie had walked beyond the
town and had got into a country road. They went along this for a mile
and then turned into a little side road. There was a great tree growing
beside the road and they went to lean against it, standing side by side
in silence.
It was after they had kissed that he told Natalie of his plans. “There
are three or four thousand dollars in the bank and the factory is worth
thirty or forty thousand more. I don’t know how much it is worth,
perhaps nothing at all.
“At any rate I’ll take a thousand dollars and go away with you. I
suppose I’ll leave some kind of papers making over the ownership of the
place to my wife and daughter. That would, I suppose, be the thing to
do.
“Then I’ll have to talk to my daughter, make her understand what I’m
doing and why. Well, I hardly know whether it is possible to make her
understand, but I’ll have to try. I’ll have to try to say something
that will stay in her mind so that she in her turn may learn to live
and not close and lock the doors of her being as my own doors have been
locked. It may take, you see, two or three weeks to think out what I
have to say and how to say it. My daughter Jane knows nothing. She is
an American middle-class girl and I have helped to make her that. She
is a virgin and that, I am afraid, Natalie, you do not understand.
The gods have robbed you of your virginity or perhaps it was your old
mother, drunk and calling you names, eh? That might have been a help
to you. You wanted so much to have some sweet clean thing happen to
you, to something deep down in you, that you went about with the doors
of your being opened, eh? They did not have to be torn open. Virginity
and respectability had not fastened them with bolts and locks. Your
mother must quite have killed all notion of respectability in your
family, eh Natalie? It is the most wonderful thing in the world to love
you and to know that there is something in you that would make the
notion of being cheap and second-class impossible to your lover. O, my
Natalie, you are a woman strong to be loved.”
Natalie did not answer, perhaps did not understand this outpouring
of words from him, and John Webster stopped talking and moved about
so that he stood directly facing her. They were of about the same
height and when he had come close they looked directly into each
other’s faces. He put up his hands so that they lay on her cheeks
and for a long time they stood thus, without words, looking at each
other as though they could neither of them get enough of the sight of
the face of the other. A late moon came up presently and they moved
instinctively out from under the shadow of the tree and went into a
field. They kept moving slowly along, stopping constantly and standing
thus, with his hands on her cheeks. Her body began to tremble and
the tears ran from her eyes. Then he laid her down upon the grass.
It was an experience with a woman new in his life. After their first
love-making and when their passions were spent she seemed more
beautiful to him than before.
* * * * *
He stood within the door of his own house and it was late at night. One
did not breathe any too well within those walls. He had a desire to
creep through the house, to be unheard, and was thankful when he had
got to his own room and had undressed and got into bed without being
spoken to.
In bed he lay with eyes open listening to the night noises from without
the house. They were not very plain. He had forgotten to open the
window. When he had done that a low humming sound arose. The first
frost had not come yet and the night was warm. In the garden owned
by the German, in the grass in his own back-yard, in the branches of
the trees along the streets and far off in the country there was life
abundant.
Perhaps Natalie would have a child. It did not matter. They would go
away together, live together in some distant place. Now Natalie must be
at home in her mother’s house and she would also be lying awake. She
would be taking deep breaths of the night air. He did that himself.
One could think of her and could also think of the people closer
about. There was the German who lived next door. By turning his head
he could see faintly the walls of the German’s house. His neighbor had
a wife, a son and two daughters. Perhaps now they were all asleep. In
fancy he went into his neighbor’s house, went softly from room to room
through the house. There was the old man sleeping beside his wife
and in another room the son who had drawn up his legs so that he lay
in a little ball. He was a pale slender young man. “Perhaps he has
indigestion,” whispered John Webster’s fancy. In another room the two
daughters lay in two beds set closely together. One could just pass
between them. They had been whispering to each other before they slept,
perhaps of the lover they hoped would come, some time in the future.
He stood so close to them that he could have touched their cheeks with
his out-stretched fingers. He wondered why it had happened that he had
become Natalie’s lover instead of the lover of one of these girls.
“That could have happened. I could have loved either of them had she
opened the doors of herself as Natalie has done.”
Loving Natalie did not preclude the possibility of his loving another,
perhaps many others. “A rich man might have many marriages,” he
thought. It was certain that the possibility of human relationship
had not even been tapped yet. Something had stood in the way of a
sufficiently broad acceptance of life. One had to accept oneself and
the others before one could love.
* * * * *
As for himself he had to accept now his wife and daughter, draw close
to them for a little before he went away with Natalie. It was a
difficult thing to think about. He lay with wide-open eyes in his bed
and tried to send his fancy into his wife’s room. He could not do it.
His fancy could go into his daughter’s room and look at her lying
asleep in her bed, but with his wife it was different. Something within
him drew back. “Not now. Do not try it. It is not permitted. If she is
ever to have a lover now it must be another,” a voice within him said.
“Did she do something that has destroyed the possibility of that or
did I?” he asked himself sitting up in bed. There was no doubt a human
relationship had been spoiled--messed. “It is not permitted. It is not
permitted to make a mess on the floor of the temple,” the answering
voice within said sternly.
To John Webster it seemed that the voices in the room spoke so loudly
that as he lay down again and tried to sleep he was a little surprised
that they had not awakened from their sleep the others in the house.
II
Into the air of the Webster house and into the air also of John
Webster’s office and factory a new element had come. On all sides of
him there was a straining at something within. When he was not alone or
in the company of Natalie he no longer breathed freely. “You have done
us an injury. You are doing us an injury,” everyone else seemed to be
saying.
He wondered about that, tried to think about it. The presence of
Natalie gave him each day a breathing time. When he sat beside her in
the office he breathed freely, the tight thing within him relaxed. It
was because she was simple and straightforward. She said little, but
her eyes spoke often. “It’s all right. I love you. I am not afraid to
love you,” her eyes said.
However he thought constantly of the others. The bookkeeper refused to
look into his eyes or spoke with a new and elaborate politeness. He had
already got into the habit of discussing the matter of John Webster and
Natalie’s affair every evening with his wife. In the presence of his
employer he now felt self-conscious and it was the same with the two
older women in the office. As he passed through the office the younger
of the three still sometimes looked up and smiled at him.
It was no doubt a fact that no man could do a quite isolated thing
in the modern world of men. Sometimes when John Webster was walking
homeward late at night, after having spent some hours with Natalie, he
stopped and looked about him. The street was deserted and the lights
had been put out in many of the houses. He raised his two arms and
looked at them. They had recently held a woman, tightly, tightly, and
the woman was not the one with whom he had lived for so many years, but
a new woman he had found. His arms had held her tightly and her arms
had held him. There had been joy in that. Joy had run through their
two bodies during the long embrace. They had breathed deeply. Had the
breath blown out of their lungs poisoned the air others had to breathe?
As to the woman, who was called his wife--she had wanted no such
embraces, or, had she wanted them, had been unable to take or give. A
notion came to him. “If you love in a loveless world you face others
with the sin of not loving,” he thought.
The streets lined with houses in which people lived were dark. It was
past eleven o’clock, but there was no need to hurry home. When he got
into bed he could not sleep. “It would be better just to walk about for
an hour yet,” he decided and when he came to the corner that led into
his own street did not turn, but kept on, going far out to the edge
of town and back. His feet made a sharp sound on the stone sidewalks.
Sometimes he met a man homeward bound and as they passed the man
looked at him with surprise and something like distrust in his eyes. He
walked past and then turned to look back. “What are you doing abroad?
Why aren’t you at home and in bed with your wife?” the man seemed to be
asking.
What was the man really thinking? Was there much thinking going on in
all the dark houses along the street or did people simply go into them
to eat and sleep as he had always gone into his own house? In fancy he
got a quick vision of many people lying in beds stuck high in the air.
The walls of the houses had receded from them.
Once, during the year before, there had been a fire in a house on his
own street and the front wall of the house had fallen down. When the
fire was put out one walked past in the street and there, laid bare
to the public gaze, were two upstairs rooms in which people had lived
for many years. Everything was a little burned and charred, but quite
intact. In each room there were a bed, one or two chairs, a square
piece of furniture with drawers in which shirts or dresses could be
kept, and at the side of the room a closet for other clothes.
The house had quite burned out below and the stairway had been
destroyed. When the fire broke out the people must have fled from the
rooms like frightened and disturbed insects. One of the rooms had been
occupied by a man and woman. There was a dress lying on the floor and a
pair of half-burned trousers flung over the back of a chair, while in
the second room, evidently occupied by a woman, there were no signs of
male attire. The place had made John Webster think of his own married
life. “It is as it might have been with us had my wife and I not quit
sleeping together. That might have been our room with the room of our
daughter Jane beside it,” he had thought on the morning after the fire
as he walked past and stopped with other curious idlers to gaze up at
the scene above.
And now, as he walked alone in the sleeping streets of his town his
imagination succeeded in stripping all the walls from all the houses
and he walked as in some strange city of the dead. That his imagination
could so flame up, running along whole streets of houses and wiping
out walls as a wind shakes the branches of the trees, was a new and
living wonder to himself. “A life-giving thing has been given to me.
For many years I have been dead and now I am alive,” he thought. To
give the fuller play to his fancy he got off the sidewalk and walked in
the centre of the street. The houses lay before him all silent and the
late moon had appeared and made black pools under the trees. The houses
stripped of their walls were on either side of him.
In the houses the people were sleeping in their beds. How many bodies
lying and sleeping close together, babes asleep in cribs, young boys
sleeping sometimes two or three in a single bed, young women asleep
with their hair fallen down about their faces.
As they slept they dreamed. Of what did they dream? He had a great
desire that what had happened to himself and Natalie should happen
to all of them. The love-making in the field had after all been but a
symbol of something more filled with meaning than the mere act of two
bodies embracing, the passage of the seeds of life from one body to
another.
A great hope flared up in him. “A time will come when love like a sheet
of fire will run through the towns and cities. It will tear walls
away. It will destroy ugly houses. It will tear ugly clothes off the
bodies of men and women. They will build anew and build beautifully,”
he declared aloud. As he walked and talked thus he felt suddenly like
a young prophet come out of some far strange clean land to visit with
the blessing of his presence the people of the street. He stopped and
putting his hands to his head laughed loudly at the picture he had
made of himself. “You would think I was another John the Baptist who
has been living in a wilderness on locusts and wild honey instead of a
washing machine manufacturer in a Wisconsin town,” he thought. A window
to one of the houses was opened and he heard low voices talking. “Well,
I’d better be going home before they lock me up for a crazy man,” he
thought, getting out of the road and turning out of the street at a
nearby corner.
* * * * *
At the office, during the day, there were no such periods of
exhilaration. There only Natalie seemed quite in control of the
situation. “She has stout legs and strong feet. She knows how to stand
her ground,” John Webster thought as he sat at his desk and looked
across at her sitting at her desk.
She was not insensible to what was going on about her. Sometimes when
he looked suddenly up at her and when she did not know he was looking
he saw something that convinced him her hours alone were not now very
happy. There was a tightening about the eyes. No doubt she had her own
little hell to face.
Still she went about her work every day outwardly unperturbed. “That
old Irish woman, with her temper, her drinking, and her love of loud
picturesque profanity has managed to put her daughter through a course
of sprouts,” he decided. It was well Natalie was so level-headed. “The
Lord knows she and I may need all of her level-headedness before we
are through with our lives,” he decided. There was something in women,
a kind of power, few men understood. They could stand the gaff. Now
Natalie did his work and her own too. When a letter came she answered
it and when there was something to be decided she made the decision.
Sometimes she looked across at him as though to say, “Your job, the
clearing up you will still have to do in your own house, will be more
difficult than anything I shall have to face. You let me attend to
these minor details of our life now. To do that makes the time of
waiting less difficult for me.”
She did not say anything of the sort in words, being one not given
to words, but there was always something in her eyes that made him
understand what she wanted to say.
After that first love-making in the field they were not lovers again
while they remained in the Wisconsin town although every evening they
went to walk together. After dining at her mother’s house where she had
to pass under the questioning eyes of her sister the school teacher,
also a silent woman, and to withstand a fiery outbreak from her mother
who came to the door to shout questions after her down the street,
Natalie came back along the railroad tracks to find John Webster
waiting for her in the darkness by the office door. Then they walked
boldly through the streets and went into the country and, when they
had got upon a country road, went hand in hand, for the most part in
silence.
* * * * *
And from day to day, in the office and in the Webster household the
feeling of tenseness grew more and more pronounced.
In the house, when he had come in late at night and had crept up to
his room, he had a sense of the fact that both his wife and daughter
were lying awake, thinking of him, wondering about him, wondering
what strange thing had happened to make him suddenly a new man. From
what he had seen in their eyes in the day-time he knew that they had
both became suddenly aware of him. Now he was no longer the mere
bread-winner, the man who goes in and out of his house as a work horse
goes in and out of a stable. Now, as he lay in his bed and behind the
two walls of his room and the two closed doors, voices were awakening
within them, little fearful voices. His mind had got into the habit
of thinking of walls and doors. “Some night the walls will fall down
and the two doors will open. I must be ready for the time when that
happens,” he thought.
His wife was one who, when she was excited, resentful, or angry, sank
herself into an ocean of silence. Perhaps the whole town knew of his
walking about in the evening with Natalie Swartz. Had news of it come
to his wife she would not have spoken of the matter to her daughter.
There would be just a dense kind of silence in the house and the
daughter would know there was something the matter. There had been such
times before. The daughter would have become frightened, perhaps it
would be just at bottom the fear of change, that something was about to
happen that would disturb the steady even passage of days.
One noon, during the second week after the love-making with Natalie, he
walked toward the centre of town, intending to go into a restaurant and
eat lunch, but instead walked straight ahead down the tracks for nearly
a mile. Then, not knowing exactly what impulse had led him, he went
back to the office. Natalie and all the others except the youngest of
the three women had gone out. Perhaps the air of the place had become
so heavy with unexpressed thoughts and feelings that none of them
wanted to stay there when they were not working. The day was bright and
warm, a golden and red Wisconsin day of early October.
He walked into the inner office, stood a moment looking vaguely about
and then came out again. The young woman sitting there arose. Was she
going to say something to him about the affair with Natalie? He also
stopped and stood looking at her. She was a small woman with a sweet
womanly mouth, gray eyes, and with a kind of tiredness expressing
itself in her whole being. What did she want? Did she want him to go
ahead with the love affair with Natalie, of which she no doubt knew, or
did she want him to stop? “It would be dreadful if she should try to
speak about it,” he thought and then at once, for some unexplainable
reason, knew she would not do that.
They stood for a moment looking into each other’s eyes and the look
was like a kind of love-making too. It was very strange and the moment
would afterward give him much to think about. In the future no doubt
his life was to be filled with many thoughts. There was this woman he
did not know at all, standing before him, and in their own way he and
she were being lovers too. Had the thing not happened between himself
and Natalie so recently, had he not still been filled with that,
something of the sort might well have happened between him and this
woman.
In reality the matter of the two people standing thus and looking at
each other occupied but a moment. Then she sat down, a little confused,
and he went quickly out.
There was a kind of joy in him now. “There is love abundant in the
world. It may take many roads to expression. The woman in there is
hungry for love and there is something fine and generous about her.
She knows Natalie and I love and she has, in some obscure way I can’t
yet understand, given herself to that until it has become almost a
physical experience with her too. There are a thousand things in life
no one rightly understands. Love has as many branches as a tree.”
He went up into a business street of the town and turned into a
section with which he was not very familiar. He was passing a little
store, near a Catholic church, such a store as is patronized by devout
Catholics and in which are sold figures of the Christ on the cross,
the Christ lying at the foot of the cross with His bleeding wounds,
the Virgin standing with arms crossed looking demurely down, blessed
candles, candlesticks, and the like. For a moment he stood before
the store window looking at the figures displayed and then went in
and bought a small framed picture of the Virgin, a supply of yellow
candles, and two glass candlesticks, made in the shape of crosses and
with little gilded figures of the Christ on the cross upon them.
To tell the truth the figure of the Virgin looked not unlike Natalie.
There was a kind of quiet strength in her. She stood, holding a lily in
her right hand and the thumb and first finger of her left hand touched
lightly a great heart pinned to her breast by a dagger. Across the
heart was a wreath of five red roses.
John Webster stood for a moment looking into the Virgin’s eyes and then
bought the things and hurried out of the store. Then he took a street
car and went to his own house. His wife and daughter were out and he
went up into his own room and put the packages in a closet. When he
came downstairs the servant Katherine was waiting for him. “May I get
you something to eat again to-day?” she asked and smiled.
* * * * *
He did not stay to have lunch, but it was fine, being asked to stay. At
any rate she had remembered the day when she had stood near him while
he ate. He had liked being alone with her that day. Perhaps she had
felt the same thing and had liked being with him.
He walked straight out of town and got into a country road and
presently turned off the road into a small wood. For two hours he sat
on a log looking at the trees now flaming with color. The sun shone
brightly and after a time the squirrels and birds became less conscious
of his presence and the animal and bird life that had been stilled by
his coming was renewed.
It was the afternoon after the night of his walking in the streets
between the rows of houses the walls of which had been torn away by
his fancy. “I shall tell Natalie of that to-night and I shall tell her
also of what I intend to do at home there in my room. I shall tell
her and she will say nothing. She is a strange one. When she does not
understand she believes. There is something in her that accepts life as
these trees do,” he thought.
III
A strange kind of nightly ceremony was begun in John Webster’s corner
room on the second floor of his house. When he had come into the house
he went softly upstairs and into his own room. Then he took off all his
clothes and hung them in a closet. When he was quite nude he got out
the little picture of the Virgin and set it up on a kind of dresser
that stood in a corner between the two windows. On the dresser he also
placed the two candlesticks with the Christ on the cross on them and
putting two of the yellow candles in them lighted the candles.
As he had undressed in the darkness he did not see the room or himself
until he saw by the light of the candles. Then he began to walk back
and forth, thinking such thoughts as came into his head.
“I have no doubt I am insane,” he told himself, “but as long as I am it
might as well be a purposeful insanity. I haven’t been liking this room
or the clothes I wear. Now I have taken the clothes off and perhaps I
can in some way purify the room a bit. As for my walking about in the
streets and letting my fancy play over many people in their houses,
that will be all right in its turn too, but at present my problem
lies in this house. There have been many years of stupid living in
the house and in this room. Now I shall keep up this ceremony; making
myself nude and walking up and down here before the Virgin, until
neither my wife nor my daughter can keep up her silence. They will
break in here some night quite suddenly and then I will say what I have
to say before I go away with Natalie.”
“As for you, my Virgin, I dare say I shall not offend you,” he said
aloud, turning and bowing to the woman within her frame. She looked
steadily at him as Natalie might have looked and he kept smiling at
her. It seemed quite clear to him now what his course in life was to
be. He reasoned it all out slowly. In a way he did not, at the time,
need much sleep. Just letting go of himself, as he was doing, was a
kind of resting.
In the meantime he walked naked and with bare feet up and down the room
trying to plan out his future life. “I accept the notion that I am at
present insane and only hope I shall remain so,” he told himself. After
all, it was quite apparent that the sane people about were not getting
such joy out of life as himself. There was this matter of his having
brought the Virgin into his own naked presence and having set her up
under the candles. For one thing the candles spread a soft glowing
light through the room. The clothes he habitually wore and that he had
learned to dislike because they had been made not for himself, but for
some impersonal being, in some clothing factory, were now hung away,
out of sight in the closet. “The gods have been good to me. I am not
very young any more, but for some reason I have not let my body get
fat or gross,” he thought going into the circle of candle-light and
looking long and earnestly at himself.
In the future and after the nights when his walking thus back and
forth in the room had forced itself upon the attention of his wife and
daughter until they were compelled to break in upon him, he would take
Natalie with him and go away. He had provided himself with a little
money, enough so that they could live for a few months. The rest would
be left to his wife and daughter. After he and Natalie had got clear of
the town they would go off somewhere, perhaps to the West. Then they
would settle down somewhere and work for their living.
What he himself wanted, more than anything else, was to give way to the
impulses within himself. “It must have been that, when I was a boy and
my imagination played madly over all the life about me, I was intended
to be something other than the dull clod I have been all these years.
In Natalie’s presence, as in the presence of a tree or a field, I can
be myself. I dare say I shall have to be a little careful sometimes
as I do not want to be declared insane and locked up somewhere, but
Natalie will help me in that. In a way my letting go of myself will be
an expression for both of us. In her own way she also has been locked
within a prison. Walls have been erected about her too.
“It may just be, you see, that there is something of the poet in me and
Natalie should have a poet for a lover.
“The truth is that I shall be at the job of in some way bringing grace
and meaning into my life. It must be after all that it is for something
of the sort life is intended.
“In reality it would not be such a bad thing if, in the few years of
life I have left, I accomplish nothing of importance. When one comes
right down to it accomplishment is not the vital thing in a life.
“As things are now, here in this town and in all the other towns
and cities I have ever been in, things are a good deal in a muddle.
Everywhere lives are lived without purpose. Men and women either spend
their lives going in and out of the doors of houses and factories
or they own houses and factories and they live their lives and find
themselves at last facing death and the end of life without having
lived at all.”
He kept smiling at himself and his own thoughts as he walked up and
down the room and occasionally he stopped walking and made an elaborate
bow to the Virgin. “I hope you are a true virgin,” he said. “I brought
you into this room and into the presence of my nude body because I
thought you would be that. You see, being a virgin, you cannot have
anything but pure thoughts.”
IV
Quite often, during the day-time, and after the time when the nightly
ceremony in his room began, John Webster had moments of fright.
“Suppose,” he thought, “my wife and daughter should look through the
keyhole into my room some night, and should decide to have me locked up
instead of coming in here and giving me the chance I want to talk with
them. As the matter stands I cannot carry out my plans unless I can get
the two of them into the room without asking them to come.”
He had a keen sense of the fact that what was to transpire in his room
would be terrible for his wife. Perhaps she would not be able to stand
it. A streak of cruelty had developed in him. In the day-time now he
seldom went to his office and when he did, stayed but a few minutes.
Every day he took a long walk in the country, sat under the trees,
wandered in woodland paths and in the evening walked in silence beside
Natalie, also in the country. The days marched past in quiet fall
splendor. There was a kind of sweet new responsibility in just being
alive when one felt so alive.
One day he climbed a little hill from the top of which he could see,
off across fields, the factory chimneys of his town. A soft haze lay
over woodland and fields. The voices within him did not riot now, but
chattered softly.
As for his daughter, the thing to be done was to startle her, if
possible, into a realization of the fact of life. “I owe her that,”
he thought. “Even though the thing that must happen will be terribly
hard for her mother it may bring life to Jane. In the end the dead
must surrender their places in life to the living. When long ago, I
went to bed of that woman, who is my Jane’s mother, I took a certain
responsibility upon myself. The going to bed of her may not have been
the most lovely thing in the world, as it turned out, but it is a thing
that was done and the result is this child, who is now no longer a
child, but who has become in her physical life a woman. Having helped
to give her this physical life I have now to try at least to give her
this other, this inner life also.”
He looked down across the fields toward the town. When the job he had
yet to do was done he would go away and spend the rest of his life
moving about among people, looking at people, thinking of them and
their lives. Perhaps he would become a writer. That would be as it
turned out.
He got up from his seat on the grass at the top of the hill and went
down along a road that would lead back to town and to his evening’s
walk with Natalie. Evening would be coming on soon now. “I’ll never
preach at anyone, anyhow. If by chance I do ever become a writer I’ll
only try to tell people what I have seen and heard in life and besides
that I’ll spend my time walking up and down, looking and listening,” he
thought.
BOOK THREE
I
And on that very night, after he had been seated on the hill thinking
of his life and what he would do with what remained of it and after he
had gone for the customary evening walk with Natalie, the doors of his
room did open and his wife and daughter came in.
It was about half past eleven o’clock and for an hour he had been
walking softly up and down before the picture of the Virgin. The
candles were lighted. His feet made a soft cat-like sound on the floor.
There was something strange and startling about hearing the sound in
the quiet house.
The door leading to his wife’s room opened and she stood looking at
him. Her tall form filled the doorway and her hands clutched at the
sides of the door. She was very pale and her eyes were fixed and
staring. “John,” she said hoarsely and then repeated the word. She
seemed to want to say more, but to be unable to speak. There was a
sharp sense of ineffectual struggle.
It was certain she was not very handsome as she stood there. “Life pays
people out. Turn your back on life and it gets even with you. When
people do not live they die and when they are dead they look dead,”
he thought. He smiled at her and then turned his head away and stood
listening.
It came--the sound for which he was listening. There was a stir in
his daughter’s room. He had counted so much on things turning out
as he wished and had even had a premonition it would happen on this
particular night. What had happened he thought he understood. For more
than a week now there had been this storm raging over the ocean of
silence that was his wife. There had been just such another prolonged
and resentful silence after their first attempt at love-making and
after he had said certain sharp hurtful things to her. That had
gradually worn itself out, but this new thing was something different.
It could not wear itself out in that way. The thing had happened for
which he had prayed. She had been compelled to meet him here, in the
place he had prepared.
And now his daughter, who had also been lying awake night after night,
and hearing the strange sounds in her father’s room, would be compelled
to come. He felt almost gay. On that evening he had told Natalie that
he thought his struggle might come to a breaking point that night and
had asked her to be ready for him. There was a train that would leave
town at four in the morning. “Perhaps we shall be able to take that,”
he had said.
“I’ll be waiting for you,” Natalie had said and now there was his wife,
standing pale and trembling, as though about to fall and looking from
the Virgin between her candles to his naked body and then there was the
sound of some one moving in his daughter’s room.
And now her door crept open an inch, softly, and he went at once and
threw it completely open. “Come in,” he said. “Both of you come in.
Go sit there on the bed together. I’ve something to say to you both.”
There was a commanding ring in his voice.
There was no doubt the women were both, for the moment at least,
completely frightened and cowed. How pale they both were. The daughter
put her hands to her face and ran across the room to sit upright
holding to a railing at the foot of the bed and still holding one hand
over her eyes and his wife walked across and fell face downward on the
bed. She made a continuous little moaning sound for a time and then
buried her face in the bedclothes and became silent. There was no doubt
both women thought him completely insane.
John Webster began walking up and down before them. “What an idea,” he
thought looking down at his own bare legs. He smiled, again looking
into the frightened face of his daughter. “Hito, tito,” he whispered
to himself. “Now do not lose your head. You’re going to pull this off.
Keep your head on your shoulders, my boy.” Some strange freak of his
mind made him raise his two hands as though he were conferring some
kind of blessing upon the two women. “I’m off my nut, out of my shell,
but I don’t care at all,” he mused.
He addressed his daughter. “Well, Jane,” he began, speaking with great
earnestness and in a clear quiet voice, “I can see you are frightened
and upset by what is going on here and I do not blame you. The truth
is that it was all planned. For a week now you have been lying awake in
your bed in the next room there and hearing me move about in here and
in that room over there your mother has been lying. There is something
I have been wanting to say to you and your mother, but as you know
there has never been any habit of talk in this house.
“The truth is I have wanted to startle you and I guess I have succeeded
in that.”
He walked across the room and sat on the bed between his daughter and
the heavy inert body of his wife. They were both dressed in nightgowns
and his daughter’s hair had fallen down about her shoulders. It was
like his wife’s hair when he married her. Then her hair had been just
such a golden yellow and when the sun shone on it coppery and brown
lights sometimes appeared.
“I’m going away from this house to-night. I’m not going to live with
your mother any more,” he said, leaning forward and looking at the
floor.
He straightened his body and for a long time sat looking at his
daughter’s body. It was young and slender. She would not be
extraordinarily tall like her mother but would be a woman of the medium
height. He studied her body carefully. Once, when she was a child of
six, Jane had been ill for nearly a year and he remembered now that
during that time she had been very precious to him. It was during a
year when the business had gone badly and he thought he might have to
go into bankruptcy at any moment, but he had managed to keep a trained
nurse in the house during the whole period of her illness. Every day
during that time he came home from the factory at noon and went into
his daughter’s room.
There was no fever. What was wrong? He had thrown the bedclothes off
the child’s body and had looked at it. She was very thin then and the
little bones of the body could be plainly seen. There was just the tiny
bony structure over which the fair white skin was drawn.
The doctors had said it was a matter of malnutrition, that the food
given the child did not nourish it, and they couldn’t find the right
food. The mother had been unable to nurse the child. Sometimes during
that period he stood for long minutes looking at the child whose tired
listless eyes looked back at him. The tears ran from his own eyes.
It was very strange. Since that time and after she had suddenly begun
to grow well and strong again he had in some way lost all track of his
daughter. Where had he been in the meantime and where had she been?
They were two people and they had been living in the same house all
these years. What was it that shut people off from each other? He
looked carefully at his daughter’s body, now clearly outlined under the
thin nightgown. She had rather broad hips, like a woman’s hips, and her
shoulders were narrow. How her body trembled. How afraid she was. “I
am a stranger to her and it is not surprising,” he thought. He leaned
forward and looked at her bare feet. They were small and well made.
Sometime a lover would come to kiss them. Sometime a man would feel
concerning her body as he now felt concerning the strong hard body of
Natalie Swartz.
His silence seemed to have aroused his wife, who turned and looked at
him. Then she sat up on the bed and he sprang to his feet and stood
confronting her. “John,” she said again in a hoarse whisper as though
wishing to call him back to her out of some dark mysterious place. Her
mouth opened and closed two or three times like the mouth of a fish
taken out of the water. He looked away and paid no more attention to
her and she again put her face down among the bedclothes.
“What I wanted, long ago, when Jane was a tiny thing, was simply that
life come into her and that is what I want now. That’s all I do want.
That’s what I’m after now,” John Webster thought.
He began walking up and down the room again, having a sense of great
leisure. Nothing would happen. Now his wife had again fallen into the
ocean of silence. She would lie there on the bed and say nothing, do
nothing until he had finished saying what he had to say and had gone
away. His daughter was blind and dumb with fear now, but perhaps he
could warm the fear out of her. “I must go about this matter slowly,
take my time, tell her everything,” he thought. The frightened girl
now took her hand from before her eyes and looked at him. Her mouth
trembled and then a word was formed. “Father,” she said appealingly.
He smiled at her reassuringly and made a movement with his arm toward
the Virgin, sitting so solemnly between the two candles. “Look up
there for a moment while I talk to you,” he said.
He plunged at once into an explanation of his situation.
“There has been something broken,” he said. “It is the habit of life in
this house. Now you will not understand, but sometime you will.
“For years I have not been in love with this woman here, who is your
mother and has been my wife, and now I have fallen in love with another
woman. Her name is Natalie and to-night, after you and I have had our
talk, she and I are going away to live together.”
On an impulse he went and knelt on the floor at his daughter’s feet and
then quickly sprang up again. “No, that’s not right. I am not to ask
her forgiveness, I am to tell her of things,” he thought.
“Well now,” he began again, “you are going to think me insane and
perhaps I am. I don’t know. Anyway my being here in this room with the
Virgin and without any clothes, the strangeness of all this will make
you think me insane. Your mind will cling to that thought. It will want
to cling to that thought,” he said aloud. “It may turn out so for a
time.”
He seemed puzzled as to how to say all the things he wanted to say.
The whole matter, the scene in the room, the talk with his daughter
that he had planned so carefully was going to be a harder matter to
handle than he had counted on. He had thought there would be a kind
of final significance in his nakedness and in the presence of the
Virgin and her candles. Had he overset the stage? He wondered, and kept
looking with eyes filled with anxiety at his daughter’s face. It told
him nothing. She was just frightened and clinging to the railing at
the foot of the bed as one cast suddenly into the sea might cling to a
floating piece of wood. His wife’s body lying on the bed had a strange
rigid look. Well there had for years been something rigid and cold in
the woman’s body. Perhaps she had died. That would be a thing to have
happen. It would be something he had not counted upon. It was rather
strange, now that he came to face the problem before him, how very
little the presence of his wife had to do with the matter in hand.
He stopped looking at his daughter and began walking up and down and
as he walked he talked. In a calm, although slightly strained voice
he began trying to explain first of all the presence of the Virgin
and the candles in the room. He was speaking now to some person, not
his own daughter but just a human being like himself. Immediately he
felt relieved. “Well, now. That’s the ticket. That’s the way to go at
things,” he thought. For a long time he went on talking and walking
thus up and down. It was better not to think too much. One had to cling
to the faith that the thing he had so recently found within himself
and within Natalie was somewhere alive in her too. Before the morning
when the whole matter between himself and Natalie began, his life had
been like a beach covered with rubbish and lying in darkness. The beach
was covered with old dead water-logged trees and stumps. The twisted
roots of old trees stuck up into the darkness. Before it lay the heavy
sluggish inert sea of life.
And then there had come this storm within and now the beach was clean.
Could he keep it clean? Could he keep it clean so that it would sparkle
in the morning light?
He was trying to tell his daughter Jane something about the life he
had lived in the house with her and why, before he could talk to her,
he had been compelled to do something extraordinary, like bringing the
Virgin into his room and taking off his own body the clothes that, when
he wore them, would make him seem in her eyes just the goer in and out
of the house, the provider of bread and clothes for herself she had
always known.
Speaking very clearly and slowly, as though afraid he would get off
the track, he told her something of his life as a business man, of
how little essential interest he always had in the affairs that had
occupied all his days.
He forgot about the Virgin and for a time spoke only of himself. He
came again to sit beside her and as he talked boldly put his hand on
her leg. The flesh was cold under her thin nightgown.
“I was a young thing as you are now, Jane, when I met the woman who is
your mother and who was my wife,” he explained. “You must try to adjust
your mind to the thought that both your mother and I were once young
things like yourself.
“I suppose your mother, when she was your age must have been very
much as you are now. She would of course have been somewhat taller.
I remember that her body was at that time very long and slender. I
thought it very lovely then.
“I have cause to remember your mother’s body. She and I first met
each other through our bodies. At first there was nothing else, just
our naked bodies. We had that and we denied it. Perhaps upon that
everything might have been built, but we were too ignorant or too
cowardly. It is because of what happened between your mother and myself
that I have brought you into my own naked presence and have brought
this picture of the Virgin in here. I have a desire to in some way make
the flesh a sacred thing to you.”
His voice had grown soft and reminiscent and he took his hand from his
daughter’s leg and touched her cheeks and then her hair. He was frankly
making love to her now and she had somewhat fallen under his influence.
He reached down and taking one of her hands held it tightly.
“We met, you see, your mother and I, at the house of a friend.
Although, until a few weeks ago, when I suddenly began to love another
woman, I had not for years thought about that meeting, it is, at this
moment, as clear in my mind as though it had happened here, in this
house, to-night.
“The whole thing, of which I now want to tell you the details, happened
right here in this town, at the house of a man who was at that time my
friend. Now he is dead, but at that time we were constantly together.
He had a sister, a year younger than himself, of whom I was fond, but
although we went about together a good deal, she and I were not in love
with each other. Afterward she married and moved out of town.
“There was another young woman, the very woman who is now your mother,
who was coming to that house to visit my friend’s sister and as they
lived at the other end of town and as my father and mother were away
from town on a visit I was asked to visit there too. It was to be a
kind of special occasion. The Christmas holidays were coming on and
there were to be many parties and dances.
“A thing happened to me and your mother that was not at bottom so
unlike the thing that has happened to you and me here to-night,” he
said sharply. He had grown a little excited again and thought he had
better get up and walk. Dropping his daughter’s hand he sprang to his
feet and for a few minutes walked nervously about. The whole thing, the
startled fear of him that kept going and coming in his daughter’s eyes
and the inert silent presence of his wife, was making what he wanted
to do more difficult than he had imagined it would be. He looked at
his wife’s body lying silent and motionless on the bed. How many times
he had seen the same body, lying just in that way. She had submitted
to him long ago and had been submitting to the life in himself ever
since. The figure his mind had made, ‘an ocean of silence,’ fitted her
well. She had always been silent. At the best all she had learned from
life was a half-resentful habit of submission. Even when she talked to
him she did not really talk. It was odd indeed that Natalie out of
her silence could say so many things to him while he and this woman in
all their years together had said nothing really touching each other’s
lives.
He looked from the motionless body of the older woman to his daughter
and smiled. “I can enter into her,” he thought exultant. “She cannot
shut me out of herself, does not want to shut me out of herself.” There
was something in his daughter’s face that told him what was going on
in her mind. The younger woman now sat looking at the figure of the
Virgin and it was evident that the dumb fright that had taken such
complete possession of her when she was ushered abruptly into the room
and the presence of the naked man was beginning a little to loosen
its grip. In spite of herself she was thinking. There was the man,
her own father, moving nude like a tree in winter about the room and
occasionally stopping to look at her, the dim light, the Virgin with
the candles burning beneath and the figure of her mother lying on the
bed. Her father was trying to tell her some story she wanted to hear.
In some way it concerned herself, some vital part of herself. There was
no doubt it was wrong, terribly wrong for the story to be told and for
her to listen, but she wanted to hear it now.
“After all I was right,” John Webster was thinking. “Such a thing as
has happened here might make or utterly ruin a woman of Jane’s age, but
as it is everything will come out right. She has a streak of cruelty in
her too. There is a kind of health in her eyes now. She wants to know.
After this experience she will perhaps no longer be afraid of the
dead. It is the dead who are forever frightening the living.”
He took up the thread of his tale as he walked up and down in the dim
light.
“A thing happened to your mother and me. I went to my friend’s house
in the early morning and your mother was to arrive on a train in the
late afternoon. There were two trains, one at noon and the other in the
afternoon about five, and as she would have to get up in the middle of
the night to take the first one we all supposed she would come later.
My friend and I had planned to spend the day hunting rabbits on the
fields near town and we got back to his house about four.
“There would be time enough for us to bathe and dress ourselves before
the guest arrived. When we got home my friend’s mother and sister had
gone out and we supposed there was no one in the house but a servant.
In reality the guest, you see, had arrived on the train at noon, but
that we did not know and the servant did not tell us. We hurried
upstairs to undress and then went downstairs and into a shed to bathe.
At that time people had no bathtubs in their houses and the servant had
filled two washtubs with water and had put them in the shed. After she
had filled the tubs she disappeared, got herself out of the way.
“We were running about the house naked as I am doing here now. What
happened was that I came naked out of that shed downstairs and climbed
the stairs to the upper part of the house, going to my room. The day
had grown warm and now it was almost dark.”
Again John Webster came to sit with his daughter on the bed and to hold
one of her hands.
“I went up the stairs and along a hallway and opening a door went
across a room to what I thought was my bed, where I had laid out the
clothes I had brought that morning in my bag.
“You see what had happened was that your mother had got out of bed in
her own town at midnight on the night before and when she arrived at my
friend’s house his mother and sister had insisted she undress and get
into bed. She had not unpacked her bag, but had thrown off her clothes
and had got in between the sheets as naked as I was when I walked in
upon her. As the day had turned warm she had I suppose grown somewhat
restless and in stirring about had thrown the bedclothes to one side.
“She lay, you see, quite nude on the bed, in the uncertain light, and
as I had no shoes on my feet I made no sound when I came in to her.
“It was an amazing moment for me. I had walked directly to the bed
and there she was within a few inches of my hands as they hung by my
side. It was your mother’s most lovely moment with me. As I have said
she was then very slender and her long body was white like the sheets
of the bed. At that time I had never before been in the presence of a
woman undressed. I had just come from the bath. It was like a kind of
wedding, you see.
“How long I stood there looking at her I don’t know, but anyway she
knew I was there. Her eyes came up to me out of sleep like a swimmer
out of the sea. Perhaps, it is just possible, she had been dreaming of
me or of some other man.
“At any rate and for just a moment she was not frightened or startled
at all. It was really our wedding moment, you see.
“O, had we only known how to live up to that moment! I stood there
looking at her and she was there on the bed looking at me. There must
have been a glowing something alive in our eyes. I did not know then
all I felt, but long afterward, sometimes, when I was walking in the
country or riding on a train, I thought. Well, what did I think? It was
evening you see. I mean that afterward, sometimes, when I was alone,
when it was evening and I was alone I looked off across hills or I saw
a river making a white streak down below as I stood on a cliff. What I
mean to say is that I have spent all these years trying to recapture
that moment and now it is dead.”
John Webster threw out his hands with a gesture of disgust and then
got quickly off the bed. His wife’s body had begun to stir and now she
lifted herself up. For a moment her rather huge figure was crouched on
the bed and she looked like some great animal on all fours, sick and
trying to get up and walk.
And then she did get up, putting her feet firmly on the floor and
walking slowly out of the room without looking at the two people. Her
husband stood with his back pressed against the wall of the room and
watched her go. “Well, that’s the end of her,” he thought grimly. The
door that led into her room came slowly toward him. Now it was closed.
“Some doors have to be closed forever too,” he told himself.
He was still in his daughter’s presence and she was not afraid of him.
He went to a closet and getting out his clothes began to dress. That he
realized was a terrible moment. Well, he was playing the cards he held
in his hand to the limit. He had been nude. Now he had to get into his
clothes, into the clothes he had come to feel had no meaning and were
altogether unlovely because the unknown hands that had fashioned them
were unmoved by the desire to create beauty. An absurd notion came to
him. “Has my daughter a sense of moments? Will she help me now?” he
asked himself.
And then his heart jumped. His daughter Jane had done a quite lovely
thing. While he jerked his clothes on hurriedly she turned and threw
herself face downward on the bed, in the same position in which her
mother had been but a moment before.
“I walked out of her room into the hallway,” he explained. “My friend
had come upstairs and was standing in the hallway lighting a lamp that
was fastened to a bracket on the wall. You can perhaps imagine the
things that were going through my mind. My friend looked at me, as yet
knowing nothing. You see, he did not yet know that woman was in the
house, but he had seen me walk out of the room. He had just lighted the
lamp when I came out and closed the door behind me and the light fell
on my face. There must have been something that startled him. Later
we never spoke of the matter at all. As it turned out every one was
embarrassed and made self-conscious by what had occurred and what was
still to occur.
“I must have walked out of the room like a man walking in sleep. What
was in my mind? What had been in my mind when I stood there beside her
naked body and even before that? It was a situation that might not
occur again in a lifetime. You have just now seen how your mother went
out of this room. You are wondering, I dare say, what is in her mind.
I can tell you of that. There is nothing in her mind. She has made her
mind a blank empty place into which nothing that matters can come. She
has spent a lifetime at that, as I dare say most people have.
“As for that evening when I stood in the hallway, with the light of
that lamp shining on me and with my friend looking and wondering what
was the matter--that, after all, is what I must try to tell you about.”
He was partially dressed now and again Jane was sitting upright on the
bed. He came to sit in his shirt sleeves beside her. Long afterward
she remembered how extraordinarily young he looked at that moment.
He seemed intent on making her understand fully everything that had
happened. “Well, you understand,” he said slowly, “that although she
had seen my friend and his sister before, she had never seen me. At the
same time she knew I was to stay in the house during her visit. No
doubt she had been having thoughts about the strange young man she was
to meet and it is also true I had been having thoughts about her.
“Even at the moment when I walked, thus nude, into her presence she was
a living thing in my mind. And when she came up to me, out of sleep you
see, before she had time to think, I was a living thing to her then.
What living things we were to each other we dared understand but for
a moment. I know that now, but for many years after that happened I
didn’t know and was only confused.
“I was confused also when I came out into the hallway and stood before
my friend. You understand that he did not yet know she was in the
house. I had to tell him something and it was like having to tell in
some public way the secret of what happens between two people in a
moment of love.
“It can’t be done, you understand, and so there I stood stammering and
making things worse every minute. I must have had a guilty look on my
face and right away I began to feel guilty, although when I was in that
room standing by the bed, as I have explained, I didn’t feel guilty at
all, quite the contrary in fact.
“‘I went naked into that room and stood beside the bed and that woman
is in there now, all naked,’ I said.
“My friend was of course amazed. ‘What woman?’ he asked.
“I tried to explain. ‘Your sister’s friend. She is in there naked on
the bed and I went in and stood beside her. She came on the train at
noon,’ I said.
“You see, I appeared to know all about everything. I felt guilty.
That was what was the matter with me. I suppose I stammered and acted
confused. ‘He’ll never believe it was an accident now. He’ll think I am
up to something strange,’ I thought immediately. Whether he ever had
all or any of the thoughts that went through my mind at that moment and
of which I was in a way accusing him I never found out. I was always a
stranger in that house after that moment. You see, what I had done, to
have been made quite clear would have required a good deal of whispered
explanation that I never offered and, even after your mother and I were
married, things were never as they had been between me and my friend.
“And so I stood there stammering and he was looking at me with a
puzzled startled look in his eyes. The house was very quiet and I
remember how the light of the lamp, in its bracket on the wall, fell
on our two naked bodies. My friend, the man who was the witness of
that moment of vital drama in my life, is dead now. He died some eight
years ago and your mother and I dressed ourselves in our best clothes
and went in a carriage to his funeral and later to a graveyard to watch
his body being put away into the ground, but at that moment he was very
much alive and I shall always continue to think of him as he was then.
We had been tramping about all day in the fields and he, like myself,
had just come, you remember, from the bath. His young body was very
slender and strong and it made a glowing white mark against the dark
wall of the hallway, against which he stood.
“Were we both expecting something more to happen, waiting for something
more to happen? We did not speak to each other again, but stood in
silence. Perhaps he was only startled by my statement of what I had
just done and by something a little strange in the manner in which I
had told him. Ordinarily after such an accident there would have been a
kind of giggling confusion, the thing would have been passed off as a
kind of secret and delicious joke, but I had killed all possibility of
its being taken in that spirit by something in the way I had looked and
acted when I came out to him. I was, I suppose, at the same time both
too conscious and not conscious enough of the significance of what I
had done.
“And so we just stood in silence looking at each other and then the
door downstairs, that led to the street, opened and his mother and
sister came into the house. They had taken advantage of the fact that
their guest had gone to sleep and had walked to the business part of
town to do some shopping.
“As for myself, what was going on within me at that moment is the
hardest thing of all to explain. I had difficulty getting hold of
myself, of that you may be sure. What I think now, at this moment, is
that then, at that moment long ago when I stood there naked in that
hallway beside my friend, something had gone out of me that I could not
immediately get back.
“Perhaps when you have grown older you will understand as you cannot
understand now.”
John Webster looked long and hard at his daughter who also looked at
him. For both of them the story he was telling had become a rather
impersonal one. The woman, who was so closely connected to them both as
wife and mother, had gone quite out of the tale as she had but a few
moments before gone stumbling out of the room.
“You see,” he said slowly, “what I did not then understand, could not
then have been expected to understand, was that I had really gone
out of myself in love to the woman on the bed in the room. No one
understands that a thing of that sort may occur like a thought flashing
across the mind. What I am nowadays coming to believe and would like
to get fixed in your mind, young woman, is that such moments come into
all lives, but that in all the millions of people who are born and live
long or short lives but a few ever really come to find out what life is
like. There is a kind of perpetual denial of life, you understand.
“I was dazed as I stood in the hallway outside that woman’s room long
ago. There had been a flashing kind of something between the woman
and myself, in the moment I have described to you, when she came up
to me out of sleep. Something deep in our two beings had been touched
and I could not quickly recover. There had been a marriage, something
intensely personal to our two selves, and by chance it had been made
a kind of public affair. I suppose it would have turned out the same
way had we two been alone in the house. We were very young. Sometimes I
think all the people in the world are very young. They cannot carry the
fire of life when it flashes to life in their hands.
“And in the room, behind the closed door, the woman must have been
having, at just that moment, some such feeling as myself. She had
raised herself up and was now sitting on the edge of the bed. She was
listening to the sudden silence of the house as my friend and I were
listening. It may be an absurd thing to say, but it is nevertheless
true that my friend’s mother and sister, who had just come into the
house, were both, in some unconscious way, affected also as they stood
with their coats on downstairs, also listening.
“Just then, at that moment, in the room in the darkness, the woman
began to sob like a brokenhearted child. There had been a thing quite
tremendous come to her and she could not hold it. To be sure the
immediate cause of her weeping that way, the way in which she would
have explained her grief, was shame. That was what she thought had
happened to her, that she had been put into a shameful ridiculous
position. She was a young girl. I dare say thoughts had already come
into her mind concerning what all the others would think. At any rate I
know that at the moment and afterward I was more pure than herself.
“The sound of her sobbing rang through the house and downstairs my
friend’s mother and sister, who had been standing and listening as I
have said, now ran to the foot of the stairway leading up.
“As for myself, I did what must have seemed to all the others a
ridiculous, almost a criminal thing. I ran to the door leading into the
bedroom and tearing it open ran in, slamming the door behind me. It was
by this time almost completely dark in the room, but without hesitation
I ran to her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed and as she sobbed
her body rocked back and forth. She was, at that moment, like a slender
young tree, standing in an open field, without any other trees to
protect it. She was shaken as by a great storm, that’s what I mean.
“And so you see, I ran to her and threw my arms about her body.
“The thing that had happened to us before happened once again, for
the last time in our lives. She gave herself to me, that’s what I am
trying to say. There was another marriage. For just a moment she became
altogether quiet and in the uncertain light her face was turned up to
mine. From her eyes came that same look, as of one coming up to me, out
of a deep buried place, out of the sea or something like that. I have
always thought of the place out of which she came as the sea.
“I dare say if anyone but you heard me tell this and if I had told it
to you under less strange circumstances you would only have thought me
a romantic fool. ‘She was startled,’ you would say and I dare say she
was. But also there was this other. Even though it was dark in the room
I felt the thing glowing deep down in her and then coming up, straight
up to me. The moment was unspeakably lovely. It lasted for but a
fraction of a second, like the snapping of the shutter of a camera, and
then it passed.
“I still held her tightly and the door opened and in the doorway stood
my friend and his mother and sister. He had taken the lamp from its
bracket on the wall and held it in his hand. She sat quite naked on the
bed and I stood beside her, with one knee on the edge of the bed, and
with my arms thrown about her.”
II
Ten or fifteen minutes had passed and in the interval John Webster had
completed his arrangements for leaving the house and setting out with
Natalie on his new adventure in life. In a short time now he would be
with her and all the cords that bound him to his old life would have
been cut. It was sure that, whatever happened, he would never see his
wife again and perhaps he would never see again the woman, now in the
room with him, who was his daughter. If the doors of life could be torn
open they could also be closed. One could walk out of a certain phase
of life as out of a room. There might be traces of him left behind, but
he would no longer be there.
He had put on his collar and coat, arranging everything quite calmly.
Also he had packed a small bag, putting in extra shirts, pajamas,
toilet articles, et cetera.
During all this time his daughter sat at the foot of the bed with her
face buried in the crook of her arm that hung over the railing of the
bed. Was she thinking? Were voices talking within her? What was she
thinking?
In the interval, when the father’s telling of the tale of his life
in the house had ceased and while he was doing the necessary little
mechanical things before setting out on his new way of life, there was
this pregnant time of silence.
There was no doubt that, if he had become insane, the insanity within
was becoming constantly more fixed, more a habit of his being.
There was, taking constantly deeper and deeper roots within him, a
new viewpoint of life or rather to be a bit fancy and speak of the
matter more in the modern spirit, as he himself might later have done
laughingly, one might say he had been permanently caught up and held by
a new rhythm of life.
At any rate it is true that, long afterward, when the man sometimes
spoke of the experiences of that time, what he himself said was that
one, by an effort of his own, and if he would but dare let himself go,
could almost at will walk in and out of various planes of life. In
speaking of such matters later he sometimes gave the impression that
he quite calmly believed that one, once he had acquired the talent and
courage for it, that one might even go so far as to be able to walk in
the air along a street at the level of the second story of houses and
look in at the people going about their private affairs in the upper
rooms as a certain historic man of the East is said to have once walked
on the surface of the waters of a sea. It was all a part of a notion he
had got fixed in his head regarding the tearing down of walls and the
taking of people out of prisons.
There he was, at any rate, in his room fixing, let us say, his tie pin
in his necktie. He had got out the small bag into which he put as he
thought of them, the things he might need. In the next room his wife,
the woman who in the process of living her life had become the large
heavy inert one, was lying in silence on her bed as she had but a short
while before been lying on the bed in the presence of himself and his
daughter.
What dark and terrible things were in her mind? Or was her mind a blank
as John Webster sometimes thought it had become?
At his back, in the same room with himself, was his daughter, in
her thin nightgown and with her hair fallen down about her face and
shoulders. Her body--he could see the reflection of it in the glass
as he arranged the tie--was drooped and limp. The experiences of
the evening had no doubt taken something out of her body, perhaps
permanently. He wondered about that and his eyes in roving about the
room found again the Virgin with the candles burning by her side
looking calmly at the scene. It was that calmness men worshipped in the
Virgin perhaps. It was a strange turn of events that had led him to
bring her, the calm one, into the room, to make her a part of the whole
remarkable affair. No doubt it was the calm virginal thing he was at
that moment in the process of taking out of his daughter, it was the
coming of that element out of her body that had left her so limp and
apparently lifeless. There was no doubt he had been daring. The hand
that was arranging the tie trembled a little.
Doubt came. As I have said the house was at that moment very silent.
In the next room his wife, lying on the bed, made no sound. She floated
in a sea of silence, as she had done ever since that other night, long
before, when shame, in the form of a naked and distraught man, had
embraced her nakedness in the presence of those others.
Had he in turn done the same thing to his daughter? Had he plunged her
also into that sea? It was a startling and terrible thought. One did
no doubt upset things by becoming insane in a sane world or sane in
an insane world. Quite suddenly everything became upset, turned quite
upside down.
* * * * *
And then it might well be true that the whole matter simply resolved
itself into this--that he, John Webster, was merely a man who had
become suddenly enamoured of his stenographer and wanted to go and
live with her and that he had found himself without the courage to do
so simple a thing without making a fuss about it, without in fact an
elaborate justification of himself, at the expense of these others. To
justify himself he had devised this strange business of appearing nude
before the young girl who was his daughter and who in reality, being
his daughter, deserved the utmost consideration from him. There was no
doubt but that, from one point of view, what he had done was altogether
unforgivable. “After all I am still but a washing machine manufacturer
in a small Wisconsin town,” he told himself, whispering the words out
slowly and distinctly to himself.
That was a thing to bear in mind. Now his bag was packed and he was
quite dressed and ready to set out. When the mind no longer moved
forward sometimes the body took its place and made the consummation of
an act once begun quite definitely unavoidable.
He walked across the room and stood for a time looking up into the calm
eyes of the Virgin in the frame.
His thoughts were again like bells heard ringing across fields. “I am
in a room in a house on a street in a town in the state of Wisconsin.
At this moment most of the other people here in town, the people among
whom I have always lived, are in bed and asleep but to-morrow morning,
when I am gone, the town will be here and will move forward with its
life, as it has been doing since I was a young fellow, married a woman
and began living my present life.” There were these definite facts of
existence. One wore clothes, ate, moved about among his fellow men and
women. Certain phases of life were lived in the darkness of nights,
others in the light of days. In the morning the three women who worked
at his office and also the bookkeeper would appear to do their usual
tasks. When, after a time, neither he nor Natalie Swartz appeared there
would begin a looking from one to another. After a time whispering
would begin. There would begin a whispering that would run through the
town, visit all the houses, the shops, the stores. Men and women would
stop on the street to speak to each other, the men speaking to other
men, the women to other women. The women who were wives would be a
little angry at him and the men a little envious, but the men would
perhaps speak of him more bitterly than the women. That would be to
cover up their own wish to break in some way the boredom of their own
existence.
A smile spread itself over John Webster’s face and it was then he went
to sit on the floor at his daughter’s feet and tell her the rest of
the story of his married life. There was after all a kind of wicked
satisfaction to be got out of his situation. As for his daughter, well,
it was a fact too, that nature had made the connection between them
quite inevitable. He might throw into his daughter’s lap the new aspect
of life that had come to him and then, did she choose to reject it,
that would be a matter for her to decide. People would not blame her.
“Poor girl,” they would say, “what a shame she should have had such a
man for a father.” On the other hand and if after hearing all he had
to say she decided to run a little more swiftly through life, to open
her arms to it, in a way of speaking, what he had done would be a help.
There was Natalie whose old mother had made herself a great nuisance
by getting drunk and shouting so that all the neighbors could hear and
calling her hard-working daughters whores. It was perhaps absurd to
think that such a mother might be giving her daughters a better chance
in life than a quite respectable mother could possibly have given them
and still, in a world upset, turned upside down as it were, that might
be quite true too.
At any rate there was a quiet sureness in Natalie that was, even in his
moments of doubt, amazingly quieting and healing to himself. “I love
her and I accept her. If her old mother, by letting go of herself and
shouting in the streets in a kind of drunken splendor of abandonment,
has made a clear way in which Natalie may walk, all hail to her too,”
he thought, smiling at his own thoughts.
He sat at his daughter’s feet talking quietly and as he talked
something within her became more quiet. She listened with constantly
growing interest, looking down at him occasionally. He sat very close
to her and occasionally leaned over a little and laid his cheek against
her leg. “The devil! He was quite apparently making love to her too.”
She did not think such a thought definitely. A subtle feeling of
confidence and sureness went out of him into her. He began the tale of
his marriage again.
On the evening of his youth, when his friend and his friend’s mother
and sister had come into the presence of himself and the woman he
was to marry, he had suddenly been overcome by the same thing that
afterward left so permanent a scar on her. Shame swept over him.
Well what was he to do? How was he to explain this second running into
that room and into the presence of the naked woman? It was a matter
that could not be explained. A mood of desperation swept over him and
he ran past the people at the door and down the hallway, this time
getting into the room to which he had been assigned.
He had closed and locked the door behind him and then he dressed,
hurriedly, with feverish rapidity. When he was quite dressed he came
out of the room carrying his bag. The hallway was silent and the lamp
had been put back into its bracket on the wall. What had happened? No
doubt the daughter of the house was with the woman, trying to comfort
her. His friend had perhaps gone into his own room and was at the
moment dressing and no doubt thinking thoughts too. There was bound to
be no end of disturbed agitated thinking in the house. Everything might
have been all right had he not gone into the room that second time, but
how could he ever explain that the second going was as unpremeditated
as the first. He went quickly downstairs.
Below he met his friend’s mother, a woman of fifty. She stood in a
doorway that led into a dining room. A servant was putting dinner
on the table. The laws of the household were being observed. It was
time to dine and in a few minutes the people of the house would dine.
“Holy Moses,” he thought, “I wonder if she could come down here now
and sit at table with myself and the others, eating food? Can the
habits of existence so quickly reassert themselves after so profound a
disturbance?”
He put his bag down on the floor by his feet and looked at the
older woman. “I don’t know,” he began, and stood looking at her and
stammering. She was confused, as every one in that house must have been
confused at that moment, but there was something in her, very kindly,
that gave sympathy when it could not understand. She started to speak.
“It was all an accident and there is nobody hurt,” she started to say,
but he did not wait to listen. Picking up the bag he rushed out of the
house.
What was to be done then? He had hurried across town to his own home
and it was dark and silent. His father and mother had gone away. His
grandmother, that is to say, his mother’s mother, was very ill in
another town and his father and mother had gone there. They might not
return for several days. There were two servants employed in the house,
but as the house was to be unoccupied they had been permitted to go
away. Even the fires were out. He could not stay there, but would have
to go to a hotel.
“I went into the house and put my bag down on the floor by the front
door,” he explained, and a shiver ran through his body as he remembered
the dreariness of that evening long before. It was to have been an
evening of gaiety. The four young people had planned to go to a dance
and in anticipation of the figure he would cut with the new girl
from another town, he had, in advance, worked himself up to a state
of semi-excitement. The devil!--He had counted on finding in her the
something--well, what was it?--the something a young fellow is always
dreaming of finding in some strange woman who is suddenly to come up
to him out of nowhere and bring with her new life which she presents
to him freely, asking nothing. “You see, the dream is obviously an
impossible one, but one has it in youth,” he explained, smiling. All
through the telling of this part of his story he kept smiling. Did
his daughter understand? One couldn’t question her understanding too
closely. “The woman is to come clad in shining garments and with a
calm smile on her face,” he went on, building up his fanciful picture.
“With what regal grace she carries herself and yet, you understand,
she is not some impossible cold drawn-away thing either. There are
many men standing about, all no doubt more deserving than yourself,
but it is to you she comes, walking slowly, with her body all alive.
She is the unspeakably beautiful Virgin, but there is something very
earthy about her too. The truth is that she can be very cold and proud
and drawn-away when anyone else but yourself is concerned, but in your
presence the coldness all goes out of her.
“She comes toward you and her hand, that holds before her slender young
body a golden tray, trembles a little. On the tray there is a box,
small and cunningly wrought, and within it is a jewel, a talisman,
that is for you. You are to take the jewel, set in a golden ring, out
of the box and put in on your finger. It is nothing. The strange and
beautiful woman has but brought it to you as a sign, before all the
others, that she lays herself at your feet. When your hand reaches
forward and takes the jewel from the box her body begins to tremble
and the golden tray falls to the floor making a loud rattling sound.
Something terrific happens to all the others who have been witnesses of
the scene. Of a sudden all the people present realize that you, whom
they had always thought of as just an ordinary fellow, not, to tell the
truth, as worthy as themselves, well, you see, they have been made,
fairly forced, to realize your true self. Of a sudden there you stand
before them all in your true colors, quite revealed at last. There is a
kind of radiant splendor comes out of you and fairly lights up the room
where you, the woman, and all the others, the men and women of your own
town you have always known and who have always thought they knew you,
where they all stand looking and gasping with astonishment.
“It is a moment. The most unbelievable thing happens. There is a clock
on the wall and it has been ticking, ticking, running out the span
of your life and the lives of all the others. Outside the room, in
which this remarkable scene takes place, there is a street with the
activities of the street going on. Men and women are perhaps hurrying
up and down, trains are coming in and going out of distant railroad
stations, and even further away ships are sailing on many wide seas and
great winds are disturbing the waters of seas.
“And suddenly all is stopped. It is a fact. On the wall the clock stops
ticking, moving trains become dead and lifeless, people in the streets,
who have started to say words to each other, stand now with their
mouths open, on the seas winds no longer blow.
“For all life everywhere there is this hushed moment and, out of it
all, the buried thing within you asserts itself. Out of the great
stillness you step and take the woman into your arms. In a moment now
all life can begin to move and be again, but after this moment all
life forever will have been colored by this act of your own, by this
marriage. It was for this marriage you and the woman were made.”
All of which is perhaps going the extreme limit of fancifulness, as
John Webster was careful to explain to Jane, and yet, there he was in
the upper bedroom with his daughter, brought suddenly close to the
daughter he had never known until that moment, and he was trying to
speak to her of his feelings at the moment when, in his youth, he had
once played the part of a supreme and innocent fool.
“The house was like a tomb, Jane,” he said, and there was a break in
his voice.
It was evident the old boyhood dream was not yet dead. Even now, in his
maturity, some faint perfume of it floated up to him as he sat on the
floor at his daughter’s feet. “The fires in the house had been out all
day and outdoors it was getting colder,” he began again. “All through
the house there was that kind of damp coldness that always makes one
think of death. You must remember that I had been thinking, and was
still thinking, of what I had done at my friend’s house as the act of
an insane fool. Well, you see, our house was heated by stoves and there
was a small one in my own room upstairs. I went into the kitchen, where
behind the kitchen stove, in a box, kindlings were always kept, cut and
ready, and taking out an armful started upstairs.
“In the hallway, in the darkness at the foot of the stairs, my leg
knocked against a chair and I put the armful of kindlings down on the
chair seat. I stood in the darkness trying to think and not thinking.
‘I’m going to be sick perhaps,’ I thought. My self-respect was all gone
and perhaps one cannot think at such times.
“In the kitchen, above the kitchen stove, before which my mother or
our servant Adaline was always standing when the house was alive and
not dead as it was now, just up there, where one could see it over the
women’s heads, there was a small clock and now that clock began making
a sound as loud as though some one were beating on sheets of iron with
big hammers. In the house next door some one was talking steadily or
maybe reading aloud. The wife of the German who lived in the next
house had been ill in bed for months and perhaps now he was trying to
entertain her by reading some story. The words came steadily, but in
a broken way too. What I mean is, that there would be a steady little
run of sounds, then it would be broken and then begin again. Sometimes
the voice would be raised a little, for emphasis no doubt, and that was
like a kind of splash, as when the waves along a beach all, for a long
time, run to the same place clearly marked on the wet sand and then
there comes one wave that goes far beyond all the others and splashes
against the face of a rock.
“You see perhaps the state I was in. It was, as I have said, very cold
in the house and for a long time I stood in one spot, not moving at
all and thinking I never wanted to move again. The voices from the
distance, from the German’s house next door, were like voices coming
from some hidden buried place in myself. There was one voice telling
me I was a fool and that, after what had happened, I could never again
hold up my head in the world, and another voice telling me I was not a
fool at all, but for the time the first voice had all the best of the
argument. What I did was to stand there in the cold and try to let the
two voices fight it out without putting in my oar, but after a while,
it may have been because I was so cold, I began to cry like a kid and
that made me so ashamed I went to the front door quickly and got out of
the house forgetting to put on my overcoat.
“Well, I had left my hat in the house too and there I was outside in
the cold, bareheaded, and presently as I walked, keeping as much as I
could in unfrequented streets, it began to snow.
“‘All right,’ I said to myself, ‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll go to their
house and ask her to marry me.’
“When I got there my friend’s mother was not in sight and the three
younger people were sitting in the parlor of the house. I looked in
through a window and then, fearing I would lose my courage if I
hesitated, went boldly up and knocked on the door. I was glad anyway
they had felt that after what had happened they couldn’t go to the
dance and when my friend came and opened the door I said nothing, but
walked directly into the room where the two girls sat.
“She was on a couch in a corner, where the light from a lamp on a
table in the centre of the room fell on her but faintly, and I went
directly to her. My friend had followed me into the room, but now I
turned to him and his sister and asked them both to go out of the room.
‘Something has happened here to-night that can’t very well be explained
and we must be left alone together for a few minutes,’ I said making a
motion with my hand to where she sat on the couch.
“When they went out I followed to the door and closed it after them.
“And so there I was in the presence of the woman who was later to be my
wife. There was an odd kind of droopiness to her whole person as she
sat on the couch. Her body had, in a way you see, slid down from its
perch on the couch and now she was lying rather than sitting. What I
mean is that her body was draped on the couch. It was like a garment
thrown carelessly down there. That had happened since I had come into
the room. I stood before it a moment and then got down on my knees. Her
face was very pale, but her eyes were looking directly into mine.
“‘I did something very strange twice this evening,’ I said, turning my
face away so that I no longer looked into her eyes. Her eyes frightened
and disconcerted me, I suppose. That must have been it. I had a certain
speech to make and wanted to go through with it. There were certain
words I was about to say, but now I know that at the same moment other
words and thoughts, having nothing to do with what I was saying, were
going on down within me.
“For one thing I knew my friend and his sister were at that moment
standing just outside the door of the room waiting and listening.
“What were they thinking? Well, never mind that.
“What was I thinking myself? What was the woman to whom I was about to
propose marriage thinking about?
“I had come to the house bareheaded, you understand, and no doubt
looking a little wild. Perhaps every one in that house thought I had
gone suddenly out of my mind and it may be that in fact I had.
“At any rate I felt very calm and on that evening and for all these
years, up to a short time ago, when I became in love with Natalie,
I’ve always been a very calm man, or at least thought I was. I have
dramatized myself that way. What I suppose is that death is always a
very calm thing and I must, in a way, have been committing suicide on
that evening.
“There had been, in the town, a few weeks before this happened, a
scandal that had got into the courts and was written about guardedly in
our weekly newspaper. It concerned a case of rape. A farmer, who had
employed in his household a young girl, had sent his wife off to town
to buy supplies and while she was gone had got the girl into the upper
part of his house and had raped her, tearing her clothes off and even
beating her before he forced her to acquiesce in his desires. Later he
had been arrested and brought to town where, at the very time I was
kneeling on the floor before the body of my future wife, he was in jail.
“I speak of the matter because, as I knelt there, I remember now,
a thought crossed my mind connecting me with the man. ‘I am also
committing a rape’ something within me said.
“To the woman, who was there before me, so cold and white, I said
something else.
“‘You understand that, this evening, when I first came to you naked, it
was an accident,’ I said. ‘I want you to understand that, but I want
you also to understand that when I came to you the second time it was
not an accident. I want you to understand everything quite fully and
then I want to ask you to marry me, to consent to be my wife.’
“That was what I said and after I had said it took one of her hands in
mine and, without looking at her, knelt there at her feet waiting for
her to speak. Perhaps had she spoken then, even in condemnation of me,
everything would have been all right.
“She said nothing. I understand now why she could not, but then I did
not understand. I have always, I admit, been impatient. Time passed and
I waited. I was like one who has fallen from a great height into the
sea and who feels himself going down and down, deeper and deeper. There
is a great weight, you understand, pressing upon the man in the sea and
he cannot breathe. What I suppose is that in the case of a man, falling
thus into the sea, the force of his fall does after a time expend
itself and he comes to a stop in his descent, and then suddenly begins
again rising to the surface of the sea.
“And something of the sort happened to me. When I had been kneeling
there for some little time, at her feet, I suddenly sprang up. Going to
the door I threw it open and there, as I had expected, stood my friend
and his sister. I must have appeared to them, at the moment, almost
gay, perhaps they afterward thought it an insane gaiety. I cannot say
as to that. After that evening I never went back to their house and my
former friend and I began avoiding each other’s presence. There was no
danger that they would tell anyone what had happened--out of respect to
their guest, you understand. The woman was safe as far as their talking
was concerned.
“Anyway I stood before them and smiled. ‘Your guest and I have got into
a jam because of a series of absurd accidents that perhaps did not look
like accidents and now I have asked her to marry me. She has not made
up her mind about that,’ I said, speaking very formally and turning
from them and going out of the house and to my father’s house where I
quite calmly got my overcoat, my hat and my bag. ‘I’ll have to go to
the hotel and stay until father and mother come home,’ I thought. At
any rate I knew that the affairs of the evening would not, as I had
supposed earlier in the evening, throw me into a time of illness.”
III
“I do not mean to say that after that evening I did think more clearly,
but after that day and its adventures other days and weeks did come
marching along and, as nothing specially happened as a result of what I
had done, I couldn’t stay in the half-exalted state I was in then.”
John Webster rolled over on the floor at his daughter’s feet and,
squirming about so that he lay on his belly facing her, looked up into
her face. He had his elbows on the floor and his chin rested on his two
hands. There was something diabolically strange about the way youth had
come into his figure and he had quite won his way with his daughter.
There he was, you see, wanting nothing specially from her and he was
wholeheartedly giving himself to her. For the time even Natalie was
forgotten and as for his wife, in the next room lying on the bed and
perhaps in her dumb way suffering as he had never suffered, to him at
the moment she simply did not exist.
Well, there was the woman, who was his daughter, before him and he was
giving himself to her. It is likely that at the moment he had quite
forgotten she was his daughter. He was thinking now of his youth, when
he was a young man, much perplexed by life, and was seeing her as a
young woman who would inevitably, and as she went along through life,
often be as perplexed as he had been. He tried to describe to her his
feelings as a young man who had proposed to a woman who had made no
answer and in whom nevertheless there was the perhaps romantic notion
that he was in some queer way inevitably and finally attached to that
particular woman.
“You see what I did then, Jane, is something you will perhaps find
yourself doing some day and that it may be inevitable every one does.”
He reached forward and taking his daughter’s bare foot in his hand drew
it to him and kissed it. Then he sat quickly upright holding his knees
in his arms. Something like a blush came swiftly over his daughter’s
face and then she began to look at him with very serious puzzled eyes.
He smiled gaily.
“And so you see, there I was, living right here in this very town and
that girl to whom I had proposed marriage had gone away and I had heard
nothing more from her. She only stayed at my friend’s house a day or
two after I had managed to make the beginning of her visit such a
startling affair.
“For a long time my father had been scolding at me because I had taken
no special interest in the washing machine factory, it was supposed
I was after his day to take hold of and run, and so I decided I had
better do a thing called ‘settling down.’ That is to say, I made up
my mind it would be better for me if I gave myself less to dreams and
to the kind of gawky youthfulness that only led to my doing such
unaccountable things as that second running into that naked woman’s
presence.
“The truth is, of course, that my father, who in his own youth had come
to a day when he had made just such another decision as I was then
making, that he, for all his settling down and becoming a hard-working
sensible man, hadn’t got very much for it; but I didn’t think of that
at the time. Well, he wasn’t such a gay old dog as I remember him now.
He had always worked pretty hard, I suppose, and every day he sat for
eight or ten hours at his desk and through all the years I had known
him he had been subject to attacks of indigestion, during which every
one in our house had to go softly about for fear of making his head
ache worse than it did. The attacks used to come on about once a month
and he would come home, and mother would fix him up on a couch in our
front room, and she used to heat flatirons and roll them in towels and
put them on his belly, and there he would lie all day groaning, and as
you may suppose, making the life of our house a gay, festive affair.
“And then, when he got all right again and only looked a little gray
and drawn he would come sit at the table at meal-time with the rest
of us and would talk to me about his life, as an entirely successful
affair, and take it for granted I wanted just such another life.
“For some fool reason, I don’t understand now, I thought then that
was just what I did want. I suppose all the time I must have wanted
something else and that made me spend so much of my time having vague
dreams, but not only father, but all the older men in our town and
perhaps in all the other towns along the railroad east and west were
thinking and talking just that same way to their sons and I suppose I
got caught up by the general drift of thinking and just went into it
blind, with my head down, not thinking at all.
“So there I was, a young washing machine manufacturer, and I hadn’t any
woman, and since that affair at his house I didn’t see my former friend
with whom I used to try to talk of the vague, but nevertheless more
colorful dreams of my idle hours. After a few months father sent me out
on the road to see if I couldn’t sell washing machines to merchants
in small towns and sometimes I was successful and did sell some and
sometimes I didn’t.
“At night in the towns I used to walk about in the streets and
sometimes I did get in with a woman, with a waitress from the hotel, or
a girl I had picked up on the streets.
“We walked about under the trees along the residence streets of the
town and when I was lucky I sometimes induced one of them to go with me
to a little cheap hotel or into the darkness of the fields at the edge
of the towns.
“At such times we talked of love and sometimes I was a good deal moved,
but after all not really moved.
“The whole thing started me thinking of the slender naked girl I had
seen on the bed and of the look in her eyes at the moment when she
came up out of sleep and her eyes met mine.
“I knew her name and address and so one day I grew bold and wrote her a
long letter. You must understand that by this time I felt I had become
quite a sensible fellow and so I tried to write in a sensible way.
“I remember I was sitting in the writing-room of a small hotel in an
Indiana town when I did it. The desk where I sat was by a window near
the town’s Main Street and, as it was evening, people were going along
the street to their houses, I suppose going home to the evening meal.
“I don’t deny I grew pretty romantic. As I sat there, feeling lonely
and I suppose filled with self-pity, I looked up and saw a little
drama acted out in a hallway across the street. There was a rather old
tumble-down building with a stairway at the side running to an upper
story where it was evident some one lived, as there were white curtains
at the window.
“I sat looking across at the place, and I suppose I was dreaming of the
long slender body of the girl on the bed upstairs in another house. It
was evening and growing dusk, you understand, and just such a light
as had fallen over us at the moment we looked into each other’s eyes,
at the moment when there was no one but just our two selves, before
we had time to think and remember the others in that house, when I
was coming out of a daydream and she was coming out of the dreams of
sleep, at the moment when we accepted each other and the complete and
momentary loveliness of each other--well, you see, just such a light as
I had stood in and she had lain in as one might lie on the soft waters
of some southern sea, just such another light was now lying over the
little bare writing-room of the foul little hotel in that town and
across the street a woman came down the stairway and stood in just such
another light.
“As it turned out she was also tall, like your mother, but I could not
see what kind or color of clothes she wore. There was some peculiarity
of the light; an illusion was created. The devil! I wish I could tell
of things that have happened to me without this eternal business of
having everything I say seem a little strange and uncanny. One walks
in a wood at evening, let us say, Jane, and one has queer fascinating
illusions. The light, the shadows cast by trees, the open spaces
between trees--these things create the illusions. Often the trees
seem to beckon to one. Old sturdy trees look wise and you think they
are going to tell you some great secret, but they don’t. One gets
into a forest of young birches. What naked girlish things, running
and running, free, free. Once I was in such a wood with a girl. We
were up to something. Well, it had gone no further than that we had a
tremendous feeling for each other at the moment. We had kissed and I
remember that twice I had stopped in the half-darkness and had touched
her face with my fingers--tenderly and softly, you know. She was a
little dumb shy girl I had picked up on the streets of an Indiana town,
a kind of free immoral little thing, such as sometimes pop up in such
towns. I mean she was free with men in a kind of queer shy way. I had
picked her up on the street and then, when we got out there in the
wood, we both felt the strangeness of things and the strangeness of
being with each other too.
“There we were, you see. We were about to--I don’t exactly know what we
were up to. We were standing and looking at each other.
“And then we both looked suddenly up and there, in the path before us,
was a very dignified and beautiful old man. He was wearing a robe that
was caught over his shoulders, in a swaggering kind of a way, and it
was spread out behind him over the floor of the forest, between the
trees.
“What a princely old man! What a kingly fellow, in fact! We both saw
him, both stood looking at him with eyes filled with wonder, and he
stood looking at us.
“I had to go forward and touch the thing with my hands before the
illusion our minds had created could be dispelled. The kingly old man
was just a half-decayed old stump and the robe he wore was just the
purple night shadows falling down on the floor of the forest, but our
having seen the thing together made everything different between the
shy little town girl and myself. What we had perhaps both intended
doing couldn’t be done in the spirit in which we had approached it. I
mustn’t try to tell you of that now. I mustn’t get too much off the
track.
“What I am thinking is merely that such things happen. I am talking
of another time and place, you see. On that other evening, as I sat in
the hotel writing-room, there was just such another light, and across
the street a girl, or a woman, was coming down a stairway. I had the
illusion that she was nude like a young birch tree and that she was
coming toward me. Her face made a grayish wavering shadow-like spot
in the hallway and she was evidently waiting for some one as she kept
thrusting her head out and looking up and down the street.
“I became a fool again. That’s the story, I dare say. As I sat looking
and leaning forward, trying to see deeper and deeper into the evening
light, a man came hurrying along the street and stopped at the
stairway. He was tall like herself and when he stopped I remember that
he took off his hat and stepped into the darkness holding it in his
hand. There was probably something stealthy and covered-up about the
love affair between the two people as the man also put his head out
of the stairway and looked long and carefully up and down the street
before taking the woman into his arms. Perhaps she was some other man’s
wife. Anyway they stepped back a little into a greater darkness and, I
thought, took each other quite completely. How much I saw and how much
I imagined I’ll of course never know. At any rate the two grayish white
faces seemed to float and then merge and become one grayish white spot.
“A violent tremor ran through my body. There, it seemed to me, but a
few hundred feet from where I sat, now almost in complete darkness, was
love finding glorious expression. Lips clung to lips, two warm bodies
pressed close to each other, something altogether glorious and lovely
in life, that I, by running about in the evening with the poor little
girls of the town, and by trying to induce them to go with me into the
fields to serve only my animal hunger--well, you see, there was a thing
one might find in life that I had not found and that at the moment I
thought I had failed to find because, at a great crisis, I had not
found courage to go persistently toward it.”
IV
“And so you see I lighted a lamp in the writing-room of that hotel and
forgot my supper and sat there and wrote pages and pages to the woman,
and grew foolish too and confessed a lie, that I was ashamed of the
thing that had happened between us some months before, and that I had
only done it, that is to say, that I had only run into the room to her
that second time, because I was a fool and a lot of other unspeakable
nonsense.”
John Webster jumped to his feet and started to walk nervously about
the room, but now his daughter became something more than a passive
listener to his tale. He had walked to where the Virgin stood between
the burning candles and was moving back toward the door, that led into
the hallway and down stairs, when she sprang up and running to him
impulsively threw her arms about his neck. She began to sob and buried
her face on his shoulder. “I love you,” she said. “I don’t care what’s
happened, I love you.”
V
And so there was John Webster in his house and he had succeeded, at
least for the moment, in breaking through the wall that had separated
him from his daughter. After her outburst they went and sat together
on the bed, with his arm about her and her head on his shoulder. Years
afterward, sometimes, when he was with a friend and was in a certain
mood, John Webster occasionally spoke of that moment as having been the
most important and lovely of his whole life. In a way his daughter had
given herself to him as he had given himself to her. There had been a
kind of marriage, that he realized. “I have been a father as well as
a lover. Perhaps the two things cannot be differentiated. I have been
one father who has not been afraid to realize the loveliness of his
daughter’s flesh and to fill my senses with the fragrance of it,” was
what he said.
As it turned out he might have sat thus, talking with his daughter,
for another half-hour and then left the house to go away with Natalie,
without any more drama, but that his wife, lying on the bed in the
next room, heard her daughter’s cry of love and it must have stirred
something deeply buried away in her. She got silently off the bed and
going to the door opened it softly. Then she stood leaning against the
door-frame and listening as her husband talked. There was a look of
hard terror in her eyes. Perhaps she wanted at that moment to kill the
man who had for so long a time been her husband and did not do so only
because the long years of inaction and submission into life had made it
impossible for her to lift an arm to strike.
At any rate she stood in silence and one might have thought that she
would at any moment fall to the floor, but she didn’t. She waited and
John Webster kept on talking. Now he was telling his daughter with a
kind of devilish attention to details all the story of their marriage.
What had happened, at least in the man’s version of the affair, was
that, after having written one letter he could not stop and wrote
another on the same evening and two more on the following day.
He kept on writing letters and what he himself thought was that the
letter writing had created within him a kind of furious passion of
lying that, once started, couldn’t be stopped. “I began something that
has been going on in me all these years,” he explained. “It is a trick
one practises, this lying to oneself about oneself.” It was evident
his daughter did not follow him, although she tried. He was talking
now of something she had not experienced, could not have experienced,
that is to say, the hypnotic power of words. Already she had read books
and had been tricked by words, but there was in her no realization of
what had already been done to her. She was a young girl and as, often
enough, there was nothing in the life about her that seemed exciting
or interesting she was thankful for the life of words and books. It
was true they left one quite blank, went out of the mind leaving no
trace. Well, they were created out of a kind of dream world. One had
to have lived, to have experienced much of life, before one could come
to the realization that just beneath the surface of ordinary everyday
life there was deep and moving drama always going on. Few come to
realization of the poetry of the actual.
It was evident her father had come to some such realization. Now he was
talking. He was opening doors for her. It was like travelling in an old
town one had thought one knew, with a marvellously inspired guide. One
went in and out of old houses, seeing things as they had never been
seen before. All the things of everyday life, a picture on the wall, an
old chair sitting by a table, the table itself at which a man one had
always known, sits smoking a pipe.
By some miracle all these things were now being invested with new life
and significance.
The painter Van Gogh, who it is said killed himself in a fit of
desperation because he could not gather within the limits of his canvas
all the wonder and glory of the sun shining in the sky, once painted
a canvas. An old chair set in an empty room. When Jane Webster grew
to be a woman and had got her own understanding of life she once saw
the canvas hanging in a gallery in the city of New York. There was
a strange wonder of life to be got from looking at the painting of
an ordinary, roughly made chair that had perhaps been owned by some
peasant of France, some peasant at whose house the painter had perhaps
stopped for an hour on a summer day.
It must have been a day when he was very much alive and very conscious
of all the life of the house in which he sat and so he painted the
chair and channeled into the painting all of the emotional reactions
within himself to the people in that particular house and in many other
houses he had visited.
* * * * *
Jane Webster was in the room with her father and his arm was about
her and he was talking of something she couldn’t understand and yet
she did understand too. Now he was again a young man and was feeling
the loneliness and uncertainty of young manhood as she had already
sometimes felt the loneliness and uncertainty of her own young
womanhood. Like her father she must begin to try to understand things a
little. Now he was an honest man, he was talking to her honestly. There
was wonder in that alone.
In his young manhood he went about towns, getting in with girls, doing
with girls a thing she had heard whispers about. That made him feel
unclean. He did not feel deeply enough the thing he did with the poor
little girls. His body had made love to women, but he had not. That her
father knew, but she did not yet know. There was much she did not know.
Her father, then a young man, had begun writing letters to a woman into
whose presence he once came quite nude as he had appeared before her
but a short time before. He was trying to explain how his mind, feeling
about, had alighted upon the figure of a certain woman as one towards
whom love might be directed.
He sat in a room in a hotel and wrote the word “love” in black ink on
a white sheet of paper. Then he went out to walk in the quiet night
streets of the town. She got the picture of him now quite clearly. The
strangeness of his being so much older than herself and of his being
her father had gone away. He was a man and she was a woman. She wanted
to quiet the clamoring voices within him, to fill the blank empty
spaces. She pressed her body more closely against his.
His voice kept explaining things. There was a passion for explanation
in him.
As he sat in the hotel he had written certain words on paper and
putting the paper into an envelope had sent it away to a woman living
in a distant place. Then he walked and walked and thought of more words
and going back to the hotel wrote them out on other pieces of paper.
A thing was created within him it was hard to explain, that he had not
understood himself. One walked under the stars and in quiet streets of
towns under trees and sometimes, on summer evenings, heard voices in
the darkness. People, men and women, were sitting in the darkness on
the porches of houses. There was an illusion created. One sensed in the
darkness somewhere a deep quiet splendor of life and ran toward it.
There was a kind of desperate eagerness. In the sky the stars shone
more splendidly because of one’s thoughts. There was a little wind and
it was like the hand of a lover touching the cheeks, playing in one’s
hair. There was something lovely in life one must find. When one was
young one could not stand still, but must go toward it. The writing of
the letters was an effort to go toward the thing. It was an effort to
find footing in the darkness on strange winding roads.
And so John Webster had, by his letter writing, done a strange and
false thing to himself and to the woman who was later to be his wife.
He had created a world of unrealities. Would he and the woman be able
to live together in that world?
VI
In the semi-darkness of the room, as the man talked to his daughter
trying to make her understand an intangible thing, the woman who had
been his wife for so many years and out of whose body had come the
younger woman who now sat close to her husband, began also to try
to understand. After a time, and being unable to stand longer, she
managed, without attracting the attention of the others, to slip to the
floor. She let her back slide down along the frame of the door and her
legs turned sideways under her heavy body. In the position into which
she had got she was uncomfortable and her knees hurt, but she did not
mind. There was in fact a kind of satisfaction to be got from physical
discomfort.
One had lived for so many years in a world that was now and before
one’s very eyes being destroyed. There was something wicked and ungodly
in this business of defining life too sharply. Certain things should
not be spoken of. One moved dimly through a dim world not asking too
many questions. If there was death in silence, then one accepted death.
What was the use of denial? One’s body got old and heavy. When one
sat on the floor the knees hurt. There was something unbearable in
this notion that a man, with whom one had lived so many years of life
and whom one had accepted quite definitely as a part of the machinery
of life, should suddenly become something else, should become this
terrible questioner, this raker-up of forgotten things.
If one lived behind a wall one preferred life behind the wall. Behind
the wall the light was dim and did not hurt the eyes. Memories were
shut out. The sounds of life grew faint and indistinct in the distance.
There was something barbaric and savage in all this business of
breaking down walls, making cracks and gaps in the wall of life.
There was a struggle going on within the woman, Mary Webster, also. A
queer sort of new life came and went in her eyes. Had a fourth person
at that moment come into the room he might have been more conscious of
her than of the others.
There was something terrible in the way her husband John Webster had
set the stage for the battle that was now to go on within her. The man
was after all a dramatist. The business of buying the picture of the
Virgin and the candles, the making of this little stage upon which a
drama was to be played out; there was an unconscious art expression in
all this.
Perhaps he had outwardly intended nothing of the sort, but with what
devilish certainty he had worked. The woman now sat in a half-darkness
on the floor. Between her and the burning candles was the bed on which
the two others sat, one talking, the other listening. All the floor of
the room, near where she sat was in heavy black shadows. She had put
one hand out against the door-frame to help support herself.
The candles on their high place flickered as they burned. The light
fell only on her shoulders, her head, and her upraised arm and hand.
She was almost submerged in a sea of darkness. Now and then, from sheer
weariness her head fell forward and there was an effect of sinking
completely into the sea.
Still her arm was upraised and her head came back again to the surface
of the sea. There was a slight rocking movement to her body. She
was like an old boat, half water-logged, lying in the sea. Little
fluttering waves of light seemed playing over her heavy white upraised
face.
Breathing was somewhat difficult. Thinking was somewhat difficult. One
had gone along for years without thinking. It was better to lie quietly
in a sea of silence. The world was quite right in excommunicating
those who disturbed the sea of silence. Mary Webster’s body quivered a
little. One might kill, but had not the strength to kill, did not know
how to kill. Killing was a business one had to learn too.
It was unbearable, but one had at times to think. Things happened. A
woman married a man and then found, quite suddenly, she had not married
him. The world was getting strange unacceptable notions about marriage.
Daughters should not be told such things as her husband was now telling
their daughter. Could the mind of a young virginal girl be raped, by
her own father, into consciousness of unspeakable things in life? If
such things were permitted what would become of all decent orderly
living of lives? Virginal girls should find out nothing about life
until the time came to live the things they must, being women, finally
accept.
* * * * *
In every human body there is a great well of silent thinking always
going on. Outwardly certain words are said, but there are other words
being said at the same time down in the deep hidden places. There is a
deposit of thoughts, of unexpressed emotions. How many things thrown
down into the deep well, hidden away in the deep well!
There is a heavy iron lid clamped over the mouth of the well. When the
lid is safely in place one gets on all right. One goes about saying
words, eating food, meeting people, conducting affairs, accumulating
money, wearing clothes, one lives an ordered life.
Sometimes at night, in dreams, the lid trembles, but no one knows about
that.
Why should there be those who desire to tear the lids off the wells, to
break through the walls? Things had better be left as they are. Those
who disturb the heavy iron lids should be killed.
* * * * *
The heavy iron lid over the deep well that was within the body of Mary
Webster was trembling violently. It danced up and down. The dancing
light from the candles was like the little playful waves on the
surface of a calm sea. It met in her eyes another kind of dancing light.
On the bed John Webster talked freely and easily. If he had set the
stage he had also given himself the talking rôle in the drama that was
to be played out upon it. His own thought had been that everything that
happened on that evening was directed toward his daughter. He had even
dared to think he might be able to re-channel her life. Her young life
was like a river that was still small and made but a slight murmuring
sound as it ran through quiet fields. One might still step across the
stream that was later, and when it had taken other streams into itself,
to become a river. One might venture to throw a log across the stream,
to start it off in a quite different direction. The whole thing was a
daring, a quite reckless thing to do, but one could not quite escape
some such action.
Now he had dismissed from his mind the other woman, his former wife,
Mary Webster. He had thought when she went out of the bedroom she had
finally walked off the stage. There had been satisfaction in seeing her
go. He had really, in all their life together, never made a contact
with her. When he thought her gone from the field of his own life he
felt relieved. One could breathe more deeply, talk more freely.
He thought of her as having gone off the stage, but she had come back.
He still had her to deal with too.
In Mary Webster’s mind memories were awakening. Her husband was
telling the story of his marriage, but she did not hear his words. A
story began to tell itself within her, beginning far back on a day in
her own young womanhood.
She had heard the cry of love for a man come out of her daughter’s
throat and the cry had stirred something within her so deeply that she
had come back into the room where her husband and daughter sat together
on the bed. Once there had been that same cry within another young
woman, but for some reason it had never got itself out, past her lips.
At the moment when it might have come from her, at that moment long ago
when she lay naked on a bed and looked into the eyes of a young naked
man something, a thing people called shame, had come between her and
the getting of that glad cry past her lips.
Her mind now wearily went back over the details of the scene. An old
railroad journey was retravelled.
Things were tangled. First she lived in one place and then, as though
pushed into the act by a hand she could not see, she went on a visit to
another place.
The journey there was taken in the middle of the night and, as there
were no sleeping cars on the train, she had to sit in a day-coach
through several hours of darkness.
Outside the car window there was darkness, broken now and then when the
train stopped for a few minutes at some town in Western Illinois or
Southern Wisconsin. There was a station building with a lamp fastened
to the outer wall and sometimes but a solitary man, bundled in a coat
and perhaps pushing a truck piled with trunks and boxes along a station
platform. At some of the towns people got aboard the train and at
others people got off and went away into the darkness.
An old woman who carried a basket in which there was a black and white
cat came to sit in the seat with her and after she had got off at one
of the stations an old man took her place.
The old man did not look at her, but kept muttering words she could not
catch. He had a ragged gray moustache that hung down over his shrunken
lips and he continually stroked it with a bony old hand. The words he
said in an undertone were muttered behind the hand.
The young woman of that railroad journey, taken long ago, had, after a
time, fallen into a half-waking, half-sleeping state. Her mind had run
ahead of her body to her journey’s end. A girl she had known at school
had invited her for a visit and there had been several letters written
back and forth. Two young men would be in the house all during the time
of the visit.
One of the young men she had already seen. He was her friend’s brother
and had once come on a visit to the school where the two girls were
students.
What would the other young man be like? It was curious how many times
she had already asked herself that question. Now her mind was making
fanciful pictures of him.
The train ran through a country of low hills. Dawn was coming. It would
be a day of gray cold clouds. Snow threatened. The muttering old man of
the gray moustache and the bony hand had got off the train.
The half-awake eyes of the tall slender young woman looked out over
low hills and long stretches of flat land. The train crossed a bridge
over a river. She slipped into sleep and was jerked out again by the
starting or stopping of the train. Across a distant field a young man
was walking in the gray morning light.
Had she dreamed there was a young man going across a field beside the
train or had she actually seen such a man? In what way was he connected
with the young man she was to meet at her journey’s end?
It was a little absurd to think the young man in the field could be
of flesh and blood. He walked at the same pace the train was going
stepping lightly over fences, going swiftly through the streets of
towns, passing like a shadow through strips of dark woodland.
When the train stopped he also stopped and stood looking at her and
smiling. One almost felt he could go into one’s body and come out
smiling thus. The idea was strangely sweet too. Now he walked for a
long time on the surface of the waters of a river alongside which the
train was running.
And all the time he looked into her eyes, darkly, when the train passed
through a forest and it was dark inside the train, with a smile in
his eyes when they came out again into the open country. There was
something in his eyes that invited, called to her. Her body grew warm
and she stirred uneasily in the car seat.
The trainmen had built a fire in a stove at the end of the car and all
the doors and windows were closed. Evidently it was not going to be
such a cold day after all. It was unbearably hot in the car.
She got out of her seat and, clutching at the edges of other seats,
made her way to the end of the car where she opened a door and stood
for a time looking at the flying landscape.
* * * * *
The train came to the station where she was to get off and there, on
the station platform, was her girl friend, come to the station on the
odd chance she would come on that train.
And then she had gone with her friend into the strange house and her
friend’s mother had insisted she go to bed and sleep until evening. The
two women kept asking how it had happened she had come on that train
and as she could not explain she became a little embarrassed. It was
true there was another and faster train she might have taken and had
the entire ride in the day-time.
There had just been a kind of feverish desire to get out of her own
town and her mother’s house. She had been unable to explain that to her
own people. One couldn’t tell one’s mother and father she just wanted
to get out. In her own home there had been a confusion of questions
about the whole matter. Well, there she was, being driven into a corner
and asked questions that couldn’t be answered. She had a hope that her
girl friend would understand and kept hopefully saying to her what she
had said over and over rather senselessly at home. “I just wanted to do
it. I don’t know, I just wanted to do it.”
In the strange house she had got into bed to sleep, glad to escape the
annoying question. When she awoke they would have forgotten the whole
matter. Her friend had come into the room with her and she wanted to
dismiss her quickly, to be alone for a time. “I’ll not unpack my bag
now. I think I’ll just undress and crawl in between the sheets. It’s
going to be warm anyway,” she explained. It was absurd. Well she had
looked forward to something quite different on her arrival, laughter,
young men standing about and looking a little self-conscious. Now she
only felt uncomfortable. Why did people keep asking why she had got up
at midnight and taken a slow train instead of waiting until morning?
One wanted sometimes just to be a fool about little things, and not to
have to give explanations. When her friend went out of the room she
threw off all her clothes and got quickly into bed and closed her eyes.
It was another foolish notion she had, her wanting to be naked. Had she
not taken the slow uncomfortable train she would not have had the fancy
about the young man walking beside the train in the fields, through
the streets of towns, through forests.
It was good to be naked sometimes. There was the feel of things against
one’s skin. If one could only have the joyful feeling of that more
often. One could sink into a clean bed, sometimes, when one was tired
and sleepy and it was like getting into the firm warm arms of some one
who could love and understand one’s foolish impulses.
The young woman in the bed slept and in her sleep was again being
carried swiftly along through the darkness. The woman with the cat
and the old man who muttered words did not appear again, but many
other people came and went through her dream-world. There was a swift
tangled march of strange events. She went forward, always forward
toward something she wanted. Now it approached. A great eagerness took
possession of her.
It was strange that she wore no clothes. The young man who walked so
swiftly through fields had reappeared, but she had not noticed before
that he also did not wear clothes.
The world had grown dark. There was a dusky darkness.
And now the young man had stopped going swiftly forward and like
herself was silent. They both hung suspended in a sea of silence. He
was standing and looking directly into her eyes. He could go within her
and come out again. The thought was infinitely sweet.
She lay in a soft warm darkness and her flesh was hot, too hot. “Some
one has foolishly built a fire and has forgotten to open the doors and
windows,” she thought vaguely.
The young man, who was now so close to her, who was standing silently
so close to her and looking directly into her eyes, could make
everything all right. His hands were within a few inches of her body.
In a moment they would touch, bring cool peace into her body, into
herself too.
There was a sweet peace to be got by looking directly into the young
man’s eyes. They were glowing in the darkness like little pools into
which one could cast oneself. A final and infinite peace and joy could
be got by casting oneself into the pools.
Could one stay thus, lying quietly in the soft warm dark pools? One
had got into a secret place, behind a high wall. Outside voices
cried--“Shame! Shame!” When one listened to the voices the pools became
foul loathsome places. Should one listen to the voices or should one
close the ears, close the eyes? The voices beyond the wall became
louder and louder--crying, “Shame! Be ashamed!” To listen to the voices
brought death. Did closing one’s ears to the voices bring death too?
VII
John Webster was telling a story. There was a thing he himself wanted
to understand. Wanting to understand things was a new passion, come to
him. What a world he had lived in always and how little he had wanted
to understand it. Children were being born in towns and on farms. They
grew up to be men and women. Some of them went to colleges, others,
after a few years in the town or country schools, got out into life,
married perhaps, got jobs in factories or shops, went to church on
Sundays or to a ball game, became parents of children.
People everywhere told things, talked of things they thought interested
them, but no one told truths. At school there was no attention paid
to truth. What a tangle of other and unimportant things. “Two and two
make four. If a merchant sell three oranges and two apples to a man and
oranges are to be sold at twenty-four cents per dozen and apples at
sixteen, how much does the man owe the merchant?”
An important matter indeed. Where is the fellow going with the three
oranges and two apples? He is a small man in brown boots and has his
cap stuck on the side of his head. There is a peculiar smile playing
around his mouth. The sleeve of his coat is torn. What did that? The
cuss is singing a song under his breath. Listen:
“Diddle de di do,
Diddle de di do,
Chinaberries grow on a Chinaberry tree.
Diddle de di do.”
What in the name of the bearded men, who came into the queen’s
bed-chamber when the king of Rome was born, does he mean by that? What
is a Chinaberry tree?
John Webster talked to his daughter, sat with his arm about her
talking, and back of him, and unseen, his wife struggled and fought to
put back into its place the iron lid one should always keep tightly
clamped down on the opening of the well of unexpressed thoughts within
oneself.
There was a man who had come naked into her naked presence in the dusk
of the late afternoon of a day long ago. He had come in to her and had
done a thing to her. There had been a rape of the unconscious self.
That had been in time forgotten or forgiven, but now he was doing it
again. He was talking now. Of what was he talking? Were there not
things of which one never talked? For what purpose the deep well within
oneself except that it be a place into which one could put the things
that must not be talked about?
Now John Webster was trying to tell the whole story of his attempt at
love-making with the woman he had married.
The writing of letters containing the word “love,” had come to
something. After a time, and when he had sent off several such letters
written in the hotel writing-rooms, and just when he was beginning to
think he would never get an answer to one of them and might as well
give the whole matter up, an answer had come. Then there had burst from
him a flood of letters.
He was still then going about from town to town trying to sell washing
machines to merchants, but that only took a part of each day. There was
left the late afternoons, mornings when he arose early and sometimes
went for a walk along the streets of one of the towns before breakfast,
the long evenings and the Sundays.
He was full of unaccountable energy all through that time. It must have
been because he was in love. If one were not in love one could not
feel so alive. In the early mornings, and in the evenings as he walked
about, looking at houses and people, every one suddenly seemed close
to him. Men and women came out of houses and went along the streets,
factory whistles blew, men and boys went in and out at the doors of
factories.
He was standing by a tree on a strange street of a strange town in the
evening. In a nearby house a child cried and a woman’s voice talked to
it in low tones. His fingers gripped the bark of the tree. He wanted to
run into the house where the child was crying, to take the child out
of its mother’s arms and quiet it, to kiss the mother perhaps. What a
thing it would be if he could only go along a street shaking men by the
hand, putting his arms about the shoulders of young girls.
He had extravagant fancies. There might be a world in which there were
new and marvellous cities. He went along imagining such cities. For
one thing the doors to all the houses were wide open. Everything was
clean and neat. The sills to the doors of the houses had been washed.
He walked into one of the houses. Well, the people had gone out, but
on the chance some such fellow as himself would wander in they had set
out a little feast on a table in one of the rooms downstairs. There was
a loaf of white bread with a carving knife lying beside it so that one
could cut off slices, cold meats, little squares of cheese, a decanter
of wine.
He sat alone at the table to eat, feeling very happy, and after his
hunger had been satisfied carefully brushed away the crumbs and fixed
everything nicely. Some other fellow might come along later and wander
into the same house.
The fancies young Webster had during that period of his life filled
him with delight. Sometimes he stopped in his night walks along dark
residence streets and stood looking up at the sky and laughing.
There he was in a world of fancies, in a place of dreams. His mind
plunged him back into the house he had visited in his dream-world. What
curiosity there was in him in regard to the people who lived there.
It was night, but the place was lighted. There were little lamps one
could pick up and carry about. There was a city, wherein each house was
a feasting place and this was one of the houses and in its sweet depths
things other than the belly could be fed.
One went through the house feeding all the senses. The walls had been
painted with strong colors that had now faded and become soft and
mellow with age. The time had passed in America when people continually
built new houses. They built houses strongly and then stayed in them,
beautified them slowly and with a sure touch. One would perhaps rather
be in such a house in the day-time when the owners were at home, but it
was fine to be there alone at night too.
The lamp held above one’s head threw dancing shadows on the walls. One
went up a stairway into bedrooms, wandered in halls, came down the
stairs again and putting the lamp back into its place passed out at the
open front door.
How sweet to linger on the front steps for a moment, having more
dreams. What of the people who lived in the house? In one of the
bedrooms upstairs he had fancied he knew that a young woman slept. Had
she been in the bed and asleep and had he walked in on her, what would
have happened?
Might there be in the world, well, one might as well say in some world
of the fancy--perhaps it would take too much time for an actual people
to create such a world--but might there not be a people, in the world
of one’s fancy, a people who had really developed the senses, people
who really smelled, saw, tasted, felt things with their fingers, heard
things with their ears? One could dream of such a world. It was early
evening and for several hours one did not have to go back to the little
dirty town hotel.
Some day there might be a world inhabited by people who lived. There
would be, then, an end of continual mouthings about death. People would
take life up firmly like a filled cup and carry it until the time came
to throw it away over the shoulder with a gesture. They would realize
that wine was made to drink, food to eat and nourish the body, the ears
to hear all manner of sounds, the eyes to see things.
Within the bodies of such people what unknown senses might there not be
developed? Well, it might very well be that a young woman, such as John
Webster was trying to fancify into existence, that on such evenings
such a young woman might be lying quietly in a bed in an upper chamber
of one of the houses along the dark street. One went in at the open
door of the house and taking up the lamp went to her. One could fancy
the lamp itself as a thing of beauty too. There was a small ring-like
arrangement through which one slipped the finger. One wore the lamp
like a ring on the finger. The little flame of it was like a jewel
shining in the darkness.
One went up the stairs and softly into the room where the woman was
lying on the bed. One held the lamp above one’s head. Its light shone
into one’s eyes and into the eyes of the woman. There was a long slow
time when the two just remained so, looking at each other.
There was a question being asked. “Are you for me? Am I for you?”
People had developed a new sense, many new senses. People saw with
their eyes, smelled with their nostrils, heard with their ears. The
deeper-lying, buried-away senses of the body had been developed too.
Now people could accept or dismiss one another with a gesture. There
was no more slow starvation of men and women. Long lives did not
have to be lived during which one knew, and then but faintly, a few
half-golden moments.
* * * * *
There was something about all this having fancies closely connected
with his marriage and with his life since his marriage. He was trying
to make that clear to his daughter but it was difficult.
There had been that moment once, when he had gone into the upper room
of a house and had found a woman lying before him. There had been a
question come suddenly and unexpectedly into his own eyes and it had
found a quick eager answer in hers.
And then--the devil, it was hard to get things straight! In some way a
lie had been told. By whom? There had been a poison he and the woman
had breathed together. Who had blown the cloud of poison vapor into the
air of that upper bed-chamber?
The moment had kept coming back into the mind of the young man. He
walked in streets of strange towns having thoughts of coming into the
upper bed-chamber of a new kind of womanhood.
Then later he went to the hotel and sat for hours writing letters. To
be sure he did not write out the fancies he had been having. O, had he
but had the courage to do that! Had he but known enough to do that!
What he did was to write the word “love,” over and over rather
stupidly. “I went walking and I thought of you and I loved you so. I
saw a house I liked and I thought of you and me living in it as man and
wife. I am sorry I was so stupid and blundering when I saw you that
other time. Give me another chance and I will prove my ‘love’ to you.”
What a betrayal! It was John Webster himself who had, in the end,
poisoned the wells of truth at which he and the woman would have to
drink as they went along the road toward happiness.
He hadn’t been thinking of her at all. He had been thinking of the
strange mysterious woman lying in the upper bed-chamber in the city of
the land of his fancy.
Everything got started wrong and then nothing could be set straight
again. One day a letter came from her and then, after writing a great
many other letters, he went to her town to see her.
There was a time of embarrassment and then the past was apparently
forgotten. They went to walk together under the trees in a strange
town. Later he wrote more letters and came to see her again. One night
he asked her to marry him.
The very devil! He didn’t even take her into his arms when he asked
her. There was a kind of fear involved in the whole matter. “I’d better
not after what happened before. I’ll wait until we’re married. Things
will be different then.” One had a notion. It was that after marriage
one became something quite different from what one had been before and
that the beloved one also became something quite different.
And so he had managed to get married, having that notion, and he and
the woman had set out together upon a wedding trip.
John Webster held his daughter’s body closely against his own and
trembled a little. “I had some notion in my head that I had better go
slow,” he said. “You see, I had already frightened her once. ‘We’ll go
slow here,’ I kept saying to myself; ‘well, she doesn’t know much about
life, I’d better go pretty slow.’”
The memory of the moment of his marriage stirred John Webster
profoundly.
The bride was coming down a stairway. Strange people stood about.
All the time, down inside the strange people, down inside all people
everywhere, there was thinking going on of which no one seemed aware.
“Now you look at me, Jane. I’m your father. I was that way. All these
years, while I’ve been your father, I’ve been just like that.
“Something happened to me. A lid was jerked off something somewhere in
me. Now, you see, I stand, as though on a high hill and look down into
a valley where all my former life has been lived. Quite suddenly, you
understand, I know all the thoughts I’ve been having all of my life.
“You’ll hear it said. Well, you’ll read it in books and stories people
write about death. ‘At the moment of death he looked back and saw all
his life spread out before him.’ That’s what you’ll read.
“Ha! That’s all right, but what about life? What about the moment,
when, having been dead, one comes back into life?”
* * * * *
John Webster had got himself excited again. He took his arm from
about his daughter’s shoulder and rubbed his hands together. A slight
shivering sensation ran through his body and through the body of his
daughter. She did not understand what he was saying, but in a queer
sense that did not matter. They were, at the moment deeply in accord.
This having one’s whole being suddenly become alive, after years of
a kind of partial death, was a strain. One had to get a kind of new
balance to the body and mind. One felt very young and strong and then
suddenly old and tired. Now one was carrying his life forward as one
might carry a filled cup through a crowded street. All the time one had
to remember, to keep in mind, that there must be a certain relaxation
to the body. One must give and swing with things a little. That must
always be borne in mind. If one became rigid and tense at any time,
except at the moment when one cast one’s body into the body of one’s
beloved, one’s foot stumbled or one knocked against things and the
filled cup one carried was emptied with an awkward gesture.
Strange thoughts kept coming into the mind of the man as he sat on the
bed with his daughter trying to get himself in hand. One might very
easily become one of the kind of people one saw everywhere about, one
of the kind of people whose empty bodies went walking everywhere in
towns and cities and on farms, “one of the kind of people whose life
is an empty cup,” he thought and then a more majestic thought came and
steadied him. There was something he had heard or read about sometime.
What was it? “Arouse not up or awaken my love ’til he please,” a voice
within him said.
* * * * *
Again he began the telling of the story of his marriage.
“We went off on our wedding trip to a farmhouse in Kentucky, went there
in the sleeping car of a train at night. I kept thinking about going
slow with her, kept telling myself all the time I’d better go slow so
that night she slept in a lower berth while I crept into the one above.
We were going on a visit to a farm owned by her uncle, by her father’s
brother, and we got to the town, where we were to get off the train,
before breakfast in the morning.
“Her uncle was waiting with a carriage at the station and we drove off
at once to this place in the country where we were to visit.”
John Webster told with great attention to details the story of the
arrival of the two people at the little town. He had slept but little
during the night and was very aware of everything going on about him.
There was a row of wooden store buildings that led up from the station
and, within a few hundred yards, it became a residence street and then
a country road. A man in his shirt sleeves walked along the sidewalk on
one side the street. He was smoking a pipe, but as the carriage passed
he took the pipe out of his mouth and laughed. He called to another man
who stood before the open door of a store on the opposite side of the
street. What strange words he was saying. What did they mean? “Make it
fancy, Eddie,” he called.
The carriage containing the three people drove quickly along. John
Webster had not slept during the night and there was a kind of
straining at something within him. He was all alive, eager. Her uncle
on the front seat was a large man, like her father, but living as he
did out of doors had made the skin of his face brown. He also had a
gray moustache. Could one get acquainted with him? Would one ever be
able to say intimate confidential things to him?
For that matter would one ever be able to say intimate confidential
things to the woman one had married? The truth was that all night his
body had been aching with anticipation of a coming love-making. How
odd that one did not speak of such matters when one had married women
out of respectable families in respectable Illinois manufacturing
towns. At the wedding every one must have known. That was no doubt what
the young married men and women were smiling and laughing about, behind
the walls, as it were.
There were two horses hitched to the carriage and they went soberly
and steadily along. Now the woman who had become John Webster’s bride,
was sitting up, very straight and tall on the seat beside him and she
had her hands folded in her lap. They were nearing the edge of town
and a boy came out at the front door of a house and stood on a little
porch staring at them with blank questioning eyes. There was a large
dog asleep beneath a cherry tree beside another house a little further
along. He let the carriage get almost past before he moved. John
Webster watched the dog. “Shall I get up from this comfortable place
and make a fuss about that carriage or shall I not?” the dog seemed to
be asking himself. Then he sprang up and racing madly along the road
began barking at the horses. The man on the front seat struck at him
with the whip. “I suppose he made up his mind he had to do it, that it
was the proper thing to do,” John Webster said. His bride and her uncle
both looked at him with questioning eyes. “Eh, what’s that? What’d you
say?” the uncle asked, but got no answer. John Webster felt suddenly
embarrassed. “I was only speaking of the dog,” he said presently. One
had to make some kind of explanation. The rest of the ride was taken in
silence.
* * * * *
It was late on that same afternoon that the thing to which he had
been looking forward with so much hope and doubt came to a kind of
consummation.
Her uncle’s farmhouse, a large comfortable white frame building, stood
on the bank of a river in a narrow green valley and hills rose up
before and behind it. In the afternoon young Webster and his bride
walked past the barn, back of the house, and got into a lane that ran
beside an orchard. Then they crawled over a fence and crossing a field
got into a wood that led up the hillside. There was another meadow
above and then another wood that covered the top of the hill quite
completely.
It was a warm day and they tried to talk as they went along, but did
not succeed very well. Now and then she looked at him shyly, as though
to say, “The road we are thinking of taking in life is very dangerous.
Are you quite sure you are a safe guide?”
Well he had felt her questioning and was in doubt about the answer to
be made. It would have been better no doubt had the question been asked
and answered long ago. When they came to a narrow path in the wood, he
let her walk ahead and then he could look at her quite boldly. There
was fear in him too. “Our self-consciousness is going to make us muddle
everything,” he thought. It was hard to remember whether he really had
thought anything so definite at that time. He was afraid. Her back was
very straight and once when she stooped to pass under the limb of an
overhanging tree, her long slender body going down and up made a very
lovely gesture. A lump came into his throat.
He tried to keep his mind fixed on little things. There had been rain
a day or two before and little mushrooms grew beside the path. In one
spot there was a whole army of them, very graceful and with their
caps touched with tender splashes of color. He picked one of them.
How strangely pungent to the nostrils. He wanted to eat it, but she
was frightened and protested. “Don’t,” she said. “It may be a poison
one.” For a moment it seemed they might, after all, get acquainted.
She looked directly at him. It was odd. They had not yet called each
other endearing names. They did not address each other by any name at
all. “Don’t eat it,” she said. “All right, but isn’t it tempting and
lovely?” he answered. They looked at each other for a moment and then
she blushed, after which they went on again along the path.
They had got out upon the hill where they could look back over the
valley and she sat with her back against a tree. Spring had passed,
but, as they walked through the wood, there had been, on all sides, a
sense of new growth springing up. Little green, pale green things were
just pushing their way up from among the dead brown leaves and out
of the black ground and on trees and bushes there was a sense of new
growth too. Were new leaves coming or had the old leaves but begun to
stand up a little straighter and more firmly because they had been
refreshed? It was a thing to think about too, when one was puzzled and
had before one a question wanting answering that one could not answer.
They were on the hill now and as he lay at her feet he did not need
to look at her, but could look down across the valley. She might be
looking at him and having thoughts just as he was, but that was her own
affair. One did well enough to have one’s own thoughts, straighten out
one’s own matters. The rain that had freshened everything had stirred
up many new smells in the wood. How fortunate there was no wind. The
smells were not blown away, but were lying low, like a soft blanket
over everything. The ground had a fragrance of its own and with it was
blended the fragrance of decaying leaves and of animals too. There was
a path along the top of the hill along which sheep sometimes went.
Little piles of sheep-droppings were lying in the hard path back of
the tree where she sat. He did not turn to look, but knew they were
there. The sheep-droppings were like marbles. It was good to feel that
within the compass of his love of smells he could include all life,
even the excretions of life. Somewhere in the wood there was a kind of
flowering tree. It couldn’t be far away. The fragrance from it mingled
with all the other smells floating over the hillside. The trees were
calling to the bees and insects who were answering with mad eagerness.
They flew swiftly along, in the air over John Webster’s head, over her
head too. One put off other things to play with thoughts. One pitched
little thoughts into the air idly, like boys at play, pitched and then
caught them again. After a while, when the proper time came, there
would be a crisis come into the lives of John Webster and the woman he
had married, but now one played with thoughts. One pitched the thoughts
into the air and caught them again.
People went about knowing the fragrance of flowers and a few other
things, spices and the like, they had been told by the poets were
fragrant. Could walls be erected about smells too? Was there not a
Frenchman once who wrote a poem regarding the fragrance of the armpits
of women? Was that something he had heard talked about among the young
men at school or was it just a fool idea that had come into his own
head?
The thing was to get the sense of the fragrance of all things, of
earth, plants, peoples, animals, insects, all together in the mind. One
could weave a golden mantle to spread over the earth and over people.
The strong animal smells, taken with the smell of pine trees and all
such heavy odors, would give the mantle strength to wear well. Then
upon the basis of that strength one could turn one’s fancy loose. Now
was the time for all the minor poets to come running. On the solid
basis John Webster’s fancy had built, they could weave all manner of
designs, using all the smells their less sturdy nostrils dare receive,
the smell of violets growing beside woodland paths, of little fragile
mushrooms, of honey dripping from the sacks under the bellies of
insects, of the hair of maidens fresh come from the bath.
* * * * *
After all John Webster, a man of the middle age, was sitting on a bed
with his daughter talking of an experience of his youth. In spite of
himself he was giving the tale of that experience a curiously perverted
twist. No doubt he was lying to his daughter. Had that young man on the
hillside, in the long ago, had the many and complicated feelings with
which he was now endowing him?
Now and then he stopped talking and shook his head while a smile played
across his face.
“How firmly now things were arranged between himself and his daughter.
There was no doubt a miracle had been wrought.”
He even fancied she knew he was lying, that he was throwing a certain
mantle of romance over the experience of his young manhood, but he
fancied she knew also that it was only by lying to the limit he could
come at truth.
* * * * *
Now one was back in fancy on the hillside again. There was an opening
among the trees and through this one looked, seeing the whole valley
below. There was a large town down the river somewhere, not the town
where he and his bride had got off the train, but a much larger one
with factories. Some people had come up the river in boats from the
town and were preparing to have a picnic in a grove of trees, upstream
and across the river from her uncle’s house.
There were both men and women in the party and the women had on white
dresses. It was charming to watch them moving in and out among the
green trees and one of them came down to the river’s edge and, putting
one foot in a boat that was drawn up on the bank, and with the other on
the bank itself, she leaned over to fill a pitcher with water. There
was the woman and her reflection in the water, seen faintly, even from
this distance. There was a going together and a coming apart. The two
white figures opened and closed like a delicately tinted shell.
Young Webster on the hill had not looked at his bride and they were
both silent, but he was becoming almost insanely excited. Was she
thinking the thoughts he was thinking? Had her nature also opened
itself, as had his?
It was becoming impossible to keep things straight in the mind. What
was he thinking and what was she thinking and feeling? Far away in the
wood across the river the white figures of women were moving about
among trees. The men of the picnic party, with their darker clothes
could no longer be discerned. One no longer thought of them. The
white-clad women’s figures were being woven in and out among the sturdy
upstanding trunks of the trees.
There was a woman on the hill behind him and she was his bride. Perhaps
she was having just such thoughts as himself. That must be true. She
was a woman and young and she would be afraid, but there came a time
when fear must be put aside. One was a male and at the proper time went
toward the female and took her. There was a kind of cruelty in nature
and at the proper time that cruelty became a part of one’s manhood.
He closed his eyes and rolling over to his belly got to his hands and
knees.
If one stayed longer lying quietly at her feet there would be a kind
of insanity. Already there was too much anarchy within. “At the moment
of death all of life passes before a man.” What a silly notion. “What
about the moment of the coming of life?”
He was on his knees like an animal, looking at the ground, not yet
looking at her. With all the strength of his being he tried to tell his
daughter of the meaning of that moment in his life.
“How shall I say how I felt? Perhaps I should have been a painter or
a singer. My eyes were closed and within myself were all the sights,
sounds, smells, feeling of the world of the valley into which I had
been looking. Within myself I comprehended all things.
“Things came in flashes, in colors. First there were the yellows, the
golden shining yellow things, not yet born. The yellows were little
streaks of shining color buried down with the dark blues and blacks
of the soil. The yellows were things not yet born, not yet come into
the light. They were yellow because they were not yet green. Soon the
yellows would combine with the dark colors in the earth and spring
forth into a world of color. There would be a sea of color, running in
waves, splashing over everything. Spring would come, within the earth,
within myself too.”
Birds were flying in the air over a river, and young Webster, with his
eyes closed, crouched before the woman, was himself the birds in the
air, the air itself, and the fishes in the river below. It seemed to
him now that if he were to open his eyes and look back, down into the
valley, he could see, even from that great distance, the movements of
the fins of fishes in the waters of the river far below.
Well he had better not open his eyes now. Once he had looked into a
woman’s eyes and she had come to him like a swimmer coming up out of
the sea, but then something had happened to spoil everything. He crept
toward her. Now she had begun to protest. “Don’t,” she said, “I’m
afraid.”
It would not do to stop now. There was a time came when one must not
stop. He threw his arms out, took her protesting and crying into his
arms.
VIII
“Why must one commit rape, rape of the conscious, rape of the
unconscious?”
John Webster sprang up from beside his daughter and then whirled
quickly about. A word had come out of the body of his wife sitting
unobserved on the floor behind him. “Don’t,” she said and then, after
opening and closing her mouth twice, ineffectually, repeated the
word. “Don’t, don’t,” she said again. The words seemed to be forcing
themselves through her lips. Her body lumped down there on the floor
had become just a strangely misshapen bundle of flesh and bones.
She was pale, of a pasty paleness.
John Webster had jumped off the bed as a dog, lying asleep in the dust
of a roadway, might have leaped out of the path of a rapidly moving
vehicle.
The devil! His mind was jerked back into the present swiftly,
violently. A moment before he had been with a young woman on a hillside
above a wide sun-washed valley and had been making love to her. The
love-making had not been a success. It had turned out badly. There
had been a tall slender girl who had submitted her body to a man, but
who had been all the time terribly frightened and beset by a sense
of guilt and shame. After the love-making she had cried, not with an
excess of tenderness, but because she had felt unclean. They had walked
down the hillside later and she had tried to tell him how she felt.
Then he also had begun to feel mean and unclean. Tears had come into
his own eyes. He had thought she must be right. What she said almost
every one said. After all man was not an animal. Man was a conscious
thing trying to struggle upward out of animalism. He had tried to
think everything out that same night as he, for the first time, lay in
bed beside his wife, and he had come to certain conclusions. She was
no doubt right in her belief that there were certain impulses in men
that had better be subjected to the power of the will. If one just let
oneself go one became no better than a beast.
He had tried hard to think everything out clearly. What she had wanted
was that there be no love-making between them except for the purpose of
breeding children. If one went about the business of bringing children
into the world, making new citizens for the state and all that, then
one could feel a certain dignity in love-making. She had tried to
explain how humiliated and mean she had felt that day when he had come
into her naked presence. For the first time they had talked of that.
It had been made ten times, a thousand times worse because he had
come the second time and the others had seen him. The clean moment of
their relationship was denied with determined insistence. After that
had happened she could not bear to remain in the company of her girl
friend and, as for her friend’s brother--well, how could she ever look
into his face again? Whenever he looked at her he would be seeing her
not properly clothed as she should be, but shamelessly naked and on a
bed with a naked man holding her in his arms. She had been compelled
to get out of the house, go home at once, and of course, when she
got home, every one wondered what had happened that her visit had
come to such an abrupt end. The trouble was that when her mother was
questioning her, on the day after her arrival home, she suddenly burst
into tears.
What they thought after that she did not know. The truth was that she
had begun to be afraid of every one’s thoughts. When she went into her
bedroom at night she was almost ashamed to look at her own body and had
got into the habit of undressing in the darkness. Her mother was always
dropping remarks. “Did your coming home so suddenly have anything to do
with the young man in that house?”
After she had come home, and because she began to feel so ashamed of
herself in the presence of other people, she had decided she would join
a church, a decision that had pleased her father, who was a devout
church member. The whole incident had in fact drawn her and her father
closer together. Perhaps that was because, unlike her mother, he never
bothered her with embarrassing questions.
Anyway she had made up her mind that if she ever married she would try
to make her marriage a pure thing, based on comradeship, and she had
felt that after all she must marry John Webster if he ever repeated his
proposal of marriage. After what had happened that was the only right
thing for them both to do and now that they were married it would be
right also for them to try and make up for the past by leading clean
pure lives and trying never to give way to the animal impulses that
shocked and frightened people.
* * * * *
John Webster was standing facing his wife and daughter and his mind had
gone back to the first night in bed with his wife and to the many other
nights they had spent together. On that first night, long ago, when she
lay talking to him, the moonlight came in through a window and fell on
her face. She had been very beautiful at the moment. Now that he no
longer approached her, afire with passion, but lay quietly beside her,
with her body drawn a little away and with his arm about her shoulders,
she was not afraid of him and occasionally put up her hand and touched
his face.
The truth was that he had got the notion into his head that there was
in her a kind of spiritual power divorced altogether from the flesh.
Outside the house, along the river banks, frogs were calling their
throaty calls and once in the night some strange weird call came out of
the air. That must have been some night bird, perhaps a loon. The sound
wasn’t a call, really. It was a kind of wild laugh. From another part
of the house, on the same floor there came the sound of her uncle’s
snoring.
The two people had slept little. There was so much to say. After all
they were hardly acquainted. What he thought at the time was that
she wasn’t a woman after all. She was a child. Something dreadful
had happened to the child and he was to blame and now that she was
his wife he would try hard to make everything all right. If passion
frightened her he would subdue his passions. A thought had got into his
head that had stayed there for years. It was that spiritual love was
stronger and purer than physical love, that they were two different
and distinct things. He had felt quite exalted when that notion came.
He wondered now, as he stood looking down at the figure of his wife,
what had happened that the notion at one time so strong in him, had
not enabled him or her to get happiness together. One said the words
and then, after all, they did not mean anything. They were trick words
of the sort that were always fooling people, forcing people into false
positions. He had come to hate such words. “Now I accept the flesh
first, all flesh,” he thought vaguely, still looking down at her.
He turned and stepped across the room to look in a glass. The flame
of the candles made light enough so that he could see himself quite
distinctly. It was a rather puzzling notion, but the truth was, that
every time he had looked at his wife during the last few weeks he had
wanted to run at once and look at himself in a glass. He had wanted to
assure himself of something. The tall slender girl who had once lain
beside him in a bed, with the moonlight falling on her face, had become
the heavy inert woman now in the room with him, the woman who was at
this moment crouched on the floor in the doorway at the foot of the
bed. How much had he become like that?
One didn’t escape animalism so easily. Now the woman on the floor was
so much more like an animal than himself. Perhaps the very sins he had
committed, his shamefaced running off sometimes to other women in the
cities, had saved him. “That would be a pronouncement to throw into the
teeth of the good pure people if it were true,” he thought with a quick
inner throb of satisfaction.
The woman on the floor was like a heavy animal that had suddenly become
very ill. He stepped back to the bed and looked at her with a queer
impersonal light in his eyes. She had difficulty holding up her head.
The light from the candles, cut off from her submerged body by the bed
itself shone full on her face and shoulders. The rest of her body was
buried in a kind of darkness. His mind remained the alert swift thing
it had been ever since he had found Natalie. In a moment now he could
do more thinking than he had done before in a year. If he ever became
a writer, as he sometimes thought maybe he would, after he had gone
away with Natalie, he would never want for things to write about. If
one kept the lid off the well of thinking within oneself, let the well
empty itself, let the mind consciously think any thoughts that came to
it, accepted all thinking, all imaginings, as one accepted the flesh
of people, animals, birds, trees, plants, one might live a hundred or a
thousand lives in one life. To be sure it was absurd to go stretching
things too much, but one could at least play with the notion that one
could become something more than just one individual man and woman
living one narrow circumscribed life. One could tear down all walls
and fences and walk in and out of many people, become many people. One
might in oneself become a whole town full of people, a city, a nation.
The thing to bear in mind however now, at this moment, was the woman on
the floor, the woman whose voice had, but a moment before called out
again the word her lips had always been saying to him.
“Don’t! Don’t! Let’s not, John! Not now, John!” What persistent denial,
of himself, perhaps of herself, too, there had been.
It was rather absurdly cruel how impersonal he felt toward her. It was
likely few people in the world ever realized what depths of cruelty lay
sleeping within themselves. All the things that came out of the well of
thinking within oneself, when one jerked off the lid, were not easy to
accept as a part of oneself.
As for the woman on the floor, if one let one’s fancy go, one could
stand as he was now doing, looking directly at the woman, and could
think the most absurdly inconsequential thoughts.
For one thing one could have the fancy that the darkness in which her
body was submerged, because of the accident that the light from the
candles did not fall on it, was the sea of silence into which she had,
all through these years, been sinking herself deeper and deeper.
And the sea of silence was just another and fancier name for something
else, for that deep well within all men and women, of which he had been
thinking so much during the last few weeks.
The woman who had been his wife, all people for that matter, spent
their entire lives sinking themselves deeper and deeper into that sea.
If one wanted to let oneself get more and more fancy about the matter,
indulge in a kind of drunken debauch of fancy, as it were, one could
in a half playful mood jump over some invisible line and say that the
sea of silence into which people were always so intent on sinking
themselves was in reality death. There was a race toward the goal of
death between the mind and body and almost always the mind arrived
first.
The race began in childhood and never stopped until either the body
or mind had worn itself out and stopped working. Every one carried
about, all the time, within himself life and death. There were two
Gods sitting on two thrones. One could worship either, but in general
mankind had preferred kneeling before death.
The god of denial had won the victory. To reach his throne-room one
went through long hallways of evasion. That was the road to his
throne-room, the road of evasion. One twisted and turned, felt one’s
way in the darkness. There were no sudden and blinding flashes of light.
John Webster had got a notion regarding his wife. It was sure the
heavy inert woman, now looking up into his face from the darkness of
the floor, unable to speak to him, had little or nothing to do with
a slender girl he had once married. For one thing how utterly unlike
they were physically. It wasn’t the same woman at all. He could see
that. Anyone who had looked at the two women could see that they had
really nothing physically in common. But did she know that, had she
ever thought of that, had she been, in any but a very superficial way,
aware of the changes that had taken place in her? He decided she had
not. There was a kind of blindness common to almost all people. The
thing called beauty, men sought in woman, and that women, although
they did not speak of it so often, were also looking for in men wasn’t
a thing that remained. When it existed at all it came to people only
in flashes. One came into the presence of another and the flash came.
How confusing that was. Strange things like marriages followed. “Until
death do us part.” Well, that was all right too. One had to try to get
things straight if one could. When one clutched at the thing called
beauty in another, death always came, bobbing its head up too.
How many marriages among peoples! John Webster’s mind was flying about.
He stood looking at the woman who, although they had separated long
before--they had really and irrevocably separated one day on a hill
above a valley in the state of Kentucky--was still in an odd way bound
to him, and there was another woman who was his daughter in the same
room. The daughter stood beside him. He could put out his hand and
touch her. She was not looking at himself or her mother, but at the
floor. What was she thinking? What thoughts had he stirred up in her?
What would be the result to her of the events of the night? There were
things he couldn’t answer, that he had to leave on the knees of the
gods.
His mind was racing, racing. There were certain men he had always been
seeing in the world. Usually they belonged to a class known as fellows
with shaky reputations. What had happened to them? There were men who
walked through life with a certain easy grace of manner. In some way
they were beyond good and evil, stood outside the influences that made
or unmade other men. John Webster had seen a few such men and had never
been able to forget them. Now they passed, as in a procession, before
his mind’s eyes.
There was an old man with a white beard who carried a heavy walking
stick and was followed by a dog. He had broad shoulders and walked with
a certain stride. John Webster had encountered the man once, as he
himself drove on a dusty country road. Who was the fellow? Where was
he going? There was about him a certain air. “Go to the devil then,”
his manner seemed to say. “I’m a man walking here. Within me there is
kingship. Go prattle of democracy and equality if you will, worry your
silly heads about a life after death, make up little lies to cheer your
way in the darkness, but get out of my way. I walk in the light.”
It might be all just a silly notion, what John Webster was now thinking
about an old man he had once met walking on a country road. It was
certain he remembered the figure with extraordinary sharpness. He had
stopped his horse to gaze after the old man, who had not even bothered
to turn and look at him. Well the old man had walked with a kingly
stride. Perhaps that was the reason he had attracted John Webster’s
attention.
Now he was thinking of him and a few other such men he had seen during
his life. There was one, a sailor who had come down to a wharf in the
city of Philadelphia. John Webster was in that city on business and
having nothing to do one afternoon had gone down to where the ships
were loaded and unloaded. A sailing vessel, a brigantine, lay at the
wharf, and the man he had seen came down to it. He had a bag over his
shoulder, containing perhaps his sea clothes. He was no doubt a sailor,
about to sail before the mast on the brigantine. What he did was simply
to come to the vessel’s side, throw his bag aboard, call to another man
who put his head out at a cabin door, and turning walked away.
But who had taught him to walk like that? The old Harry! Most men, and
women too, crept through life like sneaks. What gave them the sense
of being such underlings, such dogs? Were they constantly besmearing
themselves with accusations of guilt and, if that was it, what made
them do it?
The old man in the road, the sailor walking off along a street, a negro
prize fighter he had once seen driving an automobile, a gambler at the
horse races in a Southern city, who walked wearing a loud checkered
vest before a grandstand filled with people, a woman actress he had
once seen coming out at the stage entrance of a theatre, reprobates all
perhaps and all walking with the stride of kings.
What had given such men and women this respect for themselves? It was
apparent respect for self must be at the bottom of the matter. Perhaps
they hadn’t at all the sense of guilt and shame that had made of the
slender girl he had once married the heavy inarticulate woman now
squatted so grotesquely on the floor at his feet. One could imagine
some such person as he had in mind saying to himself, “Well, here I
am, you see, in the world. I have this long or short body, this brown
or yellow hair. My eyes are of a certain color. I eat food, I sleep at
night. I shall have to spend the whole of my life going about among
people in this body of mine. Shall I crawl before them or shall I walk
upright like a king? Shall I hate and fear my own body, this house in
which I must live, or shall I respect and care for it? Well, the devil!
The question is not worth answering. I shall take life as it offers
itself. For me the birds shall sing, the green spread itself over the
earth in the spring, for me the cherry tree in the orchard shall bloom.”
John Webster had a fanciful picture of the man of his fancy going into
a room. He closed the door. A row of candles stood on a mantle above a
fireplace. The man opened a box and took from it a silver crown. Then
he laughed softly and put the crown on his own head. “I crown myself a
man,” he said.
* * * * *
It was amazing. One was in a room looking at a woman who had been one’s
wife, and one was about to set out on a journey and would not see her
again. Of a sudden there was a blinding rush of thoughts. One’s fancy
played far and wide. One seemed to have been standing in one spot
thinking thoughts for hours, but in reality only a few seconds had
passed since the voice of his wife, calling out that word, “don’t,” had
interrupted his own voice telling a tale of an ordinary unsuccessful
marriage.
The thing now was to keep his daughter in mind. He had better get her
out of the room now. She was moving toward the door to her own room and
in a moment would be gone. He turned away from the white-faced woman on
the floor and watched his daughter. Now his own body was thrust between
the bodies of the two women. They could not see each other.
There was a story of a marriage he had not finished, would never finish
telling now, but in time his daughter would come to understand what the
end of the story must inevitably be.
There was something that should be thought of now. His daughter was
going out of his presence. Perhaps he would never see her again. One
continually dramatized life, made a play of it. That was inevitable.
Every day of one’s life consisted of a series of little dramas and one
was always casting oneself for an important part in the performance.
It was annoying to forget one’s lines, not to walk out upon the stage
when one had got one’s cue. Nero fiddled when Rome was burning. He had
forgotten what part he had assigned to himself and so fiddled in order
not to give himself away. Perhaps he had intended making an ordinary
politician’s speech about a city rising again from the flames.
Blood of the saints! Would his daughter walk calmly out of the room
without turning at the door? What had he yet intended saying to her? He
was growing a little nervous and upset.
* * * * *
His daughter was standing in the doorway leading to her own room,
looking at him, and there was a kind of intense half-insane mood in
her as all evening there had been in him. He had infected her with
something out of himself. After all there had been what he had wanted,
a real marriage. After this evening the younger woman could never be
what she might have been, had this evening not happened. Now he knew
what he wanted for her. Those men, whose figures had just visited his
fancy, the race-track man, the old man in the road, the sailor on the
docks, there was a thing they had got hold of he had wanted her to have
hold of too.
Now he was going away with Natalie, with his own woman, and he would
not see his daughter again. She was a young girl yet, really. All of
womanhood lay before her.
“I’m damned. I’m crazy as a loon,” he thought. He had suddenly a
ridiculous desire to begin singing a silly refrain that had just come
into his head.
Diddle de di do,
Diddle de di do,
Chinaberries grow on a Chinaberry tree.
Diddle de di do.
And then his fingers, fumbling about in his pockets, came upon the
thing he had unconsciously been looking for. He clutched it, half
convulsively, and went toward his daughter, holding it between his
thumb and finger.
* * * * *
On the afternoon of the day, on which he had first found his way in at
the door of Natalie’s house, and when he had become almost distracted
from much thinking, he had found a bright little stone on the railroad
track near his factory.
When one tried to think his way along a too difficult road one was
likely, at any moment, to get lost. One went up some dark lonely road
and then, becoming frightened, one became at the same time shrill and
distracted. There were things to be done, but one could do nothing.
For example, and at the most vital moment in life, one might spoil
everything by beginning to sing a silly song. Others would throw up
their hands. “He’s crazy,” they would say, as though such a saying ever
meant anything at all.
Well, once before, he had been, as he was now, at just this moment.
Too much thinking had upset him. The door of Natalie’s house had been
opened and he had been afraid to enter. He had planned to run away from
her, go to the city and get drunk and write her a letter telling her
to go away to where he would not have to see her again. He had thought
he preferred to walk in loneliness and darkness, to take the road of
evasion to the throne-room of the god Death.
And at the moment all this was going on his eye had caught the glint of
a little green stone lying among all the gray meaningless stones in the
gravel bed of a railroad track. That was in the late afternoon and the
sun’s rays had been caught and reflected by the little stone.
He had picked it up and the simple act of doing so had broken a kind
of absurd determination within him. His fancy, unable at the moment to
play over the facts of his life, had played over the stone. A man’s
fancy, the creative thing within him, was in reality intended to be a
healing thing, a supplementary and healing influence to the working
of the mind. Men sometimes did a thing they called, “going it blind,”
and at such moments did the least blind acts of their whole lives. The
truth was that the mind working alone was but a one-sided, maimed thing.
“Hito, tito, there’s no use my trying to become a philosopher.” John
Webster was stepping toward his daughter who was waiting for him to say
or do something that had not yet been done. Now he was quite all right
again. Some minute re-adjustment had taken place inside himself as it
had on so many other occasions within the last few weeks.
Something like a gay mood had come over him. “In one evening I have
managed to plunge pretty deeply down into the sea of life,” he thought.
He became a little vain. There he was, a man of the middle class, who
had lived all his life in a Wisconsin industrial town. But a few weeks
before he had been but a colorless fellow in an almost altogether
colorless world. For years he had been going along, just so, day after
day, week after week, year after year, going along streets, passing
people in the streets, picking his feet up and setting them down, thump
thump, eating food, sleeping, borrowing money at banks, dictating
letters in offices, going along, thump thump, not daring to think or
feel much of anything at all.
Now he could think more thoughts, have more fancies, while he took
three or four steps across a room toward his daughter, than he had
sometimes dared do in a whole year of his former life. There was a
picture of himself in his fancy now that he liked.
In the fanciful picture he had climbed up to a high place above the sea
and had taken off his clothes. Then he had run to the end of a cliff
and had leaped off into space. His body, his own white body, the same
body in which he had been living all through these dead years, was now
making a long graceful arched curve against a blue sky.
That was rather nice too. It made a picture for the mind to take hold
of and it was pleasant to think of one’s body as making sharp striking
pictures.
He had plunged far down into the sea of lives, into the clear warm
still sea of Natalie’s life, into the heavy salt dead sea of his wife’s
life, into the swiftly running young river of life that was in his
daughter Jane.
“I’m a great little mixer-up of figures of speech, but at the same time
I’m a great little swimmer in seas,” he said aloud to his daughter.
Well, he had better be a little careful too. Her eyes were becoming
puzzled again. It would take a long time for one, living with another,
to become used to the sight of things jerked suddenly up out of the
wells of thought within oneself and he and his daughter would perhaps
never live together again.
He looked at the little stone held so firmly between his thumb and
finger. It would be better to keep his mind fastened upon that now.
It was a small, a minute thing, but one could fancy it looming large
on the surface of a calm sea. His daughter’s life was a river running
down to the sea of life. She would want something to which she could
cling when she had been cast out into the sea. What an absurd notion. A
little green stone would not float in the sea. It would sink. He smiled
knowingly.
There was the little stone held before him, in his extended hand.
He had picked it up on a railroad track one day and had indulged in
fancies concerning it and the fancies had healed him. By indulging in
fancies concerning inanimate objects, one in a strange way glorified
them. For example a man might go to live in a room. There was a picture
in a frame on a wall, the walls of a room, an old desk, two candles
under a Virgin, and a man’s fancy made the place a sacred place. All
the art of life perhaps consisted in just letting the fancy wash over
and color the facts of life.
The light from the two candles under the Virgin fell on the stone he
held before him. It was about the size and shape of a small bean and
was dark green in color. In certain lights its color changed swiftly.
There was a flash of yellow green as of new grown things just coming
out of the ground and then that faded away and the stone became
altogether a dark lusty green, as of the leaves of oak trees in the
late summer, one could fancy.
How clearly John Webster had remembered everything now. The stone
he had found on the railroad track had been lost by a woman who was
travelling west. The woman had worn it among other stones in a brooch
at her throat. He remembered how his imagination had created her at the
moment.
Or had it been set in a ring and worn on her finger?
Things were a bit mixed. Now he saw the woman quite clearly, as he
had seen her in fancy once before, but she was not on a train, but
was standing on a hill. It was winter and the hill was coated with
a light blanket of snow and below the hill, in a valley, was a wide
river covered with a shining sheet of ice. A man, a middle-aged,
rather heavy-looking man stood beside the woman and she was pointing
at something in the distance. The stone was set in a ring worn on the
extended finger.
Now everything became very clear to John Webster. He knew now what he
wanted. The woman on the hill was one of the strange people, like the
sailor who had come down to the ship, the old man in the road, the
actress coming out of the stage door of the theatre, one of the people
who had crowned themselves with the crown of life.
He stepped to his daughter and, taking her hand, opened it and laid the
little stone on her palm. Then he carefully closed her fingers until
her hand was a fist.
He smiled, a knowing little smile and looked into her eyes. “Well, now
Jane, it’s pretty hard to tell you what I’m thinking,” he said. “You
see, there are a lot of things in me I can’t get out without time and
now I’m going away. I want to give you something.”
He hesitated. “This stone,” he began again, “it’s something for you to
cling to perhaps, yes, that’s it. In moments of doubt cling to it. When
you become almost distracted and do not know what to do hold it in your
hand.”
He turned his head and his eyes seemed to be taking in the room slowly,
carefully, as though not wanting to forget anything that made a part of
the picture in which he and his daughter were now the central figures.
“As a matter of fact,” he began again, “a woman, a beautiful woman
might, you see, hold many jewels in her hand. She might have many
loves, you see, and the jewels might be the jewels of experience, the
challenges of life she had met, eh?”
John Webster seemed to be playing some fanciful game with his daughter,
but now she was no longer frightened, as when she had first come into
the room, or puzzled as she had been but a moment before. She was
absorbed in what he was saying. The woman crouched on the floor behind
her father was forgotten.
“There’s one thing I shall have to do before I go away. I’ve got to
give you a name for this little stone,” he said, still smiling. Opening
her hand again he took it out and went and stood for a moment holding
it before one of the candles. Then he returned to her and again put it
into her hand.
“It is from your father, but he is giving it to you at the moment
when he is no longer being your father and has begun to love you as a
woman. Well, I guess you’d better cling to it, Jane. You’ll need it,
God knows. If you want a name for it call it the ‘Jewel of Life,’” he
said and then, as though he had already forgotten the incident he put
his hand on her arm and pushing her gently through the door closed it
behind her.
IX
There still remained something for John Webster to do in the room.
When his daughter had gone he picked up his bag and went out into the
hallway as though about to leave without more words to the wife, who
still sat on the floor with her head hanging down, as though unaware of
any life about her.
When he had got into the hallway and had closed the door he set his
bag down and came back. As he stood within the room, with the knob
still held in his hand, he heard a noise on the floor below. “That’s
Katherine. What’s she doing up at this time of the night?” he thought.
He took out his watch and went nearer the burning candles. It was
fifteen minutes to three. “We’ll catch the early morning train at four
all right,” he thought.
There was his wife, or rather the woman who for so long a time had
been his wife, on the floor at the foot of the bed. Now her eyes were
looking directly at him. Still the eyes had nothing to say. They
did not even plead with him. There was in them something that was
hopelessly puzzled. If the events that had transpired in the room that
night had torn the lid off the well she carried about within herself
she had managed to clamp it back on again. Now perhaps the lid would
never again stir from its place. John Webster felt peculiarly like he
fancied an undertaker might feel on being called at night into the
presence of a dead body.
“The devil! Such fellows perhaps had no such feelings.” Quite
unconscious of what he was doing he took out a cigarette and lit it. He
felt strangely impersonal; like one watching a rehearsal for some play
in which one is not particularly interested. “It’s a time of death all
right,” he thought. “The woman is dying. I can’t say whether or not her
body is dying but there’s something within her that has already died.”
He wondered if he had killed her, but had no sense of guilt in the
matter.
He went to stand at the foot of the bed and, putting his hand on the
railing, leaned over to look at her.
It was a time of darkness. A shiver ran through his body and dark
thoughts like flocks of blackbirds flew across the field of his fancy.
“The devil! There’s a hell too! There’s such a thing as death, as well
as such a thing as life,” he told himself. Here was however an amazing
and quite interesting fact too. It had taken a long time and much grim
determination for the woman on the floor before him to find her way
along the road to the throne-room of death. “Perhaps no one, while
there is life within him to lift the lid, ever becomes quite submerged
in the swamp of decaying flesh,” he thought.
Thoughts stirred within John Webster that had not come to his mind in
years. As a young man in college he must really have been more alive
than he knew at the time. Things he had heard discussed by other young
men, fellows who had a taste for literature, and that he had read in
the books, the reading of which were a part of his duties, had all
through the last few weeks been coming back to his mind. “One might
almost think I had followed such things all my life,” he thought.
The poet Dante, Milton, with his “Paradise Lost,” the Hebrew poets of
the older Testaments, all such fellows must at some time in their lives
have seen what he was seeing at just this moment.
There was a woman on the floor before him and her eyes were looking
directly into his. All evening there had been something struggling
within her, something that wanted to come out to him and to her
daughter. Now the struggle was at an end. There was surrender. He kept
looking down at her with a strange fixed stare in his own eyes.
“It’s too late. It didn’t work,” he said slowly. He did not say the
words aloud, but whispered them.
A new thought came. All through his life with this woman there had
been a notion to which he had clung. It had been a kind of beacon that
now he felt had from the first led him into a false trail. He had in
some way picked up the notion from others about him. It was peculiarly
an American notion, always being indirectly repeated in newspapers,
magazines and books. Back of it was an insane, wishy-washy philosophy
of life. “All things work together for good. God’s in his Heaven, all’s
right with the world. All men are created free and equal.”
“What an ungodly lot of noisy meaningless sayings drummed into the ears
of men and women trying to live their lives!”
A great disgust swept over him. “Well, there’s no use my staying here
any longer. My life in this house has come to an end,” he thought.
He walked to the door and when he had opened it turned again. “Good
night and good bye,” he said as cheerfully as though he were just
leaving the house in the morning for a day at the factory.
And then the sound of the door closing made a sharp jarring break in
the silence of the house.
BOOK FOUR
I
The spirit of death was no doubt lurking in the Webster house. Jane
Webster felt its presence. She had suddenly been made aware of the
possibility of feeling, within herself, many unspoken, unannounced
things. When her father had put his hand on her arm and had pushed her
back into the darkness behind the closed door of her own room, she
had gone directly to her bed and had thrown herself down on top of
the bed covers. Now she lay clutching the little stone he had given
her. How glad she was to have that something to clutch. Her fingers
pressed against it so that it had already become imbedded in the flesh
of her palm. If her life had been, until this evening, a quiet river,
running down through fields toward the sea of life, it would be that
no more. Now the river had come into a dark stony country. It ran now
along rocky passageways, between high dark cliffs. What things might
not now happen to her on the morrow, on the day after to-morrow. Her
father was going away with a strange woman. There would be a scandal in
the town. All her young women and men friends would look at her with a
question in their eyes. Perhaps they would pity her. Her spirit rose
up and the thought made her squirm with anger. It was odd, but it was
nevertheless true, that she had no particular feeling of sympathy for
her mother. Her father had managed to bring himself close to her. In a
queer way she understood what he was going to do, why he was doing it.
She kept seeing the naked figure of the man striding up and down before
her. There had always, since she could remember, been in her a kind of
curiosity regarding men’s bodies.
Once or twice, with young girls she knew well, there had been talk of
the matter, guarded, half-frightened talk. “A man was so and so. It was
quite dreadful what happened when one grew up and got married.” One
of the girls had seen something. There was a man lived near her, on
the same street, and he wasn’t always careful about pulling the shade
to his bedroom window. One summer afternoon the girl was in her room,
lying on her bed, and the man came into his room and took off all his
clothes. He was up to some foolishness. There was a looking glass and
he pranced up and down before it. He must have been pretending he was
fighting the man he saw reflected in the glass as he kept advancing and
receding and making the funniest movements with his body and arms. He
lunged and scowled and struck out with his fists and then jumped back,
as though the man in the glass had struck at him.
The girl on the bed had seen everything, all the man’s body. At first
she thought she would run out of the room and then she made up her mind
to stay. Well, she didn’t want her mother to know what she had seen so
she got up softly and crept along the floor to lock the door, so that
her mother or a servant could not come suddenly in. What the girl had
thought was that one had to find out things sometime and might as well
take the chance that offered. It was dreadful and she had been unable
to sleep for two or three nights after it happened but just the same
she was glad she had looked. One couldn’t always be a ninny and not
know anything.
* * * * *
As Jane Webster lay on the bed with her fingers pressed down upon the
stone her father had given her, the girl, talking of the naked man she
had seen in the next house, seemed very young and unsophisticated. She
felt a kind of contempt for her. As for herself, she had been in the
actual presence of a naked man and the man had been seated beside her
and had put his arm about her. His hands had actually touched the flesh
of her own body. In the future, whatever happened, men would not be
to her as they had been, and as they were to the young women who had
been her friends. Now she would know about men as she hadn’t before and
would not be afraid of them. Of that she was glad. Her father’s going
away with a strange woman and the scandal that would no doubt spring
up in the town might ruin the quiet security in which she had always
lived but there had been much gained. Now the river that was her life
was running through dark passageways. It would perhaps be plunged down
over sharp jutting rocks.
It is, to be sure, false to credit Jane Webster with such definite
thoughts although later, when she remembered that evening her own mind
would begin to build a tower of romance about it. She lay on her bed
clutching the little stone and was frightened but at the same time
strangely glad.
Something had been torn open, perhaps the door out into life for her.
There was a feeling of death in the Webster house but in her was a new
sense of life and a glad new feeling of being unafraid of life.
* * * * *
Her father went down the stairway and into the dark hallway below,
carrying his bag and thinking of death too.
Now there was no end to the elaboration of thinking that went on within
John Webster. In the future he would be a weaver, weaving designs out
of threads of thought. Death was a thing, like life, that came to
people suddenly, that flashed in upon them. There were always the two
figures walking through towns and cities, going in and out of houses,
in and out of factories and stores, visiting lonely farmhouses at
night, walking in the light of day along gay city streets, getting on
and off trains, always on the move, appearing before people at the most
unexpected moments. It might be somewhat difficult for a man to learn
to go in and out of other people but for the two gods, Life and Death,
there was no difficulty.
There was a deep well within every man and woman and when Life came in
at the door of the house, that was the body, it reached down and tore
the heavy iron lid off the well. Dark hidden things, festering in the
well, came out and found expression for themselves, and the miracle
was that, expressed, they became often very beautiful. There was a
cleansing, a strange sort of renewal within the house of the man or
woman when the god Life had come in.
As for Death and his entrance, that was another matter. Death had many
strange tricks to play on people too. Sometimes he let their bodies
live for a long time while he satisfied himself with merely clamping
the lid down on the well within. It was as though he had said, “Well,
there is no great hurry about physical death. That will come as an
inevitable thing in its time. There is a much more ironic and subtle
game to be played against my opponent Life. I will fill the cities
with the damp fetid smell of death while the very dead think they are
still alive. As for myself, I am the crafty one. I am like a great and
subtile king, every one serves, while he talks only of freedom and
leads his subjects to think it is he who serves, instead of themselves.
I am like a great general, having always at his command, ready to
spring to arms at the least sign from himself, a vast army of men.”
* * * * *
John Webster went along the dark hallway below to the door leading into
the street and had put his hand on the knob of the outer door when,
instead of passing directly out, he stopped and reflected a moment.
He was somewhat vain of the thoughts he had been having. “Perhaps I am
a poet. Perhaps it’s only the poet who manages to keep the lid off the
well within and to keep alive up to the last minute before his body has
become worn out and he must get out of it,” he thought.
His vain mood passed and he turned and looked with a curious awareness
along the hallway. At the moment he was much like an animal, moving in
a dark wood, who, without hearing anything, is nevertheless aware there
is life stirring, perhaps waiting for him, near at hand. Could that be
the figure of a woman he saw, sitting within a few feet of him? There
was a small old-fashioned hat-rack in the hallway near the front door
and the lower part of it made a kind of seat on which one might sit.
One might fancy there was a woman sitting quietly there. She also had a
bag packed and it was sitting on the floor beside her.
The old Harry! John Webster was a little startled. Was his fancy
getting a little out of hand? There could be no doubt that there was a
woman sitting there, within a few feet of where he stood, with the knob
of the door in his hand.
He was tempted to put out his hand and see if he could touch the
woman’s face. He had been thinking of the two gods, Life and Death. No
doubt an illusion had been created in his mind. There was this deep
sense of a presence, sitting silently there, on the lower part of the
hat-rack. He stepped a little nearer and a shiver ran through his body.
There was a dark mass, making crudely the outlines of a human body, and
as he stood looking it seemed to him that a face began to be more and
more sharply outlined. The face, like the faces of two other women that
had, at important and unexpected moments in his life, floated up before
him, the face of a young naked girl on a bed in the long ago, the face
of Natalie Swartz, seen in the darkness of a field at night, as he lay
beside her--these faces had seemed to float up to him as though coming
toward him out of the deep waters of a sea.
He had, no doubt, let himself become a little overwrought. One did not
step lightly along the road he had been travelling. He had dared set
out upon the road of lives and had tried to take others with him. No
doubt he had been more worked up and excited than he had realized.
He put out his hand softly and touched the face that now appeared to
come floating toward him out of darkness. Then he sprang back, striking
his head against the opposite wall of the hallway. His fingers had
encountered warm flesh. There was a terrific sensation of something
whirling within his brain. Had he gone quite insane? A comforting
thought came, flashing across the confusion of his mind.
“Katherine,” he said in a loud voice. It was a kind of call out of
himself.
“Yes,” a woman’s voice answered quietly, “I wasn’t going to let you go
away without saying good bye.”
The woman, who had for so many years been a servant in his house,
explained her presence there in the darkness. “I’m sorry I startled
you,” she said. “I was just going to speak. You are going away and
so am I. I’ve got everything packed and ready. I went up the stairs
to-night and heard you say you were leaving so I came down and did my
own packing. It didn’t take me long. I didn’t have many things to pack.”
John Webster opened the front door and asked her to come outside with
him and for a few minutes they stood talking together on the steps that
led down from the front porch.
Outside the house he felt better. There was a kind of weakness,
following the fright inside, and for a moment he sat on the steps while
she stood waiting. Then the weakness passed and he arose. The night
was clear and dark. He breathed deeply and there was a great relief
in the thought that he would never again go through the door out of
which he had just come. He felt very young and strong. Soon now, there
would be a streak of light showing in the eastern sky. When he had got
Natalie and they had climbed aboard a train they would sit in the day
coach on the side that looked toward the East. It would be sweet to see
the new day come. His fancy ran ahead of his body and he saw himself
and the woman sitting together in the train. They would come into the
lighted day coach from the darkness outside, just before dawn came. In
the day coach people would have been asleep, folded up in the seats,
looking uncomfortable and tired. The air would be heavy with the stale
heaviness of breathing people confined in a close place. There would
be the heavy acrid smell of clothes, that had for a long time absorbed
the acids thrown off by bodies. He and Natalie would take the train as
far as Chicago and get off there. Perhaps they would get on another
train at once. It might be that they would stay in Chicago for a day or
two. There would be plans to make, long hours of talk perhaps. There
was a new life to begin now. He himself had to think what he wanted to
do with his days. It was odd. He and Natalie had made no plans beyond
getting on a train. Now for the first time his fancy tried to creep out
beyond that moment, to penetrate into the future.
It was fine that the night had turned out clear. One would hate to set
out, plodding off to the railroad station in the rain. How bright the
stars were in the early morning hours. Now Katherine was talking. It
would be well to listen to what she had to say.
She was telling him, with a kind of brutal frankness, that she did not
like Mrs. Webster, had never liked her, and that she had only stayed in
the house all these years as a servant because of himself.
He turned to look at her and her eyes were looking directly into his.
They were standing very close together, almost as close as lovers might
have stood, and, in the uncertain light, her eyes were strangely like
Natalie’s. In the darkness they appeared to glow as Natalie’s eyes had
seemed to glow on that night when he had lain with her in the field.
Was it only a chance that this new sense he had, of being able to
refresh and rebuild himself by loving others, by going in and out at
the open doors of the houses of others, had come to him through Natalie
instead of through this woman Katherine? “Huh, it’s marriage, every one
is seeking marriage, that’s what they are up to, seeking marriages,”
he told himself. There was something quiet and fine and strong in
Katherine as in Natalie. Perhaps had he, at some moment, during all
his dead unconscious years of living in the same house with her, but
happened to have been alone with Katherine in a room, and had the doors
to his own being opened at that moment, something might have transpired
between himself and this woman that would have started within just such
another revolution as the one through which he had been passing.
“That was possible too,” he decided. “People would gain a lot if they
could but learn to keep that thought in mind,” he thought. His fancy
played with the notion for a moment. One would walk through towns and
cities, in and out of houses, into and out of the presence of people
with a new feeling of respect if the notion should once get fixed in
people’s minds that, at any moment, anywhere, one was likely to come
upon the one who carried before him as on a golden tray, the gift of
life and the consciousness of life for his beloved. Well, there was
a picture to be borne in mind, a picture of a land and a people,
cleanly arrayed, a people bearing gifts, a people who had learned the
secret and the beauty of bestowing unasking love. Such a people would
inevitably keep their own persons clean and well arrayed. They would be
colorful people with a certain decorative sense, a certain awareness
of themselves in relation to the houses in which they lived and the
streets in which they walked. One could not love until one had cleansed
and a little beautified one’s own body and mind, until one had opened
the doors of one’s being and let in sun and air, until one had freed
one’s own mind and fancy.
John Webster fought with himself now, striving to push his own thoughts
and fancies into the background. There he was standing before the house
in which he had lived all these years so near the woman Katherine and
she was now talking to him of her own affairs. It was time now to give
heed to her.
She was explaining how that, for a week or more, she had been aware of
the fact that there was something wrong in the Webster household. One
did not need to have been very sharp to have realized that. It was in
the very air one breathed. The air of the house was heavy with it. As
for herself, well she had thought John Webster had fallen in love with
some woman other than Mrs. Webster. She had once been in love herself
and the man she had loved had been killed. She knew about love.
On that night, hearing voices in the room above, she had crept up the
stairs. She had not felt it was eavesdropping as she was directly
concerned. Long ago when she was in trouble she had heard voices
upstairs and she knew that in her hour of trouble John Webster had
stood by her.
After that time, long ago, she had made up her mind that as long as he
stayed in the house she would stay. One had to work and might as well
work as a servant, but she had never felt close to Mrs. Webster. When
one was a servant one sometimes had difficulty enough keeping up one’s
self-respect and the only way it could be done was by working for some
one who also had self-respect. That was something few people seemed to
understand. They thought people worked for money. As a matter of fact
no one really worked for money. People only thought they did, maybe. To
do so was to be a slave and she, Katherine, was no slave. She had money
saved and besides she had a brother who owned a farm in Minnesota, who
had several times written asking her to come and live with him. She
intended to go there now but would not live in her brother’s house. He
was married and she did not intend to push herself into his household.
As a matter of fact she would probably take the money she had saved and
buy a small farm of her own.
“Anyway you’re going away from this house to-night. I heard you say you
were going with another woman and I thought I would go too,” she said.
She became silent and stood looking at John Webster who was also
looking at her, who was at the moment absorbed in contemplation of
her. In the uncertain light her face had become the face of a young
girl. There was something about her face, at the moment, that suggested
to his mind his daughter’s face as she had looked at him in the dim
light of the candles in the room upstairs. It was like that and at the
same time it was like Natalie’s face, as Natalie’s face had been that
afternoon in the office when he and she had first come close to each
other, and as it had looked that other night in the darkness of the
field.
One might so easily become confused. “It’s all right about your going
away, Katherine,” he said aloud. “You know about that, what I mean is
that you know what you want to do.”
He stood in silence a moment, thinking. “It’s like this, Katherine,” he
began again. “There’s my daughter Jane upstairs. I’m going away but I
can’t take her with me any more than you can go live in your brother’s
house out there in Minnesota. I’m thinking that for the next two or
three days or maybe for several weeks Jane is going to have a pretty
hard time.
“There’s no telling what will happen here.” He made a gesture toward
the house. “I’m going away but I suppose I’ve been counting on your
being here until Jane gets on her own feet a little. You know what I
mean, until she gets so she can stand alone.”
* * * * *
On the bed upstairs Jane Webster’s body was becoming more and more
rigid and tense as she lay listening to the undercurrent of noises
in the house. There was a sound of movement in the next room. A door
handle struck against a wall. The boards of the floor creaked. Her
mother had been seated on the floor at the foot of the bed. Now she
was getting up. She had put her hand on the railing of the bed to pull
herself up. The bed moved a little. It moved on its rollers. There was
a low rumbling sound. Would her mother come into her room? Jane Webster
wanted no more words, no further explanations of what had happened to
spoil the marriage between her mother and father. She wanted to be let
alone now, to think her own thoughts. The thought that her mother might
come into her bedroom frightened her. It was odd, she had now a sharp
and distinct sense of the presence of death, in some way connected with
her mother’s figure. To have the older woman come into her room now,
even though no words were said, would be like having a ghost come.
The thought of it happening made little creeping sensations run over
the surface of her body. It was as though little soft hairy-legged
creatures were running up and down her legs, up and down her back. She
moved uneasily in the bed.
Her father had gone downstairs and along the hallway below but she had
not heard the front door open and close. She lay listening for the
sound of that, expecting it.
The house was silent, too silent. Somewhere, a long way off, there
was the loud ticking of a clock. During the year before, when she had
graduated from the town high school, her father had given her a small
watch. It lay now on a dressing table at the further side of the room.
Its rapid ticking was like some small creature, clad in steel shoes
and running rapidly and with the shoes clicking together. The little
creature was running swiftly along an endless hallway, running with
a kind of mad sharp determination but never getting either nearer or
further away. Into her mind there came a picture of a small imp-like
boy with a wide grinning mouth and with pointed ears that stood
straight up from his head like the ears of a fox terrier. Perhaps the
notion had got into her head from some picture of Puck remembered from
a childhood story book. She was conscious that the sound she heard came
from the watch on the dresser but the picture in her mind stayed. The
imp-like figure stood with his head and body motionless while his legs
worked furiously. He grinned at her and his little steel-clad feet
clicked together.
She tried consciously to relax her body. There were hours to be spent,
lying thus on the bed, before another day came and she would have to
face the problems of the new day. There would be things to face. Her
father would have gone off with a strange woman. When she walked in the
streets people would be looking at her. “That’s his daughter,” they
would be saying. Perhaps, as long as she stayed in town, she could
never again walk along streets unaware that she was being looked at,
but on the other hand, perhaps she would not stay. There was a kind of
exhilaration to be got from thinking of going off to strange places,
perhaps to some large city, where she would always be walking about
among strangers.
She was getting herself into a state and would have to take herself in
hand. There were times, although she was young she had already known
such times, when the mind and body seemed to have nothing at all to do
with each other. One did things with the body, put it into bed, made
it get up and walk about, made the eyes attempt to read pages in some
book, did many kinds of things with the body, while the mind went on
about its own affairs unheeding. It thought of things, fancied all
manner of absurd things, went its own way.
At such times in the past Jane’s mind had a trick of getting her body
into the most absurd and startling situations, while it ran wild and
free--did as it pleased. She was in bed in her room with the door
closed but her fancy took her body out into the street. She went
along conscious that all the men she passed were smiling and she kept
wondering what was the matter. She hurried home and went to her room
only to find that her dress was all unbuttoned at the back. It was
terrible. Again she was walking in the street and the white drawers she
wore under her skirts had become in some unaccountable way unfastened.
There was a young man coming toward her. He was a new young man who had
just come to town and had taken a job in a store. Well, he was going
to speak to her. He raised his hat and at just that moment the drawers
began to creep down along her legs.
Jane Webster lay in her bed and smiled at the memory of the fears that
had visited her when, in the past, her mind had got into the trick of
running wildly, uncontrolled. In the future things would be somewhat
different. She had gone through something and had perhaps much more to
go through. The things that had seemed so terrible would perhaps only
be amusing now. She felt infinitely older, more sophisticated, than she
had been but a few hours earlier.
* * * * *
How strange it was that the house remained so silent. From somewhere,
off in the town, there came the sound of horses’ hoofs on a hard road
and the rattle of a wagon. A voice shouted, faintly. Some man of the
town, a teamster, was setting out early. Perhaps he was going to
another town to get a load of goods and haul them back. He must have a
long way to go that he started out so early.
She moved her shoulders uneasily. What was the matter with her? Was she
afraid in her own bedroom, in her own bed? Of what was she afraid?
She sat suddenly and rigidly upright in bed and then, after a moment,
let her body fall backward again. There had come a sharp cry out of the
throat of her father, a cry that had gone ringing through the house.
“Katherine,” her father’s voice cried. There was just that one word. It
was the name of the Webster’s one servant. What did her father want of
Katherine? What had happened? Had something terrible happened in the
house? Had something happened to her mother?
There was something lurking at the back of Jane Webster’s mind, a
thought that did not want to be expressed. It was as yet unable to make
its way up out of the hidden parts of herself and into her mind.
The thing she feared, expected, could not have happened yet. Her mother
was in the next room. She had just heard her moving about in there.
There was a new sound in the house. Her mother was moving heavily along
the hallway just outside the bedroom door. The Websters had turned a
small bedroom, at the end of the hall, into a bathroom and her mother
was going in there. Her feet fell slowly, flatly, heavily and slowly,
on the floor of the hallway. After all her feet only made that strange
sound because she had put on her soft bedroom slippers.
Downstairs now, if one listened, one could hear voices saying words
softly. That must be her father talking to the servant Katherine. What
could he want of her? The front door opened and then closed again. She
was afraid. Her body shook with fear. It was terrible of her father
to go away and leave her alone in the house. Could he have taken the
servant Katherine with him? The thought was unbearable. Why was she so
afraid of the thought of being left alone in the house with her mother?
There was a thought lurking within her, deep within her, that did not
want to get itself expressed. Something was about to happen to her
mother, now, within a few minutes. One did not want to think about it.
In the bathroom there were certain bottles, sitting on shelves in a
little box-like cabinet. They were labeled poison. One hardly knew why
they were kept there but Jane had seen them many times. She kept her
toothbrush in a glass tumbler in the cabinet. One supposed the bottles
contained medicines of the sort that was only to be taken externally.
One did not think much of such matters, was not in the habit of
thinking of them.
* * * * *
Now Jane was sitting upright in bed again. She was alone in the house
with her mother. Even the servant Katherine had gone away. The house
felt altogether cold and lonely, deserted. In the future she would
always feel out of place in this house in which she had always lived
and she would feel also, in some odd way, separated from her mother.
To be alone with her mother would now, perhaps, always make her feel a
little lonely.
Could it be that the servant Katherine was the woman with whom her
father had planned to go away? That could not be. Katherine was a large
heavy woman with big breasts and dark hair that was turning gray. One
could not think of her as going away with a man. One thought of her as
moving silently about a house and doing housework. Her father would
be going away with a younger woman, with a woman not much older than
herself.
One should get hold of oneself. When one got excited, let oneself go,
the fancy sometimes played one strange and terrible tricks.
Her mother was in the bathroom, standing by the little box-like
cabinet. Her face was pale, of a pasty paleness. She had to keep one
hand against the wall to keep from falling. Her eyes were gray and
heavy. There was no life in them. A heavy cloud-like film had passed
over her eyes. It was like a heavy gray cloud over the blue of the sky.
Her body rocked back and forth too. At any moment it might fall. But
a short time ago, and even amid the strangeness of the adventure in
her father’s bedroom, things had seemed suddenly quite clear. She had
understood things she had never understood before. Now nothing could be
understood. There was a whirlpool of confused thoughts and actions into
which one had been plunged.
Now her own body had begun to rock back and forth on the bed. The
fingers of her right hand were clutched over the tiny stone her father
had given her but she was, at the moment, unaware of the small round
hard thing lying in her palm. Her fists kept beating her own body, her
own legs and knees. There was something she wanted to do, something it
was now right and proper she should do. It was the time now for her to
scream, to jump off the bed, to run along the hallway to the bathroom
and tear the bathroom door open. Her mother was about to do something
one did not passively stand by and see done. She should be crying out
at the top of her voice, crying for help. There was a word that should
be on her lips now. “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” she should now be screaming.
Her lips should now be making the word ring through the house. She
should be making the house and the street on which the house stood echo
and reëcho with the word.
And she could say nothing. Her lips were sealed. Her body could not
move from the bed. It could only rock back and forth on the bed.
Her fancy kept on painting pictures, swift, vivid, terrible pictures.
There was, in the bathroom, in the cabinet, a bottle containing a brown
liquid and her mother had put up her hand and had got hold of it. Now
she had put it to her lips. She had swallowed all the contents of the
bottle.
The liquid in the bottle was brown, of a reddish brownness. Before she
had swallowed it her mother had lighted a gas light. It was directly
above her head, as she stood facing the cabinet, and the light from
it fell down over her face. There were little puffy red bags of flesh
under the eyes and they looked strange and almost revolting against
the pasty whiteness of the skin. The mouth was open and the lips were
gray too. There was a reddish brown stain running down from one corner
of the mouth, down over the chin. Some drops of the liquid had fallen
on her mother’s white nightgown. Convulsive spasms, as of pain, passed
over the pasty white face. The eyes remained closed. There was a
trembling quivering movement of the shoulders.
Jane’s body continued to rock back and forth. The flesh of her body
quivered too. Her body was rigid. Her fists were closed, tight, tight.
Her fists continued to beat down upon her legs. Her mother had managed
to get out through the bathroom door and across the little hallway to
her own room. She had thrown herself face-downward on her bed in the
darkness. Had she thrown herself down or had she fallen? Was she dying
now, would she die presently or was she already dead? In the next
room, in the room where Jane had seen her father walking naked before
her mother and herself, the candles were still burning, under the
picture of the Virgin. There was no doubt the older woman would die. In
fancy Jane had seen the label on the bottle that contained the brown
liquid. It was marked “Poison.” There was the picture of the skull and
cross-bones druggists put on such bottles.
And now Jane’s body had quit rocking. Perhaps her mother was dead. Now
one tried to begin to think of other things. She became vaguely, but at
the same time almost deliciously, conscious of some new element come
into the air of the bedroom.
There was a pain in the palm of her right hand. Something hurt her and
the sense of hurting was refreshing. It brought life back. There was
consciousness of self in the realization of bodily pain. One’s mind
could start back along the road from some dark far place to which it
had run crazily off. One’s mind could take hold of the thought of the
little hurt place in the soft flesh of the palm of the hand. There was
something there, something hard and sharp that cut into the flesh of
the palm when one’s finger pressed down rigid and tense upon it.
II
In the palm of Jane Webster’s hand lay the small green stone her father
had picked up on the railroad tracks and had given her at the moment
of his departure. “The Jewel of Life,” he had called it in the moment
when confusion had led him to give way to a desire to make some kind of
gesture. A romantic notion had popped into his head. Had not men always
used symbols to help carry them over the rough places in life? There
was the Virgin with her candles. Was she not also a symbol? At some
time, having decided in a moment of vanity that thought was of more
importance than fancy, men had discarded the symbol. A Protestant kind
of man arose who believed in a thing called “the age of reason.” There
was a dreadful kind of egotism. Men could trust their own minds. As
though they knew anything at all of the workings of their own minds.
With a gesture and a smile John Webster had put the stone into his
daughter’s hand and now she was clinging to it. One could press the
finger down hard upon it and feel in the soft palm of the hand this
delicious and healing pain.
Jane Webster was trying to reconstruct something. In darkness she was
trying to feel her way along the face of a wall. The wall had little
sharp points sticking out that hurt the palm of the hand. If one
followed the wall far enough one came to a lighted place. Perhaps the
wall was studded with jewels, put there by others, who had groped their
way along in the darkness.
Her father had gone away with a woman, with a young woman, much like
herself. He would live with the woman now. Perhaps she would never see
him again. Her mother was dead. In the future she would be alone in
life. She would have to begin now and make a life of her own.
Was her mother dead or had she just been having terrible fancies?
One was plunged suddenly down from a high safe place into the sea and
then one had to try to swim, to save oneself. Jane’s mind began playing
with the thought of herself as swimming in a sea.
During the summer of the year before she had gone with some young men
and women on an excursion to a town facing Lake Michigan, and to a
resort near the town. There was a man who dived down into the sea from
a tall tower, that had been stuck far up into the sky. He had been
employed to dive in order to entertain the crowd but things had not
turned out as they should. The day, for such an affair, should have
been bright and clear, but in the morning it began to rain and in the
afternoon it turned cold and the sky, covered with low heavy clouds,
was heavy and cold too.
Cold gray clouds hurried across the sky. The diver fell down from
his high place into the sea, in the presence of a small silent crowd,
but the sea did not receive him warmly. It awaited him in a cold gray
silence. Looking at him, falling thus, sent a cold shiver through the
body.
What was the cold gray sea toward which the man’s naked body fell so
swiftly?
On that day, when the professional diver had taken his leap, Jane
Webster’s heart had stopped beating until he had gone down into the sea
and his head had reappeared on the surface. She was standing beside a
young man, her escort for the day, and her hands clutched eagerly his
arm and shoulder. When the diver’s head reappeared she put her head
down on the young man’s shoulder and her own shoulders shook with sobs.
It had, no doubt, been a very silly performance and she had been
ashamed of it later. The diver was a professional. “He knows what he is
about,” the young man had said. Every one present had laughed at Jane
and she had become angry because her escort had laughed too. Had he but
had sense enough to know how she was feeling at the moment, she thought
she would not have minded the others laughing.
* * * * *
“I’m a great little swimmer in seas.”
It was altogether amazing how ideas, expressed in words, kept running
from mind to mind. “I’m a great little swimmer in seas.” But a short
time before her father had said the words as she stood in the doorway
between the two bedrooms and he came walking toward her. He had wanted
to give her the stone, she now held pressed against the palm of her
hand, and had wanted to say something about it, and instead of words
regarding the stone, there had come to his lips these words about
swimming in seas. There had been something puzzled and confused in his
whole bearing at the moment. He had been upset, as she was now. The
moment was now being lived over again, swiftly, in the daughter’s mind.
Her father was again stepping toward her, holding the stone between his
thumb and finger, and the wavering, uncertain light had again come into
his eyes. Quite distinctly, as though he were again in her presence,
Jane heard again the words that, but such a short time before, had
seemed without meaning, meaningless words come from the lips of a man
temporarily drunk or insane, “I’m a great little swimmer in seas.”
* * * * *
She had been plunged down from a high safe place, down into a sea
of doubt and fear. Only a short time before, but yesterday, she had
been standing on firm ground. One could let one’s fancy play with the
thought of what had happened to her. There would be a kind of comfort
in doing that.
She had been standing on firm ground, high above a vast sea of
confusion, and then, quite suddenly, she had been pushed off the firm
high ground and down into the sea.
Now, at this very moment, she was falling down into the sea. Now a new
life had to begin for her. Her father had gone away with a strange
woman and her mother was dead.
She was falling down off the high safe ground into the sea. With a kind
of absurd flourish, as by a gesture of the arm, her own father had
plunged her down. She was clad in her white nightgown and her falling
figure made a white streak against the gray of cold skies.
Her father had put a meaningless little stone in her hand and had gone
away and then her mother had gone into the bathroom and had done a
terrible, an unthinkable thing, to herself.
And now she, Jane Webster, had gone quite down into the sea, far far
down into a lonely cold gray place. She had gone down into the place
from which all life came and to which, in the end, all life goes.
There was a heaviness, a deadly heaviness. All life had become gray and
cold and old. One walked in darkness. One’s body fell with a soft thump
against gray soft unyielding walls.
The house in which one lived was empty. It was an empty house in an
empty street of an empty town. All the people Jane Webster had known,
the young men and women with whom she had lived, with whom she had
walked about on summer evenings, could not be a part of what she was
facing now. Now she was quite alone. Her father had gone away and
her mother had killed herself. There was no one. One walked alone
in darkness. One’s body struck with a soft thump against soft gray
unyielding walls.
The little stone held so firmly in the palm of the hand hurt and hurt.
Before her father had given it to her he had gone to hold it up before
the candle flame. In certain lights its color changed. Yellowish green
lights came and went in it. The yellowish green lights were of the
color of young growing things pushing their way up out of the damp and
cold of frozen grounds, in the spring.
III
Jane Webster was lying on the bed in the darkness of her room and
crying. Her shoulders shook with sobs but she made no sound. Her
finger, that had been pressed down so hard against her palms, had
relaxed, but there was a spot, in the palm of her right hand, that
burned with a warm feverishness. Her mind had become passive now. Fancy
had released her from its grip. She was like a fretful and hungry child
that has been fed and that lies quietly with its face turned to a white
wall.
Her sobbing now indicated nothing. It was a release. She was a little
ashamed of her lack of control over herself and kept putting up the
hand, that held the stone, first closing it carefully that the precious
stone be not lost, and with her fist wiping the tears away. What she
wished, at the moment, was that she could become suddenly a strong
resolute woman, able to handle quietly and firmly the situation that
had arisen in the Webster household.
IV
The servant Katherine was coming up the stairs. After all she was
not the woman with whom Jane’s father was going away. How heavy and
resolute Katherine’s footsteps were! One could be resolute and strong
when one knew nothing of what had been going on in the house. One could
walk thus, as though one were going up the stairs of an ordinary house,
in an ordinary street.
When Katherine put her foot down on one of the steps the house seemed
to shake a little. Well, one could not say the house shook. That would
be stretching things too much. What one was trying to express was just
that Katherine was not very sensitive. She was one who made a direct
frontal attack upon life. Had she been very sensitive she might have
known something of the terrible things going on in the house without
having to wait to be told.
Now Jane’s mind was playing tricks on her again. An absurd sentence
came into her mind.
“Wait until you see the whites of their eyes and then shoot.”
It was silly, altogether silly and absurd, what notions were now
racing through her head. Her father had set going in her the sometimes
relentless and often unexplainable thing, represented by the released
fancy. It was a thing that could color and beautify the facts of life
but it could also, upon occasions, run on and on regardless of the
facts of life. Jane believed she was in the house with the dead body
of her mother, who had just committed suicide, and there was something
within her that told her she should now give herself over to sadness.
She did weep but her weeping had nothing to do with her mother’s death.
It did not take that into consideration. She was not, after all, so
much sad as excited.
The weeping that had been silent was now audible all over the house.
She was making a noise like a foolish child and was ashamed of herself.
What would Katherine think of her?
“Wait until you see the whites of their eyes and then shoot.”
What an utterly silly jumble of words. Where had they come from? Why
were such meaningless silly words dancing in her brain at such a vital
moment of her life? She had got them out of some book at school, a
history book perhaps. Some general had shouted the words at his men as
they stood waiting for an advancing enemy. And what had that to do with
the fact of Katherine’s footsteps on the stairs? In a moment Katherine
would be coming into the room where she was.
She thought she knew exactly what she would do. She would get quietly
out of bed and go to the door and admit the servant. Then she would
strike a light.
She had, in fancy, a picture of herself, standing by a dressing
table at the side of the room and addressing the servant calmly and
resolutely. One had to begin a new life now. Yesterday perhaps one
was a young woman with no experience in life but now one was a mature
woman who had difficult problems to face. One had, not only the servant
Katherine, but the whole town to face. To-morrow one would be very much
in the position of a general in command of troops that had to withstand
an attack. One had to comport oneself with dignity. There would be
people who wanted to scold at her father, others who wanted to pity
herself. Perhaps she would have to handle affairs too. There would be
arrangements necessary, in connection with selling her father’s factory
and getting moneys so that she could go on and make plans for living
her life. One could not be a silly child sitting and sobbing on a bed
at such a moment.
And at the same time one could not, at such a tragic moment in life,
and when the servant came in, suddenly burst out laughing. Why was it
that the sound of Katherine’s resolute footsteps on the stairs made her
want to laugh and weep at the same time? “Soldiers advancing resolutely
across an open field toward an enemy. Wait until you see the whites of
their eyes.” Silly notions. Silly words dancing in the brain. One did
not want either to laugh or weep. One wanted to comport oneself with
dignity.
An intensive struggle was going on within Jane Webster and now it had
lost dignity and had become no more than a struggle to stop crying
loudly, not to begin laughing, and to be ready to receive the servant
Katherine with a certain dignity.
As the footsteps drew nearer the struggle intensified. Now she was
again sitting very stiffly upright in the bed and again her body was
rocking back and forth. Her fists, doubled and hard, were again beating
down upon her legs.
Like every one else in the world Jane had been spending her entire life
making dramatizations of herself in relation to life. One did that as a
child and later as a young girl in school. One’s mother died suddenly
or one found oneself violently ill and facing death. Every one gathered
about one’s death-bed and all were amazed at the quiet dignity with
which one met the situation.
Or again there was a young man who had smiled at one on the street.
Perhaps he had the audacity to think of one as merely a child. Very
well. Let the two of them be thrown together into a difficult position
and then see which one could comport himself with the greater dignity.
There was something terrible about this whole situation. After all
Jane felt she had it in her to carry life off with a kind of flourish.
It was certain no other young woman of her acquaintance had ever been
put into such a position as she was now in. Already, although they, as
yet, knew nothing of what had occurred, the eyes of the whole town were
directed toward herself and she was merely sitting in the darkness on a
bed and sobbing like a child.
She began to laugh, sharply, hysterically, and then the laughter
stopped and the loud sobbing began again. The servant Katherine came
to her bedroom door but she did not knock and give Jane the chance to
arise and receive her with dignity, but came right in. She ran across
the room and knelt at the side of Jane’s bed. Her impulsive action
brought an end to Jane’s desire to be the grand lady, at least for the
night. The woman Katherine had become, by her quick impulsiveness,
sister to something that was her own real self too. There were two
women, shaken and in trouble, both deeply stirred by some inward storm,
and clutching at each other in the darkness. For a time they stayed
thus, on the bed, their arms about each other.
And so Katherine was not after all such a strong resolute person. One
need not be afraid of her. That was an infinitely comforting thought to
Jane. She also was weeping. Perhaps now, if Katherine were to jump up
and begin walking about, one would not have the fancy about her strong
resolute steps making the house shake. Had she been in Jane Webster’s
shoes perhaps she also would have been unable to get up out of bed and
speak of everything that had happened calmly and with cool dignity.
Why, Katherine also might have found herself unable to control the
desire to weep and laugh loudly at the same time. Well, she was not
such a terrible, such a strong resolute and terrible person, after all.
To the younger woman, sitting now in the darkness with her body pressed
against the more sturdy body of the older woman there came a sweet
intangible sense of being fed and refreshed out of the body of this
other woman. She even gave way to a desire to put up her hand and touch
Katherine’s cheek. The older woman had great breasts against which one
could cushion oneself. What comfort there was in her presence in the
silent house.
Jane stopped weeping and felt suddenly weary and a little cold. “Let’s
not stay here. Let’s go downstairs into my room,” Katherine said. Could
it be that she knew what had happened in that other bedroom? It was
evident she did know. Then it was true. Jane’s heart stopped beating
and her body shook with fear. She stood in the darkness beside the bed
and put her hand against the wall to keep from falling. She had been
telling herself that her mother had taken poison and had killed herself
but it was evident there was an inner part of her had not believed, had
not dared believe.
Katherine had found a coat and was putting it about Jane’s shoulders.
It was odd, this being so cold when the night was comparatively warm.
The two women went out of the room into the hallway. A gas light was
burning in the bathroom at the end of the hallway and the bathroom door
had been left open.
Jane closed her eyes and clung to Katherine. The notion that her mother
had killed herself had now become a certainty. It was so evident now
that Katherine knew about it too. Before Jane’s eyes the drama of
the suicide again played itself out in the theatre of her fancy. Her
mother was standing and facing the little cabinet fastened to the wall
of the bathroom. Her face was turned upward and the light from above
shone down on it. One hand was against the wall of the room to keep the
body from falling and the other hand held a bottle. The face turned
up to the light was white, of a pasty whiteness. It was a face that
from long association had become familiar to Jane but it was at the
same time strangely unfamiliar. The eyes were closed and there were
little reddish bags of flesh under the eyes. The lips hung loosely open
and from one corner of the mouth a reddish brown streak ran down over
the chin. Some spots of a brown liquid had fallen down over the white
nightgown.
Jane’s body was trembling violently. “How cold the house has become,
Katherine,” she said and opened her eyes. They had reached the head
of the stairs and from where they stood could look directly into the
bathroom. There was a gray bath mat on the floor and a small brown
bottle had been dropped on it. In passing out of the room the heavy
foot of the woman, who had swallowed the contents of the bottle, had
stepped on the bottle and had broken it. Perhaps her foot had been cut
but she had not minded. “If there was pain, a hurt place, that would
have been a comfort to her,” Jane thought. In her hand she still held
the stone her father had given her. How absurd that he should have
called it “the Jewel of Life.” There was a spot of yellowish green
light reflected from an edge of the broken bottle on the floor of the
bathroom. When her father had taken the little stone to the candle
in the bedroom, and had held it up to the candle-light such another
yellowish green light had flashed from it too. “If mother were still
alive she would surely make some sound of life now. She would wonder
what Katherine and I were doing tramping about the house and would
get up and come to her bedroom door to inquire about it,” she thought
drearily.
* * * * *
When Katherine had put Jane into her own bed, in a little room off the
kitchen, she went upstairs to make certain arrangements. There had been
no explanations. In the kitchen she had left a light burning and the
servant’s bedroom was lighted by a reflected light, shining through an
open doorway.
Katherine went to Mary Webster’s bedroom and without knocking opened
the door and went in. There had been a gas lamp lighted and the woman,
who did not want any more of life, had tried to get into bed and die
respectably between the sheets but had not been successful. The tall
slender girl, who had once refused love on a hillside, had been taken
by death before she had time to protest. Her body, half lying on the
bed, had struggled and twisted itself about and had slipped off the bed
to the floor. Katherine lifted it up and put it on the bed and went to
get a wet cloth to cleanse the disfigured and discolored face.
Then a thought came to her and she put the cloth away. For a moment she
stood in the room looking about. Her own face had become very white
and she felt ill. She put out the light and going into John Webster’s
bedroom closed the door.
The candles were still burning beside the Virgin and she took the
little framed picture and put it away, high up on a closet shelf. Then
she blew out one of the candles and carried it, with the lighted one,
downstairs and into the room where Jane lay waiting.
The servant went to a closet and getting an extra blanket wrapped it
about Jane’s shoulders. “I don’t believe I’ll undress,” she said. “I’ll
come sit on the bed with you as I am.”
* * * * *
“You have already figured it out,” she said, in a matter of fact tone,
when she had seated herself and when she had put her arm about Jane’s
shoulder. Both women were pale but Jane’s body no longer trembled.
“If mother has died at least I have not been left alone in the house
with the dead body,” she thought gratefully. Katherine did not tell her
any of the details of what she had found on the floor above. “She’s
dead,” she said, and after the two had waited in silence for a moment
she began to elaborate an idea that had come into her mind as she stood
in the presence of the dead woman, in the bedroom above. “I don’t
suppose they’ll try to connect your father with this but they may,” she
said thoughtfully. “I saw something like that happen once. A man died
and after he was dead some men tried to make him out a thief. What I
think is this--we had better sit here together until morning comes.
Then I’ll call in a doctor. We’ll say we knew nothing of what had
happened until I went to call your mother for breakfast. By that time,
you see, your father will be gone.”
The two women sat in silence close together, looking at the white wall
of the bedroom. “I suppose we had both better remember that we heard
mother moving about the house after father went away,” Jane whispered
presently. It was pleasant to be able to make herself, thus, a part of
Katherine’s plans to protect her father. Her eyes were shining now,
and there was something of feverishness in her eagerness to understand
everything clearly but she kept pressing her body close against the
body of Katherine. In the palm of her hand she still held the stone her
father had given her and now when her finger pressed down upon it even
lightly there was a comforting throb of pain from the tender hurt place
in her palm.
V
And as the two women sat on the bed, John Webster walked through the
silent deserted streets toward the railroad station with his new woman,
Natalie.
“Well, the devil,” he thought as he plodded along, “this has been a
night! If the rest of my life is as busy as these last ten hours have
been I’ll be kept on the jump.”
Natalie was walking in silence and carrying a bag. The houses along
the street were all dark. There was a strip of grass between the brick
sidewalk and the roadway and John Webster stepped over and walked upon
it. He liked the idea of his feet making no sound as he escaped out of
the town. How pleasant it would be if he and Natalie were winged things
and could fly away unobserved in the darkness.
Now Natalie was weeping. Well that was all right. She did not weep
audibly. John Webster did not, as a matter of fact, know for sure that
she was weeping. Still he did know. “At any rate,” he thought, “when
she weeps she does the job with a certain dignity.” He was himself in
a rather impersonal mood. “There’s no use thinking too much about what
I’ve done. What’s done is done. I’ve begun a new life. I couldn’t turn
back now if I chose.”
The houses along the street were dark and silent. The whole town was
dark and silent. In the houses people were sleeping, dreaming all
manner of absurd dreams, too.
Well he had expected he would run into some kind of a row at Natalie’s
house but nothing of the sort had happened. The old mother had been
quite wonderful. John Webster half regretted he had never known her
personally. There was something about the terrible old woman that was
like himself. He smiled as he walked along on the strip of grass. “It
may well be that in the end I will turn out an old reprobate, a regular
old heller,” he thought almost gaily. His mind played with the idea. He
had surely made a good start. Here he was, a man well past the middle
age, and it was past midnight, almost morning, and he was walking in
deserted streets with a woman with whom he was going away to live what
was called an illegitimate life. “I started late but I’m proving a
merry little upsetter of things now that I’ve started,” he told himself.
It was really too bad that Natalie did not step off the brick sidewalk
and walk on the grass. After all it was better, when one was setting
out on new adventures, that one go swiftly and stealthily. There must
be innumerable growling lions of respectability sleeping in the houses
along the streets. “They’re pure sweet people, such as I was when I
used to go home from the washing machine factory and sleep beside my
wife in the days when we were newly married and had come back here to
live in this town,” he thought sardonically. He imagined innumerable
people, men and women, creeping into beds at night and sometimes
talking as he and his wife had so often talked. They had always been
covering something up, busily talking, covering something up. “We made
a big smoke of talk about purity and sweetness of living, didn’t we
though, eh?” he whispered to himself.
Well the people in the houses were asleep and he did not wish to awaken
them. It was too bad Natalie was weeping. One couldn’t disturb her in
her grief. That wouldn’t be fair. He wished he might speak to her and
ask her to get off the sidewalk and walk silently on the grass along
the roadway or at the edge of the lawns.
His mind turned back to the few moments at Natalie’s house. The devil!
He had expected a row there and nothing of the sort had happened. When
he got to the house, Natalie was waiting for him. She was sitting by
a window in a dark room, downstairs in the Swartz cottage, and her
bag was packed and sitting beside her. She came to the front door and
opened it before he had time to knock.
And there she was all ready to set out. She came out carrying her bag
and didn’t say anything. As a matter of fact she had not said anything
to him yet. She had just come out of the house and had walked beside
him to where they had to pass through a gate to reach the street and
then her mother and sister had come out and had stood on a little porch
to watch them go.
How bully the old mother had been. She had even laughed at them. “Well,
you two have got the gall. You tramp off as cool as two cucumbers, now
don’t you?” she had shouted. Then she had laughed again. “Do you know
there’s going to be a hell of a row about this all over town in the
morning?” she asked. Natalie hadn’t answered her. “Well, good luck to
you, you husky whore, trotting off with your damned reprobate,” her
mother had shouted, still laughing.
The two people had turned a corner and had passed out of sight of the
Swartz house. No doubt there must be other people awake in other houses
along the little street, and no doubt they had been listening and
wondering. On two or three occasions some of the neighbors had wanted
to have Natalie’s mother arrested because of her foul language but they
had been dissuaded by others, out of consideration for the daughters.
Was Natalie weeping now because she was leaving the old mother or was
it because of the school-teacher sister whom John Webster had never
known?
He felt very like laughing at himself. As a matter of fact he knew
little of Natalie or what she might be thinking or feeling at such
a time. Had he only taken up with her because she was a kind of
instrument that would help him escape from his wife and from a life
he had come to detest? Was he but using her? Had he at bottom any real
feeling in regard to her, any understanding of her?
He wondered.
One made a mighty big fuss, fixed up a room with candles and a picture
of the Virgin, paraded oneself naked before women, got oneself little
glass candle sticks with bronze-colored Christs on the Cross on them.
One made a great fuss, pretended one was upsetting the whole world, in
order to do something that a man of real courage would have gone at in
a direct simple way. Another man might have done everything he had done
with a laugh and a gesture.
What was all this business he was up to anyway?
He was going away, he was deliberately walking out of his native town,
walking out of a town in which he had been a respectable citizen for
years, all his life in fact. He was going out of the town with a woman,
younger than himself, who had taken his fancy.
The whole thing was a matter that could be easily enough understood, by
anyone, by any man one might happen to meet in the street. At any rate
every one would be quite sure he understood. There would be eyebrows
raised, shoulder shrugging. Men would stand together in little groups
and talk and women would run from house to house talking, talking.
O, the merry little shoulder shruggers! O, the merry little talkers!
Where did a man come out in all this? What, in the end, did he think of
himself?
There was Natalie, walking along, in the half darkness. She breathed.
She was a woman with a body, with arms, legs. She had a trunk to her
body and perched upon her neck was a head within which there was a
brain. She thought thoughts. She had dreams.
Natalie was walking along a street in the darkness. Her footsteps were
ringing out sharp and clear as she stepped along, on the sidewalk.
What did he know of Natalie?
It might well be that, when he and Natalie really knew each other, when
they had together faced the problem of living together--Well, it might
be that it wouldn’t work at all.
John Webster was walking along the street, in the darkness, on the
strip of grass, that in Middle Western towns is between the sidewalk
and the roadway. He stumbled and came near falling. What was the matter
with him? Was he growing tired again?
Did doubts come because he was growing tired? It might well be that
everything that had happened to him, during the night, had happened
because he was caught up and carried along by a kind of temporary
insanity.
What would happen when the insanity had passed, when he became again a
sane, a well, a normal man?
Hito, tito, what was the use thinking of turning back when it was too
late to turn back? If, in the end, he and Natalie found they could not
live together there was still life.
Life was life. One might still find a way to live a life.
* * * * *
John Webster began to grow courageous again. He looked toward the dark
houses along the street and smiled. He became like a child, playing a
game with his fellows of the Wisconsin town. In the game he was some
kind of public character, who because of some brave deed was receiving
the applause of the people who lived in the houses. He imagined himself
as riding through the street in a carriage. The people were sticking
their heads out of the windows of the houses and shouting, and he was
turning his head from side to side, bowing and smiling.
As Natalie was not looking he enjoyed himself for a moment, playing the
game. As he walked along he kept turning his head from side to side and
bowing. There was a rather absurd smile on his lips.
The old Harry!
“Chinaberries grow on a chinaberry tree!”
All the same it would be better if Natalie did not make such a racket
with her feet walking on stone and brick sidewalks.
One might be found out. It might be that, quite suddenly, without any
warning, all the people, now sleeping so peacefully in the dark houses
along the street, would sit up in their beds and begin to laugh. That
would be terrible and it would be just the sort of thing John Webster
would himself do, were he a respectable man in bed with a lawfully
wedded wife, and saw some other man doing some such fool thing as he
was now doing.
It was annoying. The night was warm but John Webster felt somewhat
cold. He shivered. It was no doubt due to the fact that he was tired.
Perhaps thinking of the respectable married people lying in beds in the
houses, between which he and Natalie were passing, had made him shiver.
One could be very cold, being a respectable married man and lying in
bed with a respectable wife. A thought that had been coming and going
in his mind for two weeks now came again: “Perhaps I am insane and have
infected Natalie, and for that matter my daughter Jane too, with my
insanity.”
There was no use crying over spilled milk. “What’s the use thinking
about the matter now?”
“Diddle de di do!”
“Chinaberries grow on a chinaberry tree!”
He and Natalie had come out of the section of town where working people
lived and were now passing before houses in which lived merchants,
small manufacturers, such men as John Webster had himself been,
lawyers, doctors, and such fellows too. Now they were passing the house
in which his own banker lived. “The stingy cuss. He has plenty of
money. Why doesn’t he build himself a larger and finer house?”
To the east, dimly seen through trees and above tree tops, there was a
light place coming into the sky.
Now they had come to a place where there were several vacant lots. Some
one had given the lots to the town and there was a movement on foot
to raise money with which to build a public library. A man had come to
John Webster to ask him to contribute to a fund for the purpose. That
was but a few days ago.
He had enjoyed the situation immensely. Now he felt like giggling over
the remembrance of it.
He had been seated, and as he thought, looking very dignified, at his
desk in the factory office when the man came in and told him of the
plan. A desire to make an ironic gesture had taken possession of him.
“I am making rather elaborate plans about that fund and my contributing
to it but do not want to say what I am planning to do at this
particular moment,” he had announced. What a falsehood! The matter
had not interested him in the least. He had simply enjoyed the man’s
surprise at his unexpected interest and was having a good time making a
swaggering gesture.
The man who came to see him had once served with him on a committee of
the Chamber of Commerce, a committee appointed to make an effort to
bring new industries into the town.
“I didn’t know you were specially interested in literary matters,” the
man had said.
A troop of derisive thoughts had popped into John Webster’s head.
“O, you would be surprised,” he had assured the man. At the moment he
had felt as he fancied a terrier might feel as it worried a rat.
“I think American literary men have done wonders to uplift the people,”
he had said, very solemnly. “Why, do you realize that it is our writers
who have kept us constantly reminded of the moral code and of the
virtues? Such men as you and I, who own factories and who are in a
way responsible for the happiness and welfare of the people of the
community, cannot be too grateful to our American literary men. I’ll
tell you what, they are really such strong, red-blooded fellows, always
standing up for the right.”
John Webster laughed at the thought of his talk with the man from the
Chamber of Commerce and at the remembrance of the confused look in the
man’s eyes as he went away.
Now, as he and Natalie walked along, the intersecting streets led away
to the east. There was no doubt a new day was coming. He stopped to
light a match and look at his watch. They would be just in comfortable
time for the train. Soon now they would be coming into the business
section of town where they would both have to make a clattering noise
as they walked on stone pavements, but then it would not matter. People
did not sleep in the business sections of towns.
He wished it were possible for him to speak to Natalie, to ask her to
walk on the grass and not to awaken the people sleeping in the houses.
“Well, I’m going to do it,” he thought. It was odd how much courage it
took now just to speak to her. Neither of them had spoken since they
had set out together on this adventure. He stopped and stood for a
moment and Natalie, realizing that he was no longer walking beside her,
also stopped.
“What is it? What’s the matter, John?” she asked. It was the first time
she had addressed him by that name. It made everything easier, her
having done that.
Still his throat was a little tight. It couldn’t be that he also wanted
to weep. What nonsense.
There was no need accepting defeat with Natalie until defeat came.
There were two sides to this matter of his passing judgment on what
he had done. To be sure there was a chance, a possibility, that he
had made all this row, upset all his past life, made a mess of things
for his wife and daughter, and for Natalie too, to no purpose, merely
because he had wanted to escape the boredom of his past existence.
He stood on the strip of grass at the edge of a lawn before a silent
respectable house, some one’s home. He was trying to see Natalie
clearly, trying to see himself clearly. What kind of a figure was he
cutting? The light was not very clear. Natalie was but a dark mass
before him. His own thoughts were but a dark mass before him.
“Am I just a lustful man wanting a new woman?” he asked himself.
Suppose that were true. What did it mean?
“I am myself. I am trying to be myself,” he told himself stoutly.
One should try to live outside oneself too, to live in others. Had
he tried to live in Natalie? He had gone within Natalie. Had he gone
within her because there was something within her he had wanted and
needed, something he loved?
There was something within Natalie that had set fire to something
within himself. It was that ability in her to set him afire he had
wanted, still wanted.
She had done that for him, was still doing it for him. When he could no
longer respond to her he could perhaps find other loves. She could do
that too.
He laughed softly. There was a kind of gladness in him now. He had made
of himself, and of Natalie too, what is called disreputable characters.
Back into his fancy came a troop of figures, all in their own ways
disreputable characters. There was the white-haired old man he had once
seen walking with a certain air of being proud and glad of the road,
an actress he had seen coming out at the stage entrance of a theatre,
a sailor who had thrown his bag aboard a ship and had walked off along
a street with a certain air of being proud and glad of the life within
himself.
There were such fellows in the world.
The fanciful picture in John Webster’s mind changed. There was a
certain man going into a room. He had closed the door. A row of candles
stood on a mantle above a fireplace. The fellow was playing some kind
of game with himself. Well, every one played some kind of game with
himself. The fellow in the picture of his fancy had taken a silver
crown out of a box. He had put it on his head. “I crown myself with the
crown of life,” he said.
Was it a silly performance? If it was, what did that matter?
He took a step toward Natalie and then stopped again. “Come woman, walk
on the grass. Don’t make such a row as we go along,” he said aloud.
Now he was walking with a certain swagger toward Natalie who stood in
silence at the edge of the sidewalk waiting for him. He went and stood
before her and looked into her face. It was true she had been weeping.
Even in the faint light there were graces of tears to be seen on her
cheeks. “I only had a silly notion. I didn’t want to disturb anyone as
we went away,” he said, laughing softly again. He put his hand on her
arm and drew her toward him and they went on again, both now stepping
softly and gingerly on the grass between the sidewalk and the roadway.
* * * * *
Transcriber’s note
Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Hyphenation
has been standardized.
Spelling was retained as in the original except for the following
changes:
Page 109: “and made self-consoious” “and made self-conscious”
Page 126: “his daughter uuderstand” “his daughter understand”
Page 244: “oneself with diginity” “oneself with dignity”
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