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.