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.