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.