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.