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.”