I
And on that very night, after he had been seated on the hill thinking
of his life and what he would do with what remained of it and after he
had gone for the customary evening walk with Natalie, the doors of his
room did open and his wife and daughter came in.
It was about half past eleven o’clock and for an hour he had been
walking softly up and down before the picture of the Virgin. The
candles were lighted. His feet made a soft cat-like sound on the floor.
There was something strange and startling about hearing the sound in
the quiet house.
The door leading to his wife’s room opened and she stood looking at
him. Her tall form filled the doorway and her hands clutched at the
sides of the door. She was very pale and her eyes were fixed and
staring. “John,” she said hoarsely and then repeated the word. She
seemed to want to say more, but to be unable to speak. There was a
sharp sense of ineffectual struggle.
It was certain she was not very handsome as she stood there. “Life pays
people out. Turn your back on life and it gets even with you. When
people do not live they die and when they are dead they look dead,”
he thought. He smiled at her and then turned his head away and stood
listening.
It came--the sound for which he was listening. There was a stir in
his daughter’s room. He had counted so much on things turning out
as he wished and had even had a premonition it would happen on this
particular night. What had happened he thought he understood. For more
than a week now there had been this storm raging over the ocean of
silence that was his wife. There had been just such another prolonged
and resentful silence after their first attempt at love-making and
after he had said certain sharp hurtful things to her. That had
gradually worn itself out, but this new thing was something different.
It could not wear itself out in that way. The thing had happened for
which he had prayed. She had been compelled to meet him here, in the
place he had prepared.
And now his daughter, who had also been lying awake night after night,
and hearing the strange sounds in her father’s room, would be compelled
to come. He felt almost gay. On that evening he had told Natalie that
he thought his struggle might come to a breaking point that night and
had asked her to be ready for him. There was a train that would leave
town at four in the morning. “Perhaps we shall be able to take that,”
he had said.
“I’ll be waiting for you,” Natalie had said and now there was his wife,
standing pale and trembling, as though about to fall and looking from
the Virgin between her candles to his naked body and then there was the
sound of some one moving in his daughter’s room.
And now her door crept open an inch, softly, and he went at once and
threw it completely open. “Come in,” he said. “Both of you come in.
Go sit there on the bed together. I’ve something to say to you both.”
There was a commanding ring in his voice.
There was no doubt the women were both, for the moment at least,
completely frightened and cowed. How pale they both were. The daughter
put her hands to her face and ran across the room to sit upright
holding to a railing at the foot of the bed and still holding one hand
over her eyes and his wife walked across and fell face downward on the
bed. She made a continuous little moaning sound for a time and then
buried her face in the bedclothes and became silent. There was no doubt
both women thought him completely insane.
John Webster began walking up and down before them. “What an idea,” he
thought looking down at his own bare legs. He smiled, again looking
into the frightened face of his daughter. “Hito, tito,” he whispered
to himself. “Now do not lose your head. You’re going to pull this off.
Keep your head on your shoulders, my boy.” Some strange freak of his
mind made him raise his two hands as though he were conferring some
kind of blessing upon the two women. “I’m off my nut, out of my shell,
but I don’t care at all,” he mused.
He addressed his daughter. “Well, Jane,” he began, speaking with great
earnestness and in a clear quiet voice, “I can see you are frightened
and upset by what is going on here and I do not blame you. The truth
is that it was all planned. For a week now you have been lying awake in
your bed in the next room there and hearing me move about in here and
in that room over there your mother has been lying. There is something
I have been wanting to say to you and your mother, but as you know
there has never been any habit of talk in this house.
“The truth is I have wanted to startle you and I guess I have succeeded
in that.”
He walked across the room and sat on the bed between his daughter and
the heavy inert body of his wife. They were both dressed in nightgowns
and his daughter’s hair had fallen down about her shoulders. It was
like his wife’s hair when he married her. Then her hair had been just
such a golden yellow and when the sun shone on it coppery and brown
lights sometimes appeared.
“I’m going away from this house to-night. I’m not going to live with
your mother any more,” he said, leaning forward and looking at the
floor.
He straightened his body and for a long time sat looking at his
daughter’s body. It was young and slender. She would not be
extraordinarily tall like her mother but would be a woman of the medium
height. He studied her body carefully. Once, when she was a child of
six, Jane had been ill for nearly a year and he remembered now that
during that time she had been very precious to him. It was during a
year when the business had gone badly and he thought he might have to
go into bankruptcy at any moment, but he had managed to keep a trained
nurse in the house during the whole period of her illness. Every day
during that time he came home from the factory at noon and went into
his daughter’s room.
There was no fever. What was wrong? He had thrown the bedclothes off
the child’s body and had looked at it. She was very thin then and the
little bones of the body could be plainly seen. There was just the tiny
bony structure over which the fair white skin was drawn.
The doctors had said it was a matter of malnutrition, that the food
given the child did not nourish it, and they couldn’t find the right
food. The mother had been unable to nurse the child. Sometimes during
that period he stood for long minutes looking at the child whose tired
listless eyes looked back at him. The tears ran from his own eyes.
It was very strange. Since that time and after she had suddenly begun
to grow well and strong again he had in some way lost all track of his
daughter. Where had he been in the meantime and where had she been?
They were two people and they had been living in the same house all
these years. What was it that shut people off from each other? He
looked carefully at his daughter’s body, now clearly outlined under the
thin nightgown. She had rather broad hips, like a woman’s hips, and her
shoulders were narrow. How her body trembled. How afraid she was. “I
am a stranger to her and it is not surprising,” he thought. He leaned
forward and looked at her bare feet. They were small and well made.
Sometime a lover would come to kiss them. Sometime a man would feel
concerning her body as he now felt concerning the strong hard body of
Natalie Swartz.
His silence seemed to have aroused his wife, who turned and looked at
him. Then she sat up on the bed and he sprang to his feet and stood
confronting her. “John,” she said again in a hoarse whisper as though
wishing to call him back to her out of some dark mysterious place. Her
mouth opened and closed two or three times like the mouth of a fish
taken out of the water. He looked away and paid no more attention to
her and she again put her face down among the bedclothes.
“What I wanted, long ago, when Jane was a tiny thing, was simply that
life come into her and that is what I want now. That’s all I do want.
That’s what I’m after now,” John Webster thought.
He began walking up and down the room again, having a sense of great
leisure. Nothing would happen. Now his wife had again fallen into the
ocean of silence. She would lie there on the bed and say nothing, do
nothing until he had finished saying what he had to say and had gone
away. His daughter was blind and dumb with fear now, but perhaps he
could warm the fear out of her. “I must go about this matter slowly,
take my time, tell her everything,” he thought. The frightened girl
now took her hand from before her eyes and looked at him. Her mouth
trembled and then a word was formed. “Father,” she said appealingly.
He smiled at her reassuringly and made a movement with his arm toward
the Virgin, sitting so solemnly between the two candles. “Look up
there for a moment while I talk to you,” he said.
He plunged at once into an explanation of his situation.
“There has been something broken,” he said. “It is the habit of life in
this house. Now you will not understand, but sometime you will.
“For years I have not been in love with this woman here, who is your
mother and has been my wife, and now I have fallen in love with another
woman. Her name is Natalie and to-night, after you and I have had our
talk, she and I are going away to live together.”
On an impulse he went and knelt on the floor at his daughter’s feet and
then quickly sprang up again. “No, that’s not right. I am not to ask
her forgiveness, I am to tell her of things,” he thought.
“Well now,” he began again, “you are going to think me insane and
perhaps I am. I don’t know. Anyway my being here in this room with the
Virgin and without any clothes, the strangeness of all this will make
you think me insane. Your mind will cling to that thought. It will want
to cling to that thought,” he said aloud. “It may turn out so for a
time.”
He seemed puzzled as to how to say all the things he wanted to say.
The whole matter, the scene in the room, the talk with his daughter
that he had planned so carefully was going to be a harder matter to
handle than he had counted on. He had thought there would be a kind
of final significance in his nakedness and in the presence of the
Virgin and her candles. Had he overset the stage? He wondered, and kept
looking with eyes filled with anxiety at his daughter’s face. It told
him nothing. She was just frightened and clinging to the railing at
the foot of the bed as one cast suddenly into the sea might cling to a
floating piece of wood. His wife’s body lying on the bed had a strange
rigid look. Well there had for years been something rigid and cold in
the woman’s body. Perhaps she had died. That would be a thing to have
happen. It would be something he had not counted upon. It was rather
strange, now that he came to face the problem before him, how very
little the presence of his wife had to do with the matter in hand.
He stopped looking at his daughter and began walking up and down and
as he walked he talked. In a calm, although slightly strained voice
he began trying to explain first of all the presence of the Virgin
and the candles in the room. He was speaking now to some person, not
his own daughter but just a human being like himself. Immediately he
felt relieved. “Well, now. That’s the ticket. That’s the way to go at
things,” he thought. For a long time he went on talking and walking
thus up and down. It was better not to think too much. One had to cling
to the faith that the thing he had so recently found within himself
and within Natalie was somewhere alive in her too. Before the morning
when the whole matter between himself and Natalie began, his life had
been like a beach covered with rubbish and lying in darkness. The beach
was covered with old dead water-logged trees and stumps. The twisted
roots of old trees stuck up into the darkness. Before it lay the heavy
sluggish inert sea of life.
And then there had come this storm within and now the beach was clean.
Could he keep it clean? Could he keep it clean so that it would sparkle
in the morning light?
He was trying to tell his daughter Jane something about the life he
had lived in the house with her and why, before he could talk to her,
he had been compelled to do something extraordinary, like bringing the
Virgin into his room and taking off his own body the clothes that, when
he wore them, would make him seem in her eyes just the goer in and out
of the house, the provider of bread and clothes for herself she had
always known.
Speaking very clearly and slowly, as though afraid he would get off
the track, he told her something of his life as a business man, of
how little essential interest he always had in the affairs that had
occupied all his days.
He forgot about the Virgin and for a time spoke only of himself. He
came again to sit beside her and as he talked boldly put his hand on
her leg. The flesh was cold under her thin nightgown.
“I was a young thing as you are now, Jane, when I met the woman who is
your mother and who was my wife,” he explained. “You must try to adjust
your mind to the thought that both your mother and I were once young
things like yourself.
“I suppose your mother, when she was your age must have been very
much as you are now. She would of course have been somewhat taller.
I remember that her body was at that time very long and slender. I
thought it very lovely then.
“I have cause to remember your mother’s body. She and I first met
each other through our bodies. At first there was nothing else, just
our naked bodies. We had that and we denied it. Perhaps upon that
everything might have been built, but we were too ignorant or too
cowardly. It is because of what happened between your mother and myself
that I have brought you into my own naked presence and have brought
this picture of the Virgin in here. I have a desire to in some way make
the flesh a sacred thing to you.”
His voice had grown soft and reminiscent and he took his hand from his
daughter’s leg and touched her cheeks and then her hair. He was frankly
making love to her now and she had somewhat fallen under his influence.
He reached down and taking one of her hands held it tightly.
“We met, you see, your mother and I, at the house of a friend.
Although, until a few weeks ago, when I suddenly began to love another
woman, I had not for years thought about that meeting, it is, at this
moment, as clear in my mind as though it had happened here, in this
house, to-night.
“The whole thing, of which I now want to tell you the details, happened
right here in this town, at the house of a man who was at that time my
friend. Now he is dead, but at that time we were constantly together.
He had a sister, a year younger than himself, of whom I was fond, but
although we went about together a good deal, she and I were not in love
with each other. Afterward she married and moved out of town.
“There was another young woman, the very woman who is now your mother,
who was coming to that house to visit my friend’s sister and as they
lived at the other end of town and as my father and mother were away
from town on a visit I was asked to visit there too. It was to be a
kind of special occasion. The Christmas holidays were coming on and
there were to be many parties and dances.
“A thing happened to me and your mother that was not at bottom so
unlike the thing that has happened to you and me here to-night,” he
said sharply. He had grown a little excited again and thought he had
better get up and walk. Dropping his daughter’s hand he sprang to his
feet and for a few minutes walked nervously about. The whole thing, the
startled fear of him that kept going and coming in his daughter’s eyes
and the inert silent presence of his wife, was making what he wanted
to do more difficult than he had imagined it would be. He looked at
his wife’s body lying silent and motionless on the bed. How many times
he had seen the same body, lying just in that way. She had submitted
to him long ago and had been submitting to the life in himself ever
since. The figure his mind had made, ‘an ocean of silence,’ fitted her
well. She had always been silent. At the best all she had learned from
life was a half-resentful habit of submission. Even when she talked to
him she did not really talk. It was odd indeed that Natalie out of
her silence could say so many things to him while he and this woman in
all their years together had said nothing really touching each other’s
lives.
He looked from the motionless body of the older woman to his daughter
and smiled. “I can enter into her,” he thought exultant. “She cannot
shut me out of herself, does not want to shut me out of herself.” There
was something in his daughter’s face that told him what was going on
in her mind. The younger woman now sat looking at the figure of the
Virgin and it was evident that the dumb fright that had taken such
complete possession of her when she was ushered abruptly into the room
and the presence of the naked man was beginning a little to loosen
its grip. In spite of herself she was thinking. There was the man,
her own father, moving nude like a tree in winter about the room and
occasionally stopping to look at her, the dim light, the Virgin with
the candles burning beneath and the figure of her mother lying on the
bed. Her father was trying to tell her some story she wanted to hear.
In some way it concerned herself, some vital part of herself. There was
no doubt it was wrong, terribly wrong for the story to be told and for
her to listen, but she wanted to hear it now.
“After all I was right,” John Webster was thinking. “Such a thing as
has happened here might make or utterly ruin a woman of Jane’s age, but
as it is everything will come out right. She has a streak of cruelty in
her too. There is a kind of health in her eyes now. She wants to know.
After this experience she will perhaps no longer be afraid of the
dead. It is the dead who are forever frightening the living.”
He took up the thread of his tale as he walked up and down in the dim
light.
“A thing happened to your mother and me. I went to my friend’s house
in the early morning and your mother was to arrive on a train in the
late afternoon. There were two trains, one at noon and the other in the
afternoon about five, and as she would have to get up in the middle of
the night to take the first one we all supposed she would come later.
My friend and I had planned to spend the day hunting rabbits on the
fields near town and we got back to his house about four.
“There would be time enough for us to bathe and dress ourselves before
the guest arrived. When we got home my friend’s mother and sister had
gone out and we supposed there was no one in the house but a servant.
In reality the guest, you see, had arrived on the train at noon, but
that we did not know and the servant did not tell us. We hurried
upstairs to undress and then went downstairs and into a shed to bathe.
At that time people had no bathtubs in their houses and the servant had
filled two washtubs with water and had put them in the shed. After she
had filled the tubs she disappeared, got herself out of the way.
“We were running about the house naked as I am doing here now. What
happened was that I came naked out of that shed downstairs and climbed
the stairs to the upper part of the house, going to my room. The day
had grown warm and now it was almost dark.”
Again John Webster came to sit with his daughter on the bed and to hold
one of her hands.
“I went up the stairs and along a hallway and opening a door went
across a room to what I thought was my bed, where I had laid out the
clothes I had brought that morning in my bag.
“You see what had happened was that your mother had got out of bed in
her own town at midnight on the night before and when she arrived at my
friend’s house his mother and sister had insisted she undress and get
into bed. She had not unpacked her bag, but had thrown off her clothes
and had got in between the sheets as naked as I was when I walked in
upon her. As the day had turned warm she had I suppose grown somewhat
restless and in stirring about had thrown the bedclothes to one side.
“She lay, you see, quite nude on the bed, in the uncertain light, and
as I had no shoes on my feet I made no sound when I came in to her.
“It was an amazing moment for me. I had walked directly to the bed
and there she was within a few inches of my hands as they hung by my
side. It was your mother’s most lovely moment with me. As I have said
she was then very slender and her long body was white like the sheets
of the bed. At that time I had never before been in the presence of a
woman undressed. I had just come from the bath. It was like a kind of
wedding, you see.
“How long I stood there looking at her I don’t know, but anyway she
knew I was there. Her eyes came up to me out of sleep like a swimmer
out of the sea. Perhaps, it is just possible, she had been dreaming of
me or of some other man.
“At any rate and for just a moment she was not frightened or startled
at all. It was really our wedding moment, you see.
“O, had we only known how to live up to that moment! I stood there
looking at her and she was there on the bed looking at me. There must
have been a glowing something alive in our eyes. I did not know then
all I felt, but long afterward, sometimes, when I was walking in the
country or riding on a train, I thought. Well, what did I think? It was
evening you see. I mean that afterward, sometimes, when I was alone,
when it was evening and I was alone I looked off across hills or I saw
a river making a white streak down below as I stood on a cliff. What I
mean to say is that I have spent all these years trying to recapture
that moment and now it is dead.”
John Webster threw out his hands with a gesture of disgust and then
got quickly off the bed. His wife’s body had begun to stir and now she
lifted herself up. For a moment her rather huge figure was crouched on
the bed and she looked like some great animal on all fours, sick and
trying to get up and walk.
And then she did get up, putting her feet firmly on the floor and
walking slowly out of the room without looking at the two people. Her
husband stood with his back pressed against the wall of the room and
watched her go. “Well, that’s the end of her,” he thought grimly. The
door that led into her room came slowly toward him. Now it was closed.
“Some doors have to be closed forever too,” he told himself.
He was still in his daughter’s presence and she was not afraid of him.
He went to a closet and getting out his clothes began to dress. That he
realized was a terrible moment. Well, he was playing the cards he held
in his hand to the limit. He had been nude. Now he had to get into his
clothes, into the clothes he had come to feel had no meaning and were
altogether unlovely because the unknown hands that had fashioned them
were unmoved by the desire to create beauty. An absurd notion came to
him. “Has my daughter a sense of moments? Will she help me now?” he
asked himself.
And then his heart jumped. His daughter Jane had done a quite lovely
thing. While he jerked his clothes on hurriedly she turned and threw
herself face downward on the bed, in the same position in which her
mother had been but a moment before.
“I walked out of her room into the hallway,” he explained. “My friend
had come upstairs and was standing in the hallway lighting a lamp that
was fastened to a bracket on the wall. You can perhaps imagine the
things that were going through my mind. My friend looked at me, as yet
knowing nothing. You see, he did not yet know that woman was in the
house, but he had seen me walk out of the room. He had just lighted the
lamp when I came out and closed the door behind me and the light fell
on my face. There must have been something that startled him. Later
we never spoke of the matter at all. As it turned out every one was
embarrassed and made self-conscious by what had occurred and what was
still to occur.
“I must have walked out of the room like a man walking in sleep. What
was in my mind? What had been in my mind when I stood there beside her
naked body and even before that? It was a situation that might not
occur again in a lifetime. You have just now seen how your mother went
out of this room. You are wondering, I dare say, what is in her mind.
I can tell you of that. There is nothing in her mind. She has made her
mind a blank empty place into which nothing that matters can come. She
has spent a lifetime at that, as I dare say most people have.
“As for that evening when I stood in the hallway, with the light of
that lamp shining on me and with my friend looking and wondering what
was the matter--that, after all, is what I must try to tell you about.”
He was partially dressed now and again Jane was sitting upright on the
bed. He came to sit in his shirt sleeves beside her. Long afterward
she remembered how extraordinarily young he looked at that moment.
He seemed intent on making her understand fully everything that had
happened. “Well, you understand,” he said slowly, “that although she
had seen my friend and his sister before, she had never seen me. At the
same time she knew I was to stay in the house during her visit. No
doubt she had been having thoughts about the strange young man she was
to meet and it is also true I had been having thoughts about her.
“Even at the moment when I walked, thus nude, into her presence she was
a living thing in my mind. And when she came up to me, out of sleep you
see, before she had time to think, I was a living thing to her then.
What living things we were to each other we dared understand but for
a moment. I know that now, but for many years after that happened I
didn’t know and was only confused.
“I was confused also when I came out into the hallway and stood before
my friend. You understand that he did not yet know she was in the
house. I had to tell him something and it was like having to tell in
some public way the secret of what happens between two people in a
moment of love.
“It can’t be done, you understand, and so there I stood stammering and
making things worse every minute. I must have had a guilty look on my
face and right away I began to feel guilty, although when I was in that
room standing by the bed, as I have explained, I didn’t feel guilty at
all, quite the contrary in fact.
“‘I went naked into that room and stood beside the bed and that woman
is in there now, all naked,’ I said.
“My friend was of course amazed. ‘What woman?’ he asked.
“I tried to explain. ‘Your sister’s friend. She is in there naked on
the bed and I went in and stood beside her. She came on the train at
noon,’ I said.
“You see, I appeared to know all about everything. I felt guilty.
That was what was the matter with me. I suppose I stammered and acted
confused. ‘He’ll never believe it was an accident now. He’ll think I am
up to something strange,’ I thought immediately. Whether he ever had
all or any of the thoughts that went through my mind at that moment and
of which I was in a way accusing him I never found out. I was always a
stranger in that house after that moment. You see, what I had done, to
have been made quite clear would have required a good deal of whispered
explanation that I never offered and, even after your mother and I were
married, things were never as they had been between me and my friend.
“And so I stood there stammering and he was looking at me with a
puzzled startled look in his eyes. The house was very quiet and I
remember how the light of the lamp, in its bracket on the wall, fell
on our two naked bodies. My friend, the man who was the witness of
that moment of vital drama in my life, is dead now. He died some eight
years ago and your mother and I dressed ourselves in our best clothes
and went in a carriage to his funeral and later to a graveyard to watch
his body being put away into the ground, but at that moment he was very
much alive and I shall always continue to think of him as he was then.
We had been tramping about all day in the fields and he, like myself,
had just come, you remember, from the bath. His young body was very
slender and strong and it made a glowing white mark against the dark
wall of the hallway, against which he stood.
“Were we both expecting something more to happen, waiting for something
more to happen? We did not speak to each other again, but stood in
silence. Perhaps he was only startled by my statement of what I had
just done and by something a little strange in the manner in which I
had told him. Ordinarily after such an accident there would have been a
kind of giggling confusion, the thing would have been passed off as a
kind of secret and delicious joke, but I had killed all possibility of
its being taken in that spirit by something in the way I had looked and
acted when I came out to him. I was, I suppose, at the same time both
too conscious and not conscious enough of the significance of what I
had done.
“And so we just stood in silence looking at each other and then the
door downstairs, that led to the street, opened and his mother and
sister came into the house. They had taken advantage of the fact that
their guest had gone to sleep and had walked to the business part of
town to do some shopping.
“As for myself, what was going on within me at that moment is the
hardest thing of all to explain. I had difficulty getting hold of
myself, of that you may be sure. What I think now, at this moment, is
that then, at that moment long ago when I stood there naked in that
hallway beside my friend, something had gone out of me that I could not
immediately get back.
“Perhaps when you have grown older you will understand as you cannot
understand now.”
John Webster looked long and hard at his daughter who also looked at
him. For both of them the story he was telling had become a rather
impersonal one. The woman, who was so closely connected to them both as
wife and mother, had gone quite out of the tale as she had but a few
moments before gone stumbling out of the room.
“You see,” he said slowly, “what I did not then understand, could not
then have been expected to understand, was that I had really gone
out of myself in love to the woman on the bed in the room. No one
understands that a thing of that sort may occur like a thought flashing
across the mind. What I am nowadays coming to believe and would like
to get fixed in your mind, young woman, is that such moments come into
all lives, but that in all the millions of people who are born and live
long or short lives but a few ever really come to find out what life is
like. There is a kind of perpetual denial of life, you understand.
“I was dazed as I stood in the hallway outside that woman’s room long
ago. There had been a flashing kind of something between the woman
and myself, in the moment I have described to you, when she came up
to me out of sleep. Something deep in our two beings had been touched
and I could not quickly recover. There had been a marriage, something
intensely personal to our two selves, and by chance it had been made
a kind of public affair. I suppose it would have turned out the same
way had we two been alone in the house. We were very young. Sometimes I
think all the people in the world are very young. They cannot carry the
fire of life when it flashes to life in their hands.
“And in the room, behind the closed door, the woman must have been
having, at just that moment, some such feeling as myself. She had
raised herself up and was now sitting on the edge of the bed. She was
listening to the sudden silence of the house as my friend and I were
listening. It may be an absurd thing to say, but it is nevertheless
true that my friend’s mother and sister, who had just come into the
house, were both, in some unconscious way, affected also as they stood
with their coats on downstairs, also listening.
“Just then, at that moment, in the room in the darkness, the woman
began to sob like a brokenhearted child. There had been a thing quite
tremendous come to her and she could not hold it. To be sure the
immediate cause of her weeping that way, the way in which she would
have explained her grief, was shame. That was what she thought had
happened to her, that she had been put into a shameful ridiculous
position. She was a young girl. I dare say thoughts had already come
into her mind concerning what all the others would think. At any rate I
know that at the moment and afterward I was more pure than herself.
“The sound of her sobbing rang through the house and downstairs my
friend’s mother and sister, who had been standing and listening as I
have said, now ran to the foot of the stairway leading up.
“As for myself, I did what must have seemed to all the others a
ridiculous, almost a criminal thing. I ran to the door leading into the
bedroom and tearing it open ran in, slamming the door behind me. It was
by this time almost completely dark in the room, but without hesitation
I ran to her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed and as she sobbed
her body rocked back and forth. She was, at that moment, like a slender
young tree, standing in an open field, without any other trees to
protect it. She was shaken as by a great storm, that’s what I mean.
“And so you see, I ran to her and threw my arms about her body.
“The thing that had happened to us before happened once again, for
the last time in our lives. She gave herself to me, that’s what I am
trying to say. There was another marriage. For just a moment she became
altogether quiet and in the uncertain light her face was turned up to
mine. From her eyes came that same look, as of one coming up to me, out
of a deep buried place, out of the sea or something like that. I have
always thought of the place out of which she came as the sea.
“I dare say if anyone but you heard me tell this and if I had told it
to you under less strange circumstances you would only have thought me
a romantic fool. ‘She was startled,’ you would say and I dare say she
was. But also there was this other. Even though it was dark in the room
I felt the thing glowing deep down in her and then coming up, straight
up to me. The moment was unspeakably lovely. It lasted for but a
fraction of a second, like the snapping of the shutter of a camera, and
then it passed.
“I still held her tightly and the door opened and in the doorway stood
my friend and his mother and sister. He had taken the lamp from its
bracket on the wall and held it in his hand. She sat quite naked on the
bed and I stood beside her, with one knee on the edge of the bed, and
with my arms thrown about her.”