Ten or fifteen minutes had passed and in the interval John Webster had
completed his arrangements for leaving the house and setting out with
Natalie on his new adventure in life. In a short time now he would be
with her and all the cords that bound him to his old life would have
been cut. It was sure that, whatever happened, he would never see his
wife again and perhaps he would never see again the woman, now in the
room with him, who was his daughter. If the doors of life could be torn
open they could also be closed. One could walk out of a certain phase
of life as out of a room. There might be traces of him left behind, but
he would no longer be there.
He had put on his collar and coat, arranging everything quite calmly.
Also he had packed a small bag, putting in extra shirts, pajamas,
toilet articles, et cetera.
During all this time his daughter sat at the foot of the bed with her
face buried in the crook of her arm that hung over the railing of the
bed. Was she thinking? Were voices talking within her? What was she
thinking?
In the interval, when the father’s telling of the tale of his life
in the house had ceased and while he was doing the necessary little
mechanical things before setting out on his new way of life, there was
this pregnant time of silence.
There was no doubt that, if he had become insane, the insanity within
was becoming constantly more fixed, more a habit of his being.
There was, taking constantly deeper and deeper roots within him, a
new viewpoint of life or rather to be a bit fancy and speak of the
matter more in the modern spirit, as he himself might later have done
laughingly, one might say he had been permanently caught up and held by
a new rhythm of life.
At any rate it is true that, long afterward, when the man sometimes
spoke of the experiences of that time, what he himself said was that
one, by an effort of his own, and if he would but dare let himself go,
could almost at will walk in and out of various planes of life. In
speaking of such matters later he sometimes gave the impression that
he quite calmly believed that one, once he had acquired the talent and
courage for it, that one might even go so far as to be able to walk in
the air along a street at the level of the second story of houses and
look in at the people going about their private affairs in the upper
rooms as a certain historic man of the East is said to have once walked
on the surface of the waters of a sea. It was all a part of a notion he
had got fixed in his head regarding the tearing down of walls and the
taking of people out of prisons.
There he was, at any rate, in his room fixing, let us say, his tie pin
in his necktie. He had got out the small bag into which he put as he
thought of them, the things he might need. In the next room his wife,
the woman who in the process of living her life had become the large
heavy inert one, was lying in silence on her bed as she had but a short
while before been lying on the bed in the presence of himself and his
daughter.
What dark and terrible things were in her mind? Or was her mind a blank
as John Webster sometimes thought it had become?
At his back, in the same room with himself, was his daughter, in
her thin nightgown and with her hair fallen down about her face and
shoulders. Her body--he could see the reflection of it in the glass
as he arranged the tie--was drooped and limp. The experiences of
the evening had no doubt taken something out of her body, perhaps
permanently. He wondered about that and his eyes in roving about the
room found again the Virgin with the candles burning by her side
looking calmly at the scene. It was that calmness men worshipped in the
Virgin perhaps. It was a strange turn of events that had led him to
bring her, the calm one, into the room, to make her a part of the whole
remarkable affair. No doubt it was the calm virginal thing he was at
that moment in the process of taking out of his daughter, it was the
coming of that element out of her body that had left her so limp and
apparently lifeless. There was no doubt he had been daring. The hand
that was arranging the tie trembled a little.
Doubt came. As I have said the house was at that moment very silent.
In the next room his wife, lying on the bed, made no sound. She floated
in a sea of silence, as she had done ever since that other night, long
before, when shame, in the form of a naked and distraught man, had
embraced her nakedness in the presence of those others.
Had he in turn done the same thing to his daughter? Had he plunged her
also into that sea? It was a startling and terrible thought. One did
no doubt upset things by becoming insane in a sane world or sane in
an insane world. Quite suddenly everything became upset, turned quite
upside down.
* * * * *
And then it might well be true that the whole matter simply resolved
itself into this--that he, John Webster, was merely a man who had
become suddenly enamoured of his stenographer and wanted to go and
live with her and that he had found himself without the courage to do
so simple a thing without making a fuss about it, without in fact an
elaborate justification of himself, at the expense of these others. To
justify himself he had devised this strange business of appearing nude
before the young girl who was his daughter and who in reality, being
his daughter, deserved the utmost consideration from him. There was no
doubt but that, from one point of view, what he had done was altogether
unforgivable. “After all I am still but a washing machine manufacturer
in a small Wisconsin town,” he told himself, whispering the words out
slowly and distinctly to himself.
That was a thing to bear in mind. Now his bag was packed and he was
quite dressed and ready to set out. When the mind no longer moved
forward sometimes the body took its place and made the consummation of
an act once begun quite definitely unavoidable.
He walked across the room and stood for a time looking up into the calm
eyes of the Virgin in the frame.
His thoughts were again like bells heard ringing across fields. “I am
in a room in a house on a street in a town in the state of Wisconsin.
At this moment most of the other people here in town, the people among
whom I have always lived, are in bed and asleep but to-morrow morning,
when I am gone, the town will be here and will move forward with its
life, as it has been doing since I was a young fellow, married a woman
and began living my present life.” There were these definite facts of
existence. One wore clothes, ate, moved about among his fellow men and
women. Certain phases of life were lived in the darkness of nights,
others in the light of days. In the morning the three women who worked
at his office and also the bookkeeper would appear to do their usual
tasks. When, after a time, neither he nor Natalie Swartz appeared there
would begin a looking from one to another. After a time whispering
would begin. There would begin a whispering that would run through the
town, visit all the houses, the shops, the stores. Men and women would
stop on the street to speak to each other, the men speaking to other
men, the women to other women. The women who were wives would be a
little angry at him and the men a little envious, but the men would
perhaps speak of him more bitterly than the women. That would be to
cover up their own wish to break in some way the boredom of their own
existence.
A smile spread itself over John Webster’s face and it was then he went
to sit on the floor at his daughter’s feet and tell her the rest of
the story of his married life. There was after all a kind of wicked
satisfaction to be got out of his situation. As for his daughter, well,
it was a fact too, that nature had made the connection between them
quite inevitable. He might throw into his daughter’s lap the new aspect
of life that had come to him and then, did she choose to reject it,
that would be a matter for her to decide. People would not blame her.
“Poor girl,” they would say, “what a shame she should have had such a
man for a father.” On the other hand and if after hearing all he had
to say she decided to run a little more swiftly through life, to open
her arms to it, in a way of speaking, what he had done would be a help.
There was Natalie whose old mother had made herself a great nuisance
by getting drunk and shouting so that all the neighbors could hear and
calling her hard-working daughters whores. It was perhaps absurd to
think that such a mother might be giving her daughters a better chance
in life than a quite respectable mother could possibly have given them
and still, in a world upset, turned upside down as it were, that might
be quite true too.
At any rate there was a quiet sureness in Natalie that was, even in his
moments of doubt, amazingly quieting and healing to himself. “I love
her and I accept her. If her old mother, by letting go of herself and
shouting in the streets in a kind of drunken splendor of abandonment,
has made a clear way in which Natalie may walk, all hail to her too,”
he thought, smiling at his own thoughts.
He sat at his daughter’s feet talking quietly and as he talked
something within her became more quiet. She listened with constantly
growing interest, looking down at him occasionally. He sat very close
to her and occasionally leaned over a little and laid his cheek against
her leg. “The devil! He was quite apparently making love to her too.”
She did not think such a thought definitely. A subtle feeling of
confidence and sureness went out of him into her. He began the tale of
his marriage again.
On the evening of his youth, when his friend and his friend’s mother
and sister had come into the presence of himself and the woman he
was to marry, he had suddenly been overcome by the same thing that
afterward left so permanent a scar on her. Shame swept over him.
Well what was he to do? How was he to explain this second running into
that room and into the presence of the naked woman? It was a matter
that could not be explained. A mood of desperation swept over him and
he ran past the people at the door and down the hallway, this time
getting into the room to which he had been assigned.
He had closed and locked the door behind him and then he dressed,
hurriedly, with feverish rapidity. When he was quite dressed he came
out of the room carrying his bag. The hallway was silent and the lamp
had been put back into its bracket on the wall. What had happened? No
doubt the daughter of the house was with the woman, trying to comfort
her. His friend had perhaps gone into his own room and was at the
moment dressing and no doubt thinking thoughts too. There was bound to
be no end of disturbed agitated thinking in the house. Everything might
have been all right had he not gone into the room that second time, but
how could he ever explain that the second going was as unpremeditated
as the first. He went quickly downstairs.
Below he met his friend’s mother, a woman of fifty. She stood in a
doorway that led into a dining room. A servant was putting dinner
on the table. The laws of the household were being observed. It was
time to dine and in a few minutes the people of the house would dine.
“Holy Moses,” he thought, “I wonder if she could come down here now
and sit at table with myself and the others, eating food? Can the
habits of existence so quickly reassert themselves after so profound a
disturbance?”
He put his bag down on the floor by his feet and looked at the
older woman. “I don’t know,” he began, and stood looking at her and
stammering. She was confused, as every one in that house must have been
confused at that moment, but there was something in her, very kindly,
that gave sympathy when it could not understand. She started to speak.
“It was all an accident and there is nobody hurt,” she started to say,
but he did not wait to listen. Picking up the bag he rushed out of the
house.
What was to be done then? He had hurried across town to his own home
and it was dark and silent. His father and mother had gone away. His
grandmother, that is to say, his mother’s mother, was very ill in
another town and his father and mother had gone there. They might not
return for several days. There were two servants employed in the house,
but as the house was to be unoccupied they had been permitted to go
away. Even the fires were out. He could not stay there, but would have
to go to a hotel.
“I went into the house and put my bag down on the floor by the front
door,” he explained, and a shiver ran through his body as he remembered
the dreariness of that evening long before. It was to have been an
evening of gaiety. The four young people had planned to go to a dance
and in anticipation of the figure he would cut with the new girl
from another town, he had, in advance, worked himself up to a state
of semi-excitement. The devil!--He had counted on finding in her the
something--well, what was it?--the something a young fellow is always
dreaming of finding in some strange woman who is suddenly to come up
to him out of nowhere and bring with her new life which she presents
to him freely, asking nothing. “You see, the dream is obviously an
impossible one, but one has it in youth,” he explained, smiling. All
through the telling of this part of his story he kept smiling. Did
his daughter understand? One couldn’t question her understanding too
closely. “The woman is to come clad in shining garments and with a
calm smile on her face,” he went on, building up his fanciful picture.
“With what regal grace she carries herself and yet, you understand,
she is not some impossible cold drawn-away thing either. There are
many men standing about, all no doubt more deserving than yourself,
but it is to you she comes, walking slowly, with her body all alive.
She is the unspeakably beautiful Virgin, but there is something very
earthy about her too. The truth is that she can be very cold and proud
and drawn-away when anyone else but yourself is concerned, but in your
presence the coldness all goes out of her.
“She comes toward you and her hand, that holds before her slender young
body a golden tray, trembles a little. On the tray there is a box,
small and cunningly wrought, and within it is a jewel, a talisman,
that is for you. You are to take the jewel, set in a golden ring, out
of the box and put in on your finger. It is nothing. The strange and
beautiful woman has but brought it to you as a sign, before all the
others, that she lays herself at your feet. When your hand reaches
forward and takes the jewel from the box her body begins to tremble
and the golden tray falls to the floor making a loud rattling sound.
Something terrific happens to all the others who have been witnesses of
the scene. Of a sudden all the people present realize that you, whom
they had always thought of as just an ordinary fellow, not, to tell the
truth, as worthy as themselves, well, you see, they have been made,
fairly forced, to realize your true self. Of a sudden there you stand
before them all in your true colors, quite revealed at last. There is a
kind of radiant splendor comes out of you and fairly lights up the room
where you, the woman, and all the others, the men and women of your own
town you have always known and who have always thought they knew you,
where they all stand looking and gasping with astonishment.
“It is a moment. The most unbelievable thing happens. There is a clock
on the wall and it has been ticking, ticking, running out the span
of your life and the lives of all the others. Outside the room, in
which this remarkable scene takes place, there is a street with the
activities of the street going on. Men and women are perhaps hurrying
up and down, trains are coming in and going out of distant railroad
stations, and even further away ships are sailing on many wide seas and
great winds are disturbing the waters of seas.
“And suddenly all is stopped. It is a fact. On the wall the clock stops
ticking, moving trains become dead and lifeless, people in the streets,
who have started to say words to each other, stand now with their
mouths open, on the seas winds no longer blow.
“For all life everywhere there is this hushed moment and, out of it
all, the buried thing within you asserts itself. Out of the great
stillness you step and take the woman into your arms. In a moment now
all life can begin to move and be again, but after this moment all
life forever will have been colored by this act of your own, by this
marriage. It was for this marriage you and the woman were made.”
All of which is perhaps going the extreme limit of fancifulness, as
John Webster was careful to explain to Jane, and yet, there he was in
the upper bedroom with his daughter, brought suddenly close to the
daughter he had never known until that moment, and he was trying to
speak to her of his feelings at the moment when, in his youth, he had
once played the part of a supreme and innocent fool.
“The house was like a tomb, Jane,” he said, and there was a break in
his voice.
It was evident the old boyhood dream was not yet dead. Even now, in his
maturity, some faint perfume of it floated up to him as he sat on the
floor at his daughter’s feet. “The fires in the house had been out all
day and outdoors it was getting colder,” he began again. “All through
the house there was that kind of damp coldness that always makes one
think of death. You must remember that I had been thinking, and was
still thinking, of what I had done at my friend’s house as the act of
an insane fool. Well, you see, our house was heated by stoves and there
was a small one in my own room upstairs. I went into the kitchen, where
behind the kitchen stove, in a box, kindlings were always kept, cut and
ready, and taking out an armful started upstairs.
“In the hallway, in the darkness at the foot of the stairs, my leg
knocked against a chair and I put the armful of kindlings down on the
chair seat. I stood in the darkness trying to think and not thinking.
‘I’m going to be sick perhaps,’ I thought. My self-respect was all gone
and perhaps one cannot think at such times.
“In the kitchen, above the kitchen stove, before which my mother or
our servant Adaline was always standing when the house was alive and
not dead as it was now, just up there, where one could see it over the
women’s heads, there was a small clock and now that clock began making
a sound as loud as though some one were beating on sheets of iron with
big hammers. In the house next door some one was talking steadily or
maybe reading aloud. The wife of the German who lived in the next
house had been ill in bed for months and perhaps now he was trying to
entertain her by reading some story. The words came steadily, but in
a broken way too. What I mean is, that there would be a steady little
run of sounds, then it would be broken and then begin again. Sometimes
the voice would be raised a little, for emphasis no doubt, and that was
like a kind of splash, as when the waves along a beach all, for a long
time, run to the same place clearly marked on the wet sand and then
there comes one wave that goes far beyond all the others and splashes
against the face of a rock.
“You see perhaps the state I was in. It was, as I have said, very cold
in the house and for a long time I stood in one spot, not moving at
all and thinking I never wanted to move again. The voices from the
distance, from the German’s house next door, were like voices coming
from some hidden buried place in myself. There was one voice telling
me I was a fool and that, after what had happened, I could never again
hold up my head in the world, and another voice telling me I was not a
fool at all, but for the time the first voice had all the best of the
argument. What I did was to stand there in the cold and try to let the
two voices fight it out without putting in my oar, but after a while,
it may have been because I was so cold, I began to cry like a kid and
that made me so ashamed I went to the front door quickly and got out of
the house forgetting to put on my overcoat.
“Well, I had left my hat in the house too and there I was outside in
the cold, bareheaded, and presently as I walked, keeping as much as I
could in unfrequented streets, it began to snow.
“‘All right,’ I said to myself, ‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll go to their
house and ask her to marry me.’
“When I got there my friend’s mother was not in sight and the three
younger people were sitting in the parlor of the house. I looked in
through a window and then, fearing I would lose my courage if I
hesitated, went boldly up and knocked on the door. I was glad anyway
they had felt that after what had happened they couldn’t go to the
dance and when my friend came and opened the door I said nothing, but
walked directly into the room where the two girls sat.
“She was on a couch in a corner, where the light from a lamp on a
table in the centre of the room fell on her but faintly, and I went
directly to her. My friend had followed me into the room, but now I
turned to him and his sister and asked them both to go out of the room.
‘Something has happened here to-night that can’t very well be explained
and we must be left alone together for a few minutes,’ I said making a
motion with my hand to where she sat on the couch.
“When they went out I followed to the door and closed it after them.
“And so there I was in the presence of the woman who was later to be my
wife. There was an odd kind of droopiness to her whole person as she
sat on the couch. Her body had, in a way you see, slid down from its
perch on the couch and now she was lying rather than sitting. What I
mean is that her body was draped on the couch. It was like a garment
thrown carelessly down there. That had happened since I had come into
the room. I stood before it a moment and then got down on my knees. Her
face was very pale, but her eyes were looking directly into mine.
“‘I did something very strange twice this evening,’ I said, turning my
face away so that I no longer looked into her eyes. Her eyes frightened
and disconcerted me, I suppose. That must have been it. I had a certain
speech to make and wanted to go through with it. There were certain
words I was about to say, but now I know that at the same moment other
words and thoughts, having nothing to do with what I was saying, were
going on down within me.
“For one thing I knew my friend and his sister were at that moment
standing just outside the door of the room waiting and listening.
“What were they thinking? Well, never mind that.
“What was I thinking myself? What was the woman to whom I was about to
propose marriage thinking about?
“I had come to the house bareheaded, you understand, and no doubt
looking a little wild. Perhaps every one in that house thought I had
gone suddenly out of my mind and it may be that in fact I had.
“At any rate I felt very calm and on that evening and for all these
years, up to a short time ago, when I became in love with Natalie,
I’ve always been a very calm man, or at least thought I was. I have
dramatized myself that way. What I suppose is that death is always a
very calm thing and I must, in a way, have been committing suicide on
that evening.
“There had been, in the town, a few weeks before this happened, a
scandal that had got into the courts and was written about guardedly in
our weekly newspaper. It concerned a case of rape. A farmer, who had
employed in his household a young girl, had sent his wife off to town
to buy supplies and while she was gone had got the girl into the upper
part of his house and had raped her, tearing her clothes off and even
beating her before he forced her to acquiesce in his desires. Later he
had been arrested and brought to town where, at the very time I was
kneeling on the floor before the body of my future wife, he was in jail.
“I speak of the matter because, as I knelt there, I remember now,
a thought crossed my mind connecting me with the man. ‘I am also
committing a rape’ something within me said.
“To the woman, who was there before me, so cold and white, I said
something else.
“‘You understand that, this evening, when I first came to you naked, it
was an accident,’ I said. ‘I want you to understand that, but I want
you also to understand that when I came to you the second time it was
not an accident. I want you to understand everything quite fully and
then I want to ask you to marry me, to consent to be my wife.’
“That was what I said and after I had said it took one of her hands in
mine and, without looking at her, knelt there at her feet waiting for
her to speak. Perhaps had she spoken then, even in condemnation of me,
everything would have been all right.
“She said nothing. I understand now why she could not, but then I did
not understand. I have always, I admit, been impatient. Time passed and
I waited. I was like one who has fallen from a great height into the
sea and who feels himself going down and down, deeper and deeper. There
is a great weight, you understand, pressing upon the man in the sea and
he cannot breathe. What I suppose is that in the case of a man, falling
thus into the sea, the force of his fall does after a time expend
itself and he comes to a stop in his descent, and then suddenly begins
again rising to the surface of the sea.
“And something of the sort happened to me. When I had been kneeling
there for some little time, at her feet, I suddenly sprang up. Going to
the door I threw it open and there, as I had expected, stood my friend
and his sister. I must have appeared to them, at the moment, almost
gay, perhaps they afterward thought it an insane gaiety. I cannot say
as to that. After that evening I never went back to their house and my
former friend and I began avoiding each other’s presence. There was no
danger that they would tell anyone what had happened--out of respect to
their guest, you understand. The woman was safe as far as their talking
was concerned.
“Anyway I stood before them and smiled. ‘Your guest and I have got into
a jam because of a series of absurd accidents that perhaps did not look
like accidents and now I have asked her to marry me. She has not made
up her mind about that,’ I said, speaking very formally and turning
from them and going out of the house and to my father’s house where I
quite calmly got my overcoat, my hat and my bag. ‘I’ll have to go to
the hotel and stay until father and mother come home,’ I thought. At
any rate I knew that the affairs of the evening would not, as I had
supposed earlier in the evening, throw me into a time of illness.”