“I do not mean to say that after that evening I did think more clearly,
but after that day and its adventures other days and weeks did come
marching along and, as nothing specially happened as a result of what I
had done, I couldn’t stay in the half-exalted state I was in then.”
John Webster rolled over on the floor at his daughter’s feet and,
squirming about so that he lay on his belly facing her, looked up into
her face. He had his elbows on the floor and his chin rested on his two
hands. There was something diabolically strange about the way youth had
come into his figure and he had quite won his way with his daughter.
There he was, you see, wanting nothing specially from her and he was
wholeheartedly giving himself to her. For the time even Natalie was
forgotten and as for his wife, in the next room lying on the bed and
perhaps in her dumb way suffering as he had never suffered, to him at
the moment she simply did not exist.
Well, there was the woman, who was his daughter, before him and he was
giving himself to her. It is likely that at the moment he had quite
forgotten she was his daughter. He was thinking now of his youth, when
he was a young man, much perplexed by life, and was seeing her as a
young woman who would inevitably, and as she went along through life,
often be as perplexed as he had been. He tried to describe to her his
feelings as a young man who had proposed to a woman who had made no
answer and in whom nevertheless there was the perhaps romantic notion
that he was in some queer way inevitably and finally attached to that
particular woman.
“You see what I did then, Jane, is something you will perhaps find
yourself doing some day and that it may be inevitable every one does.”
He reached forward and taking his daughter’s bare foot in his hand drew
it to him and kissed it. Then he sat quickly upright holding his knees
in his arms. Something like a blush came swiftly over his daughter’s
face and then she began to look at him with very serious puzzled eyes.
He smiled gaily.
“And so you see, there I was, living right here in this very town and
that girl to whom I had proposed marriage had gone away and I had heard
nothing more from her. She only stayed at my friend’s house a day or
two after I had managed to make the beginning of her visit such a
startling affair.
“For a long time my father had been scolding at me because I had taken
no special interest in the washing machine factory, it was supposed
I was after his day to take hold of and run, and so I decided I had
better do a thing called ‘settling down.’ That is to say, I made up
my mind it would be better for me if I gave myself less to dreams and
to the kind of gawky youthfulness that only led to my doing such
unaccountable things as that second running into that naked woman’s
presence.
“The truth is, of course, that my father, who in his own youth had come
to a day when he had made just such another decision as I was then
making, that he, for all his settling down and becoming a hard-working
sensible man, hadn’t got very much for it; but I didn’t think of that
at the time. Well, he wasn’t such a gay old dog as I remember him now.
He had always worked pretty hard, I suppose, and every day he sat for
eight or ten hours at his desk and through all the years I had known
him he had been subject to attacks of indigestion, during which every
one in our house had to go softly about for fear of making his head
ache worse than it did. The attacks used to come on about once a month
and he would come home, and mother would fix him up on a couch in our
front room, and she used to heat flatirons and roll them in towels and
put them on his belly, and there he would lie all day groaning, and as
you may suppose, making the life of our house a gay, festive affair.
“And then, when he got all right again and only looked a little gray
and drawn he would come sit at the table at meal-time with the rest
of us and would talk to me about his life, as an entirely successful
affair, and take it for granted I wanted just such another life.
“For some fool reason, I don’t understand now, I thought then that
was just what I did want. I suppose all the time I must have wanted
something else and that made me spend so much of my time having vague
dreams, but not only father, but all the older men in our town and
perhaps in all the other towns along the railroad east and west were
thinking and talking just that same way to their sons and I suppose I
got caught up by the general drift of thinking and just went into it
blind, with my head down, not thinking at all.
“So there I was, a young washing machine manufacturer, and I hadn’t any
woman, and since that affair at his house I didn’t see my former friend
with whom I used to try to talk of the vague, but nevertheless more
colorful dreams of my idle hours. After a few months father sent me out
on the road to see if I couldn’t sell washing machines to merchants
in small towns and sometimes I was successful and did sell some and
sometimes I didn’t.
“At night in the towns I used to walk about in the streets and
sometimes I did get in with a woman, with a waitress from the hotel, or
a girl I had picked up on the streets.
“We walked about under the trees along the residence streets of the
town and when I was lucky I sometimes induced one of them to go with me
to a little cheap hotel or into the darkness of the fields at the edge
of the towns.
“At such times we talked of love and sometimes I was a good deal moved,
but after all not really moved.
“The whole thing started me thinking of the slender naked girl I had
seen on the bed and of the look in her eyes at the moment when she
came up out of sleep and her eyes met mine.
“I knew her name and address and so one day I grew bold and wrote her a
long letter. You must understand that by this time I felt I had become
quite a sensible fellow and so I tried to write in a sensible way.
“I remember I was sitting in the writing-room of a small hotel in an
Indiana town when I did it. The desk where I sat was by a window near
the town’s Main Street and, as it was evening, people were going along
the street to their houses, I suppose going home to the evening meal.
“I don’t deny I grew pretty romantic. As I sat there, feeling lonely
and I suppose filled with self-pity, I looked up and saw a little
drama acted out in a hallway across the street. There was a rather old
tumble-down building with a stairway at the side running to an upper
story where it was evident some one lived, as there were white curtains
at the window.
“I sat looking across at the place, and I suppose I was dreaming of the
long slender body of the girl on the bed upstairs in another house. It
was evening and growing dusk, you understand, and just such a light
as had fallen over us at the moment we looked into each other’s eyes,
at the moment when there was no one but just our two selves, before
we had time to think and remember the others in that house, when I
was coming out of a daydream and she was coming out of the dreams of
sleep, at the moment when we accepted each other and the complete and
momentary loveliness of each other--well, you see, just such a light as
I had stood in and she had lain in as one might lie on the soft waters
of some southern sea, just such another light was now lying over the
little bare writing-room of the foul little hotel in that town and
across the street a woman came down the stairway and stood in just such
another light.
“As it turned out she was also tall, like your mother, but I could not
see what kind or color of clothes she wore. There was some peculiarity
of the light; an illusion was created. The devil! I wish I could tell
of things that have happened to me without this eternal business of
having everything I say seem a little strange and uncanny. One walks
in a wood at evening, let us say, Jane, and one has queer fascinating
illusions. The light, the shadows cast by trees, the open spaces
between trees--these things create the illusions. Often the trees
seem to beckon to one. Old sturdy trees look wise and you think they
are going to tell you some great secret, but they don’t. One gets
into a forest of young birches. What naked girlish things, running
and running, free, free. Once I was in such a wood with a girl. We
were up to something. Well, it had gone no further than that we had a
tremendous feeling for each other at the moment. We had kissed and I
remember that twice I had stopped in the half-darkness and had touched
her face with my fingers--tenderly and softly, you know. She was a
little dumb shy girl I had picked up on the streets of an Indiana town,
a kind of free immoral little thing, such as sometimes pop up in such
towns. I mean she was free with men in a kind of queer shy way. I had
picked her up on the street and then, when we got out there in the
wood, we both felt the strangeness of things and the strangeness of
being with each other too.
“There we were, you see. We were about to--I don’t exactly know what we
were up to. We were standing and looking at each other.
“And then we both looked suddenly up and there, in the path before us,
was a very dignified and beautiful old man. He was wearing a robe that
was caught over his shoulders, in a swaggering kind of a way, and it
was spread out behind him over the floor of the forest, between the
trees.
“What a princely old man! What a kingly fellow, in fact! We both saw
him, both stood looking at him with eyes filled with wonder, and he
stood looking at us.
“I had to go forward and touch the thing with my hands before the
illusion our minds had created could be dispelled. The kingly old man
was just a half-decayed old stump and the robe he wore was just the
purple night shadows falling down on the floor of the forest, but our
having seen the thing together made everything different between the
shy little town girl and myself. What we had perhaps both intended
doing couldn’t be done in the spirit in which we had approached it. I
mustn’t try to tell you of that now. I mustn’t get too much off the
track.
“What I am thinking is merely that such things happen. I am talking
of another time and place, you see. On that other evening, as I sat in
the hotel writing-room, there was just such another light, and across
the street a girl, or a woman, was coming down a stairway. I had the
illusion that she was nude like a young birch tree and that she was
coming toward me. Her face made a grayish wavering shadow-like spot
in the hallway and she was evidently waiting for some one as she kept
thrusting her head out and looking up and down the street.
“I became a fool again. That’s the story, I dare say. As I sat looking
and leaning forward, trying to see deeper and deeper into the evening
light, a man came hurrying along the street and stopped at the
stairway. He was tall like herself and when he stopped I remember that
he took off his hat and stepped into the darkness holding it in his
hand. There was probably something stealthy and covered-up about the
love affair between the two people as the man also put his head out
of the stairway and looked long and carefully up and down the street
before taking the woman into his arms. Perhaps she was some other man’s
wife. Anyway they stepped back a little into a greater darkness and, I
thought, took each other quite completely. How much I saw and how much
I imagined I’ll of course never know. At any rate the two grayish white
faces seemed to float and then merge and become one grayish white spot.
“A violent tremor ran through my body. There, it seemed to me, but a
few hundred feet from where I sat, now almost in complete darkness, was
love finding glorious expression. Lips clung to lips, two warm bodies
pressed close to each other, something altogether glorious and lovely
in life, that I, by running about in the evening with the poor little
girls of the town, and by trying to induce them to go with me into the
fields to serve only my animal hunger--well, you see, there was a thing
one might find in life that I had not found and that at the moment I
thought I had failed to find because, at a great crisis, I had not
found courage to go persistently toward it.”