“And so you see I lighted a lamp in the writing-room of that hotel and
forgot my supper and sat there and wrote pages and pages to the woman,
and grew foolish too and confessed a lie, that I was ashamed of the
thing that had happened between us some months before, and that I had
only done it, that is to say, that I had only run into the room to her
that second time, because I was a fool and a lot of other unspeakable
nonsense.”
John Webster jumped to his feet and started to walk nervously about
the room, but now his daughter became something more than a passive
listener to his tale. He had walked to where the Virgin stood between
the burning candles and was moving back toward the door, that led into
the hallway and down stairs, when she sprang up and running to him
impulsively threw her arms about his neck. She began to sob and buried
her face on his shoulder. “I love you,” she said. “I don’t care what’s
happened, I love you.”
V
And so there was John Webster in his house and he had succeeded, at
least for the moment, in breaking through the wall that had separated
him from his daughter. After her outburst they went and sat together
on the bed, with his arm about her and her head on his shoulder. Years
afterward, sometimes, when he was with a friend and was in a certain
mood, John Webster occasionally spoke of that moment as having been the
most important and lovely of his whole life. In a way his daughter had
given herself to him as he had given himself to her. There had been a
kind of marriage, that he realized. “I have been a father as well as
a lover. Perhaps the two things cannot be differentiated. I have been
one father who has not been afraid to realize the loveliness of his
daughter’s flesh and to fill my senses with the fragrance of it,” was
what he said.
As it turned out he might have sat thus, talking with his daughter,
for another half-hour and then left the house to go away with Natalie,
without any more drama, but that his wife, lying on the bed in the
next room, heard her daughter’s cry of love and it must have stirred
something deeply buried away in her. She got silently off the bed and
going to the door opened it softly. Then she stood leaning against the
door-frame and listening as her husband talked. There was a look of
hard terror in her eyes. Perhaps she wanted at that moment to kill the
man who had for so long a time been her husband and did not do so only
because the long years of inaction and submission into life had made it
impossible for her to lift an arm to strike.
At any rate she stood in silence and one might have thought that she
would at any moment fall to the floor, but she didn’t. She waited and
John Webster kept on talking. Now he was telling his daughter with a
kind of devilish attention to details all the story of their marriage.
What had happened, at least in the man’s version of the affair, was
that, after having written one letter he could not stop and wrote
another on the same evening and two more on the following day.
He kept on writing letters and what he himself thought was that the
letter writing had created within him a kind of furious passion of
lying that, once started, couldn’t be stopped. “I began something that
has been going on in me all these years,” he explained. “It is a trick
one practises, this lying to oneself about oneself.” It was evident
his daughter did not follow him, although she tried. He was talking
now of something she had not experienced, could not have experienced,
that is to say, the hypnotic power of words. Already she had read books
and had been tricked by words, but there was in her no realization of
what had already been done to her. She was a young girl and as, often
enough, there was nothing in the life about her that seemed exciting
or interesting she was thankful for the life of words and books. It
was true they left one quite blank, went out of the mind leaving no
trace. Well, they were created out of a kind of dream world. One had
to have lived, to have experienced much of life, before one could come
to the realization that just beneath the surface of ordinary everyday
life there was deep and moving drama always going on. Few come to
realization of the poetry of the actual.
It was evident her father had come to some such realization. Now he was
talking. He was opening doors for her. It was like travelling in an old
town one had thought one knew, with a marvellously inspired guide. One
went in and out of old houses, seeing things as they had never been
seen before. All the things of everyday life, a picture on the wall, an
old chair sitting by a table, the table itself at which a man one had
always known, sits smoking a pipe.
By some miracle all these things were now being invested with new life
and significance.
The painter Van Gogh, who it is said killed himself in a fit of
desperation because he could not gather within the limits of his canvas
all the wonder and glory of the sun shining in the sky, once painted
a canvas. An old chair set in an empty room. When Jane Webster grew
to be a woman and had got her own understanding of life she once saw
the canvas hanging in a gallery in the city of New York. There was
a strange wonder of life to be got from looking at the painting of
an ordinary, roughly made chair that had perhaps been owned by some
peasant of France, some peasant at whose house the painter had perhaps
stopped for an hour on a summer day.
It must have been a day when he was very much alive and very conscious
of all the life of the house in which he sat and so he painted the
chair and channeled into the painting all of the emotional reactions
within himself to the people in that particular house and in many other
houses he had visited.
* * * * *
Jane Webster was in the room with her father and his arm was about
her and he was talking of something she couldn’t understand and yet
she did understand too. Now he was again a young man and was feeling
the loneliness and uncertainty of young manhood as she had already
sometimes felt the loneliness and uncertainty of her own young
womanhood. Like her father she must begin to try to understand things a
little. Now he was an honest man, he was talking to her honestly. There
was wonder in that alone.
In his young manhood he went about towns, getting in with girls, doing
with girls a thing she had heard whispers about. That made him feel
unclean. He did not feel deeply enough the thing he did with the poor
little girls. His body had made love to women, but he had not. That her
father knew, but she did not yet know. There was much she did not know.
Her father, then a young man, had begun writing letters to a woman into
whose presence he once came quite nude as he had appeared before her
but a short time before. He was trying to explain how his mind, feeling
about, had alighted upon the figure of a certain woman as one towards
whom love might be directed.
He sat in a room in a hotel and wrote the word “love” in black ink on
a white sheet of paper. Then he went out to walk in the quiet night
streets of the town. She got the picture of him now quite clearly. The
strangeness of his being so much older than herself and of his being
her father had gone away. He was a man and she was a woman. She wanted
to quiet the clamoring voices within him, to fill the blank empty
spaces. She pressed her body more closely against his.
His voice kept explaining things. There was a passion for explanation
in him.
As he sat in the hotel he had written certain words on paper and
putting the paper into an envelope had sent it away to a woman living
in a distant place. Then he walked and walked and thought of more words
and going back to the hotel wrote them out on other pieces of paper.
A thing was created within him it was hard to explain, that he had not
understood himself. One walked under the stars and in quiet streets of
towns under trees and sometimes, on summer evenings, heard voices in
the darkness. People, men and women, were sitting in the darkness on
the porches of houses. There was an illusion created. One sensed in the
darkness somewhere a deep quiet splendor of life and ran toward it.
There was a kind of desperate eagerness. In the sky the stars shone
more splendidly because of one’s thoughts. There was a little wind and
it was like the hand of a lover touching the cheeks, playing in one’s
hair. There was something lovely in life one must find. When one was
young one could not stand still, but must go toward it. The writing of
the letters was an effort to go toward the thing. It was an effort to
find footing in the darkness on strange winding roads.
And so John Webster had, by his letter writing, done a strange and
false thing to himself and to the woman who was later to be his wife.
He had created a world of unrealities. Would he and the woman be able
to live together in that world?