In the semi-darkness of the room, as the man talked to his daughter
trying to make her understand an intangible thing, the woman who had
been his wife for so many years and out of whose body had come the
younger woman who now sat close to her husband, began also to try
to understand. After a time, and being unable to stand longer, she
managed, without attracting the attention of the others, to slip to the
floor. She let her back slide down along the frame of the door and her
legs turned sideways under her heavy body. In the position into which
she had got she was uncomfortable and her knees hurt, but she did not
mind. There was in fact a kind of satisfaction to be got from physical
discomfort.
One had lived for so many years in a world that was now and before
one’s very eyes being destroyed. There was something wicked and ungodly
in this business of defining life too sharply. Certain things should
not be spoken of. One moved dimly through a dim world not asking too
many questions. If there was death in silence, then one accepted death.
What was the use of denial? One’s body got old and heavy. When one
sat on the floor the knees hurt. There was something unbearable in
this notion that a man, with whom one had lived so many years of life
and whom one had accepted quite definitely as a part of the machinery
of life, should suddenly become something else, should become this
terrible questioner, this raker-up of forgotten things.
If one lived behind a wall one preferred life behind the wall. Behind
the wall the light was dim and did not hurt the eyes. Memories were
shut out. The sounds of life grew faint and indistinct in the distance.
There was something barbaric and savage in all this business of
breaking down walls, making cracks and gaps in the wall of life.
There was a struggle going on within the woman, Mary Webster, also. A
queer sort of new life came and went in her eyes. Had a fourth person
at that moment come into the room he might have been more conscious of
her than of the others.
There was something terrible in the way her husband John Webster had
set the stage for the battle that was now to go on within her. The man
was after all a dramatist. The business of buying the picture of the
Virgin and the candles, the making of this little stage upon which a
drama was to be played out; there was an unconscious art expression in
all this.
Perhaps he had outwardly intended nothing of the sort, but with what
devilish certainty he had worked. The woman now sat in a half-darkness
on the floor. Between her and the burning candles was the bed on which
the two others sat, one talking, the other listening. All the floor of
the room, near where she sat was in heavy black shadows. She had put
one hand out against the door-frame to help support herself.
The candles on their high place flickered as they burned. The light
fell only on her shoulders, her head, and her upraised arm and hand.
She was almost submerged in a sea of darkness. Now and then, from sheer
weariness her head fell forward and there was an effect of sinking
completely into the sea.
Still her arm was upraised and her head came back again to the surface
of the sea. There was a slight rocking movement to her body. She
was like an old boat, half water-logged, lying in the sea. Little
fluttering waves of light seemed playing over her heavy white upraised
face.
Breathing was somewhat difficult. Thinking was somewhat difficult. One
had gone along for years without thinking. It was better to lie quietly
in a sea of silence. The world was quite right in excommunicating
those who disturbed the sea of silence. Mary Webster’s body quivered a
little. One might kill, but had not the strength to kill, did not know
how to kill. Killing was a business one had to learn too.
It was unbearable, but one had at times to think. Things happened. A
woman married a man and then found, quite suddenly, she had not married
him. The world was getting strange unacceptable notions about marriage.
Daughters should not be told such things as her husband was now telling
their daughter. Could the mind of a young virginal girl be raped, by
her own father, into consciousness of unspeakable things in life? If
such things were permitted what would become of all decent orderly
living of lives? Virginal girls should find out nothing about life
until the time came to live the things they must, being women, finally
accept.
* * * * *
In every human body there is a great well of silent thinking always
going on. Outwardly certain words are said, but there are other words
being said at the same time down in the deep hidden places. There is a
deposit of thoughts, of unexpressed emotions. How many things thrown
down into the deep well, hidden away in the deep well!
There is a heavy iron lid clamped over the mouth of the well. When the
lid is safely in place one gets on all right. One goes about saying
words, eating food, meeting people, conducting affairs, accumulating
money, wearing clothes, one lives an ordered life.
Sometimes at night, in dreams, the lid trembles, but no one knows about
that.
Why should there be those who desire to tear the lids off the wells, to
break through the walls? Things had better be left as they are. Those
who disturb the heavy iron lids should be killed.
* * * * *
The heavy iron lid over the deep well that was within the body of Mary
Webster was trembling violently. It danced up and down. The dancing
light from the candles was like the little playful waves on the
surface of a calm sea. It met in her eyes another kind of dancing light.
On the bed John Webster talked freely and easily. If he had set the
stage he had also given himself the talking rôle in the drama that was
to be played out upon it. His own thought had been that everything that
happened on that evening was directed toward his daughter. He had even
dared to think he might be able to re-channel her life. Her young life
was like a river that was still small and made but a slight murmuring
sound as it ran through quiet fields. One might still step across the
stream that was later, and when it had taken other streams into itself,
to become a river. One might venture to throw a log across the stream,
to start it off in a quite different direction. The whole thing was a
daring, a quite reckless thing to do, but one could not quite escape
some such action.
Now he had dismissed from his mind the other woman, his former wife,
Mary Webster. He had thought when she went out of the bedroom she had
finally walked off the stage. There had been satisfaction in seeing her
go. He had really, in all their life together, never made a contact
with her. When he thought her gone from the field of his own life he
felt relieved. One could breathe more deeply, talk more freely.
He thought of her as having gone off the stage, but she had come back.
He still had her to deal with too.
In Mary Webster’s mind memories were awakening. Her husband was
telling the story of his marriage, but she did not hear his words. A
story began to tell itself within her, beginning far back on a day in
her own young womanhood.
She had heard the cry of love for a man come out of her daughter’s
throat and the cry had stirred something within her so deeply that she
had come back into the room where her husband and daughter sat together
on the bed. Once there had been that same cry within another young
woman, but for some reason it had never got itself out, past her lips.
At the moment when it might have come from her, at that moment long ago
when she lay naked on a bed and looked into the eyes of a young naked
man something, a thing people called shame, had come between her and
the getting of that glad cry past her lips.
Her mind now wearily went back over the details of the scene. An old
railroad journey was retravelled.
Things were tangled. First she lived in one place and then, as though
pushed into the act by a hand she could not see, she went on a visit to
another place.
The journey there was taken in the middle of the night and, as there
were no sleeping cars on the train, she had to sit in a day-coach
through several hours of darkness.
Outside the car window there was darkness, broken now and then when the
train stopped for a few minutes at some town in Western Illinois or
Southern Wisconsin. There was a station building with a lamp fastened
to the outer wall and sometimes but a solitary man, bundled in a coat
and perhaps pushing a truck piled with trunks and boxes along a station
platform. At some of the towns people got aboard the train and at
others people got off and went away into the darkness.
An old woman who carried a basket in which there was a black and white
cat came to sit in the seat with her and after she had got off at one
of the stations an old man took her place.
The old man did not look at her, but kept muttering words she could not
catch. He had a ragged gray moustache that hung down over his shrunken
lips and he continually stroked it with a bony old hand. The words he
said in an undertone were muttered behind the hand.
The young woman of that railroad journey, taken long ago, had, after a
time, fallen into a half-waking, half-sleeping state. Her mind had run
ahead of her body to her journey’s end. A girl she had known at school
had invited her for a visit and there had been several letters written
back and forth. Two young men would be in the house all during the time
of the visit.
One of the young men she had already seen. He was her friend’s brother
and had once come on a visit to the school where the two girls were
students.
What would the other young man be like? It was curious how many times
she had already asked herself that question. Now her mind was making
fanciful pictures of him.
The train ran through a country of low hills. Dawn was coming. It would
be a day of gray cold clouds. Snow threatened. The muttering old man of
the gray moustache and the bony hand had got off the train.
The half-awake eyes of the tall slender young woman looked out over
low hills and long stretches of flat land. The train crossed a bridge
over a river. She slipped into sleep and was jerked out again by the
starting or stopping of the train. Across a distant field a young man
was walking in the gray morning light.
Had she dreamed there was a young man going across a field beside the
train or had she actually seen such a man? In what way was he connected
with the young man she was to meet at her journey’s end?
It was a little absurd to think the young man in the field could be
of flesh and blood. He walked at the same pace the train was going
stepping lightly over fences, going swiftly through the streets of
towns, passing like a shadow through strips of dark woodland.
When the train stopped he also stopped and stood looking at her and
smiling. One almost felt he could go into one’s body and come out
smiling thus. The idea was strangely sweet too. Now he walked for a
long time on the surface of the waters of a river alongside which the
train was running.
And all the time he looked into her eyes, darkly, when the train passed
through a forest and it was dark inside the train, with a smile in
his eyes when they came out again into the open country. There was
something in his eyes that invited, called to her. Her body grew warm
and she stirred uneasily in the car seat.
The trainmen had built a fire in a stove at the end of the car and all
the doors and windows were closed. Evidently it was not going to be
such a cold day after all. It was unbearably hot in the car.
She got out of her seat and, clutching at the edges of other seats,
made her way to the end of the car where she opened a door and stood
for a time looking at the flying landscape.
* * * * *
The train came to the station where she was to get off and there, on
the station platform, was her girl friend, come to the station on the
odd chance she would come on that train.
And then she had gone with her friend into the strange house and her
friend’s mother had insisted she go to bed and sleep until evening. The
two women kept asking how it had happened she had come on that train
and as she could not explain she became a little embarrassed. It was
true there was another and faster train she might have taken and had
the entire ride in the day-time.
There had just been a kind of feverish desire to get out of her own
town and her mother’s house. She had been unable to explain that to her
own people. One couldn’t tell one’s mother and father she just wanted
to get out. In her own home there had been a confusion of questions
about the whole matter. Well, there she was, being driven into a corner
and asked questions that couldn’t be answered. She had a hope that her
girl friend would understand and kept hopefully saying to her what she
had said over and over rather senselessly at home. “I just wanted to do
it. I don’t know, I just wanted to do it.”
In the strange house she had got into bed to sleep, glad to escape the
annoying question. When she awoke they would have forgotten the whole
matter. Her friend had come into the room with her and she wanted to
dismiss her quickly, to be alone for a time. “I’ll not unpack my bag
now. I think I’ll just undress and crawl in between the sheets. It’s
going to be warm anyway,” she explained. It was absurd. Well she had
looked forward to something quite different on her arrival, laughter,
young men standing about and looking a little self-conscious. Now she
only felt uncomfortable. Why did people keep asking why she had got up
at midnight and taken a slow train instead of waiting until morning?
One wanted sometimes just to be a fool about little things, and not to
have to give explanations. When her friend went out of the room she
threw off all her clothes and got quickly into bed and closed her eyes.
It was another foolish notion she had, her wanting to be naked. Had she
not taken the slow uncomfortable train she would not have had the fancy
about the young man walking beside the train in the fields, through
the streets of towns, through forests.
It was good to be naked sometimes. There was the feel of things against
one’s skin. If one could only have the joyful feeling of that more
often. One could sink into a clean bed, sometimes, when one was tired
and sleepy and it was like getting into the firm warm arms of some one
who could love and understand one’s foolish impulses.
The young woman in the bed slept and in her sleep was again being
carried swiftly along through the darkness. The woman with the cat
and the old man who muttered words did not appear again, but many
other people came and went through her dream-world. There was a swift
tangled march of strange events. She went forward, always forward
toward something she wanted. Now it approached. A great eagerness took
possession of her.
It was strange that she wore no clothes. The young man who walked so
swiftly through fields had reappeared, but she had not noticed before
that he also did not wear clothes.
The world had grown dark. There was a dusky darkness.
And now the young man had stopped going swiftly forward and like
herself was silent. They both hung suspended in a sea of silence. He
was standing and looking directly into her eyes. He could go within her
and come out again. The thought was infinitely sweet.
She lay in a soft warm darkness and her flesh was hot, too hot. “Some
one has foolishly built a fire and has forgotten to open the doors and
windows,” she thought vaguely.
The young man, who was now so close to her, who was standing silently
so close to her and looking directly into her eyes, could make
everything all right. His hands were within a few inches of her body.
In a moment they would touch, bring cool peace into her body, into
herself too.
There was a sweet peace to be got by looking directly into the young
man’s eyes. They were glowing in the darkness like little pools into
which one could cast oneself. A final and infinite peace and joy could
be got by casting oneself into the pools.
Could one stay thus, lying quietly in the soft warm dark pools? One
had got into a secret place, behind a high wall. Outside voices
cried--“Shame! Shame!” When one listened to the voices the pools became
foul loathsome places. Should one listen to the voices or should one
close the ears, close the eyes? The voices beyond the wall became
louder and louder--crying, “Shame! Be ashamed!” To listen to the voices
brought death. Did closing one’s ears to the voices bring death too?