John Webster was telling a story. There was a thing he himself wanted
to understand. Wanting to understand things was a new passion, come to
him. What a world he had lived in always and how little he had wanted
to understand it. Children were being born in towns and on farms. They
grew up to be men and women. Some of them went to colleges, others,
after a few years in the town or country schools, got out into life,
married perhaps, got jobs in factories or shops, went to church on
Sundays or to a ball game, became parents of children.
People everywhere told things, talked of things they thought interested
them, but no one told truths. At school there was no attention paid
to truth. What a tangle of other and unimportant things. “Two and two
make four. If a merchant sell three oranges and two apples to a man and
oranges are to be sold at twenty-four cents per dozen and apples at
sixteen, how much does the man owe the merchant?”
An important matter indeed. Where is the fellow going with the three
oranges and two apples? He is a small man in brown boots and has his
cap stuck on the side of his head. There is a peculiar smile playing
around his mouth. The sleeve of his coat is torn. What did that? The
cuss is singing a song under his breath. Listen:
“Diddle de di do,
Diddle de di do,
Chinaberries grow on a Chinaberry tree.
Diddle de di do.”
What in the name of the bearded men, who came into the queen’s
bed-chamber when the king of Rome was born, does he mean by that? What
is a Chinaberry tree?
John Webster talked to his daughter, sat with his arm about her
talking, and back of him, and unseen, his wife struggled and fought to
put back into its place the iron lid one should always keep tightly
clamped down on the opening of the well of unexpressed thoughts within
oneself.
There was a man who had come naked into her naked presence in the dusk
of the late afternoon of a day long ago. He had come in to her and had
done a thing to her. There had been a rape of the unconscious self.
That had been in time forgotten or forgiven, but now he was doing it
again. He was talking now. Of what was he talking? Were there not
things of which one never talked? For what purpose the deep well within
oneself except that it be a place into which one could put the things
that must not be talked about?
Now John Webster was trying to tell the whole story of his attempt at
love-making with the woman he had married.
The writing of letters containing the word “love,” had come to
something. After a time, and when he had sent off several such letters
written in the hotel writing-rooms, and just when he was beginning to
think he would never get an answer to one of them and might as well
give the whole matter up, an answer had come. Then there had burst from
him a flood of letters.
He was still then going about from town to town trying to sell washing
machines to merchants, but that only took a part of each day. There was
left the late afternoons, mornings when he arose early and sometimes
went for a walk along the streets of one of the towns before breakfast,
the long evenings and the Sundays.
He was full of unaccountable energy all through that time. It must have
been because he was in love. If one were not in love one could not
feel so alive. In the early mornings, and in the evenings as he walked
about, looking at houses and people, every one suddenly seemed close
to him. Men and women came out of houses and went along the streets,
factory whistles blew, men and boys went in and out at the doors of
factories.
He was standing by a tree on a strange street of a strange town in the
evening. In a nearby house a child cried and a woman’s voice talked to
it in low tones. His fingers gripped the bark of the tree. He wanted to
run into the house where the child was crying, to take the child out
of its mother’s arms and quiet it, to kiss the mother perhaps. What a
thing it would be if he could only go along a street shaking men by the
hand, putting his arms about the shoulders of young girls.
He had extravagant fancies. There might be a world in which there were
new and marvellous cities. He went along imagining such cities. For
one thing the doors to all the houses were wide open. Everything was
clean and neat. The sills to the doors of the houses had been washed.
He walked into one of the houses. Well, the people had gone out, but
on the chance some such fellow as himself would wander in they had set
out a little feast on a table in one of the rooms downstairs. There was
a loaf of white bread with a carving knife lying beside it so that one
could cut off slices, cold meats, little squares of cheese, a decanter
of wine.
He sat alone at the table to eat, feeling very happy, and after his
hunger had been satisfied carefully brushed away the crumbs and fixed
everything nicely. Some other fellow might come along later and wander
into the same house.
The fancies young Webster had during that period of his life filled
him with delight. Sometimes he stopped in his night walks along dark
residence streets and stood looking up at the sky and laughing.
There he was in a world of fancies, in a place of dreams. His mind
plunged him back into the house he had visited in his dream-world. What
curiosity there was in him in regard to the people who lived there.
It was night, but the place was lighted. There were little lamps one
could pick up and carry about. There was a city, wherein each house was
a feasting place and this was one of the houses and in its sweet depths
things other than the belly could be fed.
One went through the house feeding all the senses. The walls had been
painted with strong colors that had now faded and become soft and
mellow with age. The time had passed in America when people continually
built new houses. They built houses strongly and then stayed in them,
beautified them slowly and with a sure touch. One would perhaps rather
be in such a house in the day-time when the owners were at home, but it
was fine to be there alone at night too.
The lamp held above one’s head threw dancing shadows on the walls. One
went up a stairway into bedrooms, wandered in halls, came down the
stairs again and putting the lamp back into its place passed out at the
open front door.
How sweet to linger on the front steps for a moment, having more
dreams. What of the people who lived in the house? In one of the
bedrooms upstairs he had fancied he knew that a young woman slept. Had
she been in the bed and asleep and had he walked in on her, what would
have happened?
Might there be in the world, well, one might as well say in some world
of the fancy--perhaps it would take too much time for an actual people
to create such a world--but might there not be a people, in the world
of one’s fancy, a people who had really developed the senses, people
who really smelled, saw, tasted, felt things with their fingers, heard
things with their ears? One could dream of such a world. It was early
evening and for several hours one did not have to go back to the little
dirty town hotel.
Some day there might be a world inhabited by people who lived. There
would be, then, an end of continual mouthings about death. People would
take life up firmly like a filled cup and carry it until the time came
to throw it away over the shoulder with a gesture. They would realize
that wine was made to drink, food to eat and nourish the body, the ears
to hear all manner of sounds, the eyes to see things.
Within the bodies of such people what unknown senses might there not be
developed? Well, it might very well be that a young woman, such as John
Webster was trying to fancify into existence, that on such evenings
such a young woman might be lying quietly in a bed in an upper chamber
of one of the houses along the dark street. One went in at the open
door of the house and taking up the lamp went to her. One could fancy
the lamp itself as a thing of beauty too. There was a small ring-like
arrangement through which one slipped the finger. One wore the lamp
like a ring on the finger. The little flame of it was like a jewel
shining in the darkness.
One went up the stairs and softly into the room where the woman was
lying on the bed. One held the lamp above one’s head. Its light shone
into one’s eyes and into the eyes of the woman. There was a long slow
time when the two just remained so, looking at each other.
There was a question being asked. “Are you for me? Am I for you?”
People had developed a new sense, many new senses. People saw with
their eyes, smelled with their nostrils, heard with their ears. The
deeper-lying, buried-away senses of the body had been developed too.
Now people could accept or dismiss one another with a gesture. There
was no more slow starvation of men and women. Long lives did not
have to be lived during which one knew, and then but faintly, a few
half-golden moments.
* * * * *
There was something about all this having fancies closely connected
with his marriage and with his life since his marriage. He was trying
to make that clear to his daughter but it was difficult.
There had been that moment once, when he had gone into the upper room
of a house and had found a woman lying before him. There had been a
question come suddenly and unexpectedly into his own eyes and it had
found a quick eager answer in hers.
And then--the devil, it was hard to get things straight! In some way a
lie had been told. By whom? There had been a poison he and the woman
had breathed together. Who had blown the cloud of poison vapor into the
air of that upper bed-chamber?
The moment had kept coming back into the mind of the young man. He
walked in streets of strange towns having thoughts of coming into the
upper bed-chamber of a new kind of womanhood.
Then later he went to the hotel and sat for hours writing letters. To
be sure he did not write out the fancies he had been having. O, had he
but had the courage to do that! Had he but known enough to do that!
What he did was to write the word “love,” over and over rather
stupidly. “I went walking and I thought of you and I loved you so. I
saw a house I liked and I thought of you and me living in it as man and
wife. I am sorry I was so stupid and blundering when I saw you that
other time. Give me another chance and I will prove my ‘love’ to you.”
What a betrayal! It was John Webster himself who had, in the end,
poisoned the wells of truth at which he and the woman would have to
drink as they went along the road toward happiness.
He hadn’t been thinking of her at all. He had been thinking of the
strange mysterious woman lying in the upper bed-chamber in the city of
the land of his fancy.
Everything got started wrong and then nothing could be set straight
again. One day a letter came from her and then, after writing a great
many other letters, he went to her town to see her.
There was a time of embarrassment and then the past was apparently
forgotten. They went to walk together under the trees in a strange
town. Later he wrote more letters and came to see her again. One night
he asked her to marry him.
The very devil! He didn’t even take her into his arms when he asked
her. There was a kind of fear involved in the whole matter. “I’d better
not after what happened before. I’ll wait until we’re married. Things
will be different then.” One had a notion. It was that after marriage
one became something quite different from what one had been before and
that the beloved one also became something quite different.
And so he had managed to get married, having that notion, and he and
the woman had set out together upon a wedding trip.
John Webster held his daughter’s body closely against his own and
trembled a little. “I had some notion in my head that I had better go
slow,” he said. “You see, I had already frightened her once. ‘We’ll go
slow here,’ I kept saying to myself; ‘well, she doesn’t know much about
life, I’d better go pretty slow.’”
The memory of the moment of his marriage stirred John Webster
profoundly.
The bride was coming down a stairway. Strange people stood about.
All the time, down inside the strange people, down inside all people
everywhere, there was thinking going on of which no one seemed aware.
“Now you look at me, Jane. I’m your father. I was that way. All these
years, while I’ve been your father, I’ve been just like that.
“Something happened to me. A lid was jerked off something somewhere in
me. Now, you see, I stand, as though on a high hill and look down into
a valley where all my former life has been lived. Quite suddenly, you
understand, I know all the thoughts I’ve been having all of my life.
“You’ll hear it said. Well, you’ll read it in books and stories people
write about death. ‘At the moment of death he looked back and saw all
his life spread out before him.’ That’s what you’ll read.
“Ha! That’s all right, but what about life? What about the moment,
when, having been dead, one comes back into life?”
* * * * *
John Webster had got himself excited again. He took his arm from
about his daughter’s shoulder and rubbed his hands together. A slight
shivering sensation ran through his body and through the body of his
daughter. She did not understand what he was saying, but in a queer
sense that did not matter. They were, at the moment deeply in accord.
This having one’s whole being suddenly become alive, after years of
a kind of partial death, was a strain. One had to get a kind of new
balance to the body and mind. One felt very young and strong and then
suddenly old and tired. Now one was carrying his life forward as one
might carry a filled cup through a crowded street. All the time one had
to remember, to keep in mind, that there must be a certain relaxation
to the body. One must give and swing with things a little. That must
always be borne in mind. If one became rigid and tense at any time,
except at the moment when one cast one’s body into the body of one’s
beloved, one’s foot stumbled or one knocked against things and the
filled cup one carried was emptied with an awkward gesture.
Strange thoughts kept coming into the mind of the man as he sat on the
bed with his daughter trying to get himself in hand. One might very
easily become one of the kind of people one saw everywhere about, one
of the kind of people whose empty bodies went walking everywhere in
towns and cities and on farms, “one of the kind of people whose life
is an empty cup,” he thought and then a more majestic thought came and
steadied him. There was something he had heard or read about sometime.
What was it? “Arouse not up or awaken my love ’til he please,” a voice
within him said.
* * * * *
Again he began the telling of the story of his marriage.
“We went off on our wedding trip to a farmhouse in Kentucky, went there
in the sleeping car of a train at night. I kept thinking about going
slow with her, kept telling myself all the time I’d better go slow so
that night she slept in a lower berth while I crept into the one above.
We were going on a visit to a farm owned by her uncle, by her father’s
brother, and we got to the town, where we were to get off the train,
before breakfast in the morning.
“Her uncle was waiting with a carriage at the station and we drove off
at once to this place in the country where we were to visit.”
John Webster told with great attention to details the story of the
arrival of the two people at the little town. He had slept but little
during the night and was very aware of everything going on about him.
There was a row of wooden store buildings that led up from the station
and, within a few hundred yards, it became a residence street and then
a country road. A man in his shirt sleeves walked along the sidewalk on
one side the street. He was smoking a pipe, but as the carriage passed
he took the pipe out of his mouth and laughed. He called to another man
who stood before the open door of a store on the opposite side of the
street. What strange words he was saying. What did they mean? “Make it
fancy, Eddie,” he called.
The carriage containing the three people drove quickly along. John
Webster had not slept during the night and there was a kind of
straining at something within him. He was all alive, eager. Her uncle
on the front seat was a large man, like her father, but living as he
did out of doors had made the skin of his face brown. He also had a
gray moustache. Could one get acquainted with him? Would one ever be
able to say intimate confidential things to him?
For that matter would one ever be able to say intimate confidential
things to the woman one had married? The truth was that all night his
body had been aching with anticipation of a coming love-making. How
odd that one did not speak of such matters when one had married women
out of respectable families in respectable Illinois manufacturing
towns. At the wedding every one must have known. That was no doubt what
the young married men and women were smiling and laughing about, behind
the walls, as it were.
There were two horses hitched to the carriage and they went soberly
and steadily along. Now the woman who had become John Webster’s bride,
was sitting up, very straight and tall on the seat beside him and she
had her hands folded in her lap. They were nearing the edge of town
and a boy came out at the front door of a house and stood on a little
porch staring at them with blank questioning eyes. There was a large
dog asleep beneath a cherry tree beside another house a little further
along. He let the carriage get almost past before he moved. John
Webster watched the dog. “Shall I get up from this comfortable place
and make a fuss about that carriage or shall I not?” the dog seemed to
be asking himself. Then he sprang up and racing madly along the road
began barking at the horses. The man on the front seat struck at him
with the whip. “I suppose he made up his mind he had to do it, that it
was the proper thing to do,” John Webster said. His bride and her uncle
both looked at him with questioning eyes. “Eh, what’s that? What’d you
say?” the uncle asked, but got no answer. John Webster felt suddenly
embarrassed. “I was only speaking of the dog,” he said presently. One
had to make some kind of explanation. The rest of the ride was taken in
silence.
* * * * *
It was late on that same afternoon that the thing to which he had
been looking forward with so much hope and doubt came to a kind of
consummation.
Her uncle’s farmhouse, a large comfortable white frame building, stood
on the bank of a river in a narrow green valley and hills rose up
before and behind it. In the afternoon young Webster and his bride
walked past the barn, back of the house, and got into a lane that ran
beside an orchard. Then they crawled over a fence and crossing a field
got into a wood that led up the hillside. There was another meadow
above and then another wood that covered the top of the hill quite
completely.
It was a warm day and they tried to talk as they went along, but did
not succeed very well. Now and then she looked at him shyly, as though
to say, “The road we are thinking of taking in life is very dangerous.
Are you quite sure you are a safe guide?”
Well he had felt her questioning and was in doubt about the answer to
be made. It would have been better no doubt had the question been asked
and answered long ago. When they came to a narrow path in the wood, he
let her walk ahead and then he could look at her quite boldly. There
was fear in him too. “Our self-consciousness is going to make us muddle
everything,” he thought. It was hard to remember whether he really had
thought anything so definite at that time. He was afraid. Her back was
very straight and once when she stooped to pass under the limb of an
overhanging tree, her long slender body going down and up made a very
lovely gesture. A lump came into his throat.
He tried to keep his mind fixed on little things. There had been rain
a day or two before and little mushrooms grew beside the path. In one
spot there was a whole army of them, very graceful and with their
caps touched with tender splashes of color. He picked one of them.
How strangely pungent to the nostrils. He wanted to eat it, but she
was frightened and protested. “Don’t,” she said. “It may be a poison
one.” For a moment it seemed they might, after all, get acquainted.
She looked directly at him. It was odd. They had not yet called each
other endearing names. They did not address each other by any name at
all. “Don’t eat it,” she said. “All right, but isn’t it tempting and
lovely?” he answered. They looked at each other for a moment and then
she blushed, after which they went on again along the path.
They had got out upon the hill where they could look back over the
valley and she sat with her back against a tree. Spring had passed,
but, as they walked through the wood, there had been, on all sides, a
sense of new growth springing up. Little green, pale green things were
just pushing their way up from among the dead brown leaves and out
of the black ground and on trees and bushes there was a sense of new
growth too. Were new leaves coming or had the old leaves but begun to
stand up a little straighter and more firmly because they had been
refreshed? It was a thing to think about too, when one was puzzled and
had before one a question wanting answering that one could not answer.
They were on the hill now and as he lay at her feet he did not need
to look at her, but could look down across the valley. She might be
looking at him and having thoughts just as he was, but that was her own
affair. One did well enough to have one’s own thoughts, straighten out
one’s own matters. The rain that had freshened everything had stirred
up many new smells in the wood. How fortunate there was no wind. The
smells were not blown away, but were lying low, like a soft blanket
over everything. The ground had a fragrance of its own and with it was
blended the fragrance of decaying leaves and of animals too. There was
a path along the top of the hill along which sheep sometimes went.
Little piles of sheep-droppings were lying in the hard path back of
the tree where she sat. He did not turn to look, but knew they were
there. The sheep-droppings were like marbles. It was good to feel that
within the compass of his love of smells he could include all life,
even the excretions of life. Somewhere in the wood there was a kind of
flowering tree. It couldn’t be far away. The fragrance from it mingled
with all the other smells floating over the hillside. The trees were
calling to the bees and insects who were answering with mad eagerness.
They flew swiftly along, in the air over John Webster’s head, over her
head too. One put off other things to play with thoughts. One pitched
little thoughts into the air idly, like boys at play, pitched and then
caught them again. After a while, when the proper time came, there
would be a crisis come into the lives of John Webster and the woman he
had married, but now one played with thoughts. One pitched the thoughts
into the air and caught them again.
People went about knowing the fragrance of flowers and a few other
things, spices and the like, they had been told by the poets were
fragrant. Could walls be erected about smells too? Was there not a
Frenchman once who wrote a poem regarding the fragrance of the armpits
of women? Was that something he had heard talked about among the young
men at school or was it just a fool idea that had come into his own
head?
The thing was to get the sense of the fragrance of all things, of
earth, plants, peoples, animals, insects, all together in the mind. One
could weave a golden mantle to spread over the earth and over people.
The strong animal smells, taken with the smell of pine trees and all
such heavy odors, would give the mantle strength to wear well. Then
upon the basis of that strength one could turn one’s fancy loose. Now
was the time for all the minor poets to come running. On the solid
basis John Webster’s fancy had built, they could weave all manner of
designs, using all the smells their less sturdy nostrils dare receive,
the smell of violets growing beside woodland paths, of little fragile
mushrooms, of honey dripping from the sacks under the bellies of
insects, of the hair of maidens fresh come from the bath.
* * * * *
After all John Webster, a man of the middle age, was sitting on a bed
with his daughter talking of an experience of his youth. In spite of
himself he was giving the tale of that experience a curiously perverted
twist. No doubt he was lying to his daughter. Had that young man on the
hillside, in the long ago, had the many and complicated feelings with
which he was now endowing him?
Now and then he stopped talking and shook his head while a smile played
across his face.
“How firmly now things were arranged between himself and his daughter.
There was no doubt a miracle had been wrought.”
He even fancied she knew he was lying, that he was throwing a certain
mantle of romance over the experience of his young manhood, but he
fancied she knew also that it was only by lying to the limit he could
come at truth.
* * * * *
Now one was back in fancy on the hillside again. There was an opening
among the trees and through this one looked, seeing the whole valley
below. There was a large town down the river somewhere, not the town
where he and his bride had got off the train, but a much larger one
with factories. Some people had come up the river in boats from the
town and were preparing to have a picnic in a grove of trees, upstream
and across the river from her uncle’s house.
There were both men and women in the party and the women had on white
dresses. It was charming to watch them moving in and out among the
green trees and one of them came down to the river’s edge and, putting
one foot in a boat that was drawn up on the bank, and with the other on
the bank itself, she leaned over to fill a pitcher with water. There
was the woman and her reflection in the water, seen faintly, even from
this distance. There was a going together and a coming apart. The two
white figures opened and closed like a delicately tinted shell.
Young Webster on the hill had not looked at his bride and they were
both silent, but he was becoming almost insanely excited. Was she
thinking the thoughts he was thinking? Had her nature also opened
itself, as had his?
It was becoming impossible to keep things straight in the mind. What
was he thinking and what was she thinking and feeling? Far away in the
wood across the river the white figures of women were moving about
among trees. The men of the picnic party, with their darker clothes
could no longer be discerned. One no longer thought of them. The
white-clad women’s figures were being woven in and out among the sturdy
upstanding trunks of the trees.
There was a woman on the hill behind him and she was his bride. Perhaps
she was having just such thoughts as himself. That must be true. She
was a woman and young and she would be afraid, but there came a time
when fear must be put aside. One was a male and at the proper time went
toward the female and took her. There was a kind of cruelty in nature
and at the proper time that cruelty became a part of one’s manhood.
He closed his eyes and rolling over to his belly got to his hands and
knees.
If one stayed longer lying quietly at her feet there would be a kind
of insanity. Already there was too much anarchy within. “At the moment
of death all of life passes before a man.” What a silly notion. “What
about the moment of the coming of life?”
He was on his knees like an animal, looking at the ground, not yet
looking at her. With all the strength of his being he tried to tell his
daughter of the meaning of that moment in his life.
“How shall I say how I felt? Perhaps I should have been a painter or
a singer. My eyes were closed and within myself were all the sights,
sounds, smells, feeling of the world of the valley into which I had
been looking. Within myself I comprehended all things.
“Things came in flashes, in colors. First there were the yellows, the
golden shining yellow things, not yet born. The yellows were little
streaks of shining color buried down with the dark blues and blacks
of the soil. The yellows were things not yet born, not yet come into
the light. They were yellow because they were not yet green. Soon the
yellows would combine with the dark colors in the earth and spring
forth into a world of color. There would be a sea of color, running in
waves, splashing over everything. Spring would come, within the earth,
within myself too.”
Birds were flying in the air over a river, and young Webster, with his
eyes closed, crouched before the woman, was himself the birds in the
air, the air itself, and the fishes in the river below. It seemed to
him now that if he were to open his eyes and look back, down into the
valley, he could see, even from that great distance, the movements of
the fins of fishes in the waters of the river far below.
Well he had better not open his eyes now. Once he had looked into a
woman’s eyes and she had come to him like a swimmer coming up out of
the sea, but then something had happened to spoil everything. He crept
toward her. Now she had begun to protest. “Don’t,” she said, “I’m
afraid.”
It would not do to stop now. There was a time came when one must not
stop. He threw his arms out, took her protesting and crying into his
arms.