“Why must one commit rape, rape of the conscious, rape of the
unconscious?”
John Webster sprang up from beside his daughter and then whirled
quickly about. A word had come out of the body of his wife sitting
unobserved on the floor behind him. “Don’t,” she said and then, after
opening and closing her mouth twice, ineffectually, repeated the
word. “Don’t, don’t,” she said again. The words seemed to be forcing
themselves through her lips. Her body lumped down there on the floor
had become just a strangely misshapen bundle of flesh and bones.
She was pale, of a pasty paleness.
John Webster had jumped off the bed as a dog, lying asleep in the dust
of a roadway, might have leaped out of the path of a rapidly moving
vehicle.
The devil! His mind was jerked back into the present swiftly,
violently. A moment before he had been with a young woman on a hillside
above a wide sun-washed valley and had been making love to her. The
love-making had not been a success. It had turned out badly. There
had been a tall slender girl who had submitted her body to a man, but
who had been all the time terribly frightened and beset by a sense
of guilt and shame. After the love-making she had cried, not with an
excess of tenderness, but because she had felt unclean. They had walked
down the hillside later and she had tried to tell him how she felt.
Then he also had begun to feel mean and unclean. Tears had come into
his own eyes. He had thought she must be right. What she said almost
every one said. After all man was not an animal. Man was a conscious
thing trying to struggle upward out of animalism. He had tried to
think everything out that same night as he, for the first time, lay in
bed beside his wife, and he had come to certain conclusions. She was
no doubt right in her belief that there were certain impulses in men
that had better be subjected to the power of the will. If one just let
oneself go one became no better than a beast.
He had tried hard to think everything out clearly. What she had wanted
was that there be no love-making between them except for the purpose of
breeding children. If one went about the business of bringing children
into the world, making new citizens for the state and all that, then
one could feel a certain dignity in love-making. She had tried to
explain how humiliated and mean she had felt that day when he had come
into her naked presence. For the first time they had talked of that.
It had been made ten times, a thousand times worse because he had
come the second time and the others had seen him. The clean moment of
their relationship was denied with determined insistence. After that
had happened she could not bear to remain in the company of her girl
friend and, as for her friend’s brother--well, how could she ever look
into his face again? Whenever he looked at her he would be seeing her
not properly clothed as she should be, but shamelessly naked and on a
bed with a naked man holding her in his arms. She had been compelled
to get out of the house, go home at once, and of course, when she
got home, every one wondered what had happened that her visit had
come to such an abrupt end. The trouble was that when her mother was
questioning her, on the day after her arrival home, she suddenly burst
into tears.
What they thought after that she did not know. The truth was that she
had begun to be afraid of every one’s thoughts. When she went into her
bedroom at night she was almost ashamed to look at her own body and had
got into the habit of undressing in the darkness. Her mother was always
dropping remarks. “Did your coming home so suddenly have anything to do
with the young man in that house?”
After she had come home, and because she began to feel so ashamed of
herself in the presence of other people, she had decided she would join
a church, a decision that had pleased her father, who was a devout
church member. The whole incident had in fact drawn her and her father
closer together. Perhaps that was because, unlike her mother, he never
bothered her with embarrassing questions.
Anyway she had made up her mind that if she ever married she would try
to make her marriage a pure thing, based on comradeship, and she had
felt that after all she must marry John Webster if he ever repeated his
proposal of marriage. After what had happened that was the only right
thing for them both to do and now that they were married it would be
right also for them to try and make up for the past by leading clean
pure lives and trying never to give way to the animal impulses that
shocked and frightened people.
* * * * *
John Webster was standing facing his wife and daughter and his mind had
gone back to the first night in bed with his wife and to the many other
nights they had spent together. On that first night, long ago, when she
lay talking to him, the moonlight came in through a window and fell on
her face. She had been very beautiful at the moment. Now that he no
longer approached her, afire with passion, but lay quietly beside her,
with her body drawn a little away and with his arm about her shoulders,
she was not afraid of him and occasionally put up her hand and touched
his face.
The truth was that he had got the notion into his head that there was
in her a kind of spiritual power divorced altogether from the flesh.
Outside the house, along the river banks, frogs were calling their
throaty calls and once in the night some strange weird call came out of
the air. That must have been some night bird, perhaps a loon. The sound
wasn’t a call, really. It was a kind of wild laugh. From another part
of the house, on the same floor there came the sound of her uncle’s
snoring.
The two people had slept little. There was so much to say. After all
they were hardly acquainted. What he thought at the time was that
she wasn’t a woman after all. She was a child. Something dreadful
had happened to the child and he was to blame and now that she was
his wife he would try hard to make everything all right. If passion
frightened her he would subdue his passions. A thought had got into his
head that had stayed there for years. It was that spiritual love was
stronger and purer than physical love, that they were two different
and distinct things. He had felt quite exalted when that notion came.
He wondered now, as he stood looking down at the figure of his wife,
what had happened that the notion at one time so strong in him, had
not enabled him or her to get happiness together. One said the words
and then, after all, they did not mean anything. They were trick words
of the sort that were always fooling people, forcing people into false
positions. He had come to hate such words. “Now I accept the flesh
first, all flesh,” he thought vaguely, still looking down at her.
He turned and stepped across the room to look in a glass. The flame
of the candles made light enough so that he could see himself quite
distinctly. It was a rather puzzling notion, but the truth was, that
every time he had looked at his wife during the last few weeks he had
wanted to run at once and look at himself in a glass. He had wanted to
assure himself of something. The tall slender girl who had once lain
beside him in a bed, with the moonlight falling on her face, had become
the heavy inert woman now in the room with him, the woman who was at
this moment crouched on the floor in the doorway at the foot of the
bed. How much had he become like that?
One didn’t escape animalism so easily. Now the woman on the floor was
so much more like an animal than himself. Perhaps the very sins he had
committed, his shamefaced running off sometimes to other women in the
cities, had saved him. “That would be a pronouncement to throw into the
teeth of the good pure people if it were true,” he thought with a quick
inner throb of satisfaction.
The woman on the floor was like a heavy animal that had suddenly become
very ill. He stepped back to the bed and looked at her with a queer
impersonal light in his eyes. She had difficulty holding up her head.
The light from the candles, cut off from her submerged body by the bed
itself shone full on her face and shoulders. The rest of her body was
buried in a kind of darkness. His mind remained the alert swift thing
it had been ever since he had found Natalie. In a moment now he could
do more thinking than he had done before in a year. If he ever became
a writer, as he sometimes thought maybe he would, after he had gone
away with Natalie, he would never want for things to write about. If
one kept the lid off the well of thinking within oneself, let the well
empty itself, let the mind consciously think any thoughts that came to
it, accepted all thinking, all imaginings, as one accepted the flesh
of people, animals, birds, trees, plants, one might live a hundred or a
thousand lives in one life. To be sure it was absurd to go stretching
things too much, but one could at least play with the notion that one
could become something more than just one individual man and woman
living one narrow circumscribed life. One could tear down all walls
and fences and walk in and out of many people, become many people. One
might in oneself become a whole town full of people, a city, a nation.
The thing to bear in mind however now, at this moment, was the woman on
the floor, the woman whose voice had, but a moment before called out
again the word her lips had always been saying to him.
“Don’t! Don’t! Let’s not, John! Not now, John!” What persistent denial,
of himself, perhaps of herself, too, there had been.
It was rather absurdly cruel how impersonal he felt toward her. It was
likely few people in the world ever realized what depths of cruelty lay
sleeping within themselves. All the things that came out of the well of
thinking within oneself, when one jerked off the lid, were not easy to
accept as a part of oneself.
As for the woman on the floor, if one let one’s fancy go, one could
stand as he was now doing, looking directly at the woman, and could
think the most absurdly inconsequential thoughts.
For one thing one could have the fancy that the darkness in which her
body was submerged, because of the accident that the light from the
candles did not fall on it, was the sea of silence into which she had,
all through these years, been sinking herself deeper and deeper.
And the sea of silence was just another and fancier name for something
else, for that deep well within all men and women, of which he had been
thinking so much during the last few weeks.
The woman who had been his wife, all people for that matter, spent
their entire lives sinking themselves deeper and deeper into that sea.
If one wanted to let oneself get more and more fancy about the matter,
indulge in a kind of drunken debauch of fancy, as it were, one could
in a half playful mood jump over some invisible line and say that the
sea of silence into which people were always so intent on sinking
themselves was in reality death. There was a race toward the goal of
death between the mind and body and almost always the mind arrived
first.
The race began in childhood and never stopped until either the body
or mind had worn itself out and stopped working. Every one carried
about, all the time, within himself life and death. There were two
Gods sitting on two thrones. One could worship either, but in general
mankind had preferred kneeling before death.
The god of denial had won the victory. To reach his throne-room one
went through long hallways of evasion. That was the road to his
throne-room, the road of evasion. One twisted and turned, felt one’s
way in the darkness. There were no sudden and blinding flashes of light.
John Webster had got a notion regarding his wife. It was sure the
heavy inert woman, now looking up into his face from the darkness of
the floor, unable to speak to him, had little or nothing to do with
a slender girl he had once married. For one thing how utterly unlike
they were physically. It wasn’t the same woman at all. He could see
that. Anyone who had looked at the two women could see that they had
really nothing physically in common. But did she know that, had she
ever thought of that, had she been, in any but a very superficial way,
aware of the changes that had taken place in her? He decided she had
not. There was a kind of blindness common to almost all people. The
thing called beauty, men sought in woman, and that women, although
they did not speak of it so often, were also looking for in men wasn’t
a thing that remained. When it existed at all it came to people only
in flashes. One came into the presence of another and the flash came.
How confusing that was. Strange things like marriages followed. “Until
death do us part.” Well, that was all right too. One had to try to get
things straight if one could. When one clutched at the thing called
beauty in another, death always came, bobbing its head up too.
How many marriages among peoples! John Webster’s mind was flying about.
He stood looking at the woman who, although they had separated long
before--they had really and irrevocably separated one day on a hill
above a valley in the state of Kentucky--was still in an odd way bound
to him, and there was another woman who was his daughter in the same
room. The daughter stood beside him. He could put out his hand and
touch her. She was not looking at himself or her mother, but at the
floor. What was she thinking? What thoughts had he stirred up in her?
What would be the result to her of the events of the night? There were
things he couldn’t answer, that he had to leave on the knees of the
gods.
His mind was racing, racing. There were certain men he had always been
seeing in the world. Usually they belonged to a class known as fellows
with shaky reputations. What had happened to them? There were men who
walked through life with a certain easy grace of manner. In some way
they were beyond good and evil, stood outside the influences that made
or unmade other men. John Webster had seen a few such men and had never
been able to forget them. Now they passed, as in a procession, before
his mind’s eyes.
There was an old man with a white beard who carried a heavy walking
stick and was followed by a dog. He had broad shoulders and walked with
a certain stride. John Webster had encountered the man once, as he
himself drove on a dusty country road. Who was the fellow? Where was
he going? There was about him a certain air. “Go to the devil then,”
his manner seemed to say. “I’m a man walking here. Within me there is
kingship. Go prattle of democracy and equality if you will, worry your
silly heads about a life after death, make up little lies to cheer your
way in the darkness, but get out of my way. I walk in the light.”
It might be all just a silly notion, what John Webster was now thinking
about an old man he had once met walking on a country road. It was
certain he remembered the figure with extraordinary sharpness. He had
stopped his horse to gaze after the old man, who had not even bothered
to turn and look at him. Well the old man had walked with a kingly
stride. Perhaps that was the reason he had attracted John Webster’s
attention.
Now he was thinking of him and a few other such men he had seen during
his life. There was one, a sailor who had come down to a wharf in the
city of Philadelphia. John Webster was in that city on business and
having nothing to do one afternoon had gone down to where the ships
were loaded and unloaded. A sailing vessel, a brigantine, lay at the
wharf, and the man he had seen came down to it. He had a bag over his
shoulder, containing perhaps his sea clothes. He was no doubt a sailor,
about to sail before the mast on the brigantine. What he did was simply
to come to the vessel’s side, throw his bag aboard, call to another man
who put his head out at a cabin door, and turning walked away.
But who had taught him to walk like that? The old Harry! Most men, and
women too, crept through life like sneaks. What gave them the sense
of being such underlings, such dogs? Were they constantly besmearing
themselves with accusations of guilt and, if that was it, what made
them do it?
The old man in the road, the sailor walking off along a street, a negro
prize fighter he had once seen driving an automobile, a gambler at the
horse races in a Southern city, who walked wearing a loud checkered
vest before a grandstand filled with people, a woman actress he had
once seen coming out at the stage entrance of a theatre, reprobates all
perhaps and all walking with the stride of kings.
What had given such men and women this respect for themselves? It was
apparent respect for self must be at the bottom of the matter. Perhaps
they hadn’t at all the sense of guilt and shame that had made of the
slender girl he had once married the heavy inarticulate woman now
squatted so grotesquely on the floor at his feet. One could imagine
some such person as he had in mind saying to himself, “Well, here I
am, you see, in the world. I have this long or short body, this brown
or yellow hair. My eyes are of a certain color. I eat food, I sleep at
night. I shall have to spend the whole of my life going about among
people in this body of mine. Shall I crawl before them or shall I walk
upright like a king? Shall I hate and fear my own body, this house in
which I must live, or shall I respect and care for it? Well, the devil!
The question is not worth answering. I shall take life as it offers
itself. For me the birds shall sing, the green spread itself over the
earth in the spring, for me the cherry tree in the orchard shall bloom.”
John Webster had a fanciful picture of the man of his fancy going into
a room. He closed the door. A row of candles stood on a mantle above a
fireplace. The man opened a box and took from it a silver crown. Then
he laughed softly and put the crown on his own head. “I crown myself a
man,” he said.
* * * * *
It was amazing. One was in a room looking at a woman who had been one’s
wife, and one was about to set out on a journey and would not see her
again. Of a sudden there was a blinding rush of thoughts. One’s fancy
played far and wide. One seemed to have been standing in one spot
thinking thoughts for hours, but in reality only a few seconds had
passed since the voice of his wife, calling out that word, “don’t,” had
interrupted his own voice telling a tale of an ordinary unsuccessful
marriage.
The thing now was to keep his daughter in mind. He had better get her
out of the room now. She was moving toward the door to her own room and
in a moment would be gone. He turned away from the white-faced woman on
the floor and watched his daughter. Now his own body was thrust between
the bodies of the two women. They could not see each other.
There was a story of a marriage he had not finished, would never finish
telling now, but in time his daughter would come to understand what the
end of the story must inevitably be.
There was something that should be thought of now. His daughter was
going out of his presence. Perhaps he would never see her again. One
continually dramatized life, made a play of it. That was inevitable.
Every day of one’s life consisted of a series of little dramas and one
was always casting oneself for an important part in the performance.
It was annoying to forget one’s lines, not to walk out upon the stage
when one had got one’s cue. Nero fiddled when Rome was burning. He had
forgotten what part he had assigned to himself and so fiddled in order
not to give himself away. Perhaps he had intended making an ordinary
politician’s speech about a city rising again from the flames.
Blood of the saints! Would his daughter walk calmly out of the room
without turning at the door? What had he yet intended saying to her? He
was growing a little nervous and upset.
* * * * *
His daughter was standing in the doorway leading to her own room,
looking at him, and there was a kind of intense half-insane mood in
her as all evening there had been in him. He had infected her with
something out of himself. After all there had been what he had wanted,
a real marriage. After this evening the younger woman could never be
what she might have been, had this evening not happened. Now he knew
what he wanted for her. Those men, whose figures had just visited his
fancy, the race-track man, the old man in the road, the sailor on the
docks, there was a thing they had got hold of he had wanted her to have
hold of too.
Now he was going away with Natalie, with his own woman, and he would
not see his daughter again. She was a young girl yet, really. All of
womanhood lay before her.
“I’m damned. I’m crazy as a loon,” he thought. He had suddenly a
ridiculous desire to begin singing a silly refrain that had just come
into his head.
Diddle de di do,
Diddle de di do,
Chinaberries grow on a Chinaberry tree.
Diddle de di do.
And then his fingers, fumbling about in his pockets, came upon the
thing he had unconsciously been looking for. He clutched it, half
convulsively, and went toward his daughter, holding it between his
thumb and finger.
* * * * *
On the afternoon of the day, on which he had first found his way in at
the door of Natalie’s house, and when he had become almost distracted
from much thinking, he had found a bright little stone on the railroad
track near his factory.
When one tried to think his way along a too difficult road one was
likely, at any moment, to get lost. One went up some dark lonely road
and then, becoming frightened, one became at the same time shrill and
distracted. There were things to be done, but one could do nothing.
For example, and at the most vital moment in life, one might spoil
everything by beginning to sing a silly song. Others would throw up
their hands. “He’s crazy,” they would say, as though such a saying ever
meant anything at all.
Well, once before, he had been, as he was now, at just this moment.
Too much thinking had upset him. The door of Natalie’s house had been
opened and he had been afraid to enter. He had planned to run away from
her, go to the city and get drunk and write her a letter telling her
to go away to where he would not have to see her again. He had thought
he preferred to walk in loneliness and darkness, to take the road of
evasion to the throne-room of the god Death.
And at the moment all this was going on his eye had caught the glint of
a little green stone lying among all the gray meaningless stones in the
gravel bed of a railroad track. That was in the late afternoon and the
sun’s rays had been caught and reflected by the little stone.
He had picked it up and the simple act of doing so had broken a kind
of absurd determination within him. His fancy, unable at the moment to
play over the facts of his life, had played over the stone. A man’s
fancy, the creative thing within him, was in reality intended to be a
healing thing, a supplementary and healing influence to the working
of the mind. Men sometimes did a thing they called, “going it blind,”
and at such moments did the least blind acts of their whole lives. The
truth was that the mind working alone was but a one-sided, maimed thing.
“Hito, tito, there’s no use my trying to become a philosopher.” John
Webster was stepping toward his daughter who was waiting for him to say
or do something that had not yet been done. Now he was quite all right
again. Some minute re-adjustment had taken place inside himself as it
had on so many other occasions within the last few weeks.
Something like a gay mood had come over him. “In one evening I have
managed to plunge pretty deeply down into the sea of life,” he thought.
He became a little vain. There he was, a man of the middle class, who
had lived all his life in a Wisconsin industrial town. But a few weeks
before he had been but a colorless fellow in an almost altogether
colorless world. For years he had been going along, just so, day after
day, week after week, year after year, going along streets, passing
people in the streets, picking his feet up and setting them down, thump
thump, eating food, sleeping, borrowing money at banks, dictating
letters in offices, going along, thump thump, not daring to think or
feel much of anything at all.
Now he could think more thoughts, have more fancies, while he took
three or four steps across a room toward his daughter, than he had
sometimes dared do in a whole year of his former life. There was a
picture of himself in his fancy now that he liked.
In the fanciful picture he had climbed up to a high place above the sea
and had taken off his clothes. Then he had run to the end of a cliff
and had leaped off into space. His body, his own white body, the same
body in which he had been living all through these dead years, was now
making a long graceful arched curve against a blue sky.
That was rather nice too. It made a picture for the mind to take hold
of and it was pleasant to think of one’s body as making sharp striking
pictures.
He had plunged far down into the sea of lives, into the clear warm
still sea of Natalie’s life, into the heavy salt dead sea of his wife’s
life, into the swiftly running young river of life that was in his
daughter Jane.
“I’m a great little mixer-up of figures of speech, but at the same time
I’m a great little swimmer in seas,” he said aloud to his daughter.
Well, he had better be a little careful too. Her eyes were becoming
puzzled again. It would take a long time for one, living with another,
to become used to the sight of things jerked suddenly up out of the
wells of thought within oneself and he and his daughter would perhaps
never live together again.
He looked at the little stone held so firmly between his thumb and
finger. It would be better to keep his mind fastened upon that now.
It was a small, a minute thing, but one could fancy it looming large
on the surface of a calm sea. His daughter’s life was a river running
down to the sea of life. She would want something to which she could
cling when she had been cast out into the sea. What an absurd notion. A
little green stone would not float in the sea. It would sink. He smiled
knowingly.
There was the little stone held before him, in his extended hand.
He had picked it up on a railroad track one day and had indulged in
fancies concerning it and the fancies had healed him. By indulging in
fancies concerning inanimate objects, one in a strange way glorified
them. For example a man might go to live in a room. There was a picture
in a frame on a wall, the walls of a room, an old desk, two candles
under a Virgin, and a man’s fancy made the place a sacred place. All
the art of life perhaps consisted in just letting the fancy wash over
and color the facts of life.
The light from the two candles under the Virgin fell on the stone he
held before him. It was about the size and shape of a small bean and
was dark green in color. In certain lights its color changed swiftly.
There was a flash of yellow green as of new grown things just coming
out of the ground and then that faded away and the stone became
altogether a dark lusty green, as of the leaves of oak trees in the
late summer, one could fancy.
How clearly John Webster had remembered everything now. The stone
he had found on the railroad track had been lost by a woman who was
travelling west. The woman had worn it among other stones in a brooch
at her throat. He remembered how his imagination had created her at the
moment.
Or had it been set in a ring and worn on her finger?
Things were a bit mixed. Now he saw the woman quite clearly, as he
had seen her in fancy once before, but she was not on a train, but
was standing on a hill. It was winter and the hill was coated with
a light blanket of snow and below the hill, in a valley, was a wide
river covered with a shining sheet of ice. A man, a middle-aged,
rather heavy-looking man stood beside the woman and she was pointing
at something in the distance. The stone was set in a ring worn on the
extended finger.
Now everything became very clear to John Webster. He knew now what he
wanted. The woman on the hill was one of the strange people, like the
sailor who had come down to the ship, the old man in the road, the
actress coming out of the stage door of the theatre, one of the people
who had crowned themselves with the crown of life.
He stepped to his daughter and, taking her hand, opened it and laid the
little stone on her palm. Then he carefully closed her fingers until
her hand was a fist.
He smiled, a knowing little smile and looked into her eyes. “Well, now
Jane, it’s pretty hard to tell you what I’m thinking,” he said. “You
see, there are a lot of things in me I can’t get out without time and
now I’m going away. I want to give you something.”
He hesitated. “This stone,” he began again, “it’s something for you to
cling to perhaps, yes, that’s it. In moments of doubt cling to it. When
you become almost distracted and do not know what to do hold it in your
hand.”
He turned his head and his eyes seemed to be taking in the room slowly,
carefully, as though not wanting to forget anything that made a part of
the picture in which he and his daughter were now the central figures.
“As a matter of fact,” he began again, “a woman, a beautiful woman
might, you see, hold many jewels in her hand. She might have many
loves, you see, and the jewels might be the jewels of experience, the
challenges of life she had met, eh?”
John Webster seemed to be playing some fanciful game with his daughter,
but now she was no longer frightened, as when she had first come into
the room, or puzzled as she had been but a moment before. She was
absorbed in what he was saying. The woman crouched on the floor behind
her father was forgotten.
“There’s one thing I shall have to do before I go away. I’ve got to
give you a name for this little stone,” he said, still smiling. Opening
her hand again he took it out and went and stood for a moment holding
it before one of the candles. Then he returned to her and again put it
into her hand.
“It is from your father, but he is giving it to you at the moment
when he is no longer being your father and has begun to love you as a
woman. Well, I guess you’d better cling to it, Jane. You’ll need it,
God knows. If you want a name for it call it the ‘Jewel of Life,’” he
said and then, as though he had already forgotten the incident he put
his hand on her arm and pushing her gently through the door closed it
behind her.