There still remained something for John Webster to do in the room.
When his daughter had gone he picked up his bag and went out into the
hallway as though about to leave without more words to the wife, who
still sat on the floor with her head hanging down, as though unaware of
any life about her.
When he had got into the hallway and had closed the door he set his
bag down and came back. As he stood within the room, with the knob
still held in his hand, he heard a noise on the floor below. “That’s
Katherine. What’s she doing up at this time of the night?” he thought.
He took out his watch and went nearer the burning candles. It was
fifteen minutes to three. “We’ll catch the early morning train at four
all right,” he thought.
There was his wife, or rather the woman who for so long a time had
been his wife, on the floor at the foot of the bed. Now her eyes were
looking directly at him. Still the eyes had nothing to say. They
did not even plead with him. There was in them something that was
hopelessly puzzled. If the events that had transpired in the room that
night had torn the lid off the well she carried about within herself
she had managed to clamp it back on again. Now perhaps the lid would
never again stir from its place. John Webster felt peculiarly like he
fancied an undertaker might feel on being called at night into the
presence of a dead body.
“The devil! Such fellows perhaps had no such feelings.” Quite
unconscious of what he was doing he took out a cigarette and lit it. He
felt strangely impersonal; like one watching a rehearsal for some play
in which one is not particularly interested. “It’s a time of death all
right,” he thought. “The woman is dying. I can’t say whether or not her
body is dying but there’s something within her that has already died.”
He wondered if he had killed her, but had no sense of guilt in the
matter.
He went to stand at the foot of the bed and, putting his hand on the
railing, leaned over to look at her.
It was a time of darkness. A shiver ran through his body and dark
thoughts like flocks of blackbirds flew across the field of his fancy.
“The devil! There’s a hell too! There’s such a thing as death, as well
as such a thing as life,” he told himself. Here was however an amazing
and quite interesting fact too. It had taken a long time and much grim
determination for the woman on the floor before him to find her way
along the road to the throne-room of death. “Perhaps no one, while
there is life within him to lift the lid, ever becomes quite submerged
in the swamp of decaying flesh,” he thought.
Thoughts stirred within John Webster that had not come to his mind in
years. As a young man in college he must really have been more alive
than he knew at the time. Things he had heard discussed by other young
men, fellows who had a taste for literature, and that he had read in
the books, the reading of which were a part of his duties, had all
through the last few weeks been coming back to his mind. “One might
almost think I had followed such things all my life,” he thought.
The poet Dante, Milton, with his “Paradise Lost,” the Hebrew poets of
the older Testaments, all such fellows must at some time in their lives
have seen what he was seeing at just this moment.
There was a woman on the floor before him and her eyes were looking
directly into his. All evening there had been something struggling
within her, something that wanted to come out to him and to her
daughter. Now the struggle was at an end. There was surrender. He kept
looking down at her with a strange fixed stare in his own eyes.
“It’s too late. It didn’t work,” he said slowly. He did not say the
words aloud, but whispered them.
A new thought came. All through his life with this woman there had
been a notion to which he had clung. It had been a kind of beacon that
now he felt had from the first led him into a false trail. He had in
some way picked up the notion from others about him. It was peculiarly
an American notion, always being indirectly repeated in newspapers,
magazines and books. Back of it was an insane, wishy-washy philosophy
of life. “All things work together for good. God’s in his Heaven, all’s
right with the world. All men are created free and equal.”
“What an ungodly lot of noisy meaningless sayings drummed into the ears
of men and women trying to live their lives!”
A great disgust swept over him. “Well, there’s no use my staying here
any longer. My life in this house has come to an end,” he thought.
He walked to the door and when he had opened it turned again. “Good
night and good bye,” he said as cheerfully as though he were just
leaving the house in the morning for a day at the factory.
And then the sound of the door closing made a sharp jarring break in
the silence of the house.