I
The spirit of death was no doubt lurking in the Webster house. Jane
Webster felt its presence. She had suddenly been made aware of the
possibility of feeling, within herself, many unspoken, unannounced
things. When her father had put his hand on her arm and had pushed her
back into the darkness behind the closed door of her own room, she
had gone directly to her bed and had thrown herself down on top of
the bed covers. Now she lay clutching the little stone he had given
her. How glad she was to have that something to clutch. Her fingers
pressed against it so that it had already become imbedded in the flesh
of her palm. If her life had been, until this evening, a quiet river,
running down through fields toward the sea of life, it would be that
no more. Now the river had come into a dark stony country. It ran now
along rocky passageways, between high dark cliffs. What things might
not now happen to her on the morrow, on the day after to-morrow. Her
father was going away with a strange woman. There would be a scandal in
the town. All her young women and men friends would look at her with a
question in their eyes. Perhaps they would pity her. Her spirit rose
up and the thought made her squirm with anger. It was odd, but it was
nevertheless true, that she had no particular feeling of sympathy for
her mother. Her father had managed to bring himself close to her. In a
queer way she understood what he was going to do, why he was doing it.
She kept seeing the naked figure of the man striding up and down before
her. There had always, since she could remember, been in her a kind of
curiosity regarding men’s bodies.
Once or twice, with young girls she knew well, there had been talk of
the matter, guarded, half-frightened talk. “A man was so and so. It was
quite dreadful what happened when one grew up and got married.” One
of the girls had seen something. There was a man lived near her, on
the same street, and he wasn’t always careful about pulling the shade
to his bedroom window. One summer afternoon the girl was in her room,
lying on her bed, and the man came into his room and took off all his
clothes. He was up to some foolishness. There was a looking glass and
he pranced up and down before it. He must have been pretending he was
fighting the man he saw reflected in the glass as he kept advancing and
receding and making the funniest movements with his body and arms. He
lunged and scowled and struck out with his fists and then jumped back,
as though the man in the glass had struck at him.
The girl on the bed had seen everything, all the man’s body. At first
she thought she would run out of the room and then she made up her mind
to stay. Well, she didn’t want her mother to know what she had seen so
she got up softly and crept along the floor to lock the door, so that
her mother or a servant could not come suddenly in. What the girl had
thought was that one had to find out things sometime and might as well
take the chance that offered. It was dreadful and she had been unable
to sleep for two or three nights after it happened but just the same
she was glad she had looked. One couldn’t always be a ninny and not
know anything.
* * * * *
As Jane Webster lay on the bed with her fingers pressed down upon the
stone her father had given her, the girl, talking of the naked man she
had seen in the next house, seemed very young and unsophisticated. She
felt a kind of contempt for her. As for herself, she had been in the
actual presence of a naked man and the man had been seated beside her
and had put his arm about her. His hands had actually touched the flesh
of her own body. In the future, whatever happened, men would not be
to her as they had been, and as they were to the young women who had
been her friends. Now she would know about men as she hadn’t before and
would not be afraid of them. Of that she was glad. Her father’s going
away with a strange woman and the scandal that would no doubt spring
up in the town might ruin the quiet security in which she had always
lived but there had been much gained. Now the river that was her life
was running through dark passageways. It would perhaps be plunged down
over sharp jutting rocks.
It is, to be sure, false to credit Jane Webster with such definite
thoughts although later, when she remembered that evening her own mind
would begin to build a tower of romance about it. She lay on her bed
clutching the little stone and was frightened but at the same time
strangely glad.
Something had been torn open, perhaps the door out into life for her.
There was a feeling of death in the Webster house but in her was a new
sense of life and a glad new feeling of being unafraid of life.
* * * * *
Her father went down the stairway and into the dark hallway below,
carrying his bag and thinking of death too.
Now there was no end to the elaboration of thinking that went on within
John Webster. In the future he would be a weaver, weaving designs out
of threads of thought. Death was a thing, like life, that came to
people suddenly, that flashed in upon them. There were always the two
figures walking through towns and cities, going in and out of houses,
in and out of factories and stores, visiting lonely farmhouses at
night, walking in the light of day along gay city streets, getting on
and off trains, always on the move, appearing before people at the most
unexpected moments. It might be somewhat difficult for a man to learn
to go in and out of other people but for the two gods, Life and Death,
there was no difficulty.
There was a deep well within every man and woman and when Life came in
at the door of the house, that was the body, it reached down and tore
the heavy iron lid off the well. Dark hidden things, festering in the
well, came out and found expression for themselves, and the miracle
was that, expressed, they became often very beautiful. There was a
cleansing, a strange sort of renewal within the house of the man or
woman when the god Life had come in.
As for Death and his entrance, that was another matter. Death had many
strange tricks to play on people too. Sometimes he let their bodies
live for a long time while he satisfied himself with merely clamping
the lid down on the well within. It was as though he had said, “Well,
there is no great hurry about physical death. That will come as an
inevitable thing in its time. There is a much more ironic and subtle
game to be played against my opponent Life. I will fill the cities
with the damp fetid smell of death while the very dead think they are
still alive. As for myself, I am the crafty one. I am like a great and
subtile king, every one serves, while he talks only of freedom and
leads his subjects to think it is he who serves, instead of themselves.
I am like a great general, having always at his command, ready to
spring to arms at the least sign from himself, a vast army of men.”
* * * * *
John Webster went along the dark hallway below to the door leading into
the street and had put his hand on the knob of the outer door when,
instead of passing directly out, he stopped and reflected a moment.
He was somewhat vain of the thoughts he had been having. “Perhaps I am
a poet. Perhaps it’s only the poet who manages to keep the lid off the
well within and to keep alive up to the last minute before his body has
become worn out and he must get out of it,” he thought.
His vain mood passed and he turned and looked with a curious awareness
along the hallway. At the moment he was much like an animal, moving in
a dark wood, who, without hearing anything, is nevertheless aware there
is life stirring, perhaps waiting for him, near at hand. Could that be
the figure of a woman he saw, sitting within a few feet of him? There
was a small old-fashioned hat-rack in the hallway near the front door
and the lower part of it made a kind of seat on which one might sit.
One might fancy there was a woman sitting quietly there. She also had a
bag packed and it was sitting on the floor beside her.
The old Harry! John Webster was a little startled. Was his fancy
getting a little out of hand? There could be no doubt that there was a
woman sitting there, within a few feet of where he stood, with the knob
of the door in his hand.
He was tempted to put out his hand and see if he could touch the
woman’s face. He had been thinking of the two gods, Life and Death. No
doubt an illusion had been created in his mind. There was this deep
sense of a presence, sitting silently there, on the lower part of the
hat-rack. He stepped a little nearer and a shiver ran through his body.
There was a dark mass, making crudely the outlines of a human body, and
as he stood looking it seemed to him that a face began to be more and
more sharply outlined. The face, like the faces of two other women that
had, at important and unexpected moments in his life, floated up before
him, the face of a young naked girl on a bed in the long ago, the face
of Natalie Swartz, seen in the darkness of a field at night, as he lay
beside her--these faces had seemed to float up to him as though coming
toward him out of the deep waters of a sea.
He had, no doubt, let himself become a little overwrought. One did not
step lightly along the road he had been travelling. He had dared set
out upon the road of lives and had tried to take others with him. No
doubt he had been more worked up and excited than he had realized.
He put out his hand softly and touched the face that now appeared to
come floating toward him out of darkness. Then he sprang back, striking
his head against the opposite wall of the hallway. His fingers had
encountered warm flesh. There was a terrific sensation of something
whirling within his brain. Had he gone quite insane? A comforting
thought came, flashing across the confusion of his mind.
“Katherine,” he said in a loud voice. It was a kind of call out of
himself.
“Yes,” a woman’s voice answered quietly, “I wasn’t going to let you go
away without saying good bye.”
The woman, who had for so many years been a servant in his house,
explained her presence there in the darkness. “I’m sorry I startled
you,” she said. “I was just going to speak. You are going away and
so am I. I’ve got everything packed and ready. I went up the stairs
to-night and heard you say you were leaving so I came down and did my
own packing. It didn’t take me long. I didn’t have many things to pack.”
John Webster opened the front door and asked her to come outside with
him and for a few minutes they stood talking together on the steps that
led down from the front porch.
Outside the house he felt better. There was a kind of weakness,
following the fright inside, and for a moment he sat on the steps while
she stood waiting. Then the weakness passed and he arose. The night
was clear and dark. He breathed deeply and there was a great relief
in the thought that he would never again go through the door out of
which he had just come. He felt very young and strong. Soon now, there
would be a streak of light showing in the eastern sky. When he had got
Natalie and they had climbed aboard a train they would sit in the day
coach on the side that looked toward the East. It would be sweet to see
the new day come. His fancy ran ahead of his body and he saw himself
and the woman sitting together in the train. They would come into the
lighted day coach from the darkness outside, just before dawn came. In
the day coach people would have been asleep, folded up in the seats,
looking uncomfortable and tired. The air would be heavy with the stale
heaviness of breathing people confined in a close place. There would
be the heavy acrid smell of clothes, that had for a long time absorbed
the acids thrown off by bodies. He and Natalie would take the train as
far as Chicago and get off there. Perhaps they would get on another
train at once. It might be that they would stay in Chicago for a day or
two. There would be plans to make, long hours of talk perhaps. There
was a new life to begin now. He himself had to think what he wanted to
do with his days. It was odd. He and Natalie had made no plans beyond
getting on a train. Now for the first time his fancy tried to creep out
beyond that moment, to penetrate into the future.
It was fine that the night had turned out clear. One would hate to set
out, plodding off to the railroad station in the rain. How bright the
stars were in the early morning hours. Now Katherine was talking. It
would be well to listen to what she had to say.
She was telling him, with a kind of brutal frankness, that she did not
like Mrs. Webster, had never liked her, and that she had only stayed in
the house all these years as a servant because of himself.
He turned to look at her and her eyes were looking directly into his.
They were standing very close together, almost as close as lovers might
have stood, and, in the uncertain light, her eyes were strangely like
Natalie’s. In the darkness they appeared to glow as Natalie’s eyes had
seemed to glow on that night when he had lain with her in the field.
Was it only a chance that this new sense he had, of being able to
refresh and rebuild himself by loving others, by going in and out at
the open doors of the houses of others, had come to him through Natalie
instead of through this woman Katherine? “Huh, it’s marriage, every one
is seeking marriage, that’s what they are up to, seeking marriages,”
he told himself. There was something quiet and fine and strong in
Katherine as in Natalie. Perhaps had he, at some moment, during all
his dead unconscious years of living in the same house with her, but
happened to have been alone with Katherine in a room, and had the doors
to his own being opened at that moment, something might have transpired
between himself and this woman that would have started within just such
another revolution as the one through which he had been passing.
“That was possible too,” he decided. “People would gain a lot if they
could but learn to keep that thought in mind,” he thought. His fancy
played with the notion for a moment. One would walk through towns and
cities, in and out of houses, into and out of the presence of people
with a new feeling of respect if the notion should once get fixed in
people’s minds that, at any moment, anywhere, one was likely to come
upon the one who carried before him as on a golden tray, the gift of
life and the consciousness of life for his beloved. Well, there was
a picture to be borne in mind, a picture of a land and a people,
cleanly arrayed, a people bearing gifts, a people who had learned the
secret and the beauty of bestowing unasking love. Such a people would
inevitably keep their own persons clean and well arrayed. They would be
colorful people with a certain decorative sense, a certain awareness
of themselves in relation to the houses in which they lived and the
streets in which they walked. One could not love until one had cleansed
and a little beautified one’s own body and mind, until one had opened
the doors of one’s being and let in sun and air, until one had freed
one’s own mind and fancy.
John Webster fought with himself now, striving to push his own thoughts
and fancies into the background. There he was standing before the house
in which he had lived all these years so near the woman Katherine and
she was now talking to him of her own affairs. It was time now to give
heed to her.
She was explaining how that, for a week or more, she had been aware of
the fact that there was something wrong in the Webster household. One
did not need to have been very sharp to have realized that. It was in
the very air one breathed. The air of the house was heavy with it. As
for herself, well she had thought John Webster had fallen in love with
some woman other than Mrs. Webster. She had once been in love herself
and the man she had loved had been killed. She knew about love.
On that night, hearing voices in the room above, she had crept up the
stairs. She had not felt it was eavesdropping as she was directly
concerned. Long ago when she was in trouble she had heard voices
upstairs and she knew that in her hour of trouble John Webster had
stood by her.
After that time, long ago, she had made up her mind that as long as he
stayed in the house she would stay. One had to work and might as well
work as a servant, but she had never felt close to Mrs. Webster. When
one was a servant one sometimes had difficulty enough keeping up one’s
self-respect and the only way it could be done was by working for some
one who also had self-respect. That was something few people seemed to
understand. They thought people worked for money. As a matter of fact
no one really worked for money. People only thought they did, maybe. To
do so was to be a slave and she, Katherine, was no slave. She had money
saved and besides she had a brother who owned a farm in Minnesota, who
had several times written asking her to come and live with him. She
intended to go there now but would not live in her brother’s house. He
was married and she did not intend to push herself into his household.
As a matter of fact she would probably take the money she had saved and
buy a small farm of her own.
“Anyway you’re going away from this house to-night. I heard you say you
were going with another woman and I thought I would go too,” she said.
She became silent and stood looking at John Webster who was also
looking at her, who was at the moment absorbed in contemplation of
her. In the uncertain light her face had become the face of a young
girl. There was something about her face, at the moment, that suggested
to his mind his daughter’s face as she had looked at him in the dim
light of the candles in the room upstairs. It was like that and at the
same time it was like Natalie’s face, as Natalie’s face had been that
afternoon in the office when he and she had first come close to each
other, and as it had looked that other night in the darkness of the
field.
One might so easily become confused. “It’s all right about your going
away, Katherine,” he said aloud. “You know about that, what I mean is
that you know what you want to do.”
He stood in silence a moment, thinking. “It’s like this, Katherine,” he
began again. “There’s my daughter Jane upstairs. I’m going away but I
can’t take her with me any more than you can go live in your brother’s
house out there in Minnesota. I’m thinking that for the next two or
three days or maybe for several weeks Jane is going to have a pretty
hard time.
“There’s no telling what will happen here.” He made a gesture toward
the house. “I’m going away but I suppose I’ve been counting on your
being here until Jane gets on her own feet a little. You know what I
mean, until she gets so she can stand alone.”
* * * * *
On the bed upstairs Jane Webster’s body was becoming more and more
rigid and tense as she lay listening to the undercurrent of noises
in the house. There was a sound of movement in the next room. A door
handle struck against a wall. The boards of the floor creaked. Her
mother had been seated on the floor at the foot of the bed. Now she
was getting up. She had put her hand on the railing of the bed to pull
herself up. The bed moved a little. It moved on its rollers. There was
a low rumbling sound. Would her mother come into her room? Jane Webster
wanted no more words, no further explanations of what had happened to
spoil the marriage between her mother and father. She wanted to be let
alone now, to think her own thoughts. The thought that her mother might
come into her bedroom frightened her. It was odd, she had now a sharp
and distinct sense of the presence of death, in some way connected with
her mother’s figure. To have the older woman come into her room now,
even though no words were said, would be like having a ghost come.
The thought of it happening made little creeping sensations run over
the surface of her body. It was as though little soft hairy-legged
creatures were running up and down her legs, up and down her back. She
moved uneasily in the bed.
Her father had gone downstairs and along the hallway below but she had
not heard the front door open and close. She lay listening for the
sound of that, expecting it.
The house was silent, too silent. Somewhere, a long way off, there
was the loud ticking of a clock. During the year before, when she had
graduated from the town high school, her father had given her a small
watch. It lay now on a dressing table at the further side of the room.
Its rapid ticking was like some small creature, clad in steel shoes
and running rapidly and with the shoes clicking together. The little
creature was running swiftly along an endless hallway, running with
a kind of mad sharp determination but never getting either nearer or
further away. Into her mind there came a picture of a small imp-like
boy with a wide grinning mouth and with pointed ears that stood
straight up from his head like the ears of a fox terrier. Perhaps the
notion had got into her head from some picture of Puck remembered from
a childhood story book. She was conscious that the sound she heard came
from the watch on the dresser but the picture in her mind stayed. The
imp-like figure stood with his head and body motionless while his legs
worked furiously. He grinned at her and his little steel-clad feet
clicked together.
She tried consciously to relax her body. There were hours to be spent,
lying thus on the bed, before another day came and she would have to
face the problems of the new day. There would be things to face. Her
father would have gone off with a strange woman. When she walked in the
streets people would be looking at her. “That’s his daughter,” they
would be saying. Perhaps, as long as she stayed in town, she could
never again walk along streets unaware that she was being looked at,
but on the other hand, perhaps she would not stay. There was a kind of
exhilaration to be got from thinking of going off to strange places,
perhaps to some large city, where she would always be walking about
among strangers.
She was getting herself into a state and would have to take herself in
hand. There were times, although she was young she had already known
such times, when the mind and body seemed to have nothing at all to do
with each other. One did things with the body, put it into bed, made
it get up and walk about, made the eyes attempt to read pages in some
book, did many kinds of things with the body, while the mind went on
about its own affairs unheeding. It thought of things, fancied all
manner of absurd things, went its own way.
At such times in the past Jane’s mind had a trick of getting her body
into the most absurd and startling situations, while it ran wild and
free--did as it pleased. She was in bed in her room with the door
closed but her fancy took her body out into the street. She went
along conscious that all the men she passed were smiling and she kept
wondering what was the matter. She hurried home and went to her room
only to find that her dress was all unbuttoned at the back. It was
terrible. Again she was walking in the street and the white drawers she
wore under her skirts had become in some unaccountable way unfastened.
There was a young man coming toward her. He was a new young man who had
just come to town and had taken a job in a store. Well, he was going
to speak to her. He raised his hat and at just that moment the drawers
began to creep down along her legs.
Jane Webster lay in her bed and smiled at the memory of the fears that
had visited her when, in the past, her mind had got into the trick of
running wildly, uncontrolled. In the future things would be somewhat
different. She had gone through something and had perhaps much more to
go through. The things that had seemed so terrible would perhaps only
be amusing now. She felt infinitely older, more sophisticated, than she
had been but a few hours earlier.
* * * * *
How strange it was that the house remained so silent. From somewhere,
off in the town, there came the sound of horses’ hoofs on a hard road
and the rattle of a wagon. A voice shouted, faintly. Some man of the
town, a teamster, was setting out early. Perhaps he was going to
another town to get a load of goods and haul them back. He must have a
long way to go that he started out so early.
She moved her shoulders uneasily. What was the matter with her? Was she
afraid in her own bedroom, in her own bed? Of what was she afraid?
She sat suddenly and rigidly upright in bed and then, after a moment,
let her body fall backward again. There had come a sharp cry out of the
throat of her father, a cry that had gone ringing through the house.
“Katherine,” her father’s voice cried. There was just that one word. It
was the name of the Webster’s one servant. What did her father want of
Katherine? What had happened? Had something terrible happened in the
house? Had something happened to her mother?
There was something lurking at the back of Jane Webster’s mind, a
thought that did not want to be expressed. It was as yet unable to make
its way up out of the hidden parts of herself and into her mind.
The thing she feared, expected, could not have happened yet. Her mother
was in the next room. She had just heard her moving about in there.
There was a new sound in the house. Her mother was moving heavily along
the hallway just outside the bedroom door. The Websters had turned a
small bedroom, at the end of the hall, into a bathroom and her mother
was going in there. Her feet fell slowly, flatly, heavily and slowly,
on the floor of the hallway. After all her feet only made that strange
sound because she had put on her soft bedroom slippers.
Downstairs now, if one listened, one could hear voices saying words
softly. That must be her father talking to the servant Katherine. What
could he want of her? The front door opened and then closed again. She
was afraid. Her body shook with fear. It was terrible of her father
to go away and leave her alone in the house. Could he have taken the
servant Katherine with him? The thought was unbearable. Why was she so
afraid of the thought of being left alone in the house with her mother?
There was a thought lurking within her, deep within her, that did not
want to get itself expressed. Something was about to happen to her
mother, now, within a few minutes. One did not want to think about it.
In the bathroom there were certain bottles, sitting on shelves in a
little box-like cabinet. They were labeled poison. One hardly knew why
they were kept there but Jane had seen them many times. She kept her
toothbrush in a glass tumbler in the cabinet. One supposed the bottles
contained medicines of the sort that was only to be taken externally.
One did not think much of such matters, was not in the habit of
thinking of them.
* * * * *
Now Jane was sitting upright in bed again. She was alone in the house
with her mother. Even the servant Katherine had gone away. The house
felt altogether cold and lonely, deserted. In the future she would
always feel out of place in this house in which she had always lived
and she would feel also, in some odd way, separated from her mother.
To be alone with her mother would now, perhaps, always make her feel a
little lonely.
Could it be that the servant Katherine was the woman with whom her
father had planned to go away? That could not be. Katherine was a large
heavy woman with big breasts and dark hair that was turning gray. One
could not think of her as going away with a man. One thought of her as
moving silently about a house and doing housework. Her father would
be going away with a younger woman, with a woman not much older than
herself.
One should get hold of oneself. When one got excited, let oneself go,
the fancy sometimes played one strange and terrible tricks.
Her mother was in the bathroom, standing by the little box-like
cabinet. Her face was pale, of a pasty paleness. She had to keep one
hand against the wall to keep from falling. Her eyes were gray and
heavy. There was no life in them. A heavy cloud-like film had passed
over her eyes. It was like a heavy gray cloud over the blue of the sky.
Her body rocked back and forth too. At any moment it might fall. But
a short time ago, and even amid the strangeness of the adventure in
her father’s bedroom, things had seemed suddenly quite clear. She had
understood things she had never understood before. Now nothing could be
understood. There was a whirlpool of confused thoughts and actions into
which one had been plunged.
Now her own body had begun to rock back and forth on the bed. The
fingers of her right hand were clutched over the tiny stone her father
had given her but she was, at the moment, unaware of the small round
hard thing lying in her palm. Her fists kept beating her own body, her
own legs and knees. There was something she wanted to do, something it
was now right and proper she should do. It was the time now for her to
scream, to jump off the bed, to run along the hallway to the bathroom
and tear the bathroom door open. Her mother was about to do something
one did not passively stand by and see done. She should be crying out
at the top of her voice, crying for help. There was a word that should
be on her lips now. “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” she should now be screaming.
Her lips should now be making the word ring through the house. She
should be making the house and the street on which the house stood echo
and reëcho with the word.
And she could say nothing. Her lips were sealed. Her body could not
move from the bed. It could only rock back and forth on the bed.
Her fancy kept on painting pictures, swift, vivid, terrible pictures.
There was, in the bathroom, in the cabinet, a bottle containing a brown
liquid and her mother had put up her hand and had got hold of it. Now
she had put it to her lips. She had swallowed all the contents of the
bottle.
The liquid in the bottle was brown, of a reddish brownness. Before she
had swallowed it her mother had lighted a gas light. It was directly
above her head, as she stood facing the cabinet, and the light from
it fell down over her face. There were little puffy red bags of flesh
under the eyes and they looked strange and almost revolting against
the pasty whiteness of the skin. The mouth was open and the lips were
gray too. There was a reddish brown stain running down from one corner
of the mouth, down over the chin. Some drops of the liquid had fallen
on her mother’s white nightgown. Convulsive spasms, as of pain, passed
over the pasty white face. The eyes remained closed. There was a
trembling quivering movement of the shoulders.
Jane’s body continued to rock back and forth. The flesh of her body
quivered too. Her body was rigid. Her fists were closed, tight, tight.
Her fists continued to beat down upon her legs. Her mother had managed
to get out through the bathroom door and across the little hallway to
her own room. She had thrown herself face-downward on her bed in the
darkness. Had she thrown herself down or had she fallen? Was she dying
now, would she die presently or was she already dead? In the next
room, in the room where Jane had seen her father walking naked before
her mother and herself, the candles were still burning, under the
picture of the Virgin. There was no doubt the older woman would die. In
fancy Jane had seen the label on the bottle that contained the brown
liquid. It was marked “Poison.” There was the picture of the skull and
cross-bones druggists put on such bottles.
And now Jane’s body had quit rocking. Perhaps her mother was dead. Now
one tried to begin to think of other things. She became vaguely, but at
the same time almost deliciously, conscious of some new element come
into the air of the bedroom.
There was a pain in the palm of her right hand. Something hurt her and
the sense of hurting was refreshing. It brought life back. There was
consciousness of self in the realization of bodily pain. One’s mind
could start back along the road from some dark far place to which it
had run crazily off. One’s mind could take hold of the thought of the
little hurt place in the soft flesh of the palm of the hand. There was
something there, something hard and sharp that cut into the flesh of
the palm when one’s finger pressed down rigid and tense upon it.