In the palm of Jane Webster’s hand lay the small green stone her father
had picked up on the railroad tracks and had given her at the moment
of his departure. “The Jewel of Life,” he had called it in the moment
when confusion had led him to give way to a desire to make some kind of
gesture. A romantic notion had popped into his head. Had not men always
used symbols to help carry them over the rough places in life? There
was the Virgin with her candles. Was she not also a symbol? At some
time, having decided in a moment of vanity that thought was of more
importance than fancy, men had discarded the symbol. A Protestant kind
of man arose who believed in a thing called “the age of reason.” There
was a dreadful kind of egotism. Men could trust their own minds. As
though they knew anything at all of the workings of their own minds.
With a gesture and a smile John Webster had put the stone into his
daughter’s hand and now she was clinging to it. One could press the
finger down hard upon it and feel in the soft palm of the hand this
delicious and healing pain.
Jane Webster was trying to reconstruct something. In darkness she was
trying to feel her way along the face of a wall. The wall had little
sharp points sticking out that hurt the palm of the hand. If one
followed the wall far enough one came to a lighted place. Perhaps the
wall was studded with jewels, put there by others, who had groped their
way along in the darkness.
Her father had gone away with a woman, with a young woman, much like
herself. He would live with the woman now. Perhaps she would never see
him again. Her mother was dead. In the future she would be alone in
life. She would have to begin now and make a life of her own.
Was her mother dead or had she just been having terrible fancies?
One was plunged suddenly down from a high safe place into the sea and
then one had to try to swim, to save oneself. Jane’s mind began playing
with the thought of herself as swimming in a sea.
During the summer of the year before she had gone with some young men
and women on an excursion to a town facing Lake Michigan, and to a
resort near the town. There was a man who dived down into the sea from
a tall tower, that had been stuck far up into the sky. He had been
employed to dive in order to entertain the crowd but things had not
turned out as they should. The day, for such an affair, should have
been bright and clear, but in the morning it began to rain and in the
afternoon it turned cold and the sky, covered with low heavy clouds,
was heavy and cold too.
Cold gray clouds hurried across the sky. The diver fell down from
his high place into the sea, in the presence of a small silent crowd,
but the sea did not receive him warmly. It awaited him in a cold gray
silence. Looking at him, falling thus, sent a cold shiver through the
body.
What was the cold gray sea toward which the man’s naked body fell so
swiftly?
On that day, when the professional diver had taken his leap, Jane
Webster’s heart had stopped beating until he had gone down into the sea
and his head had reappeared on the surface. She was standing beside a
young man, her escort for the day, and her hands clutched eagerly his
arm and shoulder. When the diver’s head reappeared she put her head
down on the young man’s shoulder and her own shoulders shook with sobs.
It had, no doubt, been a very silly performance and she had been
ashamed of it later. The diver was a professional. “He knows what he is
about,” the young man had said. Every one present had laughed at Jane
and she had become angry because her escort had laughed too. Had he but
had sense enough to know how she was feeling at the moment, she thought
she would not have minded the others laughing.
* * * * *
“I’m a great little swimmer in seas.”
It was altogether amazing how ideas, expressed in words, kept running
from mind to mind. “I’m a great little swimmer in seas.” But a short
time before her father had said the words as she stood in the doorway
between the two bedrooms and he came walking toward her. He had wanted
to give her the stone, she now held pressed against the palm of her
hand, and had wanted to say something about it, and instead of words
regarding the stone, there had come to his lips these words about
swimming in seas. There had been something puzzled and confused in his
whole bearing at the moment. He had been upset, as she was now. The
moment was now being lived over again, swiftly, in the daughter’s mind.
Her father was again stepping toward her, holding the stone between his
thumb and finger, and the wavering, uncertain light had again come into
his eyes. Quite distinctly, as though he were again in her presence,
Jane heard again the words that, but such a short time before, had
seemed without meaning, meaningless words come from the lips of a man
temporarily drunk or insane, “I’m a great little swimmer in seas.”
* * * * *
She had been plunged down from a high safe place, down into a sea
of doubt and fear. Only a short time before, but yesterday, she had
been standing on firm ground. One could let one’s fancy play with the
thought of what had happened to her. There would be a kind of comfort
in doing that.
She had been standing on firm ground, high above a vast sea of
confusion, and then, quite suddenly, she had been pushed off the firm
high ground and down into the sea.
Now, at this very moment, she was falling down into the sea. Now a new
life had to begin for her. Her father had gone away with a strange
woman and her mother was dead.
She was falling down off the high safe ground into the sea. With a kind
of absurd flourish, as by a gesture of the arm, her own father had
plunged her down. She was clad in her white nightgown and her falling
figure made a white streak against the gray of cold skies.
Her father had put a meaningless little stone in her hand and had gone
away and then her mother had gone into the bathroom and had done a
terrible, an unthinkable thing, to herself.
And now she, Jane Webster, had gone quite down into the sea, far far
down into a lonely cold gray place. She had gone down into the place
from which all life came and to which, in the end, all life goes.
There was a heaviness, a deadly heaviness. All life had become gray and
cold and old. One walked in darkness. One’s body fell with a soft thump
against gray soft unyielding walls.
The house in which one lived was empty. It was an empty house in an
empty street of an empty town. All the people Jane Webster had known,
the young men and women with whom she had lived, with whom she had
walked about on summer evenings, could not be a part of what she was
facing now. Now she was quite alone. Her father had gone away and
her mother had killed herself. There was no one. One walked alone
in darkness. One’s body struck with a soft thump against soft gray
unyielding walls.
The little stone held so firmly in the palm of the hand hurt and hurt.
Before her father had given it to her he had gone to hold it up before
the candle flame. In certain lights its color changed. Yellowish green
lights came and went in it. The yellowish green lights were of the
color of young growing things pushing their way up out of the damp and
cold of frozen grounds, in the spring.