Chapter V: Book THREE: I (1)

And on that very night, after he had been seated on the hill thinking of his life and what he would do with what remained of it and after he had gone for the customary evening walk with Natalie, the doors of his room did open and his wife and daughter came in.

It was about half past eleven o’clock and for an hour he had been walking softly up and down before the picture of the Virgin. The candles were lighted. His feet made a soft cat-like sound on the floor. There was something strange and startling about hearing the sound in the quiet house.

The door leading to his wife’s room opened and she stood looking at him. Her tall form filled the doorway and her hands clutched at the sides of the door. She was very pale and her eyes were fixed and staring. “John,” she said hoarsely and then repeated the word. She seemed to want to say more, but to be unable to speak. There was a sharp sense of ineffectual struggle.

It was certain she was not very handsome as she stood there. “Life pays people out. Turn your back on life and it gets even with you. When people do not live they die and when they are dead they look dead,” he thought. He smiled at her and then turned his head away and stood listening.

It came--the sound for which he was listening. There was a stir in his daughter’s room. He had counted so much on things turning out as he wished and had even had a premonition it would happen on this particular night. What had happened he thought he understood. For more than a week now there had been this storm raging over the ocean of silence that was his wife. There had been just such another prolonged and resentful silence after their first attempt at love-making and after he had said certain sharp hurtful things to her. That had gradually worn itself out, but this new thing was something different. It could not wear itself out in that way. The thing had happened for which he had prayed. She had been compelled to meet him here, in the place he had prepared.

And now his daughter, who had also been lying awake night after night, and hearing the strange sounds in her father’s room, would be compelled to come. He felt almost gay. On that evening he had told Natalie that he thought his struggle might come to a breaking point that night and had asked her to be ready for him. There was a train that would leave town at four in the morning. “Perhaps we shall be able to take that,” he had said.

“I’ll be waiting for you,” Natalie had said and now there was his wife, standing pale and trembling, as though about to fall and looking from the Virgin between her candles to his naked body and then there was the sound of some one moving in his daughter’s room.

And now her door crept open an inch, softly, and he went at once and threw it completely open. “Come in,” he said. “Both of you come in. Go sit there on the bed together. I’ve something to say to you both.” There was a commanding ring in his voice.

There was no doubt the women were both, for the moment at least, completely frightened and cowed. How pale they both were. The daughter put her hands to her face and ran across the room to sit upright holding to a railing at the foot of the bed and still holding one hand over her eyes and his wife walked across and fell face downward on the bed. She made a continuous little moaning sound for a time and then buried her face in the bedclothes and became silent. There was no doubt both women thought him completely insane.

John Webster began walking up and down before them. “What an idea,” he thought looking down at his own bare legs. He smiled, again looking into the frightened face of his daughter. “Hito, tito,” he whispered to himself. “Now do not lose your head. You’re going to pull this off. Keep your head on your shoulders, my boy.” Some strange freak of his mind made him raise his two hands as though he were conferring some kind of blessing upon the two women. “I’m off my nut, out of my shell, but I don’t care at all,” he mused.

He addressed his daughter. “Well, Jane,” he began, speaking with great earnestness and in a clear quiet voice, “I can see you are frightened and upset by what is going on here and I do not blame you. The truth is that it was all planned. For a week now you have been lying awake in your bed in the next room there and hearing me move about in here and in that room over there your mother has been lying. There is something I have been wanting to say to you and your mother, but as you know there has never been any habit of talk in this house.

“The truth is I have wanted to startle you and I guess I have succeeded in that.”

He walked across the room and sat on the bed between his daughter and the heavy inert body of his wife. They were both dressed in nightgowns and his daughter’s hair had fallen down about her shoulders. It was like his wife’s hair when he married her. Then her hair had been just such a golden yellow and when the sun shone on it coppery and brown lights sometimes appeared.

“I’m going away from this house to-night. I’m not going to live with your mother any more,” he said, leaning forward and looking at the floor.

He straightened his body and for a long time sat looking at his daughter’s body. It was young and slender. She would not be extraordinarily tall like her mother but would be a woman of the medium height. He studied her body carefully. Once, when she was a child of six, Jane had been ill for nearly a year and he remembered now that during that time she had been very precious to him. It was during a year when the business had gone badly and he thought he might have to go into bankruptcy at any moment, but he had managed to keep a trained nurse in the house during the whole period of her illness. Every day during that time he came home from the factory at noon and went into his daughter’s room.

There was no fever. What was wrong? He had thrown the bedclothes off the child’s body and had looked at it. She was very thin then and the little bones of the body could be plainly seen. There was just the tiny bony structure over which the fair white skin was drawn.

The doctors had said it was a matter of malnutrition, that the food given the child did not nourish it, and they couldn’t find the right food. The mother had been unable to nurse the child. Sometimes during that period he stood for long minutes looking at the child whose tired listless eyes looked back at him. The tears ran from his own eyes.

It was very strange. Since that time and after she had suddenly begun to grow well and strong again he had in some way lost all track of his daughter. Where had he been in the meantime and where had she been? They were two people and they had been living in the same house all these years. What was it that shut people off from each other? He looked carefully at his daughter’s body, now clearly outlined under the thin nightgown. She had rather broad hips, like a woman’s hips, and her shoulders were narrow. How her body trembled. How afraid she was. “I am a stranger to her and it is not surprising,” he thought. He leaned forward and looked at her bare feet. They were small and well made. Sometime a lover would come to kiss them. Sometime a man would feel concerning her body as he now felt concerning the strong hard body of Natalie Swartz.

His silence seemed to have aroused his wife, who turned and looked at him. Then she sat up on the bed and he sprang to his feet and stood confronting her. “John,” she said again in a hoarse whisper as though wishing to call him back to her out of some dark mysterious place. Her mouth opened and closed two or three times like the mouth of a fish taken out of the water. He looked away and paid no more attention to her and she again put her face down among the bedclothes.

“What I wanted, long ago, when Jane was a tiny thing, was simply that life come into her and that is what I want now. That’s all I do want. That’s what I’m after now,” John Webster thought.

He began walking up and down the room again, having a sense of great leisure. Nothing would happen. Now his wife had again fallen into the ocean of silence. She would lie there on the bed and say nothing, do nothing until he had finished saying what he had to say and had gone away. His daughter was blind and dumb with fear now, but perhaps he could warm the fear out of her. “I must go about this matter slowly, take my time, tell her everything,” he thought. The frightened girl now took her hand from before her eyes and looked at him. Her mouth trembled and then a word was formed. “Father,” she said appealingly.

He smiled at her reassuringly and made a movement with his arm toward the Virgin, sitting so solemnly between the two candles. “Look up there for a moment while I talk to you,” he said.

He plunged at once into an explanation of his situation.

“There has been something broken,” he said. “It is the habit of life in this house. Now you will not understand, but sometime you will.

“For years I have not been in love with this woman here, who is your mother and has been my wife, and now I have fallen in love with another woman. Her name is Natalie and to-night, after you and I have had our talk, she and I are going away to live together.”

On an impulse he went and knelt on the floor at his daughter’s feet and then quickly sprang up again. “No, that’s not right. I am not to ask her forgiveness, I am to tell her of things,” he thought.

“Well now,” he began again, “you are going to think me insane and perhaps I am. I don’t know. Anyway my being here in this room with the Virgin and without any clothes, the strangeness of all this will make you think me insane. Your mind will cling to that thought. It will want to cling to that thought,” he said aloud. “It may turn out so for a time.”

He seemed puzzled as to how to say all the things he wanted to say. The whole matter, the scene in the room, the talk with his daughter that he had planned so carefully was going to be a harder matter to handle than he had counted on. He had thought there would be a kind of final significance in his nakedness and in the presence of the Virgin and her candles. Had he overset the stage? He wondered, and kept looking with eyes filled with anxiety at his daughter’s face. It told him nothing. She was just frightened and clinging to the railing at the foot of the bed as one cast suddenly into the sea might cling to a floating piece of wood. His wife’s body lying on the bed had a strange rigid look. Well there had for years been something rigid and cold in the woman’s body. Perhaps she had died. That would be a thing to have happen. It would be something he had not counted upon. It was rather strange, now that he came to face the problem before him, how very little the presence of his wife had to do with the matter in hand.

He stopped looking at his daughter and began walking up and down and as he walked he talked. In a calm, although slightly strained voice he began trying to explain first of all the presence of the Virgin and the candles in the room. He was speaking now to some person, not his own daughter but just a human being like himself. Immediately he felt relieved. “Well, now. That’s the ticket. That’s the way to go at things,” he thought. For a long time he went on talking and walking thus up and down. It was better not to think too much. One had to cling to the faith that the thing he had so recently found within himself and within Natalie was somewhere alive in her too. Before the morning when the whole matter between himself and Natalie began, his life had been like a beach covered with rubbish and lying in darkness. The beach was covered with old dead water-logged trees and stumps. The twisted roots of old trees stuck up into the darkness. Before it lay the heavy sluggish inert sea of life.

And then there had come this storm within and now the beach was clean. Could he keep it clean? Could he keep it clean so that it would sparkle in the morning light?

He was trying to tell his daughter Jane something about the life he had lived in the house with her and why, before he could talk to her, he had been compelled to do something extraordinary, like bringing the Virgin into his room and taking off his own body the clothes that, when he wore them, would make him seem in her eyes just the goer in and out of the house, the provider of bread and clothes for herself she had always known.

Speaking very clearly and slowly, as though afraid he would get off the track, he told her something of his life as a business man, of how little essential interest he always had in the affairs that had occupied all his days.

He forgot about the Virgin and for a time spoke only of himself. He came again to sit beside her and as he talked boldly put his hand on her leg. The flesh was cold under her thin nightgown.

“I was a young thing as you are now, Jane, when I met the woman who is your mother and who was my wife,” he explained. “You must try to adjust your mind to the thought that both your mother and I were once young things like yourself.

“I suppose your mother, when she was your age must have been very much as you are now. She would of course have been somewhat taller. I remember that her body was at that time very long and slender. I thought it very lovely then.

“I have cause to remember your mother’s body. She and I first met each other through our bodies. At first there was nothing else, just our naked bodies. We had that and we denied it. Perhaps upon that everything might have been built, but we were too ignorant or too cowardly. It is because of what happened between your mother and myself that I have brought you into my own naked presence and have brought this picture of the Virgin in here. I have a desire to in some way make the flesh a sacred thing to you.”

His voice had grown soft and reminiscent and he took his hand from his daughter’s leg and touched her cheeks and then her hair. He was frankly making love to her now and she had somewhat fallen under his influence. He reached down and taking one of her hands held it tightly.

“We met, you see, your mother and I, at the house of a friend. Although, until a few weeks ago, when I suddenly began to love another woman, I had not for years thought about that meeting, it is, at this moment, as clear in my mind as though it had happened here, in this house, to-night.

“The whole thing, of which I now want to tell you the details, happened right here in this town, at the house of a man who was at that time my friend. Now he is dead, but at that time we were constantly together. He had a sister, a year younger than himself, of whom I was fond, but although we went about together a good deal, she and I were not in love with each other. Afterward she married and moved out of town.

“There was another young woman, the very woman who is now your mother, who was coming to that house to visit my friend’s sister and as they lived at the other end of town and as my father and mother were away from town on a visit I was asked to visit there too. It was to be a kind of special occasion. The Christmas holidays were coming on and there were to be many parties and dances.

“A thing happened to me and your mother that was not at bottom so unlike the thing that has happened to you and me here to-night,” he said sharply. He had grown a little excited again and thought he had better get up and walk. Dropping his daughter’s hand he sprang to his feet and for a few minutes walked nervously about. The whole thing, the startled fear of him that kept going and coming in his daughter’s eyes and the inert silent presence of his wife, was making what he wanted to do more difficult than he had imagined it would be. He looked at his wife’s body lying silent and motionless on the bed. How many times he had seen the same body, lying just in that way. She had submitted to him long ago and had been submitting to the life in himself ever since. The figure his mind had made, ‘an ocean of silence,’ fitted her well. She had always been silent. At the best all she had learned from life was a half-resentful habit of submission. Even when she talked to him she did not really talk. It was odd indeed that Natalie out of her silence could say so many things to him while he and this woman in all their years together had said nothing really touching each other’s lives.

He looked from the motionless body of the older woman to his daughter and smiled. “I can enter into her,” he thought exultant. “She cannot shut me out of herself, does not want to shut me out of herself.” There was something in his daughter’s face that told him what was going on in her mind. The younger woman now sat looking at the figure of the Virgin and it was evident that the dumb fright that had taken such complete possession of her when she was ushered abruptly into the room and the presence of the naked man was beginning a little to loosen its grip. In spite of herself she was thinking. There was the man, her own father, moving nude like a tree in winter about the room and occasionally stopping to look at her, the dim light, the Virgin with the candles burning beneath and the figure of her mother lying on the bed. Her father was trying to tell her some story she wanted to hear. In some way it concerned herself, some vital part of herself. There was no doubt it was wrong, terribly wrong for the story to be told and for her to listen, but she wanted to hear it now.

“After all I was right,” John Webster was thinking. “Such a thing as has happened here might make or utterly ruin a woman of Jane’s age, but as it is everything will come out right. She has a streak of cruelty in her too. There is a kind of health in her eyes now. She wants to know. After this experience she will perhaps no longer be afraid of the dead. It is the dead who are forever frightening the living.”

He took up the thread of his tale as he walked up and down in the dim light.

“A thing happened to your mother and me. I went to my friend’s house in the early morning and your mother was to arrive on a train in the late afternoon. There were two trains, one at noon and the other in the afternoon about five, and as she would have to get up in the middle of the night to take the first one we all supposed she would come later. My friend and I had planned to spend the day hunting rabbits on the fields near town and we got back to his house about four.

“There would be time enough for us to bathe and dress ourselves before the guest arrived. When we got home my friend’s mother and sister had gone out and we supposed there was no one in the house but a servant. In reality the guest, you see, had arrived on the train at noon, but that we did not know and the servant did not tell us. We hurried upstairs to undress and then went downstairs and into a shed to bathe. At that time people had no bathtubs in their houses and the servant had filled two washtubs with water and had put them in the shed. After she had filled the tubs she disappeared, got herself out of the way.

“We were running about the house naked as I am doing here now. What happened was that I came naked out of that shed downstairs and climbed the stairs to the upper part of the house, going to my room. The day had grown warm and now it was almost dark.”

Again John Webster came to sit with his daughter on the bed and to hold one of her hands.

“I went up the stairs and along a hallway and opening a door went across a room to what I thought was my bed, where I had laid out the clothes I had brought that morning in my bag.

“You see what had happened was that your mother had got out of bed in her own town at midnight on the night before and when she arrived at my friend’s house his mother and sister had insisted she undress and get into bed. She had not unpacked her bag, but had thrown off her clothes and had got in between the sheets as naked as I was when I walked in upon her. As the day had turned warm she had I suppose grown somewhat restless and in stirring about had thrown the bedclothes to one side.

“She lay, you see, quite nude on the bed, in the uncertain light, and as I had no shoes on my feet I made no sound when I came in to her.

“It was an amazing moment for me. I had walked directly to the bed and there she was within a few inches of my hands as they hung by my side. It was your mother’s most lovely moment with me. As I have said she was then very slender and her long body was white like the sheets of the bed. At that time I had never before been in the presence of a woman undressed. I had just come from the bath. It was like a kind of wedding, you see.

“How long I stood there looking at her I don’t know, but anyway she knew I was there. Her eyes came up to me out of sleep like a swimmer out of the sea. Perhaps, it is just possible, she had been dreaming of me or of some other man.

“At any rate and for just a moment she was not frightened or startled at all. It was really our wedding moment, you see.

“O, had we only known how to live up to that moment! I stood there looking at her and she was there on the bed looking at me. There must have been a glowing something alive in our eyes. I did not know then all I felt, but long afterward, sometimes, when I was walking in the country or riding on a train, I thought. Well, what did I think? It was evening you see. I mean that afterward, sometimes, when I was alone, when it was evening and I was alone I looked off across hills or I saw a river making a white streak down below as I stood on a cliff. What I mean to say is that I have spent all these years trying to recapture that moment and now it is dead.”

John Webster threw out his hands with a gesture of disgust and then got quickly off the bed. His wife’s body had begun to stir and now she lifted herself up. For a moment her rather huge figure was crouched on the bed and she looked like some great animal on all fours, sick and trying to get up and walk.

And then she did get up, putting her feet firmly on the floor and walking slowly out of the room without looking at the two people. Her husband stood with his back pressed against the wall of the room and watched her go. “Well, that’s the end of her,” he thought grimly. The door that led into her room came slowly toward him. Now it was closed. “Some doors have to be closed forever too,” he told himself.

He was still in his daughter’s presence and she was not afraid of him. He went to a closet and getting out his clothes began to dress. That he realized was a terrible moment. Well, he was playing the cards he held in his hand to the limit. He had been nude. Now he had to get into his clothes, into the clothes he had come to feel had no meaning and were altogether unlovely because the unknown hands that had fashioned them were unmoved by the desire to create beauty. An absurd notion came to him. “Has my daughter a sense of moments? Will she help me now?” he asked himself.

And then his heart jumped. His daughter Jane had done a quite lovely thing. While he jerked his clothes on hurriedly she turned and threw herself face downward on the bed, in the same position in which her mother had been but a moment before.

“I walked out of her room into the hallway,” he explained. “My friend had come upstairs and was standing in the hallway lighting a lamp that was fastened to a bracket on the wall. You can perhaps imagine the things that were going through my mind. My friend looked at me, as yet knowing nothing. You see, he did not yet know that woman was in the house, but he had seen me walk out of the room. He had just lighted the lamp when I came out and closed the door behind me and the light fell on my face. There must have been something that startled him. Later we never spoke of the matter at all. As it turned out every one was embarrassed and made self-conscious by what had occurred and what was still to occur.

“I must have walked out of the room like a man walking in sleep. What was in my mind? What had been in my mind when I stood there beside her naked body and even before that? It was a situation that might not occur again in a lifetime. You have just now seen how your mother went out of this room. You are wondering, I dare say, what is in her mind. I can tell you of that. There is nothing in her mind. She has made her mind a blank empty place into which nothing that matters can come. She has spent a lifetime at that, as I dare say most people have.

“As for that evening when I stood in the hallway, with the light of that lamp shining on me and with my friend looking and wondering what was the matter--that, after all, is what I must try to tell you about.”

He was partially dressed now and again Jane was sitting upright on the bed. He came to sit in his shirt sleeves beside her. Long afterward she remembered how extraordinarily young he looked at that moment. He seemed intent on making her understand fully everything that had happened. “Well, you understand,” he said slowly, “that although she had seen my friend and his sister before, she had never seen me. At the same time she knew I was to stay in the house during her visit. No doubt she had been having thoughts about the strange young man she was to meet and it is also true I had been having thoughts about her.

“Even at the moment when I walked, thus nude, into her presence she was a living thing in my mind. And when she came up to me, out of sleep you see, before she had time to think, I was a living thing to her then. What living things we were to each other we dared understand but for a moment. I know that now, but for many years after that happened I didn’t know and was only confused.

“I was confused also when I came out into the hallway and stood before my friend. You understand that he did not yet know she was in the house. I had to tell him something and it was like having to tell in some public way the secret of what happens between two people in a moment of love.

“It can’t be done, you understand, and so there I stood stammering and making things worse every minute. I must have had a guilty look on my face and right away I began to feel guilty, although when I was in that room standing by the bed, as I have explained, I didn’t feel guilty at all, quite the contrary in fact.

“‘I went naked into that room and stood beside the bed and that woman is in there now, all naked,’ I said.

“My friend was of course amazed. ‘What woman?’ he asked.

“I tried to explain. ‘Your sister’s friend. She is in there naked on the bed and I went in and stood beside her. She came on the train at noon,’ I said.

“You see, I appeared to know all about everything. I felt guilty. That was what was the matter with me. I suppose I stammered and acted confused. ‘He’ll never believe it was an accident now. He’ll think I am up to something strange,’ I thought immediately. Whether he ever had all or any of the thoughts that went through my mind at that moment and of which I was in a way accusing him I never found out. I was always a stranger in that house after that moment. You see, what I had done, to have been made quite clear would have required a good deal of whispered explanation that I never offered and, even after your mother and I were married, things were never as they had been between me and my friend.

“And so I stood there stammering and he was looking at me with a puzzled startled look in his eyes. The house was very quiet and I remember how the light of the lamp, in its bracket on the wall, fell on our two naked bodies. My friend, the man who was the witness of that moment of vital drama in my life, is dead now. He died some eight years ago and your mother and I dressed ourselves in our best clothes and went in a carriage to his funeral and later to a graveyard to watch his body being put away into the ground, but at that moment he was very much alive and I shall always continue to think of him as he was then. We had been tramping about all day in the fields and he, like myself, had just come, you remember, from the bath. His young body was very slender and strong and it made a glowing white mark against the dark wall of the hallway, against which he stood.

“Were we both expecting something more to happen, waiting for something more to happen? We did not speak to each other again, but stood in silence. Perhaps he was only startled by my statement of what I had just done and by something a little strange in the manner in which I had told him. Ordinarily after such an accident there would have been a kind of giggling confusion, the thing would have been passed off as a kind of secret and delicious joke, but I had killed all possibility of its being taken in that spirit by something in the way I had looked and acted when I came out to him. I was, I suppose, at the same time both too conscious and not conscious enough of the significance of what I had done.

“And so we just stood in silence looking at each other and then the door downstairs, that led to the street, opened and his mother and sister came into the house. They had taken advantage of the fact that their guest had gone to sleep and had walked to the business part of town to do some shopping.

“As for myself, what was going on within me at that moment is the hardest thing of all to explain. I had difficulty getting hold of myself, of that you may be sure. What I think now, at this moment, is that then, at that moment long ago when I stood there naked in that hallway beside my friend, something had gone out of me that I could not immediately get back.

“Perhaps when you have grown older you will understand as you cannot understand now.”

John Webster looked long and hard at his daughter who also looked at him. For both of them the story he was telling had become a rather impersonal one. The woman, who was so closely connected to them both as wife and mother, had gone quite out of the tale as she had but a few moments before gone stumbling out of the room.

“You see,” he said slowly, “what I did not then understand, could not then have been expected to understand, was that I had really gone out of myself in love to the woman on the bed in the room. No one understands that a thing of that sort may occur like a thought flashing across the mind. What I am nowadays coming to believe and would like to get fixed in your mind, young woman, is that such moments come into all lives, but that in all the millions of people who are born and live long or short lives but a few ever really come to find out what life is like. There is a kind of perpetual denial of life, you understand.

“I was dazed as I stood in the hallway outside that woman’s room long ago. There had been a flashing kind of something between the woman and myself, in the moment I have described to you, when she came up to me out of sleep. Something deep in our two beings had been touched and I could not quickly recover. There had been a marriage, something intensely personal to our two selves, and by chance it had been made a kind of public affair. I suppose it would have turned out the same way had we two been alone in the house. We were very young. Sometimes I think all the people in the world are very young. They cannot carry the fire of life when it flashes to life in their hands.

“And in the room, behind the closed door, the woman must have been having, at just that moment, some such feeling as myself. She had raised herself up and was now sitting on the edge of the bed. She was listening to the sudden silence of the house as my friend and I were listening. It may be an absurd thing to say, but it is nevertheless true that my friend’s mother and sister, who had just come into the house, were both, in some unconscious way, affected also as they stood with their coats on downstairs, also listening.

“Just then, at that moment, in the room in the darkness, the woman began to sob like a brokenhearted child. There had been a thing quite tremendous come to her and she could not hold it. To be sure the immediate cause of her weeping that way, the way in which she would have explained her grief, was shame. That was what she thought had happened to her, that she had been put into a shameful ridiculous position. She was a young girl. I dare say thoughts had already come into her mind concerning what all the others would think. At any rate I know that at the moment and afterward I was more pure than herself.

“The sound of her sobbing rang through the house and downstairs my friend’s mother and sister, who had been standing and listening as I have said, now ran to the foot of the stairway leading up.

“As for myself, I did what must have seemed to all the others a ridiculous, almost a criminal thing. I ran to the door leading into the bedroom and tearing it open ran in, slamming the door behind me. It was by this time almost completely dark in the room, but without hesitation I ran to her. She was sitting on the edge of the bed and as she sobbed her body rocked back and forth. She was, at that moment, like a slender young tree, standing in an open field, without any other trees to protect it. She was shaken as by a great storm, that’s what I mean.

“And so you see, I ran to her and threw my arms about her body.

“The thing that had happened to us before happened once again, for the last time in our lives. She gave herself to me, that’s what I am trying to say. There was another marriage. For just a moment she became altogether quiet and in the uncertain light her face was turned up to mine. From her eyes came that same look, as of one coming up to me, out of a deep buried place, out of the sea or something like that. I have always thought of the place out of which she came as the sea.

“I dare say if anyone but you heard me tell this and if I had told it to you under less strange circumstances you would only have thought me a romantic fool. ‘She was startled,’ you would say and I dare say she was. But also there was this other. Even though it was dark in the room I felt the thing glowing deep down in her and then coming up, straight up to me. The moment was unspeakably lovely. It lasted for but a fraction of a second, like the snapping of the shutter of a camera, and then it passed.

“I still held her tightly and the door opened and in the doorway stood my friend and his mother and sister. He had taken the lamp from its bracket on the wall and held it in his hand. She sat quite naked on the bed and I stood beside her, with one knee on the edge of the bed, and with my arms thrown about her.”

II

Ten or fifteen minutes had passed and in the interval John Webster had completed his arrangements for leaving the house and setting out with Natalie on his new adventure in life. In a short time now he would be with her and all the cords that bound him to his old life would have been cut. It was sure that, whatever happened, he would never see his wife again and perhaps he would never see again the woman, now in the room with him, who was his daughter. If the doors of life could be torn open they could also be closed. One could walk out of a certain phase of life as out of a room. There might be traces of him left behind, but he would no longer be there.

He had put on his collar and coat, arranging everything quite calmly. Also he had packed a small bag, putting in extra shirts, pajamas, toilet articles, et cetera.

During all this time his daughter sat at the foot of the bed with her face buried in the crook of her arm that hung over the railing of the bed. Was she thinking? Were voices talking within her? What was she thinking?

In the interval, when the father’s telling of the tale of his life in the house had ceased and while he was doing the necessary little mechanical things before setting out on his new way of life, there was this pregnant time of silence.

There was no doubt that, if he had become insane, the insanity within was becoming constantly more fixed, more a habit of his being. There was, taking constantly deeper and deeper roots within him, a new viewpoint of life or rather to be a bit fancy and speak of the matter more in the modern spirit, as he himself might later have done laughingly, one might say he had been permanently caught up and held by a new rhythm of life.

At any rate it is true that, long afterward, when the man sometimes spoke of the experiences of that time, what he himself said was that one, by an effort of his own, and if he would but dare let himself go, could almost at will walk in and out of various planes of life. In speaking of such matters later he sometimes gave the impression that he quite calmly believed that one, once he had acquired the talent and courage for it, that one might even go so far as to be able to walk in the air along a street at the level of the second story of houses and look in at the people going about their private affairs in the upper rooms as a certain historic man of the East is said to have once walked on the surface of the waters of a sea. It was all a part of a notion he had got fixed in his head regarding the tearing down of walls and the taking of people out of prisons.

There he was, at any rate, in his room fixing, let us say, his tie pin in his necktie. He had got out the small bag into which he put as he thought of them, the things he might need. In the next room his wife, the woman who in the process of living her life had become the large heavy inert one, was lying in silence on her bed as she had but a short while before been lying on the bed in the presence of himself and his daughter.

What dark and terrible things were in her mind? Or was her mind a blank as John Webster sometimes thought it had become?

At his back, in the same room with himself, was his daughter, in her thin nightgown and with her hair fallen down about her face and shoulders. Her body--he could see the reflection of it in the glass as he arranged the tie--was drooped and limp. The experiences of the evening had no doubt taken something out of her body, perhaps permanently. He wondered about that and his eyes in roving about the room found again the Virgin with the candles burning by her side looking calmly at the scene. It was that calmness men worshipped in the Virgin perhaps. It was a strange turn of events that had led him to bring her, the calm one, into the room, to make her a part of the whole remarkable affair. No doubt it was the calm virginal thing he was at that moment in the process of taking out of his daughter, it was the coming of that element out of her body that had left her so limp and apparently lifeless. There was no doubt he had been daring. The hand that was arranging the tie trembled a little.

Doubt came. As I have said the house was at that moment very silent. In the next room his wife, lying on the bed, made no sound. She floated in a sea of silence, as she had done ever since that other night, long before, when shame, in the form of a naked and distraught man, had embraced her nakedness in the presence of those others.

Had he in turn done the same thing to his daughter? Had he plunged her also into that sea? It was a startling and terrible thought. One did no doubt upset things by becoming insane in a sane world or sane in an insane world. Quite suddenly everything became upset, turned quite upside down.

* * * * *

And then it might well be true that the whole matter simply resolved itself into this--that he, John Webster, was merely a man who had become suddenly enamoured of his stenographer and wanted to go and live with her and that he had found himself without the courage to do so simple a thing without making a fuss about it, without in fact an elaborate justification of himself, at the expense of these others. To justify himself he had devised this strange business of appearing nude before the young girl who was his daughter and who in reality, being his daughter, deserved the utmost consideration from him. There was no doubt but that, from one point of view, what he had done was altogether unforgivable. “After all I am still but a washing machine manufacturer in a small Wisconsin town,” he told himself, whispering the words out slowly and distinctly to himself.

That was a thing to bear in mind. Now his bag was packed and he was quite dressed and ready to set out. When the mind no longer moved forward sometimes the body took its place and made the consummation of an act once begun quite definitely unavoidable.

He walked across the room and stood for a time looking up into the calm eyes of the Virgin in the frame.

His thoughts were again like bells heard ringing across fields. “I am in a room in a house on a street in a town in the state of Wisconsin. At this moment most of the other people here in town, the people among whom I have always lived, are in bed and asleep but to-morrow morning, when I am gone, the town will be here and will move forward with its life, as it has been doing since I was a young fellow, married a woman and began living my present life.” There were these definite facts of existence. One wore clothes, ate, moved about among his fellow men and women. Certain phases of life were lived in the darkness of nights, others in the light of days. In the morning the three women who worked at his office and also the bookkeeper would appear to do their usual tasks. When, after a time, neither he nor Natalie Swartz appeared there would begin a looking from one to another. After a time whispering would begin. There would begin a whispering that would run through the town, visit all the houses, the shops, the stores. Men and women would stop on the street to speak to each other, the men speaking to other men, the women to other women. The women who were wives would be a little angry at him and the men a little envious, but the men would perhaps speak of him more bitterly than the women. That would be to cover up their own wish to break in some way the boredom of their own existence.

A smile spread itself over John Webster’s face and it was then he went to sit on the floor at his daughter’s feet and tell her the rest of the story of his married life. There was after all a kind of wicked satisfaction to be got out of his situation. As for his daughter, well, it was a fact too, that nature had made the connection between them quite inevitable. He might throw into his daughter’s lap the new aspect of life that had come to him and then, did she choose to reject it, that would be a matter for her to decide. People would not blame her. “Poor girl,” they would say, “what a shame she should have had such a man for a father.” On the other hand and if after hearing all he had to say she decided to run a little more swiftly through life, to open her arms to it, in a way of speaking, what he had done would be a help. There was Natalie whose old mother had made herself a great nuisance by getting drunk and shouting so that all the neighbors could hear and calling her hard-working daughters whores. It was perhaps absurd to think that such a mother might be giving her daughters a better chance in life than a quite respectable mother could possibly have given them and still, in a world upset, turned upside down as it were, that might be quite true too.

At any rate there was a quiet sureness in Natalie that was, even in his moments of doubt, amazingly quieting and healing to himself. “I love her and I accept her. If her old mother, by letting go of herself and shouting in the streets in a kind of drunken splendor of abandonment, has made a clear way in which Natalie may walk, all hail to her too,” he thought, smiling at his own thoughts.

He sat at his daughter’s feet talking quietly and as he talked something within her became more quiet. She listened with constantly growing interest, looking down at him occasionally. He sat very close to her and occasionally leaned over a little and laid his cheek against her leg. “The devil! He was quite apparently making love to her too.” She did not think such a thought definitely. A subtle feeling of confidence and sureness went out of him into her. He began the tale of his marriage again.

On the evening of his youth, when his friend and his friend’s mother and sister had come into the presence of himself and the woman he was to marry, he had suddenly been overcome by the same thing that afterward left so permanent a scar on her. Shame swept over him.

Well what was he to do? How was he to explain this second running into that room and into the presence of the naked woman? It was a matter that could not be explained. A mood of desperation swept over him and he ran past the people at the door and down the hallway, this time getting into the room to which he had been assigned.

He had closed and locked the door behind him and then he dressed, hurriedly, with feverish rapidity. When he was quite dressed he came out of the room carrying his bag. The hallway was silent and the lamp had been put back into its bracket on the wall. What had happened? No doubt the daughter of the house was with the woman, trying to comfort her. His friend had perhaps gone into his own room and was at the moment dressing and no doubt thinking thoughts too. There was bound to be no end of disturbed agitated thinking in the house. Everything might have been all right had he not gone into the room that second time, but how could he ever explain that the second going was as unpremeditated as the first. He went quickly downstairs.

Below he met his friend’s mother, a woman of fifty. She stood in a doorway that led into a dining room. A servant was putting dinner on the table. The laws of the household were being observed. It was time to dine and in a few minutes the people of the house would dine. “Holy Moses,” he thought, “I wonder if she could come down here now and sit at table with myself and the others, eating food? Can the habits of existence so quickly reassert themselves after so profound a disturbance?”