Chapter VI: Book THREE: I (2)

He put his bag down on the floor by his feet and looked at the older woman. “I don’t know,” he began, and stood looking at her and stammering. She was confused, as every one in that house must have been confused at that moment, but there was something in her, very kindly, that gave sympathy when it could not understand. She started to speak. “It was all an accident and there is nobody hurt,” she started to say, but he did not wait to listen. Picking up the bag he rushed out of the house.

What was to be done then? He had hurried across town to his own home and it was dark and silent. His father and mother had gone away. His grandmother, that is to say, his mother’s mother, was very ill in another town and his father and mother had gone there. They might not return for several days. There were two servants employed in the house, but as the house was to be unoccupied they had been permitted to go away. Even the fires were out. He could not stay there, but would have to go to a hotel.

“I went into the house and put my bag down on the floor by the front door,” he explained, and a shiver ran through his body as he remembered the dreariness of that evening long before. It was to have been an evening of gaiety. The four young people had planned to go to a dance and in anticipation of the figure he would cut with the new girl from another town, he had, in advance, worked himself up to a state of semi-excitement. The devil!--He had counted on finding in her the something--well, what was it?--the something a young fellow is always dreaming of finding in some strange woman who is suddenly to come up to him out of nowhere and bring with her new life which she presents to him freely, asking nothing. “You see, the dream is obviously an impossible one, but one has it in youth,” he explained, smiling. All through the telling of this part of his story he kept smiling. Did his daughter understand? One couldn’t question her understanding too closely. “The woman is to come clad in shining garments and with a calm smile on her face,” he went on, building up his fanciful picture. “With what regal grace she carries herself and yet, you understand, she is not some impossible cold drawn-away thing either. There are many men standing about, all no doubt more deserving than yourself, but it is to you she comes, walking slowly, with her body all alive. She is the unspeakably beautiful Virgin, but there is something very earthy about her too. The truth is that she can be very cold and proud and drawn-away when anyone else but yourself is concerned, but in your presence the coldness all goes out of her.

“She comes toward you and her hand, that holds before her slender young body a golden tray, trembles a little. On the tray there is a box, small and cunningly wrought, and within it is a jewel, a talisman, that is for you. You are to take the jewel, set in a golden ring, out of the box and put in on your finger. It is nothing. The strange and beautiful woman has but brought it to you as a sign, before all the others, that she lays herself at your feet. When your hand reaches forward and takes the jewel from the box her body begins to tremble and the golden tray falls to the floor making a loud rattling sound. Something terrific happens to all the others who have been witnesses of the scene. Of a sudden all the people present realize that you, whom they had always thought of as just an ordinary fellow, not, to tell the truth, as worthy as themselves, well, you see, they have been made, fairly forced, to realize your true self. Of a sudden there you stand before them all in your true colors, quite revealed at last. There is a kind of radiant splendor comes out of you and fairly lights up the room where you, the woman, and all the others, the men and women of your own town you have always known and who have always thought they knew you, where they all stand looking and gasping with astonishment.

“It is a moment. The most unbelievable thing happens. There is a clock on the wall and it has been ticking, ticking, running out the span of your life and the lives of all the others. Outside the room, in which this remarkable scene takes place, there is a street with the activities of the street going on. Men and women are perhaps hurrying up and down, trains are coming in and going out of distant railroad stations, and even further away ships are sailing on many wide seas and great winds are disturbing the waters of seas.

“And suddenly all is stopped. It is a fact. On the wall the clock stops ticking, moving trains become dead and lifeless, people in the streets, who have started to say words to each other, stand now with their mouths open, on the seas winds no longer blow.

“For all life everywhere there is this hushed moment and, out of it all, the buried thing within you asserts itself. Out of the great stillness you step and take the woman into your arms. In a moment now all life can begin to move and be again, but after this moment all life forever will have been colored by this act of your own, by this marriage. It was for this marriage you and the woman were made.”

All of which is perhaps going the extreme limit of fancifulness, as John Webster was careful to explain to Jane, and yet, there he was in the upper bedroom with his daughter, brought suddenly close to the daughter he had never known until that moment, and he was trying to speak to her of his feelings at the moment when, in his youth, he had once played the part of a supreme and innocent fool.

“The house was like a tomb, Jane,” he said, and there was a break in his voice.

It was evident the old boyhood dream was not yet dead. Even now, in his maturity, some faint perfume of it floated up to him as he sat on the floor at his daughter’s feet. “The fires in the house had been out all day and outdoors it was getting colder,” he began again. “All through the house there was that kind of damp coldness that always makes one think of death. You must remember that I had been thinking, and was still thinking, of what I had done at my friend’s house as the act of an insane fool. Well, you see, our house was heated by stoves and there was a small one in my own room upstairs. I went into the kitchen, where behind the kitchen stove, in a box, kindlings were always kept, cut and ready, and taking out an armful started upstairs.

“In the hallway, in the darkness at the foot of the stairs, my leg knocked against a chair and I put the armful of kindlings down on the chair seat. I stood in the darkness trying to think and not thinking. ‘I’m going to be sick perhaps,’ I thought. My self-respect was all gone and perhaps one cannot think at such times.

“In the kitchen, above the kitchen stove, before which my mother or our servant Adaline was always standing when the house was alive and not dead as it was now, just up there, where one could see it over the women’s heads, there was a small clock and now that clock began making a sound as loud as though some one were beating on sheets of iron with big hammers. In the house next door some one was talking steadily or maybe reading aloud. The wife of the German who lived in the next house had been ill in bed for months and perhaps now he was trying to entertain her by reading some story. The words came steadily, but in a broken way too. What I mean is, that there would be a steady little run of sounds, then it would be broken and then begin again. Sometimes the voice would be raised a little, for emphasis no doubt, and that was like a kind of splash, as when the waves along a beach all, for a long time, run to the same place clearly marked on the wet sand and then there comes one wave that goes far beyond all the others and splashes against the face of a rock.

“You see perhaps the state I was in. It was, as I have said, very cold in the house and for a long time I stood in one spot, not moving at all and thinking I never wanted to move again. The voices from the distance, from the German’s house next door, were like voices coming from some hidden buried place in myself. There was one voice telling me I was a fool and that, after what had happened, I could never again hold up my head in the world, and another voice telling me I was not a fool at all, but for the time the first voice had all the best of the argument. What I did was to stand there in the cold and try to let the two voices fight it out without putting in my oar, but after a while, it may have been because I was so cold, I began to cry like a kid and that made me so ashamed I went to the front door quickly and got out of the house forgetting to put on my overcoat.

“Well, I had left my hat in the house too and there I was outside in the cold, bareheaded, and presently as I walked, keeping as much as I could in unfrequented streets, it began to snow.

“‘All right,’ I said to myself, ‘I know what I’ll do. I’ll go to their house and ask her to marry me.’

“When I got there my friend’s mother was not in sight and the three younger people were sitting in the parlor of the house. I looked in through a window and then, fearing I would lose my courage if I hesitated, went boldly up and knocked on the door. I was glad anyway they had felt that after what had happened they couldn’t go to the dance and when my friend came and opened the door I said nothing, but walked directly into the room where the two girls sat.

“She was on a couch in a corner, where the light from a lamp on a table in the centre of the room fell on her but faintly, and I went directly to her. My friend had followed me into the room, but now I turned to him and his sister and asked them both to go out of the room. ‘Something has happened here to-night that can’t very well be explained and we must be left alone together for a few minutes,’ I said making a motion with my hand to where she sat on the couch.

“When they went out I followed to the door and closed it after them.

“And so there I was in the presence of the woman who was later to be my wife. There was an odd kind of droopiness to her whole person as she sat on the couch. Her body had, in a way you see, slid down from its perch on the couch and now she was lying rather than sitting. What I mean is that her body was draped on the couch. It was like a garment thrown carelessly down there. That had happened since I had come into the room. I stood before it a moment and then got down on my knees. Her face was very pale, but her eyes were looking directly into mine.

“‘I did something very strange twice this evening,’ I said, turning my face away so that I no longer looked into her eyes. Her eyes frightened and disconcerted me, I suppose. That must have been it. I had a certain speech to make and wanted to go through with it. There were certain words I was about to say, but now I know that at the same moment other words and thoughts, having nothing to do with what I was saying, were going on down within me.

“For one thing I knew my friend and his sister were at that moment standing just outside the door of the room waiting and listening.

“What were they thinking? Well, never mind that.

“What was I thinking myself? What was the woman to whom I was about to propose marriage thinking about?

“I had come to the house bareheaded, you understand, and no doubt looking a little wild. Perhaps every one in that house thought I had gone suddenly out of my mind and it may be that in fact I had.

“At any rate I felt very calm and on that evening and for all these years, up to a short time ago, when I became in love with Natalie, I’ve always been a very calm man, or at least thought I was. I have dramatized myself that way. What I suppose is that death is always a very calm thing and I must, in a way, have been committing suicide on that evening.

“There had been, in the town, a few weeks before this happened, a scandal that had got into the courts and was written about guardedly in our weekly newspaper. It concerned a case of rape. A farmer, who had employed in his household a young girl, had sent his wife off to town to buy supplies and while she was gone had got the girl into the upper part of his house and had raped her, tearing her clothes off and even beating her before he forced her to acquiesce in his desires. Later he had been arrested and brought to town where, at the very time I was kneeling on the floor before the body of my future wife, he was in jail.

“I speak of the matter because, as I knelt there, I remember now, a thought crossed my mind connecting me with the man. ‘I am also committing a rape’ something within me said.

“To the woman, who was there before me, so cold and white, I said something else.

“‘You understand that, this evening, when I first came to you naked, it was an accident,’ I said. ‘I want you to understand that, but I want you also to understand that when I came to you the second time it was not an accident. I want you to understand everything quite fully and then I want to ask you to marry me, to consent to be my wife.’

“That was what I said and after I had said it took one of her hands in mine and, without looking at her, knelt there at her feet waiting for her to speak. Perhaps had she spoken then, even in condemnation of me, everything would have been all right.

“She said nothing. I understand now why she could not, but then I did not understand. I have always, I admit, been impatient. Time passed and I waited. I was like one who has fallen from a great height into the sea and who feels himself going down and down, deeper and deeper. There is a great weight, you understand, pressing upon the man in the sea and he cannot breathe. What I suppose is that in the case of a man, falling thus into the sea, the force of his fall does after a time expend itself and he comes to a stop in his descent, and then suddenly begins again rising to the surface of the sea.

“And something of the sort happened to me. When I had been kneeling there for some little time, at her feet, I suddenly sprang up. Going to the door I threw it open and there, as I had expected, stood my friend and his sister. I must have appeared to them, at the moment, almost gay, perhaps they afterward thought it an insane gaiety. I cannot say as to that. After that evening I never went back to their house and my former friend and I began avoiding each other’s presence. There was no danger that they would tell anyone what had happened--out of respect to their guest, you understand. The woman was safe as far as their talking was concerned.

“Anyway I stood before them and smiled. ‘Your guest and I have got into a jam because of a series of absurd accidents that perhaps did not look like accidents and now I have asked her to marry me. She has not made up her mind about that,’ I said, speaking very formally and turning from them and going out of the house and to my father’s house where I quite calmly got my overcoat, my hat and my bag. ‘I’ll have to go to the hotel and stay until father and mother come home,’ I thought. At any rate I knew that the affairs of the evening would not, as I had supposed earlier in the evening, throw me into a time of illness.”

III

“I do not mean to say that after that evening I did think more clearly, but after that day and its adventures other days and weeks did come marching along and, as nothing specially happened as a result of what I had done, I couldn’t stay in the half-exalted state I was in then.”

John Webster rolled over on the floor at his daughter’s feet and, squirming about so that he lay on his belly facing her, looked up into her face. He had his elbows on the floor and his chin rested on his two hands. There was something diabolically strange about the way youth had come into his figure and he had quite won his way with his daughter. There he was, you see, wanting nothing specially from her and he was wholeheartedly giving himself to her. For the time even Natalie was forgotten and as for his wife, in the next room lying on the bed and perhaps in her dumb way suffering as he had never suffered, to him at the moment she simply did not exist.

Well, there was the woman, who was his daughter, before him and he was giving himself to her. It is likely that at the moment he had quite forgotten she was his daughter. He was thinking now of his youth, when he was a young man, much perplexed by life, and was seeing her as a young woman who would inevitably, and as she went along through life, often be as perplexed as he had been. He tried to describe to her his feelings as a young man who had proposed to a woman who had made no answer and in whom nevertheless there was the perhaps romantic notion that he was in some queer way inevitably and finally attached to that particular woman.

“You see what I did then, Jane, is something you will perhaps find yourself doing some day and that it may be inevitable every one does.” He reached forward and taking his daughter’s bare foot in his hand drew it to him and kissed it. Then he sat quickly upright holding his knees in his arms. Something like a blush came swiftly over his daughter’s face and then she began to look at him with very serious puzzled eyes. He smiled gaily.

“And so you see, there I was, living right here in this very town and that girl to whom I had proposed marriage had gone away and I had heard nothing more from her. She only stayed at my friend’s house a day or two after I had managed to make the beginning of her visit such a startling affair.

“For a long time my father had been scolding at me because I had taken no special interest in the washing machine factory, it was supposed I was after his day to take hold of and run, and so I decided I had better do a thing called ‘settling down.’ That is to say, I made up my mind it would be better for me if I gave myself less to dreams and to the kind of gawky youthfulness that only led to my doing such unaccountable things as that second running into that naked woman’s presence.

“The truth is, of course, that my father, who in his own youth had come to a day when he had made just such another decision as I was then making, that he, for all his settling down and becoming a hard-working sensible man, hadn’t got very much for it; but I didn’t think of that at the time. Well, he wasn’t such a gay old dog as I remember him now. He had always worked pretty hard, I suppose, and every day he sat for eight or ten hours at his desk and through all the years I had known him he had been subject to attacks of indigestion, during which every one in our house had to go softly about for fear of making his head ache worse than it did. The attacks used to come on about once a month and he would come home, and mother would fix him up on a couch in our front room, and she used to heat flatirons and roll them in towels and put them on his belly, and there he would lie all day groaning, and as you may suppose, making the life of our house a gay, festive affair.

“And then, when he got all right again and only looked a little gray and drawn he would come sit at the table at meal-time with the rest of us and would talk to me about his life, as an entirely successful affair, and take it for granted I wanted just such another life.

“For some fool reason, I don’t understand now, I thought then that was just what I did want. I suppose all the time I must have wanted something else and that made me spend so much of my time having vague dreams, but not only father, but all the older men in our town and perhaps in all the other towns along the railroad east and west were thinking and talking just that same way to their sons and I suppose I got caught up by the general drift of thinking and just went into it blind, with my head down, not thinking at all.

“So there I was, a young washing machine manufacturer, and I hadn’t any woman, and since that affair at his house I didn’t see my former friend with whom I used to try to talk of the vague, but nevertheless more colorful dreams of my idle hours. After a few months father sent me out on the road to see if I couldn’t sell washing machines to merchants in small towns and sometimes I was successful and did sell some and sometimes I didn’t.

“At night in the towns I used to walk about in the streets and sometimes I did get in with a woman, with a waitress from the hotel, or a girl I had picked up on the streets.

“We walked about under the trees along the residence streets of the town and when I was lucky I sometimes induced one of them to go with me to a little cheap hotel or into the darkness of the fields at the edge of the towns.

“At such times we talked of love and sometimes I was a good deal moved, but after all not really moved.

“The whole thing started me thinking of the slender naked girl I had seen on the bed and of the look in her eyes at the moment when she came up out of sleep and her eyes met mine.

“I knew her name and address and so one day I grew bold and wrote her a long letter. You must understand that by this time I felt I had become quite a sensible fellow and so I tried to write in a sensible way.

“I remember I was sitting in the writing-room of a small hotel in an Indiana town when I did it. The desk where I sat was by a window near the town’s Main Street and, as it was evening, people were going along the street to their houses, I suppose going home to the evening meal.

“I don’t deny I grew pretty romantic. As I sat there, feeling lonely and I suppose filled with self-pity, I looked up and saw a little drama acted out in a hallway across the street. There was a rather old tumble-down building with a stairway at the side running to an upper story where it was evident some one lived, as there were white curtains at the window.

“I sat looking across at the place, and I suppose I was dreaming of the long slender body of the girl on the bed upstairs in another house. It was evening and growing dusk, you understand, and just such a light as had fallen over us at the moment we looked into each other’s eyes, at the moment when there was no one but just our two selves, before we had time to think and remember the others in that house, when I was coming out of a daydream and she was coming out of the dreams of sleep, at the moment when we accepted each other and the complete and momentary loveliness of each other--well, you see, just such a light as I had stood in and she had lain in as one might lie on the soft waters of some southern sea, just such another light was now lying over the little bare writing-room of the foul little hotel in that town and across the street a woman came down the stairway and stood in just such another light.

“As it turned out she was also tall, like your mother, but I could not see what kind or color of clothes she wore. There was some peculiarity of the light; an illusion was created. The devil! I wish I could tell of things that have happened to me without this eternal business of having everything I say seem a little strange and uncanny. One walks in a wood at evening, let us say, Jane, and one has queer fascinating illusions. The light, the shadows cast by trees, the open spaces between trees--these things create the illusions. Often the trees seem to beckon to one. Old sturdy trees look wise and you think they are going to tell you some great secret, but they don’t. One gets into a forest of young birches. What naked girlish things, running and running, free, free. Once I was in such a wood with a girl. We were up to something. Well, it had gone no further than that we had a tremendous feeling for each other at the moment. We had kissed and I remember that twice I had stopped in the half-darkness and had touched her face with my fingers--tenderly and softly, you know. She was a little dumb shy girl I had picked up on the streets of an Indiana town, a kind of free immoral little thing, such as sometimes pop up in such towns. I mean she was free with men in a kind of queer shy way. I had picked her up on the street and then, when we got out there in the wood, we both felt the strangeness of things and the strangeness of being with each other too.

“There we were, you see. We were about to--I don’t exactly know what we were up to. We were standing and looking at each other.

“And then we both looked suddenly up and there, in the path before us, was a very dignified and beautiful old man. He was wearing a robe that was caught over his shoulders, in a swaggering kind of a way, and it was spread out behind him over the floor of the forest, between the trees.

“What a princely old man! What a kingly fellow, in fact! We both saw him, both stood looking at him with eyes filled with wonder, and he stood looking at us.

“I had to go forward and touch the thing with my hands before the illusion our minds had created could be dispelled. The kingly old man was just a half-decayed old stump and the robe he wore was just the purple night shadows falling down on the floor of the forest, but our having seen the thing together made everything different between the shy little town girl and myself. What we had perhaps both intended doing couldn’t be done in the spirit in which we had approached it. I mustn’t try to tell you of that now. I mustn’t get too much off the track.

“What I am thinking is merely that such things happen. I am talking of another time and place, you see. On that other evening, as I sat in the hotel writing-room, there was just such another light, and across the street a girl, or a woman, was coming down a stairway. I had the illusion that she was nude like a young birch tree and that she was coming toward me. Her face made a grayish wavering shadow-like spot in the hallway and she was evidently waiting for some one as she kept thrusting her head out and looking up and down the street.

“I became a fool again. That’s the story, I dare say. As I sat looking and leaning forward, trying to see deeper and deeper into the evening light, a man came hurrying along the street and stopped at the stairway. He was tall like herself and when he stopped I remember that he took off his hat and stepped into the darkness holding it in his hand. There was probably something stealthy and covered-up about the love affair between the two people as the man also put his head out of the stairway and looked long and carefully up and down the street before taking the woman into his arms. Perhaps she was some other man’s wife. Anyway they stepped back a little into a greater darkness and, I thought, took each other quite completely. How much I saw and how much I imagined I’ll of course never know. At any rate the two grayish white faces seemed to float and then merge and become one grayish white spot.

“A violent tremor ran through my body. There, it seemed to me, but a few hundred feet from where I sat, now almost in complete darkness, was love finding glorious expression. Lips clung to lips, two warm bodies pressed close to each other, something altogether glorious and lovely in life, that I, by running about in the evening with the poor little girls of the town, and by trying to induce them to go with me into the fields to serve only my animal hunger--well, you see, there was a thing one might find in life that I had not found and that at the moment I thought I had failed to find because, at a great crisis, I had not found courage to go persistently toward it.”

IV

“And so you see I lighted a lamp in the writing-room of that hotel and forgot my supper and sat there and wrote pages and pages to the woman, and grew foolish too and confessed a lie, that I was ashamed of the thing that had happened between us some months before, and that I had only done it, that is to say, that I had only run into the room to her that second time, because I was a fool and a lot of other unspeakable nonsense.”

John Webster jumped to his feet and started to walk nervously about the room, but now his daughter became something more than a passive listener to his tale. He had walked to where the Virgin stood between the burning candles and was moving back toward the door, that led into the hallway and down stairs, when she sprang up and running to him impulsively threw her arms about his neck. She began to sob and buried her face on his shoulder. “I love you,” she said. “I don’t care what’s happened, I love you.”

V

And so there was John Webster in his house and he had succeeded, at least for the moment, in breaking through the wall that had separated him from his daughter. After her outburst they went and sat together on the bed, with his arm about her and her head on his shoulder. Years afterward, sometimes, when he was with a friend and was in a certain mood, John Webster occasionally spoke of that moment as having been the most important and lovely of his whole life. In a way his daughter had given herself to him as he had given himself to her. There had been a kind of marriage, that he realized. “I have been a father as well as a lover. Perhaps the two things cannot be differentiated. I have been one father who has not been afraid to realize the loveliness of his daughter’s flesh and to fill my senses with the fragrance of it,” was what he said.

As it turned out he might have sat thus, talking with his daughter, for another half-hour and then left the house to go away with Natalie, without any more drama, but that his wife, lying on the bed in the next room, heard her daughter’s cry of love and it must have stirred something deeply buried away in her. She got silently off the bed and going to the door opened it softly. Then she stood leaning against the door-frame and listening as her husband talked. There was a look of hard terror in her eyes. Perhaps she wanted at that moment to kill the man who had for so long a time been her husband and did not do so only because the long years of inaction and submission into life had made it impossible for her to lift an arm to strike.

At any rate she stood in silence and one might have thought that she would at any moment fall to the floor, but she didn’t. She waited and John Webster kept on talking. Now he was telling his daughter with a kind of devilish attention to details all the story of their marriage.

What had happened, at least in the man’s version of the affair, was that, after having written one letter he could not stop and wrote another on the same evening and two more on the following day.

He kept on writing letters and what he himself thought was that the letter writing had created within him a kind of furious passion of lying that, once started, couldn’t be stopped. “I began something that has been going on in me all these years,” he explained. “It is a trick one practises, this lying to oneself about oneself.” It was evident his daughter did not follow him, although she tried. He was talking now of something she had not experienced, could not have experienced, that is to say, the hypnotic power of words. Already she had read books and had been tricked by words, but there was in her no realization of what had already been done to her. She was a young girl and as, often enough, there was nothing in the life about her that seemed exciting or interesting she was thankful for the life of words and books. It was true they left one quite blank, went out of the mind leaving no trace. Well, they were created out of a kind of dream world. One had to have lived, to have experienced much of life, before one could come to the realization that just beneath the surface of ordinary everyday life there was deep and moving drama always going on. Few come to realization of the poetry of the actual.

It was evident her father had come to some such realization. Now he was talking. He was opening doors for her. It was like travelling in an old town one had thought one knew, with a marvellously inspired guide. One went in and out of old houses, seeing things as they had never been seen before. All the things of everyday life, a picture on the wall, an old chair sitting by a table, the table itself at which a man one had always known, sits smoking a pipe.

By some miracle all these things were now being invested with new life and significance.

The painter Van Gogh, who it is said killed himself in a fit of desperation because he could not gather within the limits of his canvas all the wonder and glory of the sun shining in the sky, once painted a canvas. An old chair set in an empty room. When Jane Webster grew to be a woman and had got her own understanding of life she once saw the canvas hanging in a gallery in the city of New York. There was a strange wonder of life to be got from looking at the painting of an ordinary, roughly made chair that had perhaps been owned by some peasant of France, some peasant at whose house the painter had perhaps stopped for an hour on a summer day.

It must have been a day when he was very much alive and very conscious of all the life of the house in which he sat and so he painted the chair and channeled into the painting all of the emotional reactions within himself to the people in that particular house and in many other houses he had visited.

* * * * *

Jane Webster was in the room with her father and his arm was about her and he was talking of something she couldn’t understand and yet she did understand too. Now he was again a young man and was feeling the loneliness and uncertainty of young manhood as she had already sometimes felt the loneliness and uncertainty of her own young womanhood. Like her father she must begin to try to understand things a little. Now he was an honest man, he was talking to her honestly. There was wonder in that alone.

In his young manhood he went about towns, getting in with girls, doing with girls a thing she had heard whispers about. That made him feel unclean. He did not feel deeply enough the thing he did with the poor little girls. His body had made love to women, but he had not. That her father knew, but she did not yet know. There was much she did not know.

Her father, then a young man, had begun writing letters to a woman into whose presence he once came quite nude as he had appeared before her but a short time before. He was trying to explain how his mind, feeling about, had alighted upon the figure of a certain woman as one towards whom love might be directed.

He sat in a room in a hotel and wrote the word “love” in black ink on a white sheet of paper. Then he went out to walk in the quiet night streets of the town. She got the picture of him now quite clearly. The strangeness of his being so much older than herself and of his being her father had gone away. He was a man and she was a woman. She wanted to quiet the clamoring voices within him, to fill the blank empty spaces. She pressed her body more closely against his.

His voice kept explaining things. There was a passion for explanation in him.

As he sat in the hotel he had written certain words on paper and putting the paper into an envelope had sent it away to a woman living in a distant place. Then he walked and walked and thought of more words and going back to the hotel wrote them out on other pieces of paper.

A thing was created within him it was hard to explain, that he had not understood himself. One walked under the stars and in quiet streets of towns under trees and sometimes, on summer evenings, heard voices in the darkness. People, men and women, were sitting in the darkness on the porches of houses. There was an illusion created. One sensed in the darkness somewhere a deep quiet splendor of life and ran toward it. There was a kind of desperate eagerness. In the sky the stars shone more splendidly because of one’s thoughts. There was a little wind and it was like the hand of a lover touching the cheeks, playing in one’s hair. There was something lovely in life one must find. When one was young one could not stand still, but must go toward it. The writing of the letters was an effort to go toward the thing. It was an effort to find footing in the darkness on strange winding roads.

And so John Webster had, by his letter writing, done a strange and false thing to himself and to the woman who was later to be his wife. He had created a world of unrealities. Would he and the woman be able to live together in that world?

VI

In the semi-darkness of the room, as the man talked to his daughter trying to make her understand an intangible thing, the woman who had been his wife for so many years and out of whose body had come the younger woman who now sat close to her husband, began also to try to understand. After a time, and being unable to stand longer, she managed, without attracting the attention of the others, to slip to the floor. She let her back slide down along the frame of the door and her legs turned sideways under her heavy body. In the position into which she had got she was uncomfortable and her knees hurt, but she did not mind. There was in fact a kind of satisfaction to be got from physical discomfort.

One had lived for so many years in a world that was now and before one’s very eyes being destroyed. There was something wicked and ungodly in this business of defining life too sharply. Certain things should not be spoken of. One moved dimly through a dim world not asking too many questions. If there was death in silence, then one accepted death. What was the use of denial? One’s body got old and heavy. When one sat on the floor the knees hurt. There was something unbearable in this notion that a man, with whom one had lived so many years of life and whom one had accepted quite definitely as a part of the machinery of life, should suddenly become something else, should become this terrible questioner, this raker-up of forgotten things.

If one lived behind a wall one preferred life behind the wall. Behind the wall the light was dim and did not hurt the eyes. Memories were shut out. The sounds of life grew faint and indistinct in the distance. There was something barbaric and savage in all this business of breaking down walls, making cracks and gaps in the wall of life.

There was a struggle going on within the woman, Mary Webster, also. A queer sort of new life came and went in her eyes. Had a fourth person at that moment come into the room he might have been more conscious of her than of the others.

There was something terrible in the way her husband John Webster had set the stage for the battle that was now to go on within her. The man was after all a dramatist. The business of buying the picture of the Virgin and the candles, the making of this little stage upon which a drama was to be played out; there was an unconscious art expression in all this.

Perhaps he had outwardly intended nothing of the sort, but with what devilish certainty he had worked. The woman now sat in a half-darkness on the floor. Between her and the burning candles was the bed on which the two others sat, one talking, the other listening. All the floor of the room, near where she sat was in heavy black shadows. She had put one hand out against the door-frame to help support herself.

The candles on their high place flickered as they burned. The light fell only on her shoulders, her head, and her upraised arm and hand.

She was almost submerged in a sea of darkness. Now and then, from sheer weariness her head fell forward and there was an effect of sinking completely into the sea.

Still her arm was upraised and her head came back again to the surface of the sea. There was a slight rocking movement to her body. She was like an old boat, half water-logged, lying in the sea. Little fluttering waves of light seemed playing over her heavy white upraised face.

Breathing was somewhat difficult. Thinking was somewhat difficult. One had gone along for years without thinking. It was better to lie quietly in a sea of silence. The world was quite right in excommunicating those who disturbed the sea of silence. Mary Webster’s body quivered a little. One might kill, but had not the strength to kill, did not know how to kill. Killing was a business one had to learn too.

It was unbearable, but one had at times to think. Things happened. A woman married a man and then found, quite suddenly, she had not married him. The world was getting strange unacceptable notions about marriage. Daughters should not be told such things as her husband was now telling their daughter. Could the mind of a young virginal girl be raped, by her own father, into consciousness of unspeakable things in life? If such things were permitted what would become of all decent orderly living of lives? Virginal girls should find out nothing about life until the time came to live the things they must, being women, finally accept.

* * * * *

In every human body there is a great well of silent thinking always going on. Outwardly certain words are said, but there are other words being said at the same time down in the deep hidden places. There is a deposit of thoughts, of unexpressed emotions. How many things thrown down into the deep well, hidden away in the deep well!

There is a heavy iron lid clamped over the mouth of the well. When the lid is safely in place one gets on all right. One goes about saying words, eating food, meeting people, conducting affairs, accumulating money, wearing clothes, one lives an ordered life.

Sometimes at night, in dreams, the lid trembles, but no one knows about that.

Why should there be those who desire to tear the lids off the wells, to break through the walls? Things had better be left as they are. Those who disturb the heavy iron lids should be killed.

* * * * *

The heavy iron lid over the deep well that was within the body of Mary Webster was trembling violently. It danced up and down. The dancing light from the candles was like the little playful waves on the surface of a calm sea. It met in her eyes another kind of dancing light.

On the bed John Webster talked freely and easily. If he had set the stage he had also given himself the talking rôle in the drama that was to be played out upon it. His own thought had been that everything that happened on that evening was directed toward his daughter. He had even dared to think he might be able to re-channel her life. Her young life was like a river that was still small and made but a slight murmuring sound as it ran through quiet fields. One might still step across the stream that was later, and when it had taken other streams into itself, to become a river. One might venture to throw a log across the stream, to start it off in a quite different direction. The whole thing was a daring, a quite reckless thing to do, but one could not quite escape some such action.

Now he had dismissed from his mind the other woman, his former wife, Mary Webster. He had thought when she went out of the bedroom she had finally walked off the stage. There had been satisfaction in seeing her go. He had really, in all their life together, never made a contact with her. When he thought her gone from the field of his own life he felt relieved. One could breathe more deeply, talk more freely.

He thought of her as having gone off the stage, but she had come back. He still had her to deal with too.

In Mary Webster’s mind memories were awakening. Her husband was telling the story of his marriage, but she did not hear his words. A story began to tell itself within her, beginning far back on a day in her own young womanhood.

She had heard the cry of love for a man come out of her daughter’s throat and the cry had stirred something within her so deeply that she had come back into the room where her husband and daughter sat together on the bed. Once there had been that same cry within another young woman, but for some reason it had never got itself out, past her lips. At the moment when it might have come from her, at that moment long ago when she lay naked on a bed and looked into the eyes of a young naked man something, a thing people called shame, had come between her and the getting of that glad cry past her lips.

Her mind now wearily went back over the details of the scene. An old railroad journey was retravelled.

Things were tangled. First she lived in one place and then, as though pushed into the act by a hand she could not see, she went on a visit to another place.

The journey there was taken in the middle of the night and, as there were no sleeping cars on the train, she had to sit in a day-coach through several hours of darkness.

Outside the car window there was darkness, broken now and then when the train stopped for a few minutes at some town in Western Illinois or Southern Wisconsin. There was a station building with a lamp fastened to the outer wall and sometimes but a solitary man, bundled in a coat and perhaps pushing a truck piled with trunks and boxes along a station platform. At some of the towns people got aboard the train and at others people got off and went away into the darkness.

An old woman who carried a basket in which there was a black and white cat came to sit in the seat with her and after she had got off at one of the stations an old man took her place.

The old man did not look at her, but kept muttering words she could not catch. He had a ragged gray moustache that hung down over his shrunken lips and he continually stroked it with a bony old hand. The words he said in an undertone were muttered behind the hand.

The young woman of that railroad journey, taken long ago, had, after a time, fallen into a half-waking, half-sleeping state. Her mind had run ahead of her body to her journey’s end. A girl she had known at school had invited her for a visit and there had been several letters written back and forth. Two young men would be in the house all during the time of the visit.

One of the young men she had already seen. He was her friend’s brother and had once come on a visit to the school where the two girls were students.

What would the other young man be like? It was curious how many times she had already asked herself that question. Now her mind was making fanciful pictures of him.

The train ran through a country of low hills. Dawn was coming. It would be a day of gray cold clouds. Snow threatened. The muttering old man of the gray moustache and the bony hand had got off the train.

The half-awake eyes of the tall slender young woman looked out over low hills and long stretches of flat land. The train crossed a bridge over a river. She slipped into sleep and was jerked out again by the starting or stopping of the train. Across a distant field a young man was walking in the gray morning light.