Chapter VII: Book THREE: I (3)

Had she dreamed there was a young man going across a field beside the train or had she actually seen such a man? In what way was he connected with the young man she was to meet at her journey’s end?

It was a little absurd to think the young man in the field could be of flesh and blood. He walked at the same pace the train was going stepping lightly over fences, going swiftly through the streets of towns, passing like a shadow through strips of dark woodland.

When the train stopped he also stopped and stood looking at her and smiling. One almost felt he could go into one’s body and come out smiling thus. The idea was strangely sweet too. Now he walked for a long time on the surface of the waters of a river alongside which the train was running.

And all the time he looked into her eyes, darkly, when the train passed through a forest and it was dark inside the train, with a smile in his eyes when they came out again into the open country. There was something in his eyes that invited, called to her. Her body grew warm and she stirred uneasily in the car seat.

The trainmen had built a fire in a stove at the end of the car and all the doors and windows were closed. Evidently it was not going to be such a cold day after all. It was unbearably hot in the car.

She got out of her seat and, clutching at the edges of other seats, made her way to the end of the car where she opened a door and stood for a time looking at the flying landscape.

* * * * *

The train came to the station where she was to get off and there, on the station platform, was her girl friend, come to the station on the odd chance she would come on that train.

And then she had gone with her friend into the strange house and her friend’s mother had insisted she go to bed and sleep until evening. The two women kept asking how it had happened she had come on that train and as she could not explain she became a little embarrassed. It was true there was another and faster train she might have taken and had the entire ride in the day-time.

There had just been a kind of feverish desire to get out of her own town and her mother’s house. She had been unable to explain that to her own people. One couldn’t tell one’s mother and father she just wanted to get out. In her own home there had been a confusion of questions about the whole matter. Well, there she was, being driven into a corner and asked questions that couldn’t be answered. She had a hope that her girl friend would understand and kept hopefully saying to her what she had said over and over rather senselessly at home. “I just wanted to do it. I don’t know, I just wanted to do it.”

In the strange house she had got into bed to sleep, glad to escape the annoying question. When she awoke they would have forgotten the whole matter. Her friend had come into the room with her and she wanted to dismiss her quickly, to be alone for a time. “I’ll not unpack my bag now. I think I’ll just undress and crawl in between the sheets. It’s going to be warm anyway,” she explained. It was absurd. Well she had looked forward to something quite different on her arrival, laughter, young men standing about and looking a little self-conscious. Now she only felt uncomfortable. Why did people keep asking why she had got up at midnight and taken a slow train instead of waiting until morning? One wanted sometimes just to be a fool about little things, and not to have to give explanations. When her friend went out of the room she threw off all her clothes and got quickly into bed and closed her eyes. It was another foolish notion she had, her wanting to be naked. Had she not taken the slow uncomfortable train she would not have had the fancy about the young man walking beside the train in the fields, through the streets of towns, through forests.

It was good to be naked sometimes. There was the feel of things against one’s skin. If one could only have the joyful feeling of that more often. One could sink into a clean bed, sometimes, when one was tired and sleepy and it was like getting into the firm warm arms of some one who could love and understand one’s foolish impulses.

The young woman in the bed slept and in her sleep was again being carried swiftly along through the darkness. The woman with the cat and the old man who muttered words did not appear again, but many other people came and went through her dream-world. There was a swift tangled march of strange events. She went forward, always forward toward something she wanted. Now it approached. A great eagerness took possession of her.

It was strange that she wore no clothes. The young man who walked so swiftly through fields had reappeared, but she had not noticed before that he also did not wear clothes.

The world had grown dark. There was a dusky darkness.

And now the young man had stopped going swiftly forward and like herself was silent. They both hung suspended in a sea of silence. He was standing and looking directly into her eyes. He could go within her and come out again. The thought was infinitely sweet.

She lay in a soft warm darkness and her flesh was hot, too hot. “Some one has foolishly built a fire and has forgotten to open the doors and windows,” she thought vaguely.

The young man, who was now so close to her, who was standing silently so close to her and looking directly into her eyes, could make everything all right. His hands were within a few inches of her body. In a moment they would touch, bring cool peace into her body, into herself too.

There was a sweet peace to be got by looking directly into the young man’s eyes. They were glowing in the darkness like little pools into which one could cast oneself. A final and infinite peace and joy could be got by casting oneself into the pools.

Could one stay thus, lying quietly in the soft warm dark pools? One had got into a secret place, behind a high wall. Outside voices cried--“Shame! Shame!” When one listened to the voices the pools became foul loathsome places. Should one listen to the voices or should one close the ears, close the eyes? The voices beyond the wall became louder and louder--crying, “Shame! Be ashamed!” To listen to the voices brought death. Did closing one’s ears to the voices bring death too?

VII

John Webster was telling a story. There was a thing he himself wanted to understand. Wanting to understand things was a new passion, come to him. What a world he had lived in always and how little he had wanted to understand it. Children were being born in towns and on farms. They grew up to be men and women. Some of them went to colleges, others, after a few years in the town or country schools, got out into life, married perhaps, got jobs in factories or shops, went to church on Sundays or to a ball game, became parents of children.

People everywhere told things, talked of things they thought interested them, but no one told truths. At school there was no attention paid to truth. What a tangle of other and unimportant things. “Two and two make four. If a merchant sell three oranges and two apples to a man and oranges are to be sold at twenty-four cents per dozen and apples at sixteen, how much does the man owe the merchant?”

An important matter indeed. Where is the fellow going with the three oranges and two apples? He is a small man in brown boots and has his cap stuck on the side of his head. There is a peculiar smile playing around his mouth. The sleeve of his coat is torn. What did that? The cuss is singing a song under his breath. Listen:

“Diddle de di do,
Diddle de di do,
Chinaberries grow on a Chinaberry tree.
Diddle de di do.”

What in the name of the bearded men, who came into the queen’s bed-chamber when the king of Rome was born, does he mean by that? What is a Chinaberry tree?

John Webster talked to his daughter, sat with his arm about her talking, and back of him, and unseen, his wife struggled and fought to put back into its place the iron lid one should always keep tightly clamped down on the opening of the well of unexpressed thoughts within oneself.

There was a man who had come naked into her naked presence in the dusk of the late afternoon of a day long ago. He had come in to her and had done a thing to her. There had been a rape of the unconscious self. That had been in time forgotten or forgiven, but now he was doing it again. He was talking now. Of what was he talking? Were there not things of which one never talked? For what purpose the deep well within oneself except that it be a place into which one could put the things that must not be talked about?

Now John Webster was trying to tell the whole story of his attempt at love-making with the woman he had married.

The writing of letters containing the word “love,” had come to something. After a time, and when he had sent off several such letters written in the hotel writing-rooms, and just when he was beginning to think he would never get an answer to one of them and might as well give the whole matter up, an answer had come. Then there had burst from him a flood of letters.

He was still then going about from town to town trying to sell washing machines to merchants, but that only took a part of each day. There was left the late afternoons, mornings when he arose early and sometimes went for a walk along the streets of one of the towns before breakfast, the long evenings and the Sundays.

He was full of unaccountable energy all through that time. It must have been because he was in love. If one were not in love one could not feel so alive. In the early mornings, and in the evenings as he walked about, looking at houses and people, every one suddenly seemed close to him. Men and women came out of houses and went along the streets, factory whistles blew, men and boys went in and out at the doors of factories.

He was standing by a tree on a strange street of a strange town in the evening. In a nearby house a child cried and a woman’s voice talked to it in low tones. His fingers gripped the bark of the tree. He wanted to run into the house where the child was crying, to take the child out of its mother’s arms and quiet it, to kiss the mother perhaps. What a thing it would be if he could only go along a street shaking men by the hand, putting his arms about the shoulders of young girls.

He had extravagant fancies. There might be a world in which there were new and marvellous cities. He went along imagining such cities. For one thing the doors to all the houses were wide open. Everything was clean and neat. The sills to the doors of the houses had been washed. He walked into one of the houses. Well, the people had gone out, but on the chance some such fellow as himself would wander in they had set out a little feast on a table in one of the rooms downstairs. There was a loaf of white bread with a carving knife lying beside it so that one could cut off slices, cold meats, little squares of cheese, a decanter of wine.

He sat alone at the table to eat, feeling very happy, and after his hunger had been satisfied carefully brushed away the crumbs and fixed everything nicely. Some other fellow might come along later and wander into the same house.

The fancies young Webster had during that period of his life filled him with delight. Sometimes he stopped in his night walks along dark residence streets and stood looking up at the sky and laughing.

There he was in a world of fancies, in a place of dreams. His mind plunged him back into the house he had visited in his dream-world. What curiosity there was in him in regard to the people who lived there. It was night, but the place was lighted. There were little lamps one could pick up and carry about. There was a city, wherein each house was a feasting place and this was one of the houses and in its sweet depths things other than the belly could be fed.

One went through the house feeding all the senses. The walls had been painted with strong colors that had now faded and become soft and mellow with age. The time had passed in America when people continually built new houses. They built houses strongly and then stayed in them, beautified them slowly and with a sure touch. One would perhaps rather be in such a house in the day-time when the owners were at home, but it was fine to be there alone at night too.

The lamp held above one’s head threw dancing shadows on the walls. One went up a stairway into bedrooms, wandered in halls, came down the stairs again and putting the lamp back into its place passed out at the open front door.

How sweet to linger on the front steps for a moment, having more dreams. What of the people who lived in the house? In one of the bedrooms upstairs he had fancied he knew that a young woman slept. Had she been in the bed and asleep and had he walked in on her, what would have happened?

Might there be in the world, well, one might as well say in some world of the fancy--perhaps it would take too much time for an actual people to create such a world--but might there not be a people, in the world of one’s fancy, a people who had really developed the senses, people who really smelled, saw, tasted, felt things with their fingers, heard things with their ears? One could dream of such a world. It was early evening and for several hours one did not have to go back to the little dirty town hotel.

Some day there might be a world inhabited by people who lived. There would be, then, an end of continual mouthings about death. People would take life up firmly like a filled cup and carry it until the time came to throw it away over the shoulder with a gesture. They would realize that wine was made to drink, food to eat and nourish the body, the ears to hear all manner of sounds, the eyes to see things.

Within the bodies of such people what unknown senses might there not be developed? Well, it might very well be that a young woman, such as John Webster was trying to fancify into existence, that on such evenings such a young woman might be lying quietly in a bed in an upper chamber of one of the houses along the dark street. One went in at the open door of the house and taking up the lamp went to her. One could fancy the lamp itself as a thing of beauty too. There was a small ring-like arrangement through which one slipped the finger. One wore the lamp like a ring on the finger. The little flame of it was like a jewel shining in the darkness.

One went up the stairs and softly into the room where the woman was lying on the bed. One held the lamp above one’s head. Its light shone into one’s eyes and into the eyes of the woman. There was a long slow time when the two just remained so, looking at each other.

There was a question being asked. “Are you for me? Am I for you?” People had developed a new sense, many new senses. People saw with their eyes, smelled with their nostrils, heard with their ears. The deeper-lying, buried-away senses of the body had been developed too. Now people could accept or dismiss one another with a gesture. There was no more slow starvation of men and women. Long lives did not have to be lived during which one knew, and then but faintly, a few half-golden moments.

* * * * *

There was something about all this having fancies closely connected with his marriage and with his life since his marriage. He was trying to make that clear to his daughter but it was difficult.

There had been that moment once, when he had gone into the upper room of a house and had found a woman lying before him. There had been a question come suddenly and unexpectedly into his own eyes and it had found a quick eager answer in hers.

And then--the devil, it was hard to get things straight! In some way a lie had been told. By whom? There had been a poison he and the woman had breathed together. Who had blown the cloud of poison vapor into the air of that upper bed-chamber?

The moment had kept coming back into the mind of the young man. He walked in streets of strange towns having thoughts of coming into the upper bed-chamber of a new kind of womanhood.

Then later he went to the hotel and sat for hours writing letters. To be sure he did not write out the fancies he had been having. O, had he but had the courage to do that! Had he but known enough to do that!

What he did was to write the word “love,” over and over rather stupidly. “I went walking and I thought of you and I loved you so. I saw a house I liked and I thought of you and me living in it as man and wife. I am sorry I was so stupid and blundering when I saw you that other time. Give me another chance and I will prove my ‘love’ to you.”

What a betrayal! It was John Webster himself who had, in the end, poisoned the wells of truth at which he and the woman would have to drink as they went along the road toward happiness.

He hadn’t been thinking of her at all. He had been thinking of the strange mysterious woman lying in the upper bed-chamber in the city of the land of his fancy.

Everything got started wrong and then nothing could be set straight again. One day a letter came from her and then, after writing a great many other letters, he went to her town to see her.

There was a time of embarrassment and then the past was apparently forgotten. They went to walk together under the trees in a strange town. Later he wrote more letters and came to see her again. One night he asked her to marry him.

The very devil! He didn’t even take her into his arms when he asked her. There was a kind of fear involved in the whole matter. “I’d better not after what happened before. I’ll wait until we’re married. Things will be different then.” One had a notion. It was that after marriage one became something quite different from what one had been before and that the beloved one also became something quite different.

And so he had managed to get married, having that notion, and he and the woman had set out together upon a wedding trip.

John Webster held his daughter’s body closely against his own and trembled a little. “I had some notion in my head that I had better go slow,” he said. “You see, I had already frightened her once. ‘We’ll go slow here,’ I kept saying to myself; ‘well, she doesn’t know much about life, I’d better go pretty slow.’”

The memory of the moment of his marriage stirred John Webster profoundly.

The bride was coming down a stairway. Strange people stood about. All the time, down inside the strange people, down inside all people everywhere, there was thinking going on of which no one seemed aware.

“Now you look at me, Jane. I’m your father. I was that way. All these years, while I’ve been your father, I’ve been just like that.

“Something happened to me. A lid was jerked off something somewhere in me. Now, you see, I stand, as though on a high hill and look down into a valley where all my former life has been lived. Quite suddenly, you understand, I know all the thoughts I’ve been having all of my life.

“You’ll hear it said. Well, you’ll read it in books and stories people write about death. ‘At the moment of death he looked back and saw all his life spread out before him.’ That’s what you’ll read.

“Ha! That’s all right, but what about life? What about the moment, when, having been dead, one comes back into life?”

* * * * *

John Webster had got himself excited again. He took his arm from about his daughter’s shoulder and rubbed his hands together. A slight shivering sensation ran through his body and through the body of his daughter. She did not understand what he was saying, but in a queer sense that did not matter. They were, at the moment deeply in accord. This having one’s whole being suddenly become alive, after years of a kind of partial death, was a strain. One had to get a kind of new balance to the body and mind. One felt very young and strong and then suddenly old and tired. Now one was carrying his life forward as one might carry a filled cup through a crowded street. All the time one had to remember, to keep in mind, that there must be a certain relaxation to the body. One must give and swing with things a little. That must always be borne in mind. If one became rigid and tense at any time, except at the moment when one cast one’s body into the body of one’s beloved, one’s foot stumbled or one knocked against things and the filled cup one carried was emptied with an awkward gesture.

Strange thoughts kept coming into the mind of the man as he sat on the bed with his daughter trying to get himself in hand. One might very easily become one of the kind of people one saw everywhere about, one of the kind of people whose empty bodies went walking everywhere in towns and cities and on farms, “one of the kind of people whose life is an empty cup,” he thought and then a more majestic thought came and steadied him. There was something he had heard or read about sometime. What was it? “Arouse not up or awaken my love ’til he please,” a voice within him said.

* * * * *

Again he began the telling of the story of his marriage.

“We went off on our wedding trip to a farmhouse in Kentucky, went there in the sleeping car of a train at night. I kept thinking about going slow with her, kept telling myself all the time I’d better go slow so that night she slept in a lower berth while I crept into the one above. We were going on a visit to a farm owned by her uncle, by her father’s brother, and we got to the town, where we were to get off the train, before breakfast in the morning.

“Her uncle was waiting with a carriage at the station and we drove off at once to this place in the country where we were to visit.”

John Webster told with great attention to details the story of the arrival of the two people at the little town. He had slept but little during the night and was very aware of everything going on about him. There was a row of wooden store buildings that led up from the station and, within a few hundred yards, it became a residence street and then a country road. A man in his shirt sleeves walked along the sidewalk on one side the street. He was smoking a pipe, but as the carriage passed he took the pipe out of his mouth and laughed. He called to another man who stood before the open door of a store on the opposite side of the street. What strange words he was saying. What did they mean? “Make it fancy, Eddie,” he called.

The carriage containing the three people drove quickly along. John Webster had not slept during the night and there was a kind of straining at something within him. He was all alive, eager. Her uncle on the front seat was a large man, like her father, but living as he did out of doors had made the skin of his face brown. He also had a gray moustache. Could one get acquainted with him? Would one ever be able to say intimate confidential things to him?

For that matter would one ever be able to say intimate confidential things to the woman one had married? The truth was that all night his body had been aching with anticipation of a coming love-making. How odd that one did not speak of such matters when one had married women out of respectable families in respectable Illinois manufacturing towns. At the wedding every one must have known. That was no doubt what the young married men and women were smiling and laughing about, behind the walls, as it were.

There were two horses hitched to the carriage and they went soberly and steadily along. Now the woman who had become John Webster’s bride, was sitting up, very straight and tall on the seat beside him and she had her hands folded in her lap. They were nearing the edge of town and a boy came out at the front door of a house and stood on a little porch staring at them with blank questioning eyes. There was a large dog asleep beneath a cherry tree beside another house a little further along. He let the carriage get almost past before he moved. John Webster watched the dog. “Shall I get up from this comfortable place and make a fuss about that carriage or shall I not?” the dog seemed to be asking himself. Then he sprang up and racing madly along the road began barking at the horses. The man on the front seat struck at him with the whip. “I suppose he made up his mind he had to do it, that it was the proper thing to do,” John Webster said. His bride and her uncle both looked at him with questioning eyes. “Eh, what’s that? What’d you say?” the uncle asked, but got no answer. John Webster felt suddenly embarrassed. “I was only speaking of the dog,” he said presently. One had to make some kind of explanation. The rest of the ride was taken in silence.

* * * * *

It was late on that same afternoon that the thing to which he had been looking forward with so much hope and doubt came to a kind of consummation.

Her uncle’s farmhouse, a large comfortable white frame building, stood on the bank of a river in a narrow green valley and hills rose up before and behind it. In the afternoon young Webster and his bride walked past the barn, back of the house, and got into a lane that ran beside an orchard. Then they crawled over a fence and crossing a field got into a wood that led up the hillside. There was another meadow above and then another wood that covered the top of the hill quite completely.

It was a warm day and they tried to talk as they went along, but did not succeed very well. Now and then she looked at him shyly, as though to say, “The road we are thinking of taking in life is very dangerous. Are you quite sure you are a safe guide?”

Well he had felt her questioning and was in doubt about the answer to be made. It would have been better no doubt had the question been asked and answered long ago. When they came to a narrow path in the wood, he let her walk ahead and then he could look at her quite boldly. There was fear in him too. “Our self-consciousness is going to make us muddle everything,” he thought. It was hard to remember whether he really had thought anything so definite at that time. He was afraid. Her back was very straight and once when she stooped to pass under the limb of an overhanging tree, her long slender body going down and up made a very lovely gesture. A lump came into his throat.

He tried to keep his mind fixed on little things. There had been rain a day or two before and little mushrooms grew beside the path. In one spot there was a whole army of them, very graceful and with their caps touched with tender splashes of color. He picked one of them. How strangely pungent to the nostrils. He wanted to eat it, but she was frightened and protested. “Don’t,” she said. “It may be a poison one.” For a moment it seemed they might, after all, get acquainted. She looked directly at him. It was odd. They had not yet called each other endearing names. They did not address each other by any name at all. “Don’t eat it,” she said. “All right, but isn’t it tempting and lovely?” he answered. They looked at each other for a moment and then she blushed, after which they went on again along the path.

They had got out upon the hill where they could look back over the valley and she sat with her back against a tree. Spring had passed, but, as they walked through the wood, there had been, on all sides, a sense of new growth springing up. Little green, pale green things were just pushing their way up from among the dead brown leaves and out of the black ground and on trees and bushes there was a sense of new growth too. Were new leaves coming or had the old leaves but begun to stand up a little straighter and more firmly because they had been refreshed? It was a thing to think about too, when one was puzzled and had before one a question wanting answering that one could not answer.

They were on the hill now and as he lay at her feet he did not need to look at her, but could look down across the valley. She might be looking at him and having thoughts just as he was, but that was her own affair. One did well enough to have one’s own thoughts, straighten out one’s own matters. The rain that had freshened everything had stirred up many new smells in the wood. How fortunate there was no wind. The smells were not blown away, but were lying low, like a soft blanket over everything. The ground had a fragrance of its own and with it was blended the fragrance of decaying leaves and of animals too. There was a path along the top of the hill along which sheep sometimes went. Little piles of sheep-droppings were lying in the hard path back of the tree where she sat. He did not turn to look, but knew they were there. The sheep-droppings were like marbles. It was good to feel that within the compass of his love of smells he could include all life, even the excretions of life. Somewhere in the wood there was a kind of flowering tree. It couldn’t be far away. The fragrance from it mingled with all the other smells floating over the hillside. The trees were calling to the bees and insects who were answering with mad eagerness. They flew swiftly along, in the air over John Webster’s head, over her head too. One put off other things to play with thoughts. One pitched little thoughts into the air idly, like boys at play, pitched and then caught them again. After a while, when the proper time came, there would be a crisis come into the lives of John Webster and the woman he had married, but now one played with thoughts. One pitched the thoughts into the air and caught them again.

People went about knowing the fragrance of flowers and a few other things, spices and the like, they had been told by the poets were fragrant. Could walls be erected about smells too? Was there not a Frenchman once who wrote a poem regarding the fragrance of the armpits of women? Was that something he had heard talked about among the young men at school or was it just a fool idea that had come into his own head?

The thing was to get the sense of the fragrance of all things, of earth, plants, peoples, animals, insects, all together in the mind. One could weave a golden mantle to spread over the earth and over people. The strong animal smells, taken with the smell of pine trees and all such heavy odors, would give the mantle strength to wear well. Then upon the basis of that strength one could turn one’s fancy loose. Now was the time for all the minor poets to come running. On the solid basis John Webster’s fancy had built, they could weave all manner of designs, using all the smells their less sturdy nostrils dare receive, the smell of violets growing beside woodland paths, of little fragile mushrooms, of honey dripping from the sacks under the bellies of insects, of the hair of maidens fresh come from the bath.

* * * * *

After all John Webster, a man of the middle age, was sitting on a bed with his daughter talking of an experience of his youth. In spite of himself he was giving the tale of that experience a curiously perverted twist. No doubt he was lying to his daughter. Had that young man on the hillside, in the long ago, had the many and complicated feelings with which he was now endowing him?

Now and then he stopped talking and shook his head while a smile played across his face.

“How firmly now things were arranged between himself and his daughter. There was no doubt a miracle had been wrought.”

He even fancied she knew he was lying, that he was throwing a certain mantle of romance over the experience of his young manhood, but he fancied she knew also that it was only by lying to the limit he could come at truth.

* * * * *

Now one was back in fancy on the hillside again. There was an opening among the trees and through this one looked, seeing the whole valley below. There was a large town down the river somewhere, not the town where he and his bride had got off the train, but a much larger one with factories. Some people had come up the river in boats from the town and were preparing to have a picnic in a grove of trees, upstream and across the river from her uncle’s house.

There were both men and women in the party and the women had on white dresses. It was charming to watch them moving in and out among the green trees and one of them came down to the river’s edge and, putting one foot in a boat that was drawn up on the bank, and with the other on the bank itself, she leaned over to fill a pitcher with water. There was the woman and her reflection in the water, seen faintly, even from this distance. There was a going together and a coming apart. The two white figures opened and closed like a delicately tinted shell.

Young Webster on the hill had not looked at his bride and they were both silent, but he was becoming almost insanely excited. Was she thinking the thoughts he was thinking? Had her nature also opened itself, as had his?

It was becoming impossible to keep things straight in the mind. What was he thinking and what was she thinking and feeling? Far away in the wood across the river the white figures of women were moving about among trees. The men of the picnic party, with their darker clothes could no longer be discerned. One no longer thought of them. The white-clad women’s figures were being woven in and out among the sturdy upstanding trunks of the trees.

There was a woman on the hill behind him and she was his bride. Perhaps she was having just such thoughts as himself. That must be true. She was a woman and young and she would be afraid, but there came a time when fear must be put aside. One was a male and at the proper time went toward the female and took her. There was a kind of cruelty in nature and at the proper time that cruelty became a part of one’s manhood.

He closed his eyes and rolling over to his belly got to his hands and knees.

If one stayed longer lying quietly at her feet there would be a kind of insanity. Already there was too much anarchy within. “At the moment of death all of life passes before a man.” What a silly notion. “What about the moment of the coming of life?”

He was on his knees like an animal, looking at the ground, not yet looking at her. With all the strength of his being he tried to tell his daughter of the meaning of that moment in his life.

“How shall I say how I felt? Perhaps I should have been a painter or a singer. My eyes were closed and within myself were all the sights, sounds, smells, feeling of the world of the valley into which I had been looking. Within myself I comprehended all things.

“Things came in flashes, in colors. First there were the yellows, the golden shining yellow things, not yet born. The yellows were little streaks of shining color buried down with the dark blues and blacks of the soil. The yellows were things not yet born, not yet come into the light. They were yellow because they were not yet green. Soon the yellows would combine with the dark colors in the earth and spring forth into a world of color. There would be a sea of color, running in waves, splashing over everything. Spring would come, within the earth, within myself too.”

Birds were flying in the air over a river, and young Webster, with his eyes closed, crouched before the woman, was himself the birds in the air, the air itself, and the fishes in the river below. It seemed to him now that if he were to open his eyes and look back, down into the valley, he could see, even from that great distance, the movements of the fins of fishes in the waters of the river far below.

Well he had better not open his eyes now. Once he had looked into a woman’s eyes and she had come to him like a swimmer coming up out of the sea, but then something had happened to spoil everything. He crept toward her. Now she had begun to protest. “Don’t,” she said, “I’m afraid.”

It would not do to stop now. There was a time came when one must not stop. He threw his arms out, took her protesting and crying into his arms.

VIII

“Why must one commit rape, rape of the conscious, rape of the unconscious?”

John Webster sprang up from beside his daughter and then whirled quickly about. A word had come out of the body of his wife sitting unobserved on the floor behind him. “Don’t,” she said and then, after opening and closing her mouth twice, ineffectually, repeated the word. “Don’t, don’t,” she said again. The words seemed to be forcing themselves through her lips. Her body lumped down there on the floor had become just a strangely misshapen bundle of flesh and bones.

She was pale, of a pasty paleness.

John Webster had jumped off the bed as a dog, lying asleep in the dust of a roadway, might have leaped out of the path of a rapidly moving vehicle.

The devil! His mind was jerked back into the present swiftly, violently. A moment before he had been with a young woman on a hillside above a wide sun-washed valley and had been making love to her. The love-making had not been a success. It had turned out badly. There had been a tall slender girl who had submitted her body to a man, but who had been all the time terribly frightened and beset by a sense of guilt and shame. After the love-making she had cried, not with an excess of tenderness, but because she had felt unclean. They had walked down the hillside later and she had tried to tell him how she felt. Then he also had begun to feel mean and unclean. Tears had come into his own eyes. He had thought she must be right. What she said almost every one said. After all man was not an animal. Man was a conscious thing trying to struggle upward out of animalism. He had tried to think everything out that same night as he, for the first time, lay in bed beside his wife, and he had come to certain conclusions. She was no doubt right in her belief that there were certain impulses in men that had better be subjected to the power of the will. If one just let oneself go one became no better than a beast.

He had tried hard to think everything out clearly. What she had wanted was that there be no love-making between them except for the purpose of breeding children. If one went about the business of bringing children into the world, making new citizens for the state and all that, then one could feel a certain dignity in love-making. She had tried to explain how humiliated and mean she had felt that day when he had come into her naked presence. For the first time they had talked of that. It had been made ten times, a thousand times worse because he had come the second time and the others had seen him. The clean moment of their relationship was denied with determined insistence. After that had happened she could not bear to remain in the company of her girl friend and, as for her friend’s brother--well, how could she ever look into his face again? Whenever he looked at her he would be seeing her not properly clothed as she should be, but shamelessly naked and on a bed with a naked man holding her in his arms. She had been compelled to get out of the house, go home at once, and of course, when she got home, every one wondered what had happened that her visit had come to such an abrupt end. The trouble was that when her mother was questioning her, on the day after her arrival home, she suddenly burst into tears.

What they thought after that she did not know. The truth was that she had begun to be afraid of every one’s thoughts. When she went into her bedroom at night she was almost ashamed to look at her own body and had got into the habit of undressing in the darkness. Her mother was always dropping remarks. “Did your coming home so suddenly have anything to do with the young man in that house?”

After she had come home, and because she began to feel so ashamed of herself in the presence of other people, she had decided she would join a church, a decision that had pleased her father, who was a devout church member. The whole incident had in fact drawn her and her father closer together. Perhaps that was because, unlike her mother, he never bothered her with embarrassing questions.

Anyway she had made up her mind that if she ever married she would try to make her marriage a pure thing, based on comradeship, and she had felt that after all she must marry John Webster if he ever repeated his proposal of marriage. After what had happened that was the only right thing for them both to do and now that they were married it would be right also for them to try and make up for the past by leading clean pure lives and trying never to give way to the animal impulses that shocked and frightened people.

* * * * *

John Webster was standing facing his wife and daughter and his mind had gone back to the first night in bed with his wife and to the many other nights they had spent together. On that first night, long ago, when she lay talking to him, the moonlight came in through a window and fell on her face. She had been very beautiful at the moment. Now that he no longer approached her, afire with passion, but lay quietly beside her, with her body drawn a little away and with his arm about her shoulders, she was not afraid of him and occasionally put up her hand and touched his face.

The truth was that he had got the notion into his head that there was in her a kind of spiritual power divorced altogether from the flesh. Outside the house, along the river banks, frogs were calling their throaty calls and once in the night some strange weird call came out of the air. That must have been some night bird, perhaps a loon. The sound wasn’t a call, really. It was a kind of wild laugh. From another part of the house, on the same floor there came the sound of her uncle’s snoring.

The two people had slept little. There was so much to say. After all they were hardly acquainted. What he thought at the time was that she wasn’t a woman after all. She was a child. Something dreadful had happened to the child and he was to blame and now that she was his wife he would try hard to make everything all right. If passion frightened her he would subdue his passions. A thought had got into his head that had stayed there for years. It was that spiritual love was stronger and purer than physical love, that they were two different and distinct things. He had felt quite exalted when that notion came. He wondered now, as he stood looking down at the figure of his wife, what had happened that the notion at one time so strong in him, had not enabled him or her to get happiness together. One said the words and then, after all, they did not mean anything. They were trick words of the sort that were always fooling people, forcing people into false positions. He had come to hate such words. “Now I accept the flesh first, all flesh,” he thought vaguely, still looking down at her. He turned and stepped across the room to look in a glass. The flame of the candles made light enough so that he could see himself quite distinctly. It was a rather puzzling notion, but the truth was, that every time he had looked at his wife during the last few weeks he had wanted to run at once and look at himself in a glass. He had wanted to assure himself of something. The tall slender girl who had once lain beside him in a bed, with the moonlight falling on her face, had become the heavy inert woman now in the room with him, the woman who was at this moment crouched on the floor in the doorway at the foot of the bed. How much had he become like that?

One didn’t escape animalism so easily. Now the woman on the floor was so much more like an animal than himself. Perhaps the very sins he had committed, his shamefaced running off sometimes to other women in the cities, had saved him. “That would be a pronouncement to throw into the teeth of the good pure people if it were true,” he thought with a quick inner throb of satisfaction.

The woman on the floor was like a heavy animal that had suddenly become very ill. He stepped back to the bed and looked at her with a queer impersonal light in his eyes. She had difficulty holding up her head. The light from the candles, cut off from her submerged body by the bed itself shone full on her face and shoulders. The rest of her body was buried in a kind of darkness. His mind remained the alert swift thing it had been ever since he had found Natalie. In a moment now he could do more thinking than he had done before in a year. If he ever became a writer, as he sometimes thought maybe he would, after he had gone away with Natalie, he would never want for things to write about. If one kept the lid off the well of thinking within oneself, let the well empty itself, let the mind consciously think any thoughts that came to it, accepted all thinking, all imaginings, as one accepted the flesh of people, animals, birds, trees, plants, one might live a hundred or a thousand lives in one life. To be sure it was absurd to go stretching things too much, but one could at least play with the notion that one could become something more than just one individual man and woman living one narrow circumscribed life. One could tear down all walls and fences and walk in and out of many people, become many people. One might in oneself become a whole town full of people, a city, a nation.

The thing to bear in mind however now, at this moment, was the woman on the floor, the woman whose voice had, but a moment before called out again the word her lips had always been saying to him.

“Don’t! Don’t! Let’s not, John! Not now, John!” What persistent denial, of himself, perhaps of herself, too, there had been.

It was rather absurdly cruel how impersonal he felt toward her. It was likely few people in the world ever realized what depths of cruelty lay sleeping within themselves. All the things that came out of the well of thinking within oneself, when one jerked off the lid, were not easy to accept as a part of oneself.

As for the woman on the floor, if one let one’s fancy go, one could stand as he was now doing, looking directly at the woman, and could think the most absurdly inconsequential thoughts.

For one thing one could have the fancy that the darkness in which her body was submerged, because of the accident that the light from the candles did not fall on it, was the sea of silence into which she had, all through these years, been sinking herself deeper and deeper.

And the sea of silence was just another and fancier name for something else, for that deep well within all men and women, of which he had been thinking so much during the last few weeks.

The woman who had been his wife, all people for that matter, spent their entire lives sinking themselves deeper and deeper into that sea. If one wanted to let oneself get more and more fancy about the matter, indulge in a kind of drunken debauch of fancy, as it were, one could in a half playful mood jump over some invisible line and say that the sea of silence into which people were always so intent on sinking themselves was in reality death. There was a race toward the goal of death between the mind and body and almost always the mind arrived first.

The race began in childhood and never stopped until either the body or mind had worn itself out and stopped working. Every one carried about, all the time, within himself life and death. There were two Gods sitting on two thrones. One could worship either, but in general mankind had preferred kneeling before death.

The god of denial had won the victory. To reach his throne-room one went through long hallways of evasion. That was the road to his throne-room, the road of evasion. One twisted and turned, felt one’s way in the darkness. There were no sudden and blinding flashes of light.