Chapter IX: Book FOUR: I (1)

The spirit of death was no doubt lurking in the Webster house. Jane Webster felt its presence. She had suddenly been made aware of the possibility of feeling, within herself, many unspoken, unannounced things. When her father had put his hand on her arm and had pushed her back into the darkness behind the closed door of her own room, she had gone directly to her bed and had thrown herself down on top of the bed covers. Now she lay clutching the little stone he had given her. How glad she was to have that something to clutch. Her fingers pressed against it so that it had already become imbedded in the flesh of her palm. If her life had been, until this evening, a quiet river, running down through fields toward the sea of life, it would be that no more. Now the river had come into a dark stony country. It ran now along rocky passageways, between high dark cliffs. What things might not now happen to her on the morrow, on the day after to-morrow. Her father was going away with a strange woman. There would be a scandal in the town. All her young women and men friends would look at her with a question in their eyes. Perhaps they would pity her. Her spirit rose up and the thought made her squirm with anger. It was odd, but it was nevertheless true, that she had no particular feeling of sympathy for her mother. Her father had managed to bring himself close to her. In a queer way she understood what he was going to do, why he was doing it. She kept seeing the naked figure of the man striding up and down before her. There had always, since she could remember, been in her a kind of curiosity regarding men’s bodies.

Once or twice, with young girls she knew well, there had been talk of the matter, guarded, half-frightened talk. “A man was so and so. It was quite dreadful what happened when one grew up and got married.” One of the girls had seen something. There was a man lived near her, on the same street, and he wasn’t always careful about pulling the shade to his bedroom window. One summer afternoon the girl was in her room, lying on her bed, and the man came into his room and took off all his clothes. He was up to some foolishness. There was a looking glass and he pranced up and down before it. He must have been pretending he was fighting the man he saw reflected in the glass as he kept advancing and receding and making the funniest movements with his body and arms. He lunged and scowled and struck out with his fists and then jumped back, as though the man in the glass had struck at him.

The girl on the bed had seen everything, all the man’s body. At first she thought she would run out of the room and then she made up her mind to stay. Well, she didn’t want her mother to know what she had seen so she got up softly and crept along the floor to lock the door, so that her mother or a servant could not come suddenly in. What the girl had thought was that one had to find out things sometime and might as well take the chance that offered. It was dreadful and she had been unable to sleep for two or three nights after it happened but just the same she was glad she had looked. One couldn’t always be a ninny and not know anything.

* * * * *

As Jane Webster lay on the bed with her fingers pressed down upon the stone her father had given her, the girl, talking of the naked man she had seen in the next house, seemed very young and unsophisticated. She felt a kind of contempt for her. As for herself, she had been in the actual presence of a naked man and the man had been seated beside her and had put his arm about her. His hands had actually touched the flesh of her own body. In the future, whatever happened, men would not be to her as they had been, and as they were to the young women who had been her friends. Now she would know about men as she hadn’t before and would not be afraid of them. Of that she was glad. Her father’s going away with a strange woman and the scandal that would no doubt spring up in the town might ruin the quiet security in which she had always lived but there had been much gained. Now the river that was her life was running through dark passageways. It would perhaps be plunged down over sharp jutting rocks.

It is, to be sure, false to credit Jane Webster with such definite thoughts although later, when she remembered that evening her own mind would begin to build a tower of romance about it. She lay on her bed clutching the little stone and was frightened but at the same time strangely glad.

Something had been torn open, perhaps the door out into life for her. There was a feeling of death in the Webster house but in her was a new sense of life and a glad new feeling of being unafraid of life.

* * * * *

Her father went down the stairway and into the dark hallway below, carrying his bag and thinking of death too.

Now there was no end to the elaboration of thinking that went on within John Webster. In the future he would be a weaver, weaving designs out of threads of thought. Death was a thing, like life, that came to people suddenly, that flashed in upon them. There were always the two figures walking through towns and cities, going in and out of houses, in and out of factories and stores, visiting lonely farmhouses at night, walking in the light of day along gay city streets, getting on and off trains, always on the move, appearing before people at the most unexpected moments. It might be somewhat difficult for a man to learn to go in and out of other people but for the two gods, Life and Death, there was no difficulty.

There was a deep well within every man and woman and when Life came in at the door of the house, that was the body, it reached down and tore the heavy iron lid off the well. Dark hidden things, festering in the well, came out and found expression for themselves, and the miracle was that, expressed, they became often very beautiful. There was a cleansing, a strange sort of renewal within the house of the man or woman when the god Life had come in.

As for Death and his entrance, that was another matter. Death had many strange tricks to play on people too. Sometimes he let their bodies live for a long time while he satisfied himself with merely clamping the lid down on the well within. It was as though he had said, “Well, there is no great hurry about physical death. That will come as an inevitable thing in its time. There is a much more ironic and subtle game to be played against my opponent Life. I will fill the cities with the damp fetid smell of death while the very dead think they are still alive. As for myself, I am the crafty one. I am like a great and subtile king, every one serves, while he talks only of freedom and leads his subjects to think it is he who serves, instead of themselves. I am like a great general, having always at his command, ready to spring to arms at the least sign from himself, a vast army of men.”

* * * * *

John Webster went along the dark hallway below to the door leading into the street and had put his hand on the knob of the outer door when, instead of passing directly out, he stopped and reflected a moment. He was somewhat vain of the thoughts he had been having. “Perhaps I am a poet. Perhaps it’s only the poet who manages to keep the lid off the well within and to keep alive up to the last minute before his body has become worn out and he must get out of it,” he thought.

His vain mood passed and he turned and looked with a curious awareness along the hallway. At the moment he was much like an animal, moving in a dark wood, who, without hearing anything, is nevertheless aware there is life stirring, perhaps waiting for him, near at hand. Could that be the figure of a woman he saw, sitting within a few feet of him? There was a small old-fashioned hat-rack in the hallway near the front door and the lower part of it made a kind of seat on which one might sit.

One might fancy there was a woman sitting quietly there. She also had a bag packed and it was sitting on the floor beside her.

The old Harry! John Webster was a little startled. Was his fancy getting a little out of hand? There could be no doubt that there was a woman sitting there, within a few feet of where he stood, with the knob of the door in his hand.

He was tempted to put out his hand and see if he could touch the woman’s face. He had been thinking of the two gods, Life and Death. No doubt an illusion had been created in his mind. There was this deep sense of a presence, sitting silently there, on the lower part of the hat-rack. He stepped a little nearer and a shiver ran through his body. There was a dark mass, making crudely the outlines of a human body, and as he stood looking it seemed to him that a face began to be more and more sharply outlined. The face, like the faces of two other women that had, at important and unexpected moments in his life, floated up before him, the face of a young naked girl on a bed in the long ago, the face of Natalie Swartz, seen in the darkness of a field at night, as he lay beside her--these faces had seemed to float up to him as though coming toward him out of the deep waters of a sea.

He had, no doubt, let himself become a little overwrought. One did not step lightly along the road he had been travelling. He had dared set out upon the road of lives and had tried to take others with him. No doubt he had been more worked up and excited than he had realized.

He put out his hand softly and touched the face that now appeared to come floating toward him out of darkness. Then he sprang back, striking his head against the opposite wall of the hallway. His fingers had encountered warm flesh. There was a terrific sensation of something whirling within his brain. Had he gone quite insane? A comforting thought came, flashing across the confusion of his mind.

“Katherine,” he said in a loud voice. It was a kind of call out of himself.

“Yes,” a woman’s voice answered quietly, “I wasn’t going to let you go away without saying good bye.”

The woman, who had for so many years been a servant in his house, explained her presence there in the darkness. “I’m sorry I startled you,” she said. “I was just going to speak. You are going away and so am I. I’ve got everything packed and ready. I went up the stairs to-night and heard you say you were leaving so I came down and did my own packing. It didn’t take me long. I didn’t have many things to pack.”

John Webster opened the front door and asked her to come outside with him and for a few minutes they stood talking together on the steps that led down from the front porch.

Outside the house he felt better. There was a kind of weakness, following the fright inside, and for a moment he sat on the steps while she stood waiting. Then the weakness passed and he arose. The night was clear and dark. He breathed deeply and there was a great relief in the thought that he would never again go through the door out of which he had just come. He felt very young and strong. Soon now, there would be a streak of light showing in the eastern sky. When he had got Natalie and they had climbed aboard a train they would sit in the day coach on the side that looked toward the East. It would be sweet to see the new day come. His fancy ran ahead of his body and he saw himself and the woman sitting together in the train. They would come into the lighted day coach from the darkness outside, just before dawn came. In the day coach people would have been asleep, folded up in the seats, looking uncomfortable and tired. The air would be heavy with the stale heaviness of breathing people confined in a close place. There would be the heavy acrid smell of clothes, that had for a long time absorbed the acids thrown off by bodies. He and Natalie would take the train as far as Chicago and get off there. Perhaps they would get on another train at once. It might be that they would stay in Chicago for a day or two. There would be plans to make, long hours of talk perhaps. There was a new life to begin now. He himself had to think what he wanted to do with his days. It was odd. He and Natalie had made no plans beyond getting on a train. Now for the first time his fancy tried to creep out beyond that moment, to penetrate into the future.

It was fine that the night had turned out clear. One would hate to set out, plodding off to the railroad station in the rain. How bright the stars were in the early morning hours. Now Katherine was talking. It would be well to listen to what she had to say.

She was telling him, with a kind of brutal frankness, that she did not like Mrs. Webster, had never liked her, and that she had only stayed in the house all these years as a servant because of himself.

He turned to look at her and her eyes were looking directly into his. They were standing very close together, almost as close as lovers might have stood, and, in the uncertain light, her eyes were strangely like Natalie’s. In the darkness they appeared to glow as Natalie’s eyes had seemed to glow on that night when he had lain with her in the field.

Was it only a chance that this new sense he had, of being able to refresh and rebuild himself by loving others, by going in and out at the open doors of the houses of others, had come to him through Natalie instead of through this woman Katherine? “Huh, it’s marriage, every one is seeking marriage, that’s what they are up to, seeking marriages,” he told himself. There was something quiet and fine and strong in Katherine as in Natalie. Perhaps had he, at some moment, during all his dead unconscious years of living in the same house with her, but happened to have been alone with Katherine in a room, and had the doors to his own being opened at that moment, something might have transpired between himself and this woman that would have started within just such another revolution as the one through which he had been passing.

“That was possible too,” he decided. “People would gain a lot if they could but learn to keep that thought in mind,” he thought. His fancy played with the notion for a moment. One would walk through towns and cities, in and out of houses, into and out of the presence of people with a new feeling of respect if the notion should once get fixed in people’s minds that, at any moment, anywhere, one was likely to come upon the one who carried before him as on a golden tray, the gift of life and the consciousness of life for his beloved. Well, there was a picture to be borne in mind, a picture of a land and a people, cleanly arrayed, a people bearing gifts, a people who had learned the secret and the beauty of bestowing unasking love. Such a people would inevitably keep their own persons clean and well arrayed. They would be colorful people with a certain decorative sense, a certain awareness of themselves in relation to the houses in which they lived and the streets in which they walked. One could not love until one had cleansed and a little beautified one’s own body and mind, until one had opened the doors of one’s being and let in sun and air, until one had freed one’s own mind and fancy.

John Webster fought with himself now, striving to push his own thoughts and fancies into the background. There he was standing before the house in which he had lived all these years so near the woman Katherine and she was now talking to him of her own affairs. It was time now to give heed to her.

She was explaining how that, for a week or more, she had been aware of the fact that there was something wrong in the Webster household. One did not need to have been very sharp to have realized that. It was in the very air one breathed. The air of the house was heavy with it. As for herself, well she had thought John Webster had fallen in love with some woman other than Mrs. Webster. She had once been in love herself and the man she had loved had been killed. She knew about love.

On that night, hearing voices in the room above, she had crept up the stairs. She had not felt it was eavesdropping as she was directly concerned. Long ago when she was in trouble she had heard voices upstairs and she knew that in her hour of trouble John Webster had stood by her.

After that time, long ago, she had made up her mind that as long as he stayed in the house she would stay. One had to work and might as well work as a servant, but she had never felt close to Mrs. Webster. When one was a servant one sometimes had difficulty enough keeping up one’s self-respect and the only way it could be done was by working for some one who also had self-respect. That was something few people seemed to understand. They thought people worked for money. As a matter of fact no one really worked for money. People only thought they did, maybe. To do so was to be a slave and she, Katherine, was no slave. She had money saved and besides she had a brother who owned a farm in Minnesota, who had several times written asking her to come and live with him. She intended to go there now but would not live in her brother’s house. He was married and she did not intend to push herself into his household. As a matter of fact she would probably take the money she had saved and buy a small farm of her own.

“Anyway you’re going away from this house to-night. I heard you say you were going with another woman and I thought I would go too,” she said.

She became silent and stood looking at John Webster who was also looking at her, who was at the moment absorbed in contemplation of her. In the uncertain light her face had become the face of a young girl. There was something about her face, at the moment, that suggested to his mind his daughter’s face as she had looked at him in the dim light of the candles in the room upstairs. It was like that and at the same time it was like Natalie’s face, as Natalie’s face had been that afternoon in the office when he and she had first come close to each other, and as it had looked that other night in the darkness of the field.

One might so easily become confused. “It’s all right about your going away, Katherine,” he said aloud. “You know about that, what I mean is that you know what you want to do.”

He stood in silence a moment, thinking. “It’s like this, Katherine,” he began again. “There’s my daughter Jane upstairs. I’m going away but I can’t take her with me any more than you can go live in your brother’s house out there in Minnesota. I’m thinking that for the next two or three days or maybe for several weeks Jane is going to have a pretty hard time.

“There’s no telling what will happen here.” He made a gesture toward the house. “I’m going away but I suppose I’ve been counting on your being here until Jane gets on her own feet a little. You know what I mean, until she gets so she can stand alone.”

* * * * *

On the bed upstairs Jane Webster’s body was becoming more and more rigid and tense as she lay listening to the undercurrent of noises in the house. There was a sound of movement in the next room. A door handle struck against a wall. The boards of the floor creaked. Her mother had been seated on the floor at the foot of the bed. Now she was getting up. She had put her hand on the railing of the bed to pull herself up. The bed moved a little. It moved on its rollers. There was a low rumbling sound. Would her mother come into her room? Jane Webster wanted no more words, no further explanations of what had happened to spoil the marriage between her mother and father. She wanted to be let alone now, to think her own thoughts. The thought that her mother might come into her bedroom frightened her. It was odd, she had now a sharp and distinct sense of the presence of death, in some way connected with her mother’s figure. To have the older woman come into her room now, even though no words were said, would be like having a ghost come. The thought of it happening made little creeping sensations run over the surface of her body. It was as though little soft hairy-legged creatures were running up and down her legs, up and down her back. She moved uneasily in the bed.

Her father had gone downstairs and along the hallway below but she had not heard the front door open and close. She lay listening for the sound of that, expecting it.

The house was silent, too silent. Somewhere, a long way off, there was the loud ticking of a clock. During the year before, when she had graduated from the town high school, her father had given her a small watch. It lay now on a dressing table at the further side of the room. Its rapid ticking was like some small creature, clad in steel shoes and running rapidly and with the shoes clicking together. The little creature was running swiftly along an endless hallway, running with a kind of mad sharp determination but never getting either nearer or further away. Into her mind there came a picture of a small imp-like boy with a wide grinning mouth and with pointed ears that stood straight up from his head like the ears of a fox terrier. Perhaps the notion had got into her head from some picture of Puck remembered from a childhood story book. She was conscious that the sound she heard came from the watch on the dresser but the picture in her mind stayed. The imp-like figure stood with his head and body motionless while his legs worked furiously. He grinned at her and his little steel-clad feet clicked together.

She tried consciously to relax her body. There were hours to be spent, lying thus on the bed, before another day came and she would have to face the problems of the new day. There would be things to face. Her father would have gone off with a strange woman. When she walked in the streets people would be looking at her. “That’s his daughter,” they would be saying. Perhaps, as long as she stayed in town, she could never again walk along streets unaware that she was being looked at, but on the other hand, perhaps she would not stay. There was a kind of exhilaration to be got from thinking of going off to strange places, perhaps to some large city, where she would always be walking about among strangers.

She was getting herself into a state and would have to take herself in hand. There were times, although she was young she had already known such times, when the mind and body seemed to have nothing at all to do with each other. One did things with the body, put it into bed, made it get up and walk about, made the eyes attempt to read pages in some book, did many kinds of things with the body, while the mind went on about its own affairs unheeding. It thought of things, fancied all manner of absurd things, went its own way.

At such times in the past Jane’s mind had a trick of getting her body into the most absurd and startling situations, while it ran wild and free--did as it pleased. She was in bed in her room with the door closed but her fancy took her body out into the street. She went along conscious that all the men she passed were smiling and she kept wondering what was the matter. She hurried home and went to her room only to find that her dress was all unbuttoned at the back. It was terrible. Again she was walking in the street and the white drawers she wore under her skirts had become in some unaccountable way unfastened. There was a young man coming toward her. He was a new young man who had just come to town and had taken a job in a store. Well, he was going to speak to her. He raised his hat and at just that moment the drawers began to creep down along her legs.

Jane Webster lay in her bed and smiled at the memory of the fears that had visited her when, in the past, her mind had got into the trick of running wildly, uncontrolled. In the future things would be somewhat different. She had gone through something and had perhaps much more to go through. The things that had seemed so terrible would perhaps only be amusing now. She felt infinitely older, more sophisticated, than she had been but a few hours earlier.

* * * * *

How strange it was that the house remained so silent. From somewhere, off in the town, there came the sound of horses’ hoofs on a hard road and the rattle of a wagon. A voice shouted, faintly. Some man of the town, a teamster, was setting out early. Perhaps he was going to another town to get a load of goods and haul them back. He must have a long way to go that he started out so early.

She moved her shoulders uneasily. What was the matter with her? Was she afraid in her own bedroom, in her own bed? Of what was she afraid?

She sat suddenly and rigidly upright in bed and then, after a moment, let her body fall backward again. There had come a sharp cry out of the throat of her father, a cry that had gone ringing through the house. “Katherine,” her father’s voice cried. There was just that one word. It was the name of the Webster’s one servant. What did her father want of Katherine? What had happened? Had something terrible happened in the house? Had something happened to her mother?

There was something lurking at the back of Jane Webster’s mind, a thought that did not want to be expressed. It was as yet unable to make its way up out of the hidden parts of herself and into her mind.

The thing she feared, expected, could not have happened yet. Her mother was in the next room. She had just heard her moving about in there.

There was a new sound in the house. Her mother was moving heavily along the hallway just outside the bedroom door. The Websters had turned a small bedroom, at the end of the hall, into a bathroom and her mother was going in there. Her feet fell slowly, flatly, heavily and slowly, on the floor of the hallway. After all her feet only made that strange sound because she had put on her soft bedroom slippers.

Downstairs now, if one listened, one could hear voices saying words softly. That must be her father talking to the servant Katherine. What could he want of her? The front door opened and then closed again. She was afraid. Her body shook with fear. It was terrible of her father to go away and leave her alone in the house. Could he have taken the servant Katherine with him? The thought was unbearable. Why was she so afraid of the thought of being left alone in the house with her mother?

There was a thought lurking within her, deep within her, that did not want to get itself expressed. Something was about to happen to her mother, now, within a few minutes. One did not want to think about it. In the bathroom there were certain bottles, sitting on shelves in a little box-like cabinet. They were labeled poison. One hardly knew why they were kept there but Jane had seen them many times. She kept her toothbrush in a glass tumbler in the cabinet. One supposed the bottles contained medicines of the sort that was only to be taken externally. One did not think much of such matters, was not in the habit of thinking of them.

* * * * *

Now Jane was sitting upright in bed again. She was alone in the house with her mother. Even the servant Katherine had gone away. The house felt altogether cold and lonely, deserted. In the future she would always feel out of place in this house in which she had always lived and she would feel also, in some odd way, separated from her mother. To be alone with her mother would now, perhaps, always make her feel a little lonely.

Could it be that the servant Katherine was the woman with whom her father had planned to go away? That could not be. Katherine was a large heavy woman with big breasts and dark hair that was turning gray. One could not think of her as going away with a man. One thought of her as moving silently about a house and doing housework. Her father would be going away with a younger woman, with a woman not much older than herself.

One should get hold of oneself. When one got excited, let oneself go, the fancy sometimes played one strange and terrible tricks.

Her mother was in the bathroom, standing by the little box-like cabinet. Her face was pale, of a pasty paleness. She had to keep one hand against the wall to keep from falling. Her eyes were gray and heavy. There was no life in them. A heavy cloud-like film had passed over her eyes. It was like a heavy gray cloud over the blue of the sky. Her body rocked back and forth too. At any moment it might fall. But a short time ago, and even amid the strangeness of the adventure in her father’s bedroom, things had seemed suddenly quite clear. She had understood things she had never understood before. Now nothing could be understood. There was a whirlpool of confused thoughts and actions into which one had been plunged.

Now her own body had begun to rock back and forth on the bed. The fingers of her right hand were clutched over the tiny stone her father had given her but she was, at the moment, unaware of the small round hard thing lying in her palm. Her fists kept beating her own body, her own legs and knees. There was something she wanted to do, something it was now right and proper she should do. It was the time now for her to scream, to jump off the bed, to run along the hallway to the bathroom and tear the bathroom door open. Her mother was about to do something one did not passively stand by and see done. She should be crying out at the top of her voice, crying for help. There was a word that should be on her lips now. “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” she should now be screaming. Her lips should now be making the word ring through the house. She should be making the house and the street on which the house stood echo and reëcho with the word.

And she could say nothing. Her lips were sealed. Her body could not move from the bed. It could only rock back and forth on the bed.

Her fancy kept on painting pictures, swift, vivid, terrible pictures.

There was, in the bathroom, in the cabinet, a bottle containing a brown liquid and her mother had put up her hand and had got hold of it. Now she had put it to her lips. She had swallowed all the contents of the bottle.

The liquid in the bottle was brown, of a reddish brownness. Before she had swallowed it her mother had lighted a gas light. It was directly above her head, as she stood facing the cabinet, and the light from it fell down over her face. There were little puffy red bags of flesh under the eyes and they looked strange and almost revolting against the pasty whiteness of the skin. The mouth was open and the lips were gray too. There was a reddish brown stain running down from one corner of the mouth, down over the chin. Some drops of the liquid had fallen on her mother’s white nightgown. Convulsive spasms, as of pain, passed over the pasty white face. The eyes remained closed. There was a trembling quivering movement of the shoulders.

Jane’s body continued to rock back and forth. The flesh of her body quivered too. Her body was rigid. Her fists were closed, tight, tight. Her fists continued to beat down upon her legs. Her mother had managed to get out through the bathroom door and across the little hallway to her own room. She had thrown herself face-downward on her bed in the darkness. Had she thrown herself down or had she fallen? Was she dying now, would she die presently or was she already dead? In the next room, in the room where Jane had seen her father walking naked before her mother and herself, the candles were still burning, under the picture of the Virgin. There was no doubt the older woman would die. In fancy Jane had seen the label on the bottle that contained the brown liquid. It was marked “Poison.” There was the picture of the skull and cross-bones druggists put on such bottles.

And now Jane’s body had quit rocking. Perhaps her mother was dead. Now one tried to begin to think of other things. She became vaguely, but at the same time almost deliciously, conscious of some new element come into the air of the bedroom.

There was a pain in the palm of her right hand. Something hurt her and the sense of hurting was refreshing. It brought life back. There was consciousness of self in the realization of bodily pain. One’s mind could start back along the road from some dark far place to which it had run crazily off. One’s mind could take hold of the thought of the little hurt place in the soft flesh of the palm of the hand. There was something there, something hard and sharp that cut into the flesh of the palm when one’s finger pressed down rigid and tense upon it.

II

In the palm of Jane Webster’s hand lay the small green stone her father had picked up on the railroad tracks and had given her at the moment of his departure. “The Jewel of Life,” he had called it in the moment when confusion had led him to give way to a desire to make some kind of gesture. A romantic notion had popped into his head. Had not men always used symbols to help carry them over the rough places in life? There was the Virgin with her candles. Was she not also a symbol? At some time, having decided in a moment of vanity that thought was of more importance than fancy, men had discarded the symbol. A Protestant kind of man arose who believed in a thing called “the age of reason.” There was a dreadful kind of egotism. Men could trust their own minds. As though they knew anything at all of the workings of their own minds.

With a gesture and a smile John Webster had put the stone into his daughter’s hand and now she was clinging to it. One could press the finger down hard upon it and feel in the soft palm of the hand this delicious and healing pain.

Jane Webster was trying to reconstruct something. In darkness she was trying to feel her way along the face of a wall. The wall had little sharp points sticking out that hurt the palm of the hand. If one followed the wall far enough one came to a lighted place. Perhaps the wall was studded with jewels, put there by others, who had groped their way along in the darkness.

Her father had gone away with a woman, with a young woman, much like herself. He would live with the woman now. Perhaps she would never see him again. Her mother was dead. In the future she would be alone in life. She would have to begin now and make a life of her own.

Was her mother dead or had she just been having terrible fancies?

One was plunged suddenly down from a high safe place into the sea and then one had to try to swim, to save oneself. Jane’s mind began playing with the thought of herself as swimming in a sea.

During the summer of the year before she had gone with some young men and women on an excursion to a town facing Lake Michigan, and to a resort near the town. There was a man who dived down into the sea from a tall tower, that had been stuck far up into the sky. He had been employed to dive in order to entertain the crowd but things had not turned out as they should. The day, for such an affair, should have been bright and clear, but in the morning it began to rain and in the afternoon it turned cold and the sky, covered with low heavy clouds, was heavy and cold too.

Cold gray clouds hurried across the sky. The diver fell down from his high place into the sea, in the presence of a small silent crowd, but the sea did not receive him warmly. It awaited him in a cold gray silence. Looking at him, falling thus, sent a cold shiver through the body.

What was the cold gray sea toward which the man’s naked body fell so swiftly?

On that day, when the professional diver had taken his leap, Jane Webster’s heart had stopped beating until he had gone down into the sea and his head had reappeared on the surface. She was standing beside a young man, her escort for the day, and her hands clutched eagerly his arm and shoulder. When the diver’s head reappeared she put her head down on the young man’s shoulder and her own shoulders shook with sobs.

It had, no doubt, been a very silly performance and she had been ashamed of it later. The diver was a professional. “He knows what he is about,” the young man had said. Every one present had laughed at Jane and she had become angry because her escort had laughed too. Had he but had sense enough to know how she was feeling at the moment, she thought she would not have minded the others laughing.

* * * * *

“I’m a great little swimmer in seas.”

It was altogether amazing how ideas, expressed in words, kept running from mind to mind. “I’m a great little swimmer in seas.” But a short time before her father had said the words as she stood in the doorway between the two bedrooms and he came walking toward her. He had wanted to give her the stone, she now held pressed against the palm of her hand, and had wanted to say something about it, and instead of words regarding the stone, there had come to his lips these words about swimming in seas. There had been something puzzled and confused in his whole bearing at the moment. He had been upset, as she was now. The moment was now being lived over again, swiftly, in the daughter’s mind. Her father was again stepping toward her, holding the stone between his thumb and finger, and the wavering, uncertain light had again come into his eyes. Quite distinctly, as though he were again in her presence, Jane heard again the words that, but such a short time before, had seemed without meaning, meaningless words come from the lips of a man temporarily drunk or insane, “I’m a great little swimmer in seas.”

* * * * *

She had been plunged down from a high safe place, down into a sea of doubt and fear. Only a short time before, but yesterday, she had been standing on firm ground. One could let one’s fancy play with the thought of what had happened to her. There would be a kind of comfort in doing that.

She had been standing on firm ground, high above a vast sea of confusion, and then, quite suddenly, she had been pushed off the firm high ground and down into the sea.

Now, at this very moment, she was falling down into the sea. Now a new life had to begin for her. Her father had gone away with a strange woman and her mother was dead.

She was falling down off the high safe ground into the sea. With a kind of absurd flourish, as by a gesture of the arm, her own father had plunged her down. She was clad in her white nightgown and her falling figure made a white streak against the gray of cold skies.

Her father had put a meaningless little stone in her hand and had gone away and then her mother had gone into the bathroom and had done a terrible, an unthinkable thing, to herself.

And now she, Jane Webster, had gone quite down into the sea, far far down into a lonely cold gray place. She had gone down into the place from which all life came and to which, in the end, all life goes.

There was a heaviness, a deadly heaviness. All life had become gray and cold and old. One walked in darkness. One’s body fell with a soft thump against gray soft unyielding walls.

The house in which one lived was empty. It was an empty house in an empty street of an empty town. All the people Jane Webster had known, the young men and women with whom she had lived, with whom she had walked about on summer evenings, could not be a part of what she was facing now. Now she was quite alone. Her father had gone away and her mother had killed herself. There was no one. One walked alone in darkness. One’s body struck with a soft thump against soft gray unyielding walls.

The little stone held so firmly in the palm of the hand hurt and hurt.

Before her father had given it to her he had gone to hold it up before the candle flame. In certain lights its color changed. Yellowish green lights came and went in it. The yellowish green lights were of the color of young growing things pushing their way up out of the damp and cold of frozen grounds, in the spring.

III

Jane Webster was lying on the bed in the darkness of her room and crying. Her shoulders shook with sobs but she made no sound. Her finger, that had been pressed down so hard against her palms, had relaxed, but there was a spot, in the palm of her right hand, that burned with a warm feverishness. Her mind had become passive now. Fancy had released her from its grip. She was like a fretful and hungry child that has been fed and that lies quietly with its face turned to a white wall.

Her sobbing now indicated nothing. It was a release. She was a little ashamed of her lack of control over herself and kept putting up the hand, that held the stone, first closing it carefully that the precious stone be not lost, and with her fist wiping the tears away. What she wished, at the moment, was that she could become suddenly a strong resolute woman, able to handle quietly and firmly the situation that had arisen in the Webster household.

IV

The servant Katherine was coming up the stairs. After all she was not the woman with whom Jane’s father was going away. How heavy and resolute Katherine’s footsteps were! One could be resolute and strong when one knew nothing of what had been going on in the house. One could walk thus, as though one were going up the stairs of an ordinary house, in an ordinary street.

When Katherine put her foot down on one of the steps the house seemed to shake a little. Well, one could not say the house shook. That would be stretching things too much. What one was trying to express was just that Katherine was not very sensitive. She was one who made a direct frontal attack upon life. Had she been very sensitive she might have known something of the terrible things going on in the house without having to wait to be told.

Now Jane’s mind was playing tricks on her again. An absurd sentence came into her mind.

“Wait until you see the whites of their eyes and then shoot.”

It was silly, altogether silly and absurd, what notions were now racing through her head. Her father had set going in her the sometimes relentless and often unexplainable thing, represented by the released fancy. It was a thing that could color and beautify the facts of life but it could also, upon occasions, run on and on regardless of the facts of life. Jane believed she was in the house with the dead body of her mother, who had just committed suicide, and there was something within her that told her she should now give herself over to sadness. She did weep but her weeping had nothing to do with her mother’s death. It did not take that into consideration. She was not, after all, so much sad as excited.

The weeping that had been silent was now audible all over the house. She was making a noise like a foolish child and was ashamed of herself. What would Katherine think of her?

“Wait until you see the whites of their eyes and then shoot.”

What an utterly silly jumble of words. Where had they come from? Why were such meaningless silly words dancing in her brain at such a vital moment of her life? She had got them out of some book at school, a history book perhaps. Some general had shouted the words at his men as they stood waiting for an advancing enemy. And what had that to do with the fact of Katherine’s footsteps on the stairs? In a moment Katherine would be coming into the room where she was.

She thought she knew exactly what she would do. She would get quietly out of bed and go to the door and admit the servant. Then she would strike a light.

She had, in fancy, a picture of herself, standing by a dressing table at the side of the room and addressing the servant calmly and resolutely. One had to begin a new life now. Yesterday perhaps one was a young woman with no experience in life but now one was a mature woman who had difficult problems to face. One had, not only the servant Katherine, but the whole town to face. To-morrow one would be very much in the position of a general in command of troops that had to withstand an attack. One had to comport oneself with dignity. There would be people who wanted to scold at her father, others who wanted to pity herself. Perhaps she would have to handle affairs too. There would be arrangements necessary, in connection with selling her father’s factory and getting moneys so that she could go on and make plans for living her life. One could not be a silly child sitting and sobbing on a bed at such a moment.

And at the same time one could not, at such a tragic moment in life, and when the servant came in, suddenly burst out laughing. Why was it that the sound of Katherine’s resolute footsteps on the stairs made her want to laugh and weep at the same time? “Soldiers advancing resolutely across an open field toward an enemy. Wait until you see the whites of their eyes.” Silly notions. Silly words dancing in the brain. One did not want either to laugh or weep. One wanted to comport oneself with dignity.

An intensive struggle was going on within Jane Webster and now it had lost dignity and had become no more than a struggle to stop crying loudly, not to begin laughing, and to be ready to receive the servant Katherine with a certain dignity.

As the footsteps drew nearer the struggle intensified. Now she was again sitting very stiffly upright in the bed and again her body was rocking back and forth. Her fists, doubled and hard, were again beating down upon her legs.

Like every one else in the world Jane had been spending her entire life making dramatizations of herself in relation to life. One did that as a child and later as a young girl in school. One’s mother died suddenly or one found oneself violently ill and facing death. Every one gathered about one’s death-bed and all were amazed at the quiet dignity with which one met the situation.

Or again there was a young man who had smiled at one on the street. Perhaps he had the audacity to think of one as merely a child. Very well. Let the two of them be thrown together into a difficult position and then see which one could comport himself with the greater dignity.

There was something terrible about this whole situation. After all Jane felt she had it in her to carry life off with a kind of flourish. It was certain no other young woman of her acquaintance had ever been put into such a position as she was now in. Already, although they, as yet, knew nothing of what had occurred, the eyes of the whole town were directed toward herself and she was merely sitting in the darkness on a bed and sobbing like a child.

She began to laugh, sharply, hysterically, and then the laughter stopped and the loud sobbing began again. The servant Katherine came to her bedroom door but she did not knock and give Jane the chance to arise and receive her with dignity, but came right in. She ran across the room and knelt at the side of Jane’s bed. Her impulsive action brought an end to Jane’s desire to be the grand lady, at least for the night. The woman Katherine had become, by her quick impulsiveness, sister to something that was her own real self too. There were two women, shaken and in trouble, both deeply stirred by some inward storm, and clutching at each other in the darkness. For a time they stayed thus, on the bed, their arms about each other.