I
As you will remember, the room in which John Webster slept was at a corner of the house, upstairs. From one of his two windows he looked out into the garden of a German who owned a store in his town but whose real interest in life was the garden. All through the year he worked at it and had John Webster been more alive, during the years he lived in the room, he might have got keen pleasure out of looking down upon his neighbor at work. In the early morning and late afternoon the German was always to be seen, smoking his pipe and digging, and a great variety of smells came floating up and in at the window of the room above, the sour acid smell of vegetables decaying, the rich heady smell of stable manure and then, all through the summer and late into the fall, the fragrant smell of roses and the marching procession of the flowers of the seasons.
John Webster had lived in his room for many years without much thought of what a room, within which a man lives and the walls of which enclose him like a garment when he sleeps, might be like. It was a square room with one window looking down into the German’s garden and another window that faced the blank walls of the German’s house. There were three doors—one leading into a hallway, one into the room where his wife slept, and a third that led into his daughter’s room.
One came into the place at night and closed the doors and prepared oneself for sleep. Behind the two walls were the two other people, also preparing for sleep, and behind the walls of the German’s house no doubt the same thing was going on. The German had two daughters and a son. They would be going to bed or were already in bed. There was, at that street end, something like a little village of people going to bed or already in bed.
For a good many years John Webster and his wife had not been very intimate. Long ago, when he had found himself married to her he had found also that she had a theory of life, picked up somewhere, perhaps from her parents, perhaps just absorbed out of the general atmosphere of fear in which so many modern women live and breathe, clutched at, as it were, and used as a weapon against too close contact with another. She thought, or believed she thought, that even in marriage a man and woman should not be lovers except for the purpose of bringing children into the world. The belief threw a sort of heavy air of responsibility about the matter of love-making. One does not go very freely in and out of the body of another when the going in and out involves such heavy responsibility. The doors of the body become rusty and creak. “Well, you see,” John Webster, in later years, sometimes explained, “one is quite seriously at the business of bringing another human into the world. Here is the Puritan in full flower. The night has come. From the gardens back of men’s houses comes the scent of flowers. Little hushed noises arise followed by silences. The flowers in their gardens have known an ecstasy unfettered by any awareness of responsibility, but man is something else. For ages he has been taking himself with extraordinary seriousness. The race, you see, must be perpetuated. It must be improved. There is in this affair something of obligation to God and to one’s fellow men. Even when, after long preparation, talk, prayer, and the acquiring of a little wisdom, a kind of abandon is acquired, as one would acquire a new language, one has still achieved something quite foreign to the flowers, the trees, and the life and the carrying on of life among what is called the lower animals.”
As for the earnest God-fearing people, among whom John Webster and his wife then lived and as one of whom they had for so many years counted themselves, the chances are no such thing as ecstasy is ever acquired at all. There is instead, for the most part, a kind of cold sensuality tempered by an itching conscience. That life can perpetuate itself at all in such an atmosphere is one of the wonders of the world and proves, as nothing else could, the cold determination of nature not to be defeated.
And so for years the man had been in the habit of coming into his bedroom at night, taking off his clothes, and hanging them on a chair or in a closet and then crawling into bed to sleep heavily. Sleeping was a part of the necessary business of living and if, before he slept, he thought at all he thought of his washing machine business. There was a note due and payable at the bank on the next day and he had no money with which to pay it. He thought of that and of what he could and would say to the banker to induce him to renew the note. Then he thought about the trouble he was having with the foreman at his factory. The man wanted a larger wage and he was trying to think whether or not, if he did not give it to him, the man would quit and put him to the trouble of finding another foreman.
When he slept he did not sleep lightly and no fancies visited his dreams. What should have been a sweet time of renewal became a heavy time filled with distorted dreams.
And then, after the doors of Natalie’s body had been swung open for him, he became aware. After that evening when they had knelt together in the darkness it was hard for him to go home in the evening and sit at table with his wife and daughter. “Well, I can’t do it,” he told himself and ate his evening meal at a restaurant down town. He stayed about, walking in unfrequented streets, talking or in silence beside Natalie and then went with her to her own house, far out at the edge of town. People saw them walking thus together and, as there was no effort at concealment, there was a blaze of talk in the town.
When John Webster went home to his own house his wife and daughter had already gone to bed. “I am very busy at the shop. Do not expect to see much of me for a time,” he had said to his wife on the morning after he had told Natalie of his love.
He did not intend to stay on in the washing machine business or to continue his married life. What he would do he did not quite know. He would live with Natalie for one thing. The time had come to do that.
He had spoken of it to Natalie on that first evening of their intimacy. On that evening, after the others were all gone they went to walk together. As they went through the streets people in the houses were sitting down to the evening meal, but the man and woman did not think of eating.
John Webster’s tongue had become loosened and he did a great deal of talking to which Natalie listened in silence. Of the people of the town those he did not know all became romantic figures in his awaking mind. His fancy wanted to play about them and he let it. They went along a residence street toward the open country beyond and he kept speaking of the people in the houses. “Now Natalie, my woman, you see all these houses here,” he said waving his arms to right and left, “well, what do you and I know about what goes on back of these walls?” He kept taking deep breaths as he went along, just as he had done back there at the office when he had run across the room to kneel at Natalie’s feet. The little voices within him were still talking. He had been something like this sometimes when he was a boy, but no one had ever understood the riotous play of his fancy and in time he had come to think that letting his fancy go was all foolishness. Then when he was a young man and had married there had come a sharp new flare-up of the fanciful life, but then it had been frozen in him by the fear and the vulgarity that is born of fears. Now it was playing madly. “Now you see, Natalie,” he cried, stopping on the sidewalk to take hold of her two hands and swinging them madly back and forth, “now you see, here’s how it is. These houses along here look like just ordinary houses, such as you and I live in, but they aren’t like that at all. The outer walls are, you see, just things stuck up, like scenery on a stage. A breath can blow the walls down or an outburst of flames can consume them all in an hour. I’ll bet you what—I’ll bet that what you think is that the people back of the walls of these houses are just ordinary people. They aren’t at all. You’re all wrong about that, Natalie, my love. The women in the rooms back of these walls are all fair sweet women and you should just go into the rooms. They are hung with beautiful pictures and tapestry and the women have jewels on their hands and in their hair.
“And so the men and women live together in their houses and there are no good people, only beautiful ones, and children are born and their fancies are allowed to riot all over the place, and no one takes himself too seriously and thinks the whole outcome of human life depends upon himself, and people go out of these houses to work in the morning and come back at night and where they get all the rich comforts of life they have I can’t make out. It’s because there is really such a rich abundance of everything in the world somewhere and they have found out about it, I suppose.”
On their first evening together he and Natalie had walked beyond the town and had got into a country road. They went along this for a mile and then turned into a little side road. There was a great tree growing beside the road and they went to lean against it, standing side by side in silence.
It was after they had kissed that he told Natalie of his plans. “There are three or four thousand dollars in the bank and the factory is worth thirty or forty thousand more. I don’t know how much it is worth, perhaps nothing at all.
“At any rate I’ll take a thousand dollars and go away with you. I suppose I’ll leave some kind of papers making over the ownership of the place to my wife and daughter. That would, I suppose, be the thing to do.
“Then I’ll have to talk to my daughter, make her understand what I’m doing and why. Well, I hardly know whether it is possible to make her understand, but I’ll have to try. I’ll have to try to say something that will stay in her mind so that she in her turn may learn to live and not close and lock the doors of her being as my own doors have been locked. It may take, you see, two or three weeks to think out what I have to say and how to say it. My daughter Jane knows nothing. She is an American middle-class girl and I have helped to make her that. She is a virgin and that, I am afraid, Natalie, you do not understand. The gods have robbed you of your virginity or perhaps it was your old mother, drunk and calling you names, eh? That might have been a help to you. You wanted so much to have some sweet clean thing happen to you, to something deep down in you, that you went about with the doors of your being opened, eh? They did not have to be torn open. Virginity and respectability had not fastened them with bolts and locks. Your mother must quite have killed all notion of respectability in your family, eh Natalie? It is the most wonderful thing in the world to love you and to know that there is something in you that would make the notion of being cheap and second-class impossible to your lover. O, my Natalie, you are a woman strong to be loved.”
Natalie did not answer, perhaps did not understand this outpouring of words from him, and John Webster stopped talking and moved about so that he stood directly facing her. They were of about the same height and when he had come close they looked directly into each other’s faces. He put up his hands so that they lay on her cheeks and for a long time they stood thus, without words, looking at each other as though they could neither of them get enough of the sight of the face of the other. A late moon came up presently and they moved instinctively out from under the shadow of the tree and went into a field. They kept moving slowly along, stopping constantly and standing thus, with his hands on her cheeks. Her body began to tremble and the tears ran from her eyes. Then he laid her down upon the grass. It was an experience with a woman new in his life. After their first love-making and when their passions were spent she seemed more beautiful to him than before.
He stood within the door of his own house and it was late at night. One did not breathe any too well within those walls. He had a desire to creep through the house, to be unheard, and was thankful when he had got to his own room and had undressed and got into bed without being spoken to.
In bed he lay with eyes open listening to the night noises from without the house. They were not very plain. He had forgotten to open the window. When he had done that a low humming sound arose. The first frost had not come yet and the night was warm. In the garden owned by the German, in the grass in his own back-yard, in the branches of the trees along the streets and far off in the country there was life abundant.
Perhaps Natalie would have a child. It did not matter. They would go away together, live together in some distant place. Now Natalie must be at home in her mother’s house and she would also be lying awake. She would be taking deep breaths of the night air. He did that himself.
One could think of her and could also think of the people closer about. There was the German who lived next door. By turning his head he could see faintly the walls of the German’s house. His neighbor had a wife, a son and two daughters. Perhaps now they were all asleep. In fancy he went into his neighbor’s house, went softly from room to room through the house. There was the old man sleeping beside his wife and in another room the son who had drawn up his legs so that he lay in a little ball. He was a pale slender young man. “Perhaps he has indigestion,” whispered John Webster’s fancy. In another room the two daughters lay in two beds set closely together. One could just pass between them. They had been whispering to each other before they slept, perhaps of the lover they hoped would come, some time in the future. He stood so close to them that he could have touched their cheeks with his out-stretched fingers. He wondered why it had happened that he had become Natalie’s lover instead of the lover of one of these girls. “That could have happened. I could have loved either of them had she opened the doors of herself as Natalie has done.”
Loving Natalie did not preclude the possibility of his loving another, perhaps many others. “A rich man might have many marriages,” he thought. It was certain that the possibility of human relationship had not even been tapped yet. Something had stood in the way of a sufficiently broad acceptance of life. One had to accept oneself and the others before one could love.
As for himself he had to accept now his wife and daughter, draw close to them for a little before he went away with Natalie. It was a difficult thing to think about. He lay with wide-open eyes in his bed and tried to send his fancy into his wife’s room. He could not do it. His fancy could go into his daughter’s room and look at her lying asleep in her bed, but with his wife it was different. Something within him drew back. “Not now. Do not try it. It is not permitted. If she is ever to have a lover now it must be another,” a voice within him said.
“Did she do something that has destroyed the possibility of that or did I?” he asked himself sitting up in bed. There was no doubt a human relationship had been spoiled—messed. “It is not permitted. It is not permitted to make a mess on the floor of the temple,” the answering voice within said sternly.
To John Webster it seemed that the voices in the room spoke so loudly that as he lay down again and tried to sleep he was a little surprised that they had not awakened from their sleep the others in the house.