II
Into the air of the Webster house and into the air also of John Webster’s office and factory a new element had come. On all sides of him there was a straining at something within. When he was not alone or in the company of Natalie he no longer breathed freely. “You have done us an injury. You are doing us an injury,” everyone else seemed to be saying.
He wondered about that, tried to think about it. The presence of Natalie gave him each day a breathing time. When he sat beside her in the office he breathed freely, the tight thing within him relaxed. It was because she was simple and straightforward. She said little, but her eyes spoke often. “It’s all right. I love you. I am not afraid to love you,” her eyes said.
However he thought constantly of the others. The bookkeeper refused to look into his eyes or spoke with a new and elaborate politeness. He had already got into the habit of discussing the matter of John Webster and Natalie’s affair every evening with his wife. In the presence of his employer he now felt self-conscious and it was the same with the two older women in the office. As he passed through the office the younger of the three still sometimes looked up and smiled at him.
It was no doubt a fact that no man could do a quite isolated thing in the modern world of men. Sometimes when John Webster was walking homeward late at night, after having spent some hours with Natalie, he stopped and looked about him. The street was deserted and the lights had been put out in many of the houses. He raised his two arms and looked at them. They had recently held a woman, tightly, tightly, and the woman was not the one with whom he had lived for so many years, but a new woman he had found. His arms had held her tightly and her arms had held him. There had been joy in that. Joy had run through their two bodies during the long embrace. They had breathed deeply. Had the breath blown out of their lungs poisoned the air others had to breathe? As to the woman, who was called his wife—she had wanted no such embraces, or, had she wanted them, had been unable to take or give. A notion came to him. “If you love in a loveless world you face others with the sin of not loving,” he thought.
The streets lined with houses in which people lived were dark. It was past eleven o’clock, but there was no need to hurry home. When he got into bed he could not sleep. “It would be better just to walk about for an hour yet,” he decided and when he came to the corner that led into his own street did not turn, but kept on, going far out to the edge of town and back. His feet made a sharp sound on the stone sidewalks. Sometimes he met a man homeward bound and as they passed the man looked at him with surprise and something like distrust in his eyes. He walked past and then turned to look back. “What are you doing abroad? Why aren’t you at home and in bed with your wife?” the man seemed to be asking.
What was the man really thinking? Was there much thinking going on in all the dark houses along the street or did people simply go into them to eat and sleep as he had always gone into his own house? In fancy he got a quick vision of many people lying in beds stuck high in the air. The walls of the houses had receded from them.
Once, during the year before, there had been a fire in a house on his own street and the front wall of the house had fallen down. When the fire was put out one walked past in the street and there, laid bare to the public gaze, were two upstairs rooms in which people had lived for many years. Everything was a little burned and charred, but quite intact. In each room there were a bed, one or two chairs, a square piece of furniture with drawers in which shirts or dresses could be kept, and at the side of the room a closet for other clothes.
The house had quite burned out below and the stairway had been destroyed. When the fire broke out the people must have fled from the rooms like frightened and disturbed insects. One of the rooms had been occupied by a man and woman. There was a dress lying on the floor and a pair of half-burned trousers flung over the back of a chair, while in the second room, evidently occupied by a woman, there were no signs of male attire. The place had made John Webster think of his own married life. “It is as it might have been with us had my wife and I not quit sleeping together. That might have been our room with the room of our daughter Jane beside it,” he had thought on the morning after the fire as he walked past and stopped with other curious idlers to gaze up at the scene above.
And now, as he walked alone in the sleeping streets of his town his imagination succeeded in stripping all the walls from all the houses and he walked as in some strange city of the dead. That his imagination could so flame up, running along whole streets of houses and wiping out walls as a wind shakes the branches of the trees, was a new and living wonder to himself. “A life-giving thing has been given to me. For many years I have been dead and now I am alive,” he thought. To give the fuller play to his fancy he got off the sidewalk and walked in the centre of the street. The houses lay before him all silent and the late moon had appeared and made black pools under the trees. The houses stripped of their walls were on either side of him.
In the houses the people were sleeping in their beds. How many bodies lying and sleeping close together, babes asleep in cribs, young boys sleeping sometimes two or three in a single bed, young women asleep with their hair fallen down about their faces.
As they slept they dreamed. Of what did they dream? He had a great desire that what had happened to himself and Natalie should happen to all of them. The love-making in the field had after all been but a symbol of something more filled with meaning than the mere act of two bodies embracing, the passage of the seeds of life from one body to another.
A great hope flared up in him. “A time will come when love like a sheet of fire will run through the towns and cities. It will tear walls away. It will destroy ugly houses. It will tear ugly clothes off the bodies of men and women. They will build anew and build beautifully,” he declared aloud. As he walked and talked thus he felt suddenly like a young prophet come out of some far strange clean land to visit with the blessing of his presence the people of the street. He stopped and putting his hands to his head laughed loudly at the picture he had made of himself. “You would think I was another John the Baptist who has been living in a wilderness on locusts and wild honey instead of a washing machine manufacturer in a Wisconsin town,” he thought. A window to one of the houses was opened and he heard low voices talking. “Well, I’d better be going home before they lock me up for a crazy man,” he thought, getting out of the road and turning out of the street at a nearby corner.
At the office, during the day, there were no such periods of exhilaration. There only Natalie seemed quite in control of the situation. “She has stout legs and strong feet. She knows how to stand her ground,” John Webster thought as he sat at his desk and looked across at her sitting at her desk.
She was not insensible to what was going on about her. Sometimes when he looked suddenly up at her and when she did not know he was looking he saw something that convinced him her hours alone were not now very happy. There was a tightening about the eyes. No doubt she had her own little hell to face.
Still she went about her work every day outwardly unperturbed. “That old Irish woman, with her temper, her drinking, and her love of loud picturesque profanity has managed to put her daughter through a course of sprouts,” he decided. It was well Natalie was so level-headed. “The Lord knows she and I may need all of her level-headedness before we are through with our lives,” he decided. There was something in women, a kind of power, few men understood. They could stand the gaff. Now Natalie did his work and her own too. When a letter came she answered it and when there was something to be decided she made the decision. Sometimes she looked across at him as though to say, “Your job, the clearing up you will still have to do in your own house, will be more difficult than anything I shall have to face. You let me attend to these minor details of our life now. To do that makes the time of waiting less difficult for me.”
She did not say anything of the sort in words, being one not given to words, but there was always something in her eyes that made him understand what she wanted to say.
After that first love-making in the field they were not lovers again while they remained in the Wisconsin town although every evening they went to walk together. After dining at her mother’s house where she had to pass under the questioning eyes of her sister the school teacher, also a silent woman, and to withstand a fiery outbreak from her mother who came to the door to shout questions after her down the street, Natalie came back along the railroad tracks to find John Webster waiting for her in the darkness by the office door. Then they walked boldly through the streets and went into the country and, when they had got upon a country road, went hand in hand, for the most part in silence.
And from day to day, in the office and in the Webster household the feeling of tenseness grew more and more pronounced.
In the house, when he had come in late at night and had crept up to his room, he had a sense of the fact that both his wife and daughter were lying awake, thinking of him, wondering about him, wondering what strange thing had happened to make him suddenly a new man. From what he had seen in their eyes in the day-time he knew that they had both became suddenly aware of him. Now he was no longer the mere bread-winner, the man who goes in and out of his house as a work horse goes in and out of a stable. Now, as he lay in his bed and behind the two walls of his room and the two closed doors, voices were awakening within them, little fearful voices. His mind had got into the habit of thinking of walls and doors. “Some night the walls will fall down and the two doors will open. I must be ready for the time when that happens,” he thought.
His wife was one who, when she was excited, resentful, or angry, sank herself into an ocean of silence. Perhaps the whole town knew of his walking about in the evening with Natalie Swartz. Had news of it come to his wife she would not have spoken of the matter to her daughter. There would be just a dense kind of silence in the house and the daughter would know there was something the matter. There had been such times before. The daughter would have become frightened, perhaps it would be just at bottom the fear of change, that something was about to happen that would disturb the steady even passage of days.
One noon, during the second week after the love-making with Natalie, he walked toward the centre of town, intending to go into a restaurant and eat lunch, but instead walked straight ahead down the tracks for nearly a mile. Then, not knowing exactly what impulse had led him, he went back to the office. Natalie and all the others except the youngest of the three women had gone out. Perhaps the air of the place had become so heavy with unexpressed thoughts and feelings that none of them wanted to stay there when they were not working. The day was bright and warm, a golden and red Wisconsin day of early October.
He walked into the inner office, stood a moment looking vaguely about and then came out again. The young woman sitting there arose. Was she going to say something to him about the affair with Natalie? He also stopped and stood looking at her. She was a small woman with a sweet womanly mouth, gray eyes, and with a kind of tiredness expressing itself in her whole being. What did she want? Did she want him to go ahead with the love affair with Natalie, of which she no doubt knew, or did she want him to stop? “It would be dreadful if she should try to speak about it,” he thought and then at once, for some unexplainable reason, knew she would not do that.
They stood for a moment looking into each other’s eyes and the look was like a kind of love-making too. It was very strange and the moment would afterward give him much to think about. In the future no doubt his life was to be filled with many thoughts. There was this woman he did not know at all, standing before him, and in their own way he and she were being lovers too. Had the thing not happened between himself and Natalie so recently, had he not still been filled with that, something of the sort might well have happened between him and this woman.
In reality the matter of the two people standing thus and looking at each other occupied but a moment. Then she sat down, a little confused, and he went quickly out.
There was a kind of joy in him now. “There is love abundant in the world. It may take many roads to expression. The woman in there is hungry for love and there is something fine and generous about her. She knows Natalie and I love and she has, in some obscure way I can’t yet understand, given herself to that until it has become almost a physical experience with her too. There are a thousand things in life no one rightly understands. Love has as many branches as a tree.”
He went up into a business street of the town and turned into a section with which he was not very familiar. He was passing a little store, near a Catholic church, such a store as is patronized by devout Catholics and in which are sold figures of the Christ on the cross, the Christ lying at the foot of the cross with His bleeding wounds, the Virgin standing with arms crossed looking demurely down, blessed candles, candlesticks, and the like. For a moment he stood before the store window looking at the figures displayed and then went in and bought a small framed picture of the Virgin, a supply of yellow candles, and two glass candlesticks, made in the shape of crosses and with little gilded figures of the Christ on the cross upon them.
To tell the truth the figure of the Virgin looked not unlike Natalie. There was a kind of quiet strength in her. She stood, holding a lily in her right hand and the thumb and first finger of her left hand touched lightly a great heart pinned to her breast by a dagger. Across the heart was a wreath of five red roses.
John Webster stood for a moment looking into the Virgin’s eyes and then bought the things and hurried out of the store. Then he took a street car and went to his own house. His wife and daughter were out and he went up into his own room and put the packages in a closet. When he came downstairs the servant Katherine was waiting for him. “May I get you something to eat again to-day?” she asked and smiled.
He did not stay to have lunch, but it was fine, being asked to stay. At any rate she had remembered the day when she had stood near him while he ate. He had liked being alone with her that day. Perhaps she had felt the same thing and had liked being with him.
He walked straight out of town and got into a country road and presently turned off the road into a small wood. For two hours he sat on a log looking at the trees now flaming with color. The sun shone brightly and after a time the squirrels and birds became less conscious of his presence and the animal and bird life that had been stilled by his coming was renewed.
It was the afternoon after the night of his walking in the streets between the rows of houses the walls of which had been torn away by his fancy. “I shall tell Natalie of that to-night and I shall tell her also of what I intend to do at home there in my room. I shall tell her and she will say nothing. She is a strange one. When she does not understand she believes. There is something in her that accepts life as these trees do,” he thought.