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:
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.