VIII
“Why must one commit rape, rape of the conscious, rape of the unconscious?”
John Webster sprang up from beside his daughter and then whirled quickly about. A word had come out of the body of his wife sitting unobserved on the floor behind him. “Don’t,” she said and then, after opening and closing her mouth twice, ineffectually, repeated the word. “Don’t, don’t,” she said again. The words seemed to be forcing themselves through her lips. Her body lumped down there on the floor had become just a strangely misshapen bundle of flesh and bones.
She was pale, of a pasty paleness.
John Webster had jumped off the bed as a dog, lying asleep in the dust of a roadway, might have leaped out of the path of a rapidly moving vehicle.
The devil! His mind was jerked back into the present swiftly, violently. A moment before he had been with a young woman on a hillside above a wide sun-washed valley and had been making love to her. The love-making had not been a success. It had turned out badly. There had been a tall slender girl who had submitted her body to a man, but who had been all the time terribly frightened and beset by a sense of guilt and shame. After the love-making she had cried, not with an excess of tenderness, but because she had felt unclean. They had walked down the hillside later and she had tried to tell him how she felt. Then he also had begun to feel mean and unclean. Tears had come into his own eyes. He had thought she must be right. What she said almost every one said. After all man was not an animal. Man was a conscious thing trying to struggle upward out of animalism. He had tried to think everything out that same night as he, for the first time, lay in bed beside his wife, and he had come to certain conclusions. She was no doubt right in her belief that there were certain impulses in men that had better be subjected to the power of the will. If one just let oneself go one became no better than a beast.
He had tried hard to think everything out clearly. What she had wanted was that there be no love-making between them except for the purpose of breeding children. If one went about the business of bringing children into the world, making new citizens for the state and all that, then one could feel a certain dignity in love-making. She had tried to explain how humiliated and mean she had felt that day when he had come into her naked presence. For the first time they had talked of that. It had been made ten times, a thousand times worse because he had come the second time and the others had seen him. The clean moment of their relationship was denied with determined insistence. After that had happened she could not bear to remain in the company of her girl friend and, as for her friend’s brother—well, how could she ever look into his face again? Whenever he looked at her he would be seeing her not properly clothed as she should be, but shamelessly naked and on a bed with a naked man holding her in his arms. She had been compelled to get out of the house, go home at once, and of course, when she got home, every one wondered what had happened that her visit had come to such an abrupt end. The trouble was that when her mother was questioning her, on the day after her arrival home, she suddenly burst into tears.
What they thought after that she did not know. The truth was that she had begun to be afraid of every one’s thoughts. When she went into her bedroom at night she was almost ashamed to look at her own body and had got into the habit of undressing in the darkness. Her mother was always dropping remarks. “Did your coming home so suddenly have anything to do with the young man in that house?”
After she had come home, and because she began to feel so ashamed of herself in the presence of other people, she had decided she would join a church, a decision that had pleased her father, who was a devout church member. The whole incident had in fact drawn her and her father closer together. Perhaps that was because, unlike her mother, he never bothered her with embarrassing questions.
Anyway she had made up her mind that if she ever married she would try to make her marriage a pure thing, based on comradeship, and she had felt that after all she must marry John Webster if he ever repeated his proposal of marriage. After what had happened that was the only right thing for them both to do and now that they were married it would be right also for them to try and make up for the past by leading clean pure lives and trying never to give way to the animal impulses that shocked and frightened people.
John Webster was standing facing his wife and daughter and his mind had gone back to the first night in bed with his wife and to the many other nights they had spent together. On that first night, long ago, when she lay talking to him, the moonlight came in through a window and fell on her face. She had been very beautiful at the moment. Now that he no longer approached her, afire with passion, but lay quietly beside her, with her body drawn a little away and with his arm about her shoulders, she was not afraid of him and occasionally put up her hand and touched his face.
The truth was that he had got the notion into his head that there was in her a kind of spiritual power divorced altogether from the flesh. Outside the house, along the river banks, frogs were calling their throaty calls and once in the night some strange weird call came out of the air. That must have been some night bird, perhaps a loon. The sound wasn’t a call, really. It was a kind of wild laugh. From another part of the house, on the same floor there came the sound of her uncle’s snoring.
The two people had slept little. There was so much to say. After all they were hardly acquainted. What he thought at the time was that she wasn’t a woman after all. She was a child. Something dreadful had happened to the child and he was to blame and now that she was his wife he would try hard to make everything all right. If passion frightened her he would subdue his passions. A thought had got into his head that had stayed there for years. It was that spiritual love was stronger and purer than physical love, that they were two different and distinct things. He had felt quite exalted when that notion came. He wondered now, as he stood looking down at the figure of his wife, what had happened that the notion at one time so strong in him, had not enabled him or her to get happiness together. One said the words and then, after all, they did not mean anything. They were trick words of the sort that were always fooling people, forcing people into false positions. He had come to hate such words. “Now I accept the flesh first, all flesh,” he thought vaguely, still looking down at her. He turned and stepped across the room to look in a glass. The flame of the candles made light enough so that he could see himself quite distinctly. It was a rather puzzling notion, but the truth was, that every time he had looked at his wife during the last few weeks he had wanted to run at once and look at himself in a glass. He had wanted to assure himself of something. The tall slender girl who had once lain beside him in a bed, with the moonlight falling on her face, had become the heavy inert woman now in the room with him, the woman who was at this moment crouched on the floor in the doorway at the foot of the bed. How much had he become like that?
One didn’t escape animalism so easily. Now the woman on the floor was so much more like an animal than himself. Perhaps the very sins he had committed, his shamefaced running off sometimes to other women in the cities, had saved him. “That would be a pronouncement to throw into the teeth of the good pure people if it were true,” he thought with a quick inner throb of satisfaction.
The woman on the floor was like a heavy animal that had suddenly become very ill. He stepped back to the bed and looked at her with a queer impersonal light in his eyes. She had difficulty holding up her head. The light from the candles, cut off from her submerged body by the bed itself shone full on her face and shoulders. The rest of her body was buried in a kind of darkness. His mind remained the alert swift thing it had been ever since he had found Natalie. In a moment now he could do more thinking than he had done before in a year. If he ever became a writer, as he sometimes thought maybe he would, after he had gone away with Natalie, he would never want for things to write about. If one kept the lid off the well of thinking within oneself, let the well empty itself, let the mind consciously think any thoughts that came to it, accepted all thinking, all imaginings, as one accepted the flesh of people, animals, birds, trees, plants, one might live a hundred or a thousand lives in one life. To be sure it was absurd to go stretching things too much, but one could at least play with the notion that one could become something more than just one individual man and woman living one narrow circumscribed life. One could tear down all walls and fences and walk in and out of many people, become many people. One might in oneself become a whole town full of people, a city, a nation.
The thing to bear in mind however now, at this moment, was the woman on the floor, the woman whose voice had, but a moment before called out again the word her lips had always been saying to him.
“Don’t! Don’t! Let’s not, John! Not now, John!” What persistent denial, of himself, perhaps of herself, too, there had been.
It was rather absurdly cruel how impersonal he felt toward her. It was likely few people in the world ever realized what depths of cruelty lay sleeping within themselves. All the things that came out of the well of thinking within oneself, when one jerked off the lid, were not easy to accept as a part of oneself.
As for the woman on the floor, if one let one’s fancy go, one could stand as he was now doing, looking directly at the woman, and could think the most absurdly inconsequential thoughts.
For one thing one could have the fancy that the darkness in which her body was submerged, because of the accident that the light from the candles did not fall on it, was the sea of silence into which she had, all through these years, been sinking herself deeper and deeper.
And the sea of silence was just another and fancier name for something else, for that deep well within all men and women, of which he had been thinking so much during the last few weeks.
The woman who had been his wife, all people for that matter, spent their entire lives sinking themselves deeper and deeper into that sea. If one wanted to let oneself get more and more fancy about the matter, indulge in a kind of drunken debauch of fancy, as it were, one could in a half playful mood jump over some invisible line and say that the sea of silence into which people were always so intent on sinking themselves was in reality death. There was a race toward the goal of death between the mind and body and almost always the mind arrived first.
The race began in childhood and never stopped until either the body or mind had worn itself out and stopped working. Every one carried about, all the time, within himself life and death. There were two Gods sitting on two thrones. One could worship either, but in general mankind had preferred kneeling before death.
The god of denial had won the victory. To reach his throne-room one went through long hallways of evasion. That was the road to his throne-room, the road of evasion. One twisted and turned, felt one’s way in the darkness. There were no sudden and blinding flashes of light.
John Webster had got a notion regarding his wife. It was sure the heavy inert woman, now looking up into his face from the darkness of the floor, unable to speak to him, had little or nothing to do with a slender girl he had once married. For one thing how utterly unlike they were physically. It wasn’t the same woman at all. He could see that. Anyone who had looked at the two women could see that they had really nothing physically in common. But did she know that, had she ever thought of that, had she been, in any but a very superficial way, aware of the changes that had taken place in her? He decided she had not. There was a kind of blindness common to almost all people. The thing called beauty, men sought in woman, and that women, although they did not speak of it so often, were also looking for in men wasn’t a thing that remained. When it existed at all it came to people only in flashes. One came into the presence of another and the flash came. How confusing that was. Strange things like marriages followed. “Until death do us part.” Well, that was all right too. One had to try to get things straight if one could. When one clutched at the thing called beauty in another, death always came, bobbing its head up too.
How many marriages among peoples! John Webster’s mind was flying about. He stood looking at the woman who, although they had separated long before—they had really and irrevocably separated one day on a hill above a valley in the state of Kentucky—was still in an odd way bound to him, and there was another woman who was his daughter in the same room. The daughter stood beside him. He could put out his hand and touch her. She was not looking at himself or her mother, but at the floor. What was she thinking? What thoughts had he stirred up in her? What would be the result to her of the events of the night? There were things he couldn’t answer, that he had to leave on the knees of the gods.
His mind was racing, racing. There were certain men he had always been seeing in the world. Usually they belonged to a class known as fellows with shaky reputations. What had happened to them? There were men who walked through life with a certain easy grace of manner. In some way they were beyond good and evil, stood outside the influences that made or unmade other men. John Webster had seen a few such men and had never been able to forget them. Now they passed, as in a procession, before his mind’s eyes.
There was an old man with a white beard who carried a heavy walking stick and was followed by a dog. He had broad shoulders and walked with a certain stride. John Webster had encountered the man once, as he himself drove on a dusty country road. Who was the fellow? Where was he going? There was about him a certain air. “Go to the devil then,” his manner seemed to say. “I’m a man walking here. Within me there is kingship. Go prattle of democracy and equality if you will, worry your silly heads about a life after death, make up little lies to cheer your way in the darkness, but get out of my way. I walk in the light.”
It might be all just a silly notion, what John Webster was now thinking about an old man he had once met walking on a country road. It was certain he remembered the figure with extraordinary sharpness. He had stopped his horse to gaze after the old man, who had not even bothered to turn and look at him. Well the old man had walked with a kingly stride. Perhaps that was the reason he had attracted John Webster’s attention.
Now he was thinking of him and a few other such men he had seen during his life. There was one, a sailor who had come down to a wharf in the city of Philadelphia. John Webster was in that city on business and having nothing to do one afternoon had gone down to where the ships were loaded and unloaded. A sailing vessel, a brigantine, lay at the wharf, and the man he had seen came down to it. He had a bag over his shoulder, containing perhaps his sea clothes. He was no doubt a sailor, about to sail before the mast on the brigantine. What he did was simply to come to the vessel’s side, throw his bag aboard, call to another man who put his head out at a cabin door, and turning walked away.
But who had taught him to walk like that? The old Harry! Most men, and women too, crept through life like sneaks. What gave them the sense of being such underlings, such dogs? Were they constantly besmearing themselves with accusations of guilt and, if that was it, what made them do it?
The old man in the road, the sailor walking off along a street, a negro prize fighter he had once seen driving an automobile, a gambler at the horse races in a Southern city, who walked wearing a loud checkered vest before a grandstand filled with people, a woman actress he had once seen coming out at the stage entrance of a theatre, reprobates all perhaps and all walking with the stride of kings.
What had given such men and women this respect for themselves? It was apparent respect for self must be at the bottom of the matter. Perhaps they hadn’t at all the sense of guilt and shame that had made of the slender girl he had once married the heavy inarticulate woman now squatted so grotesquely on the floor at his feet. One could imagine some such person as he had in mind saying to himself, “Well, here I am, you see, in the world. I have this long or short body, this brown or yellow hair. My eyes are of a certain color. I eat food, I sleep at night. I shall have to spend the whole of my life going about among people in this body of mine. Shall I crawl before them or shall I walk upright like a king? Shall I hate and fear my own body, this house in which I must live, or shall I respect and care for it? Well, the devil! The question is not worth answering. I shall take life as it offers itself. For me the birds shall sing, the green spread itself over the earth in the spring, for me the cherry tree in the orchard shall bloom.”
John Webster had a fanciful picture of the man of his fancy going into a room. He closed the door. A row of candles stood on a mantle above a fireplace. The man opened a box and took from it a silver crown. Then he laughed softly and put the crown on his own head. “I crown myself a man,” he said.
It was amazing. One was in a room looking at a woman who had been one’s wife, and one was about to set out on a journey and would not see her again. Of a sudden there was a blinding rush of thoughts. One’s fancy played far and wide. One seemed to have been standing in one spot thinking thoughts for hours, but in reality only a few seconds had passed since the voice of his wife, calling out that word, “don’t,” had interrupted his own voice telling a tale of an ordinary unsuccessful marriage.
The thing now was to keep his daughter in mind. He had better get her out of the room now. She was moving toward the door to her own room and in a moment would be gone. He turned away from the white-faced woman on the floor and watched his daughter. Now his own body was thrust between the bodies of the two women. They could not see each other.
There was a story of a marriage he had not finished, would never finish telling now, but in time his daughter would come to understand what the end of the story must inevitably be.
There was something that should be thought of now. His daughter was going out of his presence. Perhaps he would never see her again. One continually dramatized life, made a play of it. That was inevitable. Every day of one’s life consisted of a series of little dramas and one was always casting oneself for an important part in the performance. It was annoying to forget one’s lines, not to walk out upon the stage when one had got one’s cue. Nero fiddled when Rome was burning. He had forgotten what part he had assigned to himself and so fiddled in order not to give himself away. Perhaps he had intended making an ordinary politician’s speech about a city rising again from the flames.
Blood of the saints! Would his daughter walk calmly out of the room without turning at the door? What had he yet intended saying to her? He was growing a little nervous and upset.
His daughter was standing in the doorway leading to her own room, looking at him, and there was a kind of intense half-insane mood in her as all evening there had been in him. He had infected her with something out of himself. After all there had been what he had wanted, a real marriage. After this evening the younger woman could never be what she might have been, had this evening not happened. Now he knew what he wanted for her. Those men, whose figures had just visited his fancy, the race-track man, the old man in the road, the sailor on the docks, there was a thing they had got hold of he had wanted her to have hold of too.
Now he was going away with Natalie, with his own woman, and he would not see his daughter again. She was a young girl yet, really. All of womanhood lay before her.
“I’m damned. I’m crazy as a loon,” he thought. He had suddenly a ridiculous desire to begin singing a silly refrain that had just come into his head.
And then his fingers, fumbling about in his pockets, came upon the thing he had unconsciously been looking for. He clutched it, half convulsively, and went toward his daughter, holding it between his thumb and finger.
On the afternoon of the day, on which he had first found his way in at the door of Natalie’s house, and when he had become almost distracted from much thinking, he had found a bright little stone on the railroad track near his factory.
When one tried to think his way along a too difficult road one was likely, at any moment, to get lost. One went up some dark lonely road and then, becoming frightened, one became at the same time shrill and distracted. There were things to be done, but one could do nothing. For example, and at the most vital moment in life, one might spoil everything by beginning to sing a silly song. Others would throw up their hands. “He’s crazy,” they would say, as though such a saying ever meant anything at all.
Well, once before, he had been, as he was now, at just this moment. Too much thinking had upset him. The door of Natalie’s house had been opened and he had been afraid to enter. He had planned to run away from her, go to the city and get drunk and write her a letter telling her to go away to where he would not have to see her again. He had thought he preferred to walk in loneliness and darkness, to take the road of evasion to the throne-room of the god Death.
And at the moment all this was going on his eye had caught the glint of a little green stone lying among all the gray meaningless stones in the gravel bed of a railroad track. That was in the late afternoon and the sun’s rays had been caught and reflected by the little stone.
He had picked it up and the simple act of doing so had broken a kind of absurd determination within him. His fancy, unable at the moment to play over the facts of his life, had played over the stone. A man’s fancy, the creative thing within him, was in reality intended to be a healing thing, a supplementary and healing influence to the working of the mind. Men sometimes did a thing they called, “going it blind,” and at such moments did the least blind acts of their whole lives. The truth was that the mind working alone was but a one-sided, maimed thing.
“Hito, tito, there’s no use my trying to become a philosopher.” John Webster was stepping toward his daughter who was waiting for him to say or do something that had not yet been done. Now he was quite all right again. Some minute re-adjustment had taken place inside himself as it had on so many other occasions within the last few weeks.
Something like a gay mood had come over him. “In one evening I have managed to plunge pretty deeply down into the sea of life,” he thought.
He became a little vain. There he was, a man of the middle class, who had lived all his life in a Wisconsin industrial town. But a few weeks before he had been but a colorless fellow in an almost altogether colorless world. For years he had been going along, just so, day after day, week after week, year after year, going along streets, passing people in the streets, picking his feet up and setting them down, thump thump, eating food, sleeping, borrowing money at banks, dictating letters in offices, going along, thump thump, not daring to think or feel much of anything at all.
Now he could think more thoughts, have more fancies, while he took three or four steps across a room toward his daughter, than he had sometimes dared do in a whole year of his former life. There was a picture of himself in his fancy now that he liked.
In the fanciful picture he had climbed up to a high place above the sea and had taken off his clothes. Then he had run to the end of a cliff and had leaped off into space. His body, his own white body, the same body in which he had been living all through these dead years, was now making a long graceful arched curve against a blue sky.
That was rather nice too. It made a picture for the mind to take hold of and it was pleasant to think of one’s body as making sharp striking pictures.
He had plunged far down into the sea of lives, into the clear warm still sea of Natalie’s life, into the heavy salt dead sea of his wife’s life, into the swiftly running young river of life that was in his daughter Jane.
“I’m a great little mixer-up of figures of speech, but at the same time I’m a great little swimmer in seas,” he said aloud to his daughter.
Well, he had better be a little careful too. Her eyes were becoming puzzled again. It would take a long time for one, living with another, to become used to the sight of things jerked suddenly up out of the wells of thought within oneself and he and his daughter would perhaps never live together again.
He looked at the little stone held so firmly between his thumb and finger. It would be better to keep his mind fastened upon that now. It was a small, a minute thing, but one could fancy it looming large on the surface of a calm sea. His daughter’s life was a river running down to the sea of life. She would want something to which she could cling when she had been cast out into the sea. What an absurd notion. A little green stone would not float in the sea. It would sink. He smiled knowingly.
There was the little stone held before him, in his extended hand. He had picked it up on a railroad track one day and had indulged in fancies concerning it and the fancies had healed him. By indulging in fancies concerning inanimate objects, one in a strange way glorified them. For example a man might go to live in a room. There was a picture in a frame on a wall, the walls of a room, an old desk, two candles under a Virgin, and a man’s fancy made the place a sacred place. All the art of life perhaps consisted in just letting the fancy wash over and color the facts of life.
The light from the two candles under the Virgin fell on the stone he held before him. It was about the size and shape of a small bean and was dark green in color. In certain lights its color changed swiftly. There was a flash of yellow green as of new grown things just coming out of the ground and then that faded away and the stone became altogether a dark lusty green, as of the leaves of oak trees in the late summer, one could fancy.
How clearly John Webster had remembered everything now. The stone he had found on the railroad track had been lost by a woman who was travelling west. The woman had worn it among other stones in a brooch at her throat. He remembered how his imagination had created her at the moment.
Or had it been set in a ring and worn on her finger?
Things were a bit mixed. Now he saw the woman quite clearly, as he had seen her in fancy once before, but she was not on a train, but was standing on a hill. It was winter and the hill was coated with a light blanket of snow and below the hill, in a valley, was a wide river covered with a shining sheet of ice. A man, a middle-aged, rather heavy-looking man stood beside the woman and she was pointing at something in the distance. The stone was set in a ring worn on the extended finger.
Now everything became very clear to John Webster. He knew now what he wanted. The woman on the hill was one of the strange people, like the sailor who had come down to the ship, the old man in the road, the actress coming out of the stage door of the theatre, one of the people who had crowned themselves with the crown of life.
He stepped to his daughter and, taking her hand, opened it and laid the little stone on her palm. Then he carefully closed her fingers until her hand was a fist.
He smiled, a knowing little smile and looked into her eyes. “Well, now Jane, it’s pretty hard to tell you what I’m thinking,” he said. “You see, there are a lot of things in me I can’t get out without time and now I’m going away. I want to give you something.”
He hesitated. “This stone,” he began again, “it’s something for you to cling to perhaps, yes, that’s it. In moments of doubt cling to it. When you become almost distracted and do not know what to do hold it in your hand.”
He turned his head and his eyes seemed to be taking in the room slowly, carefully, as though not wanting to forget anything that made a part of the picture in which he and his daughter were now the central figures.
“As a matter of fact,” he began again, “a woman, a beautiful woman might, you see, hold many jewels in her hand. She might have many loves, you see, and the jewels might be the jewels of experience, the challenges of life she had met, eh?”
John Webster seemed to be playing some fanciful game with his daughter, but now she was no longer frightened, as when she had first come into the room, or puzzled as she had been but a moment before. She was absorbed in what he was saying. The woman crouched on the floor behind her father was forgotten.
“There’s one thing I shall have to do before I go away. I’ve got to give you a name for this little stone,” he said, still smiling. Opening her hand again he took it out and went and stood for a moment holding it before one of the candles. Then he returned to her and again put it into her hand.
“It is from your father, but he is giving it to you at the moment when he is no longer being your father and has begun to love you as a woman. Well, I guess you’d better cling to it, Jane. You’ll need it, God knows. If you want a name for it call it the ‘Jewel of Life,’” he said and then, as though he had already forgotten the incident he put his hand on her arm and pushing her gently through the door closed it behind her.