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.