Many Marriages

John Webster rode to his house on a street car. It was half-past twelve o’clock when he arrived and, as he had anticipated, he was not expected. Behind his house, a rather commonplace looking frame affair, there was a little garden with two apple trees. He walked around the house and saw his daughter, Jane Webster, lying in a hammock hung between the trees. There was an old rocking-chair under one of the trees near the hammock and he went and sat in it. His daughter was surprised at his coming upon her so, at the noon hour when he so seldom appeared. “Well, hello Dad,” she said listlessly, sitting up and dropping on the grass at his feet a book she had been reading. “Is there anything wrong?” she asked. He shook his head.

Picking up the book he began to read and her head dropped again to the cushion in the hammock. The book was a modern novel of the period. It concerned life in the old city of New Orleans. He read a few pages. It was no doubt the sort of thing that might take one out of oneself, take one away from the dullness of life. A young man was stealing along a street in the darkness and had a cloak wrapped about his shoulders. Overhead the moon shone. The magnolia trees were in blossom filling the air with perfume. The young man was very handsome. The scene of the novel was laid in the time before the Civil War and he owned a great many slaves.

John Webster closed the book. There was no need of reading. When he was still a young man he had sometimes read such books himself. They took one out of oneself, made the dullness of everyday existence seem less terrible.

That was an odd thought, that everyday existence need be dull. There was no doubt the last twenty years of his own life had been dull, but during that morning, life had not been so. It seemed to him he had never before had such a morning.

Another book lay in the hammock and he took it up and read a few lines:

John Webster glanced at his daughter. As he sat he could look directly into her face.

“As pale as a candle from which the flame has been struck, huh. What a fancy way of putting things.” Well, his own daughter Jane was not pale. She was a robust young thing. “A candle that has never been lighted,” he thought.

It was a strange and terrible fact, but the truth was he had never thought much about his daughter, and here she was almost a woman. There was no doubt she already had the body of a woman. The functions of womanhood went on in her body. He sat, looking directly at her. A moment before he had been very weary, now the weariness was quite gone. “She might already have had a child,” he thought. Her body was prepared for child-bearing, it had grown and developed to that state. What an immature face she had. Her mouth was pretty but there was something, a kind of blankness. “Her face is like a fair sheet of paper on which nothing has been written.”

Her eyes in wandering met his eyes. It was odd. Something like fright came into them. She sat quickly up. “What’s the matter with you, Dad?” she asked sharply. He smiled. “There isn’t anything the matter,” he said, looking away. “I thought I’d come home to lunch. Is there anything wrong about that?”

His wife, Mary Webster, came to the back door of the house and called her daughter. When she saw her husband her eyebrows went up. “This is unexpected. What brought you home at this time of the day?” she asked.

They went into the house and along a hallway to the dining room, but there was no place set for him. He had a feeling they both thought there was something wrong, almost immoral, about his being home at that time of the day. It was unexpected and the unexpected has a doubtful air. He concluded he had better explain. “I had a headache and thought I would come home and lie down for an hour,” he said. He felt they looked relieved, as though he had taken a load off their minds, and smiled at the thought. “May I have a cup of tea? Will it be too much trouble?” he asked.

While the tea was being brought he pretended to look out through a window, but in secret studied his wife’s face. She was like her daughter. There was nothing written on her face. Her body was getting heavy.

She had been a tall slender girl with yellow hair when he married her. Now the impression she gave off was of one who had grown large without purpose, “somewhat as cattle are fattened for slaughter,” he thought. One did not feel the bone and muscle back of her bulk. Her yellow hair that, when she was younger, had a way of glistening strangely in the sunlight was now rather colorless. It had the air of being dead at the roots and there were folds of quite meaningless flesh on the face among which little streams of wrinkles wandered.

“Her face is a blank thing, untouched by the finger of life,” he thought. “She is a tall tower, without a foundation, that will soon fall down.” There was something very lovely and at the same time rather terrible to himself in the state he was now in. Things he said or thought to himself had a kind of poetic power in them. A group of words formed in his mind and the words had power and meaning. He sat playing with the handle of the teacup. Suddenly a great desire to see his own body came over him. He arose and with an apology went out of the room and up a stairway. His wife called to him: “Jane and I are going to drive out into the country. Is there anything I can do for you before we go?”

He stopped on the stairs, but did not answer at once. Her voice was like her face, a little fleshy and heavy. How odd it was for him, a commonplace washing machine manufacturer in a Wisconsin town, to be thinking in this way, to be noting all these little details of life. He resorted to a trick, wanting to hear his daughter’s voice. “Did you call to me, Jane?” he asked. The daughter answered, explaining that it was her mother who had spoken and repeating what had been said. He answered that he wanted nothing but to lie down for an hour and went on up the stairs and into his own room. The daughter’s voice, like the mother’s, seemed to represent her exactly. It was young and clear, but had no resonance. He closed the door to his room and bolted it. Then he began taking off his clothes.

Now he was not in the least weary. “I’m sure I must be a little insane. A sane person would not note every little thing that goes on as I do to-day,” he thought. He sang softly, wanting to hear his own voice, to in a way test it against the voices of his wife and daughter. He hummed over the words of a negro song that had been in his mind earlier in the day,

He thought his own voice all right. The words came out of his throat clearly and there was a kind of resonance too. “Had I tried to sing yesterday it would not have sounded like that,” he concluded. The voices of his mind were playing about busily. There was a kind of gaiety in him. The thought that had come that morning when he looked into the eyes of Natalie Swartz came running back. His own body, that was now naked, was a house. He went and stood before a mirror and looked at himself. His body was still slender and healthy looking, outside. “I think I know what all this business is I am going through,” he concluded. “A kind of house cleaning is going on. My house has been vacant now for twenty years. Dust has settled on the walls and furniture. Now, for some reason I do not understand, the doors and windows have been thrown open. I shall have to scrub the walls and the floors, make everything sweet and clean as it is in Natalie’s house. Then I shall invite people in to visit me.” He ran his hands over his naked body, over his breasts, arms, and legs. Something within him was laughing.

He went and threw himself, thus naked on the bed. There were four sleeping rooms in the upper floor of the house. His own was at a corner and there were doors opening into his wife’s and his daughter’s rooms. When he had first married his wife they had slept together, but when the baby came they gave that up and never did it afterward. Once in a long while now he went in to his wife at night. She wanted him, let him know in some woman’s way that she wanted him, and he went, not happily or eagerly, but because he was a man and she a woman and it was done. The thought wearied him a little. “Well it hasn’t happened for some weeks.” He did not want to think about it.

He owned a horse and carriage that was kept at a livery stable and now it was being driven up to the door of the house. He heard the front door close. His wife and daughter were driving out into the country. The window of his room was open and a breeze blew in and across his body. The next-door neighbor had a garden and cultivated flowers. The air that came in was fragrant. The sounds were all soft, quiet sounds. Sparrows chirped. A large winged insect flew against the screen that covered the window and crawled slowly toward the top. Away off somewhere the bell of a locomotive began to ring. Perhaps it was on the tracks by his factory where Natalie was now sitting at her desk. He turned to look at the winged thing, crawling slowly. The little voices that lived within one’s body were not always serious. Sometimes they played like children. One of the voices declared that the eyes of the insect were looking at him with approval. Now the insect was speaking. “You are a devil of a fellow to have been so long asleep,” it said. The bell of the locomotive could still be heard, coming from a long distance, softly. “I’ll tell Natalie what that winged fellow had to say,” he thought and smiled at the ceiling. His cheeks became flushed and he slept quietly with his hands thrown above his head, as a child sleeps.