As for the woman in Chicago, he would find her all right. One got bold after a few drinks and when one had the money to spend women were always to be had.
It was too bad that it was so but the truth was that the need of women was a part of a man’s makeup and the fact might as well be faced. “When you come down to that, I am a business man and it - is a business man’s place in the scheme of things to face facts,” he decided and suddenly he felt very resolute and strong.
As for Natalie, to tell the truth, there was in her perhaps something that it was a little hard for him to resist. “If there were only my wife it would be different but there is my daughter Jane. She is a pure young innocent thing and must be protected. I can’t let her in for a mess,” he told himself as he walked boldly along the little spur of the tracks that led to the door of his factory.
V
WHEN HE HAD opened the door that led into the little room where he had been sitting and working beside Natalie for three years, he quickly closed it behind him and stood with his back to the door and with his hand on the door-knob, as though for support. Natalie’s desk was beside a window at a corner of the room and beyond his own desk and through the window one could see into an empty space beside the spur of tracks that belonged to the railroad company, but in which he had been given the privilege of piling a reserve supply of lumber. The lumber was so piled that, in the soft evening light, the yellow boards made a kind of background for Natalie’s figure.
The sun was shining on the lumber pile, the last soft rays of the evening sun. Above the lumber pile there was a space of clear light and into this Natalie’s head was thrust.
An amazing and lovely thing had happened. When the fact of it came into his consciousness something within John Webster was torn open. What a simple thing Natalie had done and yet how significant. He stood with the door-knob grasped in his hand, clinging to the door-knob, and within himself the thing happened he had been trying to avoid.
Tears came into his eyes. In all his after life he never lost the sense of that moment. In one instant all within himself was muddy and dirty with the thoughts he had been having about the proposed trip to Chicago and then the mud and dirt was all, as by a quick miracle, swept away.
“At any other time what Natalie had done might have passed unnoticed,” he told himself later, but that fact did not in any way destroy its significance. All of the women who worked in his office as well as the bookkeeper and the men in the factory were in the habit of carrying their lunches and Natalie had brought her lunch on that morning as always. He remembered having seen her come in with it wrapped in a paper package.
Her home was a long distance away, at the edge of the town. None of the other of his employees came from so great a distance.
And on that noon she had not eaten her lunch. There it was done up in its package and lying on a shelf back of her head.
What had happened was this — at the noon time she had hurried out of the office and had run all the way home to her mother’s house. There was no bathtub there, but she had drawn water from a well and put it in a common washtub in a shed back of the house. Then she had plunged into the water and washed her body from head to foot.
After she had done that she had gone upstairs and arrayed herself in a special dress, the best one she owned, the one she had always kept for Sunday afternoons and for special occasions. As she dressed, her old mother, who had been following her about, swearing at her and demanding an explanation, stood at the foot of the stairway leading to her room and called her vile names. “You little whore, you are planning to go out with some man to-night so you are fixing yourself up as though you were about to be married. A swell chance either of my; two daughters have got to ever get themselves husbands. If you’ve got any money in your pocket you give it to me. I wouldn’t care so much about your traipsing around if you ever got any money,” she declared in a loud voice. On the evening before she had got money from one of the daughters and during the morning had provided herself with a bottle of whiskey. Now she was enjoying herself.
Natalie had paid no attention to her. When she was fully dressed she hurried down the stairs, brushing the old woman aside, and half ran back to the factory. The other women employed there had laughed when they saw her coming. “What’s Natalie up to?” they had asked each other.
John Webster stood looking at her and thinking. He knew all about what she had done and why she had done it although He had seen nothing. Now she did not look at him, but, turning her head slightly, looked out over the lumber piles.
Well then she had known all day what had been going on within himself. She had understood his sudden desire to come within herself so she had run home to bathe and array herself. “It was like washing the door sills of her house and hanging newly laundered curtains at the windows,” he thought whimsically.
“You have changed your dress, Natalie,” he said aloud. It was the first time he had ever called her by that name. Tears were in his eyes and his knees suddenly felt weak. He walked, a little unsteadily, across the room, and knelt beside her. Then he put his head in her lap and felt her broad strong hand in his hair and on his cheek.
For a long time he knelt thus breathing deeply. The thoughts of the morning came back. After all though he wasn’t thinking. The things going on within him were not so definite as thoughts. If his body were a house it was now the cleansing time for that house. A thousand little creatures were running through the house, going swiftly up and down stairs, opening windows, laughing, crying to each other. The rooms of his house echoed with new sounds, with joyous sounds. His body trembled. Now, after this had happened, a new life would begin for him. His body would be more alive. He would see things, smell things, taste things, as never before.
He looked up into Natalie’s face. How much did she know of all this? Well, she would no doubt be unable to say it in words but there was a way in which she did understand. She had run home to bathe and array herself. That was the reason he knew she knew. “How long have you been ready for this to happen?” he asked.
“For a year,” she said. She had grown a little pale. In the room it was beginning to grow dark.
She got up and putting him gently aside went to the door leading into the outer office and slipped a bolt that would prevent the door being opened.
Now she was standing with her back to the door and with her hand on the knob as he had been standing some time before. He got up and went to his own desk, near a window that faced the spur of the railroad track, and sat in his office chair. Leaning forward he buried his face in his two arms. The trembling, shaking thing continued to go on within him. Still the little joyous voices called. The cleansing within was going on and on.
Natalie spoke of the affairs of the office. “There were some letters, but I answered them and even dared to sign your name. I did not want you to be bothered to-day.”
She came to where he sat, leaning forward on the desk, trembling, and knelt beside him. After a time he put an arm about her shoulder.
The outside noises of the office went steadily on. In the outer office someone was running a typewriting machine. It was quite dark in the inner office now, but above the railroad track, some two or three hundred yards away, there was a lamp suspended in the air and when it was lighted a faint light came into the dark room and fell upon the two crouched figures. Presently a whistle blew and the workers from the factory went off up the spur of track. In the outer office the four people were getting ready to go home.
In a few minutes they came out, closing a door behind them, and walked also along the spur of track. Unlike the workers from the factory they knew the two people were still in the inner office and were curious. One of the three women came boldly up to the window and looked in.
She went back to the others and they stood for a few minutes, making a small intense group in the half darkness. Then they went slowly away.
When the group broke up, on the embankment above the river, the bookkeeper, a man of th
irty-five, and the oldest of the three women went to the right along the tracks while the other two went to the left. The bookkeeper and the woman he walked with did not speak of what had been seen. They walked for several hundred yards together and then parted, turning from the tracks into separate streets. When the bookkeeper was alone he began to worry about the future. “You’ll see. Within a few months I’ll have to be looking for a new place. When that sort of thing begins business goes to pieces.” He was worried about the fact that, as he had a wife and two children and did not get a very large salary, he had no money saved. “Damn that Natalie Swartz. I’ll bet she’s a whore, that’s what I’ll bet,” he muttered as he went along.
As for the two remaining women, one of them wanted to speak of the two people kneeling together in the dark office while the other did not. There were several ineffectual attempts at talk of the matter on the part of the older of the two and then they also parted. The youngest of the three, the one who had smiled at John Webster that morning when he had just come out of Natalie’s presence and when he had for the first time realized that the doors of her being were open to him, went along the street past the door of the bookseller’s shop and up a climbing street into the lighted business section of the town. She kept smiling as she went along and it was because of something she herself did not understand.
It was because she was herself one in whom the little voices talked and now they were going busily. Some phrase, picked up somewhere, from the Bible perhaps when she was a young girl and went to Sunday school, or from some book, kept saying itself over and over in her mind. What a charming combination of plain words in everyday use among people. She kept saying them in her mind and after n time, when she came to a place in the street where there was no one near, she said them aloud. “And as it turned out there was a marriage in our house,” were the words she said.
BOOK TWO
I
AS YOU WILL remember, the room in which John Webster slept was at a corner of the house, upstairs. From one of his two windows he looked out into the garden of a German who owned a store in his town but whose real interest in life was the garden. All through the year he worked at it and had John Webster been more alive, during the years he lived in the room, he might have got keen pleasure out of looking down upon his neighbor at work. In the early morning and late afternoon the German was always to be seen, smoking his pipe and digging, and a great variety of smells came floating up and in at the window of the room above, the sour acid smell of vegetables decaying, the rich heady smell of stable manure and then, all through the summer and late into the fall, the fragrant smell of roses and the marching procession of the flowers of the seasons.
John Webster had lived in his room for many years without much thought of what a room, within which a man lives and the walls of which enclose him like a garment when he sleeps, might be like. It was a square room with one window looking down into the German’s garden and another window that faced the blank walls of the German’s house. There were three doors — one leading into a hallway, one into the room where his wife slept, and a third that led into his daughter’s room.
One came into the place at night and closed the doors and prepared oneself for sleep. Behind the two walls were the two other people, also preparing for sleep, and behind the walls of the German’s house no doubt the same thing was going on. The German had two daughters and a son. They would be going to bed or were already in bed. There was, at that street end, something like a little village of people going to bed or already in bed.
For a good many years John Webster and his wife had not been very intimate. Long ago, when he had found himself married to her he had found also that she had a theory of life, picked up somewhere, perhaps from her parents, perhaps just absorbed out of the general atmosphere of fear in which so many modern women live and breathe, clutched at, as it were, and used as a weapon against too close contact with another. She thought, or believed she thought, that even in marriage a man and woman should not be lovers except for the purpose of bringing children into the world. The belief threw a sort of heavy air of responsibility about the matter of love-making. One does not go very freely in and out of the body of another when the going in and out involves such heavy responsibility. The doors of the body become rusty and creak. “Well, you see,” John Webster, in later years, sometimes explained, “one is quite seriously at the business of bringing another human into the world. Here is the Puritan in full flower. The night has come. From the gardens back of men’s houses comes the scent of flowers. Little hushed noises arise followed by silences. The flowers in their gardens have known an ecstasy unfettered by any awareness of responsibility, but man is something else. For ages he has been taking himself with extraordinary seriousness. The race, you see, must be perpetuated. It must be improved. There is in this affair, something of obligation to God and to one’s fellow men. Even when, after long preparation, talk, prayer, and the acquiring of a little wisdom, a kind of abandon is acquired, as one would acquire a new language, one has still achieved something quite foreign to the flowers, the trees, and the life and the carrying on of life among what is called the lower animals.”
As for the earnest God-fearing people, among whom John Webster and his wife then lived and as one of whom they had for so many years counted themselves, the chances are no such thing as ecstasy is ever acquired at all. There is instead, for the most part, a kind of cold sensuality tempered by an itching conscience. That life can perpetuate itself at all in such an atmosphere is one of the wonders of the world and proves, as nothing else could, the cold determination of nature not to be defeated.
And so for years the man had been in the habit of coming into his bedroom at night, taking off his clothes, and hanging them on a chair or in a closet and then crawling into bed to sleep heavily. Sleeping was a part of the necessary business of living and if, before he slept, he thought at all he thought of his washing machine business. There was a note due and payable at the bank on the next day and he had no money with which to pay it. He thought of that and of what he could and would say to the banker to induce him to renew the note. Then he thought about the trouble he was having with the foreman at his factory. The man wanted a larger wage and he was trying to think whether or not, if he did not give it to him, the man would quit and put him to the trouble of finding another foreman.
When he slept he did not sleep lightly and no fancies visited his dreams. What should have been a sweet time of renewal became a heavy time filled with distorted dreams.
And then, after the doors of Natalie’s body had been swung open for him, he became aware. After that evening when they had knelt together in the darkness it was hard for him to go home in the evening and sit at table with his wife and daughter. “Well, I can’t do it,” he told himself and ate his evening meal at a restaurant down town. He stayed about, walking in unfrequented streets, talking or in silence beside Natalie and then went with her to her own house, far out at the edge of town. People saw them walking thus together and, as there was no effort at concealment, there was a blaze of talk in the town.
When John Webster went home to his own house his wife and daughter had already gone to bed. “I am very busy at the shop. Do not expect to see much of me for a time,” he had said to his wife on the morning after he had told Natalie of his love. He did not intend to stay on in the washing machine business or to continue his married life. What he would do he did not quite know. He would live with Natalie for one thing. The time had come to do that.
He had spoken of it to Natalie on that first evening of their intimacy. On that evening, after the others were all gone they went to walk together. As they went through the streets people in the houses were sitting down to the evening meal, but the man and woman did not think of eating.’
John Webster’s tongue had become loosened and he did a great deal of talking to which Natalie listened in silence. Of the people of the town those he did not know all became romantic figures in his awaking mind. His fa
ncy wanted to play about them and he let it. They went along a residence street toward the open country beyond and he kept speaking of the people in the houses. “Now Natalie, my woman, you see all these houses here,” he said waving his arms to right and left, “well, what do you and I know about what goes on back of these walls?” He kept taking deep breaths as he went along, just as he had done back there at the office when he had run across the room to kneel at Natalie’s feet. The little voices within him were still talking. He had been something like this sometimes when he was a boy, but no one had ever understood the riotous play of his fancy and in time he had come to think that letting his fancy go was all foolishness. Then when he was a young man and had married there had come a sharp new flare-up of the fanciful life, but then it had been frozen in him by the fear and the vulgarity that is born of fears. Now it was playing madly. “Now you see, Natalie,” he cried, stopping on the sidewalk to take hold of her two hands and swinging them madly back and forth, “now you see, here’s how it is. These houses along here look like just ordinary houses, such as you and I live in, but they aren’t like that at all. The outer walls are, you see, just things stuck up, like scenery on a stage. A breath can blow the walls down or an outburst of flames can consume them all in an hour. I’ll bet you what — I’ll bet that what you think is that the people back of the walls of these houses are just ordinary people. They aren’t at all. You’re all wrong about that, Natalie, my love. The women in the rooms back of these walls are all fair sweet women and you should just go into the rooms. They are hung with beautiful pictures and tapestry and the women have jewels on their hands and in their hair.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 86