“The devil! Such fellows perhaps had no such feelings.” Quite unconscious of what he was doing he took out a cigarette and lit it. He felt strangely impersonal; like one watching a rehearsal for some play in which one is not particularly interested. “It’s a time of death all right,” he thought. “The woman is dying. I can’t say whether or not her body is dying but there’s something within her that has already died.” He wondered if he had killed her, but had no sense of guilt in the matter.
He went to stand at the foot of the bed and, putting his hand on the railing, leaned over to look at her.
It was a time of darkness. A shiver ran through his body and dark thoughts like flocks of blackbirds flew across the field of his fancy.
“The devil! There’s a hell too! There’s such a thing as death, as well as such a thing as life,” he told himself. Here was however an amazing and quite interesting fact too. It had taken a long time and much grim determination for the woman on the floor before him to find her way along the road to the throne-room of death. “Perhaps no one, while there is life within him to lift the lid, ever becomes quite submerged in the swamp of decaying flesh,” he thought.
Thoughts stirred within John Webster that had not come to his mind in years. As a young man in college he must really have been more alive than he knew at the time. Things he had heard discussed by other young men, fellows who had a taste for literature, and that he had read in the books, the reading of which were a part of his duties, had all through the last few weeks been coming back to his mind. “One might almost think I had followed such things all my life,” he thought.
The poet Dante, Milton, with his “Paradise Lost,” the Hebrew poets of the older Testaments, all such fellows must at some time in their lives have seen what he was seeing at just this moment.
There was a woman on the floor before him and her eyes were looking directly into his. All evening there had been something struggling within her, something that wanted to come out to him and to her daughter. Now the struggle was at an end. There was surrender. He kept looking down at her with a strange fixed stare in his own eyes.
“It’s too late. It didn’t work,” he said slowly. He did not say the words aloud, but whispered them.
A new thought came. All through his life with this woman there had been a notion to which he had clung. It had been a kind of beacon that now he felt had from the first led him into a false trail. He had in some way picked up the notion from others about him. It was peculiarly an American notion, always being indirectly repeated in newspapers, magazines and books. Back of it was an insane, wishy-washy philosophy of life. “All things work together for good. God’s in his Heaven, all’s right with the world. All men are created free and equal.”
“What an ungodly lot of noisy meaningless sayings drummed into the ears of men and women trying to live their lives!”
A great disgust swept over him. “Well, there’s no use my staying here any longer. My life in this house has come to an end,” he thought.
He walked to the door and when he had opened it turned again. “Good night and good bye,” he said as cheerfully as though he were just leaving the house in the morning for a day at the factory.
And then the sound of the door closing made a sharp jarring break in the silence of the house.
BOOK FOUR
I
THE SPIRIT OF death was no doubt lurking in the Webster house. Jane Webster felt its presence. She had suddenly been made aware of the possibility of feeling, within herself, many unspoken, unannounced things. When her father had put his hand on her arm and had pushed her back into the darkness behind the closed door of her own room, she had gone directly to her bed and had thrown herself down on top of the bed covers. Now she lay clutching the little stone he had given her. How glad she was to have that something to clutch. Her fingers pressed against it so that it had already become imbedded in the flesh of her palm. If her life had been, until this evening, a quiet river, running down through fields toward the sea of life, it would be that no more. Now the river had come into a dark stony country. It ran now along rocky passageways, between high dark cliffs. What things might not now happen to her on the morrow, on the day after to-morrow. Her father was going away with a strange woman. There would be a scandal in the town. All her young women and men friends would look at her with a question in their eyes. Perhaps they would pity her. Her spirit rose up and the thought made her squirm with anger. It was odd, but it was nevertheless true, that she had no particular feeling of sympathy for her mother. Her father had managed to bring himself close to her. In a queer way she understood what he was going to do, why he was doing it. She kept seeing the naked figure of the man striding up and down before her. There had always, since she could remember, been in her a kind of curiosity regarding men’s bodies.
Once or twice, with young girls she knew well, there had been talk of the matter, guarded, half frightened talk. “A man was so and so. It was quite dreadful what happened when one grew up and got married.” One of the girls had seen something. There was a man lived near her, on the same street, and he wasn’t always careful about pulling the shade to his bedroom window. One summer afternoon the girl was in her room, lying on her bed, and the man came into his room and took off all his clothes. He was up to some foolishness. There was a looking glass and he pranced up and down before it. He must have been pretending he was fighting the man he saw reflected in the glass as he kept advancing and receding and making the funniest movements with his body and arms. He lunged and scowled and struck out with his fists and then jumped back, as though the man in the glass had struck at him.
The girl on the bed had seen everything, all the man’s body. At first she thought she would run out of the room and then she made up her mind to stay. Well, she didn’t want her mother to know what she had seen so she got up softly and crept along the floor to lock the door, so that her mother or a servant could not come suddenly in. What the girl had thought was that one had to find out things sometime and might as well take the chance that offered. It was dreadful and she had been unable to sleep for two or three nights after it happened but just the same she was glad she had looked. One couldn’t always be a ninny and not know anything.
As Jane Webster lay on the bed with her fingers pressed down upon the stone her father had given her, the girl, talking of the naked man she had seen in the next house, seemed very young and unsophisticated. She felt a kind of contempt for her. As for herself, she had been in the actual presence of a naked man and the man had been seated beside her and had put his arm about her. His hands had actually touched the flesh of her own body. In the future, whatever happened, men would not be to her as they had been, and as they were to the young women who had been her friends. Now she would know about men as she hadn’t before and would not be afraid of them. Of that she was glad. Her father’s going away with a strange woman and the scandal that would no doubt spring up in the town might ruin the quiet security in which she had always lived but there had been much gained. Now the river that was her life was running through dark passageways. It would perhaps be plunged down over sharp jutting rocks.
It is, to be sure, false to credit Jane Webster with such definite thoughts although later, when she remembered that evening her own mind would begin to build a tower of romance about it. She lay on her bed clutching the little stone and was frightened but at the same time strangely glad.
Something had been torn open, perhaps the door out into life for her. There was a feeling of death in the Webster house but in her was a new sense of life and a glad new feeling of being unafraid of life.
Her father went down the stairway and into the dark hallway below, carrying his bag and thinking of death too.
Now there was no end to the elaboration of thinking that went on within John Webster. In the future he would be a weaver, weaving designs out of threads of thought. Death was a thing, like life, that came to people suddenly, that flashed in upon them. There were always the two figure
s walking through towns and cities, going in and out of houses, in and out of factories and stores, visiting lonely farmhouses at night, walking in the light of day along gay city streets, getting on and off trains, always on the move, appearing before people at the most unexpected moments. It might be somewhat difficult for a man to learn to go in and out of other people but for the two gods, Life and Death, there was no difficulty. There was a deep well within every man and woman and when Life came in at the door of the house, that was the body, it reached down and tore the heavy iron lid off the well. Dark hidden things, festering in the well, came out and found expression for themselves, and the miracle was that, expressed, they became often very beautiful. There was a cleansing, a strange sort of renewal within the house of the man or woman when the god Life had come in.
As for Death and his entrance, that was another matter. Death had many strange tricks to play on people too. Sometimes he let their bodies live for a long time while he satisfied himself with merely clamping the lid down on the well within. It was as though he had said, “Well, there is no great hurry about physical death. That will come as an inevitable thing in its time. There is a much more ironic and subtle game to be played against my opponent Life. I will fill the cities with the damp fetid smell of death while the very dead think they are still alive. As for myself, I am the crafty one. I am like a great and subtle king, every one serves, while he talks only of freedom and leads his subjects to think it is he who serves, instead of themselves. I am like a great general, having always at his command, ready to spring to arms at the least sign from himself, a vast army of men.”
John Webster went along the dark hallway below to the door leading into the street and had put his hand on the knob of the outer door when, instead of passing directly out, he stopped and reflected a moment. He was somewhat vain of the thoughts he had been having. “Perhaps I am a poet. Perhaps it’s only the poet who manages to keep the lid off the well within and to keep alive up to the last minute before his body has become worn out and he must get out of it,” he thought.
His vain mood passed and he turned and looked with a curious awareness along the hallway. At the moment he was much like an animal, moving in a dark wood, who, without hearing anything, is nevertheless aware there is life stirring, perhaps waiting for him, near at hand. Could that be the figure of a woman he saw, sitting within a few feet of him? There was a small old-fashioned hat-rack in the hallway near the front door and the lower part of it made a kind of seat on which one might sit.
One might fancy there was a woman sitting quietly there. She also had a bag packed and it was sitting on the floor beside her.
The old Harry! John Webster was a little startled. Was his fancy getting a little out of hand? There could be no doubt that there was a woman sitting there, within a few feet of where he stood, with the knob of the door in his hand.
He was tempted to put out his hand and see if he could touch the woman’s face. He had been thinking of the two gods, Life and Death. No doubt an illusion had been created in his mind. There was this deep sense of a presence, sitting silently there, on the lower part of the hat-rack. He stepped a little nearer and a shiver ran through his body. There was a dark mass, making crudely the outlines of a human body, and as he stood looking it seemed to him that a face began to be more and more sharply outlined. The face, like the faces of two other women that had, at important and unexpected moments in his life, floated up before him, the face of a young naked girl on a bed in the long ago, the face of Natalie Swartz, seen in the darkness of a field at night, as he lay beside her — these faces had seemed to float up to him as though coming toward him out of the deep waters of a sea.
He had, no doubt, let himself become a little overwrought. One did not step lightly along the road he had been travelling. He had dared set out upon the road of lives and had tried to take others with him. No doubt he had been more worked up and excited than he had realized.
He put out his hand softly and touched the face that now appeared to come floating toward him out of darkness. Then he sprang back, striking his head against the opposite wall of the hallway. His fingers had encountered warm flesh. There was a terrific sensation of something whirling within his brain. Had he gone quite insane? A comforting thought came, flashing across the confusion of his mind.
“Katherine,” he said in a loud voice. It was a kind of call out of himself.
“Yes,” a woman’s voice answered quietly, “I wasn’t going to let you go away without saying good bye.”
The woman, who had for so many years been a servant in his house, explained her presence there in the darkness. “I’m sorry I startled you,” she said. “I was just going to speak. You are going away and so am I. I’ve got everything packed and ready. I went up the stairs to-night and heard you say you were leaving so I came down and did my own packing. It didn’t take me long. I didn’t have many things to pack.”
John Webster opened the front door and asked her to come outside with him and for a few minutes they stood talking together on the steps that led down from the front porch.
Outside the house he felt better. There was a kind of weakness, following the fright inside, and for a moment he sat on the steps while she stood waiting. Then the weakness passed and he arose. The night was clear and dark. He breathed deeply and there was a great relief in the thought that he would never again go through the door out of which he had just come. He felt very young and strong. Soon now, there would be a streak of light showing in the eastern sky. When he had got Natalie and they had climbed aboard a train they would sit in the day coach on the side that looked toward the East. It would be sweet to see the new day come. His fancy ran ahead of his body and he saw himself and the woman sitting together in the train. They would come into the lighted day coach from the darkness outside, just before dawn came. In the day coach people would have been asleep, folded up in the seats, looking uncomfortable and tired. The air would be heavy with the stale heaviness of breathing people confined in a close place. There would be the heavy acrid smell of clothes, that had for a long time absorbed the acids thrown off by bodies. He and Natalie would take the train as far as Chicago and get off there. Perhaps they would get on another train at once. It might be that they would stay in Chicago for a day or two. There would be plans to make, long hours of talk perhaps. There was a new life to begin now. He himself had to think what he wanted to do with his days. It was odd. He and Natalie had made no plans beyond getting on a train. Now for the first time his fancy tried to creep out beyond that moment, to penetrate into the future.
It was fine that the night had turned out clear. One would hate to set out, plodding off to the railroad station in the rain. How bright the stars were in the early morning hours. Now Katherine was talking. It would be well to listen to what she had to say.
She was telling him, with a kind of brutal frankness, that she did not like Mrs. Webster, had never liked her, and that she had only stayed in the house all these years as a servant because of himself.
He turned to look at her and her eyes were looking directly into his. They were standing very close together, almost as close as lovers might have stood, and, in the uncertain light, her eyes were strangely like Natalie’s. In the darkness they appeared to glow as Natalie’s eyes had seemed to glow on that night when he had lain with her in the field.
Was it only a chance that this new sense he had, of being able to refresh and rebuild himself by loving others, by going in and out at the open doors of the houses of others, had come to him through Natalie instead of through this woman Katherine? “Huh, it’s marriage, every one is seeking marriage, that’s what they are up to, seeking marriages,” he told himself. There was something quiet and fine and strong in Katherine as in Natalie. Perhaps had he, at some moment, during all his dead unconscious years of living in the same house with her, but happened to have been alone with Katherine in a room, and had the doors to his own being opened at that moment, something might have transpired between hims
elf and this woman that would have started within just such another revolution as the one through which he had been passing.
“That was possible too,” he decided. “People would gain a lot if they could but learn to keep that thought in mind,” he thought. His fancy played with the notion for a moment. One would walk through towns and cities, in and out of houses, into and out of the presence of people with a new feeling of respect if the notion should once get fixed in people’s minds that, at any moment, anywhere, one was likely to come upon the one who carried before him as on a golden tray, the gift of life and the consciousness of life for his beloved. Well, there was a picture to be borne in mind, a picture of a land and a people, cleanly arrayed, a people bearing gifts, a people who had learned the secret and the beauty of bestowing unasking love. Such a people would inevitably keep their own persons clean and well arrayed. They would be colorful people with a certain decorative sense, a certain awareness of themselves in relation to the houses in which they lived and the streets in which they walked. One could not love until one had cleansed and a little beautified one’s own body and mind, until one had opened the doors of one’s being and let in sun and air, until one had freed one’s own mind and fancy.
John Webster fought with himself now, striving to push his own thoughts and fancies into the background. There he was standing before the house in which he had lived all these years so near the woman Katherine and she was now talking to him of her own affairs. It was time now to give heed to her.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 97