She was explaining how that, for a week or more, she had been aware of the fact that there was something wrong in the Webster household. One did not need to have been very sharp to have realized that. It was in the very air one breathed. The air of the house was heavy with it. As for herself, well she had thought John Webster had fallen in love with some woman other than Mrs. Webster. She had once been in love herself and the man she had loved had been killed. She knew about love.
On that night, hearing voices in the room above, she had crept up the stairs. She had not felt it was eavesdropping as she was directly concerned. Long ago when she was in trouble she had heard voices upstairs and she knew that in her hour of trouble John Webster had stood by her.
After that time, long ago, she had made up her mind that as long as he stayed in the house she would stay. One had to work and might as well work as a servant, but she had never felt close to Mrs. Webster. When one was a servant one sometimes had difficulty enough keeping up one’s self-respect and the only way it could be done was by working for some one who also had self-respect. That was something few people seemed to understand. They thought people worked for money. As a matter of fact no one really worked for money. People only thought they did, maybe. To do so was to be a slave and she, Katherine, was no slave. She had money saved and besides she had a brother who owned a farm in Minnesota, who had several times written asking her to come and live with him. She intended to go there now but would not live in her brother’s house. He was married and she did not intend to push herself into his household. As a matter of fact she would probably take the money she had saved and buy a small farm of her own.
“Anyway you’re going away from this house tonight. I heard you say you were going with another woman and I thought I would go too,” she said.
She became silent and stood looking at John Webster who was also looking at her, who was at the moment absorbed in contemplation of her. In the uncertain light her face had become the face of a young girl. There was something about her face, at the moment, that suggested to his mind his daughter’s face as she had looked at him in the dim light of the candles in the room upstairs. It was like that and at the same time it was like Natalie’s face, as Natalie’s face had been that afternoon in the office when he and she had first come close to each other, and as it had looked that other night in the darkness of the field.
One might so easily become confused. “It’s all right about your going away, Katherine,” he said aloud. “You know about that, what I mean is that you know what you want to do.”
He stood in silence a moment, thinking. “It’s like this, Katherine,” he began again. “There’s my daughter Jane upstairs. I’m going away but I can’t take her with me any more than you can go live in your brother’s house out there in Minnesota. I’m thinking that for the next two or three days or maybe for several weeks Jane is going to have a pretty hard time.
“There’s no telling what will happen here.” He made a gesture toward the house. “I’m going away but I suppose I’ve been counting on your being here until Jane gets on her own feet a little. You know what I mean, until she gets so she can stand alone.”
On the bed upstairs Jane Webster’s body was becoming more and more rigid and tense as she lay listening to the undercurrent of noises in the house. There was a sound of movement in the next room. A door handle struck against a wall. The boards of the floor creaked. Her mother had been seated on the floor at the foot of the bed. Now she was getting up. She had put her hand on the railing of the bed to pull herself up. The bed moved a little. It moved on its rollers. There was a low rumbling sound. Would her mother come into her room? Jane Webster wanted no more words, no further explanations of what had happened to spoil the marriage between her mother and father. She wanted to be let alone now, to think her own thoughts. The thought that her mother might come into her bedroom frightened her. It was odd, she had now a sharp and distinct sense of the presence of death, in some way connected with her mother’s figure. To have the older woman come into her room now, even though no words were said, would be like having a ghost come. The thought of it happening made little creeping sensations run over the surface of her body. It was as though little soft hairy-legged creatures were running up and down her legs, up and down her back. She moved uneasily in the bed.
Her father had gone downstairs and along the hallway below but she had not heard the front door open and close. She lay listening for the sound of that, expecting it.
The house was silent, too silent. Somewhere, a long way off, there was the loud ticking of a clock. During the year before, when she had graduated from the town high school, her father had given her a small watch. It lay now on a dressing table at the further side of the room. Its rapid ticking was like some small creature, clad in steel shoes and running rapidly and with the shoes clicking together. The little creature was running swiftly along an endless hallway, running with a kind of mad sharp determination but never getting either nearer or further away. Into her mind there came a picture of a small imp-like boy with a wide grinning mouth and with pointed ears that stood straight up from his head like the ears of a fox terrier. Perhaps the notion had got into her head from some picture of Puck remembered from a childhood story book. She was conscious that the sound she heard came from the watch on the dresser but the picture in her mind stayed. The imp-like figure stood with his head and body motionless while his legs worked furiously. He grinned at her and his little steel-clad feet clicked together.
She tried consciously to relax her body. There were hours to be spent, lying thus on the bed, before another day came and she would have to face the problems of the new day. There would be things to face. Her father would have gone off with a strange woman. When she walked in the streets people would be looking at her. “That’s his daughter,” they would be saying. Perhaps, as long as she stayed in town, she could never again walk along streets unaware that she was being looked at, but on the other hand, perhaps she would not stay. There was a kind of exhilaration to be got from thinking of going off to strange places, perhaps to some large city, where she would always be walking about among strangers.
She was getting herself into a state and would have to take herself in hand. There were times, although she was young she had already known such times, when the mind and body seemed to have nothing at all to do with each other. One did things with the body, put it into bed, made it get up and walk about, made the eyes attempt to read pages in some book, did many kinds of things with the body, while the mind went on about its own affairs unheeding. It thought of things, fancied all manner of absurd things, went its own way.
At such times in the past Jane’s mind had a trick of getting her body into the most absurd and startling situations, while it ran wild and free — did as it pleased. She was in bed in her room with the door closed but her fancy took her body out into the street. She went along conscious that all the men she passed were smiling and she kept wondering what was the matter. She hurried home and went to her room only to find that her dress was all unbuttoned at the back. It was terrible. Again she was walking in the street and the white drawers she wore under her skirts had become in some unaccountable way unfastened. There was a young man coming toward her. He was a new young man who had just come to town and had taken a job in a store. Well, he was going to speak to her. He raised his hat and at just that moment the drawers began to creep down along her legs. Jane Webster lay in her bed and smiled at the memory of the fears that had visited her when, in the past, her mind had got into the trick of running wildly, uncontrolled. In the future things would be somewhat different. She had gone through something and had perhaps much more to go through. The things that had seemed so terrible would perhaps only be amusing now. She felt infinitely older, more sophisticated, than she had been but a few hours earlier.
How strange it was that the house remained so silent. From somewhere, off in the town, there came the sound of horses’ hoofs on a hard road and the rattle of a wago
n. A voice shouted, faintly. Some man of the town, a teamster, was setting out early. Perhaps he was going to another town to get a load of goods and haul them back. He must have a long way to go that he started out so early.
She moved her shoulders uneasily. What was the matter with her? Was she afraid in her own bedroom, in her own bed? Of what was she afraid?
She sat suddenly and rigidly upright in bed and then, after a moment, let her body fall backward again. There had come a sharp cry out of the throat of her father, a cry that had gone ringing through the house. “Katherine,” her father’s voice cried. There was just that one word. It was the name of the Webster’s one servant. What did her father want of Katherine? What had happened? Had something terrible happened in the house? Had something happened to her mother?
There was something lurking at the back of Jane Webster’s mind, a thought that did not want to be expressed. It was as yet unable to make its way up out of the hidden parts of herself and into her mind.
The thing she feared, expected, could not have happened yet. Her mother was in the next room. She had just heard her moving about in there.
There was a new sound in the house. Her mother was moving heavily along the hallway just outside the bedroom door. The Websters had turned a small bedroom, at the end of the hall, into a bathroom and her mother was going in there. Her feet fell slowly, flatly, heavily and slowly, on the floor of the hallway. After all her feet only made that strange sound because she had put on her soft bedroom slippers.
Downstairs now, if one listened, one could hear voices saying words softly. That must be her father talking to the servant Katherine. What could he want of her? The front door opened and then closed again. She was afraid. Her body shook with fear. It was terrible of her father to go away and leave her alone in the house. Could he have taken the servant Katherine with him? The thought was unbearable. Why was she so afraid of the thought of being left alone in the house with her mother?
There was a thought lurking within her, deep within her, that did not want to get itself expressed. Something was about to happen to her mother, now, within a few minutes. One did not want to think about it. In the bathroom there were certain bottles, sitting on shelves in a little box-like cabinet. They were labeled poison. One hardly knew why they were kept there but Jane had seen them many times. She kept her toothbrush in a glass tumbler in the cabinet. One supposed the bottles contained medicines of the sort that was only to be taken externally. One did not think much of such matters, was not in the habit of thinking of them.
Now Jane was sitting upright in bed again. She was alone in the house with her mother. Even the servant Katherine had gone away. The house felt altogether cold and lonely, deserted. In the future she would always feel out of place in this house in which she had always lived and she would feel also, in some odd way, separated from her mother. To be alone with her mother would now, perhaps, always make her feel a little lonely.
Could it be that the servant Katherine was the woman with whom her father had planned to go away? That could not be. Katherine was a large heavy woman with big breasts and dark hair that was turning gray. One could not think of her as going away with a man. One thought of her as moving silently about a house and doing housework. Her father would be going away with a younger woman, with a woman not much older than herself.
One should get hold of oneself. When one got excited, let oneself go, the fancy sometimes played one strange and terrible tricks. Her mother was in the bathroom, standing by the little box-like cabinet. Her face was pale, of a pasty paleness. She had to keep one hand against the wall to keep from falling. Her eyes were gray and heavy. There was no life in them. A heavy cloud-like film had passed over her eyes. It was like a heavy gray cloud over the blue of the sky. Her body rocked back and forth too. At any moment it might fall. But a short time ago, and even amid the strangeness of the adventure in her father’s bedroom, things had seemed suddenly quite clear. She had understood things she had never understood before. Now nothing could be understood. There was a whirlpool of confused thoughts and actions into which one had been plunged.
Now her own body had begun to rock back and forth on the bed. The fingers of her right hand were clutched over the tiny stone her father had given her but she was, at the moment, unaware of the small round hard thing lying in her palm. Her fists kept beating her own body, her own legs and knees. There was something she wanted to do, something it was now right and proper she should do. It was the time now for her to scream, to jump off the bed, to run along the hallway to the bathroom and tear the bathroom door open. Her mother was about to do something one did not passively stand by and see done. She should be crying out at the top of her voice, crying for help. There was a word that should be on her lips now. “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” she should now be screaming. Her lips should now be making the word ring through the house. She should be making the house and the street on which the house stood echo and reëcho with the word.
And she could say nothing. Her lips were sealed. Her body could not move from the bed. It could only rock back and forth on the bed.
Her fancy kept on painting pictures, swift, vivid, terrible pictures.
There was, in the bathroom, in the cabinet, a bottle containing a brown liquid and her mother had put up her hand and had got hold of it. Now she had put it to her lips. She had swallowed all the contents of the bottle.
The liquid in the bottle was brown, of a reddish brownness. Before she had swallowed it her mother had lighted a gas light. It was directly above her head, as she stood facing the cabinet, and the light from it fell down over her face. There were little puffy red bags of flesh under the eyes and they looked strange and almost revolting against the pasty whiteness of the skin. The mouth was open and the lips were gray too. There was a reddish brown stain running down from one corner of the mouth, down over the chin. Some drops of the liquid had fallen on her mother’s white nightgown. Convulsive spasms, as of pain, passed over the pasty white face. The eyes remained closed. There was a trembling quivering movement of the shoulders.
Jane’s body continued to rock back and forth. The flesh of her body quivered too. Her body was rigid. Her fists were closed, tight, tight. Her fists continued to beat down upon her legs. Her mother had managed to get out through the bathroom door and across the little hallway to her own room. She had thrown herself face-downward on her bed in the darkness. Had she thrown herself down or had she fallen? Was she dying now, would she die presently or was she already dead? In the next room, in the room where Jane had seen her father walking naked before her mother and herself, the candles were still burning, under the picture of the Virgin. There was no doubt the older woman would die. In fancy Jane had seen the label on the bottle that contained the brown liquid. It was marked “Poison.” There was the picture of the skull and cross-bones druggists put on such bottles.
And now Jane’s body had quit rocking. Perhaps her mother was dead. Now one tried to begin to think of other things. She became vaguely, but at the same time almost deliciously, conscious of some new element come into the air of the bedroom.
There was a pain in the palm of her right hand. Something hurt her and the sense of hurting was refreshing. It brought life back. There was consciousness of self in the realization of bodily pain. One’s mind could start back along the road from some dark far place to which it had run crazily off. One’s mind could take hold of the thought of the little hurt place in the soft flesh of the palm of the hand. There was something there, something hard and sharp that cut into the flesh of the palm when one’s finger pressed down rigid and tense upon it.
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 t
hem 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.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 98