The two women sat in silence close together, looking at the white wall of the bedroom. I suppose we had both better remember that we heard mother moving about the house after father went away,” Jane whispered presently. It was pleasant to be able to make herself, thus, a part of Katherine’s plans to protect her father. Her eyes were shining now, and there was something of feverishness in her eagerness to understand everything clearly but she kept pressing her body close against the body of Katherine. In the palm of her hand she still held the stone her father had given her and now when her finger pressed down upon it even lightly there was a comforting throb of pain from the tender hurt place in her palm.
V
AND AS THE two women sat on the bed, John Webster walked through the silent deserted streets toward the railroad station with his new woman, Natalie.
“Well, the devil,” he thought as he plodded along, “this has been a night! If the rest of my life is as busy as these last ten hours have been I’ll be kept on the jump.”
Natalie was walking in silence and carrying a bag. The houses along the street were all dark. There was a strip of grass between the brick sidewalk and the roadway and John Webster stepped over and walked upon it. He liked the idea of his feet making no sound as he escaped out of the town. How pleasant it would be if he and Natalie were winged things and could fly away unobserved in the darkness.
Now Natalie was weeping. Well that was all right. She did not weep audibly. John Webster did not, as a matter of fact, know for sure that she was weeping. Still he did know. “At any rate,” he thought, “when she weeps she does the job with a certain dignity.” He was himself in a rather impersonal mood. I There’s no use thinking too much about what I’ve done. What’s done is done. I’ve begun a new life. I couldn’t turn back now if I chose.”
The houses along the street were dark and silent. The whole town was dark and silent. In the houses people were sleeping, dreaming all manner of absurd dreams, too.
Well he had expected he would run into some kind of a row at Natalie’s house but nothing of the sort had happened. The old mother had been quite wonderful. John Webster half regretted he had never known her personally. There was something about the terrible old woman that was like himself. He smiled as he walked along on the strip of grass. “It may well be that in the end I will turn out an old reprobate, a regular old heller,” he thought almost gaily. His mind played with the idea. He had surely made a good start. Here he was, a man well past the middle age, and it was past midnight, almost morning, and he was walking in deserted streets with a woman with whom he was going away to live what was called an illegitimate life. “I started late but I’m proving a merry little upsetter of things now that I’ve started,” he told himself.
It was really too bad that Natalie did not step off the brick sidewalk and walk on the grass. After all it was better, when one was setting out on new adventures, that one go swiftly and stealthily. There must be innumerable growling lions of respectability sleeping in the houses along the streets. “They’re pure sweet people, such as I was when I used to go home from the washing machine factory and sleep beside my wife in the days when we were newly married and had come back here to live in this town,” he thought sardonically. He imagined innumerable people, men and women, creeping into beds at night and sometimes talking as he and his wife had so often talked. They had always been covering something up, busily talking, covering something up. “We made a big smoke of talk about purity and sweetness of living, didn’t we though, eh?” he whispered to himself.
Well the people in the houses were asleep and he did not wish to awaken them. It was too bad Natalie was weeping. One couldn’t disturb her in her grief. That wouldn’t be fair. He wished he might speak to her and ask her to get off the sidewalk and walk silently on the grass along the roadway or at the edge of the lawns.
His mind turned back to the few moments at Natalie’s house. The devil! He had expected a row there and nothing of the sort had happened. When he got to the house, Natalie was waiting for him. She was sitting by a window in a dark room, downstairs in the Swartz cottage, and her bag was packed and sitting beside her. She came to the front door and opened it before he had time to knock.
And there she was all ready to set out. She came out carrying her bag and didn’t say anything. As a matter of fact she had not said anything to him yet. She had just come out of the house and had walked beside him to where they had to pass through a gate to reach the street and then her mother and sister had come out and had stood on a little porch to watch them go.
How bully the old mother had been. She had even laughed at them. “Well, you two have got the gall. You tramp off as cool as two cucumbers, now don’t you?” she had shouted. Then she had laughed again. “Do you know there’s going to be a hell of a row about this all over town in the morning?” she asked. Natalie hadn’t answered her. “Well, good luck to you, you husky whore, trotting off with your damned reprobate,” her mother had shouted, still laughing.
The two people had turned a corner and had passed out of sight of the Swartz house. No doubt there must be other people awake in other houses along the little street, and no doubt they had been listening and wondering. On two or three occasions some of the neighbors had wanted to have Natalie’s mother arrested because of her foul language but they had been dissuaded by others, out of consideration for the daughters.
Was Natalie weeping now because she was leaving the old mother or was it because of the schoolteacher sister whom John Webster had never known?
He felt very like laughing at himself. As a matter of fact he knew little of Natalie or what she might be thinking or feeling at such a time. Had he only taken up with her because she was a kind of instrument that would help him escape from his wife and from a life he had come to detest? Was he but using her? Had he at bottom any real feeling in regard to her, any understanding of her?
He wondered.
One made a mighty big fuss, fixed up a room with candles and a picture of the Virgin, paraded oneself naked before women, got oneself little glass candle sticks with bronze-colored Christs on the Cross on them.
One made a great fuss, pretended one was upsetting the whole world, in order to do something that a man of real courage would have gone at in a direct simple way. Another man might have done everything he had done with a laugh and a gesture.
What was all this business he was up to anyway?
He was going away, he was deliberately walking out of his native town, walking out of a town in which he had been a respectable citizen for years, all his life in fact. He was going out of the town with a woman, younger than himself, who had taken his fancy.
The whole thing was a matter that could be easily enough understood, by anyone, by any man one might happen to meet in the street. At any rate every one would be quite sure he understood. There would be eyebrows raised, shoulder shrugging. Men would stand together in little groups and talk and women would run from house to house talking, talking. O, the merry little shoulder shruggers! O, the merry little talkers! Where did a man come out in all this? What, in the end, did he think of himself?
There was Natalie, walking along, in the half darkness. She breathed. She was a woman with a body, with arms, legs. She had a trunk to her body and perched upon her neck was a head within which there was a brain. She thought thoughts. She had dreams.
Natalie was walking along a street in the darkness. Her footsteps were ringing out sharp and clear as she stepped along, on the sidewalk.
What did he know of Natalie?
It might well be that, when he and Natalie really knew each other, when they had together faced the problem of living together — Well, it might be that it wouldn’t work at all.
John Webster was walking along the street, in the darkness, on the strip of grass, that in Middle Western towns is between the sidewalk and the roadway. He stumbled and came near falling. What was the matter with him? Was he growing tired again?
Did doubts come because
he was growing tired? It might well be that everything that had happened to him, during the night, had happened because he was caught up and carried along by a kind of temporary insanity.
What would happen when the insanity had passed, when he became again a sane, a well, a normal man?
Hito, tito, what was the use thinking of turning back when it was too late to turn back? If, in the end, he and Natalie found they could not live together there was still life. Life was life. One might still find a way to live a life.
John Webster began to grow courageous again. He looked toward the dark houses along the street and smiled. He became like a child, playing a game with his fellows of the Wisconsin town. In the game he was some kind of public character, who because of some brave deed was receiving the applause of the people who lived in the houses. He imagined himself as riding through the street in a carriage. The people were sticking their heads out of the windows of the houses and shouting, and he was turning his head from side to side, bowing and smiling.
As Natalie was not looking he enjoyed himself for a moment, playing the game. As he walked along he kept turning his head from side to side and bowing. There was a rather absurd smile on his lips.
The old Harry!
“Chinaberries grow on a chinaberry tree!”
All the same it would be better if Natalie did not make such a racket with her feet walking on stone and brick sidewalks.
One might be found out. It might be that, quite suddenly, without any warning, all the people, now sleeping so peacefully in the dark houses along the street, would sit up in their beds and begin to laugh. That would be terrible and it would be just the sort of thing John Webster would himself do, were he a respectable man in bed with a lawfully wedded wife, and saw some other man doing some such fool thing as he was now doing.
It was annoying. The night was warm but John Webster felt somewhat cold. He shivered. It was no doubt due to the fact that he was tired. Perhaps thinking of the respectable married people lying in beds in the houses, between which he and Natalie were passing, had made him shiver. One could be very cold, being a respectable married man and lying in bed with a respectable wife. A thought that had been coming and going in his mind for two weeks now came again:— “Perhaps I am insane and have infected Natalie, and for that matter my daughter Jane too, with my insanity.”
There was no use crying over spilled milk. “What’s the use thinking about the matter now?”
“Diddle de di do!”
“Chinaberries grow on a chinaberry tree!”
He and Natalie had come out of the section of town where working people lived and were now passing before houses in which lived merchants, small manufacturers, such men as John Webster had himself been, lawyers, doctors, and such fellows too. Now they were passing the house in which his own banker lived. “The stingy cuss. He has plenty of money. Why doesn’t he build himself a larger and finer house?”
To the east, dimly seen through trees and above tree tops, there was a light place coming into the sky.
Now they had come to a place where there were several vacant lots. Some one had given the lots to the town and there was a movement on foot to raise money with which to build a public library. A man had come to John Webster to ask him to contribute to a fund for the purpose. That was but a few days ago.
He had enjoyed the situation immensely. Now he felt like giggling over the remembrance of it.
He had been seated, and as he thought, looking very dignified, at his desk in the factory office when the man came in and told him of the plan. A desire to make an ironic gesture had taken possession of him.
“I am making rather elaborate plans about that fund and my contributing to it but do not want to say what I am planning to do at this particular moment,” he had announced. What a falsehood! The matter had not interested him in the least. He had simply enjoyed the man’s surprise at his unexpected interest and was having a good time making a swaggering gesture.
The man who came to see him had once served with him on a committee of the Chamber of Commerce, a committee appointed to make an effort to bring new industries into the town.
“I didn’t know you were specially interested in literary matters,” the man had said.
A troop of derisive thoughts had popped into John Webster’s head.
“O, you would be surprised,” he had assured the man. At the moment he had felt as he fancied a terrier might feel as it worried a rat. “I think American literary men have done wonders to uplift the people,” he had said, very solemnly. “Why, do you realize that it is our writers who have kept us constantly reminded of the moral code and of the virtues? Such men as you and I, who own factories and who are in a way responsible for the happiness and welfare of the people of the community, cannot be too grateful to our American literary men. I’ll tell you what, they are really such strong, red-blooded fellows, always standing up for the right.”
John Webster laughed at the thought of his talk with the man from the Chamber of Commerce and at the remembrance of the confused look in the man’s eyes as he went away.
Now, as he and Natalie walked along, the intersecting streets led away to the east. There was no doubt a new day was coming. He stopped to light a match and look at his watch. They would be just in comfortable time for the train. Soon now they would be coming into the business section of town where they would both have to make a clattering noise as they walked on stone pavements, but then it would not matter. People did not sleep in the business sections of towns.
He wished it were possible for him to speak to Natalie, to ask her to walk on the grass and not to awaken the people sleeping in the houses. “Well, I’m going to do it,” he thought. It was odd how much courage it took now just to speak to her. Neither of them had spoken since they had set out together on this adventure. He stopped and stood for a moment and Natalie, realizing that he was no longer walking beside her, also stopped.
“What is it? What’s the matter, John?” she asked. It was the first time she had addressed him by that name. It made everything easier, her having done that.
Still his throat was a little tight. It couldn’t be that he also wanted to weep. What nonsense.
There was no need accepting defeat with Natalie until defeat came. There were two sides to this matter of his passing judgment on what he had done. To be sure there was a chance, a possibility, that he had made all this row, upset all his past life, made a mess of things for his wife and daughter, and for Natalie too, to no purpose, merely because he had wanted to escape the boredom of his past existence.
He stood on the strip of grass at the edge of a lawn before a silent respectable house, some one’s home. He was trying to see Natalie clearly, trying to see himself clearly. What kind of a figure was he cutting? The light was not very clear. Natalie was but a dark mass before him. His own thoughts were but a dark mass before him.
“Am I just a lustful man wanting a new woman?” he asked himself.
Suppose that were true. What did it mean?
“I am myself. I am trying to be myself,” he told himself stoutly.
One should try to live outside oneself too, to live in others. Had he tried to live in Natalie? He had gone within Natalie. Had he gone within her because there was something within her ‘he had wanted and needed, something he loved?
There was something within Natalie that had set fire to something within himself. It was that ability in her to set him afire he had wanted, still wanted.
She had done that for him, was still doing it for him. When he could no longer respond to her he could perhaps find other loves. She could do that too.
He laughed softly. There was a kind of gladness in him now. He had made of himself, and of Natalie too, what is called disreputable characters. Back into his fancy came a troop of figures, all in their own ways disreputable characters. There was the white-haired old man he had once seen walking with a certain air of being proud and glad of the road, an actress he had seen coming out at the stag
e entrance of a theatre, a sailor who had thrown his bag aboard a ship and had walked off along a street with a certain air of being proud and glad of the life within himself.
There were such fellows in the world.
The fanciful picture in John Webster’s mind changed. There was a certain man going into a room. He had closed the door. A row of candles stood on a mantle above a fireplace. The fellow was playing some kind of game with himself. Well, every one played some kind of game with himself. The fellow in the picture of his fancy had taken a silver crown out of a box. He had put it on his head. “I crown myself with the crown of life,” he said.
Was it a silly performance? If it was, what did that matter?
He took a step toward Natalie and then stopped again. “Come woman, walk on the grass. Don’t make such a row as we go along,” he said aloud.
Now he was walking with a certain swagger toward Natalie who stood in silence at the edge of the sidewalk waiting for him. He went and stood before her and looked into her face. It was true she had been weeping. Even in the faint light there were graces of tears to be seen on her cheeks. “I only had a silly notion. I didn’t want to disturb anyone as we went away,” he said, laughing softly again. He put his hand on her arm and drew her toward him and they went on again, both now stepping softly and gingerly on the grass between the sidewalk and the roadway.
Dark Laughter
This novel was first published in 1925 and deals with the new sexual freedom of the 1920’s, a theme also explored in Many Marriages and later works. The influence of James Joyce’s Ulysses, which Anderson had read before writing Dark Laughter, is detectable in its modernist style. It was to be Anderson’s only bestseller during his lifetime, but has been out of print since the early 1960’s and is regarded less highly by modern critics, including Kim Townsend, the author of a 1985 biography of Anderson.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 100