BOOK ONE

MANY MARRIAGES

I

There was a man named Webster lived in a town of twenty-five thousand people in the state of Wisconsin. He had a wife named Mary and a daughter named Jane and he was himself a fairly prosperous manufacturer of washing machines. When the thing happened of which I am about to write he was thirty-seven or eight years old and his one child, the daughter, was seventeen. Of the details of his life up to the time a certain revolution happened within him it will be unnecessary to speak. He was however a rather quiet man inclined to have dreams which he tried to crush out of himself in order that he function as a washing machine manufacturer; and no doubt, at odd moments, when he was on a train going some place or perhaps on Sunday afternoons in the summer when he went alone to the deserted office of the factory and sat for several hours looking out through a window and along a railroad track, he gave way to dreams.

However for many years he went quietly along his way doing his work like any other small manufacturer. Now and then he had a prosperous year when money seemed plentiful and then he had bad years when the local banks threatened to close him up, but as a manufacturer he did manage to survive.

And so there was this Webster, drawing near to his fortieth year, and his daughter had just graduated from the town high school. It was early fall and he seemed to be going along and living his life about as usual and then this thing happened to him.

Down within his body something began to affect him like an illness. It is a little hard to describe the feeling he had. It was as though something were being born. Had he been a woman he might have suspected he had suddenly become pregnant. There he sat in his office at work or walked about in the streets of his town and he had the most amazing feeling of not being himself, but something new and quite strange. Sometimes the feeling of not being himself became so strong in him that he stopped suddenly in the streets and stood looking and listening. He was, let us say, standing before a small store on a side street. Beyond there was a vacant lot in which a tree grew and under the tree stood an old work horse.

Had the horse come down to the fence and talked to him, had the tree raised one of its heavier lower branches and thrown him a kiss or had a sign that hung over the store suddenly shouted saying--“John Webster, go prepare thyself for the day of the coming of God”--his life at that time would not have seemed more strange than it did. Nothing that could have happened in the exterior world, in the world of such hard facts as sidewalks under his feet, clothes on his body, engines pulling trains along the railroad tracks beside his factory, and street cars rumbling through the streets where he stood, none of these could possibly have done anything more amazing than the things that were at that moment going on within him.

There he was, you see, a man of the medium height, with slightly graying black hair, broad shoulders, large hands, and a full, somewhat sad and perhaps sensual face, and he was much given to the habit of smoking cigarettes. At the time of which I am speaking he found it very hard to sit still in one spot and to do his work and so he continually moved about. Getting quickly up from his chair in the factory office he went out into the shops. To do so he had to pass through a large outer office where there was a bookkeeper, a desk for his factory superintendent and other desks for three girls who also did some kind of office work, sent out circulars regarding the washing machine to possible buyers, and attended to other details.

In his own office there was a broad-faced woman of twenty-four who was his secretary. She had a strong, well-made body, but was not very handsome. Nature had given her a broad flat face and thick lips, but her skin was very clear and she had very clear fine eyes.

A thousand times, since he had become a manufacturer, John Webster had walked thus out of his own office into the general office of the factory and out through a door and along a board walk to the factory itself, but not as he now walked.

Well, he had suddenly begun walking in a new world, that was a fact that could not be denied. An idea came to him. “Perhaps I am becoming for some reason a little insane,” he thought. The thought did not alarm him. It was almost pleasing. “I like myself better as I am now,” he concluded.

He was about to pass out of his small inner office into the larger office and then on into the factory, but stopped by the door. The woman who worked there in the room with him was named Natalie Swartz. She was the daughter of a German saloon-keeper of the town who had married an Irish woman and then had died leaving no money. He remembered what he had heard of her and her life. There were two daughters and the mother had an ugly temper and was given to drink. The older daughter had become a teacher in the town schools and Natalie had learned stenography and had come to work in the office of the factory. They lived in a small frame house at the edge of town and sometimes the old mother got drunk and abused the two girls. They were good girls and worked hard, but in her cups the old mother accused them of all sorts of immorality. All the neighbors felt sorry for them.

John Webster stood at the door with the door-knob in his hand. He was looking hard at Natalie, but did not feel in the least embarrassed nor strangely enough did she. She was arranging some papers, but stopped working and looked directly at him. It was an odd sensation to be able to look thus, directly into another person’s eyes. It was as though Natalie were a house and he were looking in through a window. Natalie herself lived within the house that was her body. What a quiet strong dear person she was and how strange it was that he had been able to sit near her every day for two or three years without ever before thinking of looking into her house. “How many houses there are within which I have not looked,” he thought.

A strange rapid little circle of thought welled up within him as he stood thus, without embarrassment, looking into Natalie’s eyes. How clean she had kept her house. The old Irish mother in her cups might shout and rave calling her daughter a whore, as she sometimes did, but her words did not penetrate into the house of Natalie. The little thoughts within John Webster became words, not expressed aloud, but words that ran like voices shouting softly within himself. “She is my beloved,” one of the voices said. “You shall go into the house of Natalie,” said another. A slow blush spread over Natalie’s face and she smiled. “You are not very well lately. Are you worried about something?” she said. She had never spoken to him before with just that manner. There was a suggestion of intimacy about it. As a matter of fact the washing machine business was at that time doing very well. Orders were coming in rapidly and the factory was humming with life. There were no notes to be paid at the bank. “Why, I am very well,” he said, “very happy and very well, at just this moment.”

He went on into the outer office and the three women employed there and the bookkeeper too stopped working to look at him. Their looking up from their desks was just a kind of gesture. They meant nothing by it. The bookkeeper came and asked a question regarding some account. “Why, I would like it if you would use your own judgment about that,” John Webster said. He was vaguely conscious the question had been concerned with some man’s credit. Some man, in a far-away place, had written to order twenty-four washing machines. He would sell them in a store. The question was, when the time came, would he pay the manufacturer?

The whole structure of business, the thing in which all the men and women in America were, like himself, in some way involved, was an odd affair. Really he had not thought much about it. His father had owned this factory and had died. He had not wanted to be a manufacturer. What had he wanted to be? His father had certain things called patents. Then the son, that was himself, was grown and had begun to manage the factory. He got married and after a time his mother died. Then the factory belonged to him. He made the washing machines that were intended to take the dirt out of people’s clothes and employed men to make them and other men to go forth and sell them. He stood in the outer office seeing, for the first time, all life of modern men as a strange involved thing. “It wants understanding and a lot of thinking about,” he said aloud. The bookkeeper had turned to go back to his desk, but stopped and turned, thinking he had been spoken to. Near where John Webster stood a woman was addressing circulars. She looked up and smiled suddenly and he liked her smiling so. “There is a way--something happens--people suddenly and unexpectedly come close to each other,” he thought and went out through the door and along the board walk toward the factory.

In the factory there was a kind of singing noise going on and there was a sweet smell. Great piles of cut boards lay about and the singing noise was made by saws cutting the boards into proper lengths and shapes to make up the parts of the washing machines. Outside the factory doors were three cars loaded with lumber and workmen were unloading boards and sliding them along a kind of runway into the building.

John Webster felt very much alive. The timbers had no doubt come to his factory from a great distance. That was a strange and interesting fact. Formerly, in his father’s time, there had been a great deal of timber land in Wisconsin but now the forests were pretty much cut away and timber was shipped in from the South. Somewhere, in the place from which had come the boards, now being unloaded at his factory door, were forests and rivers and men going into the forests and cutting down trees.

He had not for years felt so alive as he did at that moment, standing there by the factory door and seeing the men slide the boards from the car along the runway and into the building. How peaceful and quiet the scene! The sun was shining and the boards were of a bright yellow color. A kind of perfume came from them. His own mind was an amazing thing too. At the moment he could see, not only the cars and the men unloading them, but also the land from which the boards came. There was a place, far in the South, where the waters of a low marshy river had spread out until the river was two or three miles wide. It was spring and there had been a flood. At any rate, in the imagined scene, many trees were submerged and there were men in boats, black men, who were pushing logs out of the submerged forest into the wide sluggish stream. The men were great powerful fellows and sang as they worked, a song about John, the disciple and close comrade of Jesus. The men had on high boots and in their hands were long poles. Those in the boats on the river itself caught the logs when they were pushed out from among the trees and gathered them together to form a great raft. Two of the men jumped out of the boats and ran about on the floating logs fastening them together with young saplings. The other men, back somewhere in the forest, kept singing and the men on the raft answered. The song was about John and how he went down to fish in a lake. And the Christ came to call him and his brothers out of the boats to go through the hot dusty land of Galilee, “following in the footsteps of the Lord.” Presently the song stopped and there was silence.

How strong and rhythmical the bodies of the workers! Their bodies swayed back and forth as they worked. There was a kind of dance in their bodies.

Now two things happened in John Webster’s fanciful world. A woman, a golden-brown woman, came down along the river in a boat and all the workmen stopped working to stand looking at her. She had no hat on her head and as she pushed the boat forward through the sluggish water her young body swayed from side to side, as the bodies of the men workers had swayed when they handled the logs. The hot sun was shining on the body of the brown girl and her neck and shoulders were bare. One of the men on the raft called to her. “Hello, Elizabeth,” he shouted. She stopped paddling the boat and let it float for a moment.

“Hello you’ self, you China boy,” she answered laughing.

Again she began to paddle vigorously. A log shot out from amid the trees at the river’s edge, the trees that were submerged in the yellow water, and a young black stood astride it. With the pole in his hand he gave a vigorous push against one of the trees and the log came swiftly down toward the raft where two other men stood waiting.

The sun was shining on the neck and shoulders of the brown girl in the boat. The movements of her arms made dancing lights on her skin. The skin was brown, a golden coppery brown. Her boat slipped about a bend of the river and disappeared. There was a moment of silence and then, from back among the trees, a voice took up a new song in which the other blacks joined--

“Doubting Thomas, doubting Thomas, Doubting Thomas, doubt no more.

And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, And go home to my father and be saved.”

John Webster stood with blinking eyes watching the men unload boards at his factory door. The little voices within him were saying strange joyous things. One could not be just a manufacturer of washing machines in a Wisconsin town. In spite of oneself one became, at odd moments, something else too. One became a part of something as broad as the land in which one lived. One went about in a little shop in a town. The shop was in an obscure place, by a railroad track and beside a shallow stream, but it was also a part of some vast thing no one had as yet begun to understand. He himself was a man standing, clad in ordinary clothes, but within his clothes, and within his body too there was something, well perhaps not vast in itself, but vaguely indefinitely connected with some vast thing. It was odd he had never thought of that before. Had he thought of it? There were the men before him unloading the timbers. They touched the timbers with their hands. A kind of union was made between them and the black men who had cut the timbers and floated them down a stream to a sawmill in some far-away Southern place. One went about all day and every day touching things other men had touched. There was something wanted, a consciousness of the thing touched. A consciousness of the significance of things and people.

“And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, And go home to my father and be saved.”

He went through the door into his shop. Near by, at a machine, a man was sawing boards. There was no doubt the pieces selected for the making of his washing machine were not always of the best. Some of the pieces would soon enough break. They were put into a part of the machine where it didn’t so much matter, where they wouldn’t be seen. The machines had to be sold at a low price. He felt a little ashamed and then laughed. One might easily become involved in small things when there were big rich things to be thought about. One was a child and had to learn to walk. What was it one had to learn? To walk about smelling things, tasting things, feeling things perhaps. One had to learn who else was in the world besides oneself, for one thing. One had to look about a little. It was all very well to be thinking that better boards should be put into washing machines that poor women bought, but one might easily become corrupted by giving oneself over to such thoughts. There was danger of a kind of smug self-righteousness got from thinking about putting only good boards in washing machines. He had known men like that and had always had a kind of contempt for them.

He went on through the factory, past rows of men and boys standing at machines at work, forming the various parts of the washing machines, putting the parts together, painting and packing the machines for shipment. The upper part of the building was given over to the storage of materials. He walked through piles of cut boards to a window that looked down upon the shallow and now half-dry stream on the banks of which the factory stood. There were signs all about forbidding smoking in the factory, but he had forgotten and now took a cigarette out of his pocket and lighted it.

A rhythm of thought went on within him that was in some way related to the rhythm of the bodies of the black men at work in the forest of the world of his imagination. He had been standing before his factory door in a town in the state of Wisconsin but at the same time he was in the South, with some blacks working on a river, and at the same time with some fishermen on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, when a man came down to the shore and began to say strange words. “There must be more than one of me,” he thought vaguely and when his mind had formed the thought something seemed to have happened within himself. A few moments before, as he stood in the presence of Natalie Swartz down in the office, he had thought of her body as a house within which she lived. That was an illuminating thought too. Why could not more than one person live within such a house?

It would clear a good many things up if such an idea got abroad. No doubt it was an idea that had come to a great many other men, but perhaps they had not put it forth in a simple enough way. He had himself gone to school in his town and later to the University at Madison. For a time he had read a good many books. At one time he had thought he might like to be a writer of books.

And no doubt a great many of the writers of books had been visited by just such thoughts as he was having now. Within the pages of some books one found a kind of refuge from the tangle of things in daily life. Perhaps as they wrote, these men felt, as he felt now, exhilarated, carried out of themselves.

He puffed at his cigarette and looked beyond the river. His factory was at the edge of town and beyond the river fields began. All men and women were like himself standing on a common ground. All over America, all over the world for that matter, men and women did outward things much as he did. They ate food, slept, worked, made love.

He was growing a little weary of thinking and rubbed his hand across his forehead. His cigarette had burned out and he dropped it on the floor and lighted another. Men and women tried to go within one another’s bodies, were at times almost insanely anxious to do it. That was called making love. He wondered if a time might come when men and women did that quite freely. It was difficult to try to think one’s way through such a tangle of thoughts.

There was one thing sure, he had never before been in this state. Well that was not true. There was a time once. It was when he married. Then he had felt as he did now, but something had happened.

He began to think of Natalie Swartz. There was something clear and innocent about her. Perhaps, without knowing, he had fallen in love with her, the daughter of a saloon-keeper and the drunken old Irish woman. That would explain much if it had happened.

He became aware of a man standing near him and turned. A workman in overalls stood a few feet away. He smiled. “I guess you have forgotten something,” he said. John Webster smiled also. “Well yes,” he said, “a good many things. I’m nearly forty years old and I guess I have forgotten to live. What about you?”

The workman smiled again. “I mean the cigarettes,” he said and pointed to the burning and smoking end of the cigarette that lay on the floor. John Webster put his foot on it and then dropping the other cigarette to the floor put his foot on that. He and the workman stood looking at each other as but a little while before he had looked at Natalie Swartz. “I wonder if I might go within his house also,” he thought. “Well, I thank you. I had forgotten. My mind was far away,” he said aloud. The workman nodded. “I am sometimes like that myself,” he explained.

The puzzled manufacturer went down out of the upstairs room and along a branch of the railroad that led into the shop to the main tracks along which he walked toward the more inhabited part of town. “It must be almost noon,” he thought. Usually he had lunch at a place near his factory and his employees brought their lunches in packages and tin pails. He thought now he would go to his own home. He would not be expected but thought he would like to look at his wife and daughter. A passenger train came rushing down along the tracks and although the whistle blew madly he was unaware of it. Then when it was almost upon him a young negro, a tramp perhaps, at any rate a black man in ragged clothes who was also walking on the tracks, ran to him and taking hold of his coat jerked him violently to one side. The train rushed past and he stood staring after it. He and the young negro also looked into each other’s eyes. He put his hand into his pocket, instinctively feeling that he should pay the man for the service done him.

And then a kind of shudder ran through his body. He was very tired. “My mind was far away,” he said. “Yes, boss. I’m sometimes that way myself,” the young negro said, smiling and walking away along the tracks.

II

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:

“You see,” said Wilberforce calmly, “I am returning to South Africa soon. I am not even planning to cast my fortunes with Virginia.”

Umbrage broke into protestations, came up, and put his hand on John’s arm, and then Malloy looked at his daughter. As he feared would be the case, her eyes were fastened on Charles Wilberforce. He had thought, when he brought her to Richmond that night, that she was looking wonderfully well and gay. So indeed she had been, with the prospect before her of seeing Charles again after six weeks. Now she was lifeless and pale as a candle from which the flame has been struck.

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,

“And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, And go home to my father and be saved.”

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.

III

When he awoke an hour later he was at first frightened. He looked about the room wondering if he had been ill.

Then his eyes began an inventory of the furniture of the room. He did not like anything there. Had he lived for twenty years of his life among such things? They were no doubt all right. He knew little of such things. Few men did. A thought came. How few men in America ever really thought of the houses they lived in, of the clothes they wore. Men were willing to go through a long life without any effort to decorate their bodies, to make lovely and full of meaning the dwellings in which they lived. His own clothes were hanging on a chair where he had thrown them when he came into the room. In a moment he would get up and put them on. Thousands of times, since he had come to manhood, he had gone through the performance of clothing his body without thought. The clothes had been bought casually at some store. Who had made them? What thought had been given to the making of them or to the wearing of them either? He looked at his body lying on the bed. The clothes would enclose his body, wrap it about.

A thought came into his mind, rang across the spaces of his mind like a bell heard across fields: “Nothing either animate or inanimate can be beautiful that is not loved.”

Getting off the bed he dressed quickly and hurrying out of the room ran down a flight of stairs to the floor below. At the foot of the stairs he stopped. He felt suddenly old and weary and thought perhaps he had better not try to go back to the factory that afternoon. There was no need of his presence there. Everything was going all right. Natalie would attend to anything that came up.

“A fine business if I, a respectable business man with a wife and a grown daughter, get myself involved in an affair with Natalie Swartz, the daughter of a man who when he was alive ran a low saloon and of that terrible old Irish woman who is the scandal of the town and who when she is drunk talks and yells so that the neighbors threaten to have her arrested and are only held back because they have sympathy for the daughters.

“The fact is that a man may work and work to make a decent place for himself and then by a foolish act all may be destroyed. I’ll have to watch myself a little. I’ve been working too steadily. Perhaps I’d better take a vacation. I don’t want to get into a mess,” he thought. How glad he was that, although he had been in a state all day long, he had said nothing to anyone that would betray his condition.

He stood with his hand on the railing of the stairs. At any rate he had been doing a lot of thinking for the last two or three hours. “I haven’t been wasting my time.”

A notion came. After he married and when he had found out his wife was frightened and driven within herself by every outburst of passion and that as a result there was not much joy in making love to her he had formed a habit of going off on secret expeditions. It had been easy enough to get away. He told his wife he was going on a business trip. Then he went somewhere, to the city of Chicago usually. He did not go to one of the big hotels, but to some obscure place on a side street.

Night came and he set out to find himself a woman. Always he went through the same kind of rather silly performance. He was not given to drinking, but he now took several drinks. One might go at once to some house where women were to be had, but he really wanted something else. He spent hours wandering in the streets.

There was a dream. One vainly hoped to find, wandering about somewhere, a woman who by some miracle would love with freedom and abandon. Along through the streets one went usually in dark badly lighted places where there were factories and warehouses and poor little dwellings. One wanted a golden woman to step up out of the filth of the place in which one walked. It was insane and silly and one knew these things, but one persisted insanely. Amazing conversations were imagined. Out from the shadow of one of the dark buildings the woman was to step. She was also lonely, hungry, defeated. One went boldly up to her and began at once a conversation filled with strange and beautiful words. Love came flooding their two bodies.

Well perhaps that was exaggerated a little. No doubt one was never quite fool enough to expect anything so wonderful as all that. At any rate what one did was to wander about in the dark streets thus for hours and in the end take up with some prostitute. The two hurried silently off into a little room. Uh. There was always the feeling, “Perhaps other men have been in here with her already to-night.” There was a halting attempt at conversation. Could they get to know each other, this woman and this man? The woman had a businesslike air. The night was not over and her work was done at night. Too much time must not be wasted. From her point of view a great deal of time had to be wasted in any event. Often one walked half the night without making any money at all.

After such an adventure John Webster came home the next day feeling very mean and unclean. Still he did work better at the office and at night for a long time he slept better. For one thing he kept his mind on affairs and did not give way to dreams and to vague thoughts. When one was running a factory that was an advantage.

Now he stood at the foot of the stairs, thinking perhaps he had better go off on such an adventure again. If he stayed at home and sat all day and every day in the presence of Natalie Swartz there was no telling what would happen. One might as well face facts. After his experience of that morning, his looking into her eyes, in just the same way he had, the life of the two people in the office would be changed. A new thing would have come into the very air they breathed together. It would be better if he did not go back to the office, but went off at once and took a train to Chicago or Milwaukee. As for his wife--he had got that notion into his head of a kind of death of the flesh. He closed his eyes and leaned against the stair railing. His mind became a blank.

A door leading into the dining room of the house opened and a woman stepped forth. She was the Webster’s one servant and had been in the house for many years. Now she was past fifty and as she stood before John Webster he looked at her as he hadn’t for a long time. A multitude of thoughts came quickly, like a handful of shot thrown against a window pane.

The woman standing before him was tall and lean and her face was marked by deep lines. It was an odd thing, the notions men had got into their heads about the beauty of women. Perhaps Natalie Swartz, when she was fifty, would look much like this woman.

Her name was Katherine and her coming to work for the Websters long ago had brought on a quarrel between John Webster and his wife. There had been a wreck on the railroad near the Webster factory and this woman was traveling in the day coach of the wrecked train with a man much younger than herself, who was killed. A young man of Indianapolis, who worked in a bank, had run away with a woman who was a servant in his father’s house and after he disappeared a large sum of money was missed at the bank. He had been killed in the wreck as he sat with the woman and all trace of him had been lost until someone from Indianapolis, quite by chance, saw and recognized Katherine on the streets of her adopted town. The question asked was, what had become of the money, and Katherine had been accused of knowing and of concealing it.

Mrs. Webster had wanted to discharge her at once and there had been a quarrel in which the husband had in the end come out victorious. For some reason the whole strength of his being had been put into the matter and one night as he stood in the common bedroom with his wife he had made a pronouncement so strong that he himself was surprised by the words that came from his lips. “If this woman goes out of this house without going voluntarily then I go also,” he had said.

Now John Webster stood in the hallway of his house looking at the woman who had been the cause of the quarrel long ago. Well, he had seen her going silently about the house almost every day during the long years since that thing happened, but he had not looked at her as he did now. When she grew older Natalie Swartz might look as this woman now looked. If he were to be a fool and run away with Natalie, as that young fellow from Indianapolis had once run away with this woman, and if it fell out there was no railroad wreck he might some day be living with a woman who looked somewhat as Katherine now looked.

The thought did not alarm him. It was on the whole rather a sweet thought. “She has lived and sinned and suffered,” he thought. There was about the woman’s person a kind of strong quiet dignity and it was reflected in her physical being. There was no doubt a kind of dignity coming into his own thoughts too. The notion of going off to Chicago or Milwaukee to walk through dirty streets hungering for the golden woman to come to him out of the filth of life was quite gone now.

The woman Katherine was smiling at him. “I did not eat any lunch because I did not feel like eating but now I’m hungry. Is there anything to eat in the house, anything you might get for me without too much trouble?” he asked.

She lied cheerfully. She had just prepared lunch for herself in the kitchen but now offered it to him.

He sat at the table eating the food Katherine had prepared. Outside the house the sun was shining. It was only a little after two o’clock and the afternoon and evening were before him. It was strange how the Bible, the older Testaments, kept asserting themselves in his mind. He had never been much of a Bible reader. There was perhaps a kind of massive splendor to the prose of the book that now fell into step with his own thoughts. In that time, when men lived on the hills and on the plains with their flocks, life lasted in the body of a man or woman a long time. Men were spoken of who had lived for several hundred years. Perhaps there was more than one way to reckon the length of life. In his own case--if he could live every day as fully as he had been living this day, life would be for him lengthened indefinitely.

Katherine came into the room bringing more food and a pot of tea and he looked up and smiled at her. Another thought came. “It would be an amazingly beautiful thing to have happen in the world if everyone, every living man, woman, and child, should suddenly, by a common impulse, come out of their houses, out of the factories and stores, come, let us say, into a great plain, where everyone could see everyone else, and if they should there and then, all of them, in the light of day, with everyone in the world knowing fully what everyone else in the world was doing, if they should all by one common impulse commit the most unforgivable sin of which they were conscious, what a great cleansing time that would be.”

His mind made a kind of riot of pictures and he ate the food Katherine had set before him without thought of the physical act of eating. Katherine started to go out of the room and then, noting that he was unaware of her presence, stopped by the door leading into the kitchen and stood looking at him. He had never known that she had been aware of the struggle he had gone through for her many years before. Had he not made that struggle she would not have stayed on in the house. As a matter of fact, on that evening when he had declared that if she were to be made to leave he would leave also, the door to the bedroom upstairs was a little ajar and she was in the hallway downstairs. She had packed her few belongings and had them in a bundle and had intended to steal away somewhere. There was no point to her staying. The man she loved was dead and now she was being hounded by the newspapers and there was a threat that if she did not tell where the money was hidden she would be sent to prison. As for the money--she did not believe the man who had been killed knew any more about it than she did. No doubt there was money stolen and then, because he had run away with her, the crime was put upon her lover. The affair was very simple. The young man worked in the bank and was engaged to be married to a woman of his own class. And then one night he and Katherine were alone in his father’s house and something happened between them.

As she stood watching her employer eat the food she had prepared for herself, Katherine thought proudly of an evening long before when she had quite recklessly become the sweetheart of another man. She remembered the fight John Webster had once made for her and thought with contempt of the woman who was her employer’s wife.

“That such a man should have such a woman,” she thought, recalling the long heavy figure of Mrs. Webster.

As though aware of her thoughts the man again turned and smiled at her. “I am eating the food she had prepared for herself,” he told himself, and got quickly up from the table. He went out into the hallway and having taken his hat from a rack lighted a cigarette. Then he returned to the dining room door. The woman stood by the table looking at him and he in turn looked at her. There was no embarrassment. “If I should go away with Natalie and she should become like Katherine it would be fine,” he thought. “Well, well, good bye,” he said haltingly and turning walked rapidly out of the house.

* * * * *

As John Webster walked along the street the sun was shining and as there was a light breeze a few leaves were falling from the maple shade trees with which the streets were lined. Soon there would be frost and the trees would be all afire with color. If one could only be aware, glorious days were ahead. Even in the Wisconsin town one might have glorious days. There was a little pang of hunger, a new kind of hunger, within him as he stopped and stood for a moment looking up and down the residence street on which he had been walking. Two hours before, lying naked on the bed in his own house, he had been having the thoughts concerning clothes and houses. It was a charming thought to play with but brought sadness too. Why was it that so many houses along the street were ugly? Were people unaware? Could anyone be quite completely unaware? Could one wear ugly commonplace clothes, live always in an ugly or commonplace house in a commonplace street of a commonplace town and remain always unaware?

Now he was thinking of things he decided had better be left out of the thoughts of a business man. However, for this one day, he would give himself over to the thinking of any thought that came into his head. To-morrow things would be different. He would become again what he had always been (with the exception of a few slips, times when he had been rather as he was now), a quiet orderly man going about his business and not given to foolishness. He would run his washing machine business and try to keep his mind on that. In the evenings he would read the newspapers and keep abreast of the events of the day.

“I don’t go on a bat very often. I deserve a little vacation,” he thought rather sadly.

* * * * *

Ahead of him in the street, almost two blocks ahead, a man walked. John Webster had met the man once. He was a professor in a small college of the town, and once, two or three years before, there had been an effort made, on the part of the college president, to raise money among local business men to help the school through a financial crisis. A dinner was given and attended by a number of the college faculty and by an organization called the Chamber of Commerce to which John Webster belonged. The man who now walked before him had been at the dinner and he and the washing machine manufacturer had been seated together. He wondered if he might now presume on that brief acquaintanceship to go and talk with the man. He had been thinking rather unusual thoughts to come into a man’s head and perhaps, if he could talk with some other man and in particular with a man whose business in life it was to have thoughts and to understand thought, something might be gained.

There was a narrow strip of grass between the sidewalk and the roadway and along this John Webster began to run. He just grabbed his hat in his hand and ran bareheaded for perhaps two hundred yards and then stopped and looked quietly up and down the street.

It was all right, after all. Apparently no one had seen his strange performance. There were no people sitting on the porches of the houses along the street. He thanked God for that.

Ahead of him the college professor went soberly along with a book under his arm, unaware that he was followed. When he saw that his absurd performance had escaped notice John Webster laughed. “Well, I went to college myself once. I’ve heard enough college professors talk. I don’t know why I should expect anything from one of that stripe.”

Perhaps to speak of the things that had been in his mind that day something almost like a new language would be required.

There was that thought about Natalie being a house kept clean and sweet for living, a house into which one might go gladly and joyfully. Could he, a washing machine manufacturer of a Wisconsin town, stop on the street a college professor and say--“I want to know, Mr. College Professor, if your house is clean and sweet for living so that people may come into it and, if it is so, I want you to tell me how you went about it to cleanse your house.”

The notion was absurd. It made one laugh to even think of any such thing. There would have to be new figures of speech, a new way of looking at things. For one thing people would have to be more truly aware of themselves than they had ever been before.

Almost in the centre of town and before a stone building that was some kind of public institution there was a small park with benches and John Webster stopped following the college professor and went and sat on one of them. From where he sat he could see along two of the principal business thoroughfares.

It wasn’t a thing done by prosperous washing machine manufacturers, this sitting on benches in the park in the middle of the afternoon but he, at the moment, did not much care. To tell the truth the place for such a man as himself, who owned a factory where many men were employed, was at his desk in his own office. In the evening one might stroll about, read the newspapers or go to the theatre but now, at this hour, the thing was to attend to affairs, be on the job.

He smiled at the thought of himself lolling there on the park bench like a public idler or a tramp. On other benches in the little park sat other men and that was the kind of men they were. Well, they were the kind of fellows who didn’t fit into things, who hadn’t jobs. One could tell that by looking at them. There was a kind of hang-dog air about them and although two of the men on a nearby bench talked to each other they did it in a dull listless way that showed they were not really interested in what they were saying. Were men, when they talked, ever really interested in what they said to each other?

John Webster put his arms above his head and stretched. He was more aware of himself, of his own body, than he had been for years. “There’s something going on like the breaking up of a long hard winter. Spring is coming in me,” he thought and the thought pleased him like a caress from the hand of someone he loved.

Weary tired moments had been coming to him all day long and now another came. He was like a train running through a mountainous country and occasionally passing through tunnels. In one moment the world about him was all alive and then it was just a dull dreary place that frightened him. The thought that came to him was something like this--“Well, here I am. There is no use denying it, something unusual has happened to me. Yesterday I was one thing. Now I am something else. About me everywhere are these people I have always known, here in this town. Down that street there before me, at the corner there, in that stone building, is the bank where I do the banking business for my factory. It happens that just at this particular time I do not owe them any money, but a year from now I may be in debt to that institution up to my eyebrows. There have been times, in the years I have lived and worked as a manufacturer, when I was altogether in the power of the men who now sit at desks behind those stone walls. Why they didn’t close me up and take my business away from me I don’t know. Perhaps they did not think it worth while and then, perhaps, they felt, if they left me on there I would be working for them anyway. At any rate now, it doesn’t seem to matter much what such an institution as a bank may decide to do.

“One can’t quite make out what other men think. Perhaps they do not think at all.

“If I come right down to it I suppose I’ve never done much thinking myself. Perhaps the whole business of life, here in this town and everywhere else, is just a kind of accidental affair. Things happen. People are swept along, eh? That’s the way it must be.”

It was incomprehensible to him and his mind soon grew weary of trying to think further along that road.

It went back to the matter of people and houses. Perhaps one could speak of that matter to Natalie. There was something simple and clear about her. “She has been working for me for three years now and it is strange I’ve never thought much about her before. She has a way of keeping things clear and straight. Everything has gone better since she has been with me.”

It would be a thing to think about if all the time, since she had been with him, Natalie had understood the things that were just now becoming a little plain to him. Suppose, from the very beginning, she had been ready to have him go within herself. One could get quite romantic about the matter if one allowed oneself to think about it.

There she would be, you see, that Natalie. She got out of bed in the morning and while she was there, in her own room, in the little frame house out at the edge of town, she said a little prayer. Then she walked along the streets and down along the railroad tracks to her work and to sit all day in the presence of a man.

It was an interesting thought, just to suppose, as a kind of playful diversion let us say, that she, that Natalie, was pure and clean.

In that case she wouldn’t be thinking much of herself. She loved, that is to say she had opened the doors of herself.

One had a picture of her standing with the doors of her body open. Something constantly went out of her and into the man in whose presence she spent the day. He was unaware, was in fact too much absorbed in his own trivial affairs to be aware.

Her own self also began to be absorbed with his affairs, to take the load of small and unimportant details of business off his mind in order that he in turn become aware of her, standing thus, with the doors of her body opened. How clean, sweet, and fragrant the house within which she lived! Before one went within such a house one would have to cleanse oneself too. That was clear. Natalie had done it with prayers and devotion, single-minded devotion to the interests of another. Could one cleanse one’s own house that way? Could one be as much the man as Natalie was the woman? It was a test.

As for the matter of houses--if one got thinking of one’s own body in that way where would it all end? One might go further and think of one’s own body as a town, a city, as the world.

It was a road to madness too. One might think of people constantly passing in and out of each other. In all the world there would be no more secrecy. Something like a great wind would sweep through the world.

“A people drunk with life. A people drunk and joyous with life.”

The sentences rang through John Webster like great bells ringing. He sat upright on the park bench. Had the listless fellows sitting about him on other benches heard the words? For just a moment he thought the words might be running like living things through the streets of his town, stopping people on the streets, making people look up from their work in offices and factories.

“One had better go a little slow and not get oneself out of hand,” he told himself.

He began trying to think along another road. Across a little stretch of grass and a roadway before him there was a store with trays of fruit, oranges, apples, grapefruit, and pears arranged on the sidewalk and now a wagon stopped at the store door and began to unload other things. He looked long and hard at the wagon and at the store front.

His mind slipped off at a new tangent. There he was, himself, John Webster, sitting on that bench in a park in the very heart of a town in the state of Wisconsin. It was fall and nearly time for frost to come, but there was still new life in the grass. How green the grass was in the little park! The trees were alive too. Soon now they would flame with color and then sleep for a period. To all the world of living green things there would come the flame of evening and then the night of winter.

Out before the world of animal life the fruits of the earth would be poured. Out of the ground they would come, off trees and bushes, out of the seas, lakes, and rivers, the things that were to maintain animal life during the period when the world of vegetable life slept the sweet sleep of winter.

It was a thing to think about too. Everywhere, all about him must be men and women who lived altogether unaware of such things. To tell the truth he had himself been, all his life, unaware. He had just eaten food, stuffed it into his body through his mouth. There had been no joy. He had not really tasted things, smelled things. How filled with fragrant suggestive smells life might be!

It must have come about that as men and women went out of the fields and hills to live in cities, as factories grew and as the railroads and steamboats came to pass the fruits of the earth back and forth a kind of dreadful unawareness must have grown in people. Not touching things with their hands people lost the sense of them. That was it, perhaps.

John Webster remembered that, when he was a boy, such matters were differently arranged. He lived in the town and knew nothing much of country life, but at that time town and country were more closely wed.

In the fall, at just this time of the year, farmers used to drive into town and deliver things at his father’s house. At that time everyone had great cellars under his house and in the cellars were bins that were to be filled with potatoes, apples, turnips. There was a trick man had learned. Straw was brought in from fields near the town and pumpkins, squashes, heads of cabbage, and other solid vegetables were wrapped in straw and put into a cool part of the cellar. He remembered that his mother wrapped pears in bits of paper and kept them sweet and fresh for months.

As for himself, although he did not live in the country he was, at that time, aware of something quite tremendous going on. Wagons arrived at his father’s house. On Saturdays a farm woman, who drove an old gray horse, came to the front door and knocked. She was bringing the Websters their weekly supply of butter and eggs and often a chicken for the Sunday dinner. John Webster’s mother went to the door to meet her and the child ran along, clinging to his mother’s skirts.

The farm woman came into the house and sat up stiffly in a chair in the parlor while her basket was being emptied and while the butter was being taken out of its stone jar. The boy stood with his back to the wall in a corner and studied her. Nothing was said. What strange hands she had, so unlike his mother’s hands, that were soft and white. The farm woman’s hands were brown and the knuckles were like the bark-covered knobs that sometimes grew on the trunks of trees. They were hands to take hold of things, to take hold of things firmly.

After the men from the country had come and had put the things in the bins in the cellar it was fine to go down there in the afternoon when one had come home from school. Outside the leaves were all coming off the trees and everything looked bare. One felt a little sad and almost frightened at times and the visits to the cellar were reassuring. The rich smell of things, fragrant and strong smells! One got an apple out of one of the bins and stood eating it. In a far corner there were the dark bins where the pumpkins and squashes were buried in straw and everywhere, along the walls, were the glass jars of fruit his mother had put up. How many of them, what a plenitude of everything. One could eat and eat and still there would be plenty.

At night sometimes, when one had gone upstairs and had got into bed, one thought of the cellar and of the farm woman and the farm men. Outside the house it was dark and a wind was blowing. Soon there would be winter and snow and skating. The farm woman with the strange, strong-looking hands had driven the gray horse off along the street on which the Webster house stood, and around a corner. One had stood at a window down stairs and had watched her out of sight. She had gone off into some mysterious place, spoken of as the country. How big was the country and how far away was it? Had she got there yet? It was night now and very dark. The wind was blowing. Was she still driving the gray horse on and on, the reins held in her strong brown hands?

The boy had got into bed and had pulled the covers up about him. His mother came into the room and after kissing him went away taking his lamp. He was safe in the house. Near him, in another room, his father and mother slept. Only the country woman, with the strong hands, was now out there alone in the night. She was driving the gray horse on and on into the darkness, into the strange place from which came all the good, rich-smelling things, now stored away in the cellar under the house.

IV

“Well, hello you, Mr. Webster. This is a fine place for you to be day-dreaming. I’ve been standing here and looking at you for several minutes and you haven’t even seen me.”

John Webster jumped to his feet. The afternoon was passing and already there was a kind of grayness falling over the trees and the grass in the little park. The late afternoon sun was shining on the figure of the man who stood before him and, although the man was short of stature and slight, his shadow on the stone walk was grotesquely long. The man was evidently amused at the thought of the prosperous manufacturer day-dreaming there in the park and laughed softly, his body swaying a little back and forth. The shadow also swayed. It was like a thing hung on a pendulum, swinging back and forth, and even as John Webster sprang to his feet a sentence went through his mind. “He takes life with a long slow easy swing. How does that happen? He takes life with a long slow easy swing,” his mind said. It seemed like a fragment of a thought snatched out of nowhere, a fragmentary dancing little thought.

The man who stood before him owned a small second-hand book store on a side street along which John Webster was in the habit of walking as he went back and forth to his factory. On summer evenings the man sat in a chair before his shop and made comments on the weather and on passing events to the people going up and down the sidewalk. Once when John Webster was with his banker, a gray dignified looking man, he had been somewhat embarrassed because the bookseller called out his name. He had never done it until that day and never did it afterward. The manufacturer had become self-conscious and had explained the matter to the banker. “I really don’t know the man. I was never in his shop,” he said.

In the park John Webster stood before the little man deeply embarrassed. He told a harmless lie. “I’ve had a headache all day and sat down here for a moment,” he said sheepishly. It was annoying that he felt like apologizing. The little man smiled knowingly. “You ought to take something for that. It might get a man like you into a hell of a mess,” he said and walked away, his long shadow dancing behind him.

With a shrug of his shoulders John Webster went rapidly through a crowded business street. He was quite sure now that he knew what he wanted to do. He did not loiter and give way to vague thoughts, but walked briskly along the street. “I’ll keep my mind occupied,” he decided. “I’ll think about my business and how to develop it.” During the week before, an advertising man from Chicago had come into his office and had talked to him about advertising his washing machine in the big national magazines. It would cost a good deal of money, but the advertising man had said that he could raise his selling price and sell many more machines. That sounded possible. It would make the business a big one, an institution of national prominence, and himself a big figure in the industrial world. Other men had got into a position like that through the power of advertising. Why shouldn’t he do something of the sort?

He tried to think about the matter, but his mind didn’t work very well. It was a blank. What happened was that he walked along with his shoulders thrown back and felt childishly important about nothing. He had to be careful or he would begin laughing at himself. There was within him a lurking fear that in a few minutes he would begin laughing at the figure of John Webster as a man of national importance in the industrial world and the fear made him hurry faster than ever. When he got to the railroad tracks that ran down to his factory he was almost running. It was amazing. The advertising man from Chicago could use big words, apparently without being in any danger of suddenly beginning to laugh. When John Webster was a young fellow and had just come out of college, that was when he read a great many books and sometimes thought he would like to become a writer of books, at that time he had often thought he wasn’t cut out to be a business man at all. Perhaps he was right. A man who hadn’t any more sense than to laugh at himself had better not try to become a figure of national importance in the industrial world, that was sure. It wanted serious fellows to carry off such positions successfully.

Well now he had begun to be a little sorry for himself, that he was not cut out to be a big figure in the industrial world. What a childish fellow he was. He began to scold himself, “Won’t I ever grow up?”

As he hurried along the railroad tracks, trying to think, trying not to think, he kept his eyes turned to the ground and something attracted his attention. To the west, over the tops of distant trees and across the shallow river beside which his factory stood, the sun was just going down and its rays were suddenly caught by something that looked like a piece of glass lying among the stones on the railroad roadbed.

He stopped his rush along the tracks and leaned over to pick it up. It was something, perhaps a jewel of some sort, perhaps just a cheap little plaything some child had lost. The stone was about the size and shape of a small bean and was dark green. When the rays of the sun fell on it, as he held it in his hand, the color changed. After all it might be a valuable thing. “Perhaps some woman, riding on a train through the town, has lost it out of her ring or out of a brooch she wears at her throat,” he thought and had a momentary picture floating in his mind. In the picture there was a tall strong fair woman, standing, not on a train but on a hill above a river. The river was wide and as it was winter was covered with ice. The woman had one hand raised and was pointing. A ring was on her finger and the small green stone was set in the ring. He could see everything very minutely. The woman stood on the hill and the sun shone on her and the stone in the ring was now pale, now dark like the waters of a sea, and beside the woman stood a man, a rather heavy-looking man with gray hair, with whom the woman was in love. The woman was saying something to the man about the stone set in the ring and John Webster could hear the words very distinctly. What strange words she was saying. “My father gave it to me and told me to wear it for all my loves. He called it, ‘the jewel of life,’” she said.

Hearing the rumble of a train, far away somewhere in the distance, John Webster got off the tracks. There was at just that place a high embankment beside the river along which he could walk. “I don’t intend to come near being killed by a train as I was this morning when that young negro saved me,” he thought. He looked away to the west and to the evening sun and then down at the bed of the river. Now the river was low and only a narrow channel of water ran through wide banks of caked mud. He put the little green stone in his vest pocket.

“I know what I am going to do,” he told himself resolutely. Quickly a plan formed itself in his mind. He would go to his office and hurry through any letters that had come in. Then, without looking at Natalie Swartz, he would get up and go away. There was a train for Chicago at eight o’clock and he would tell his wife he had business in the city and would take the train. What a man had to do in life was to face facts and then act. He would go to Chicago and find himself a woman. When it came right down to the truth he would go on a regular bat. He would find himself a woman and he would get drunk and if he felt like doing it would stay drunk for several days.

There were times when it was perhaps necessary to be a down-right rotter. He would do that too. While he was in Chicago and with the woman he had found he would write a letter to his bookkeeper at the factory and tell him to discharge Natalie Swartz. Then he would write Natalie a letter and send her a large check. He would send her six months’ pay. The whole thing might cost him a pretty sum, but anything was better than this going on as he was, a regular crazy kind of man.

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 thirty-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 a 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.