BOOK TWO

I

As you will remember, the room in which John Webster slept was at a corner of the house, upstairs. From one of his two windows he looked out into the garden of a German who owned a store in his town but whose real interest in life was the garden. All through the year he worked at it and had John Webster been more alive, during the years he lived in the room, he might have got keen pleasure out of looking down upon his neighbor at work. In the early morning and late afternoon the German was always to be seen, smoking his pipe and digging, and a great variety of smells came floating up and in at the window of the room above, the sour acid smell of vegetables decaying, the rich heady smell of stable manure and then, all through the summer and late into the fall, the fragrant smell of roses and the marching procession of the flowers of the seasons.

John Webster had lived in his room for many years without much thought of what a room, within which a man lives and the walls of which enclose him like a garment when he sleeps, might be like. It was a square room with one window looking down into the German’s garden and another window that faced the blank walls of the German’s house. There were three doors--one leading into a hallway, one into the room where his wife slept, and a third that led into his daughter’s room.

One came into the place at night and closed the doors and prepared oneself for sleep. Behind the two walls were the two other people, also preparing for sleep, and behind the walls of the German’s house no doubt the same thing was going on. The German had two daughters and a son. They would be going to bed or were already in bed. There was, at that street end, something like a little village of people going to bed or already in bed.

For a good many years John Webster and his wife had not been very intimate. Long ago, when he had found himself married to her he had found also that she had a theory of life, picked up somewhere, perhaps from her parents, perhaps just absorbed out of the general atmosphere of fear in which so many modern women live and breathe, clutched at, as it were, and used as a weapon against too close contact with another. She thought, or believed she thought, that even in marriage a man and woman should not be lovers except for the purpose of bringing children into the world. The belief threw a sort of heavy air of responsibility about the matter of love-making. One does not go very freely in and out of the body of another when the going in and out involves such heavy responsibility. The doors of the body become rusty and creak. “Well, you see,” John Webster, in later years, sometimes explained, “one is quite seriously at the business of bringing another human into the world. Here is the Puritan in full flower. The night has come. From the gardens back of men’s houses comes the scent of flowers. Little hushed noises arise followed by silences. The flowers in their gardens have known an ecstasy unfettered by any awareness of responsibility, but man is something else. For ages he has been taking himself with extraordinary seriousness. The race, you see, must be perpetuated. It must be improved. There is in this affair something of obligation to God and to one’s fellow men. Even when, after long preparation, talk, prayer, and the acquiring of a little wisdom, a kind of abandon is acquired, as one would acquire a new language, one has still achieved something quite foreign to the flowers, the trees, and the life and the carrying on of life among what is called the lower animals.”

As for the earnest God-fearing people, among whom John Webster and his wife then lived and as one of whom they had for so many years counted themselves, the chances are no such thing as ecstasy is ever acquired at all. There is instead, for the most part, a kind of cold sensuality tempered by an itching conscience. That life can perpetuate itself at all in such an atmosphere is one of the wonders of the world and proves, as nothing else could, the cold determination of nature not to be defeated.

And so for years the man had been in the habit of coming into his bedroom at night, taking off his clothes, and hanging them on a chair or in a closet and then crawling into bed to sleep heavily. Sleeping was a part of the necessary business of living and if, before he slept, he thought at all he thought of his washing machine business. There was a note due and payable at the bank on the next day and he had no money with which to pay it. He thought of that and of what he could and would say to the banker to induce him to renew the note. Then he thought about the trouble he was having with the foreman at his factory. The man wanted a larger wage and he was trying to think whether or not, if he did not give it to him, the man would quit and put him to the trouble of finding another foreman.

When he slept he did not sleep lightly and no fancies visited his dreams. What should have been a sweet time of renewal became a heavy time filled with distorted dreams.

And then, after the doors of Natalie’s body had been swung open for him, he became aware. After that evening when they had knelt together in the darkness it was hard for him to go home in the evening and sit at table with his wife and daughter. “Well, I can’t do it,” he told himself and ate his evening meal at a restaurant down town. He stayed about, walking in unfrequented streets, talking or in silence beside Natalie and then went with her to her own house, far out at the edge of town. People saw them walking thus together and, as there was no effort at concealment, there was a blaze of talk in the town.

When John Webster went home to his own house his wife and daughter had already gone to bed. “I am very busy at the shop. Do not expect to see much of me for a time,” he had said to his wife on the morning after he had told Natalie of his love.

He did not intend to stay on in the washing machine business or to continue his married life. What he would do he did not quite know. He would live with Natalie for one thing. The time had come to do that.

He had spoken of it to Natalie on that first evening of their intimacy. On that evening, after the others were all gone they went to walk together. As they went through the streets people in the houses were sitting down to the evening meal, but the man and woman did not think of eating.

John Webster’s tongue had become loosened and he did a great deal of talking to which Natalie listened in silence. Of the people of the town those he did not know all became romantic figures in his awaking mind. His fancy wanted to play about them and he let it. They went along a residence street toward the open country beyond and he kept speaking of the people in the houses. “Now Natalie, my woman, you see all these houses here,” he said waving his arms to right and left, “well, what do you and I know about what goes on back of these walls?” He kept taking deep breaths as he went along, just as he had done back there at the office when he had run across the room to kneel at Natalie’s feet. The little voices within him were still talking. He had been something like this sometimes when he was a boy, but no one had ever understood the riotous play of his fancy and in time he had come to think that letting his fancy go was all foolishness. Then when he was a young man and had married there had come a sharp new flare-up of the fanciful life, but then it had been frozen in him by the fear and the vulgarity that is born of fears. Now it was playing madly. “Now you see, Natalie,” he cried, stopping on the sidewalk to take hold of her two hands and swinging them madly back and forth, “now you see, here’s how it is. These houses along here look like just ordinary houses, such as you and I live in, but they aren’t like that at all. The outer walls are, you see, just things stuck up, like scenery on a stage. A breath can blow the walls down or an outburst of flames can consume them all in an hour. I’ll bet you what--I’ll bet that what you think is that the people back of the walls of these houses are just ordinary people. They aren’t at all. You’re all wrong about that, Natalie, my love. The women in the rooms back of these walls are all fair sweet women and you should just go into the rooms. They are hung with beautiful pictures and tapestry and the women have jewels on their hands and in their hair.

“And so the men and women live together in their houses and there are no good people, only beautiful ones, and children are born and their fancies are allowed to riot all over the place, and no one takes himself too seriously and thinks the whole outcome of human life depends upon himself, and people go out of these houses to work in the morning and come back at night and where they get all the rich comforts of life they have I can’t make out. It’s because there is really such a rich abundance of everything in the world somewhere and they have found out about it, I suppose.”

On their first evening together he and Natalie had walked beyond the town and had got into a country road. They went along this for a mile and then turned into a little side road. There was a great tree growing beside the road and they went to lean against it, standing side by side in silence.

It was after they had kissed that he told Natalie of his plans. “There are three or four thousand dollars in the bank and the factory is worth thirty or forty thousand more. I don’t know how much it is worth, perhaps nothing at all.

“At any rate I’ll take a thousand dollars and go away with you. I suppose I’ll leave some kind of papers making over the ownership of the place to my wife and daughter. That would, I suppose, be the thing to do.

“Then I’ll have to talk to my daughter, make her understand what I’m doing and why. Well, I hardly know whether it is possible to make her understand, but I’ll have to try. I’ll have to try to say something that will stay in her mind so that she in her turn may learn to live and not close and lock the doors of her being as my own doors have been locked. It may take, you see, two or three weeks to think out what I have to say and how to say it. My daughter Jane knows nothing. She is an American middle-class girl and I have helped to make her that. She is a virgin and that, I am afraid, Natalie, you do not understand. The gods have robbed you of your virginity or perhaps it was your old mother, drunk and calling you names, eh? That might have been a help to you. You wanted so much to have some sweet clean thing happen to you, to something deep down in you, that you went about with the doors of your being opened, eh? They did not have to be torn open. Virginity and respectability had not fastened them with bolts and locks. Your mother must quite have killed all notion of respectability in your family, eh Natalie? It is the most wonderful thing in the world to love you and to know that there is something in you that would make the notion of being cheap and second-class impossible to your lover. O, my Natalie, you are a woman strong to be loved.”

Natalie did not answer, perhaps did not understand this outpouring of words from him, and John Webster stopped talking and moved about so that he stood directly facing her. They were of about the same height and when he had come close they looked directly into each other’s faces. He put up his hands so that they lay on her cheeks and for a long time they stood thus, without words, looking at each other as though they could neither of them get enough of the sight of the face of the other. A late moon came up presently and they moved instinctively out from under the shadow of the tree and went into a field. They kept moving slowly along, stopping constantly and standing thus, with his hands on her cheeks. Her body began to tremble and the tears ran from her eyes. Then he laid her down upon the grass. It was an experience with a woman new in his life. After their first love-making and when their passions were spent she seemed more beautiful to him than before.

* * * * *

He stood within the door of his own house and it was late at night. One did not breathe any too well within those walls. He had a desire to creep through the house, to be unheard, and was thankful when he had got to his own room and had undressed and got into bed without being spoken to.

In bed he lay with eyes open listening to the night noises from without the house. They were not very plain. He had forgotten to open the window. When he had done that a low humming sound arose. The first frost had not come yet and the night was warm. In the garden owned by the German, in the grass in his own back-yard, in the branches of the trees along the streets and far off in the country there was life abundant.

Perhaps Natalie would have a child. It did not matter. They would go away together, live together in some distant place. Now Natalie must be at home in her mother’s house and she would also be lying awake. She would be taking deep breaths of the night air. He did that himself.

One could think of her and could also think of the people closer about. There was the German who lived next door. By turning his head he could see faintly the walls of the German’s house. His neighbor had a wife, a son and two daughters. Perhaps now they were all asleep. In fancy he went into his neighbor’s house, went softly from room to room through the house. There was the old man sleeping beside his wife and in another room the son who had drawn up his legs so that he lay in a little ball. He was a pale slender young man. “Perhaps he has indigestion,” whispered John Webster’s fancy. In another room the two daughters lay in two beds set closely together. One could just pass between them. They had been whispering to each other before they slept, perhaps of the lover they hoped would come, some time in the future. He stood so close to them that he could have touched their cheeks with his out-stretched fingers. He wondered why it had happened that he had become Natalie’s lover instead of the lover of one of these girls. “That could have happened. I could have loved either of them had she opened the doors of herself as Natalie has done.”

Loving Natalie did not preclude the possibility of his loving another, perhaps many others. “A rich man might have many marriages,” he thought. It was certain that the possibility of human relationship had not even been tapped yet. Something had stood in the way of a sufficiently broad acceptance of life. One had to accept oneself and the others before one could love.

* * * * *

As for himself he had to accept now his wife and daughter, draw close to them for a little before he went away with Natalie. It was a difficult thing to think about. He lay with wide-open eyes in his bed and tried to send his fancy into his wife’s room. He could not do it. His fancy could go into his daughter’s room and look at her lying asleep in her bed, but with his wife it was different. Something within him drew back. “Not now. Do not try it. It is not permitted. If she is ever to have a lover now it must be another,” a voice within him said.

“Did she do something that has destroyed the possibility of that or did I?” he asked himself sitting up in bed. There was no doubt a human relationship had been spoiled--messed. “It is not permitted. It is not permitted to make a mess on the floor of the temple,” the answering voice within said sternly.

To John Webster it seemed that the voices in the room spoke so loudly that as he lay down again and tried to sleep he was a little surprised that they had not awakened from their sleep the others in the house.

II

Into the air of the Webster house and into the air also of John Webster’s office and factory a new element had come. On all sides of him there was a straining at something within. When he was not alone or in the company of Natalie he no longer breathed freely. “You have done us an injury. You are doing us an injury,” everyone else seemed to be saying.

He wondered about that, tried to think about it. The presence of Natalie gave him each day a breathing time. When he sat beside her in the office he breathed freely, the tight thing within him relaxed. It was because she was simple and straightforward. She said little, but her eyes spoke often. “It’s all right. I love you. I am not afraid to love you,” her eyes said.

However he thought constantly of the others. The bookkeeper refused to look into his eyes or spoke with a new and elaborate politeness. He had already got into the habit of discussing the matter of John Webster and Natalie’s affair every evening with his wife. In the presence of his employer he now felt self-conscious and it was the same with the two older women in the office. As he passed through the office the younger of the three still sometimes looked up and smiled at him.

It was no doubt a fact that no man could do a quite isolated thing in the modern world of men. Sometimes when John Webster was walking homeward late at night, after having spent some hours with Natalie, he stopped and looked about him. The street was deserted and the lights had been put out in many of the houses. He raised his two arms and looked at them. They had recently held a woman, tightly, tightly, and the woman was not the one with whom he had lived for so many years, but a new woman he had found. His arms had held her tightly and her arms had held him. There had been joy in that. Joy had run through their two bodies during the long embrace. They had breathed deeply. Had the breath blown out of their lungs poisoned the air others had to breathe? As to the woman, who was called his wife--she had wanted no such embraces, or, had she wanted them, had been unable to take or give. A notion came to him. “If you love in a loveless world you face others with the sin of not loving,” he thought.

The streets lined with houses in which people lived were dark. It was past eleven o’clock, but there was no need to hurry home. When he got into bed he could not sleep. “It would be better just to walk about for an hour yet,” he decided and when he came to the corner that led into his own street did not turn, but kept on, going far out to the edge of town and back. His feet made a sharp sound on the stone sidewalks. Sometimes he met a man homeward bound and as they passed the man looked at him with surprise and something like distrust in his eyes. He walked past and then turned to look back. “What are you doing abroad? Why aren’t you at home and in bed with your wife?” the man seemed to be asking.

What was the man really thinking? Was there much thinking going on in all the dark houses along the street or did people simply go into them to eat and sleep as he had always gone into his own house? In fancy he got a quick vision of many people lying in beds stuck high in the air. The walls of the houses had receded from them.

Once, during the year before, there had been a fire in a house on his own street and the front wall of the house had fallen down. When the fire was put out one walked past in the street and there, laid bare to the public gaze, were two upstairs rooms in which people had lived for many years. Everything was a little burned and charred, but quite intact. In each room there were a bed, one or two chairs, a square piece of furniture with drawers in which shirts or dresses could be kept, and at the side of the room a closet for other clothes.

The house had quite burned out below and the stairway had been destroyed. When the fire broke out the people must have fled from the rooms like frightened and disturbed insects. One of the rooms had been occupied by a man and woman. There was a dress lying on the floor and a pair of half-burned trousers flung over the back of a chair, while in the second room, evidently occupied by a woman, there were no signs of male attire. The place had made John Webster think of his own married life. “It is as it might have been with us had my wife and I not quit sleeping together. That might have been our room with the room of our daughter Jane beside it,” he had thought on the morning after the fire as he walked past and stopped with other curious idlers to gaze up at the scene above.

And now, as he walked alone in the sleeping streets of his town his imagination succeeded in stripping all the walls from all the houses and he walked as in some strange city of the dead. That his imagination could so flame up, running along whole streets of houses and wiping out walls as a wind shakes the branches of the trees, was a new and living wonder to himself. “A life-giving thing has been given to me. For many years I have been dead and now I am alive,” he thought. To give the fuller play to his fancy he got off the sidewalk and walked in the centre of the street. The houses lay before him all silent and the late moon had appeared and made black pools under the trees. The houses stripped of their walls were on either side of him.

In the houses the people were sleeping in their beds. How many bodies lying and sleeping close together, babes asleep in cribs, young boys sleeping sometimes two or three in a single bed, young women asleep with their hair fallen down about their faces.

As they slept they dreamed. Of what did they dream? He had a great desire that what had happened to himself and Natalie should happen to all of them. The love-making in the field had after all been but a symbol of something more filled with meaning than the mere act of two bodies embracing, the passage of the seeds of life from one body to another.

A great hope flared up in him. “A time will come when love like a sheet of fire will run through the towns and cities. It will tear walls away. It will destroy ugly houses. It will tear ugly clothes off the bodies of men and women. They will build anew and build beautifully,” he declared aloud. As he walked and talked thus he felt suddenly like a young prophet come out of some far strange clean land to visit with the blessing of his presence the people of the street. He stopped and putting his hands to his head laughed loudly at the picture he had made of himself. “You would think I was another John the Baptist who has been living in a wilderness on locusts and wild honey instead of a washing machine manufacturer in a Wisconsin town,” he thought. A window to one of the houses was opened and he heard low voices talking. “Well, I’d better be going home before they lock me up for a crazy man,” he thought, getting out of the road and turning out of the street at a nearby corner.

* * * * *

At the office, during the day, there were no such periods of exhilaration. There only Natalie seemed quite in control of the situation. “She has stout legs and strong feet. She knows how to stand her ground,” John Webster thought as he sat at his desk and looked across at her sitting at her desk.

She was not insensible to what was going on about her. Sometimes when he looked suddenly up at her and when she did not know he was looking he saw something that convinced him her hours alone were not now very happy. There was a tightening about the eyes. No doubt she had her own little hell to face.

Still she went about her work every day outwardly unperturbed. “That old Irish woman, with her temper, her drinking, and her love of loud picturesque profanity has managed to put her daughter through a course of sprouts,” he decided. It was well Natalie was so level-headed. “The Lord knows she and I may need all of her level-headedness before we are through with our lives,” he decided. There was something in women, a kind of power, few men understood. They could stand the gaff. Now Natalie did his work and her own too. When a letter came she answered it and when there was something to be decided she made the decision. Sometimes she looked across at him as though to say, “Your job, the clearing up you will still have to do in your own house, will be more difficult than anything I shall have to face. You let me attend to these minor details of our life now. To do that makes the time of waiting less difficult for me.”

She did not say anything of the sort in words, being one not given to words, but there was always something in her eyes that made him understand what she wanted to say.

After that first love-making in the field they were not lovers again while they remained in the Wisconsin town although every evening they went to walk together. After dining at her mother’s house where she had to pass under the questioning eyes of her sister the school teacher, also a silent woman, and to withstand a fiery outbreak from her mother who came to the door to shout questions after her down the street, Natalie came back along the railroad tracks to find John Webster waiting for her in the darkness by the office door. Then they walked boldly through the streets and went into the country and, when they had got upon a country road, went hand in hand, for the most part in silence.

* * * * *

And from day to day, in the office and in the Webster household the feeling of tenseness grew more and more pronounced.

In the house, when he had come in late at night and had crept up to his room, he had a sense of the fact that both his wife and daughter were lying awake, thinking of him, wondering about him, wondering what strange thing had happened to make him suddenly a new man. From what he had seen in their eyes in the day-time he knew that they had both became suddenly aware of him. Now he was no longer the mere bread-winner, the man who goes in and out of his house as a work horse goes in and out of a stable. Now, as he lay in his bed and behind the two walls of his room and the two closed doors, voices were awakening within them, little fearful voices. His mind had got into the habit of thinking of walls and doors. “Some night the walls will fall down and the two doors will open. I must be ready for the time when that happens,” he thought.

His wife was one who, when she was excited, resentful, or angry, sank herself into an ocean of silence. Perhaps the whole town knew of his walking about in the evening with Natalie Swartz. Had news of it come to his wife she would not have spoken of the matter to her daughter. There would be just a dense kind of silence in the house and the daughter would know there was something the matter. There had been such times before. The daughter would have become frightened, perhaps it would be just at bottom the fear of change, that something was about to happen that would disturb the steady even passage of days.

One noon, during the second week after the love-making with Natalie, he walked toward the centre of town, intending to go into a restaurant and eat lunch, but instead walked straight ahead down the tracks for nearly a mile. Then, not knowing exactly what impulse had led him, he went back to the office. Natalie and all the others except the youngest of the three women had gone out. Perhaps the air of the place had become so heavy with unexpressed thoughts and feelings that none of them wanted to stay there when they were not working. The day was bright and warm, a golden and red Wisconsin day of early October.

He walked into the inner office, stood a moment looking vaguely about and then came out again. The young woman sitting there arose. Was she going to say something to him about the affair with Natalie? He also stopped and stood looking at her. She was a small woman with a sweet womanly mouth, gray eyes, and with a kind of tiredness expressing itself in her whole being. What did she want? Did she want him to go ahead with the love affair with Natalie, of which she no doubt knew, or did she want him to stop? “It would be dreadful if she should try to speak about it,” he thought and then at once, for some unexplainable reason, knew she would not do that.

They stood for a moment looking into each other’s eyes and the look was like a kind of love-making too. It was very strange and the moment would afterward give him much to think about. In the future no doubt his life was to be filled with many thoughts. There was this woman he did not know at all, standing before him, and in their own way he and she were being lovers too. Had the thing not happened between himself and Natalie so recently, had he not still been filled with that, something of the sort might well have happened between him and this woman.

In reality the matter of the two people standing thus and looking at each other occupied but a moment. Then she sat down, a little confused, and he went quickly out.

There was a kind of joy in him now. “There is love abundant in the world. It may take many roads to expression. The woman in there is hungry for love and there is something fine and generous about her. She knows Natalie and I love and she has, in some obscure way I can’t yet understand, given herself to that until it has become almost a physical experience with her too. There are a thousand things in life no one rightly understands. Love has as many branches as a tree.”

He went up into a business street of the town and turned into a section with which he was not very familiar. He was passing a little store, near a Catholic church, such a store as is patronized by devout Catholics and in which are sold figures of the Christ on the cross, the Christ lying at the foot of the cross with His bleeding wounds, the Virgin standing with arms crossed looking demurely down, blessed candles, candlesticks, and the like. For a moment he stood before the store window looking at the figures displayed and then went in and bought a small framed picture of the Virgin, a supply of yellow candles, and two glass candlesticks, made in the shape of crosses and with little gilded figures of the Christ on the cross upon them.

To tell the truth the figure of the Virgin looked not unlike Natalie. There was a kind of quiet strength in her. She stood, holding a lily in her right hand and the thumb and first finger of her left hand touched lightly a great heart pinned to her breast by a dagger. Across the heart was a wreath of five red roses.

John Webster stood for a moment looking into the Virgin’s eyes and then bought the things and hurried out of the store. Then he took a street car and went to his own house. His wife and daughter were out and he went up into his own room and put the packages in a closet. When he came downstairs the servant Katherine was waiting for him. “May I get you something to eat again to-day?” she asked and smiled.

* * * * *

He did not stay to have lunch, but it was fine, being asked to stay. At any rate she had remembered the day when she had stood near him while he ate. He had liked being alone with her that day. Perhaps she had felt the same thing and had liked being with him.

He walked straight out of town and got into a country road and presently turned off the road into a small wood. For two hours he sat on a log looking at the trees now flaming with color. The sun shone brightly and after a time the squirrels and birds became less conscious of his presence and the animal and bird life that had been stilled by his coming was renewed.

It was the afternoon after the night of his walking in the streets between the rows of houses the walls of which had been torn away by his fancy. “I shall tell Natalie of that to-night and I shall tell her also of what I intend to do at home there in my room. I shall tell her and she will say nothing. She is a strange one. When she does not understand she believes. There is something in her that accepts life as these trees do,” he thought.

III

A strange kind of nightly ceremony was begun in John Webster’s corner room on the second floor of his house. When he had come into the house he went softly upstairs and into his own room. Then he took off all his clothes and hung them in a closet. When he was quite nude he got out the little picture of the Virgin and set it up on a kind of dresser that stood in a corner between the two windows. On the dresser he also placed the two candlesticks with the Christ on the cross on them and putting two of the yellow candles in them lighted the candles.

As he had undressed in the darkness he did not see the room or himself until he saw by the light of the candles. Then he began to walk back and forth, thinking such thoughts as came into his head.

“I have no doubt I am insane,” he told himself, “but as long as I am it might as well be a purposeful insanity. I haven’t been liking this room or the clothes I wear. Now I have taken the clothes off and perhaps I can in some way purify the room a bit. As for my walking about in the streets and letting my fancy play over many people in their houses, that will be all right in its turn too, but at present my problem lies in this house. There have been many years of stupid living in the house and in this room. Now I shall keep up this ceremony; making myself nude and walking up and down here before the Virgin, until neither my wife nor my daughter can keep up her silence. They will break in here some night quite suddenly and then I will say what I have to say before I go away with Natalie.”

“As for you, my Virgin, I dare say I shall not offend you,” he said aloud, turning and bowing to the woman within her frame. She looked steadily at him as Natalie might have looked and he kept smiling at her. It seemed quite clear to him now what his course in life was to be. He reasoned it all out slowly. In a way he did not, at the time, need much sleep. Just letting go of himself, as he was doing, was a kind of resting.

In the meantime he walked naked and with bare feet up and down the room trying to plan out his future life. “I accept the notion that I am at present insane and only hope I shall remain so,” he told himself. After all, it was quite apparent that the sane people about were not getting such joy out of life as himself. There was this matter of his having brought the Virgin into his own naked presence and having set her up under the candles. For one thing the candles spread a soft glowing light through the room. The clothes he habitually wore and that he had learned to dislike because they had been made not for himself, but for some impersonal being, in some clothing factory, were now hung away, out of sight in the closet. “The gods have been good to me. I am not very young any more, but for some reason I have not let my body get fat or gross,” he thought going into the circle of candle-light and looking long and earnestly at himself.

In the future and after the nights when his walking thus back and forth in the room had forced itself upon the attention of his wife and daughter until they were compelled to break in upon him, he would take Natalie with him and go away. He had provided himself with a little money, enough so that they could live for a few months. The rest would be left to his wife and daughter. After he and Natalie had got clear of the town they would go off somewhere, perhaps to the West. Then they would settle down somewhere and work for their living.

What he himself wanted, more than anything else, was to give way to the impulses within himself. “It must have been that, when I was a boy and my imagination played madly over all the life about me, I was intended to be something other than the dull clod I have been all these years. In Natalie’s presence, as in the presence of a tree or a field, I can be myself. I dare say I shall have to be a little careful sometimes as I do not want to be declared insane and locked up somewhere, but Natalie will help me in that. In a way my letting go of myself will be an expression for both of us. In her own way she also has been locked within a prison. Walls have been erected about her too.

“It may just be, you see, that there is something of the poet in me and Natalie should have a poet for a lover.

“The truth is that I shall be at the job of in some way bringing grace and meaning into my life. It must be after all that it is for something of the sort life is intended.

“In reality it would not be such a bad thing if, in the few years of life I have left, I accomplish nothing of importance. When one comes right down to it accomplishment is not the vital thing in a life.

“As things are now, here in this town and in all the other towns and cities I have ever been in, things are a good deal in a muddle. Everywhere lives are lived without purpose. Men and women either spend their lives going in and out of the doors of houses and factories or they own houses and factories and they live their lives and find themselves at last facing death and the end of life without having lived at all.”

He kept smiling at himself and his own thoughts as he walked up and down the room and occasionally he stopped walking and made an elaborate bow to the Virgin. “I hope you are a true virgin,” he said. “I brought you into this room and into the presence of my nude body because I thought you would be that. You see, being a virgin, you cannot have anything but pure thoughts.”

IV

Quite often, during the day-time, and after the time when the nightly ceremony in his room began, John Webster had moments of fright. “Suppose,” he thought, “my wife and daughter should look through the keyhole into my room some night, and should decide to have me locked up instead of coming in here and giving me the chance I want to talk with them. As the matter stands I cannot carry out my plans unless I can get the two of them into the room without asking them to come.”

He had a keen sense of the fact that what was to transpire in his room would be terrible for his wife. Perhaps she would not be able to stand it. A streak of cruelty had developed in him. In the day-time now he seldom went to his office and when he did, stayed but a few minutes. Every day he took a long walk in the country, sat under the trees, wandered in woodland paths and in the evening walked in silence beside Natalie, also in the country. The days marched past in quiet fall splendor. There was a kind of sweet new responsibility in just being alive when one felt so alive.

One day he climbed a little hill from the top of which he could see, off across fields, the factory chimneys of his town. A soft haze lay over woodland and fields. The voices within him did not riot now, but chattered softly.

As for his daughter, the thing to be done was to startle her, if possible, into a realization of the fact of life. “I owe her that,” he thought. “Even though the thing that must happen will be terribly hard for her mother it may bring life to Jane. In the end the dead must surrender their places in life to the living. When long ago, I went to bed of that woman, who is my Jane’s mother, I took a certain responsibility upon myself. The going to bed of her may not have been the most lovely thing in the world, as it turned out, but it is a thing that was done and the result is this child, who is now no longer a child, but who has become in her physical life a woman. Having helped to give her this physical life I have now to try at least to give her this other, this inner life also.”

He looked down across the fields toward the town. When the job he had yet to do was done he would go away and spend the rest of his life moving about among people, looking at people, thinking of them and their lives. Perhaps he would become a writer. That would be as it turned out.

He got up from his seat on the grass at the top of the hill and went down along a road that would lead back to town and to his evening’s walk with Natalie. Evening would be coming on soon now. “I’ll never preach at anyone, anyhow. If by chance I do ever become a writer I’ll only try to tell people what I have seen and heard in life and besides that I’ll spend my time walking up and down, looking and listening,” he thought.