BOOK FOUR

I

The spirit of death was no doubt lurking in the Webster house. Jane Webster felt its presence. She had suddenly been made aware of the possibility of feeling, within herself, many unspoken, unannounced things. When her father had put his hand on her arm and had pushed her back into the darkness behind the closed door of her own room, she had gone directly to her bed and had thrown herself down on top of the bed covers. Now she lay clutching the little stone he had given her. How glad she was to have that something to clutch. Her fingers pressed against it so that it had already become imbedded in the flesh of her palm. If her life had been, until this evening, a quiet river, running down through fields toward the sea of life, it would be that no more. Now the river had come into a dark stony country. It ran now along rocky passageways, between high dark cliffs. What things might not now happen to her on the morrow, on the day after to-morrow. Her father was going away with a strange woman. There would be a scandal in the town. All her young women and men friends would look at her with a question in their eyes. Perhaps they would pity her. Her spirit rose up and the thought made her squirm with anger. It was odd, but it was nevertheless true, that she had no particular feeling of sympathy for her mother. Her father had managed to bring himself close to her. In a queer way she understood what he was going to do, why he was doing it. She kept seeing the naked figure of the man striding up and down before her. There had always, since she could remember, been in her a kind of curiosity regarding men’s bodies.

Once or twice, with young girls she knew well, there had been talk of the matter, guarded, half-frightened talk. “A man was so and so. It was quite dreadful what happened when one grew up and got married.” One of the girls had seen something. There was a man lived near her, on the same street, and he wasn’t always careful about pulling the shade to his bedroom window. One summer afternoon the girl was in her room, lying on her bed, and the man came into his room and took off all his clothes. He was up to some foolishness. There was a looking glass and he pranced up and down before it. He must have been pretending he was fighting the man he saw reflected in the glass as he kept advancing and receding and making the funniest movements with his body and arms. He lunged and scowled and struck out with his fists and then jumped back, as though the man in the glass had struck at him.

The girl on the bed had seen everything, all the man’s body. At first she thought she would run out of the room and then she made up her mind to stay. Well, she didn’t want her mother to know what she had seen so she got up softly and crept along the floor to lock the door, so that her mother or a servant could not come suddenly in. What the girl had thought was that one had to find out things sometime and might as well take the chance that offered. It was dreadful and she had been unable to sleep for two or three nights after it happened but just the same she was glad she had looked. One couldn’t always be a ninny and not know anything.

* * * * *

As Jane Webster lay on the bed with her fingers pressed down upon the stone her father had given her, the girl, talking of the naked man she had seen in the next house, seemed very young and unsophisticated. She felt a kind of contempt for her. As for herself, she had been in the actual presence of a naked man and the man had been seated beside her and had put his arm about her. His hands had actually touched the flesh of her own body. In the future, whatever happened, men would not be to her as they had been, and as they were to the young women who had been her friends. Now she would know about men as she hadn’t before and would not be afraid of them. Of that she was glad. Her father’s going away with a strange woman and the scandal that would no doubt spring up in the town might ruin the quiet security in which she had always lived but there had been much gained. Now the river that was her life was running through dark passageways. It would perhaps be plunged down over sharp jutting rocks.

It is, to be sure, false to credit Jane Webster with such definite thoughts although later, when she remembered that evening her own mind would begin to build a tower of romance about it. She lay on her bed clutching the little stone and was frightened but at the same time strangely glad.

Something had been torn open, perhaps the door out into life for her. There was a feeling of death in the Webster house but in her was a new sense of life and a glad new feeling of being unafraid of life.

* * * * *

Her father went down the stairway and into the dark hallway below, carrying his bag and thinking of death too.

Now there was no end to the elaboration of thinking that went on within John Webster. In the future he would be a weaver, weaving designs out of threads of thought. Death was a thing, like life, that came to people suddenly, that flashed in upon them. There were always the two figures walking through towns and cities, going in and out of houses, in and out of factories and stores, visiting lonely farmhouses at night, walking in the light of day along gay city streets, getting on and off trains, always on the move, appearing before people at the most unexpected moments. It might be somewhat difficult for a man to learn to go in and out of other people but for the two gods, Life and Death, there was no difficulty.

There was a deep well within every man and woman and when Life came in at the door of the house, that was the body, it reached down and tore the heavy iron lid off the well. Dark hidden things, festering in the well, came out and found expression for themselves, and the miracle was that, expressed, they became often very beautiful. There was a cleansing, a strange sort of renewal within the house of the man or woman when the god Life had come in.

As for Death and his entrance, that was another matter. Death had many strange tricks to play on people too. Sometimes he let their bodies live for a long time while he satisfied himself with merely clamping the lid down on the well within. It was as though he had said, “Well, there is no great hurry about physical death. That will come as an inevitable thing in its time. There is a much more ironic and subtle game to be played against my opponent Life. I will fill the cities with the damp fetid smell of death while the very dead think they are still alive. As for myself, I am the crafty one. I am like a great and subtile king, every one serves, while he talks only of freedom and leads his subjects to think it is he who serves, instead of themselves. I am like a great general, having always at his command, ready to spring to arms at the least sign from himself, a vast army of men.”

* * * * *

John Webster went along the dark hallway below to the door leading into the street and had put his hand on the knob of the outer door when, instead of passing directly out, he stopped and reflected a moment. He was somewhat vain of the thoughts he had been having. “Perhaps I am a poet. Perhaps it’s only the poet who manages to keep the lid off the well within and to keep alive up to the last minute before his body has become worn out and he must get out of it,” he thought.

His vain mood passed and he turned and looked with a curious awareness along the hallway. At the moment he was much like an animal, moving in a dark wood, who, without hearing anything, is nevertheless aware there is life stirring, perhaps waiting for him, near at hand. Could that be the figure of a woman he saw, sitting within a few feet of him? There was a small old-fashioned hat-rack in the hallway near the front door and the lower part of it made a kind of seat on which one might sit.

One might fancy there was a woman sitting quietly there. She also had a bag packed and it was sitting on the floor beside her.

The old Harry! John Webster was a little startled. Was his fancy getting a little out of hand? There could be no doubt that there was a woman sitting there, within a few feet of where he stood, with the knob of the door in his hand.

He was tempted to put out his hand and see if he could touch the woman’s face. He had been thinking of the two gods, Life and Death. No doubt an illusion had been created in his mind. There was this deep sense of a presence, sitting silently there, on the lower part of the hat-rack. He stepped a little nearer and a shiver ran through his body. There was a dark mass, making crudely the outlines of a human body, and as he stood looking it seemed to him that a face began to be more and more sharply outlined. The face, like the faces of two other women that had, at important and unexpected moments in his life, floated up before him, the face of a young naked girl on a bed in the long ago, the face of Natalie Swartz, seen in the darkness of a field at night, as he lay beside her--these faces had seemed to float up to him as though coming toward him out of the deep waters of a sea.

He had, no doubt, let himself become a little overwrought. One did not step lightly along the road he had been travelling. He had dared set out upon the road of lives and had tried to take others with him. No doubt he had been more worked up and excited than he had realized.

He put out his hand softly and touched the face that now appeared to come floating toward him out of darkness. Then he sprang back, striking his head against the opposite wall of the hallway. His fingers had encountered warm flesh. There was a terrific sensation of something whirling within his brain. Had he gone quite insane? A comforting thought came, flashing across the confusion of his mind.

“Katherine,” he said in a loud voice. It was a kind of call out of himself.

“Yes,” a woman’s voice answered quietly, “I wasn’t going to let you go away without saying good bye.”

The woman, who had for so many years been a servant in his house, explained her presence there in the darkness. “I’m sorry I startled you,” she said. “I was just going to speak. You are going away and so am I. I’ve got everything packed and ready. I went up the stairs to-night and heard you say you were leaving so I came down and did my own packing. It didn’t take me long. I didn’t have many things to pack.”

John Webster opened the front door and asked her to come outside with him and for a few minutes they stood talking together on the steps that led down from the front porch.

Outside the house he felt better. There was a kind of weakness, following the fright inside, and for a moment he sat on the steps while she stood waiting. Then the weakness passed and he arose. The night was clear and dark. He breathed deeply and there was a great relief in the thought that he would never again go through the door out of which he had just come. He felt very young and strong. Soon now, there would be a streak of light showing in the eastern sky. When he had got Natalie and they had climbed aboard a train they would sit in the day coach on the side that looked toward the East. It would be sweet to see the new day come. His fancy ran ahead of his body and he saw himself and the woman sitting together in the train. They would come into the lighted day coach from the darkness outside, just before dawn came. In the day coach people would have been asleep, folded up in the seats, looking uncomfortable and tired. The air would be heavy with the stale heaviness of breathing people confined in a close place. There would be the heavy acrid smell of clothes, that had for a long time absorbed the acids thrown off by bodies. He and Natalie would take the train as far as Chicago and get off there. Perhaps they would get on another train at once. It might be that they would stay in Chicago for a day or two. There would be plans to make, long hours of talk perhaps. There was a new life to begin now. He himself had to think what he wanted to do with his days. It was odd. He and Natalie had made no plans beyond getting on a train. Now for the first time his fancy tried to creep out beyond that moment, to penetrate into the future.

It was fine that the night had turned out clear. One would hate to set out, plodding off to the railroad station in the rain. How bright the stars were in the early morning hours. Now Katherine was talking. It would be well to listen to what she had to say.

She was telling him, with a kind of brutal frankness, that she did not like Mrs. Webster, had never liked her, and that she had only stayed in the house all these years as a servant because of himself.

He turned to look at her and her eyes were looking directly into his. They were standing very close together, almost as close as lovers might have stood, and, in the uncertain light, her eyes were strangely like Natalie’s. In the darkness they appeared to glow as Natalie’s eyes had seemed to glow on that night when he had lain with her in the field.

Was it only a chance that this new sense he had, of being able to refresh and rebuild himself by loving others, by going in and out at the open doors of the houses of others, had come to him through Natalie instead of through this woman Katherine? “Huh, it’s marriage, every one is seeking marriage, that’s what they are up to, seeking marriages,” he told himself. There was something quiet and fine and strong in Katherine as in Natalie. Perhaps had he, at some moment, during all his dead unconscious years of living in the same house with her, but happened to have been alone with Katherine in a room, and had the doors to his own being opened at that moment, something might have transpired between himself and this woman that would have started within just such another revolution as the one through which he had been passing.

“That was possible too,” he decided. “People would gain a lot if they could but learn to keep that thought in mind,” he thought. His fancy played with the notion for a moment. One would walk through towns and cities, in and out of houses, into and out of the presence of people with a new feeling of respect if the notion should once get fixed in people’s minds that, at any moment, anywhere, one was likely to come upon the one who carried before him as on a golden tray, the gift of life and the consciousness of life for his beloved. Well, there was a picture to be borne in mind, a picture of a land and a people, cleanly arrayed, a people bearing gifts, a people who had learned the secret and the beauty of bestowing unasking love. Such a people would inevitably keep their own persons clean and well arrayed. They would be colorful people with a certain decorative sense, a certain awareness of themselves in relation to the houses in which they lived and the streets in which they walked. One could not love until one had cleansed and a little beautified one’s own body and mind, until one had opened the doors of one’s being and let in sun and air, until one had freed one’s own mind and fancy.

John Webster fought with himself now, striving to push his own thoughts and fancies into the background. There he was standing before the house in which he had lived all these years so near the woman Katherine and she was now talking to him of her own affairs. It was time now to give heed to her.

She was explaining how that, for a week or more, she had been aware of the fact that there was something wrong in the Webster household. One did not need to have been very sharp to have realized that. It was in the very air one breathed. The air of the house was heavy with it. As for herself, well she had thought John Webster had fallen in love with some woman other than Mrs. Webster. She had once been in love herself and the man she had loved had been killed. She knew about love.

On that night, hearing voices in the room above, she had crept up the stairs. She had not felt it was eavesdropping as she was directly concerned. Long ago when she was in trouble she had heard voices upstairs and she knew that in her hour of trouble John Webster had stood by her.

After that time, long ago, she had made up her mind that as long as he stayed in the house she would stay. One had to work and might as well work as a servant, but she had never felt close to Mrs. Webster. When one was a servant one sometimes had difficulty enough keeping up one’s self-respect and the only way it could be done was by working for some one who also had self-respect. That was something few people seemed to understand. They thought people worked for money. As a matter of fact no one really worked for money. People only thought they did, maybe. To do so was to be a slave and she, Katherine, was no slave. She had money saved and besides she had a brother who owned a farm in Minnesota, who had several times written asking her to come and live with him. She intended to go there now but would not live in her brother’s house. He was married and she did not intend to push herself into his household. As a matter of fact she would probably take the money she had saved and buy a small farm of her own.

“Anyway you’re going away from this house to-night. I heard you say you were going with another woman and I thought I would go too,” she said.

She became silent and stood looking at John Webster who was also looking at her, who was at the moment absorbed in contemplation of her. In the uncertain light her face had become the face of a young girl. There was something about her face, at the moment, that suggested to his mind his daughter’s face as she had looked at him in the dim light of the candles in the room upstairs. It was like that and at the same time it was like Natalie’s face, as Natalie’s face had been that afternoon in the office when he and she had first come close to each other, and as it had looked that other night in the darkness of the field.

One might so easily become confused. “It’s all right about your going away, Katherine,” he said aloud. “You know about that, what I mean is that you know what you want to do.”

He stood in silence a moment, thinking. “It’s like this, Katherine,” he began again. “There’s my daughter Jane upstairs. I’m going away but I can’t take her with me any more than you can go live in your brother’s house out there in Minnesota. I’m thinking that for the next two or three days or maybe for several weeks Jane is going to have a pretty hard time.

“There’s no telling what will happen here.” He made a gesture toward the house. “I’m going away but I suppose I’ve been counting on your being here until Jane gets on her own feet a little. You know what I mean, until she gets so she can stand alone.”

* * * * *

On the bed upstairs Jane Webster’s body was becoming more and more rigid and tense as she lay listening to the undercurrent of noises in the house. There was a sound of movement in the next room. A door handle struck against a wall. The boards of the floor creaked. Her mother had been seated on the floor at the foot of the bed. Now she was getting up. She had put her hand on the railing of the bed to pull herself up. The bed moved a little. It moved on its rollers. There was a low rumbling sound. Would her mother come into her room? Jane Webster wanted no more words, no further explanations of what had happened to spoil the marriage between her mother and father. She wanted to be let alone now, to think her own thoughts. The thought that her mother might come into her bedroom frightened her. It was odd, she had now a sharp and distinct sense of the presence of death, in some way connected with her mother’s figure. To have the older woman come into her room now, even though no words were said, would be like having a ghost come. The thought of it happening made little creeping sensations run over the surface of her body. It was as though little soft hairy-legged creatures were running up and down her legs, up and down her back. She moved uneasily in the bed.

Her father had gone downstairs and along the hallway below but she had not heard the front door open and close. She lay listening for the sound of that, expecting it.

The house was silent, too silent. Somewhere, a long way off, there was the loud ticking of a clock. During the year before, when she had graduated from the town high school, her father had given her a small watch. It lay now on a dressing table at the further side of the room. Its rapid ticking was like some small creature, clad in steel shoes and running rapidly and with the shoes clicking together. The little creature was running swiftly along an endless hallway, running with a kind of mad sharp determination but never getting either nearer or further away. Into her mind there came a picture of a small imp-like boy with a wide grinning mouth and with pointed ears that stood straight up from his head like the ears of a fox terrier. Perhaps the notion had got into her head from some picture of Puck remembered from a childhood story book. She was conscious that the sound she heard came from the watch on the dresser but the picture in her mind stayed. The imp-like figure stood with his head and body motionless while his legs worked furiously. He grinned at her and his little steel-clad feet clicked together.

She tried consciously to relax her body. There were hours to be spent, lying thus on the bed, before another day came and she would have to face the problems of the new day. There would be things to face. Her father would have gone off with a strange woman. When she walked in the streets people would be looking at her. “That’s his daughter,” they would be saying. Perhaps, as long as she stayed in town, she could never again walk along streets unaware that she was being looked at, but on the other hand, perhaps she would not stay. There was a kind of exhilaration to be got from thinking of going off to strange places, perhaps to some large city, where she would always be walking about among strangers.

She was getting herself into a state and would have to take herself in hand. There were times, although she was young she had already known such times, when the mind and body seemed to have nothing at all to do with each other. One did things with the body, put it into bed, made it get up and walk about, made the eyes attempt to read pages in some book, did many kinds of things with the body, while the mind went on about its own affairs unheeding. It thought of things, fancied all manner of absurd things, went its own way.

At such times in the past Jane’s mind had a trick of getting her body into the most absurd and startling situations, while it ran wild and free--did as it pleased. She was in bed in her room with the door closed but her fancy took her body out into the street. She went along conscious that all the men she passed were smiling and she kept wondering what was the matter. She hurried home and went to her room only to find that her dress was all unbuttoned at the back. It was terrible. Again she was walking in the street and the white drawers she wore under her skirts had become in some unaccountable way unfastened. There was a young man coming toward her. He was a new young man who had just come to town and had taken a job in a store. Well, he was going to speak to her. He raised his hat and at just that moment the drawers began to creep down along her legs.

Jane Webster lay in her bed and smiled at the memory of the fears that had visited her when, in the past, her mind had got into the trick of running wildly, uncontrolled. In the future things would be somewhat different. She had gone through something and had perhaps much more to go through. The things that had seemed so terrible would perhaps only be amusing now. She felt infinitely older, more sophisticated, than she had been but a few hours earlier.

* * * * *

How strange it was that the house remained so silent. From somewhere, off in the town, there came the sound of horses’ hoofs on a hard road and the rattle of a wagon. A voice shouted, faintly. Some man of the town, a teamster, was setting out early. Perhaps he was going to another town to get a load of goods and haul them back. He must have a long way to go that he started out so early.

She moved her shoulders uneasily. What was the matter with her? Was she afraid in her own bedroom, in her own bed? Of what was she afraid?

She sat suddenly and rigidly upright in bed and then, after a moment, let her body fall backward again. There had come a sharp cry out of the throat of her father, a cry that had gone ringing through the house. “Katherine,” her father’s voice cried. There was just that one word. It was the name of the Webster’s one servant. What did her father want of Katherine? What had happened? Had something terrible happened in the house? Had something happened to her mother?

There was something lurking at the back of Jane Webster’s mind, a thought that did not want to be expressed. It was as yet unable to make its way up out of the hidden parts of herself and into her mind.

The thing she feared, expected, could not have happened yet. Her mother was in the next room. She had just heard her moving about in there.

There was a new sound in the house. Her mother was moving heavily along the hallway just outside the bedroom door. The Websters had turned a small bedroom, at the end of the hall, into a bathroom and her mother was going in there. Her feet fell slowly, flatly, heavily and slowly, on the floor of the hallway. After all her feet only made that strange sound because she had put on her soft bedroom slippers.

Downstairs now, if one listened, one could hear voices saying words softly. That must be her father talking to the servant Katherine. What could he want of her? The front door opened and then closed again. She was afraid. Her body shook with fear. It was terrible of her father to go away and leave her alone in the house. Could he have taken the servant Katherine with him? The thought was unbearable. Why was she so afraid of the thought of being left alone in the house with her mother?

There was a thought lurking within her, deep within her, that did not want to get itself expressed. Something was about to happen to her mother, now, within a few minutes. One did not want to think about it. In the bathroom there were certain bottles, sitting on shelves in a little box-like cabinet. They were labeled poison. One hardly knew why they were kept there but Jane had seen them many times. She kept her toothbrush in a glass tumbler in the cabinet. One supposed the bottles contained medicines of the sort that was only to be taken externally. One did not think much of such matters, was not in the habit of thinking of them.

* * * * *

Now Jane was sitting upright in bed again. She was alone in the house with her mother. Even the servant Katherine had gone away. The house felt altogether cold and lonely, deserted. In the future she would always feel out of place in this house in which she had always lived and she would feel also, in some odd way, separated from her mother. To be alone with her mother would now, perhaps, always make her feel a little lonely.

Could it be that the servant Katherine was the woman with whom her father had planned to go away? That could not be. Katherine was a large heavy woman with big breasts and dark hair that was turning gray. One could not think of her as going away with a man. One thought of her as moving silently about a house and doing housework. Her father would be going away with a younger woman, with a woman not much older than herself.

One should get hold of oneself. When one got excited, let oneself go, the fancy sometimes played one strange and terrible tricks.

Her mother was in the bathroom, standing by the little box-like cabinet. Her face was pale, of a pasty paleness. She had to keep one hand against the wall to keep from falling. Her eyes were gray and heavy. There was no life in them. A heavy cloud-like film had passed over her eyes. It was like a heavy gray cloud over the blue of the sky. Her body rocked back and forth too. At any moment it might fall. But a short time ago, and even amid the strangeness of the adventure in her father’s bedroom, things had seemed suddenly quite clear. She had understood things she had never understood before. Now nothing could be understood. There was a whirlpool of confused thoughts and actions into which one had been plunged.

Now her own body had begun to rock back and forth on the bed. The fingers of her right hand were clutched over the tiny stone her father had given her but she was, at the moment, unaware of the small round hard thing lying in her palm. Her fists kept beating her own body, her own legs and knees. There was something she wanted to do, something it was now right and proper she should do. It was the time now for her to scream, to jump off the bed, to run along the hallway to the bathroom and tear the bathroom door open. Her mother was about to do something one did not passively stand by and see done. She should be crying out at the top of her voice, crying for help. There was a word that should be on her lips now. “Don’t, don’t, don’t,” she should now be screaming. Her lips should now be making the word ring through the house. She should be making the house and the street on which the house stood echo and reëcho with the word.

And she could say nothing. Her lips were sealed. Her body could not move from the bed. It could only rock back and forth on the bed.

Her fancy kept on painting pictures, swift, vivid, terrible pictures.

There was, in the bathroom, in the cabinet, a bottle containing a brown liquid and her mother had put up her hand and had got hold of it. Now she had put it to her lips. She had swallowed all the contents of the bottle.

The liquid in the bottle was brown, of a reddish brownness. Before she had swallowed it her mother had lighted a gas light. It was directly above her head, as she stood facing the cabinet, and the light from it fell down over her face. There were little puffy red bags of flesh under the eyes and they looked strange and almost revolting against the pasty whiteness of the skin. The mouth was open and the lips were gray too. There was a reddish brown stain running down from one corner of the mouth, down over the chin. Some drops of the liquid had fallen on her mother’s white nightgown. Convulsive spasms, as of pain, passed over the pasty white face. The eyes remained closed. There was a trembling quivering movement of the shoulders.

Jane’s body continued to rock back and forth. The flesh of her body quivered too. Her body was rigid. Her fists were closed, tight, tight. Her fists continued to beat down upon her legs. Her mother had managed to get out through the bathroom door and across the little hallway to her own room. She had thrown herself face-downward on her bed in the darkness. Had she thrown herself down or had she fallen? Was she dying now, would she die presently or was she already dead? In the next room, in the room where Jane had seen her father walking naked before her mother and herself, the candles were still burning, under the picture of the Virgin. There was no doubt the older woman would die. In fancy Jane had seen the label on the bottle that contained the brown liquid. It was marked “Poison.” There was the picture of the skull and cross-bones druggists put on such bottles.

And now Jane’s body had quit rocking. Perhaps her mother was dead. Now one tried to begin to think of other things. She became vaguely, but at the same time almost deliciously, conscious of some new element come into the air of the bedroom.

There was a pain in the palm of her right hand. Something hurt her and the sense of hurting was refreshing. It brought life back. There was consciousness of self in the realization of bodily pain. One’s mind could start back along the road from some dark far place to which it had run crazily off. One’s mind could take hold of the thought of the little hurt place in the soft flesh of the palm of the hand. There was something there, something hard and sharp that cut into the flesh of the palm when one’s finger pressed down rigid and tense upon it.

II

In the palm of Jane Webster’s hand lay the small green stone her father had picked up on the railroad tracks and had given her at the moment of his departure. “The Jewel of Life,” he had called it in the moment when confusion had led him to give way to a desire to make some kind of gesture. A romantic notion had popped into his head. Had not men always used symbols to help carry them over the rough places in life? There was the Virgin with her candles. Was she not also a symbol? At some time, having decided in a moment of vanity that thought was of more importance than fancy, men had discarded the symbol. A Protestant kind of man arose who believed in a thing called “the age of reason.” There was a dreadful kind of egotism. Men could trust their own minds. As though they knew anything at all of the workings of their own minds.

With a gesture and a smile John Webster had put the stone into his daughter’s hand and now she was clinging to it. One could press the finger down hard upon it and feel in the soft palm of the hand this delicious and healing pain.

Jane Webster was trying to reconstruct something. In darkness she was trying to feel her way along the face of a wall. The wall had little sharp points sticking out that hurt the palm of the hand. If one followed the wall far enough one came to a lighted place. Perhaps the wall was studded with jewels, put there by others, who had groped their way along in the darkness.

Her father had gone away with a woman, with a young woman, much like herself. He would live with the woman now. Perhaps she would never see him again. Her mother was dead. In the future she would be alone in life. She would have to begin now and make a life of her own.

Was her mother dead or had she just been having terrible fancies?

One was plunged suddenly down from a high safe place into the sea and then one had to try to swim, to save oneself. Jane’s mind began playing with the thought of herself as swimming in a sea.

During the summer of the year before she had gone with some young men and women on an excursion to a town facing Lake Michigan, and to a resort near the town. There was a man who dived down into the sea from a tall tower, that had been stuck far up into the sky. He had been employed to dive in order to entertain the crowd but things had not turned out as they should. The day, for such an affair, should have been bright and clear, but in the morning it began to rain and in the afternoon it turned cold and the sky, covered with low heavy clouds, was heavy and cold too.

Cold gray clouds hurried across the sky. The diver fell down from his high place into the sea, in the presence of a small silent crowd, but the sea did not receive him warmly. It awaited him in a cold gray silence. Looking at him, falling thus, sent a cold shiver through the body.

What was the cold gray sea toward which the man’s naked body fell so swiftly?

On that day, when the professional diver had taken his leap, Jane Webster’s heart had stopped beating until he had gone down into the sea and his head had reappeared on the surface. She was standing beside a young man, her escort for the day, and her hands clutched eagerly his arm and shoulder. When the diver’s head reappeared she put her head down on the young man’s shoulder and her own shoulders shook with sobs.

It had, no doubt, been a very silly performance and she had been ashamed of it later. The diver was a professional. “He knows what he is about,” the young man had said. Every one present had laughed at Jane and she had become angry because her escort had laughed too. Had he but had sense enough to know how she was feeling at the moment, she thought she would not have minded the others laughing.

* * * * *

“I’m a great little swimmer in seas.”

It was altogether amazing how ideas, expressed in words, kept running from mind to mind. “I’m a great little swimmer in seas.” But a short time before her father had said the words as she stood in the doorway between the two bedrooms and he came walking toward her. He had wanted to give her the stone, she now held pressed against the palm of her hand, and had wanted to say something about it, and instead of words regarding the stone, there had come to his lips these words about swimming in seas. There had been something puzzled and confused in his whole bearing at the moment. He had been upset, as she was now. The moment was now being lived over again, swiftly, in the daughter’s mind. Her father was again stepping toward her, holding the stone between his thumb and finger, and the wavering, uncertain light had again come into his eyes. Quite distinctly, as though he were again in her presence, Jane heard again the words that, but such a short time before, had seemed without meaning, meaningless words come from the lips of a man temporarily drunk or insane, “I’m a great little swimmer in seas.”

* * * * *

She had been plunged down from a high safe place, down into a sea of doubt and fear. Only a short time before, but yesterday, she had been standing on firm ground. One could let one’s fancy play with the thought of what had happened to her. There would be a kind of comfort in doing that.

She had been standing on firm ground, high above a vast sea of confusion, and then, quite suddenly, she had been pushed off the firm high ground and down into the sea.

Now, at this very moment, she was falling down into the sea. Now a new life had to begin for her. Her father had gone away with a strange woman and her mother was dead.

She was falling down off the high safe ground into the sea. With a kind of absurd flourish, as by a gesture of the arm, her own father had plunged her down. She was clad in her white nightgown and her falling figure made a white streak against the gray of cold skies.

Her father had put a meaningless little stone in her hand and had gone away and then her mother had gone into the bathroom and had done a terrible, an unthinkable thing, to herself.

And now she, Jane Webster, had gone quite down into the sea, far far down into a lonely cold gray place. She had gone down into the place from which all life came and to which, in the end, all life goes.

There was a heaviness, a deadly heaviness. All life had become gray and cold and old. One walked in darkness. One’s body fell with a soft thump against gray soft unyielding walls.

The house in which one lived was empty. It was an empty house in an empty street of an empty town. All the people Jane Webster had known, the young men and women with whom she had lived, with whom she had walked about on summer evenings, could not be a part of what she was facing now. Now she was quite alone. Her father had gone away and her mother had killed herself. There was no one. One walked alone in darkness. One’s body struck with a soft thump against soft gray unyielding walls.

The little stone held so firmly in the palm of the hand hurt and hurt.

Before her father had given it to her he had gone to hold it up before the candle flame. In certain lights its color changed. Yellowish green lights came and went in it. The yellowish green lights were of the color of young growing things pushing their way up out of the damp and cold of frozen grounds, in the spring.

III

Jane Webster was lying on the bed in the darkness of her room and crying. Her shoulders shook with sobs but she made no sound. Her finger, that had been pressed down so hard against her palms, had relaxed, but there was a spot, in the palm of her right hand, that burned with a warm feverishness. Her mind had become passive now. Fancy had released her from its grip. She was like a fretful and hungry child that has been fed and that lies quietly with its face turned to a white wall.

Her sobbing now indicated nothing. It was a release. She was a little ashamed of her lack of control over herself and kept putting up the hand, that held the stone, first closing it carefully that the precious stone be not lost, and with her fist wiping the tears away. What she wished, at the moment, was that she could become suddenly a strong resolute woman, able to handle quietly and firmly the situation that had arisen in the Webster household.

IV

The servant Katherine was coming up the stairs. After all she was not the woman with whom Jane’s father was going away. How heavy and resolute Katherine’s footsteps were! One could be resolute and strong when one knew nothing of what had been going on in the house. One could walk thus, as though one were going up the stairs of an ordinary house, in an ordinary street.

When Katherine put her foot down on one of the steps the house seemed to shake a little. Well, one could not say the house shook. That would be stretching things too much. What one was trying to express was just that Katherine was not very sensitive. She was one who made a direct frontal attack upon life. Had she been very sensitive she might have known something of the terrible things going on in the house without having to wait to be told.

Now Jane’s mind was playing tricks on her again. An absurd sentence came into her mind.

“Wait until you see the whites of their eyes and then shoot.”

It was silly, altogether silly and absurd, what notions were now racing through her head. Her father had set going in her the sometimes relentless and often unexplainable thing, represented by the released fancy. It was a thing that could color and beautify the facts of life but it could also, upon occasions, run on and on regardless of the facts of life. Jane believed she was in the house with the dead body of her mother, who had just committed suicide, and there was something within her that told her she should now give herself over to sadness. She did weep but her weeping had nothing to do with her mother’s death. It did not take that into consideration. She was not, after all, so much sad as excited.

The weeping that had been silent was now audible all over the house. She was making a noise like a foolish child and was ashamed of herself. What would Katherine think of her?

“Wait until you see the whites of their eyes and then shoot.”

What an utterly silly jumble of words. Where had they come from? Why were such meaningless silly words dancing in her brain at such a vital moment of her life? She had got them out of some book at school, a history book perhaps. Some general had shouted the words at his men as they stood waiting for an advancing enemy. And what had that to do with the fact of Katherine’s footsteps on the stairs? In a moment Katherine would be coming into the room where she was.

She thought she knew exactly what she would do. She would get quietly out of bed and go to the door and admit the servant. Then she would strike a light.

She had, in fancy, a picture of herself, standing by a dressing table at the side of the room and addressing the servant calmly and resolutely. One had to begin a new life now. Yesterday perhaps one was a young woman with no experience in life but now one was a mature woman who had difficult problems to face. One had, not only the servant Katherine, but the whole town to face. To-morrow one would be very much in the position of a general in command of troops that had to withstand an attack. One had to comport oneself with dignity. There would be people who wanted to scold at her father, others who wanted to pity herself. Perhaps she would have to handle affairs too. There would be arrangements necessary, in connection with selling her father’s factory and getting moneys so that she could go on and make plans for living her life. One could not be a silly child sitting and sobbing on a bed at such a moment.

And at the same time one could not, at such a tragic moment in life, and when the servant came in, suddenly burst out laughing. Why was it that the sound of Katherine’s resolute footsteps on the stairs made her want to laugh and weep at the same time? “Soldiers advancing resolutely across an open field toward an enemy. Wait until you see the whites of their eyes.” Silly notions. Silly words dancing in the brain. One did not want either to laugh or weep. One wanted to comport oneself with dignity.

An intensive struggle was going on within Jane Webster and now it had lost dignity and had become no more than a struggle to stop crying loudly, not to begin laughing, and to be ready to receive the servant Katherine with a certain dignity.

As the footsteps drew nearer the struggle intensified. Now she was again sitting very stiffly upright in the bed and again her body was rocking back and forth. Her fists, doubled and hard, were again beating down upon her legs.

Like every one else in the world Jane had been spending her entire life making dramatizations of herself in relation to life. One did that as a child and later as a young girl in school. One’s mother died suddenly or one found oneself violently ill and facing death. Every one gathered about one’s death-bed and all were amazed at the quiet dignity with which one met the situation.

Or again there was a young man who had smiled at one on the street. Perhaps he had the audacity to think of one as merely a child. Very well. Let the two of them be thrown together into a difficult position and then see which one could comport himself with the greater dignity.

There was something terrible about this whole situation. After all Jane felt she had it in her to carry life off with a kind of flourish. It was certain no other young woman of her acquaintance had ever been put into such a position as she was now in. Already, although they, as yet, knew nothing of what had occurred, the eyes of the whole town were directed toward herself and she was merely sitting in the darkness on a bed and sobbing like a child.

She began to laugh, sharply, hysterically, and then the laughter stopped and the loud sobbing began again. The servant Katherine came to her bedroom door but she did not knock and give Jane the chance to arise and receive her with dignity, but came right in. She ran across the room and knelt at the side of Jane’s bed. Her impulsive action brought an end to Jane’s desire to be the grand lady, at least for the night. The woman Katherine had become, by her quick impulsiveness, sister to something that was her own real self too. There were two women, shaken and in trouble, both deeply stirred by some inward storm, and clutching at each other in the darkness. For a time they stayed thus, on the bed, their arms about each other.

And so Katherine was not after all such a strong resolute person. One need not be afraid of her. That was an infinitely comforting thought to Jane. She also was weeping. Perhaps now, if Katherine were to jump up and begin walking about, one would not have the fancy about her strong resolute steps making the house shake. Had she been in Jane Webster’s shoes perhaps she also would have been unable to get up out of bed and speak of everything that had happened calmly and with cool dignity. Why, Katherine also might have found herself unable to control the desire to weep and laugh loudly at the same time. Well, she was not such a terrible, such a strong resolute and terrible person, after all.

To the younger woman, sitting now in the darkness with her body pressed against the more sturdy body of the older woman there came a sweet intangible sense of being fed and refreshed out of the body of this other woman. She even gave way to a desire to put up her hand and touch Katherine’s cheek. The older woman had great breasts against which one could cushion oneself. What comfort there was in her presence in the silent house.

Jane stopped weeping and felt suddenly weary and a little cold. “Let’s not stay here. Let’s go downstairs into my room,” Katherine said. Could it be that she knew what had happened in that other bedroom? It was evident she did know. Then it was true. Jane’s heart stopped beating and her body shook with fear. She stood in the darkness beside the bed and put her hand against the wall to keep from falling. She had been telling herself that her mother had taken poison and had killed herself but it was evident there was an inner part of her had not believed, had not dared believe.

Katherine had found a coat and was putting it about Jane’s shoulders. It was odd, this being so cold when the night was comparatively warm.

The two women went out of the room into the hallway. A gas light was burning in the bathroom at the end of the hallway and the bathroom door had been left open.

Jane closed her eyes and clung to Katherine. The notion that her mother had killed herself had now become a certainty. It was so evident now that Katherine knew about it too. Before Jane’s eyes the drama of the suicide again played itself out in the theatre of her fancy. Her mother was standing and facing the little cabinet fastened to the wall of the bathroom. Her face was turned upward and the light from above shone down on it. One hand was against the wall of the room to keep the body from falling and the other hand held a bottle. The face turned up to the light was white, of a pasty whiteness. It was a face that from long association had become familiar to Jane but it was at the same time strangely unfamiliar. The eyes were closed and there were little reddish bags of flesh under the eyes. The lips hung loosely open and from one corner of the mouth a reddish brown streak ran down over the chin. Some spots of a brown liquid had fallen down over the white nightgown.

Jane’s body was trembling violently. “How cold the house has become, Katherine,” she said and opened her eyes. They had reached the head of the stairs and from where they stood could look directly into the bathroom. There was a gray bath mat on the floor and a small brown bottle had been dropped on it. In passing out of the room the heavy foot of the woman, who had swallowed the contents of the bottle, had stepped on the bottle and had broken it. Perhaps her foot had been cut but she had not minded. “If there was pain, a hurt place, that would have been a comfort to her,” Jane thought. In her hand she still held the stone her father had given her. How absurd that he should have called it “the Jewel of Life.” There was a spot of yellowish green light reflected from an edge of the broken bottle on the floor of the bathroom. When her father had taken the little stone to the candle in the bedroom, and had held it up to the candle-light such another yellowish green light had flashed from it too. “If mother were still alive she would surely make some sound of life now. She would wonder what Katherine and I were doing tramping about the house and would get up and come to her bedroom door to inquire about it,” she thought drearily.

* * * * *

When Katherine had put Jane into her own bed, in a little room off the kitchen, she went upstairs to make certain arrangements. There had been no explanations. In the kitchen she had left a light burning and the servant’s bedroom was lighted by a reflected light, shining through an open doorway.

Katherine went to Mary Webster’s bedroom and without knocking opened the door and went in. There had been a gas lamp lighted and the woman, who did not want any more of life, had tried to get into bed and die respectably between the sheets but had not been successful. The tall slender girl, who had once refused love on a hillside, had been taken by death before she had time to protest. Her body, half lying on the bed, had struggled and twisted itself about and had slipped off the bed to the floor. Katherine lifted it up and put it on the bed and went to get a wet cloth to cleanse the disfigured and discolored face.

Then a thought came to her and she put the cloth away. For a moment she stood in the room looking about. Her own face had become very white and she felt ill. She put out the light and going into John Webster’s bedroom closed the door.

The candles were still burning beside the Virgin and she took the little framed picture and put it away, high up on a closet shelf. Then she blew out one of the candles and carried it, with the lighted one, downstairs and into the room where Jane lay waiting.

The servant went to a closet and getting an extra blanket wrapped it about Jane’s shoulders. “I don’t believe I’ll undress,” she said. “I’ll come sit on the bed with you as I am.”

* * * * *

“You have already figured it out,” she said, in a matter of fact tone, when she had seated herself and when she had put her arm about Jane’s shoulder. Both women were pale but Jane’s body no longer trembled.

“If mother has died at least I have not been left alone in the house with the dead body,” she thought gratefully. Katherine did not tell her any of the details of what she had found on the floor above. “She’s dead,” she said, and after the two had waited in silence for a moment she began to elaborate an idea that had come into her mind as she stood in the presence of the dead woman, in the bedroom above. “I don’t suppose they’ll try to connect your father with this but they may,” she said thoughtfully. “I saw something like that happen once. A man died and after he was dead some men tried to make him out a thief. What I think is this--we had better sit here together until morning comes. Then I’ll call in a doctor. We’ll say we knew nothing of what had happened until I went to call your mother for breakfast. By that time, you see, your father will be gone.”

The two women sat in silence close together, looking at the white wall of the bedroom. “I suppose we had both better remember that we heard mother moving about the house after father went away,” Jane whispered presently. It was pleasant to be able to make herself, thus, a part of Katherine’s plans to protect her father. Her eyes were shining now, and there was something of feverishness in her eagerness to understand everything clearly but she kept pressing her body close against the body of Katherine. In the palm of her hand she still held the stone her father had given her and now when her finger pressed down upon it even lightly there was a comforting throb of pain from the tender hurt place in her palm.

V

And as the two women sat on the bed, John Webster walked through the silent deserted streets toward the railroad station with his new woman, Natalie.

“Well, the devil,” he thought as he plodded along, “this has been a night! If the rest of my life is as busy as these last ten hours have been I’ll be kept on the jump.”

Natalie was walking in silence and carrying a bag. The houses along the street were all dark. There was a strip of grass between the brick sidewalk and the roadway and John Webster stepped over and walked upon it. He liked the idea of his feet making no sound as he escaped out of the town. How pleasant it would be if he and Natalie were winged things and could fly away unobserved in the darkness.

Now Natalie was weeping. Well that was all right. She did not weep audibly. John Webster did not, as a matter of fact, know for sure that she was weeping. Still he did know. “At any rate,” he thought, “when she weeps she does the job with a certain dignity.” He was himself in a rather impersonal mood. “There’s no use thinking too much about what I’ve done. What’s done is done. I’ve begun a new life. I couldn’t turn back now if I chose.”

The houses along the street were dark and silent. The whole town was dark and silent. In the houses people were sleeping, dreaming all manner of absurd dreams, too.

Well he had expected he would run into some kind of a row at Natalie’s house but nothing of the sort had happened. The old mother had been quite wonderful. John Webster half regretted he had never known her personally. There was something about the terrible old woman that was like himself. He smiled as he walked along on the strip of grass. “It may well be that in the end I will turn out an old reprobate, a regular old heller,” he thought almost gaily. His mind played with the idea. He had surely made a good start. Here he was, a man well past the middle age, and it was past midnight, almost morning, and he was walking in deserted streets with a woman with whom he was going away to live what was called an illegitimate life. “I started late but I’m proving a merry little upsetter of things now that I’ve started,” he told himself.

It was really too bad that Natalie did not step off the brick sidewalk and walk on the grass. After all it was better, when one was setting out on new adventures, that one go swiftly and stealthily. There must be innumerable growling lions of respectability sleeping in the houses along the streets. “They’re pure sweet people, such as I was when I used to go home from the washing machine factory and sleep beside my wife in the days when we were newly married and had come back here to live in this town,” he thought sardonically. He imagined innumerable people, men and women, creeping into beds at night and sometimes talking as he and his wife had so often talked. They had always been covering something up, busily talking, covering something up. “We made a big smoke of talk about purity and sweetness of living, didn’t we though, eh?” he whispered to himself.

Well the people in the houses were asleep and he did not wish to awaken them. It was too bad Natalie was weeping. One couldn’t disturb her in her grief. That wouldn’t be fair. He wished he might speak to her and ask her to get off the sidewalk and walk silently on the grass along the roadway or at the edge of the lawns.

His mind turned back to the few moments at Natalie’s house. The devil! He had expected a row there and nothing of the sort had happened. When he got to the house, Natalie was waiting for him. She was sitting by a window in a dark room, downstairs in the Swartz cottage, and her bag was packed and sitting beside her. She came to the front door and opened it before he had time to knock.

And there she was all ready to set out. She came out carrying her bag and didn’t say anything. As a matter of fact she had not said anything to him yet. She had just come out of the house and had walked beside him to where they had to pass through a gate to reach the street and then her mother and sister had come out and had stood on a little porch to watch them go.

How bully the old mother had been. She had even laughed at them. “Well, you two have got the gall. You tramp off as cool as two cucumbers, now don’t you?” she had shouted. Then she had laughed again. “Do you know there’s going to be a hell of a row about this all over town in the morning?” she asked. Natalie hadn’t answered her. “Well, good luck to you, you husky whore, trotting off with your damned reprobate,” her mother had shouted, still laughing.

The two people had turned a corner and had passed out of sight of the Swartz house. No doubt there must be other people awake in other houses along the little street, and no doubt they had been listening and wondering. On two or three occasions some of the neighbors had wanted to have Natalie’s mother arrested because of her foul language but they had been dissuaded by others, out of consideration for the daughters.

Was Natalie weeping now because she was leaving the old mother or was it because of the school-teacher sister whom John Webster had never known?

He felt very like laughing at himself. As a matter of fact he knew little of Natalie or what she might be thinking or feeling at such a time. Had he only taken up with her because she was a kind of instrument that would help him escape from his wife and from a life he had come to detest? Was he but using her? Had he at bottom any real feeling in regard to her, any understanding of her?

He wondered.

One made a mighty big fuss, fixed up a room with candles and a picture of the Virgin, paraded oneself naked before women, got oneself little glass candle sticks with bronze-colored Christs on the Cross on them.

One made a great fuss, pretended one was upsetting the whole world, in order to do something that a man of real courage would have gone at in a direct simple way. Another man might have done everything he had done with a laugh and a gesture.

What was all this business he was up to anyway?

He was going away, he was deliberately walking out of his native town, walking out of a town in which he had been a respectable citizen for years, all his life in fact. He was going out of the town with a woman, younger than himself, who had taken his fancy.

The whole thing was a matter that could be easily enough understood, by anyone, by any man one might happen to meet in the street. At any rate every one would be quite sure he understood. There would be eyebrows raised, shoulder shrugging. Men would stand together in little groups and talk and women would run from house to house talking, talking. O, the merry little shoulder shruggers! O, the merry little talkers! Where did a man come out in all this? What, in the end, did he think of himself?

There was Natalie, walking along, in the half darkness. She breathed. She was a woman with a body, with arms, legs. She had a trunk to her body and perched upon her neck was a head within which there was a brain. She thought thoughts. She had dreams.

Natalie was walking along a street in the darkness. Her footsteps were ringing out sharp and clear as she stepped along, on the sidewalk.

What did he know of Natalie?

It might well be that, when he and Natalie really knew each other, when they had together faced the problem of living together--Well, it might be that it wouldn’t work at all.

John Webster was walking along the street, in the darkness, on the strip of grass, that in Middle Western towns is between the sidewalk and the roadway. He stumbled and came near falling. What was the matter with him? Was he growing tired again?

Did doubts come because he was growing tired? It might well be that everything that had happened to him, during the night, had happened because he was caught up and carried along by a kind of temporary insanity.

What would happen when the insanity had passed, when he became again a sane, a well, a normal man?

Hito, tito, what was the use thinking of turning back when it was too late to turn back? If, in the end, he and Natalie found they could not live together there was still life.

Life was life. One might still find a way to live a life.

* * * * *

John Webster began to grow courageous again. He looked toward the dark houses along the street and smiled. He became like a child, playing a game with his fellows of the Wisconsin town. In the game he was some kind of public character, who because of some brave deed was receiving the applause of the people who lived in the houses. He imagined himself as riding through the street in a carriage. The people were sticking their heads out of the windows of the houses and shouting, and he was turning his head from side to side, bowing and smiling.

As Natalie was not looking he enjoyed himself for a moment, playing the game. As he walked along he kept turning his head from side to side and bowing. There was a rather absurd smile on his lips.

The old Harry!

“Chinaberries grow on a chinaberry tree!”

All the same it would be better if Natalie did not make such a racket with her feet walking on stone and brick sidewalks.

One might be found out. It might be that, quite suddenly, without any warning, all the people, now sleeping so peacefully in the dark houses along the street, would sit up in their beds and begin to laugh. That would be terrible and it would be just the sort of thing John Webster would himself do, were he a respectable man in bed with a lawfully wedded wife, and saw some other man doing some such fool thing as he was now doing.

It was annoying. The night was warm but John Webster felt somewhat cold. He shivered. It was no doubt due to the fact that he was tired. Perhaps thinking of the respectable married people lying in beds in the houses, between which he and Natalie were passing, had made him shiver. One could be very cold, being a respectable married man and lying in bed with a respectable wife. A thought that had been coming and going in his mind for two weeks now came again: “Perhaps I am insane and have infected Natalie, and for that matter my daughter Jane too, with my insanity.”

There was no use crying over spilled milk. “What’s the use thinking about the matter now?”

“Diddle de di do!”

“Chinaberries grow on a chinaberry tree!”

He and Natalie had come out of the section of town where working people lived and were now passing before houses in which lived merchants, small manufacturers, such men as John Webster had himself been, lawyers, doctors, and such fellows too. Now they were passing the house in which his own banker lived. “The stingy cuss. He has plenty of money. Why doesn’t he build himself a larger and finer house?”

To the east, dimly seen through trees and above tree tops, there was a light place coming into the sky.

Now they had come to a place where there were several vacant lots. Some one had given the lots to the town and there was a movement on foot to raise money with which to build a public library. A man had come to John Webster to ask him to contribute to a fund for the purpose. That was but a few days ago.

He had enjoyed the situation immensely. Now he felt like giggling over the remembrance of it.

He had been seated, and as he thought, looking very dignified, at his desk in the factory office when the man came in and told him of the plan. A desire to make an ironic gesture had taken possession of him.

“I am making rather elaborate plans about that fund and my contributing to it but do not want to say what I am planning to do at this particular moment,” he had announced. What a falsehood! The matter had not interested him in the least. He had simply enjoyed the man’s surprise at his unexpected interest and was having a good time making a swaggering gesture.

The man who came to see him had once served with him on a committee of the Chamber of Commerce, a committee appointed to make an effort to bring new industries into the town.

“I didn’t know you were specially interested in literary matters,” the man had said.

A troop of derisive thoughts had popped into John Webster’s head.

“O, you would be surprised,” he had assured the man. At the moment he had felt as he fancied a terrier might feel as it worried a rat.

“I think American literary men have done wonders to uplift the people,” he had said, very solemnly. “Why, do you realize that it is our writers who have kept us constantly reminded of the moral code and of the virtues? Such men as you and I, who own factories and who are in a way responsible for the happiness and welfare of the people of the community, cannot be too grateful to our American literary men. I’ll tell you what, they are really such strong, red-blooded fellows, always standing up for the right.”

John Webster laughed at the thought of his talk with the man from the Chamber of Commerce and at the remembrance of the confused look in the man’s eyes as he went away.

Now, as he and Natalie walked along, the intersecting streets led away to the east. There was no doubt a new day was coming. He stopped to light a match and look at his watch. They would be just in comfortable time for the train. Soon now they would be coming into the business section of town where they would both have to make a clattering noise as they walked on stone pavements, but then it would not matter. People did not sleep in the business sections of towns.

He wished it were possible for him to speak to Natalie, to ask her to walk on the grass and not to awaken the people sleeping in the houses. “Well, I’m going to do it,” he thought. It was odd how much courage it took now just to speak to her. Neither of them had spoken since they had set out together on this adventure. He stopped and stood for a moment and Natalie, realizing that he was no longer walking beside her, also stopped.

“What is it? What’s the matter, John?” she asked. It was the first time she had addressed him by that name. It made everything easier, her having done that.

Still his throat was a little tight. It couldn’t be that he also wanted to weep. What nonsense.

There was no need accepting defeat with Natalie until defeat came. There were two sides to this matter of his passing judgment on what he had done. To be sure there was a chance, a possibility, that he had made all this row, upset all his past life, made a mess of things for his wife and daughter, and for Natalie too, to no purpose, merely because he had wanted to escape the boredom of his past existence.

He stood on the strip of grass at the edge of a lawn before a silent respectable house, some one’s home. He was trying to see Natalie clearly, trying to see himself clearly. What kind of a figure was he cutting? The light was not very clear. Natalie was but a dark mass before him. His own thoughts were but a dark mass before him.

“Am I just a lustful man wanting a new woman?” he asked himself.

Suppose that were true. What did it mean?

“I am myself. I am trying to be myself,” he told himself stoutly.

One should try to live outside oneself too, to live in others. Had he tried to live in Natalie? He had gone within Natalie. Had he gone within her because there was something within her he had wanted and needed, something he loved?

There was something within Natalie that had set fire to something within himself. It was that ability in her to set him afire he had wanted, still wanted.

She had done that for him, was still doing it for him. When he could no longer respond to her he could perhaps find other loves. She could do that too.

He laughed softly. There was a kind of gladness in him now. He had made of himself, and of Natalie too, what is called disreputable characters. Back into his fancy came a troop of figures, all in their own ways disreputable characters. There was the white-haired old man he had once seen walking with a certain air of being proud and glad of the road, an actress he had seen coming out at the stage entrance of a theatre, a sailor who had thrown his bag aboard a ship and had walked off along a street with a certain air of being proud and glad of the life within himself.

There were such fellows in the world.

The fanciful picture in John Webster’s mind changed. There was a certain man going into a room. He had closed the door. A row of candles stood on a mantle above a fireplace. The fellow was playing some kind of game with himself. Well, every one played some kind of game with himself. The fellow in the picture of his fancy had taken a silver crown out of a box. He had put it on his head. “I crown myself with the crown of life,” he said.

Was it a silly performance? If it was, what did that matter?

He took a step toward Natalie and then stopped again. “Come woman, walk on the grass. Don’t make such a row as we go along,” he said aloud.

Now he was walking with a certain swagger toward Natalie who stood in silence at the edge of the sidewalk waiting for him. He went and stood before her and looked into her face. It was true she had been weeping. Even in the faint light there were graces of tears to be seen on her cheeks. “I only had a silly notion. I didn’t want to disturb anyone as we went away,” he said, laughing softly again. He put his hand on her arm and drew her toward him and they went on again, both now stepping softly and gingerly on the grass between the sidewalk and the roadway.

* * * * *

Transcriber’s note

Minor punctuation errors have been changed without notice. Hyphenation has been standardized.

Spelling was retained as in the original except for the following changes:

Page 109: “and made self-consoious” “and made self-conscious” Page 126: “his daughter uuderstand” “his daughter understand” Page 244: “oneself with diginity” “oneself with dignity”