“And then, when he got all right again and only looked a little gray and drawn he would come sit at the table at meal-time with the rest of us and would talk to me about his life, as an entirely successful affair, and take it for granted I wanted just such another life.
“For some fool reason, I don’t understand now, I thought then that was just what I did want. I suppose all the time I must have wanted something else and that made me spend so much of my time having vague dreams, but not only father, but all the older men in our town and perhaps in all the other towns along the railroad east and west were thinking and talking just that same way to their sons and I suppose I got caught up by the general drift of thinking and just went into it blind, with my head down, not thinking at all.
“So there I was, a young washing machine manufacturer, and I hadn’t any woman, and since that affair at his house I didn’t see my former friend with whom I used to try to talk of the vague, but nevertheless more colorful dreams of my idle hours. After a few months father sent me out on the road to see if I couldn’t sell washing machines to merchants in small towns and sometimes I was successful and did sell some and sometimes I didn’t.
“At night in the towns I used to walk about in the streets and sometimes I did get in with a woman, with a waitress from the hotel, or a girl I had picked up on the streets.
“We walked about under the trees along the residence streets of the town and when I was lucky I sometimes induced one of them to go with me to a little cheap hotel or into the darkness of the fields at the edge of the towns.
“At such times we talked of love and sometimes I was a good deal moved, but after all not really moved.
“The whole thing started me thinking of the slender naked girl I had seen on the bed and of the look in her eyes at the moment when she came up out of sleep and her eyes met mine.
“I knew her name and address and so one day I grew bold and wrote her a long letter. You must understand that by this time I felt I had become quite a sensible fellow and so I tried to write in a sensible way.
“I remember I was sitting in the writing-room of a small hotel in an Indiana town when I did it. The desk where I sat was by a window near the town’s Main Street and, as it was evening, people were going along the street to their houses, I suppose going home to the evening meal.
“I don’t deny I grew pretty romantic. As I sat there, feeling lonely and I suppose filled with self-pity, I looked up and saw a little drama acted out in a hallway across the street. There was a rather old tumble-down building with a stairway at the side running to an upper story where it was evident some one lived, as there were white curtains at the window.
“I sat looking across at the place, and I suppose I was dreaming of the long slender body of the girl on the bed upstairs in another house. It was evening and growing dusk, you understand, and just such a light as had fallen over us at the moment we looked into each other’s eyes, at the moment when there was no one but just our two selves, before we had time to think and remember the others in that house, when I was coming out of a daydream and she was coming out of the dreams of sleep, at the moment when we accepted each other and the complete and momentary loveliness of each other — well, you see, just such a light as I had stood in and she had lain in as one might lie on the soft waters of some southern sea, just such another light was now lying over the little bare writing-room of the foul little hotel in that town and across the street a woman came down the stairway and stood in just such another light.
“As it turned out she was also tall, like your mother, but I could not see what kind or color of clothes she wore. There was some peculiarity of the light; an illusion was created. The devil! I wish I could tell of things that have happened to me without this eternal business of having everything I say seem a little strange and uncanny. One walks in a wood at evening, let us say, Jane, and one has queer fascinating illusions. The light, the shadows cast by trees, the open spaces between trees — these things create the illusions. Often the trees seem to beckon to one. Old sturdy trees look wise and you think they are going to tell you some great secret, but they don’t. One gets into a forest of young birches. What naked girlish things, running and running, free, free. Once I was in such a wood with a girl. We were up to something. Well, it had gone no further than that we had a tremendous feeling for each other at the moment. We had kissed and I remember that twice I had stopped in the half-darkness and had touched her face with my fingers — tenderly and softly, you know. She was a little dumb shy girl I had picked up on the streets of an Indiana town, a kind of free immoral little thing, such as sometimes pop up in such towns. I mean she was free with men in a kind of queer shy way. I had picked her up on the street and then, when we got out there in the wood, we both felt the strangeness of things and the strangeness of being with each other too.
“There we were, you see. We were about to — I don’t exactly know what we were up to. We were standing and looking at each other.
“And then we both looked suddenly up and there, in the path before us, was a very dignified and beautiful old man. He was wearing a robe that was caught over his shoulders, in a swaggering kind of a way, and it was spread out behind him over the floor of the forest, between the trees.
“What a princely old man! What a kingly fellow, in fact! We both saw him, both stood looking at him with eyes filled with wonder, and he stood looking at us.
“I had to go forward and touch the thing with my hands before the illusion our minds had created could be dispelled. The kingly old man was just a half-decayed old stump and the robe he wore was just the purple night shadows falling down on the floor of the forest, but our having seen the thing together made everything different between the shy little town girl and myself. What we had perhaps both intended doing couldn’t be done in the spirit in which we had approached it. I mustn’t try to tell you of that now. I mustn’t get too much off the track.
“What I am thinking is merely that such things happen. I am talking of another time and place, you see. On that other evening, as I sat in the hotel writing-room, there was just such another light, and across the street a girl, or a woman, was coming down a stairway. I had the illusion that she was nude like a young birch tree and that she was coming toward me. Her face made a grayish wavering shadow-like spot in the hallway and she was evidently waiting for some one as she kept thrusting her head out and looking up and down the street.
“I became a fool again. That’s the story, I dare say. As I sat looking and leaning forward, trying to see deeper and deeper into the evening light, a man came hurrying along the street and stopped at the stairway. He was tall like herself and when he stopped I remember that he took off his hat and stepped into the darkness holding it in his hand. There was probably something stealthy and covered-up about the love affair between the two people as the man also put his head out of the stairway and looked long and carefully up and down the street before taking the woman into his arms. Perhaps she was some other man’s wife. Anyway they stepped back a little into a greater darkness and, I thought, took each other quite completely. How much I saw and how much I imagined I’ll of course never know. At any rate the two grayish white faces seemed to float and then merge and become one grayish white spot.
“A violent tremor ran through my body. There, it seemed to me, but a few hundred feet from where I sat, now almost in complete darkness, was love finding glorious expression. Lips clung to lips, two warm bodies pressed close to each other, something altogether glorious and lovely in life, that I, by running about in the evening with the poor little girls of the town, and by trying to induce them to go with me into the fields to serve only my animal hunger — well, you see, there was a thing one might find in life that I had not found and that at the moment I thought I had failed to find because, at a great crisis, I had not found courage to go persistently toward it.”
IV
“AND SO YOU see I lighted a lamp in the writing-room of that hotel and forgot my supper and
sat there and wrote pages and pages to the woman, and grew foolish too and confessed a lie, that I was ashamed of the thing that had happened between us some months before, and that I had only done it, that is to say, that I had only run into the room to her that second time, because I was a fool and a lot of other unspeakable nonsense.”
John Webster jumped to his feet and started to walk nervously about the room, but now his daughter became something more than a passive listener to his tale. He had walked to where the Virgin stood between the burning candles arid was moving back toward the door, that led into the hallway and down stairs, when she sprang up and running to him impulsively threw her arms about his neck. She began to sob and buried her face on his shoulder. “I love you,” she said. “I don’t care what’s happened, I love you.”
V
AND SO THERE was John Webster in his house and he had succeeded, at least for the moment, in breaking through the wall that had separated him from his daughter. After her outburst they went and sat together on the bed, with his arm about her and her head on his shoulder. Years afterward, sometimes, when he was with a friend and was in a certain mood, John Webster occasionally spoke of that moment as having been the most important and lovely of his whole life. In a way his daughter had giver? herself to him as he had given himself to her. There had been a kind of marriage, that he realized. “I have been a father as well as a lover. Perhaps the two things cannot be differentiated. I have been one father who has not been afraid to realize the loveliness of his daughter’s flesh and to fill my senses with the fragrance of it,” was what he said.
As it turned out he might have sat thus, talking with his daughter, for another half-hour and then left the house to go away with Natalie, without any more drama, but that his wife, lying on the bed in the next room, heard her daughter’s cry of love and it must have stirred something deeply buried away in her. She got silently off the bed and going to the door opened it softly. Then she stood leaning against the door-frame and listening as her husband talked. There was a look of hard terror in her eyes. Perhaps she wanted at that moment to kill the man who had for so long a time been her husband and did not do so only because the long years of inaction and submission into life had made it impossible for her to lift an arm to strike.
At any rate she stood in silence and one might have thought that she would at any moment fall to the floor, but she didn’t. She waited and John Webster kept on talking. Now he was telling his daughter with a kind of devilish attention to details all the story of their marriage.
What had happened, at least in the man’s version of the affair, was that, after having written one letter he could not stop and wrote another on the same evening and two more on the following day.
He kept on writing letters and what he himself thought was that the letter writing had created within him a kind of furious passion of lying that, once started, couldn’t be stopped. “I began something that has been going on in me all these years,” he explained. “It is a trick one practises, this lying to oneself about oneself.” It was evident his daughter did not follow him, although she tried. He was talking now of something she had not experienced, could not have experienced, that is to say, the hypnotic power of words. Already she had read books and had been tricked by words, but there was in her no realization of what had already been done to her. She was a young girl and as, often enough, there was nothing in the life about her that seemed exciting or interesting she was thankful for the life of words and books. It was true they left one quite blank, went out of the mind leaving no trace. Well, they were created out of a kind of dream world. One had to have lived, to have experienced much of life, before one could come to the realization that just beneath the surface of ordinary everyday life there was deep and moving drama always going on. Few come to realization of the poetry of the actual.
It was evident her father had come to some such realization. Now he was talking. He was opening doors for her. It was like travelling in an old town one had thought one knew, with a marvelously inspired guide. One went in and out of old houses, seeing things as they had never been seen before. All the things of everyday life, a picture on the wall, an old chair sitting by a table, the table itself at which a man one had always known, sits smoking a pipe.
By some miracle all these things were now being invested with new life and significance.
The painter Van Gogh, who it is said killed himself in a fit of desperation because he could not gather within the limits of his canvas all the wonder and glory of the sun shining in the sky, once painted a canvas. An old chair set in an empty room. When Jane Webster grew to be a woman and had got her own understanding of life she once saw the canvas hanging in a gallery in the city of New York. There was a strange wonder of life to be got from looking at the painting of an ordinary, roughly made chair that had perhaps been owned by some peasant of France, some peasant at whose house the painter had perhaps stopped for an hour on a summer day.
It must have been a day when he was very much alive and very conscious of all the life of the house in which he sat and so he painted the chair and channeled into the painting all of the emotional reactions within himself to the people in that particular house and in many other houses he had visited.
Jane Webster was in the room with her father and his arm was about her and he was talking of something she couldn’t understand and yet she did understand too. Now he was again a young man and was feeling the loneliness and uncertainty of young manhood as she had already sometimes felt the loneliness and uncertainty of her own young womanhood. Like her father she must begin to try to understand things a little. Now he was an honest man, he was talking to her honestly. There was wonder in that alone.
In his young manhood he went about towns, getting in with girls, doing with girls a thing she had heard whispers about. That made him feel unclean. He did not feel deeply enough the thing he did with the poor little girls. His body had made love to women, but he had not. That her father knew, but she did not yet know. There was much she did not know.
Her father, then a young man, had begun writing letters to a woman into whose presence he once came quite nude as he had appeared before her but a short time before. He was trying to explain how his mind, feeling about, had alighted upon the figure of a certain woman as one towards whom love might be directed.
He sat in a room in a hotel and wrote the word “love” in black ink on a white sheet of paper. Then he went out to walk in the quiet night streets of the town. She got the picture of him now quite clearly. The strangeness of his being so much older than herself and of his being her father had gone away. He was a man and she was a woman. She wanted to quiet the clamoring voices within him, to fill the blank empty spaces. She pressed her body more closely against his.
His voice kept explaining things. There was a passion for explanation in him.
As he sat in the hotel he had written certain words on paper and putting the paper into an envelope had sent it away to a woman living in a distant place. Then he walked and walked and thought of more words and going back to the hotel wrote them out on other pieces of paper.
A thing was created within him it was hard to explain, that he had not understood himself. One walked under the stars and in quiet streets of towns under trees and sometimes, on summer evenings, heard voices in the darkness. People, men and women, were sitting in the darkness on the porches of houses. There was an illusion created. One sensed in the darkness somewhere a deep quiet splendor of life and ran toward it. There was a kind of desperate eagerness. In the sky the stars shone more splendidly because of one’s thoughts. There was a little wind and it was like the hand of a lover touching the cheeks, playing in one’s hair. There was something lovely in life one must find. When one was young one could not stand still, but must go toward it. The writing of the letters was an effort to go toward the thing. It was an effort to find footing in the darkness on strange winding roads.
And so John Webster had, by his letter writing, done a strange a
nd false thing to himself and to the woman who was later to be his wife. He had created a world of unrealities. Would he and the woman be able to live together in that world?
VI
IN THE SEMI-DARKNESS of the room, as the man talked to his daughter trying to make her understand an intangible thing, the woman who had been his wife for so many years and out of whose body had come the younger woman who now sat close to her husband, began also to try to understand. After a time, and being unable to stand longer, she managed, without attracting the attention of the others, to slip to the floor. She let her back slide down along the frame of the door and her legs turned sideways under her heavy body. In the position into which she had got she was uncomfortable and her knees hurt, but she did not mind. There was in fact a kind of satisfaction to be got from physical discomfort.
One had lived for so many years in a world that was now and before one’s very eyes being destroyed. There was something wicked and ungodly in this business of defining life too sharply. Certain things should not be spoken of. One moved dimly through a dim world not asking too many questions. If there was death in silence, then one accepted death. What was the use of denial? One’s body got old and heavy. When one sat on the floor the knees hurt. There was something unbearable in this notion that a man, with whom one had lived so many years of life and whom one had accepted quite definitely as a part of the machinery of life, should suddenly become something else, should become this terrible questioner, this raker-up of forgotten things.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 92
