How many marriages among peoples! John Webster’s mind was flying about. He stood looking at the woman who, although they had separated long before — they had really and irrevocably separated one day on a hill above a valley in the state of Kentucky — was still in an odd way bound to him, and there was another woman who was his daughter in the same room. The daughter stood beside him. He could put out his hand and touch her. She was not looking at himself or her mother, but at the floor. What was she thinking? What thoughts had he stirred up in her? What would be the result to her of the events of the night? There were things he couldn’t answer, that he had to leave on the knees of the gods.
His mind was racing, racing. There were certain men he had always been seeing in the world. Usually they belonged to a class known as fellows with shaky reputations. What had happened to them? There were men who walked through life with a certain easy grace of manner. In some way they were beyond good and evil, stood outside the influences that made or unmade other men. John Webster had seen a few such men and had never been able to forget them. Now they passed, as in a procession, before his mind’s eyes.
There was an old man with a white beard who carried a heavy walking stick and was followed by a dog. He had broad shoulders and walked with a certain stride. John Webster had encountered the man once, as he himself drove on a dusty country road. Who was the fellow? Where was he going? There was about him a certain air. “Go to the devil then,” his manner seemed to say. “I’m a man walking here. Within me there is kingship. Go prattle of democracy and equality if you will, worry your silly heads about a life after death, make up little lies to cheer your way in the darkness, but get out of my way. I walk in the light.”
It might be all just a silly notion, what John Webster was now thinking about an old man he had once met walking on a country road. It was certain he remembered the figure with extraordinary sharpness. He had stopped his horse to gaze after the old man, who had not even bothered to turn and look at him. Well the old man had walked with a kingly stride. Perhaps that was the reason he had attracted John Webster’s attention.
Now he was thinking of him and a few other such men he had seen during his life. There was one, a sailor who had come down to a wharf in the city of Philadelphia. John Webster was in that city on business and having nothing to do one afternoon had gone down to where the ships were loaded and unloaded. A sailing vessel, a brigantine, lay at the wharf, and the man he had seen came down to it. He had a bag over his shoulder, containing perhaps his sea clothes. He was no doubt a sailor, about to sail before the mast on the brigantine. What he did was simply to come to the vessel’s side, throw his bag aboard, call to another man who put his head out at a cabin door, and turning walked away.
But who had taught him to walk like that? The old Harry! Most men, and women too, crept through life like sneaks. What gave them the sense of being such underlings, such dogs? Were they constantly besmearing themselves with accusations of guilt and, if that was it, what made them do it?
The old man in the road, the sailor walking off along a street, a negro prize fighter he had once seen driving an automobile, a gambler at the horse races in a Southern city, who walked wearing a loud checkered vest before a grandstand filled with people, a woman actress he had once seen coming out at the stage entrance of a theatre, reprobates all perhaps and all walking with the stride of kings.
What had given such men and women this respect for themselves? It was apparent respect for self must be at the bottom of the matter. Perhaps they hadn’t at all the sense of guilt and shame that had made of the slender girl he had once married the heavy inarticulate woman now squatted so grotesquely on the floor at his feet. One could imagine some such person as he had in mind saying to himself, “Well, here I am, you see, in the world. I have this long or short body, this brown or yellow hair. My eyes are of a certain color. I eat food, I sleep at night. I shall have to spend the whole of my life going about among people in this body of mine. Shall I crawl before them or shall I walk upright like a king? Shall I hate and fear my own body, this house in which I must live, or shall I respect and care for it? Well, the devil! The question is not worth answering. I shall take life as it offers itself. For me the birds shall sing, the green spread itself over the earth in the spring, for me the cherry tree in the orchard shall bloom.”
John Webster had a fanciful picture of the man of his fancy going into a room. He closed the door. A row of candles stood on a mantle above a fireplace. The man opened a box and took from it a silver crown. Then he laughed softly and put the crown on his own head. “I crown myself a man,” he said.
It was amazing. One was in a room looking at a woman who had been one’s wife, and one was about to set out on a journey and would not see her again. Of a sudden there was a blinding rush of thoughts. One’s fancy played far and wide. One seemed to have been standing in one spot thinking thoughts for hours, but in reality only a few seconds had passed since the voice of his wife, calling out that word, “don’t,” had interrupted his own voice telling a tale of an ordinary unsuccessful marriage.
The thing now was to keep his daughter in mind. He had better get her out of the room now. She was moving toward the door to her own room and in a moment would be gone. He turned away from the white-faced woman on the floor and watched his daughter. Now his own body was thrust between the bodies of the two women. They could not see each other.
There was a story of a marriage he had not finished, would never finish telling now, but in time his daughter would come to understand what the end of the story must inevitably be.
There was something that should be thought of now. His daughter was going out of his presence. Perhaps he would never see her again. One continually dramatized life, made a play of it. That was inevitable. Every day of one’s life consisted of a series of little dramas and one was always casting oneself for an important part in the performance. It was annoying to forget one’s lines, not to walk out upon the stage when one had got one’s cue. Nero fiddled when Rome was burning. He had forgotten what part he had assigned to himself and so fiddled in order not to give himself away. Perhaps he had intended making an ordinary politician’s speech about a city rising again from the flames.
Blood of the saints! Would his daughter walk calmly out of the room without turning at the door? What had he yet intended saying to her? He was growing a little nervous and upset.
His daughter was standing in the doorway leading to her own room, looking at him, and there was a kind of intense half-insane mood in her as all evening there had been in him. He had infected her with something out of himself. After all there had been what he had wanted, a real marriage. After this evening the younger woman could never be what she might have been, had this evening not happened. Now he knew what he wanted for her. Those men, whose figures had just visited his fancy, the race-track man, the old man in the road, the sailor on the docks, there was a thing they had got hold of he had wanted her to have hold of too.
Now he was going away with Natalie, with his own woman, and he would not see his daughter again. She was a young girl yet, really. All of womanhood lay before her. “I’m damned. I’m crazy as a loon,” he thought. He had suddenly a ridiculous desire to begin singing a silly refrain that had just come into his head.
Diddle de di do,
Diddle de di do,
Chinaberries grow on a Chinaberry tree.
Diddle de di do.
And then his fingers, fumbling about in his pockets, came upon the thing he had unconsciously been looking for. He clutched it, half convulsively, and went toward his daughter, holding it between his thumb and finger.
On the afternoon of the day, on which he had first found his way in at the door of Natalie’s house, and when he had become almost distracted from much thinking, he had found a bright little stone on the railroad track near his factory.
When one tried to think his way along a too difficult road one was likely, at any moment, to get lost. One went up some dark
lonely road and then, becoming frightened, one became at the same time shrill and distracted. There were things to be done, but one could do nothing. For example, and at the most vital moment in life, one might spoil everything by beginning to sing a silly song. Others would throw up their hands. “He’s crazy,” they would say, as though such a saying ever meant anything at all.
Well, once before, he had been, as he was now, at just this moment. Too much thinking had upset him. The door of Natalie’s house had been opened and he had been afraid to enter. He had planned to run away from her, go to the city and get drunk and write her a letter telling her to go away to where he would not have to see her again. He had thought he preferred to walk in loneliness and darkness, to take the road of evasion to the throne-room of the god Death.
And at the moment all this was going on his eye had caught the glint of a little green stone lying among all the gray meaningless stones in the gravel bed of a railroad track. That was in the late afternoon and the sun’s rays had been caught and reflected by the little stone.
He had picked it up and the simple act of doing so had broken a kind of absurd determination within him. His fancy, unable at the moment to play over the facts of his life, had played over the stone. A man’s fancy, the creative thing within him, was in reality intended to be a healing thing, a supplementary and healing influence to the working of the mind. Men sometimes did a thing they called, “going it blind,” and at such moments did the least blind acts of their whole lives. The truth was that the mind working alone was but a one-sided, maimed thing.
“Hito, tito, there’s no use my trying to become a philosopher.” John Webster was stepping toward his daughter who was waiting for him to say or do something that had not yet been done. Now he was quite all right again. Some minute re-adjustment had taken place inside himself as it had on so many other occasions within the last few weeks.
Something like a gay mood had come over him. “In one evening I have managed to plunge pretty deeply down into the sea of life,” he thought.
He became a little vain. There he was, a man of the middle class, who had lived all his life in a Wisconsin industrial town. But a few weeks before he had been but a colorless fellow in an almost altogether colorless world. For years he had been going along, just so, day after day, week after week, year after year, going along streets, passing people in the streets, picking his feet up and setting them down, thump thump, eating food, sleeping, borrowing money at banks, dictating letters in offices, going along, thump thump, not daring to think or feel much of anything at all.
Now he could think more thoughts, have more fancies, while he took three or four steps across a room toward his daughter, than he had sometimes dared do in a whole year of his former life. There was a picture of himself in his fancy now that he liked.
In the fanciful picture he had climbed up to a high place above the sea and had taken off his clothes. Then he had run to the end of a cliff and had leaped off into space. His body, his own white body, the same body in which he had been living all through these dead years, was now making a long graceful arched curve against a blue sky.
That was rather nice too. It made a picture for the mind to take hold of and it was pleasant to think of one’s body as making sharp striking pictures.
He had plunged far down into the sea of lives, into the clear warm still sea of Natalie’s life, into the heavy salt dead sea of his wife’s life, into the swiftly running young river of life that was in his daughter Jane.
“I’m a great little mixer-up of figures of speech, but at the same time I’m a great little swimmer in seas,” he said aloud to his daughter.
Well, he had better be a little careful too. Her eyes were becoming puzzled again. It would take a long time for one, living with another, to become used to the sight of things jerked suddenly up out of the wells of thought within oneself and he and his daughter would perhaps never live together again.
He looked at the little stone held so firmly between his thumb and finger. It would be better to keep his mind fastened upon that now. It was a small, a minute thing, but one could fancy it looming large on the surface of a calm sea. His daughter’s life was a river running down to the sea of life. She would want something to which she could cling when she had been cast out into the sea. What an absurd notion. A little green stone would not float in the sea. It would sink. He smiled knowingly.
There was the little stone held before him, in his extended hand. He had picked it up on a railroad track one day and had indulged in fancies concerning it and the fancies had healed him. By indulging in fancies concerning inanimate objects, one in a strange way glorified them. For example a man might go to live in a room. There was a picture in a frame on a wall, the walls of a room, an old desk, two candles under a Virgin, and a man’s fancy made the place a sacred place. All the art of life perhaps consisted in just letting the fancy wash over and color the facts of life.
The light from the two candles under the Virgin fell on the stone he held before him. It was about the size and shape of a small bean and was dark green in color. In certain lights its color changed swiftly. There was a flash of yellow green as of new grown things just coming out of the ground and then that faded away and the stone became altogether a dark lusty green, as of the leaves of oak trees in the late summer, one could fancy.
How clearly John Webster had remembered everything now. The stone he had found on the railroad track had been lost by a woman who was travelling west. The woman had worn it among other stones in a brooch at her throat. He remembered how his imagination had created her at the moment.
Or had it been set in a ring and worn on her finger?...’
Things were a bit mixed. Now he saw the woman quite clearly, as he had seen her in fancy once before, but she was not on a train, but was standing on a hill. It was winter and the hill was coated with a light blanket of snow and below the hill, in a valley, was a wide river covered with a shining sheet of ice. A man, a middle-aged, rather heavy-looking man stood beside the woman and she was pointing at something in the distance. The stone was set in a ring worn on the extended finger.
Now everything became very clear to John Webster. He knew now what he wanted. The woman on the hill was one of the strange people, like the sailor who had come down to the ship, the old man in the road, the actress coming out of the stage door of the theatre, one of the people who had crowned themselves with the crown of life.
He stepped to his daughter and, taking her hand, opened it and laid the little stone on her palm. Then he carefully closed her fingers until her hand was a fist.
He smiled, a knowing little smile and looked Into her eyes. “Well, now Jane, it’s pretty hard to tell you what I’m thinking,” he said. “You see, there are a lot of things in me I can’t get out without time and now I’m going away. I want to give you something.”
He hesitated. “This stone,” he began again, “it’s something for you to cling to perhaps, yes, that’s it. In moments of doubt cling to it. When you become almost distracted and do not know what to do hold it in your hand.”
He turned his head and his eyes seemed to be taking in the room slowly, carefully, as though not wanting to forget anything that made a part of the picture in which he and his daughter were now the central figures.
“As a matter of fact,” he began again, “a woman, a beautiful woman might, you see, hold many jewels in her hand. She might have many loves, you see, and the jewels might be the jewels of experience, the challenges of life she had met, eh?”
John Webster seemed to be playing some fanciful game with his daughter, but now she was no longer frightened, as when she had first come into the room, or puzzled as she had been but a moment before. She was absorbed in what he was saying. The woman crouched on the floor behind her father was forgotten.
“There’s one thing I shall have to do before I go away. I’ve got to give you a name for this little stone,” he said, still smiling. Opening her hand again he took it out and went and
stood for a moment holding it before one of the candles. Then he returned to her and again put it into her hand.
“It is from your father, but he is giving it to you at the moment when he is no longer being your father and has begun to love you as a woman. Well, I guess you’d better cling to it, Jane. You’ll need it, God knows. If you want a name for it call it the ‘Jewel of Life,’” he said and then, as though he had already forgotten the incident he put his hand on her arm and pushing her gently through the door closed it behind her.
IX
THERE STILL REMAINED something for John Webster to do in the room. When his daughter had gone he picked up his bag and went out into the hallway as though about to leave without more words to the wife, who still sat on the floor with her head hanging down, as though unaware of any life about her.
When he had got into the hallway and had closed the door he set his bag down and came back. As he stood within the room, with the knob still held in his hand, he heard a noise on the floor below. “That’s Katherine. What’s she doing up at this time of the night?” he thought. He took out his watch and went nearer the burning candles. It was fifteen minutes to three. “We’ll catch the early morning train at four all right,” he thought.
There was his wife, or rather the woman who for so long a time had been his wife, on the floor at the foot of the bed. Now her eyes were looking directly at him. Still the eyes had nothing to say. They did not even plead with him. There was in them something that was hopelessly puzzled. If the events that had transpired in the room that night had torn the lid off the well she carried about within herself she had managed to clamp it back on again. Now perhaps the lid would never again stir from its place. John Webster felt peculiarly like he fancied an undertaker might feel on being called at night into the presence of a dead body.
Complete Works of Sherwood Anderson Page 96
