“At any rate and for just a moment she was not frightened or startled
at all. It was really our wedding moment, you see.
“O, had we only known how to live up to that moment! I stood there
looking at her and she was there on the bed looking at me. There must
have been a glowing something alive in our eyes. I did not know then
all I felt, but long afterward, sometimes, when I was walking in the
country or riding on a train, I thought. Well, what did I think? It was
evening you see. I mean that afterward, sometimes, when I was alone,
when it was evening and I was alone I looked off across hills or I saw
a river making a white streak down below as I stood on a cliff. What I
mean to say is that I have spent all these years trying to recapture
that moment and now it is dead.”
John Webster threw out his hands with a gesture of disgust and then
got quickly off the bed. His wife’s body had begun to stir and now she
lifted herself up. For a moment her rather huge figure was crouched on
the bed and she looked like some great animal on all fours, sick and
trying to get up and walk.
And then she did get up, putting her feet firmly on the floor and
walking slowly out of the room without looking at the two people. Her
husband stood with his back pressed against the wall of the room and
watched her go. “Well, that’s the end of her,” he thought grimly. The
door that led into her room came slowly toward him. Now it was closed.
“Some doors have to be closed forever too,” he told himself.
He was still in his daughter’s presence and she was not afraid of him.
He went to a closet and getting out his clothes began to dress. That he
realized was a terrible moment. Well, he was playing the cards he held
in his hand to the limit. He had been nude. Now he had to get into his
clothes, into the clothes he had come to feel had no meaning and were
altogether unlovely because the unknown hands that had fashioned them
were unmoved by the desire to create beauty. An absurd notion came to
him. “Has my daughter a sense of moments? Will she help me now?” he
asked himself.
And then his heart jumped. His daughter Jane had done a quite lovely
thing. While he jerked his clothes on hurriedly she turned and threw
herself face downward on the bed, in the same position in which her
mother had been but a moment before.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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