John Webster had got himself excited again. He took his arm from
about his daughter’s shoulder and rubbed his hands together. A slight
shivering sensation ran through his body and through the body of his
daughter. She did not understand what he was saying, but in a queer
sense that did not matter. They were, at the moment deeply in accord.
This having one’s whole being suddenly become alive, after years of
a kind of partial death, was a strain. One had to get a kind of new
balance to the body and mind. One felt very young and strong and then
suddenly old and tired. Now one was carrying his life forward as one
might carry a filled cup through a crowded street. All the time one had
to remember, to keep in mind, that there must be a certain relaxation
to the body. One must give and swing with things a little. That must
always be borne in mind. If one became rigid and tense at any time,
except at the moment when one cast one’s body into the body of one’s
beloved, one’s foot stumbled or one knocked against things and the
filled cup one carried was emptied with an awkward gesture.
Strange thoughts kept coming into the mind of the man as he sat on the
bed with his daughter trying to get himself in hand. One might very
easily become one of the kind of people one saw everywhere about, one
of the kind of people whose empty bodies went walking everywhere in
towns and cities and on farms, “one of the kind of people whose life
is an empty cup,” he thought and then a more majestic thought came and
steadied him. There was something he had heard or read about sometime.
What was it? “Arouse not up or awaken my love ’til he please,” a voice
within him said.
* * * * *
Again he began the telling of the story of his marriage.
“We went off on our wedding trip to a farmhouse in Kentucky, went there
in the sleeping car of a train at night. I kept thinking about going
slow with her, kept telling myself all the time I’d better go slow so
that night she slept in a lower berth while I crept into the one above.
We were going on a visit to a farm owned by her uncle, by her father’s
brother, and we got to the town, where we were to get off the train,
before breakfast in the morning.
“Her uncle was waiting with a carriage at the station and we drove off
at once to this place in the country where we were to visit.”
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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