The Visioning by Susan Glaspell

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"I don't think of Ann as the making some man a good wife type. I think of
Ann," she tried to formulate it, "as having gone upon a quest, as being
ever upon a quest."

"A--quest?" faltered Mrs. Prescott. "For what?"

"Life," said Katie, peering off into the darkness.

Mrs. Prescott was manifestly disturbed at the prospect of a
daughter-in-law upon a quest. "She sounds--temperamental," she said
critically.

"Yes," said Katie, laughing a little grimly, "she's temperamental
all right."

They could not say more, as Ann and Wayne were coming toward them across
the grass.

And almost immediately afterward the Osborne car again stopped before the
house. It was Mr. Osborne himself this time, bringing the Leonards, who
had been dining with him. They had stopped to see Mrs. Prescott.

Katie was not sorry, for it turned Mrs. Prescott from Ann. Like the
football player who has lost his wind, she wanted a little time
counted out.

But she soon found that she was not playing anything so kindly as a game
of hard and fast rules.

It seemed at first that Ann's ride had done her good. She seemed to have
relaxed and did not give Katie that sense of something smoldering within
her. Katie sat beside her, an arm thrown lightly about Ann's
shoulders--lightly but guardingly.

Neither of them talked much. Mrs. Prescott and Mrs. Leonard were
"visiting"; the men talking of some affairs of Mr. Osborne's. He was
commending the army for minding its own business--not "butting in" and
trying to ruin business the way some other departments of the Government
did. The army seemed in high favor with Mr. Osborne.

Suddenly Mrs. Leonard turned to Katie. She was a large woman, poised by
the shallow serenity of self-approval.

"I do feel so sorry for Miss Osborne," she said. "Such a shocking thing
has occurred. One of the girls at the candy factory--you know she's
trying so hard to help them--has committed suicide!"

Mrs. Prescott uttered an exclamation of horror. Katie patted the shoulder
beside her soothingly, understandingly, and as if begging for calm. Even
under her light touch she seemed to feel the nerves leap up.

Mr. Osborne turned to them. "Poor Cal, she'd better let things alone.
What's the use? She can't do anything with people like that."

"It's the cause of the suicide that's the disgusting thing," said
Colonel Leonard.

"Or rather," amended his wife, "the lack of cause."

"But surely," protested Mrs. Prescott, "no girl would take her life
without--what she thought was cause. Surely all human beings hold life
and death too sacred for that."

"Oh, do they?" scoffed Mrs. Leonard. "Not that class. I scarcely expect
you to believe me--I had a hard time believing it myself--but she says
she committed suicide--she left a note for her room-mate--because she
was 'tired of not having any fun!'"

The hand upon Ann's shoulder grew fairly eloquent. And Ann seemed trying.
Her hands were tightly clasped in her lap.

"Why, I don't know," said Wayne, "I think that's about one of the best
reasons I can think of."

"This is not a jesting matter, Captain Jones," said Mrs. Leonard
severely.

"Far from it," said Wayne.

"Think what it means to a girl like Caroline Osborne! A girl who is
trying to do something for humanity--to find the people she wants to
uplift so trivial--so without souls!"

"It is hard on Cal," agreed Cal's father.

"Though perhaps just a trifle harder," ventured Wayne, "on the
girl who did."

"Well, what did she do it for?" he demanded. "Come now, Captain, you
can't make out much of a case for her. Mrs. Leonard's word is just
right--trivial. She said she was tired of things. Tired--tired--tired of
things, she put it. Tired of walking down the same street. Tired of
hanging her hat on the same kind of a peg! Now, Captain--if you can put
up any defense for a girl who kills herself because she's tired of
hanging her hat on a certain kind of peg! Well," he laughed, "if you can,
all I've got to say is that you'd better leave the army and go in for
criminal law."

"Why didn't she walk down some other street," he resumed, as no one
broke the pause. "If it's a matter of life and death--a person might walk
down some other street!"

"And I've no doubt," said Captain Prescott, "that if it were known her
life, as well as her hat, hung upon it--she might have had a different
kind of peg."

They laughed.

"Oh, of course, the secret of it is," pronounced the Colonel, "she was a
neurotic."

For the first time Katie spoke. "I think it's such a fine thing we got
hold of that word. Since we've known about neurotics we can just throw
all the emotion and suffering and tragedy of the world in the one heap
and leave it to the scientists. It lets _us_ out so beautifully,
doesn't it?"

"Oh, but Katie!" admonished Mrs. Prescott. "Think of it! What is the
world coming to? Going forth to meet one's God because one doesn't like
the peg for one's hat!"

Katie had a feeling of every nerve in Ann's body leaping up in frenzy.
"_God_?" she laughed wildly. "Don't drag _Him_ into it! Do you think _He_
cares"--turning upon Mrs. Prescott as if she would spring at her--"do you
think for a minute _He_ cares--_what kind of pegs our hats are on_!"

CHAPTER XXI

Katie's memory of what followed was blurred. She remembered how relieved
she was when Ann's laugh--oh the memory of that laugh was clear
enough!--gave way to sobbing. Sobbing was easier to deal with. She said
something about her friend's being ill, and that they would have to
excuse them. She almost wanted to laugh--or was it cry?--herself at the
way Harry Prescott was looking from Ann to his mother. After she got Ann
in the house she went back and begged somebody's pardon--she wasn't sure
whose--and told Colonel Leonard that of course he could understand it on
the score of Ann's being a neurotic. She was afraid she might have said
that rather disagreeably. And she believed she told Mrs. Prescott--she
had to tell Mrs. Prescott something, she looked so frightened and hurt
and outraged--that Ann had a form of nervous trouble which made it
impossible for her to hear the name of God.

The hardest was Wayne. She came to him on the porch after the others had
gone--they were not long in dispersing. "Wayne," she said, "I'm sorry to
have embarrassed you."

His short, curt laugh did not reveal his mood. It was
scoffing--contemptuous--but she could not tell at what it scoffed. He had
not turned toward her.

"I'm sorry," she repeated. "Ann will be sorry. She's so--"

He turned upon her hotly. "Katie, quit lying to _me_. I know there's
something you're not telling. I've suspected it for some time. Now don't
get off any of that 'nervous trouble' talk to me!"

She stood there dumbly.

It seemed to enrage him. "Why don't you go and look after her! What do
you mean by leaving her all alone?"

So she went to look after her.

Ann looked like one who needed looking after. Her eyes were intolerably
bright. It seemed the heat behind them must put them out.

She was walking about the room, walking as if something were behind her
with a lash.

"You see, Katie," she began, not pausing in the walking--her voice,
too, as though a whip were behind it--"it was just as I told you. It
was just as I tried to tell you. There are two worlds. There's no use
trying to put me in yours. See what I bring you! See what you get for
it! See what--"

She stood still, rocking back and forth as she stood there. "It was too
much for me to hear her talking about _God!_ That was a little too much!
_My_ father was a minister!" And Ann laughed.

A minister was one thing Katie had not thought of. Even in that moment
she was conscious of relief. Certainly the ministry was respectable.

But why should it be "too much" for the daughter of a minister to hear
anything about God?

"Ann," she began quietly, "I don't want to force anything. If you want
to be alone I'll even take my things and sleep somewhere else. But, Ann,
dear, if you could tell me a little I wouldn't be so much in the dark; I
could do better for us both."

Ann did not seem to notice what she was saying. "She was tired of things!
She was tired of things! Tired of hanging her hat on the same kind of
peg! Why it's awful--it's awful, I tell you--to always be hanging your
hat on the same kind of peg!

"She was tired of not having any fun! Oh so tired of not having any fun!
Why you don't care what you do when you get tired of not having any fun!

"Then people laugh--the people who have all the fun. Oh they think it's
so funny!--the people who don't have to hang their hats on any kind of
peg. So trivial. So--what's that nervous word? Katie--you're not like the
rest of them! Why, you seem to _know_--just know without knowing."

"But it's hard for me," suggested Katie. "Trying to know--and not
knowing."

Ann was still walking about the room. "I was brought up in a little town
in Indiana. You see I'm going to tell you. I've got to be doing
something--and it may as well be talking. Now how did I start? Oh yes--I
was brought up in a little town in Indiana. Until three years ago, that
was where I lived. Were you ever in a little town in Indiana?"

Katie replied in the negative.

"Maybe there are little towns in Indiana that are different. I don't
know. Maybe there are. But this one-in this one life was just one long
stretch of hanging your hat on exactly the same kind of peg!

"It was so square--so flat--so dingy--oh, so dreadful! It didn't have
anything around it--as some towns do--a hill, or a river, or woods.
Around it was something that was just nothing. It was just walled in by
the nothingness all around it.

"And the people in it were flat, and square, and dingy. And the things
around them were just nothing. They were walled in, too, by the
nothingness all around them."

Then the most unexpected of all things happened. Ann smiled. "Katie, I'd
like to have seen you in that town!"

"I'm afraid," said Katie, "that I would have invented a new kind of peg."

The smile seemed to have done Ann good. She sat down, grew more natural.

"When I try to tell about my life in that town I suppose it sounds as
though I were making a terrible fuss about things. When you think of
children that haven't any homes-that are beaten by drunken
fathers--starved--overworked-but it was the nothingness. If my father
only had got drunk!"

Katie smiled understandingly.

"Katie, you've a lot of imagination. Just try to think what it would mean
never to have what you could really call fun!"

Katie took a sweep back over her own life--full to the brim of fun. Her
imagination did not go far enough to get a real picture of life with the
fun left out.

"Oh, of course," said Ann, "there were pleasures! My father and the
people of his church were like Miss Osborne--they believed it was one of
the underlying principles of life--only they would call it 'God's
will'--that all must have pleasure. But such God-fearing pleasure! I
think I could have stood it if it hadn't been for the pleasures."

"Pleasures with the fun left out," suggested Kate.

"Yes, though fun isn't the word, for I don't mean just good times. I
mean--I mean--"

"You mean the joy of living," said Katie. "You mean the loveliness of
life."

"Yes; now your kind of religion--the kind of religion your kind of people
have, doesn't seem to hurt them any."

Katie laughed oddly. "True; it doesn't hurt us much."

"My father's kind is something so different. The love of God seems to
have dried him up. He's not a human being. He's a Christian."

Katie thought of her uncle--a bishop, and all too human a human being.
She was about to protest, then considered that she had never known the
kind of Christian--or human being--Ann was talking about.

"Everything at our church squeaked. The windows. The organ. The deacon's
shoes. My father's voice. The religion squeaked. Life squeaked.

"I'll tell you a story, Katie, that maybe will make you see how it was.
It's about a dog, and it's easy for you to understand things about dogs.

"Some one gave him to me. I suppose he was not a fine dog--not
full-blooded. But that didn't matter. _You_ know that we don't love dogs
for their blood. We love them for the way they look out of their eyes,
and the way they wag their tails. I can't tell you what this dog meant to
me--something to love--something that loved me--some one to play with--a
companion--a friend--something that didn't have anything to do with my
father's church!

"He used to feel so sorry when I had to sit learning Bible verses.
Sometimes he would put his two paws up on my lap and try to push the
Bible away. I loved him for that. And when at last I could put it away he
would dance round me with little yelps of joy. He warmed something in me.
He kept something alive.

"And then one day when I came home from a missionary meeting where I had
read a paper telling how cruelly young girls were treated by their
parents in India, and how there was no joy and love and beauty in their
lives, I--" Ann hid her face and it was a drawn, grayish face she raised
after a minute--"Tono was not there. I called and called him. My father
was writing a sermon. He let me go on calling. I could not understand it.
Tono always came running down the walk, wagging his tail and giving his
little barks of joy when I came. It had made coming home seem different
from what it had ever seemed before. But that day he was not there
watching for me. My father let me go on calling for a long time. At last
he came to the door and said--'Please stop that unseemly noise. The dog
has been sent away.' 'Sent _away_?' I whispered. 'What do you mean?' 'I
mean that I have seen fit to dispose of him,' he answered. I was
trembling all over. 'What right had you to dispose of him?' I wanted to
know. 'He wasn't your dog--' The answer was that I was to go up to my
room and learn Bible verses until the Lord chastened my spirit. Then I
said things. I would _not_ learn Bible verses. I _would_ have my dog. It
ended"--Ann was trembling uncontrollably--"it ended with the rod being
unspared. God's forgiveness was invoked with each stroke."

She was digging her finger nails into her palms. Katie put her arms
around her. "I wouldn't, Ann dear--it isn't worth while. It's all over
now. Wouldn't it be better to forget?"

"No, I want to tell you. Some day I may try to tell you other things. I
want this to try to explain them. Loving dogs, you will understand
this--better than you could some other things.

"The dog had been given away to some one who lived in the country. It was
because I had played with him the Sunday morning before and had been late
to Sunday-school."

Her voice was dry and hard; it was from Katie there came the exclamation
of protest and contempt.

"No one except one who loves dogs as you do would know what it meant.
Even you can't quite know. For Tono was all I had. He--"

Katie's arm about her tightened.

"I could have stood it for myself. I could have stood my own
lonesomeness. But what I couldn't stand was thinking about him. Nights I
would wake up and think of him--out in the cold--homesick--maybe
hungry--not understanding--watching and waiting--wondering why I didn't
come. I couldn't keep from thinking about things that tortured me. This
man was a deacon in my father's church. From the way he prayed, I knew he
was not one to be good to dogs.

"And then one afternoon I heard the little familiar scratch at the door.
I rushed to it, and there he was--shivering--but oh so, so glad! He
sprang right into my arms--we cried and cried together--sitting there on
the floor. His heart had been almost broken--he had grieved--_suffered_.
He wasn't willing to leave my arms; just whimpering the way one does when
a dreadful thing is over--licking my face--you know how they do--you know
how dear they are.

"Now I will tell you what I did. Holding him in my arms, my face buried
in his fur--I made up my mind. The family would be away for at least an
hour. I would give him the happiest hour I knew how to give him. One
hour--it was all I had the power to give him. Then--because I loved him
so much--I would end his life."

Katie's face whitened. "I carried out the plan," Ann went on. "I gave him
the meat we were to have had for supper. I had him do all his little
tricks. I loved him and loved him. I do not think any little dog ever
had a happier hour.

"And then--down at a house in the next block I saw my father--and the man
he had given Tono to. The man was coming to our house for supper. Our
time was up.

"I can never explain to any one the way I did it--the way I felt as I did
it. There was no crying. There was no faltering. It seemed that all at
once I understood--understood the hardness of life--that things _are_
hard--that things have _got_ to be done. Then was when it came to me that
you've got to harden yourself--that it's the only way.

"I filled a tub with water--I didn't know any other way to do it. Tono
stood there watching me. I took a bucket. I took up the dog. I hugged
him. I let him lick my face. Though I live to be very old, Katie, and
suffer very much, I can never forget the look in his eyes as I put him in
the water and held him to put down the bucket. There are things a person
goes through that make perfect happiness forever impossible. There are
hours that stay."

The face of the soldier's daughter was wet. "I love you for it, Ann," she
whispered. "I love you for it. It was strong, Ann. It was fine."

"I wasn't very strong and fine the minute it was over," sobbed Ann.
"I fainted. They found me there. And then I screamed and laughed and
said I was going to kill all the dogs in the world. I said--oh,
dreadful things."

"They should have understood," murmured Kate.

"They didn't. They said I was wicked. They said the Evil One had entered
into me. They said I must pray God to forgive me for having killed one of
his creatures! Me--!

"Of course it ended in Bible verses. Is it so strange I _loathed_ the
Bible? And every morning I had to hear myself prayed for as a wicked girl
who would harm one of God's creatures. The Almighty was implored not to
send me to Hell. 'Send me there if you want to,' I'd say to myself on my
knees, 'Tono's not in Hell, anyway.'"

Ann laughed bitterly. "So that's why I'm a sacrilegious, blasphemous
person who doesn't care much about hearing about God. I associate Him
with thin lips that shut together tight-and people who make long
prayers and break little dogs' hearts--and with boots--and souls--that
squeak. I can't think of one single thing I ever heard about Him that
made me like Him."

"Oh, Ann dear!" protested Katie shudderingly.

"Try not to think such things. Try not to feel that way. You haven't
heard everything there is to hear about God. You haven't heard any of it
in the right way."

"Perhaps not. I only know what I have heard." And Ann's face was too
white and hard for Katie to say more.

"And your mother, dear? Where was she all this time? Didn't she love
you--and help?"

"She died when I was twelve. She'd like to have loved me. She did some on
the sly--in a scared kind of way."

Katie sat there contemplating the picture of Ann's father and mother and
Ann--_Ann_, as child of that union.

"I think she died because life frightened her so. In a year my father
married again. _She_ isn't afraid of anything. She's a God-fearing,
exemplary woman. And she always looks to see if you have any mud on
your shoes."

After a moment Ann said quietly: "I hate her."

"So would I," said Katie, and it brought the ghost of a smile to Ann's
lips, perhaps thinking of just how cordially Katie would hate her.

"And then after a while you left this town?" Katie suggested as Ann
seemed held there by something.

"Yes, after a while I left." And that held her again.

"I was fifteen when I--freed Tono from life," she emerged from it. "It
was five years later that you--stopped me from freeing myself. Lots of
things were crowded into those five years, Katie--or rather into the last
three of them. I had to be treated worse than Tono was treated before it
came to me that I had better be as kind to myself as I had been to my
dog. Only I," Ann laughed, "didn't have anybody to give me a last hour!"

"But you see it wasn't a last hour, after all," soothed Katie. "Only the
last hour of the old hard things. Things that can never come back."

"Can't they come back, Katie? Can't they?"

Katie shook her head with decision. "Do you think I'd let them come
back? Why I'd shut the door in their face!"

"Sometimes," said Ann, "it seems to me they're lying in wait for me. That
they're going to spring out. That this is a dream. That there isn't any
Katie Jones. Some nights I've been afraid to go to sleep. Afraid of
waking to find it a dream. There's an awful dream I dream sometimes! The
dream is that this is a dream."

"Poor dear," murmured Katie. "It will be more real now that we've
talked."

"I used to dream a dream, Katie, and I think it was about you. Only you
weren't any one thing. You were all kinds of different things. Lovely
things. You were Something Somewhere. You were the something that was way
off beyond the nothingness of Centralia."

"The something that didn't squeak," suggested Katie tremulously.

"Something Somewhere. You were both a waking and a sleeping dream. I knew
you were there. Isn't it queer how we do--know without knowing? My father
used to talk about people being 'called.' Called to the ministry--called
to the missionary field--called to heaven. Well maybe you're called to
other things, too. Maybe," said Ann with a laugh which sobbed, "you're
even 'called' to Chicago."

The laugh died and the sob lingered. "Only when you get there--Chicago
doesn't seem to know that it had called you.

"My Something Somewhere was always something I never could catch up
with. Sometimes it was a beautiful country--where a river wound through a
woods. Sometimes it was beautiful people laughing and dancing. Sometimes
it was a star. Sometimes it was a field of flowers--all blowing back and
forth. Sometimes it was a voice--a wonderful far-away voice. Sometimes it
was a lovely dress--oh a wonderful gauzy dress--or a hat that was like
the blowing field of flowers. Sometimes--this was the loveliest of
all--it was somebody who loved me. But whatever it was, it was something
I couldn't overtake.

"And you mustn't laugh, Katie, when I tell you that the thing that made
me think I could catch up with it was a moving-picture show!

"It came to Centralia--the first one that had ever been there. I heard
the people next door talking about it. They said there were pictures of
things that really happened in the great cities--oh of kings and queens
and the president and millionaires and automobile races and grand
weddings; that the pictures went on just like the happenings went on;
that it was just as if the pictures were alive; that it was just like
being there.

"Oh, I was so excited about it! I was so excited I could hardly
get ready.

"You see ever since Tono had died--two years before, I had kept that idea
that things were hard. That the thing to do was to be hard. I dreamed
about things that were lovely--the Something Somewhere things--but as far
as the real things went I never changed my mind about them. You mustn't
let them into your heart. They just wanted to get in there to hurt you.

"Now I forgot all about that. These pictures were dreams made real. They
had caught up with the Something Somewhere. And I was going to see them.

"But I didn't--not that day. I was so happy that my father suspected
something. And he got it out of me and said I couldn't go. He said that
the things that would be pictured would be the wickedness of the world.
That I was not to see it.

"But I made up my mind that I would see the wickedness of the world." Ann
paused, and then said in lower voice: "And I have--and not just in
pictures."

She seemed to be meeting something, and she answered it. "But just the
same," she made answer defiantly, "I'd rather see the wickedness of the
world than stay in the nothingness of the world!

"The pictures were to be there a week. I thought of nothing else but how
I could see them. The last day there was a thimble-bee. I went to the
thimble-bee--said I couldn't stay--and went to the pictures.

"Katie, that moving-picture show was proof. Proof of the Something
Somewhere. And in my heart I made a vow--it was a _solemn_ vow--that I
would find the things that moved in the pictures.

"And there was music--such music as I had never heard before, even though
it came out of a box. They had the songs of the grand opera singers. And
as I listened--I tell you I was called!--I don't care how silly it
sounds--I was called by the voices that had sung into that box. For this
was real--if the life hadn't been there it couldn't have been caught into
the pictures and the box. It proved--I thought--that all the lovely
things I had dreamed were true. I had only to go and find them. People
were walking upon those streets. Then I could walk on those streets. And
those people were laughing--and talking to each other. Everybody seemed
to have friends. Everybody was happy! And all of that really _was_. The
pictures were alive. Alive with the things that there were out beyond the
nothingness of Centralia.

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