Horses and Men: Tales, long and short, from our American lifeAnderson, Sherwood
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Horses and Men: Tales, long and short, from our American life
Anderson, Sherwood
American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories, American
He was a poet, I presume, and perhaps at the moment a new poem was
forming itself in his mind.
At any rate he stood for a time, as I have said, and then he must have
had a feeling that he should make some move, that he should if possible
save himself from some disaster about to overtake him.
He had an impulse to go to the door, and by way of the stairway, to go
down stairs and into the street—but the body of the woman was between
him and the door.
What he did and what, when he later told of it, sounded so terribly
cruel to others, was to treat the woman’s dead body as one might treat a
fallen tree in the darkness in a forest. First he tried to push the body
aside with his foot and then as that seemed impossible, he stepped
awkwardly over it.
He stepped directly on the woman’s arm. The discolored mark where his
heel landed was afterward found on the body.
He almost fell, and then his body righted itself and he went walking,
marched down the rickety stairs and went walking in the streets.
By chance the night had cleared. It had grown colder and a cold wind had
driven the fog away. He walked along, very nonchalantly, for several
blocks. He walked along as calmly as you, the reader, might walk, after
having had lunch with a friend.
As a matter of fact he even stopped to make a purchase at a store. I
remember that the place was called “The Whip.” He went in, bought
himself a package of cigarettes, lighted one and stood a moment,
apparently listening to a conversation going on among several idlers in
the place.
And then he strolled again, going along smoking the cigarette and
thinking of his poem no doubt. Then he came to a moving-picture theatre.
That perhaps touched him off. He also was an old fireplace, stuffed with
old thoughts, scraps of unwritten poems—God knows what rubbish! Often he
had gone at night to the theatre, where the woman was employed, to walk
home with her, and now the people were coming out of a small
moving-picture house. They had been in there seeing a play called “The
Light of the World.”
Wilson walked into the midst of the crowd, lost himself in the crowd,
smoking his cigarette, and then he took off his hat, looked anxiously
about for a moment, and suddenly began shouting in a loud voice.
He stood there, shouting and trying to tell the story of what had
happened in a loud voice, and with the uncertain air of one trying to
remember a dream. He did that for a moment and then, after running a
little way along the pavement, stopped and began his story again. It was
only after he had gone thus, in short rushes, back, along the street to
the house and up the rickety stairway to where the woman was lying—the
crowd following curiously at his heels—that a policeman came up and
arrested him.
He seemed excited at first but was quiet afterwards and he laughed at
the notion of insanity, when the lawyer who had been retained for him,
tried to set up the plea in court.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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