The best short stories of 1921, and the yearbook of the American short story
General
The best short stories of 1921, and the yearbook of the American short story
American fiction -- 20th century; Short stories -- 20th century -- Bibliography; Short stories -- 20th century -- Indexes; Short stories, American
She dreamed of the lover who would some time come, a tall fair young
man, a rich man owning houses and lands. The workingman who walked
beside her had nothing to do with her conception of love. She walked
with him, stayed at the office until the others had gone to walk
unobserved with him, because of his eyes, because of the eager thing in
his eyes that was at the same time humble, that bowed down to her. In
his presence there was no danger, could be no danger. He would never
attempt to approach too closely, to touch her with his hands. She was
safe with him.
In his apartment in the evening the man sat under the electric light
with his wife and his mother-in-law. In the next room his two children
were asleep. In a short time his wife would have another child. He had
been with her to a picture show and presently they would get into bed
together.
He would lie awake thinking, would hear the creaking of the springs of a
bed from where, in another room, his mother-in-law was crawling under
the sheets. Life was too intimate. He would lie awake eager,
expectant--expecting what?
Nothing. Presently one of the children would cry. It wanted to get out
of bed and sit on the po-po. Nothing strange or unusual or lovely would
or could happen. Life was too close, intimate. Nothing that could happen
in the apartment could in any way stir him. The things his wife might
say, her occasional half-hearted outbursts of passion, the goodness of
his stout mother-in-law who did the work of a servant without pay--
He sat in the apartment under the electric light pretending to read a
newspaper--thinking. He looked at his hands. They were large, shapeless,
a workingman's hands.
The figure of the girl from Iowa walked about the room. With her he went
out of the apartment and walked in silence through miles of streets. It
was not necessary to say words. He walked with her by a sea, along the
crest of a mountain. The night was clear and silent and the stars shone.
She also was a star. It was not necessary to say words.
Her eyes were like stars and her lips were like soft hills rising out of
dim, star-lit plains. "She is unattainable, she is far off like the
stars," he thought. "She is unattainable like the stars but unlike the
stars she breathes, she lives, like myself she has being."
One evening, some six weeks ago, the man who worked as foreman in the
bicycle factory killed his wife and he is now in the courts being tried
for murder. Every day the newspapers are filled with the story. On the
evening of the murder he had taken his wife as usual to a picture show
and they started home at nine. In Thirty-Second Street, at a corner near
their apartment building, the figure of a man darted suddenly out of an
alleyway and then darted back again. That incident may have put the
idea of killing his wife into the man's head.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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