The Fascinating Stranger, and Other Stories — John Shaqi
The Fascinating Stranger, and Other StoriesTarkington, Booth
General
The Fascinating Stranger, and Other Stories
Tarkington, Booth
Short stories, American; United States -- Social life and customs -- 20th century -- Fiction
Definitely, it was what is known as a “limousine body” in an extreme but
permanent state of incompletion. That is to say, the wooden parts of a
“limousine body” had been set up, put together on a “buck,” or trestle,
and then abandoned with apparently the same abruptness and finality that
marked the departure of the Pompeiian baker who hurried out of his
bakery and left his bread two thousand years in the oven. So sharply the
“post-war industrial depression” had struck the factory, that the
workmen seemed to have run for their lives from the place, leaving
everything behind them just as it happened to be at the moment of panic.
And then, one cold evening, eighteen months afterward, the excavator,
Tuttle, having dug within the neighbouring city dump-heap to no
profitable result, went to explore the desert spaces where once had been
the bustling industries, and found this body of a limousine, just as it
had been abandoned by the workmen fleeing from ruin. He furnished it
plainly with simple shavings and thus made a home.
His shelter was double, for this little house of his itself stood
indoors, under a roof that covered acres. When the watery eye of Mr.
Tuttle opened, it beheld a room vaster than any palace hall, and so
littered with unaccountable other automobile bodies in embryo that their
shapes grew vague and small in the distance. But nothing living was here
except himself; what leather had been in the great place was long since
devoured, and the rats had departed. A night-watchman, paid by the
receiver-in-bankruptcy, walked through the long shops once or twice a
night, swinging a flashlight; but he was unaware of the tenant, and
usually Mr. Tuttle, in slumber, was unaware of him.
The watery eye, having partly opened and then wholly closed, remained
closed for another hour. All round about, inside and outside the great
room, there was silence; for beyond these shops there were only other
shops and others and others, covering square miles, and all as still as
a village midnight. They were as quiet as that every day in the week;
but on weekdays the cautious Tuttle usually went out rather early,
because sometimes a clerk from the receiver’s office dawdled about the
place with a notebook. To-day was Sunday; no one would come; so he slept
as long as he could.
His reasons were excellent as reasons, though immoral at the
source;—that is to say, he should not have had such reasons. He was not
well, and sleep is healing; his reasons for sleeping were therefore
good: but he should not have been unwell; his indisposition was produced
by sin; he had broken the laws of his country and had drunk of illegal
liquor, atrocious in quality; his reasons for sleeping were therefore
bad. His sleep was not a good sleep.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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