# The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/The Man's Story

THE MAN'S STORY
BY SHERWOOD ANDERSON
DURING his trial for murder and later, after he had been cleared through the confession of that queer little bald chap with the nervous hands, I watched him, fascinated by his continued effort to make something understood.
He was persistently interested in something having nothing to do with the charge that he had murdered the woman. The matter of whether or not and by due process of law he was to be convicted of murder and hanged by the neck until he was dead didn’t seem to interest him. The law was something outside his life. He simply declined to have anything to do with the killing as one might decline a cigarette. "I thank you, I am not smoking at present. I made a bet with a fellow that I could go along without cigarettes for a month."
That is the sort of thing I mean. It was puzzling. Really had he been guilty and trying to save his neck he couldn't have taken a better line. You see, at first, everyone thought that he had done the killing; we were all convinced of it, and then, just because of that magnificent air of indifference, everyone began wanting to save him. When news came of the confession of the crazy little stage-hand everyone broke out into cheers.
He was clear of the law after that, but his manner in no way changed. There was, somewhere, a man or a woman who would understand just what he understood, and it was important to find that person and talk things over. There was a time, during the trial and immediately afterwards, when I saw a good deal of him; and I had this sharp sense of him feeling about in the darkness trying to find something like a needle or pin lost on the floor. Well, he was like an old man who cannot find his glasses. He feels in all his pockets and looks helplessly about.
There was a question in my own mind too, in everyone's mind—"Can a man be wholly casual and brutal in every outward way, at a moment when the one nearest and dearest to him is dying, and at the same time and with quite another part of himself be altogether tender and sensitive?"
​Anyway it’s a story, and once in a while even a newspaper man likes to tell a story straight out, without putting in any newspaper jargon about beautiful heiresses, cold-blooded murderers, and all that sort of tommyrot.
As I picked the story up the sense of it was something like this—
The man's name was Wilson, Edgar Wilson—and he had come to Chicago from some place to the westward, perhaps from the mountains. He might once have been a sheep herder or something of the sort as he had the peculiar abstract air acquired only by being a good deal alone. About himself and his past he told a good many conflicting stories, and so after being with him for a time one instinctively discarded the past.
"The devil—it doesn't matter—the man can't tell the truth in that direction. Let it go," one said to oneself. What was known was that he had come to Chicago from a town in Kansas and that he had run away from the Kansas town with another man's wife.
As to her story, I knew little enough of it. She had been at one time I imagine a rather handsome thing, in a big strong upstanding kind of way, but her life, until she met Wilson, had been rather messy. In those dead flat Kansas towns, lives have a way of getting ugly and messy without anything very definite having happened to make them so. One can't imagine the reasons. Let it go. It just is so and one can't at all believe the Kansas writers about the life out there.
To be a little more definite about this particular woman—in her young girlhood her father had got into trouble. He had been some sort of small official, a travelling agent or something of the sort for an express company, and got arrested in connexion with the disappearance of some money. And then, when he was in jail and before his trial, he shot and killed himself. The girl's mother was already dead.
Within a year or two she married a man, an honest enough fellow, but from all accounts rather uninteresting. He was a drug clerk and a frugal man, after a short time managed to buy a drug store of his own.
The woman had, as I have said, been strong and well built, but now grew thin and nervous. Still she carried herself well, with a sort of air as it were, and there was something about her that appealed strongly to men. Several men of the seedy little town were ​smitten by her and wrote her letters, trying to get her to creep out with them at night. You know how such things are done. The letters were unsigned. "You go to such and such a place on Friday evening. If you are willing to talk things over with me carry a book in your hand."
Then the woman made a mistake and told her husband about the receipt of one of the letters, and he grew angry and tramped off to the trysting place at night with a shotgun in his hand. When no one appeared he came home and fussed about. He said little mean tentative things. "You must have looked in a certain way at the man when you passed him on the street. A man don't grow so bold with a married woman unless an opening has been given him."
The man talked and talked after that and life in the house must not have been gay. She grew habitually silent and when she was silent the house was silent. They had no children.
Then the man Edgar Wilson came along going eastward and stopped over in the town for two or three days. He had at that time a little money and stayed at a small workingmen's boardinghouse near the railroad station. One day he saw the woman walking in the street and followed her to her home and the neighbours saw them standing and talking together for an hour by the front gate. On the next day he came again.
That time they talked for two hours and then she went into the house, got a few belongings, and walked to the railroad station with him. They took a train for Chicago and lived here together apparently very happy, until she died—in a way I am about to try to tell you about. They of course could not be married, and during the three years they lived here he did nothing toward earning their common living. As he had a very small amount of money when they came, barely enough to get them here from the Kansas town, they were miserably poor.
They lived, when I knew about them, over on the North Side, in that section of old three and four story brick residences that were once the homes of what we call our nice people, but that had afterwards gone to the bad. The section is having a kind of rebirth now, but for a good many years it rather went to seed. There were these old residences, made into boarding-houses, and with unbelievably dirty lace curtains at the windows, and now and then an ​utterly disreputable old tumble-down frame house, in one of which Wilson lived with his woman.
The place is a sight. Someone owns it I suppose who is shrewd enough to know that in a big city like Chicago no section gets neglected always. Such a fellow must have said to himself, "Well, I'll let the place go. The ground on which the house stands will some day be very valuable, but the house is worth nothing. I'll let it go at a low rental and do nothing to fix it up. Perhaps I will get enough out of it to pay my taxes until prices come up."
And so the house had stood there unpainted for years and the windows were out of line and the shingles nearly all off the roof. The second floor was reached by an outside stairway with a handrail that had become just the peculiar greasy black that wood can become in a soft coal burning city like Chicago and Pittsburgh. One's hand became black when the railing was touched and the rooms above were altogether cold and cheerless.
At the front there was a large room with a fireplace from which many bricks had fallen, and back of that were two small sleeping rooms.
Wilson and his woman lived in the place at the time when the thing happened I am to tell you about, and as they had taken it in May I presume they did not too much mind the cold barrenness of the large front room in which they lived. There was a sagging wooden bed with a leg broken off the woman had tried to repair with sticks from a packing box, a kitchen table that was also used by Wilson as a writing desk, and two or three cheap kitchen chairs.
The woman had managed to get a place as wardrobe woman in a theatre in Randolph Street and they lived on her earnings. It was said she had got the job because some man connected with the theatre or a company playing there had a passion for her, but one can always pick up stories of that sort about any woman who works about the theatre—from the scrub-woman to the star.
Anyway she worked there and had a reputation in the theatre of being quiet and efficient.
As for Wilson, he wrote poetry of a sort I've never seen before, although, like most newspaper men, I've taken a turn at verse-making myself now and then, both of the rhymed kind and the newfangled vers libre sort. I rather go in for the classical stuff myself.
About Wilson's verse—it was Greek to me. Well now, to get ​right down to hardpan in this matter, it was and it wasn't. The stuff made me feel just a little bit woozy when I took a whole sheaf of it and sat alone in my room reading it at night. It was all about walls and deep wells and great bowls with young trees standing erect in them and trying to find their way to the light and air over the rim of the bowl.
Queer crazy stuff, every line of it, but fascinating too in a way. One got into a new world with new values, which after all is I suppose what poetry is all about. There was the world of fact we all know or think we know, the world of flat buildings and Middle-Western farms with wire fences about the fields and Fordson tractors running up and down, and towns with high schools and advertising billboards and everything that makes up life, or that we think makes up life.
There was this world we all walk about in and then there was another world that I have come to think of as Wilson's world: a dim world, to me at least, of far-away near places—things taking new and strange shapes, the insides of people coming out, the eyes seeing new things, the fingers feeling new and strange things.
It was a world of walls mainly. I got hold of the whole lot of Wilson's verse by a piece of luck. It happened that I was the first newspaper man who got into the place on the night when the woman's body was found; and there was all the stuff, carefully written out in a sort of child's copy-book, and two or three stupid policemen standing about. I just shoved the book under my coat, when they weren't looking, and later, during Wilson's trial, we published some of the more intelligible ones in the paper. It made pretty good newspaper stuff—the poet who killed his mistress, and all that.
To get back to the poetry itself for a moment. I just wanted to explain that all through the book there ran this notion that men had erected walls about themselves and that all men were perhaps destined to stand for ever behind the walls, on which they constantly beat with their fists, or with whatever tools they could get hold of. One couldn't quite make out whether there was just one great wall or many little individual walls. Sometimes Wilson put it one way, sometimes another. Men had themselves built the walls and now stood behind them, knowing dimly that beyond the walls there was warmth, light, air, beauty, life in fact—while at ​the same time, and because of a kind of madness in themselves, the walls were constantly being built higher and stronger.
The notion gives you the willies a little, doesn't it? Anyway it does me.
And then there was that notion about deep wells, men everywhere constantly digging and digging themselves down deeper and deeper into deep wells. They not wanting to do it, you under-stand, and none wanting them to do it, but all the time the thing going on just the same, that is to say the wells getting constantly deeper and deeper and the voices growing dimmer and dimmer in the distance—and again the light and the warmth of life going away and going away, because of a kind of blind refusal of people to try to understand each other, I suppose.
It was all very strange to me—Wilson's poetry, I mean—when I came to it. Here is one of his things. It is not directly concerned with the walls, the bowl, or the deep well theme, as you will see; but it is one we ran in the paper during the trial and a lot of folks rather liked it as I'll admit I do myself. Maybe putting it in here will give a kind of point to my story by giving you some sense of the strangeness of the man who is the story's hero. In the book it was called merely number ninety-seven and it went as follows:
"The firm grip of my fingers on the thin paper of this cigarette is a sign that I am very quiet now. Sometimes it is not so. When I am unquiet I am weak, but when I am quiet, as I am now, I am very strong.
"Just now I went along one of the streets of my city and in at a door and came up here, where I am now, lying on a bed and looking out at a window. Very suddenly and completely the knowledge has come to me that I could grip the sides of tall buildings as freely and as easily as I now grip this cigarette. I could hold the building between my fingers, put it to my lips, and blow smoke through it. I could blow confusion away. I could blow a thousand people out through the roof of one tall building into the sky, into the unknown. Building after building I could consume as I consume the cigarettes in this box. I could throw the burning ends of cities over my shoulder and out through a window.
"It is not often I get in the state I am now in—so quiet and sure of myself. When the feeling comes over me there is a directness ​and simplicity in me that make me love myself. To myself at such times I say strong sweet words.
"I am on a couch by this window and I could ask a woman to come here to lie with me, or a man either for that matter.
"I could take a row of houses standing on a street, tip them over, empty the people out of them, squeeze and compress all the people into one person, and love that person.
"Do you see this hand? Suppose it held a knife that could cut down through all the falseness in you. Suppose it could cut down through the sides of buildings and houses where thousands of people now lie asleep.
"It would be something worth thinking about if the fingers of this hand gripped a knife that could cut and rip through all the ugly husks in which millions of lives are enclosed."
Well, there is the idea you see, a kind of power that could be gentle too. I will quote you just one more of his things, a more gentle one. It is called in the book number eighty-three.
"I am a tree that grows beside the wall. I have been thrusting up and up. My body is covered with scars. My body is old, but still I thrust upward, creeping toward the top of the wall.
"It is my desire to drop blossoms and fruit over the wall.
"I would moisten dry lips.
"I would drop blossoms on the heads of children, over the top of the wall.
"I would caress with falling blossoms the bodies of those who live on the further side of the wall.
"My branches are creeping upward and new sap comes into me out of the dark ground under the wall.
"My fruit shall not be my fruit until it drops from my arms into the arms of the others over the top of the wall."
And now as to the life led by the man and woman in the large upper room in that old frame house. By a stroke of luck I have recently got rather a line on that by a discovery I have made.
After they had moved into the house—it was only last spring—the theatre in which the woman was employed was dark for a long time and they were more than usually hard up; so the woman tried ​to pick up a little extra money—to help pay the rent I suppose—by sub-letting the two little back rooms of that place of theirs.
Various people lived in the dark tiny holes, just how I can't make out, as there was no furniture. Still there are places in Chicago called "flops" where one may sleep on the floor for five or ten cents, and they are more patronized than respectable people know anything about.
What I did discover was a little woman—she wasn't so young, but she was hunchbacked and small and it is hard not to think of her as a girl—who once lived in one of the rooms for several weeks. She had a job as an ironer in a small hand laundry in the neighbourhood, and someone had given her a cheap folding cot. She was a curiously sentimental creature with the kind of hurt eyes deformed people often have, and I have a fancy she had herself a romantic attachment of a sort for the man Wilson. Anyway I managed to find out a lot from her.
After the other woman's death and after Wilson had been cleared on the murder charge by the confession of the stage-hand, I used to go over to the house where he had lived sometimes in the late afternoon after our paper had been put to bed for the day. Ours is an afternoon paper and after two o'clock most of us are free.
I found the hunchback girl standing in front of the house one day and began talking with her. She was a gold mine.
There was that look in her eyes I've told you of, the hurt sensitive look. I just spoke to her and we began talking of Wilson. She had lived in one of the rooms at the back. She told me of that at once.
On some days she had found herself unable to work at the laundry because her strength suddenly gave out, and so on such days she stayed in the room lying on the cot. Blinding headaches came that lasted for hours, during which she was almost entirely unconscious of everything going on about her. Then afterwards she was quite conscious, but for a long time very weak. She wasn't one who is destined to live very long I suppose, and I presume she didn't much care.
Anyway, there she was in the room in that weak state after the times of illness; and she grew curious about the two people in the front room, so she used to get off her couch and go softly in her ​stockinged feet to the door between the rooms and peek through the keyhole. She had to kneel on the dusty floor to do it.
The life in the room fascinated her from the beginning. Sometimes the man was in there alone, sitting at the kitchen table and writing the stuff he afterwards put into the book I collared and from which I have quoted; sometimes the woman was with him, and again sometimes he was in there alone, but wasn't writing. Then he was always walking and walking up and down.
When both people were in the room and when the man was writing the woman seldom moved, but sat in a chair by one of the windows with her hands crossed. He would write a few lines and then walk up and down talking to himself or to her. When he spoke she did not answer except with her eyes, the crippled girl said.
What I gathered of all this from her talk with me and what is the product of my own imaginings I confess I do not quite know.
Anyway what I got and what I am trying in my own way to transmit to you is a sense of a kind of strangeness in the relationship of the two. It wasn't just a domestic household, a little down on its luck, by any means. He was trying to do something very difficult—with his poetry I presume, and she in her own way was trying to help him.
And of course, as I have no doubt you have gathered from what I have quoted of Wilson's verse, the matter had something to do with the relationships between people—not necessarily between the particular man and woman who happened to be there in that room, but between all people.
The fellow had some half-mystic conception of all such things, and before he found his own woman, had been going aimlessly about the world looking for a mate. Then he had found the woman in the Kansas town and, he at least thought, things had cleared, for him.
Well, he had the notion that no one in the world could think or feel anything alone and that people only got into trouble and walled themselves in by trying it, or something of the sort. There was a discord. Things were jangled. Someone it seems had to strike a pitch that all voices could take up before the real song of life could begin. Mind you I'm not putting forth any notions of my own. What I am trying to do is to give you a sense of something I got from having read Wilson's stuff, from having known ​him a little, and from having seen something of the effect of his personality on others.
He felt quite definitely that no one in the world could feel or even think alone. And then there was the notion that if one tried to think with the mind without taking the body into account one got all balled up. True conscious life built itself up like a pyramid. First the body and mind of a beloved one must come into one's thinking and feeling and then, in some mystic way, the bodies and minds of all the other people in the world must come in, must come sweeping in like a great wind or something of that sort.
Is all this a little tangled up to you who read my story? It may not be. It may be that your minds are more clear than my own and that what I take to be so difficult will be very simple to you.
However, I have to bring up to you just what I can find after diving down into this sea of motives and impulses I admit I don't rightly understand.
The hunchback girl felt—or is it my own fancy colouring what she said? . . . it doesn't really matter. The thing to get at 1s what the man Edgar Wilson felt.
He felt, I fancy, that in the field of poetry he had something to express that could never be expressed until he had found a woman who could, in a peculiar and absolute way, give herself in the world of the flesh, and that then there was to be a marriage out of which beauty would come for all people. He had to find the woman who had that power, and the power had to be untainted by self-interest, I fancy. A profound egotist, you see, and he thought he had found what he needed in the wife of the Kansas druggist.
He had found her and had done something to her. What it was I can't quite make out, except that she was absolutely and wholly happy with him in a strangely inexpressive sort of way.
Trying to speak of him and his influence on others is rather like trying to walk on a tight rope stretched between two tall buildings above a crowded street. A cry from below, a laugh, the honk of an automobile horn, and down one goes into nothingness. One simply becomes ridiculous.
He wanted, it seems, to condense the flesh and the spirit of himself and his woman into his poems. You will remember that in one of the things of his I have quoted he speaks of condensing, of ​And so the woman went to it and found a match somewhere in the darkness and touched the pile off.
There is a picture that will remain with me always. Just that—the barren room and the blind unseeing man standing there, and the woman kneeling and making a little flare of beauty at the last. Little flames leaped up. Lights crept and danced over the walls. Below, on the floor of the room, there was a deep well of darkness in which the man, blind with his own purpose, was standing.
The pile of burning papers must have made for a moment quite a glare of light in the room, and the woman stood for a moment, beside the fireplace, just outside the glare of light.
And then, pale and wavering, she walked across it as across a lighted stage, going softly and silently toward him. Had she also something to say? No one will ever know. What happened was that she said nothing.
She walked across to him, and at the moment she reached him fell down on the floor and died at his feet, and at the same moment the little fire of papers died. If she struggled before she died, there on the floor, she struggled in silence. There was no sound. She had fallen and lay between him and the door that led out to the stairway and to the street.
It was then Wilson became altogether inhuman—too much so for my understanding.
The fire had died and the woman he had loved had died.
And there he stood looking into nothingness, thinking, God knows, perhaps of nothingness.
He stood a minute, five minutes, perhaps ten. He was a man who, before he found the woman, had been sunk far down into a deep sea of doubt and questioning. Before he found the man no expression had ever come from him. He had perhaps just wandered from place to place, looking at people's faces, wondering about people, wanting to come close to other, and not knowing how. The woman had been able to lift him up to the surface of the sea of life for a time, and with her he had floated on the surface of the sea, under the sky, in the sunlight. The woman's warm body, given to him in love, had been as a boat in which he had floated on the surface of the sea, and now the boat had wrecked and he was sinking again, back into the sea.
​Minor things happened in the room and one may speak of them.
For example there was a day in June, a dark warm rainy day. The hunchback girl was in her room, kneeling on the floor, and Wilson and his woman were in their room.
Wilson's woman had been doing a family washing, and as it could not be dried outdoors she had stretched ropes across the room and had hung the clothes inside.
When the clothes were all hung Wilson came from walking outside in the rain, and going to the desk sat down and began to write.
He wrote for a few minutes and then got up and went about the room, and in walking a wet garment brushed against his face.
He kept right on walking and talking to the woman, but as he walked and talked he gathered all the clothes in his arms and going to the little landing at the head of the stairs outside threw them down into the muddy yard below. He did that and the woman sat without moving or saying anything until he had gone back to his desk, then she went down the stairs, got the clothes and washed them again; and it was only after she had done that and when she was again hanging them in the room above that he appeared to know what he had done.
While the clothes were being rewashed he went for another walk and when she heard his footsteps on the stairs the hunchback girl ran to the keyhole. As she knelt there and as he came into the room she could look directly into his face. "He was like a puzzled child for a moment and then, although he said nothing, the tears began to run down his cheeks," she said. "That happened and then the woman, who was at the moment rehanging the clothes, turned and saw him. She had her arm filled with clothes, but dropped them on the floor and ran to him. She half knelt, the hunchback girl said, and putting her arms about his body and looking up into his face pleaded with him. "Don't. Don't be hurt. Believe me I know everything. Please don’t be hurt,” was what she said.
And now as to the story of the woman's death. It happened in the fall of that year.
In the place where she was sometimes employed, that is to say in the theatre, there was this other man, the little half-crazed stage-hand who shot her.
He had fallen in love with her and, like the men in the Kansas ​town from which she came, had written her several silly notes of which she said nothing to Wilson. The letters weren't very nice and some of them, the most unpleasant ones, were by some twist of the fellow's mind signed with Wilson's name. Two of them were afterwards found on her person and were brought in as evidence against Wilson during his trial.
And so the woman worked in the theatre, and the summer had passed; and on an evening in the fall there was to be a dress rehearsal at the theatre and the woman went there, taking Wilson with her. It was a fall day such as we sometimes have in Chicago, cold and wet and with a heavy fog lying over the city.
The dress rehearsal did not come off. The star was ill, or something of the sort happened; and Wilson and his woman sat about in the cold empty theatre for an hour or two and then the woman was told she could go for the night.
She and Wilson walked across the city, stopping to get something to eat at a small restaurant. He was in one of the abstract silent moods common to him. No doubt he was thinking of the things he wanted to express in the poetry I have tried to tell you about. He went along, not seeing the woman beside him, not seeing the people drifting up to them and passing them in the streets. He went along in that way and she—
She was no doubt then as she always was in his presence—silent and satisfied with the fact that she was with him. There was nothing he could think or feel that did not take her into account. The very blood flowing up through his body was her blood too. He had made her feel that and she was silent and satisfied as he went along, his body walking beside her, but his fancy groping its way through the land of high walls and deep wells.
They had walked from the restaurant, in the Loop district, over a bridge to the North Side, and still no words passed between them.
When they had almost reached their own place the stage-hand, the small man with the nervous hands who had written the notes, appeared out of the fog, as though out of nowhere, and shot the woman.
That was all there was to it. It was as simple as that.
They were walking, as I have described them, when a head flashed up before the woman in the midst of the fog, a hand shot out, there was the quick abrupt sound of a pistol shot, and then the ​absurd little stage-hand, he with the wrinkled impotent little old woman's face, then he turned and ran away.
All that happened, just as I have written it and it made no impression at all on the mind of Wilson. He walked along as though nothing had happened; and the woman, after half falling, gathered herself together and managed to continue walking beside him, still saying nothing.
They went thus for perhaps two blocks, and had reached the foot of the outer stairs that led up to their place when a policeman came running, and the woman told him a lie. She told him some story about a struggle between two drunken men and after a moment of talk the policeman went away, sent away by the woman in a direction opposite to the one taken by the fleeing stage-hand.
They were in the darkness and the fog now, and the woman took her man's arm while they climbed the stairs. He was as yet, as far as I will ever be able to explain logically, unaware of the shot and of the fact that she was dying although he had seen and heard everything. What the doctors said, who were put on the case afterwards, was that a cord or muscle or something of the sort that controls the action of the heart, that it had been practically severed by the shot.
She was dead and alive at the same time, I suppose.
Anyway the two people marched up the stairs and into the room above and then a really dramatic and lovely thing happened. One wishes that the scene with just all its connotations could be played out on a stage instead of having to be put down in words.
The two came into the room, the one dead, but not ready to acknowledge death without a flash of something individual and lovely, that is to say the one dead while still alive and the other alive, but at the moment dead to what was going on.
The room into which they went was dark, but with the sure instinct of an animal the woman walked across the room to the fire-place while the man stopped and stood some ten feet from the door, thinking and thinking in his peculiarly abstract way. The fireplace was filled with an accumulation of waste matter, cigarette ends—the man was a hard smoker—bits of paper on which he had scribbled—the rubbishy accumulation that gathers about all such fellows as Wilson. There was all of this quickly combustible material stuffed into the fireplace on this first cool evening of the fall.
​And so the woman went to it and found a match somewhere in the darkness and touched the pile off.
There is a picture that will remain with me always. Just that—the barren room and the blind unseeing man standing there, and the woman kneeling and making a little flare of beauty at the last. Little flames leaped up. Lights crept and danced over the walls. Below, on the floor of the room, there was a deep well of darkness in which the man, blind with his own purpose, was standing.
The pile of burning papers must have made for a moment quite a glare of light in the room, and the woman stood for a moment, beside the fireplace, just outside the glare of light.
And then, pale and wavering, she walked across it as across a lighted stage, going softly and silently toward him. Had she also something to say? No one will ever know. What happened was that she said nothing.
She walked across to him, and at the moment she reached him fell down on the floor and died at his feet, and at the same moment the little fire of papers died. If she struggled before she died, there on the floor, she struggled in silence. There was no sound. She had fallen and lay between him and the door that led out to the stairway and to the street.
It was then Wilson became altogether inhuman—too much so for my understanding.
The fire had died and the woman he had loved had died.
And there he stood looking into nothingness, thinking, God knows, perhaps of nothingness.
He stood a minute, five minutes, perhaps ten. He was a man who, before he found the woman, had been sunk far down into a deep sea of doubt and questioning. Before he found the woman no expression had ever come from him. He had perhaps just wandered from place to place, looking at people's faces, wondering about people, wanting to come close to others, and not knowing how. The woman had been able to lift him up to the surface of the sea of life for a time, and with her he had floated on the surface of the sea, under the sky, in the sunlight. The woman's warm body, given to him in love, had been as a boat in which he had floated on the surface of the sea, and now the boat had wrecked and he was sinking again, back into the sea.
​All of this had happened and he did not know—that is to say he did not know and at the same time he did know.
He was a poet I presume and perhaps at that 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 discoloured mark where his heel landed was afterwards 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.
As I have said, his action during his trial was confusing to us all, as he seemed wholly uninterested in the murder and in his own fate. After the confession of the man who had fired the shot he seemed to feel no resentment toward him either. There was something he wanted, having nothing to do with what had happened.
There he had been, you see, before he found the woman, wandering about in the world, digging himself deeper and deeper into the deep wells he talked about in his poetry, building the wall between himself and all us others constantly higher and higher.
He knew what he was doing, but he could not stop. That's what he kept talking about, pleading with people about. The man had come up out of the sea of doubt, had grasped for a time the hand of the woman, and with her hand in his had floated for a time upon the surface of life, but now he felt himself again sinking down into the sea.
His talking and talking, stopping people in the street and talking, going into people's houses and talking, was I presume but an effort he was always afterwards making not to sink back for ever into the sea; it was the struggle of a drowning man I dare say.
At any rate I have told you the man's story, have been compelled to try to tell you his story. There was a kind of power in him, and the power has been exerted over me as it was exerted over the woman from Kansas and the unknown hunchback girl kneeling on the floor in the dust and peering through a keyhole.
​Ever since the woman died we have all been trying and trying to drag the man Wilson back up out of the sea of doubt and dumbness into which we feel him sinking deeper and deeper, and to no avail.
And I have only told you his story in the hopes that among you, the readers, there may be one who, like the woman from Kansas, will know what we others do not know; that is to say that you will know how to put an arm down into the sea and that you will have the strength to drag the man Wilson back to the surface again.
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1941, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 82 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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