Short Stories

For a month, two months, the Chicago newspapers, that are delivered every morning in our village, have been filled with the story of a murder.  A man there has murdered his wife and there seems no reason for the deed.  The tale runs something like this—­

The man, who is now on trial in the courts and will no doubt be hanged, worked in a bicycle factory where he was a foreman and lived with his wife and his wife’s mother in an apartment in Thirty-second Street.  He loved a girl who worked in the office of the factory where he was employed.  She came from a town in Iowa and when she first came to the city lived with her aunt who has since died.  To the foreman, a heavy stolid looking man with grey eyes, she seemed the most beautiful woman in the world.  Her desk was by a window at an angle of the factory, a sort of wing of the building, and the foreman, down in the shop had a desk by another window.  He sat at his desk making out sheets containing the record of the work done by each man in his department.  When he looked up he could see the girl sitting at work at her desk.  The notion got into his head that she was peculiarly lovely.  He did not think of trying to draw close to her or of winning her love.  He looked at her as one might look at a star or across a country of low hills in October when the leaves of the trees are all red and yellow gold.  “She is a pure, virginal thing,” he thought vaguely.  “What can she be thinking about as she sits there by the window at work.”

In fancy the foreman took the girl from Iowa home with him to his apartment in Thirty-second Street and into the presence of his wife and his mother-in-law.  All day in the shop and during the evening at home he carried her figure about with him in his mind.  As he stood by a window in his apartment and looked out toward the Illinois Central railroad tracks and beyond the tracks to the lake, the girl was there beside him.  Down below women walked in the street and in every woman he saw there was something of the Iowa girl.  One woman walked as she did, another made a gesture with her hand that reminded of her.  All the women he saw except his wife and his mother-in-law were like the girl he had taken inside himself.

The two women in his own house puzzled and confused him.  They became suddenly unlovely and commonplace.  His wife in particular was like some strange unlovely growth that had attached itself to his body.

In the evening after the day at the factory he went home to his own place and had dinner.  He had always been a silent man and when he did not talk no one minded.  After dinner he with his wife went to a picture show.  There were two children and his wife expected another.  They came into the apartment and sat down.  The climb up two flights of stairs had wearied his wife.  She sat in a chair beside her mother groaning with weariness.

The mother-in-law was the soul of goodness.  She took the place of a servant in the home and got no pay.  When her daughter wanted to go to a picture show she waved her hand and smiled.  “Go on,” she said.  “I don’t want to go.  I’d rather sit here.”  She got a book and sat reading.  The little boy of nine awoke and cried.  He wanted to sit on the po-po.  The mother-in-law attended to that.

After the man and his wife came home the three people sat in silence for an hour or two before bed time.  The man pretended to read a newspaper.  He looked at his hands.  Although he had washed them carefully grease from the bicycle frames left dark stains under the nails.  He thought of the Iowa girl and of her white quick hands playing over the keys of a typewriter.  He felt dirty and uncomfortable.

The girl at the factory knew the foreman had fallen in love with her and the thought excited her a little.  Since her aunt’s death she had gone to live in a rooming house and had nothing to do in the evening.  Although the foreman meant nothing to her she could in a way use him.  To her he became a symbol.  Sometimes he came into the office and stood for a moment by the door.  His large hands were covered with black grease.  She looked at him without seeing.  In his place in her imagination stood a tall slender young man.  Of the foreman she saw only the grey eyes that began to burn with a strange fire.  The eyes expressed eagerness, a humble and devout eagerness.  In the presence of a man with such eyes she felt she need not be afraid.

She wanted a lover who would come to her with such a look in his eyes.  Occasionally, perhaps once in two weeks, she stayed a little late at the office, pretending to have work that must be finished.  Through the window she could see the foreman waiting.  When everyone had gone she closed her desk and went into the street.  At the same moment the foreman came out at the factory door.

They walked together along the street a half dozen blocks to where she got aboard her car.  The factory was in a place called South Chicago and as they went along evening was coming on.  The streets were lined with small unpainted frame houses and dirty faced children ran screaming in the dusty roadway.  They crossed over a bridge.  Two abandoned coal barges lay rotting in the stream.

He went by her side walking heavily and striving to conceal his hands.  He had scrubbed them carefully before leaving the factory but they seemed to him like heavy dirty pieces of waste matter hanging at his side.  Their walking together happened but a few times and during one summer.  “It’s hot,” he said.  He never spoke to her of anything but the weather.  “It’s hot,” he said.  “I think it may rain.”

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 in a short time they would get into bed together.

He would lie awake thinking, would hear the creaking of the springs of a bed where, in another room, his mother-in-law was crawling between 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 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 working-man’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.  The incident may have put the idea of killing his wife into the man’s head.

They got to the entrance to the apartment building and stepped into a dark hallway.  Then quite suddenly and apparently without thought the man took a knife out of his pocket.  “Suppose that man who darted into the alleyway had intended to kill us,” he thought.  Opening the knife he whirled about and struck at his wife.  He struck twice, a dozen times—­ madly.  There was a scream and his wife’s body fell.

The janitor had neglected to light the gas in the lower hallway.  Afterwards, the foreman, decided, that was the reason he did it, that and the fact that the dark slinking figure of a man darted out of an alleyway and then darted back again.  “Surely,” he told himself, “I could never have done it had the gas been lighted.”

He stood in the hallway thinking.  His wife was dead and with her had died her unborn child.  There was a sound of doors opening in the apartments above.  For several minutes nothing happened.  His wife and her unborn child were dead—­that was all.

He ran upstairs thinking quickly.  In the darkness on the lower stairway he had put the knife back into his pocket and, as it turned out later, there was no blood on his hands or on his clothes.  The knife he later washed carefully in the bathroom, when the excitement had died down a little.  He told everyone the same story.  “There has been a holdup,” he explained.  “A man came slinking out of an alleyway and followed me and my wife home.  He followed us into the hallway of the building and there was no light.  The janitor has neglected to light the gas.”  Well—­there had been a struggle and in the darkness his wife had been killed.  He could not tell how it had happened.  “There was no light.  The janitor has neglected to light the gas,” he kept saying.

For a day or two they did not question him specially and he had time to get rid of the knife.  He took a long walk and threw it away into the river in South Chicago where the two abandoned coal barges lay rotting under the bridge, the bridge he had crossed when on the summer evenings he walked to the street car with the girl who was virginal and pure, who was far off and unattainable, like a star and yet not like a star.

And then he was arrested and right away he confessed—­told everything.  He said he did not know why he killed his wife and was careful to say nothing of the girl at the office.  The newspapers tried to discover the motive for the crime.  They are still trying.  Someone had seen him on the few evenings when he walked with the girl and she was dragged into the affair and had her picture printed in the papers.  That has been annoying for her as of course she has been able to prove she had nothing to do with the man.

Yesterday morning a heavy fog lay over our village here at the edge of the city and I went for a long walk in the early morning.  As I returned out of the lowlands into our hill country I met the old man whose family has so many and such strange ramifications.  For a time he walked beside me holding the little dog in his arms.  It was cold and the dog whined and shivered.  In the fog the old man’s face was indistinct.  It moved slowly back and forth with the fog banks of the upper air and with the tops of trees.  He spoke of the man who has killed his wife and whose name is being shouted in the pages of the city newspapers that come to our village each morning.  As he walked beside me he launched into a long tale concerning a life he and his brother, who has now become a murderer, once lived together.  “He is my brother,” he said over and over, shaking his head.  He seemed afraid I would not believe.  There was a fact that must be established.  “We were boys together that man and I,” he began again.  “You see we played together in a barn back of our father’s house.  Our father went away to sea in a ship.  That is the way our names became confused.  You understand that.  We have different names, but we are brothers.  We had the same father.  We played together in a barn back of our father’s house.  For hours we lay together in the hay in the barn and it was warm there.”

In the fog the slender body of the old man became like a little gnarled tree.  Then it became a thing suspended in air.  It swung back and forth like a body hanging on the gallows.  The face beseeched me to believe the story the lips were trying to tell.  In my mind everything concerning the relationship of men and women became confused, a muddle.  The spirit of the man who had killed his wife came into the body of the little old man there by the roadside.

It was striving to tell me the story it would never be able to tell in the court room in the city, in the presence of the judge.  The whole story of mankind’s loneliness, of the effort to reach out to unattainable beauty tried to get itself expressed from the lips of a mumbling old man, crazed with loneliness, who stood by the side of a country road on a foggy morning holding a little dog in his arms.

The arms of the old man held the dog so closely that it began to whine with pain.  A sort of convulsion shook his body.  The soul seemed striving to wrench itself out of the body, to fly away through the fog, down across the plain to the city, to the singer, the politician, the millionaire, the murderer, to its brothers, cousins, sisters, down in the city.  The intensity of the old man’s desire was terrible and in sympathy my body began to tremble.  His arms tightened about the body of the little dog so that it cried with pain.  I stepped forward and tore the arms away and the dog fell to the ground and lay whining.  No doubt it had been injured.  Perhaps ribs had been crushed.  The old man stared at the dog lying at his feet as in the hallway of the apartment building the worker from the bicycle factory had stared at his dead wife.  “We are brothers,” he said again.  “We have different names but we are brothers.  Our father you understand went off to sea.”