To the memory of my mother,
Emma Smith Anderson,
whose keen observations on the life about her first
awoke in me the hunger to see beneath the surface
of lives, this book is dedicated.
THE BOOK OF
THE GROTESQUE
The writer, an old man with a white mustache, had
some difficulty in getting into bed. The windows
of the house in which he lived were high and he wanted
to look at the trees when he awoke in the morning.
A carpenter came to fix the bed so that it would be
on a level with the window.
Quite a fuss was made about the matter. The carpenter,
who had been a soldier in the Civil War, came into
the writer’s room and sat down to talk of building
a platform for the purpose of raising the bed.
The writer had cigars lying about and the carpenter
smoked.
For a time the two men talked of the raising of the
bed and then they talked of other things. The
soldier got on the subject of the war. The writer,
in fact, led him to that subject. The carpenter
had once been a prisoner in Andersonville prison and
had lost a brother. The brother had died of starvation,
and whenever the carpenter got upon that subject he
cried. He, like the old writer, had a white mustache,
and when he cried he puckered up his lips and the
mustache bobbed up and down. The weeping old
man with the cigar in his mouth was ludicrous.
The plan the writer had for the raising of his bed
was forgotten and later the carpenter did it in his
own way and the writer, who was past sixty, had to
help himself with a chair when he went to bed at night.
In his bed the writer rolled over on his side and
lay quite still. For years he had been beset
with notions concerning his heart. He was a hard
smoker and his heart fluttered. The idea had
got into his mind that he would some time die unexpectedly
and always when he got into bed he thought of that.
It did not alarm him. The effect in fact was
quite a special thing and not easily explained.
It made him more alive, there in bed, than at any
other time. Perfectly still he lay and his body
was old and not of much use any more, but something
inside him was altogether young. He was like a
pregnant woman, only that the thing inside him was
not a baby but a youth. No, it wasn’t a
youth, it was a woman, young, and wearing a coat of
mail like a knight. It is absurd, you see, to
try to tell what was inside the old writer as he lay
on his high bed and listened to the fluttering of
his heart. The thing to get at is what the writer,
or the young thing within the writer, was thinking
about.
The old writer, like all of the people in the world,
had got, during his long life, a great many notions
in his head. He had once been quite handsome
and a number of women had been in love with him.
And then, of course, he had known people, many people,
known them in a peculiarly intimate way that was different
from the way in which you and I know people.
At least that is what the writer thought and the thought
pleased him. Why quarrel with an old man concerning
his thoughts?
