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.”
* * * *
*
I am sitting in my house in the country and it rains.
Before my eyes the hills fall suddenly away and there
are the flat plains and beyond the plains the city.
An hour ago the old man of the house in the forest
went past my door and the little dog was not with him.
It may be that as we talked in the fog he crushed
the life out of his companion. It may be that
the dog like the workman’s wife and her unborn
child is now dead. The leaves of the trees that
line the road before my window are falling like rain—the
yellow, red and golden leaves fall straight down,
heavily. The rain beat them brutally down.
They are denied a last golden flash across the sky.
In October leaves should be carried away, out over
the plains, in a wind. They should go dancing
away.
Winifred Walker understood some things clearly enough.
She understood that when a man is put behind iron
bars he is in prison. Marriage was marriage to
her.
