The Best Short Stories of 1920 | Page 6

and many letters, telegrams and
packages were being received. He stood a little to one side and men and
women kept coming to speak with him. They congratulated him upon
his success in getting the government position and on his achievement
as a poet. Everyone seemed to be praising him, and when he went home
to bed he could not sleep. On Wednesday evening he went to the
theatre and it seemed to him that people all over the house recognized
him. Everyone nodded and smiled. After the first act five or six men
and two women left their seats to gather about him. A little group was
formed. Strangers sitting along the same row of seats stretched their
necks and looked. He had never received so much attention before, and
now a fever of expectancy took possession of him.
As he explained when he told me of his experience, it was for him an
altogether abnormal time. He felt like one floating in air. When he got
into bed after seeing so many people and hearing so many words of
praise his head whirled round and round. When he closed his eyes a
crowd of people invaded his room. It seemed as though the minds of all
the people of his city were centered on himself. The most absurd
fancies took possession of him. He imagined himself riding in a
carriage through the streets of a city. Windows were thrown open and
people ran out at the doors of houses. "There he is. That's him," they
shouted, and at the words a glad cry arose. The carriage drove into a
street blocked with people. A hundred thousand pairs of eyes looked up
at him. "There you are! What a fellow you have managed to make of
yourself!" the eyes seemed to be saying.
My friend could not explain whether the excitement of the people was
due to the fact that he had written a new poem or whether, in his new
government position, he had performed some notable act. The
apartment where he lived at that time was on a street perched along the
top of a cliff far out at the edge of the city and from his bedroom
window he could look down over trees and factory roofs to a river. As
he could not sleep and as the fancies that kept crowding in upon him
only made him more excited, he got out of bed and tried to think.

As would be natural under such circumstances, he tried to control his
thoughts, but when he sat by the window and was wide awake a most
unexpected and humiliating thing happened. The night was clear and
fine. There was a moon. He wanted to dream of the woman who was to
be his wife, think out lines for noble poems or make plans that would
affect his career. Much to his surprise his mind refused to do anything
of the sort.
At a corner of the street where he lived there was a small cigar store
and newspaper stand run by a fat man of forty and his wife, a small
active woman with bright grey eyes. In the morning he stopped there to
buy a paper before going down to the city. Sometimes he saw only the
fat man, but often the man had disappeared and the woman waited on
him. She was, as he assured me at least twenty times in telling me his
tale, a very ordinary person with nothing special or notable about her,
but for some reason he could not explain being in her presence stirred
him profoundly. During that week in the midst of his distraction she
was the only person he knew who stood out clear and distinct in his
mind. When he wanted so much to think noble thoughts, he could think
only of her. Before he knew what was happening his imagination had
taken hold of the notion of having a love affair with the woman.
"I could not understand myself," he declared, in telling me the story.
"At night, when the city was quiet and when I should have been asleep,
I thought about her all the time. After two or three days of that sort of
thing the consciousness of her got into my daytime thoughts. I was
terribly muddled. When I went to see the woman who is now my wife I
found that my love for her was in no way affected by my vagrant
thoughts. There was but one woman in the world I wanted to live with
me and to be my comrade in undertaking to improve my own character
and my position in the world, but for the moment, you see, I wanted
this other woman to be in my arms. She