The Best Short Stories of 1921 | Page 7

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 presently they would get into bed
together.
He would lie awake thinking, would hear the creaking of the springs of
a bed from where, in another room, his mother-in-law was crawling
under 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 stout 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 workingman'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. That 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 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.
Afterward, 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 had 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
had 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