The Best Short Stories of 1921 | Page 8

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 had 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. Some one 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 paper. 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 had now
become a murderer, had 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. All day 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 courtroom 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 screamed 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