absurd little stage-hand, he with the wrinkled impotent little old woman's face, then he turned and ran away.
All that happened, just as I have written it and it made no impression at all on the mind of Wilson. He walked along as though nothing had happened; and the woman, after half falling, gathered herself together and managed to continue walking beside him, still saying nothing.
They went thus for perhaps two blocks, and had reached the foot of the outer stairs that led up to their place when a policeman came running, and the woman told him a lie. She told him some story about a struggle between two drunken men and after a moment of talk the policeman went away, sent away by the woman in a direction opposite to the one taken by the fleeing stage-hand.
They were in the darkness and the fog now, and the woman took her man's arm while they climbed the stairs. He was as yet, as far as I will ever be able to explain logically, unaware of the shot and of the fact that she was dying although he had seen and heard everything. What the doctors said, who were put on the case afterwards, was that a cord or muscle or something of the sort that controls the action of the heart, that it had been practically severed by the shot.
She was dead and alive at the same time, I suppose.
Anyway the two people marched up the stairs and into the room above and then a really dramatic and lovely thing happened. One wishes that the scene with just all its connotations could be played out on a stage instead of having to be put down in words.
The two came into the room, the one dead, but not ready to acknowledge death without a flash of something individual and lovely, that is to say the one dead while still alive and the other alive, but at the moment dead to what was going on.
The room into which they went was dark, but with the sure instinct of an animal the woman walked across the room to the fire-place while the man stopped and stood some ten feet from the door, thinking and thinking in his peculiarly abstract way. The fireplace was filled with an accumulation of waste matter, cigarette ends—the man was a hard smoker—bits of paper on which he had scribbled—the rubbishy accumulation that gathers about all such fellows as Wilson. There was all of this quickly combustible material stuffed into the fireplace on this first cool evening of the fall.
