All of this had happened and he did not know—that is to say he did not know and at the same time he did know.
He was a poet I presume and perhaps at that moment a new poem was forming itself in his mind.
At any rate he stood for a time, as I have said, and then he must have had a feeling that he should make some move, that he should if possible save himself from some disaster about to overtake him.
He had an impulse to go to the door and by way of the stairway to go down stairs and into the street, but the body of the woman was between him and the door.
What he did and what, when he later told of it, sounded so terribly cruel to others was to treat the woman's dead body as one might treat a fallen tree in the darkness in a forest. First he tried to push the body aside with his foot and then, as that seemed impossible, he stepped awkwardly over it.
He stepped directly on the woman's arm. The discoloured mark where his heel landed was afterwards found on the body.
He almost fell and then his body righted itself and he went walking, marched down the rickety stairs and went walking in the streets.
By chance the night had cleared. It had grown colder and a cold wind had driven the fog away. He walked along very nonchalantly for several blocks. He walked along as calmly as you, the reader, might walk after having had lunch with a friend.
As a matter of fact he even stopped to make a purchase at a store. I remember that the place was called The Whip. He went in, bought himself a package of cigarettes, lighted one, and stood a moment apparently listening to a conversation going on among several idlers in the place.
And then he strolled again, going along smoking the cigarette and thinking of his poem no doubt. Then he came to a moving-picture theatre.
That perhaps touched him off. He also was an old fireplace, stuffed with old thoughts, scraps of unwritten poems, God knows what rubbish. Often he had gone at night to the theatre, where the woman was employed, to walk home with her; and now the people were coming out of a small moving-picture house. They had been in there seeing a play called The Light of the World.
Wilson walked into the midst of the crowd, lost himself in the
