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.
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